Marcy,
I'm sure there *is* data out there, and if it could be organized into usable forms it would be *good* data, but I have to know what I am talking about at least to *some* extent before spouting off about a topic in candidate forums. Last week I and other School Board candidates got to meet with Superintendent Carlos Garcia and some of his underlings, along with a couple current board members not up for reelection, and I pushed them to publish online a list of school district employees by name, position and salary, along with a description of what each employee actually does on a day-to-day basis. Garcia's response was that with 8,000 (iirc) employees, this would be too much trouble. I don't doubt that all this information already exists in various forms in district documents, but distilling it down to a short, useful document is something else again.
No doubt you are right about the issue of non-U.S.-born or non-English-speaking kids in government schools not being taught English quickly enough, but I need hard facts -- or even hard opinions! (i.e. detailed first-hand complaints) -- in order to be able to discuss the issue competently. I would love for you, or anyone else, to provide me with information about any aspect of the SFUSD that is specific enough to enable me to authoritatively criticize the status quo from a libertarian P.O.V. For instance, you refer to English transitioning as a "money-sucking issue" -- can you find out *how much* money this is costing the district each year?
I would very much like to have usable data from school assignment requests, in order to see how many students wanted to go to various schools. People vote with their feet, or try to in this case, and if this data were regularly published in a readable form, it could serve as a wonderful periodic report card on which schools are doing well and which are doing poorly.
Side note -- apparently it isn't just English immersion that's being poorly handled. I just came across this complaint from parents at Buena Vista middle school about the Spanish immersion program being negatively impacted by the district's new school assignment system -- http://www.escuelabv.org/profiles/blogs/statement-of-the-buena-vista.
My platform in a nutshell is let every student within the district attend his or her first-choice school, and put as much control in the hands of the teachers at each school as possible, raising their salaries and cutting administrator salaries to pay for it. The byzantine school assignment system that exists now (and the makeover from what I can tell isn't substantially if any better) doesn't accomplish its goals, leaves many people unhappy, and is so complex that it is a huge waste of everyone's time and resources trying to figure out. Let everyone choose their own school and the system would be a million times simpler. If some schools proved to be horribly overcrowded under this system, parents and students could choose between staying at the overcrowded school or picking a different one instead, but it would be their choice. Meanwhile, the popular schools would get more money, based on enrollment preferences, to expand capacity for the following year.
With teachers in control of each school's programs, and students and parents fully able to vote with their feet, they could pressure the teachers at their own schools to deliver the kind of education they wanted, without having to deal with the district-level bureaucracy. That way if there was a demand for rapid English immersion learning (and I'm sure there is), it would tend to get delivered. Ditto for Spanish immersion or whatever other types of education a significant number of parents and students at government schools wanted.
The immediate challenge however is being able to acquire enough understanding of how this needlessly complex and bureaucratic district operates now to persuasively make the case to the electorate that it should be much, much simpler.
Love & Liberty,
((( starchild )))