No one ever expected a tech revolution on San Francisco’s quiet and once-analog Westside. But at 17, Natalie Lunbeck is one of the young women in West Portal helping close the digital divide: “It feels good to show girls that a computer scientist can look like them, and not just a 30-year-old man.”
Read MoreSan Francisco welcomes Mohammed Khalil for being Muslim, but pushes him out for being middle class. How can we be a refuge for every working family? By fixing our housing shortage and affordability crisis with Khalil’s can-do spirit.
Read MoreTwo months into the school year, 5th graders at Sunnyside Elementary have only seen a revolving door of substitutes. "As a taxpayer, I really believe in public education,” said one parent. “But 31 kids without a teacher lost in this bureaucratic vortex is beyond frustrating.”
Read MoreBy Joel P. Engardio -- “Sometimes when you put people together the sum is worse than the parts, which is the best way to describe the old board of trustees,” said Rafael Mandelman, president of City College's new board. “We can’t afford to have factions pitted against each other like before. My role is to keep folks working together and focused on saving the college.”
Read MoreJoel Engardio speech on why moderates are the true progressives in San Francisco. Engardio was the guest speaker at the Golden Gate Breakfast Club in August 2014.
Read MoreBy Joel P. Engardio -- Is San Francisco segregated when a quarter of public schools have a supermajority of a single non-white race? Nearly half of San Francisco is white, but only 12 percent of public school students are. Where are the white students?
Read MoreBy Joel P. Engardio -- Lots of San Francisco voters skip school board elections. Maybe it’s because just 16 percent of The City’s households have kids. Nationally, the number is 44 percent. All of San Francisco's non-parents might care if they knew how much school board policies affect everyone.
Read MoreBy Joel P. Engardio -- There must be others like me in San Francisco who embrace liberal values but also crave a city that runs on common sense. Forward-thinkers who believe in progress and aren’t afraid of change. True progressives.
Read MoreBy Joel P. Engardio -- Elementary school graduations are cute, yet they hardly match the hat tossing euphoria of the U.S. Naval Academy or the pomp of an Ivy League procession. But don't tell that to the first-ever graduates of the Chinese Immersion School at De Avila this month. With the mythological phoenix as their mascot, they deserve a celebration fit for rising from the ashes of public education in San Francisco.
Read MoreBy Joel P. Engardio -- Ask any parent remaining in San Francisco (a city with more dogs than kids) to describe the process of applying for public school and you'll often hear "nightmare."
"I was willing to excuse some of the negative stories -- the anger, the frustration, families leaving San Francisco -- because our crazy system had a bigger goal of better outcomes," said School Board Commissioner Matt Haney. "Now I question if it is all worth it. If the system isn't accomplishing its goals, then what's the point?"
By Joel P. Engardio -- When French writer Alexis de Tocqueville studied democracy by traveling across America in the 1830s, he encountered people like Todd David -- a New Jersey native who came to San Francisco in 1998. David embodies the can-do DNA that impressed Tocqueville about early Americans: How they formed their own groups to solve problems rather than rely on a government solution that might never come.
Read MoreBy Joel P. Engardio -- By evolutionary standards, San Francisco should be headed for extinction. We have fewer children than any major American city. More dogs than kids live here. It's not that we aren't making babies. The first generation of Google and Facebook engineers are 30-somethings and starting families. Lots of gay couples are having children. The problem is many parents flee San Francisco when their kids reach ages four or five.
Read MoreBy Joel P. Engardio -- The debacle known as City College of San Francisco appears to have entered its darkest-before-dawn phase. How dark did it get? Last summer, the college was told it would lose its accreditation and public funding if it didn’t comply with the standards every other community college in California has to follow. Then it got darker when the college failed to meet the requirements. So where's the dawn? No more trustees to mismanage the college. They were stripped of their authority, giving the college hope to survive.
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