School District Reform in San Francisco
Introduction
Located in the internationally renowned city of San Francisco, the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) is both a source of local pride and a source of headache. SFUSD is the top performing urban public school district in California, is the only district to meet proficiency targets for special education students, and the school district was a finalist for the prestigious Broad Prize for Urban Education in 2005[i]. On the other hand, SFUSD is often characterized by problems that include political infighting among school board members that inhibits the activities of the Superintendent and district administration. It is often criticized for its student placement policies, lack of utilization of technological development over the years, shaky relationships with the teacher’s union, and still has much more room for improvement on student test scores. Any attempt at improving SFUSD must address these deficiencies while preserving the district’s overall progress over the years and protecting its tradition of student achievement growth over most of the past decade.
A Tale of Two Cities
San Francisco overall is a very wealthy city. The population of San Francisco is among the most highly educated in the nation (indicated by the proportion of residents with college degrees[ii]), and live in areas where housing prices are among the nation’s highest.[1] On the other hand as a result of high housing prices (and lack of affordable housing for middle-class families), San Francisco is also in the midst of a great middle-class flight. Much of San Francisco’s middle class population has evaporated over the years, and school district enrollment has reflected their decline. SFUSD currently serves approximately 55,000 students, down from its peak of over 90,000 in the 1960s and 1970s. Over the past ten years, SFUSD has lost almost 10,000 students[iii]. The lower-income group has remained relatively stable, and/or might have decreased slightly over the years due to gentrification. But most lower-income residents are protected from increasing housing costs due to specifically designated low-income housing in most development projects, and because of the relatively stable housing costs in troubled low-income neighborhoods. As such, San Francisco is sometimes known as the “tale of two cities”, because of relative differences in lifestyle among its two dominant groups. San Francisco schools in general reflect this disparity: San Francisco has the highest population of private school enrollment in the nation (at approximately 30%[iv]), while SFUSD enrollment is mostly minority and low income (SFUSD is only 10% white, and 62% of students qualify for free lunch according to 2005 figures[v])
Taking Stock
SFUSD faces many challenges familiar to an urban school district. SFUSD serves primarily low-income and minority students, faces declining enrollment, is attempting to narrow a daunting achievement gap and increase its test scores. SFUSD is also challenged by nearly annual budget deficits that are precipitated by state budget cuts, declining student enrollment, a sometimes temperamental and combative union leadership, and rising costs of conducting regular business (such as in purchasing commodities and paying for salary increases for teachers, administrators, and staff). San Francisco also faces problems that are unique to urban school districts, such as that many members of San Francisco’s active community activists, and several members of the Board of Education are ultra-liberal; for example they may take extreme positions such as closing down the city’s prestigious arts high school for all students because students with arts backgrounds are unfairly advantaged in the admissions process, which is primarily based on auditions. Infighting among the school board was the primary precipitating factor that pushed out former San Francisco Superintendent Arlene Ackerman from her position. Political infighting also prevented her successor, Interim Superintendent Gwen Chan, from seeking to apply for the permanent position of Superintendent.
On the other hand, SFUSD has many achievements that it should treasure and seek to improve. SFUSD has the highest test scores for an urban school district in the state; in 2005 48% of its students performed proficient or advanced on the state’s rigorous reading examination, and 57% of its students performed proficient or advanced on the state’s rigorous math examination[vi]. Approximately one third of San Francisco’s schools are among the top 25% percent of test scoring schools in the state. San Francisco has a very active community base from which to tap, members who include people who have worked with and/or founded or helped developed organizations such as DonorsChoose.org, GreatSchools.net, a SFSchools email listserv, and Parents for Public Schools. San Francisco also offers 17 language immersion programs and several alternative schools that specialize in college preparation, the arts, etc. Many schools have rich histories and are located in distinct communities each with unique resources of their own to offer the schools.
