No, it’s not complicated. SF teachers should get a big raise, ASAP.

Just in time for back to school night, the SF Chronicle’s star education reporter Jill Tucker is here with an article to support the case SFUSD Superintendent Dr. Matt Wayne has been trying to make for school closures and teacher layoffs.

True to form, Tucker promotes a false political narrative designed to support closures, cuts, and the SFUSD administration’s priorities. Below we will cut through the fog and break down Tucker’s story into component elements: the crisis (“the fiscal cliff”), the villains (teachers of course), and the victim/hero (Superintendent Wayne).

The Crisis: Enrollment Declining Off a Fiscal Cliff 

Public relations teams fabricate impending disasters to argue that we must take their preferred course of action quickly, or else. And Tucker is furiously amplifying the Superintendent’s manufactured crisis. The truth is there is no fiscal cliff and the budget needs surgical changes rather than the wholesale amputations demanded by Sup. Wayne.

According to Tucker and the Superintendent, the SFUSD budget is about to go the way of Thelma and Louise, flying off of a “fiscal cliff” in a speeding convertible. The District is “on track to spend $25 million to $36 million more every year than it will get in revenue over the next few years.” 

While $36M may be a lot to you and me, it’s really important to remember that SFUSD’s total yearly budget is $1.2 billion. The $36M projected overspend is only 3% of the district’s $1.2B yearly budget. 

It's also one-tenth of the $369M that will be left over and set aside as “just in case” reserves at the end of the 2023-24 fiscal year, according to a District presentation to the Board on June 6, 2023. This is like telling your kids they need to move into the closet so that you can keep their rooms empty, “just in case” something happens in the distant future. 

Another slide presented at the contentious Board meeting on August 29, 2023 titled “The District’s finances are impacted by declining enrollment” states the impact will be “an anticipated $5M reduction in LCFF revenue by 2024-25.” The effect of declining enrollment is $5M or 0.4%, less than half of one percent, of SFUSD’s total yearly budget.

The Villains: Lazy, Greedy Teachers

Even Tucker can’t avoid the obvious: teacher pay in San Francisco – one of the nation’s most expensive cities – is totally inadequate: “with a mid-career teacher paycheck of $89,000 a year – ranked 74th out of the 268 California districts with at least 250 teachers.” But Tucker has reasons why teachers don’t deserve anything better. 

To hear Tucker tell it, SF teachers deserve their low pay because they’re are slacking off by not teaching that many students:

In other words, the district spends a lot on its teachers, but it’s spread among more of them than most other districts, where the average ratio is 1 educator for every 20 students. In San Francisco, it’s 1 educator per 14 students.

We don’t know of any parents whose kids’ classes aren’t full. Tucker doesn’t link to the source of these counts. Besides, as a parent, the prospect of teaching 14 elementary school students for 6 hours a day is equally as terrifying as 20 students. 

If Tucker and the District are going to use teacher/student ratios to justify layoffs they must be honest and transparent about how they count teachers like Instructional Resource Facilitators (IRFs) – full time teachers who don’t have their own classrooms but support other teachers and fill in for them if they’re out – or Special Education and SOAR teachers who require very small class sizes, even 1:1 ratios. Surely Tucker isn’t advocating for eliminating Advanced Placement classes that commonly have fewer students than average?  

According to the analysis that Tucker cites but doesn’t link to, there is one weird trick to getting teachers better pay: fire some teachers. If only SFUSD teachers upped their student ratio, they would be living large with a 35% increase in salary + benefits. Besides the fuzzy math and unsourced numbers, this analysis ignores the fact that teacher salaries are set by a collective bargaining agreement between the district and the teacher’s union. 

Low teacher pay is a choice. There is no single pot of money in the budget for teacher salaries that would be automatically redistributed to higher pay once the district fires the “excess” teachers – the implied solution. Under the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) model – which accounts for more than 50% of SFUSD’s total yearly funding – the state of CA gives each district wide leeway on how to spend the “unrestricted” funds it sends them. The CA Dept of Education does not specify how much should go to teachers, it’s up to each district’s administrators. 

But in Tucker’s false narrative, low teacher pay has to be the teachers’ own fault. Even retired teachers, receiving their agreed upon pensions, are to blame. The article seems to advocate taking pension income and healthcare benefits away from these seniors. Maybe the goal is to increase SF’s homeless count? As the villains in Tucker’s narrative, teachers deserve everything they get, or don’t. 

