Incumbents don’t often lose elections in San Francisco, but Alida Fisher just beat one, edging out Ann Hsu for a Board of Education seat at a critical time for the city’s public schools.
Fisher is a parent of current and former SFUSD students (her oldest is now studying nursing at Sonoma State University), and is involved in the district as the former chair of its Community Advisory Committee for Special Education and a member of the African American Parent Advisory Committee. (Fisher is white and her children are Black.)
Fisher barely missed the cut for school board in 2020. This time, she squeaked past Hsu by about 3,000 votes. Hsu was one of Mayor London Breed’s three appointees after the school board recall and also a big backer of the recall. Fisher was a vocal opponent who didn’t expect the landslide. “My crystal ball is broken,” she says. “It got smashed back in February.”
The recall vote scrambled the board’s makeup amid plenty of dissatisfaction. Student outcomes are suffering; enrollment is in decline; a budget crisis was only avoided with a state windfall; and teachers are missing pay and benefits because of a botched software system.
The post-recall board immediately had an impact, restoring Lowell High’s merit admissions, hiring a new superintendent, and reforming its own way of doing business — including a framework (“Vision, Values, Goals, and Guardrails”) to focus on fewer academic priorities, such as improvements in student literacy and math scores.
Fisher, who aligns herself with SF progressives, could shift the makeup again, although she says she supports much of the board’s recent work. Fisher did not fill out The Frisc’s pre-election questionnaire, but just before the race was called in her favor Wednesday, we caught up with her to ask about student literacy, the district’s PR problem, and much more.
This conversation has been edited and condensed.
The Frisc: Student outcomes are top of mind for everyone, including the gap between white and Asian students on one side, and Black and brown students on another. As part of its refocus, the board has targeted third-grade literacy and eighth-grade math as two of three major outcomes to improve in five years. What do you think of those goals?
Alida Fisher: I’m impressed with the work they’re doing. For the academic outcomes, math and literacy are great, 3rd grade reading in particular. [I support] the work we’re doing reviewing and hopefully finding a more appropriate curriculum.
If we want our children to learn to read by third grade, we have to start teaching them the foundational skills much earlier: phonemic awareness — what the letter A sounds like in the various parts of a word — and how to break a word apart and sound it out. All these foundational skills, our current curriculum isn’t teaching and our assessments aren’t assessing for.
We’ve got a lot of families who can afford to supplement with outside tutoring and schools with [parent associations] that can bring in reading coaches, then we have families and schools that can’t. You shouldn’t have to go outside your school or classroom to learn to read.
It’s the board’s job to help set goals, and the district staff’s job to steer the ship toward them. Do you feel like they’re heading in the right direction?
Yes. The one area I keep pushing the superintendent is we have to stop conflating our SBAC scores with whether our kids know how to read. This year we added a lexile component, and that’s great. Just measuring by SBAC, just one number, isn’t going to get us there. That’s the nuance I hope to explore more as a board member.
And eighth-grade math is a great [focus] too. I’ve enjoyed listening to the different board meetings and working sessions of the current board. I really appreciate the intentionality and hard work.
Chronic absenteeism wasn’t on the list of academic goals. It has doubled during the pandemic. Should it be elevated to the same level of urgency?
You won’t get to the literacy and math goals unless you have students at school. It’s absolutely something we need to monitor, but there are so many impacts, some in the district’s control, some not. I’d love to see the city take this on from a bigger standpoint. We need to work with Muni, we need attendance officers to work with social workers to provide wraparound services.
From what you’ve said so far, it sounds like you’re on board with the current board’s reform efforts.
Yes, in theory. This will be one of the hardest parts of the job for me. Having sat on so many committees for so many years, I really enjoy digging into the weeds.
I understand governance versus management, and the role of the board versus the superintendent. But the mom in me, the special education advocate in me really wants to be in the room where it happens, to paraphrase Hamilton. As much as board members have to give the superintendent the tools to manage, the space where we are right now, the fundamental mistrust and toxicity — it’s been a rough couple of years — our families and all community stakeholders deserve a whole lot of transparency as we undergo such big change.
During the superintendent’s listening tour, we heard over and over again that folks felt it was performative. That frustration has been ongoing for years.
Then there’s the problem with any kind of community input, that at a certain point the decision-makers have to make a decision. The people who don’t like the decision can always say ‘You didn’t hear my voice’ even if it was heard, but they didn’t get what they wanted.
