Welcome to San Francisco

The current San Francisco Student Assignment System could use some improvement. We're in luck! The San Francisco Unified School District is working on redesigning it!

I've decided to try and help out. On my first post, I'm going to share some of the resources I've found regarding the redesign:

• SFUSD page about the Student Assignment Redesign.
• SFUSD technical description of the current Student Assignment Process.
• SF K files posted a Hot Topic on the Student Assignment Redesign.
• The Parents for Public Schools of San Francisco website.
• The mysterious "attendance area" map is found on p41 of the SFUSD Enrollment Guide.
• A Google Map showing greatschools.net rankings of our SFUSD public kindergardens.
• Finally greatschools.net has gather statistics on public and private schools.
  

Finally, here are some things you may want to know about the assignment process, as it pertains to kindergarden:

• Each student has a Diversity Profile which consists of 4 binary digits (1 of 16 profiles). The digits are:

1. English as a primary language
2. Attended Kindergarden
3. Socioeconomic status
4. Extreme Poverty
   

• Each school is attempting to maximize diversity by aiming for 50% ones and 50% zeros for each Diversity Profile digit. They compute a Computed Diversity Index which is equal to the sum of percentage of 1's squared, plus the percentage of 0's squared for each binary digit.

• Each school has an initial Computed Diversity Index based on some students that are pre-assigned with sibling preferences and special program needs.

• Students are allowed to choose up to 7 schools on their application, ranked in order by preference.

• Schools fill empty seats from those who applied in the school's attendance area as long as their exists an applicant which improves the Computed Diversity Index.
  

• They use a greedy algorithm to fill the remaining seats at each school. To fill the next seat at a school - they determine which applicant will improve the Computed Diversity Index the most using attendance area, then preference rank, then randomness to break ties.

• At this stage, a student may have been "assigned" to multiple schools. They use the student's preference to determine which school the student is assigned to. This may open up seats at the students less preferred schools. If so, they repeat the prior step to fill those remaining seats.

• Once all of the empty seats are filled at all of the schools - some students may be left unassigned to any of their choices. The administrators try to pick a nearby school for them using some method that I could not find documentation for.