Candidate for
Board Member; San Francisco Unified School District

The San Francisco Unified School District ("SFUSD") is in transition. There are many recent achievements for which SFUSD should be proud, and several areas where the District can do much better. Some of the highlights include:

• District students are posting higher test scores, which provide an independent measure of academic success for many of our children.
• SFUSD has adopted a Small Schools by Design policy, in an effort to personalize the educational experience for our students and create a supportive school culture.
• The District has implemented a new technology initiative to bring updated technology to the classrooms, including the use of interactive whiteboards to provide students and teachers with different ways to gauge individual learning.
• SFUSD is studying how to better provide individualized student information to parents via the Internet.
• Voters have recently approved an initiative to allocate monies to fix our school facilities and raise the wages of teachers.

• Raise the standard of expectations
• Close the achievement gap
• Engage parents in the education community
• Develop more successful principals
• Reduce inefficiencies

Currently, our school district places students into distinct tracks based upon their perceived abilities to learn. These tracks can be broken into three general sections.

Some students are placed on "college-bound" tracks where they are taught courses to fulfill the A through G requirements--those basic requirements that every UC or CSU requires to earn admittance. The A through G requirements include advanced mathematics and sciences including algebra, geometry, biology and chemistry.

Other students--the non-A through G students--are placed into another track. This track is one that offers a decidedly less rigorous academic regimen. Instead of being taught the A through G requirements, they are taught Integrated Mathematics and Science courses.

The third track is where students take remedial classes in core subjects, such as math and English. These students are challenged to graduate from our schools, but in fact, many of them do not.

This tracking begins early in a student's academic career and has created an uneven playing field for far too long.

We need to implement an academic system that prepares each and every one of our students for college or a living wage job. We must raise the academic standards that we expect all of our children will meet. In doing so, we recognize that the local economy has changed. The quality of the local workforce is directly related to the quality of our public education. The first step in improving both must be to maximize student potential.

Closing the achievement gap.

While some SFUSD students are posting higher test scores than in years past, many others are falling further and further behind. Looking beyond SFUSD's high test scores, we discover a sobering truth about our schools: San Francisco has the largest racial achievement gap in the state.

This gap has been growing over the years.

As SFUSD math and science test scores continue to improve overall, Latino and African-American students are not succeeding, on average, at the same rate as Asian and white students. For example, according to the District's own data, in 2007 the average percentage for math proficiency was 58% district-wide. In the same year, Latino proficiency in math lagged at 35%; African-American children fared even worse with only 25% scoring at a proficiency level.

We can and must do better.

While there are many reasons for the achievement gap, it is incumbent upon the school district to focus its efforts on rectifying the school-based decisions that contribute to the inequities in our system.

To start with, we need to ensure that there is strong leadership at each of our underperforming schools. There must be a supportive environment for teachers and administrative staff at these schools so that they can demand more from our students.

In addition, we need to commit to real parent engagement and build strong partnerships with accountability and responsibility on both sides.

Engaging parents in the education community.

Teachers, school administrators and parents all share the responsibility of educating our children. Education experts agree that the most effective approach to education is an integrated one, where the student, parents/guardians, teachers and administrators work together to create the best and most effective academic experience for the student.

As several recent studies show, there is a correlation between a school-family-community-linked approach and student academic success.

Our school district must reanalyze its approach to education in order to create a school climate that better emphasizes this approach. Teachers and principals should be actively taught more effective parent engagement strategies and parents in turn should have training available to them on how to be a positive active participant in their child's academic success. This, with expectations and accountability on both sides, are the tools needed to create a real partnership.

The benefits can be enormous.

Research has shown that the biggest academic gains are when parent engagement is focused on student learning, such as showing parents how they can help their children learn. If parents and guardians are to be real partners in their children's education, they must first be shown how, and be encouraged to do so. Similarly, parents need to understand what they can expect from the schools and what schools expect from them and their children.

Our school district needs to create a school climate that emphasizes a school-family-community approach to education. Teachers and principals should be taught more effective parent-engagement strategies and parents in turn should have training available to them on how to be active participants in their children's academic success. We need to give parents and educators tools and responsibilities, and we must hold all sides accountable in our children's success.

We must recognize that if a child is not successful in our schools, it is a responsibility we all share, school board members included.

Developing more successful principals.

Principals play a pivotal role in setting the direction for any school. As any teacher or administrator will tell you, the principal sets the tone and school culture. Yet many principals have not received training on how to be a successful principal in an urban school.

In our schools today, principals are charged with a variety of different duties including acting as curriculum leaders, budget analysts, facility managers, special programs administrators and overseers on the implementation of legal, contractual and policy mandates and initiatives.

With such expansive job duties, it is no wonder that principals often times feel besieged by the demands of their positions.

Nevertheless, we must expect principals to facilitate a calendar and timetable for all school improvement activities. Principals must lead the integrated partnership in which parents, teachers and administrators share the burden of a student's education.

There are effective programs, such as the Principal Leadership Institute at UC Berkeley, that focus on the particular challenges of being a principal in an urban school.

In addition to training the principals we have, we must hire principals who are prepared to be educational leaders in San Francisco's urban school setting.

All over the United States, there is a shortage of principals, and SFUSD may lose up to 50% of its current principals within the next five years. Therefore, it is all the more imperative that we hire the most prepared principals and give them the professional development they need to be successful in our schools. SFUSD needs to continue to coach and also monitor principals closely, as they are crucial to the success our schools.

Fiscal prudence within the District.

Shamefully, California ranks 46th in the nation in per-pupil spending. One fundamental problem our schools face is the shrinking amount of money they receive every year from the state. Schools, which are largely funded by the state property tax, must compete for fewer and fewer dollars as the state faces its own significant budgetary shortfall.

Such difficult times require a combination of actions. First, we must exercise greater discipline in reducing inefficiencies. One such inefficiency which must be revisited is the district-wide transportation system. Currently, SFUSD operates a transportation system that has not been changed in well over a decade, even though the school population and the student assignment process that the transportation system serves has changed.

We need to look at our transportation costs which amount to over $20 million annually and explore ways in which we can cut costs and deliver transportation more efficiently.

An area of great expense to the District is the purchasing of textbooks. Realizing that most of our textbooks are hardback (and heavy for students), SFUSD should examine the need to purchase new editions of textbooks (if the curriculum is the same) and demand of publishers that some textbooks be available in soft cover. As books become more readily available electronically, the District should explore its options on purchasing e-textbooks or books online.

Another way the District can address its budgetary problems is to find a way to generate more revenue. SFUSD owns many properties that are no longer used by our students. The District needs to create a five year real estate plan that complements how to best leverage these various properties for financial gain.

These are hard financial times, and projected budgetary numbers suggest that the next few years will be difficult too. It's not enough just to understand the budget and know where money is needed and where it is going; we must also look carefully at the budget with a critical eye for efficiency and explore ways to generate money for the District. We must first safeguard the District's budget and then channel more funds where they can do the most service to education: in the classroom.