The just-announced map for force-feeding students graduating from San Francisco elementary schools into middle schools chosen by the District will eliminate the limited choice families currently have in choosing middle schools and, worse, will lock East Side families into the poorly performing middle schools, a hurt that will fall mostly on low-income families and families of color, particularly Latino families. The plan also tears apart the Spanish language immersion program in San Francisco’s middle schools, and offers nothing in return to fix the damage.

The District’s plan also effectively abolishes sibling preference for enrollment in middle schools. This is a move that will make life miserable for the many families with kids already in middle school who will no longer be able to enroll their younger child in the same school, burdening over-stretched families with the task of juggling lives in two schools, again punishing those with the least resources.

It’s complicated assignment plan, but it’s pretty easy to understand just by taking a look at the proposed map. We are about enshrine residential segregation in the schools.

West side and Northside elementary schools, almost without exception will all feed to the high-performing middle schools, while the east side and southside elementary schools are mostly assigned to poorly performing middle schools.

Horace Mann Middle School is a good an example of what’s wrong with the District’s plan: it’s one of our most troubled middle schools and it will be fed entirely by east side elementary schools, three of them which are schools populated by large majorities of kids from low-income families.

Parents with kids currently in these east side elementary schools may have made the choice, when their kids were young, to send their children to a local school. However, under this new plan they lose the chance later on, when their kids are older, to send them to a middle school that might be further away.

The fourth school that will be force fed into Horace Mann is an all-classes Spanish Immersion school, but Mann does NOT have a Spanish Immersion program in place, even though District’s materials disingenuously lists Mann as a school with a “Spanish language pathway.”

Meanwhile the District is proposing to shut down the Spanish Immersion program at Hoover. It takes years and hundreds of thousands of dollars to get a good Spanish Immersion program up and running, but the District is offering neither. 12 months and zero dollars to set up a new dual immersion program at Horace Mann guarantees a nightmare outcome. And the District is condemning families in the other immersion schools east of Mission Street (Flynn and Monroe) to the same fate, as those schools are also to be force-fed into middle schools with no immersion programs currently in place.

It is particularly ironic that, under the same plan, all the kids coming from the elementary schools in Noe Valley will be assigned to a middle school with a strong Spanish immersion program, despite the fact that Horace Mann lies closer to the Noe Valley schools than the east-side schools being assigned to Mann.

The two glaring exceptions to the District’s plan to link local elementary schools with “nearby” middle schools are the two elementary schools in the Bay View/Hunter’s Point that will be assigned to high performing west-side schools, an exception which smacks of tokenism by district’s planners who couldn’t fully stomach the odious logic of their own plan and makes a mockery of their argument that, at the end of the day, everything will be OK because their plan will provide for quality local schools in every neighborhood.

The District needs to throw the brakes on this plan and delay the implementation of the force-feeder provisions while it either fixes the map or comes up with a better system.

And there are better systems out there. Other school districts have used a zone method to solve the problem of segregated residential patterns perpetuating inequity in an elementary to middle-school feeder program.

Alternatively the district could simply employ the assignment criteria that it is proposing to use for elementary schools, criteria that give weight to neighborhood proximity and give parents some limited choice but do not rigidly force-feed students, including students who might be better off in another school.

And rather than tearing down the current immersion program to serve their plan, the District should be building on it. One possibility would be to expand the Spanish Immersion track at James Lick so that it fills the whole school, not just half.

Middle schools come in all sizes, shapes and flavors in San Francisco, just like kids do. To insist that any particular child will do the same in any school is simply old-school social engineering that should be embarrassing in this day and age.

There is no reason for the District to ram this just-announced plan and map through an eight-week process just so that it can be used next year. San Francisco already tried the feeder system back in the 1980’s. It wasn’t a cure-all back then and it’s not going to be a cure-all now. In fact, the only way this plan will work is if the District’s planners go back to the drawing board and get it right.

Hunter Cutting is a parent of two children in the San Francisco public schools.