School Governance
Most administrative functions are decentralized. District central office plays a large role in coordinating district policy and ensuring school oversight, but most decisions such as various school policies (that don’t conflict with a pre-existing district policy) are determined on a school site by site basis. Most decisions on the school site level are made by a School Site Council (SSC), which is approximately 50% composed by teachers and administrators, and approximately 50% composed by parents and students (except at the elementary school level). SSCs are mostly responsible for the budget, although they can also determine other school policies such as student discipline, academic class offerings, etc. in coordination with the school principle within the larger school district context. SSCs typically meet monthly during most of the school year, and more often during the budget season. SSCs are required to meet with the larger school community to solicit input approximately twice during the budgeting season. Typically, the school district will provide a “menu” of items and their costs. Menu “offerings” include teachers, administrators, secretaries, supplies, central office support, nurses, security guards, etc. School budgets are allocated primarily by student attendance by way of the “Weighted Student Formula” (WSF), which distributes money on a per pupil basis. Students with more needs, such as special education and low income students, are weighted more in order to incentivize schools to outreach and enroll these students. Furthermore, “troubled” schools can sometimes receive up to three times more per student than the district average in order to provide them the financial resources to offer more programs and support.[2] School Site Councils are also responsible for annual reports which include school goals, and academic plans for each school. District staff will visit periodically to ensure that these plans are being followed, evaluate, and give input where they see fit. Sometimes, SSCs are also charged with making unfortunate decisions on which school programs to cut and which staff members to lay off in times of budget trouble.
District Budget
Many of the school district’s accomplishments have occurred in spite of nearly annual troublesome budget situations, which have also helped to further strain some of the already testy political problems that surround the school district. The twin trials of severe budget cuts and declining enrollment have put the district’s progress in jeopardy, tested the district’s relationship with its unions, strained other political relationships, and also forced the district to take action that has alienated certain constituencies and has affected all schools in the district. The district has been forced to lay off teachers, close under-enrolled schools, and cut WSF funding across the board, all three actions which prompted wide ranging reactions from political resistance and alienation to much division within the school board itself. For this upcoming school year, the school district faces an additional budget cut of $40 million, based on the latest budget proposal submitted by the governor of California. California school districts already currently spend approximately $1,900 less per student than the national average[vii].
District Reform
As previously noted, the situation in SFUSD is very complicated. Any effort at district reform submitted on behalf of the superintendent of schools needs to carefully consider both its budgetary and political consequences even before submitting it for consideration before the Board of Education or the public. Most importantly, “reform” efforts in San Francisco must not impinge on the progress that SFUSD has already made toward educating its students. As such, “reform” is probably a less apt term for SFUSD than “plan of action.” SFUSD’s plan of action should revolve around three main pillars: 1) Protecting its record of increasing student achievement, and enhancing the academic goals of the district for its students; 2) managing its tricky political and budgetary considerations in order to maximize the effectiveness of the first pillar; and finally 3) Building relationships with outside community members and organizations in order to enhance the school district’s long term position in terms of resources available to students and in terms of stemming, and hopefully, reversing the trend of declining student enrollment. The school district should aim to become a beacon of hope for all urban students within San Francisco and aim to become one of San Francisco city’s primary assets. This third goal should also support the first two major goals of the school district.
The first goal of our school district is the most important—the other two goals are designed to support this first crucial motive. Our plan of action for raising student performance should include ideas that increase individual school cultures of excellence and results, and support teachers and principals in their efforts toward this goal. Ultimately, the aim of the school district should include the idea that the definitive goal of the school district isn’t only to raise student test scores, but also to prepare them for college, teach them to better able citizens of the world, and attempt to maximize their individual potential. The school district has already put a lot of effort into raising test scores, including giving school sites more authority over their individual academic plans and holding them accountable for results. My first priority would be to protect these efforts and allow what’s working to continue, so I’d be loathe to make drastic changes. But as someone who’s gone through the SFUSD school system, I don’t think these efforts go far enough. I think SFUSD could substantially increase student achievement by also taking aim at more intangible aspects of education, such as school culture. I would propose SFUSD take aim at affecting school culture by developing a method by which teachers and staff try to emulate professional conduct in all of their actions in front of students. For example, in many schools teachers and administers often disagree with each other and among each other. Many times, these fights find their way into the classroom, and this may contribute to student despondency. Students should feel that schools are places of intellectual and academic discourse and discovery. Teachers and administrators who disrespect each other certainly do not contribute to this ideal environment.