True. The role of the board is to be accountable to the community. The question becomes what’s the community? Whose voice do we listen to?
What do you think? Were Superintendent Wayne and the board’s listening tours a good faith effort?
Seeing the superintendent out himself, not sending out staff, I was appreciative of that. There’s a lot of institutional knowledge already available, not just in district employees and schools, but in our community based organizations. Understanding where your partners are and where the work has been done, instead of recreating the wheel, I’m hoping to help with that.
The board and district just launched a task force to review high school curriculum, admissions, and more — including Lowell High admissions. Will you go with its recommendations? Are there lines in the sand that you don’t think the district should cross?
My crystal ball is broken. It got smashed back in February. But this is an area where we have a whole lot of people and their feelings. We can’t rush through with the goal of getting to one outcome over another. We’ve been sued for not following the Brown Act. A lot of families are questioning how the committee was made up.
Everyone doing the work has the best of intentions. I think it’s important to make sure we’ve got all voices at the table.
More about high schools: Why should we have this scarcity mindset around Lowell and academic standards and AP classes, most of which are taught at Lowell? Can we spread them around to other high schools?
Not everyone can go to Lowell or SOTA [Ruth Asawa School of the Arts, the only other high school with merit-based admissions]. I mean this as no disrespect to anyone at Lowell, but part of what makes it great are the resources. It’s a complete mismatch [in terms of AP classes]. Their endowment pays for things that are amazing. I wouldn’t want to take that opportunity away, so we need to look at how to do those things at other schools.
My kids have gone to Mission High; there are dual enrollment pathways with SF City College that have been successful. What [helped] my daughter, in my opinion, was having that college credit on her transcript. Not only does it look great on transcripts, but also it could lead into community and social work. Another one is the fire sciences pathway, which looks great for pre-med, or if you pass the city EMT program the city will hire these kids at totally livable wages.
I would love to see these types of models at more of our schools. It’s like a hidden gem.
That’s an interesting phrase to use. Does the district have a marketing problem? Do families who are leaving the district not know about these programs, or the O’Connell culinary program, when all they hear about is the fight over Lowell?
The marketing problem is true at all levels. When applying to elementary school, the conventional wisdom is: “Here’s your list of a dozen schools, see if you get in, but also have your list of private and parochial schools.”
I like the work the district is doing getting to the root cause of the teacher payroll crisis. I’m looking forward to the next couple reports to see how successful this is. There’s nothing more important right now.
At a recent board meeting, you said parents taking their kids out of SFUSD have a “fundamental distrust” of the district. Do you have a sense of why they’re leaving?
The only information I have is anecdotal. We were at Miraloma [Elementary] for 15 years. I’ve heard from families that the middle schools are too big, or “oh, that school seems rough,” which is coded language that just breaks my heart or burns my biscuits depending on the day.
We’ve also heard families say that academic rigor just isn’t there. Again, it’s a PR problem. James Denman [Middle] is a feeder school for Miraloma, and we’ve got kids competing in robotics programs. We’ve got a whole STEM Maker lab, we’ve got Denman TV, all these amazing resources families [don’t see] unless they’re willing to tour or push past stereotypes.
It’s hard, though, because looking for schools in the city can be a full-time job and not everyone has that luxury. When you make assumptions and have the economic means [for private school], it’s a big part of our equity gap.
How can the district reverse the enrollment decline?
I hate to say we need more central office folks to do marketing, they’ve got plenty of things they need to do, but is it fair to ask the elementary school principals to go to all these fairs and market their schools?
The enrollment process is very daunting for a lot of families. When you have anything as dense as our application process, helping families break it down is always better.
But I don’t think it would be fair for me as a board member to say ‘Hey Superintendent, open this position, fund this department.” One way to guide the work is if we determine as a board that one guardrail should be to simplify the enrollment process. Maybe not telling the superintendent to do X, Y, and Z, but making sure the budget is aligned to support the priorities.
The teacher payroll crisis doesn’t seem close to resolution. Will you advocate for changing the strategy the administration has laid out? What’s your confidence level?
In last night’s report, the superintendent spent a lot of time talking about the state of emergency and the crisis unit they’ve created. I like the work they’re doing getting to the root cause of the issues, and I’m looking forward to the next couple reports to see how successful this is. There’s nothing more important right now than this. We’re bleeding staff, heading into the holidays. Our teachers need to be made whole.
