This is a critical election for San Francisco’s public schools, which are grappling with falling enrollment, staff shortages, and a fiscal crisis that could trigger a state takeover.
Four of the seven Board of Education seats are up for grabs, with 11 candidates vying for them.
A community organizer and former SFUSD principal, Matt Alexander was elected to the board in 2020 and is the only sitting member running for re-election. He answers our questions below.
For more background on the school district’s situation, our questionnaire methodology (such as: why do some links come with asterisks?), and an overview of all the candidates, please visit our main page. – Ida Mojadad and Alex Lash
Editor’s note: Alexander submitted his answers too late for us to send follow-up questions, which was our course of action with the other candidates. We will ask Alexander a second round of questions and update this post with his answers.
If Superintendent Wayne deserves to be fired, what specifically has he done that can’t be blamed on longtime SFUSD dysfunction? If he deserves to stay, please describe why.
Systems problems are never caused by one individual, nor are they solvable by one individual. To tackle the significant challenges facing SFUSD, it will take all of us working together.
The school board’s job is to represent the vision and values of the community. We have one employee — the superintendent — and it’s our responsibility to hold the superintendent accountable and support them to succeed. While I cannot discuss details of personnel matters, I can say that the current school board has fully taken on this responsibility.
In the past, superintendent evaluations have not been completely transparent and have not focused on academic outcomes. My colleagues and I have adopted a new governance approach and are evaluating the superintendent based on transparent public metrics linked to academic goals for the first time in the past three decades.
Recently, when we uncovered some serious new fiscal and operational challenges, we acted swiftly and decisively by outlining clear priorities for the superintendent, and we reached out to Mayor Breed to get help from a team of city experts.
What issue in SFUSD doesn’t get enough attention and what do you plan to do about it?
I’ve spent the last four years on the school board fighting against SFUSD’s fiscal and operational mismanagement, its lofty rhetoric about equity but lack of accountability for real results, and a bureaucratic culture that’s often unresponsive to the needs of students, families, and school-based staff.
I became school board president a month ago, and it was clear that we needed to take more decisive action to address these challenges. That’s why I reached out to Mayor London Breed for support, and I’m grateful that she responded by creating the city’s School Stabilization Team, with experts who will work collaboratively with the school board and SFUSD management to provide the help we need to get back on track.
Over the coming months, our number one priority must be fixing SFUSD’s dysfunctional fiscal and operational systems. This will allow us to balance our budget and eliminate the structural deficit, ensure that our schools are fully staffed, rebuild trust with families, and keep our focus on student learning.
This is our moment to come together, address our challenges head-on, and create the public school system that this great city deserves.
Many candidates bring up the importance of more early education, intervention, and meeting basic needs. What do you recommend under the current financial circumstances? Please be specific.
Even as we face budget challenges, we need to continue targeted investments so we can expand what’s already working in SFUSD. One example is the elementary math program that started at John Muir Elementary School a decade ago and resulted in dramatic increases in achievement for Black and Latino students.
What’s John Muir’s secret? The school has carefully and consistently implemented an approach to elementary mathematics called “Teaching Through Problem-solving,” which includes a rigorous curriculum as well as a sophisticated instructional approach, alongside a program for in-depth teacher professional development known as “Lesson Study.”
What Muir’s experience shows is that if we invest deeply in educators and build a culture of excellence, we can dramatically increase academic outcomes for all kids. That’s why I worked with the Board of Supervisors to secure $8 million in city funding to expand the John Muir project as a pilot at Malcolm X [Academy], [Leonard R.] Flynn [Elementary], and Sanchez [Elementary] over the past two years. Early results show that it’s working, and now we’re expanding the approach to even more schools using resources from the Student Success Fund, which I co-authored in 2022.
There’s a chronic shortage of special education staff. Students have to go outside the district for services, which costs the district a lot of money. What do you propose to fix this?
One of the most important things we can do to serve students with disabilities is to ensure they have fully staffed classrooms. That means recruiting and retaining qualified staff.
Because housing is so expensive in San Francisco, it’s been tough to attract high quality staff to fill open positions. I’m proud that last year, we gave our educators the largest raise in history* to recruit and retain the best possible classroom staff, including an increase in entry-level paraeducator pay to $30/hour.
In addition to increasing pay, we must continue the work that’s just begun to make dramatic improvements to our HR department, so we’re more effective at recruitment, and treat potential new hires and current employees with the respect and dignity they deserve. We also need to improve working conditions by making the job more sustainable, such as ensuring that special education caseloads are based on students’ needs in their IEPs, rather than through a one-size-fits-all formula.
Finally, SFUSD should increase our programmatic capacity to provide the specialized services that students can currently access in non-public schools;, for example, creating a school that specializes in serving students with dyslexia.
If you’re re-elected, will you abide by the final decisions in December to close schools?
Since I’m the current board president, I will help make that decision and will certainly abide by it.
How do you propose keeping families in the district after the school closure decisions and further budget cuts?
