If San Francisco’s school years were lunar years, this one might be the Year of the Chameleon. By next summer, the city’s public schools could be on the verge of significant changes from head to tail.
This week was a big preview. Tuesday night, school officials publicly kicked off a nine-month process to rethink the district’s $1 billion-plus budget in the face of big deficits. One outcome could be school closures and consolidations.
Superintendent Matt Wayne started the meeting with a blunt admission: “The system isn’t working.” It was about the only thing everyone in the packed room could agree upon.
A more specific reform, but no less contentious, had a day in court Thursday. A state judge heard arguments about a lawsuit that aims to reverse the district’s 10-year-old math policy, which does not allow its middle schoolers to take algebra.
Wayne and the Board of Education committed last year to a comprehensive review of how the district teaches early literacy and middle school math, plus a broad look at high school curriculum and policy. There are signs that the reviews will lead to reform, but plans are still in the works.
Student outcomes in each of these areas show disturbing gaps along racial and ethnic lines, even though the math curriculum was put in place in 2014 to address those inequities.
In 2015, 53 percent of the district’s 11th grade students met the state math standard, but just 11 percent of Black and 16 percent of Latino students met it. There was little movement by 2019, and in 2022, only 9 percent of Black and 12 percent of Latino students met the standard, compared to 46 percent overall.
The court hearing in the algebra lawsuit ended today without a final ruling or indication when the ruling could be ready.
UPDATE: The court issued a ruling on Sept. 7. More details are below.
Each of these reforms is a political tightrope for the officials in charge, some of them up for reelection in November 2024. At stake is San Francisco’s commitment to right racial wrongs and disparities, as well as the need to retain or lure back families who will vote with their pocketbooks, opting for private schools, or their feet by leaving SF entirely.
What to do with Lowell High — with its merit-based admissions and deeper offerings of advanced placement courses — is just one piece of the high school puzzle, for example. A task force is slated to give the district recommendations next month.
Doing the math
Meanwhile, an attempt to speed math reform seemed to hit a speed bump today in a hearing in San Francisco Superior Court. Based on the arguments, the lawsuit to force SFUSD to change middle school math curriculum will likely be narrowed but not entirely dismissed.
In the 2014-15 school year, the district eliminated Algebra I from middle school, forcing its students to wait until 9th grade to take the course. The lawsuit argued that the California education code required Algebra I as early as 7th grade.
When Judge Joseph Quinn indicated he found no support for the plaintiffs’ position in the statute, their attorneys appeared to concede the point. The plaintiffs also asserted that the algebra policy results in socioeconomic discrimination, but Quinn seemed inclined to dismiss that argument as well.
The main focus of today’s hearing was a different question: whether the education code requires SFUSD, in judging if a student could skip to geometry, to accept any outside algebra course for credit that is “aligned to the content standards” of the state Board of Education and is at least as rigorous as SFUSD’s year-long Algebra I course.
Quinn appeared to lean toward letting the plaintiffs keep pressing their complaint, but only if they could allege that SFUSD acted arbitrarily when it did not give the plaintiffs’ students credit for a non-district algebra course.
Until Quinn issues a final ruling, however, it’s impossible to know how much of the lawsuit will be allowed to proceed.
UPDATE: As anticipated, Quinn wrote in a Sept. 7 ruling that SFUSD was required neither to offer Algebra I in 7th grade, nor to accept for credit any algebra class taken anywhere as a substitute for Algebra I. However, the judge left room for the plaintiffs to return with a more specific complaint about the district’s rejection of non-district algebra classes as credit when it failed to place the plaintiffs’ students in SFUSD geometry classes.
Outside the lawsuit, or perhaps in response to it, SFUSD in May made a few changes to its geometry eligibility rules for the current year. It temporarily waived the need for a validation test if students could show they passed a qualifying algebra course. But if the district moves back to algebra in middle school, it will almost certainly have to come from within, not from a legal mandate.
‘All options on the table’
On Tuesday night, the challenge of substantial broader reform was clear at the Board of Education meeting. It was the first public discussion of what the district might do as declining enrollment deepens a budget deficit.
Many in attendance were convinced that school closures would be inevitable, with the burden falling on SF’s lower-income neighborhoods and Black and brown families. Officials tried pushing back. “We’re not starting this conversation at the worst case scenario” of closures, said Board of Education commissioner Matt Alexander, who in 2021 fought for a budget that would cut more deeply from the central office and leave schools as intact as possible. “That’s the last item on the list.”
Other commissioners didn’t try to tamp down the speculation about closures. Mark Sanchez, like Alexander a former principal in the district, brought up new kindergarten enrollment formulas that are supposed to blunt the demand for what are perceived as better schools on the city’s west side. The formulas, or zones, were supposed to be in place this year but have been delayed until 2026.
Sanchez said it would be unconscionable if SFUSD ended up “leapfrogging” to school closures before having the chance to put the new enrollment zones in place.
The next day, Superintendent Wayne issued a letter that reinforced the inevitability of “tough decisions in the coming months,” adding that “all the options are on the table.”
SFUSD has been losing students for years, and the pandemic brought the count of non-charter students down this year below 49,000, a drop of more than 4,000 students since 2012. SFUSD predicts it will lose another 4,600 in the next decade. State funding, the bulk of the $1.28 billion budget, is tied to enrollment. Fewer students mean fewer dollars, all while costs rise.
Teacher and other staff shortages and retention are alarming, exacerbated by pandemic conditions and an 18-month payroll fiasco, with missing checks and benefits. This school year began with 21 percent of classroom positions unfilled.
The district says its salaries are competitive within the Bay Area, although they lag well behind San Mateo County.
Salaries will rise, but how much is at stake in the contentious contract negotiations now underway. The union, United Educators of San Francisco, went public this week with what its president called a “white paper” that accused SFUSD of chronic fiscal mismanagement and offered some financial ideas: “If its finances were managed differently, SFUSD could pay competitive wages that would attract and retain credentialed teachers, as nearby districts are doing. Instead, our schools go understaffed and students are asked to pay the price for SFUSD’s debt addiction, administrative bloat, resource mismanagement and expensive contracts with unreliable Consultants.”
The union ended the spring semester with a “strike readiness” training session. Talk this semester has been about “collective action.”
Even with a potential strike looming, SFUSD officials have decided big changes can’t wait. Associate Superintendent of Operations Dawn Kalamanathan said Tuesday that realigning enrollment and resources over a decade would be doable; crafting a plan in a year is quite the challenge: “There are no light-switch solutions.”
Wendy Thurm contributed to this report. Thurm’s work has appeared in the New Yorker, San Francisco magazine, and the Athletic, among other outlets. She also writes Hanging Sliders, a thrice-weekly baseball newsletter.