Why Is Private Schooling So Popular in the San Fran Bay Area? -

The people in the Bay Area are smart, rich and want great education. So, for their children, nothing but the best—private schooling. They know government schools are failures—so they try to give their children a quality education, not a government indoctrination.

“A staggering 30% of kindergarten through 12th graders in San Francisco went to private schools during the 2023–24 school year. That’s more than triple California’s statewide average of 8% among kids who aren’t homeschooled.

In fact, most of the nine Bay Area counties are higher than the state average when it comes to private schooling, with the exception of Sonoma and Solano. Three Bay Area counties’ private schooling rates are double the statewide average — Santa Clara (16%), San Mateo (17%) and Marin (19%).

The Bay Area’s private schooling prevalence is notable compared to other large counties in California. Los Angeles’s private schooling rate is 10.4%, Sacramento nearly 7.5%, and Fresno, less than 3%.”

Wy aren’t those parents fighting for vouchers so all children can get a quality education. That is what I do not understand.

Why Is Private Schooling So Popular in the San Francisco Bay Area?

Pauline Bartolone, KQED. 5/1/25 https://www.kqed.org/news/12037206/why-is-private-schooling-so-popular-in-the-san-francisco-bay-area

View the full episode transcript.

When Aaron Rothman and his wife decided to stay in San Francisco to raise their child, the cost of private school was part of their financial equation. That was the way most of their friends with two working parents did school in San Francisco.

“It’s no secret, right? Public schools are not well funded in California, and that story isn’t getting any better,” said Rothman, who lives in Miraloma Park and works as a recruiter in the tech industry.

Rothman’s son had a great experience at their local public elementary school. But when high school was around the corner, Rothman said he felt public schools were a better fit for high achievers or kids with a lot of needs. He worried his son would fall through the cracks.

“The student population that sort of fell in the middle of the bell curve, we felt, was oftentimes just shuffled through in a way. And we were looking for something a little bit different,” he said.

Rothman’s son goes to a local Catholic high school now — even though they’re not religious — and the family pays roughly $30,000 a year for their son’s tuition. Rothman said they make sacrifices, but it’s worth it.

“He’s thriving,” Rothman said. “He’s got straight As.”

The Bay Area does have high private school rates

A staggering 30% of kindergarten through 12th graders in San Francisco went to private schools during the 2023–24 school year. That’s more than triple California’s statewide average of 8% among kids who aren’t homeschooled.

There are roughly 115 private schools in the city of San Francisco alone, and annual tuition can cost anywhere from $10,000 to $65,000.

Stanford education economist Tom Dee said there could be many reasons why the private schooling rate in San Francisco is so high, including the city’s pockets of affluence, and “concerns about the quality and stability” of public schools.

Dee said San Francisco has historically had a robust Catholic schooling system — there are now 34 Catholic schools in the city — which provide families with a parallel schooling track.

While San Francisco Unified did lose 4,000 students over the past seven years, the high private schooling rate in the city has persisted for decades. According to California Department of Education data, private schooling in San Francisco was 30% dating all the way back to the 1998–99 school year, and roughly that rate in many of the years since.

“The large share of private school enrollment in [San Francisco] has been true ever since I started teaching in SFUSD in the mid-1990s,” Commissioner Alexander shared with KQED in an email, adding that he believed the trend started when the district began racially integrating schools back in the early 1970s.

“That’s when the big declines in SFUSD enrollment began,” Alexander wrote, “due to wealthier, mostly white families leaving SFUSD to avoid integrated public schools.”

Desegregation prompts demand for more private options

Alexander’s hunch about the origins of private schooling in the Bay Area is supported by research.

In Class Action: Desegregation and Diversity in San Francisco Schools, University of Pennsylvania professor Rand Quinn recounts the history of San Francisco’s efforts to mix up racial diversity in public schools by busing kids out of their neighborhoods.

“Private school enrollment surged,” said Quinn, about the desegregation era in the 1970s. “This surge essentially created a permanent shift away from public education that we see today.”

Bussing wasn’t popular among any ethnic group, according to Quinn, but white and Asian families were the most dissatisfied. Some parents believed that racial integration would lower educational standards, and there were robust private schooling options for them.

“White flight in San Francisco was among the worst in the country — more than 20,000 white students left SFUSD” after the bussing program was implemented, reads a district blog post.

Why do many local parents choose private school?

Nowadays, the reasons parents choose private schools are complex and highly individual.

National surveys suggest that parents go private because they believe it will give their kids a safe learning environment, nurture their child’s intellectual, social, and emotional skills, and give them a boost in college applications.

For example, at Alta Vista, a K–8 private school in San Francisco’s Portola neighborhood, kids benefit from small class sizes.