In August, I was talking with the dad of a three-year-old at Sunday Streets in the Mission, and I asked if he planned to enroll his child in San Francisco public schools. “Honestly I’m not sure,” he said. “The enrollment system creates so much anxiety and uncertainty. We’re looking at private school options to see if we can afford it, and we’re thinking of moving out of the cCity, even though we love it here.”
This parent’s feelings about SFUSD’s enrollment system are widely shared, including among parents who can’t afford to move or choose exclusive private schools. I believe the most important thing we can do to increase enrollment is to fix our broken enrollment system, which offers an illusion of choice while actually creating high levels of anxiety for students and families. The system also costs millions of dollars a year to operate, creates unpredictable school enrollments which makes it challenging for schools to do budgeting (especially for schools serving low-income students), and fails to create the diverse schools San Francisco needs.
Closing schools will free up facilities. What should the district do with those buildings? Do you support charter schools moving in?
The first priority for any available facilities should be affordable housing. We all know San Francisco faces a housing crisis, which has been caused by decades of public policies at the federal, state, and local levels that do not prioritize working-class and low-income people. SFUSD is the second largest landowner in the city,* so we have a special responsibility to use our land as a resource in helping to address this crisis.
Projects such as Shirley Chisholm Village with 100 percent affordable educator and staff housing are an important part of this process. The school board recently voted to move forward with two other potential sites for educator housing* at 95 Gough Street and the “pumpkin patch” at 1620 7th Avenue. We also need to consider building housing for working-class SFUSD families who cannot afford the city’s excessive market rents and who can’t access the limited supply of existing affordable housing.
Regarding charter schools, in this moment when San Francisco is facing a declining population of children and SFUSD’s enrollment is declining, we don’t need new charter schools.
What’s the No. 1 thing that SFUSD can do to improve campus safety for students and staff?
Educators and scientists know that for students to meet their full learning potential, they must be in an environment that’s both physically and psychologically safe. If we want SFUSD students to meet our challenging academic goals, it’s essential that we do a better job of promoting a safe, inclusive school climate. When I was principal at June Jordan School for Equity, we prioritized restorative practices and a trauma-informed approach to student discipline and student support; I saw first-hand how effective these approaches are. See chapter two of Redesigning High Schools: 10 Features for Success for more on my views on these issues.
But for restorative practices to work, they must be done right — or we risk creating an even more unsafe environment by having no clear boundaries. In 2014, the school board passed the Safe and Supportive Schools Resolution,* and for a few years SFUSD prioritized training and staffing at the school site level.
Today, training is inconsistent, and many schools do not have adequate staff to provide the follow-up and student support which restorative practices require. Even as we face difficult budget decisions ahead, we need to prioritize research-based approaches which keep kids safe and help all students succeed academically.
It’s been two years since five-year academic reforms began: math, literacy, and high school curriculum. What’s gone right? What’s gone wrong? How should the board address the next three years of the plan?
In 2022, my colleagues and I adopted a new governance approach* and started evaluating the superintendent based on transparent public metrics linked to academic goals for the first time in three decades. Now we engage in regular public monitoring sessions where the superintendent and team provide data on SFUSD students’ progress in 3rd grade literacy, 8th grade math, and 12th grade college and career readiness, and then explain their strategic plans moving forward. This has resulted in the adoption of new elementary literacy and math curricula for the first time in 20 years, a new approach to chronic absenteeism that is showing results, and a decision to confront the teacher shortage head-on by providing our educators with the largest raise in history.
These research-based moves have laid the foundation for significant academic gains, but it will take time to implement them fully in a large system. We also need to fix our fiscal and operational systems so educators have the support they need. The school board should build on this work and continue to invest deeply in educators, and create a culture of excellence in all of our schools, so we can dramatically increase academic outcomes for all kids.
How have you changed or evolved since you’ve been on the board?
When I first joined the school board in early 2021, there were a number of high-profile decisions happening in rapid succession.* As I learned more about how those decisions were being made, it became clear that the board’s process did not align with my values and experience as a successful educator. As a principal and in my work as a community organizer, I’ve always prioritized building bridges, finding common values, and including as many people as possible in decision-making.
I’m proud that in my time on the board, I’ve prioritized listening to students, families, and front-line staff who work in our schools. For example, I worked with immigrant parents of students with disabilities to write SFUSD’s first-ever policy on translation and interpretation; this policy is now a model for a state bill to require timely translation of special education documents for students with IEPs. I collaborated with LGBTQ families and staff to develop the district’s guide for gender-inclusive forms and communication. And I helped rebuild trust with families by securing $40 million in bond funds for the renovation of Buena Vista Horace Mann School, a promise that SFUSD made in 2016* but had never fulfilled.
Click to jump to other candidates:
✏️ Min Chang
✏️ Virginia Cheung
✏️ Lefteris Eleftheriou
✏️ Parag Gupta
✏️ Ann Hsu
✏️ Jaime Huling
✏️ John Jersin
✏️ Maddy Krantz
✏️ Laurance Lem Lee
✏️ Supryia Ray
Ida Mojadad covers education for The Frisc. Alex Lash is The Frisc’s editor in chief.