My wife and I are blessed to be bottom-end 1%-ers, and even we could not afford to live in SF, so we moved down into the peninsula. Well, we might be able to afford it if we got a crippling mortgage, but then we couldn't afford day care for our kids, and the 1hr+ commutes would have wreaked havoc on our lives.
You can't raise a family in SF without making enough money to afford a $1.4M house, and spending $2000/month on private school per kid because the SF schools have become really horrible (due to SF political stupidity).
Test scores don't tell the whole story, and I'll agree that there is some political stupidity, but think it's fair to say that the blanket statement "SF schools have become really horrible (due to SF political stupidity)" is incorrect.
For an urban district, I believe SFUSD has an unusually high number of extremely high performing schools. There are some very bad ones too. You'll see this pattern in the surrounding areas as well. The difference is that owning a house in a high-rent district doesn't get you priority access to that school, they way it does in the burbs. As a result, a lot of people who can afford a 1.4 mil house leave SF if they don't get their top school choice, because in Marin, your high mortgage guarantees you priority access to the good school.
Of course, a lot of people stay in SF precisely because they can get their kid into a 9 or 10 school even though they can't afford the 1.4mil house.
One of my coworkers lives near us, and I believe they were told to list a dozen schools in order of preference. Given the lottery nature of the system, they didn't get into a single one of them, which forced them to go the private school route.
This is a long standing and very intense debate in SF. You can reasonably criticize the "lottery" system, and you can reasonably defend the "school choice" system.
Kind of funny that Reason magazine, not normally a big cheerleader for SF politics, kind of likes the approach.
Anyway, I think it's perfectly reasonable to defend or criticize the assignment process, I just don't think you can accurately claim that SF public schools are horrible.
Many elementary schools are very good to decent. I don't recall any public high schools being very good, except for Lowell, and that's a charter school. SOTA is also decent as well, but again, I believe it's a charter school. I think the claim that SF high schools are on the whole horrible is accurate.
You can't raise a family in SF without making enough money to afford a $1.4M house, and spending $2000/month on private school per kid because the SF schools have become really horrible (due to SF political stupidity).