San Jose Unified School District

This school is awesome. :D

John Muir is MUCH safer in the past two or so years. Some key teachers have retired, but generally good staff working hard. A few grumps but district hides them in irrelevant roles. Uniforms are black — which is a bit odd but cuts down on gang colors. Very enforced: on college tshirt day no Stanford or Cal permitted (in red or blue).
Update: school’s bike security is not very good — kids will damage/​steal and (according to students) older brothers/​family/​dropouts are tipped off to bikes with weak locks.

John Muir did not fit well with my child. We were there for two years and had issues with a couple of teachers that the administration did nothing to help resolve. In fact, we were constantly ignored my the administration and we are not complainers. In two years, we contacted the administration four times and were ignored three of those times.
The overall feeling is that they just want kids to get by. I have been told by countless parents that you just need to survive John Muir in order to get to Pioneer High School. We couldn’t take it anymore and pulled our son for his 8^th grade year. He is now at an academically challenging school and thriving.
Don’t get me wrong, I do know families that have had decent experiences with John Muir. You can get a good education there, but it is the exception, not the rule. Mediocrity was the norm.

Great School with great staff