San Francisco School District set to change its school assignment process AGAIN.

[RandySF]

And this time, a Board member acknowledges there are "winners and losers".

Currently, if too many families request a school to allow everybody to get in, the first preference goes to siblings of current students, the second to residents of census tracts where students do the worst on standardized tests, and the third to students living nearby.

But the strategy isn't working. Data from the past three years show that a quarter of all schools still have a student body in which one race makes up at least 60 percent of enrollment. African American families and Latino families are less likely to participate in the crucial first round of the student assignment lottery than their white and Asian counterparts, meaning they're more likely to get the less popular schools.

School board members Rachel Norton and Sandra Fewer have proposed giving neighborhood kids priority over those living in low-performing census tracts, and expect to have a full board vote next month. They'd like the new scheme to be in place for the 2015-16 school year.

"We've tried 100 different ways to solve this problem, and we haven't cracked it yet," she said. "The trick is to minimize the unfairness so that the winners and losers at least feel they were treated fairly."

If the district had its act together, there would be no losers, period.

[bluestateguy]

1. They are overcomplexifying something that is actually not that hard

But school bureaucrats tend to do that.