We are disappointed but not surprised, based on the track record of conservative bias in her reporting, to see Tucker actively undermining the efforts of the United Educators of San Francisco (UESF), SFUSD’s teachers union. Tucker is a member of the SF Chronicle Guild union who just won a favorable new contract just last month.  

The Victim/Hero: Superintendent Matt Wayne

It sounds like somebody is going to have to make some tough choices so they can save us from the nonexistent fiscal cliff and those awful teachers. Sup. Wayne is the man willing to do it.   

“In the end, because we don’t have unlimited resources, there are tradeoffs we have to make,” Wayne told the Chronicle this week. 

Who are these choices tough for? The reality is that layoffs and school closures are going to be toughest for the people directly affected: teachers, students and families. But these folks aren’t the ones making the choices, or even setting up the choices to be made. 

The answer is Sup. Wayne. He’s not just a hero, he’s also a victim. We are supposed to feel bad for him, imagine ourselves in his dress shoes as he struggles with his conscience over sending teachers to the unemployment line and destroying communities built around neighborhood schools. How would you like to be the one making those tough choices? He’s good at making these choices, most recently in Hayward where he closed schools during the height of the COVID pandemic. That’s why he makes the big bucks. 

A Reality-Based Narrative: Austerity Performance

The real villains, the people most responsible, are usually the ones with the most power. The Superintendent and collaborating School Board members fit this role. As well as the conservative, pro-charter billionaires and real estate investors who funded the recalls that got many of them where they are today. 

SFUSD administration’s presentations have not discussed what it would take in terms of dollars and time to pay our teachers a living wage or hire more paraeducators or fix crumbling schools. They want the public to agree to teacher layoffs and school closings first, and leave what happens next up to them, and up to our imagination.

Wayne and his allies on the School Board seem to be putting on an austerity performance. It’s a way to prove to wealthy donors – and maybe even to investors in school construction bonds – that they are willing to throw teachers and low income families in underserved communities under the bus. 

It’s a key test you need to pass if you want to advance to the economic and political big leagues. Are you willing to make the tough choices that make vulnerable people’s lives even harder? Even if there is no clear benefit to doing so? 

After their austerity performance the Superintendent and some Board members will move on to their next gig, and the issues will remain. Just as Wayne did after closing schools in Hayward in 2021, which are still sitting vacant and unsold to this day. Just as other big city school districts have seen nothing but further enrollment declines and the proliferation of charter schools after similar “rightsizing” initiatives. Fixing problems and improving our kids’ education aren’t the goals. Rather, the goals are to prove a willingness to traumatize school communities in order to strip assets, privatize education dollars, and reduce the voice of teachers.

Administrative Bloat and Feckless Leadership: The Real Crisis in San Francisco Schools

The real crises are a bloated central administration office that chooses to allocate more of SFUSD’s budget to its own staff and less to teachers, and a complicit school board willing to go along to get along. According to the Iron Law of Institutions: “the people who hold power in institutions are guided principally by preserving power within the institution, rather than the success of the institution itself.”

On this topic, Tucker repeats a self-serving statistic that Wayne has trotted out before: 

“Part of the central office budget, administrative costs reached $25 million this year, or 4% of the budget”

Those numbers are way off, according to a January 10, 2023 report by the SF Board of Supervisors Budget and Legislative Analyst’s Office: 

SFUSD’s $245.5 million expended on Central Administration functions in FY 2020-21 is nearly twice the $134.4 million median amount expended in the comparison districts. SFUSD’s expenditures amount to 25 percent of the District’s total operating spending for that year compared to 18 percent for median peer district spending.

It’s not surprising that Wayne would use a convenient definition of “central administrative costs” that wouldn’t cause people to think he should cut from the staff of 1,294 Full Time Equivalent (FTE) employees in Central Administration functions, first. It’s not entirely surprising that Tucker would reprint it without question, but she is supposed to be a journalist. 

The real hero/victims are the teachers who take care of our kids all day. They keep showing up despite pay that isn’t enough to get by in one of the most expensive cities in the world. Despite a payroll system that continues to screw up their paychecks almost two years since it was rolled out. Despite local media that wants to blame them for the mistakes and self-serving decisions made by the Superintendent and his highly paid central office upper management. Let’s get our teachers the raises they deserve now, without further delay.