Each first-grade class has two teachers attending to 16 students. In comparison, at a nearby public school, a first-grade class could be 22 students with one teacher, per the teacher’s union agreement.

During a recent Friday morning math lesson, Alta Vista first graders spread out in small groups all around their classroom. Some played with plastic learning toys while sitting on a carpeted floor with a teacher. Others stood next to each other at a long table, using playing cards and rolling dice with another teacher.

But the hands-on learning environment comes with a hefty price tag. Tuition here is more than $41,000 a year, although some kids receive financial aid. And Alta Vista, along with other private schools, accepts less than two-thirds of the kids who apply.

Parents are willing to jump through the hoops and pony up the cash to get specialized education and attention for their kids, according to USF researcher Julia Roehl. San Francisco private school parents gave Roehl many reasons for keeping their kids out of the public system, including the desire for the “network effect” private school brings, which they believed can set their children up with opportunities for life.

But Roehl said some parents send their kids to private school for much simpler reasons, like proximity or a desire for community. One parent she interviewed wanted her child to be able to walk to class and have neighbors help with pick-ups.

“It was a very case-by-case basis on what worked best,” Roehl said.

For other parents, private school is about faith and morals. In the Bay Area, there are dozens of religious schools, and they tend to be less expensive than other private options.

“My husband and I still go to church,” said Ada Bajada, a nurse practitioner in South San Francisco who has three kids in Christian schools. Her youngest two attend the same school that Bajada went to as a child. She and her husband, who is an electrician, pay a total of $33,000 a year in school tuition for all three of her kids.

“We can’t take back the years,” Bajada said. “Whatever we can invest in them to help develop them, secure them as a person inside … is a positive investment.”

How the private school system affects public schools

Economists say there are real consequences of siphoning students away from the public system.

“If you have fewer kids, you expect to get less money,” Tom Dee said.

Public school districts receive state money based on how many kids are enrolled. So when parents choose to pull their kids out of public schools, the district loses out on funding.

For example, SFUSD said the 4,000 kids who left San Francisco public schools over the past seven years represent $80 million in per-pupil funding. On average, that’s a loss of $20,000 per kid.

And San Francisco is not the only public school system grappling with “gut-wrenching decisions” about cuts because of COVID-era enrollment decline, Dee said. Even if there are fewer kids using resources, districts still have fixed costs of running buildings and maintaining staff.

“The lights still have to be on, the building still has to be heated,” Dee said.

When families flood out of a public school system, it can kick off a negative cycle of enrollment decline that’s hard to reverse, said Rand Quinn. When funding dwindles, the district may be compelled to close school buildings or end programs. And when cuts make big news, the community’s confidence in the school system erodes.

“Even more families may opt out of the district and send their kids to private schools, especially middle-class families with the means to leave,” Quinn said. “So the burden of under-resourced schools falls disproportionately on working-class and poor families.”

Public schools don’t get the ‘credit [they] deserve’

Today, more than half of the students at San Francisco public schools are considered lower-income or otherwise at-risk. And total enrollment in the district is about half of what it was in the late 1960s.

Still, public school advocates say there’s a lot to brag about at San Francisco Unified. Students benefit from a number of language programs, from Spanish to Arabic and Vietnamese, and high schoolers can get ahead by enrolling in college courses.

Vanessa Marerro with Parents for Public Schools of San Francisco said some of the negativity about public schools is more rumor than fact. If parents saw classrooms in action, they’d see all the merits.

“Ask for a tour. You can see what the students are doing. You can see how teachers are attending to them,” she said.

Kendall Fleming agrees. She has two kids at a public elementary school in the Sunset, and she’s been “wowed” by the teachers, who have shown deep knowledge, versatility and responsiveness.

Fleming said she feels her kids’ teachers are invested in them. During a recent parent-teacher conference about her kindergartner, the teacher recounted her child’s facial expressions while she was learning to read.

“That’s exciting as a parent to know that someone not only sees your child … but is rooting for them and guiding them,” she said.

What do we collectively value?

The choice to leave — or to stay — in the public school system is complex and so different parent to parent. But economist Tom Dee said if fewer and fewer people are choosing public schools, over time, the trend can change basic notions about what we collectively value — and are willing to pay for — as a society.

The people who don’t use public schools may say, “This is not a public good that matters to me. Why should I look fondly on income and sales taxes and property taxes that fund it?” Dee said.

However, psychology research suggests that being exposed to racial and economic diversity at school is linked to a number of benefits, including development of critical thinking, building self-confidence and combating bias.

“Just having intergroup contact is really important because when you just engage with people, you’re more likely to see them as individualized humans,” Dee said.

Marrero said parents can witness these social bridges in many SFUSD classrooms. “The science said it all, but the heart said more,” she said. “When you get learners in the same classroom that have different backgrounds, it’s just like, no walls at all.”