As a father of three children in a San Francisco public school slated for closure, it brings me no pleasure to tell you that much of what has been written about school closures has been facile.
While the city doesn’t need to close schools, the San Francisco Unified School District is in an alarmingly precarious state. Its problems go so much deeper than a voluntary decision to cull schools that was curtailed at the 11th hour in October and led to the ouster of Superintendent Matt Wayne. The monomaniacal pursuit of this clearly misbegotten plan remains baffling.
New Superintendent Maria Su may have the most difficult job in San Francisco right now; it is challenging to describe the state of the public school district’s finances and operational abilities without using language that should get you thrown out of a public school classroom.
Mission Local has obtained a pair of reports, one of which was previously confidential, that reveal how bum a hand Su (and our kids) have been dealt and how much work she and her successors will have to do. But perhaps the best place to start is with a very not-confidential report: The Oct. 8 presentation of how closely the district’s estimated revenues and expenditures for 2023-24 adhered to the year’s actual and budgeted revenues and expenditures.
Answer: Not very! The estimated expenditures and actual expenditures diverge by $148.8 million — on a $1.28 billion budget. That is a lot.
The variation between the estimated and actual expenditures went both ways, however: Across several spending categories, the district expended $136.2 million less than it originally estimated — in part due to vacant positions going unfilled. On the one hand, this is good news for a cash-strapped district: It’s spending less than it budgeted. But, on the other hand, this reveals just how deep the district’s problems go.
The true condition of the SFUSD budget is not just that we don’t have enough money — we don’t even know where the money is.
A previously confidential report obtained by Mission Local spells this out. Former longtime city controller Ben Rosenfield in July produced a 27-page assessment of the district’s finances and inner workings “for internal discussion only.”
These must have been the sorts of discussions Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson had in “Marriage Story.” Rosenfield notes that the district is planning “a $120M cut plan and 500 FTE [full-time employee] position cut — almost 8% of the district’s budget and workforce.” This, he adds, “is the most significant reduction plan pursued by any government in San Francisco in 20 years.”
That’s daunting enough. But it’s harder when you don’t even know where the money is. Per Rosenfield’s report:
The district has significant gaps in access to data and reporting needed to manage key parts of its finances and operations. These are long-standing, internally recognized, and largely the result of a patchwork of antiquated and disconnected finance, payroll, and human resources systems. Basic and accurate information on even basic management activities (such as the count and status of hiring processes that are underway or spending versus the adopted budget) require manual data analysis … Basic information that is available with a single “click” in any comparable organization takes hours or days to produce, each time it is needed.
Many of these problems will likely be eased, if not solved, by the pending adoption of an overarching Enterprise Resource Planning management system: A (functional) HAL 9000 to run the district. This would also do wonders for the district’s disastrous payroll situation. Rosenfield acknowledged this. But he also emphasized that “improvements can’t wait for it.”
So, those improvements need to be made without the information “available with a single ‘click’ in any comparable organization” with hours or days required to obtain rudimentary data. That means Maria Su is, in many ways, flying blind. So was Matt Wayne. So was Vincent Matthews, Wayne’s predecessor. That’s a commonality they can all share (along with having first names as last names). This makes it extraordinarily difficult to achieve all the things the district must do, let alone the things it doesn’t necessarily need to do, like cutting schools.
Rosenfield acknowledged this, too — right on Page 1: “Can we really get all this done in one year?” The SFUSD was seriously attempting to adopt its new Enterprise Resource Planning system, pull off its draconian layoffs and budget bloodletting and consolidate schools in the course of 12 months.
“Completion of any one of these projects would be a major accomplishment,” Rosenfield concluded. “Accomplishing all three projects simultaneously, without significant disruption, seems both unlikely and risky.”
Rosenfield was city controller for 16 years. He acquired the reputation of being highly competent and scrupulously nonpartisan as well as being “the best and most subtle politician in City Hall.” If it was smart to hire him to do an assessment, it would’ve been smarter to listen to him.
Mission Local has also obtained the Oct. 11 audit of how equitable the proposed school closures would be for the district’s most put-upon students. Somewhat inexplicably, this audit came out three days after the district released the list of proposed closures.
Its content was apparently brushed aside. Stanford professor Francis Pearman ran 345 hypothetical closure scenarios — and he found that the plan the district chose to go with “would rank in the 12th percentile in terms of achieving equity … 88 percent of the simulated scenarios performed better on matters of equity than the current plan.”
Pearman, in the end, held that the closure plan would achieve “a moderate level of equity.” Well, fair enough: Your humble narrator is a long ways removed from high school math class, but, back then, the 12th percentile was bad. The San Francisco Unified School District seriously chose to run with a closure plan that was less equitable than 88 percent of the hypothetical plans generated by its respected Stanford consultants. Of note, Pearman also found the proposed closures would hit Black students disproportionately hard.
But that is not all. Oh no, that is not all: Pearman further reported that the schools marked for closure, by and large, had “systematically received less investment than other schools in the district over the last twenty years.” What’s more, the schools that displaced students would be transferred to were measured as lower-performing than the schools slated to be closed.
So that’s a hell of a thing. The mantra of the closure process was that district bigwigs could look affected families in the eye and say that this was in the best educational interests of their kids. Instead they moved forward with a process that was measurably less equitable than randomly tossing darts at school names taped to the wall.
They moved forward with closures of underinvested schools and pushed to move the displaced students into lower-performing schools. It’s tough to claim that the children involved would be well-served here.
But that is not all: On the composite scores to assess San Francisco schools that the Stanford scholars helped the district to create, enrollment was, by design, a minuscule factor — 6 percent of the scoring total. That’s because, in schools, underenrollment and inequity are often intertwined. Regardless, the district made underenrollment a main component in crafting its closure list.
In doing so, it re-indexed a factor of inequity that was designed to be mitigated — and counteracted the entire point of collecting composite scores. The district did this under the guise of striving to craft an equitable plan.
So, this is something to think about for the self-anointed opinion-havers who cheered the school closure process without bothering to analyze what this process really was. This is something to think about for anyone who maintained that the school closures were called off merely because of public pressure and political expediency — and not because the process was rotten to the core and indefensible.
As the district’s enrollment dwindles, the notion of consolidating schools is hardly illogical. But it’s not an existential matter of the sort facing a district that can’t properly track many millions of dollars and is gearing up to enact brutal layoffs and cutbacks — lest it suffer further state intervention. The district was adamant that the school closure process was not dollar-driven, was not tied to the SFUSD budget deficit and that cost savings would be minimal — before claiming $22 million in projected savings, a figure that the state Department of Education did not approve and for which the district has not yet revealed its methodology. The SFUSD, incidentally, hasn’t said peep regarding my Oct. 8 request to show its work: Turn over the cocktail napkin or envelope on which this figure was tabulated, please.
Regardless, as headcounts continue to plummet, the school closure process may be revived. But we have not yet seen a competent closure process, let alone a defensible one — and the work product from the prior plan was, rightly, relegated to the circular file. Any future closure processes must be started from scratch. And done right.
But this, again, isn’t close to the district’s biggest problem. There is always a next and bigger crisis. They may not teach you that in San Francisco public schools. But San Francisco public schools teach you that.
Disclosure: Joe Eskenazi’s children attend a school designated for closure and since reprieved.
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