A lot of it is a function of economics. The schools are built to get kids into college so they can get 6 figure incomes immediately out of it so they can scrape by living in the area around the schools. If you aren't on that path, or don't want to be on that path, you basically move from your parents decent->really nice house into the slums with 5 other people. Especially if your parents want you out of the nest and "independent" as soon as possible. Its like walking a tightrope - mediocrity is not an option, because its ever increasingly hard to get by and live on what most people in the country would call average.
I've had several friends in the bay who grew up there struggle coming out high school - one wasn't really up for college at the time, and the only option to move out on the $16-ish an hour service job into a doubled-up apartment in a bad part of town. Surprise surprise, extreme depression. The other had their parents just paying for their rent - they got to mostly sit around and play video games, but mental health was fine other than just general lethargy.
I can tell you that all the people that have moved into my East Bay neighborhood with good schools have been from SF. People with kids that can't handle the price for private schools and deal with the kid unfriendly nature of SF.
Hell, in SF that first bit doesn't even help, due to the broken lottery system here. It's probably the main reason why there are so few children (by percent) in SF when compared to other cities. Parents make the logical decision to move out of SF when their kids become school-age because they have near-zero control over the school their kids end up at. Alternatively, they put their kids in private school, which is out of reach cost-wise for many families.
Yeah this is a fact. I moved from SF to a suburb of Sacramento. Our SF school was absolutely horrible (and the main reason we moved). Our suburban school has a much smaller per-student budget but the student body is mainly from families where the parents are skilled tradesmen, white collar workers (mainly Asian or Indian), and state government workers. These families instill very different values in their kids than we saw in San Francisco. Although the suburb is highly diverse, 35% White, 30% Asian, 20% Hispanic, 15% Black, the student body is excellent. The high school here regularly sends a couple dozen seniors to Ivy League schools, and another 30-40 students to the UC System.
And though they have few resources and a bad football team, the students have a chess club, robotics club, various study groups and college prep groups.
There is also a big difference in what the kids here are focused on. In SF there was so much chatter about politics, protests, gender identity, and sexuality. Out here kids just seem to be focused on studying and after school activities.
Hmmm. I grew up in SF. Parents didn't have money, went through the public school system. Public schools here aren't that bad, as long as you apply yourself and get into the magnet schools.
(Still live here too. The dilemma I have now is that I hate the commute to my south bay job, but I don't want to live the city. I still think most of the peninsula is pretty damn boring.)
Being born in the San Francisco Bay Area and going to a "elite" public high school in a upper middle class suburb helps a little (and creates lots of other issues too :) ). Really tells you how many bright kids we're missing because they're not born in the right environment.
Suburban middle class parents, especially immigrants (and even more immigrants from Asia) tend to look on GreatSchools and pick Mission San José / Monta Vista / Gunn, and our crazy pressure on their kids.
It means people from there tend to have quite high achieving in life, at a pretty high mental health cost that follows them for life. It’s an open secret if you ask folks who graduated from there.
Of course, people with a bit more connections / more money just send their kids to private school instead.
Plenty of other factors too. No nightlife. Limited restaurant options. Schools that offer only the basics and may be failing. No public transit. Shitty and expensive Internet. No local job hopping opportunities. Limited extracurricular activities for the kids. Lots of anti-intellectual peer groups in the schools.
Its really the lottery system for the public schools that is the reason most of my friends with kids left SF. People buy houses in certain neighborhoods to guarantee which school their kids attend. Without that guarantee, there is not much incentive to live there.
In Bay Area the situation with public schools is pretty dire, in my oppinion. Palo Alto, Cupertino and Los Gatos are ok. The rest are surviving.
Housing in districts where public schools are ok comes at a massive premium. The difference between San Jose and Los Gatos is more than 300k.
Private schools are 2-3k per month.
To afford Bay Area both parents have to work 50+ hours a week with 30+ minute commutes. As a result, the time parents spend with children is very limited. Raising a famility with even 2 children is a big challenge.
“Terrible schools” is at least partly a upper-middle-class-white code for “schools full of poor minority kids”. A significant proportion of white kids living in the city go to private schools, and other white families move out of the city when their kids get to school age. Especially by high school, there are very few white kids left in SF schools.
