San Francisco Unified School District
| San Francisco Unified School District | |
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San Francisco, California United States |
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| Type | Public |
| Established | 1851 |
| Superintendent | Myong Leigh |
| Students | 56,310 (2011-2012) |
| Website | www |
San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD), established in 1851, is the only public school district within the City and County of San Francisco, and the first in the state of California. Under the management of the San Francisco Board of Education, the district serves more than 55,500 students in more than 160 institutions.
SFUSD utilizes an intra-district school choice system and requires students and parents to submit a selection application. Every year in the fall, the SFUSD hosts a Public School Enrollment Fair to provide families access to information about all the schools in the district.
SFUSD has the second highest Academic Performance Index among the seven largest California school districts in California.Newsweek’s national ranking of "Best High Schools in America" named seven SFUSD high schools among the top five percent in the country in 2007. In 2005, two SFUSD schools were recognized by the federal government as No Child Left Behind Blue-Ribbon Schools.
SFUSD previously practiced a race-based admissions system. In 1983 the NAACP sued the school district and won a consent decree that mandated that no more than 45% of any racial group may make up the percentage of students at a single school. At the time, white and black students were the largest demographic groups in the school district. The decree was intended to benefit black children. When it was discovered that Hispanic children also had low test scores, they were added to the decree's intended beneficiaries.
In a five-year period ending in 1999, Asian and Latino students were the largest demographic groups in the SFUSD. In 1994, after several ethnic Chinese students were denied admission to programs because too many ethnic Chinese students were present, ethnic Chinese parents sued SFUSD arguing that the system promoted racial discrimination. On April 15, 1998, the Chinese-American group asked a federal appeals court to end the admissions practice. The system required ethnic Chinese students to receive higher scores than other ethnic groups in order to be admitted to Lowell High School, the city's most prestigious public high school. Waldemar Rojas, the superintendent, wanted to keep the decree because the district had received $37 million in desegregation funds. The NAACP had defended the decree. White parents who were against the racial quotas had a tendency to leave San Francisco.
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Wikipedia