SPUR crunched Census data on the financial situations of Bay Area ethnic groups and the image reveals Black residents are being left behind region-wide, with particular acuteness in San Francisco. In the epicenter of Silicon Valley, Black income growth lagged behind White and Asian households. In the East Bay and Solano County, Black households saw a raise of just $10,000 over 10 years. But San Francisco was the worst of all: the Black community’s income barely budged since 2010. Black San Franciscans live in the shadow of a technology and wealthy renaissance that have exploded the incomes of their white neighbors.
In community college my Black computer science professor stated: “If the lot of you don’t figure this out, many of you wont be living here much longer.” So what’s the cause of Black families raised in the Bay Area being left out of the economic boom? Here are key educational statistics about the next generation of Black workers in San Francisco as they finish high school:
In 2021, 47% of Black students in SFUSD that are high school juniors don’t even come close to meeting English-language proficiency. That’s 9% higher than the state average for Black 11th graders — which is also abysmal. That means for every one of two Black students leaving San Francisco high schools they can’t read for their age. Including students who are close but still not proficient: 71.5% of Black high school juniors in San Francisco cannot read at a proficient level, compared to 20.3% of Asian students, 22.6% of White students, 32% of Filipino students and 61.8% of Hispanic students. It was bad pre-pandemic as well but it’s gotten a few percentage points worse.
These are not numbers from a red state in the Deep South but San Francisco. The technology capital of the world, which has propelled the incomes of white and Asian households tremendously, and for which Latinos largely and Black people almost entirely have been completely left out. Without meeting the most basic literacy standards, Black and Latino high school graduates aren’t even qualified for the most basic office jobs. Computer science is totally out reach — the mathematics proficiency standards are in the single-digits for Black high school graduates.
San Francisco’s educational system is producing a generation of Black San Franciscans destined to fail before they’ve even got started. I ask why should Black San Franciscans care about an economy or a city like San Francisco which is propelling so many into wealth while Black residents walk around with Great Recession-era earnings?
But it’s not just the San Francisco education system. Oakland’s even worse than San Francisco, though it trended in the right direction in terms of severely illiterate Black juniors during the pandemic. Region-wide, in district after district, about half of Black high school juniors are not sufficiently literate. Same in California and same throughout the United States. Black boys in particular struggle with literacy far below peers and Black girls as early as the 3rd grade. Moreover, the school shutdowns during the pandemic made the crisis from bad to worse and there doesn’t appear to be much mainstream focus on resolving it.
It’s not that these students will just turn out as under-average paid adults — that’s a best case scenario — but poor literacy rates are a significant indicator for being incarcerated or stuck in the criminal justice system. A study from 2014 found that the average incarcerated person is significantly illiterate compared to the general population. A study from 2003 found 80% of juvenile criminals were illiterate for their age.
The old urban legend that prison
