Over the weekend, I spoke with Maria Su, the presumptive incoming superintendent of the San Francisco Unified School District. I say “presumptive” because her appointment doesn’t become final until the Board of Education votes Tuesday night. And with this district and this board, it’s foolish to assume anything will happen just because they say it will.
I asked Su, a seasoned City Hall insider, about her priorities in this formidable job. “My first priority is to retain and maintain local control,” she said.
That makes sense. If the school district can’t get its finances in order — its fiscal gap exceeds $100 million, about a tenth of its annual budget — the California Department of Education will take over and might not relinquish control for years.
Su is the beleaguered district’s best hope at the moment. The fact that then-Mayor Gavin Newsom appointed her in 2009 to run the city’s Department of Children, Youth, and Their Families speaks to her political survival skills — a trait discussed admiringly last week by others inside the halls of power.
Yet I couldn’t help but wonder why, exactly, it is so important for San Francisco to keep overseeing the education of its children, given what a mess it has made of things for years.
This is a board that, for all its notorious travails, still spends the vast majority of its time discussing issues other than “student outcomes.” And it’s a district that can’t perform basic functions like paying teachers or tracking simple requests like the number of students applying for a ninth-grade math class. (The district reported in June that its processes for “position control,” meaning who does what job, remain largely manual and won’t be automated until next summer.)
Su, whose two sons attended public elementary and middle schools before moving to parochial high schools, answered my question adroitly — but signaled that she, too, is a creature of the same ideologically stained system that brought the district to its current depths.
“We want to have the autonomy at the school district to run the programs and provide the services that we feel meet the needs of our students and of our community,” she began. “I believe that San Francisco is rich with culture and diversity, and we want to be able to provide the different types of services that children and families need.”
So far so good, even if the sloganeering of her new city gig echoes that of her last department, which made “advancing equity and healing trauma” its highest priority. It is what Su said next that gave me pause.
“We also want to ensure that the community has a voice in how we do business by having a school board that has power to guide the school district,” she said.
One of the tragedies of the SFUSD these past years — and certainly of the debacle of the attempt at school closures — is precisely that this education establishment is, if anything, too attentive to all those local voices telling it what to do.
Consider the school-closing effort, which the board abandoned at the same time it pushed out Superintendent Matt Wayne to make room for Su. If Wayne’s muddled administration was clear about anything, it was an unwavering commitment to a months-long process, replete with massive community engagement, intended to explain why schools need to close. With 14,000 too many seats, a number forecasted to soar past 20,000, the district repeatedly explained that under-resourced schools are bad for everyone. This includes students who don’t get the attention they deserve and stretched-too-thin teachers deprived of colleagues with whom to collaborate.
Last month, I asked Wayne if the district needed such an elaborate “realignment” process that involved so much back and forth with the public. Couldn’t the district have made school closings a normal part of doing business — a fait accompli, in other words, rather than a knock-down, drag-out war of attrition?
He told me that by statute, the district needs to present its plans at only two board meetings, with time between for public comment. But the political reality is different. “Our thinking has been that we’re really going to hear from those schools that would be impacted, that it takes some time to get the feedback and understand what the needs are,” he said.
To nobody’s surprise, the feedback from communities whose schools were on the chopping block was terrible. Everyone hated the plan. And everyone blamed Wayne for overseeing it. Which doesn’t mean that the plan should have been killed. The 13 schools slated for closure would have represented a reduction of only 10% or so in student capacity. That is less than half the cutting the district needs, one budget insider told me.
Yet the hapless Wayne was doomed before he started. In retrospect, it was always a bad idea to announce school closures in the heat of a mayoral election. Mayor London Breed, who had been all but silent on school issues until recently, said the closures should be scrapped, knowing full well they have to happen.
Even politicians not running for office this year hypocritically joined the battle. Hours before news broke that no schools will close, Assemblymember Matt Haney issued a statement to say that closures “should be done as an absolute last resort, if at all” (the italics are mine). That’s rich coming from Haney, a former school board member who bears his fair share of responsibility for the dithering that got us to this moment. Remember Haney’s “if at all” battle cry when the next plan needs to be far more painful because he advocated for kicking the can down the road.
The spineless pols were responding, of course, to parents at the targeted schools who had made themselves the loudest voices in the room, effectively ensuring their pain would be shared across the entire system.
That pain will become obvious soon enough. The district must present a budget to the state by December. Su told me she plans to revisit the “stabilization” process that district executives presented to the board in June. That blueprint called for a savings of $113 million, in part by cutting 534 district jobs.
This process will be beyond complicated, in part because some of those district employees are guaranteed city jobs if their school jobs are cut, a maneuver known as “civil service bumping.” Su said she is aware of the imperative but doesn’t yet know how many of the jobs will be moved to the city, which will have headache-inducing knock-on effects for municipal workers.
The incoming superintendent is clear that closures need to happen. “We have under-enrollment,” she said. “We have schools that are not fully involved with students right now. And we want to make sure that the infrastructure of the school district reflects the enrollment level of the district.”
Notably, she said, future closures will be a result of rethinking school assignment policies — a third-rail topic among San Francisco parents. That’s a complete reversal of Wayne’s approach, in which assignment policies wouldn’t be revamped until after closures are addressed.
Su told me another of her priorities is to “restore trust” in the school district. To do that, she and her new colleagues — and the politicians who oversee and influence them — will need stiff backbones. They’ll have to lead by doing the right thing, not by doing what they are screamed at to do. If they don’t, the state of California will do it for them.