Beyond that, teacher salaries are a sad joke, and make it basically impossible for teachers to afford housing anywhere in the Bay Area.
There doesn’t seem to be particularly more violent crime in SF than any other city, but there are a lot of car break-ins and bike thefts.
This does happen in droves, but it's more when kids reach elementary school age. SF is a pretty difficult city when it comes to ensuring your kid gets into a decent elementary school, so that's one point at which many people leave. Not to mention that you don't have to go far in any direction (north to Marin, east to Berkeley, south to Palo Alto) and you have fantastic public schools.
I have friends with kids there. If you have enough money, it's still great. It only sucks if you're financially struggling or sending your kids through the SF public school lottery.
Even if you're not rich, it might not be so bad. I grew up in a state known for it's amazing public school system, and it was still a bunch of bullshit. I would have rather grown up somewhere I could have ridden my bike every day of the year and gotten college credits from one of the best community college systems in the country.
Its not just housing prices, its also the school system, and the way children are placed in schools. From the article:
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Jean Covington, a San Francisco resident who works as a public defender in Contra Costa County, said she noticed a “pilgrimage” of her friends out of the city when children reached school age. When she decided to stick it out, she was confronted with what she described as a bewildering public school selection system governed by an algorithm that determines where children in the city are placed — sometimes miles from home.
When her daughter turned 5, Ms. Covington applied to 14 public kindergartens, but her child ended up being placed in another. She chose a private school instead, along with the strain on the family budget that it entailed.
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In my personal case, we owned a house, but moved out of the city specifically because of the school system placement process.
SF has a lottery system. With the wrong stroke of luck, your child can be damned to hours of commuting across the city every day, just to go to a crappy school, when a "good" one might be across the street.
That's an extreme example, and in the worst case scenario there are plenty of good private schools to send your children. But choosing to live in SF comes with such a set of pros and cons that many parents of school-age children who have a choice choose to live outside of it.
Yes, and the mental health aspects can result in continuing challenges. A family friend had three kids go through HS in PA and not only did none of the kids end up in a particularly great school, two of the three kids didn't finish on time due to unspecified/emotional issues.
When we were house-hunting we took it as a consolation that we couldn't afford to live in Palo Alto!
Parents who have money and care enough already pick the schools by simply buying a house in a slightly different place. Cupertino used to be the hot place for tiger parents in the bay area to go but I'm not sure if it still is. The issue is that then the rest of the schools get even worse which eventually results in bad social issues in 20 years. The kids from those schools grow up and everyone has to deal with them.
I went to Homestead High School (and have friends that went to Gunn/Paly) and the experiences I've witnessed have been similar.
One of my friends has parents that worked at Adobe. During his junior year, he was taking AP Calculus BC, AP Physics C E&M, AP Physics C Mechanics and AP Computer Science. He got straight A's both semesters, and got a 5 on all of the AP tests. I went over to his house during the summer and found that there was a huge hole on the bottom of the door in his room. He told me it was because his mom was so angry at him for something school related (something trivial like getting only a 2100 on the SAT) that she kicked the door in.
Another one of my friends' dad works at Intel. My friend ended up getting accepted into UC Davis (but rejected from UCLA/Berkeley/MIT), and, while I was in the room, his dad told him that UC Davis is for failures.
This problem has little to do with the schools themselves. It has to do with the parents, and the reason why people come to live here in the Silicon Valley. People don't move here to live a great life, settle down and have kids. They come here to advance their career, and ultimately, to make money. Here in the valley, if you don't have marketable skills, you are trash. And the kids who grow up here know that all too well.
I agree 100% with you about the schools problem (and I'm facing it myself.) I've lived in a number of cities and SF has stunned me at the near total lack of school-age children. It's stunning - especially in my neighborhood (SOMA) you just never see kids walking to school in the morning. This has to be the largest drawback to living in SF, and one of the biggest reason middle-income to upper-middle-income families move out of town.
I've had several friends in the bay who grew up there struggle coming out high school - one wasn't really up for college at the time, and the only option to move out on the $16-ish an hour service job into a doubled-up apartment in a bad part of town. Surprise surprise, extreme depression. The other had their parents just paying for their rent - they got to mostly sit around and play video games, but mental health was fine other than just general lethargy.
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