Ten months into her role as superintendent of the San Francisco Unified School District, Maria Su plans to spend Monday greeting students on the first day of school. Given the fractious collection of adults she’s been dealing with all summer, these might be her most enjoyable moments of the academic year.
Among the many tragedies of San Francisco’s public school system is the ridiculous level of acrimony among supposedly grown-up stakeholders. At its root is a nasty culture war that pits a doctrinaire, left-wing rump of teachers, union officials, and administrators on one side and politically moderate parents and online agitators on the other.
The former have long prioritized policies and curricula that seek to level the socioeconomic playing field and right historic wrongs. The latter just want to see an emphasis on, if you’ll pardon the cliche, reading, writing, and arithmetic. Su, an amiable and highly polished City Hall operative, is caught in the middle of the scrum.
Based on a 27-minute interview last week in her office, it’s clear that Su would like the conversation to be about the seemingly boring topics, like math scores, literacy, and fully staffed classrooms. But her ability to make these the main focus of other district players is limited. This is San Francisco, after all. And when it comes to polarization and ruthless bickering, SFUSD is San Francisco on steroids.
Highly attuned to the district’s public-relations black eyes over the years, Su has spent heavily to beef up her PR team, paying $220,000 to SFUSD communications and governance chief Hong Mei Pang, who previously worked under Su at the Department of Children, Youth, and Their Families. Through a nonprofit tied to the district, Su is also paying an undisclosed amount to two former advisers to Mayor London Breed, Jeff Cretan and Andres Power, for their own PR wizardry. This superintendent, unlike her tonally challenged predecessors, is all about messaging.
So it is no surprise that during our conversation, she made kids her primary focus. “Our priorities for this school year are to make sure that our students get the academic teaching and learning they deserve.”
Were it only that easy.
Though she wouldn’t admit it to me directly, Su’s most pressing crisis of the moment is actually the fracas over ethnic studies, a drama that boiled over this summer. It’s a complicated topic, with much mud having been slung. It boils down to this: A group of parents objected to the ideological makeup of the district’s homegrown ethnic studies program, which had a heavy dollop of social justice/colonizer/oppressor language. Su acknowledged that the curriculum was problematic and agreed to pause it for a year.
That angered teachers who championed the program; they pressured Su to reverse herself, which she did. Her solution was to purchase a new ethnic studies curriculum, which she asked the Board of Education to authorize without showing it to the board members, and to allow high school students to opt out of taking the class for now.
Su denied having agreed to a pause, telling me she had only been pursuing “options.” These denials rile up the anti-ethnic studies crowd, feeding the narrative that Su is caving to the district’s social warriors.
Even Mayor Daniel Lurie, who has been reluctant to wade into controversies he can’t control, has advocated for a pause on the ethnic studies requirement to scrutinize the curriculum. Though Lurie doesn’t oversee SFUSD, whose board reports to a state agency, the mayor met at least five times with Su between March and June, public records show, and his late-June statement on the ethnic studies spat signals his sympathies: “If our school district, like our city, gets back to basics and focuses on outcomes, we can give our children the high-quality education they deserve.”
The situation has become so bizarre that the only way parents can read the new ethnic studies curriculum is by making an appointment to visit SFUSD’s headquarters, where they are physically monitored by the district staffer who oversees the combined history, social studies, and ethnic studies department. Su said these byzantine security requirements have to do with copyright restrictions: “We can’t just send people links without approval from the publishing house.”
The trouble is, this is just the first of the distractions that Su will have to contend with — which is why her job is so difficult, and why the district is in such hot water. In addition to the ethnic studies kerfuffle, there’s an ongoing debacle surrounding the district’s purportedly fixed yet still buggy payroll system, a skirmish with parents over a Chinese-language charter school, and the biggest (yet most symptomatic) headache of them all — the debate over whether, and when, to close under-enrolled schools.
District parents are understandably most worried about the final item on that list. The last time Su and I met, in May, she said she was studying last year’s botched effort by her predecessor to close a handful of district schools — a move most reasonable parties agree has to happen, given the city’s declining enrollment levels. Su said last week that the topic remains on the table and that she has tasked the district’s new deputy superintendent for business services, who has been on the job for two weeks, to study it. She said she expects to make a decision by October, when the enrollment process for the following school year begins.
Unlike last year, she did not rule out closures. Yet in the same breath, Su suggested it is equally possible the review could lead to added programs, particularly additional transitional kindergarten and pre-kindergarten classrooms.
I noted to the superintendent that her contract expires in June and asked if she plans to stay on. “I love this job,” Su said, twice, before deftly taking the opportunity, like a president at a State of the Union address, to list her accomplishments as she sees them: a balanced budget, a new payroll and scheduling system, “making sure there is stability” for students. “So yes, I love what I’m doing, and yes, I want to stay,” she said.
To echo a refrain I hear over and over from Su’s fans and detractors alike, her success is in the best interests of everyone, particularly San Francisco’s public school children. But the biggest barriers may be all the grownups whose help she needs to achieve it. It’s high time they stop fueling the distractions and instead pour their energies back into elevating the three R’s.