Education Policy in San Francisco Could Be Driving Parents to Pay More for Private School in Upper Grades

The trends could mean that middle-class families in San Francisco are shifting their resources to send their children to private schools when they’re older.

The San Francisco Unified School District administration building. Lear Zhou/The Epoch Times

News Analysis

SAN FRANCISCO—More and more San Francisco parents are willing to pay to send their children to private schools for grades seven to 12, according to an analysis of private school enrollment data collected by the California Department of Education.

Enrollment in grades seven through 12 in private schools in San Francisco has been mostly trending upward since the 2014–2015 school year, increasing from 11,102 in 2015 to 12,315 in 2024, according to data obtained by The Epoch Times.

In the same period, private school enrollment for grades K through six in the city dropped from 13,117 in 2015 to 11,755 in 2024.

Both trends started a year after the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) adopted a controversial policy in 2014 eliminating Algebra I in eighth grade.

The trends could mean that middle-class families in San Francisco are shifting their limited resources to allow their children to attend private schools when they’re older rather than in elementary school.

The average tuition cost of private high schools in San Francisco, according to the website Private School Review, is $37,723, much higher than the average tuition for all grades K–12, which is $27,324.

California public schools are required by law to provide free educational services to any students in the corresponding area and are usually not in direct competition with private schools because of the tuition wall.

However, policy changes in public school districts may affect parents’ decisions.

“We have seen that taking away things that people want, such as algebra in eighth grade, actually causes substantial, significant enrollment declines,” Supriya Ray, the board of education commissioner, told The Epoch Times. “I know many families who have left for that reason or who won’t come to SFUSD because they don’t feel the curriculum is rigorous enough.”

After the Algebra I policy change, enrollment in grades seven through 12 in SFUSD public schools declined for two years, from 23,170 in 2014 to 22,746 in 2016, according to data from the California Education Department.

A 2023 study by Stanford found that “delaying Algebra I until ninth grade made it difficult for some students to complete the sequence of course prerequisites that would position them to take AP Calculus before graduating,” and the policy did not achieve its goal of increasing the number of black or Hispanic students enrolling in advanced math.

With possible paid workarounds such as private classes and after-school tutoring, some families chose to keep their children in public schools after 2016. At that time, the grades seven through 12 enrollment in San Francisco public schools started to bounce back.

Another enrollment cliff occurred from 2020 to 2024, however, with a decrease from 23,438 to 21,920, because of an exodus of San Francisco residents in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Ray said that after in-person classes were closed for the pandemic, SFUSD’s delay in reopening them contributed to its steep enrollment drop “because parents knew how important an actual in-person education was for their kids, and if they could, they took them out.”

San Francisco parents, organizations, and supervisors attempted to get Algebra I allowed in eighth grade again. They eventually succeeded with the passing of Proposition G in the March 2024 election. Taking Algebra I in eighth grade will be an option at some schools in the 2024–2025 school year, according to the the district’s website.

Bayard Fong, a district parent, told The Epoch Times that he didn’t stand up against the math policy change in 2014, but when the Board of Education voted in 2020 to cease and in 2021 to permanently eliminate the traditional merit-based admissions policy of Lowell High School, as an alumnus of that elite public school, he could not keep silent.

A graph showing that San Francisco private school enrollment for grades 7–12 has been trending upward since 2015. Lear Zhou/The Epoch Times, data from California Department of Education

A graph showing that enrollment in private schools for grades K–6 is trending downward. Lear Zhou/The Epoch Times, data from California Department of Education

The Board of Education voted to reinstate the merit-based admissions policy of the high school in 2022, as students’ grades had declined without it.

Fong said when parents didn’t speak up for 15 years, the school system eroded.

“They took away algebra, they took away Lowell’s merit-based admission system, they took away gate programs at elementary [and] middle school, they took away honors classes ... they took away AP classes,” he said. “But our kids are competing with everybody else in the United States and the world that are trying to get into these same colleges.”