Although this idea seems simple, I realize that aiming at something intangible as school culture as an area for change is a difficult plan of action to implement. First of all, there are usually pre-existing cultures within schools that are hard to change. Secondly, some teachers might be offended at the implication that the district views their behavior as “disrespectful.” In one case in University Park School in Worcester, MA, one teacher attempted to file a grievance against the students he was teaching because they demanded more rigor and substance from his teaching. I think these concerns are all valid points, but I also think that these challenges can be overcome in various creative ways. To begin, it’s easier to have principals buy into ideas such as this because the administrator’s union and administrators in general tend to be more cooperative with school district officials. Having principals buy in can be a start, since the teacher’s union tends to be more combative. Having principals start leading teachers by their own example might produce tangible results. Furthermore, I think that enough teachers are amenable to the idea reasonable idea of a respectful workplace culture that enough might buy in to start a movement. If not, the district can take other steps such as negotiating with the union to include cultural factors in teacher evaluations, and the district can also continually push this message year over year in order to push more teachers to internalize this message through district newsletters, professional development days, awards and recognition to peers who cooperate, etc.
Another idea to help increase student performance would be to invest in technology to make the district more “paperless” and to make data more available to teachers. Ultimately, if we could cut down on the paperwork (and staff time wasted on paper pushing), perhaps our investment in new technologies would be revenue neutral over time, and might even save the district money over time. We then have two benefits of: saving the district money by reducing staff required to push papers (and also fewer resources wasted on commodities that might prove useless to the ordinary teacher and student in the classroom), and we’d also support our teachers by giving them more information on which to act in order to refine their teaching practices and meet individual student needs.
I’d also seek to tangibly increase student achievement by transferring resources (so that this policy is budget neutral) into creating more alternative learning communities, especially in comprehensive schools. Even if I could only afford to change schools in name into “Engineering Academies”, “Architecture/Visual Art School”, etc., I would do it on the condition of reasonable outside support. (By reasonable outside support I do not exclusively mean financial, I think soliciting coaches and perhaps “guest teachers” from professionals in their respective fields to help train students can be very meaningful.) I think our third pillar could have the most impact toward this goal. If the school district were able to attract law firms, biotechnology companies, architecture firms, and even just a small fraction of the many prestigious organizations that do business in San Francisco, even small commitments can make a difference.[viii] I believe that opening our schools to outside mentorship and resources in a carefully constructed way can 1) increase community interest in what is going on in our schools, and 2) increase the meaningful niche learning opportunities available to students. I would only pursue these ideas as long as they are an addition to reforms that have already proved their worth in SFUSD, which is namely, preserving the School Site Council and the Weighted Student Formula. I think that SSCs already do much to encourage parental participation in our public education system. Some recent candidates to school board were initially drawn into school district politics because of their experience and training on SSCs[ix].
Of our three major pillars, I think the second one is perhaps the most complicated and involves the most politicking. Methods to achieve this goal would also differ depending on the composition of the school board, and the perception of the populace toward San Francisco schools. I believe we could best prepare a plan of action for the latter in this paper. I believe the former would vary on a case by case basis. However, I would like to make one suggestion concerning the school board before I move on. I think if there were a more user friendly way to post records of board member votes, and have the public and press better able to scrutinize their votes, public statements, and political positions, then the school board might be held more accountable to being reasonable. At the very least this might encourage them to be more consistent and rely less upon personal relationships and disagreements. Moving on to the goal of increasing public support for our school district, I would lean heavily on outreach and communication. I believe most San Francisco schools are performing very well, and the school district has already achieved many accomplishments that it can use to make a case for more support such as higher taxes to support our schools, and perhaps make the case that dissuades more families from leaving the public school system. Some of these efforts have already been successful, approximately two years ago city voters decisively voted to pass an initiative that made the city pay approximately $20 million annually to schools in order to supplement its budget.[3]
Conclusion/Summation
There are many current and past practices that continue to be valuable to SFUSD’s continuing improvement in test scores. These practices include decentralization and the development of the School Site Council, the Weighted Student Formula, and efforts begun under former Superintendent Ackerman to clean up the district’s image in order to increase public support for increasing district resources by way of taxes, grants, etc. My ultimate goal would be to ensure the continuance of these valuable practices. On the other hand, SFUSD is still far from perfect. Approximately 44% of SFUSD’s graduates haven’t completed all of the courses required for admission into the prestigious University of California or California State University system. In addition, approximately half of SFUSD’s student population doesn’t score “proficient or advanced” on California’s Standards Test. In order to increase student achievement, I would aim at upgrading SFUSD’s technological resources in order to better support teachers on the front line and try to reduce the politicking on the San Francisco school board. I would also aim at relatively intangible aspects of education reform such as improving school culture and increasing community involvement in schools. I am very excited about San Francisco’s current success in educating its students, and am also very excited over the possibility of further improvement and achievement.
[1] One would think that in a city as property rich as San Francisco, SFUSD should never be in need of financial resources. In my conversations with many who were there, this was almost the case in the pre-Prop 13 era. (SFUSD was never a rich school district, but its financial picture was better in the past.) Before California’s anti-tax landmark Proposition 13 was passed, schools could pay for the latest machine technology to help train students in well-paying blue collar jobs and careers, for example. You can often tell which schools were built before and after Proposition 13 almost simply by how elaborate and posh some of the older buildings are in comparison to our newer ones. But Proposition 13 limited property tax increases year over year after its passage to approximately 2.5%. Property values have gone sky-high since then. Since this is the case, many companies are paying approximately 1970s level taxes for properties that have gone up perhaps more than tenfold since then. For this reason, SFUSD cannot tap into the vast wealth that has accumulated in San Francisco’s rich property reserves, even for commercial property worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
[2] Ultimately, however, on average these troubled schools receive about equal or less than higher academically performing schools. This is mostly due to the fact that higher performing schools have higher teacher retention rates, and teachers (because of their seniority) earn more at these schools than at lower performing schools. Schools still pay the average amount per teacher, regardless of what each teacher ultimately costs the district, so in a sense lower performing schools, in spite of their greater budget allocation, are in some ways also subsidizing the higher performing schools.
[3] This was a remarkable achievement, given that only a few years earlier a similar measure would never have passed. There had been a public scandal of a former superintendent mismanaging funds and being involved in shady deals. Superintendent Ackerman helped clean up the district’s image and laid the foundation for this victory. I believe Ackerman’s efforts should be continued, and that the district should aim for a bigger slice of the city’s wealth (San Francisco itself has a city budget of $5 billion). On another somewhat unrelated note, it is a sad statement of the extent of the state’s budget cuts for education that the district had to dip into this approximately $20 million yearly fund in order to fund salary increases for teachers in order to prevent a strike, instead of the supplementary arts, sports, and librarian funding it was intended for.
[i] This information can be found from several sources, including the California Department of Education, the Broad Education Foundation, and from the district’s “Did You Know?” webpage. http://portal.sfusd.edu/template/default.cfm?page=about.didyouknow
[ii] MSN Encarta lists that the Census Bureau’s statistic for San Francisco stands at second place for an urban area in the nation with a population proportion of 50.1% of residents having obtained a college degree or higher.
[iii] These figures were presented to the Board of Education of SFUSD of which I was a member two years ago. This information isn’t readily accessible on the internet, but please contact me if you would like contact information of district officials with whom to check these figures. As far as I’m aware, these numbers are still accurate, although district enrollment may have begun to stabilize starting this school year. You can note part of this decline by comparing Broad Finalist enrollment figures from 2005 district enrollment (approximately 57,000 students), at http://www.just4kids.org/en/files/broad/2005_San_Francisco.pdf to this past year’s student enrollment of 55,500 http://portal.sfusd.edu/template/default.cfm?page=about.glance
[iv] An article on this subject by the San Francisco Chronicle, a local newspaper, can be found online at http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/05/31/MNGJIJ50T41.DTL
[v] San Francisco overall is approximately 44% white, according to a report at http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/06/06075.html San Francisco figures can be found at the following site: http://www.just4kids.org/en/files/broad/2005_San_Francisco.pdf
[vi] The discrepancy between its reading and math scores can be attributed to its relatively high English Language Learner population, which stands at 28%. The test score information is derived from http://portal.sfusd.edu/template/default.cfm?page=about.didyouknow
[viii] The mock trial program at my high school changed my life. It only required the commitment of four lawyers, once or twice a week. From mock trial, I was introduced to the rigors of law and competition, and I was introduced to people who helped me obtain education public policy experience.
[ix] I briefly mentioned one of these cases in an article I co-wrote for the Harvard Political Review last year: http://hprsite.squarespace.com/golden-laboratory-fall2006/2006/11/13/golden-laboratory.html
No comments:
Post a Comment