Earlier this year the San Francisco School District lost control of its own budget and this week it nearly lost a superintendent. His job was saved, apparently not because anyone thinks he's doing a good job but because there is no one else waiting to take over. Instead, Mayor London Breed announced she was forming a team to help the current superintendent do his job.

Our public schools are in a difficult moment: looming closures, a worsening financial outlook, and an uncertain future. This is hard for families and educators, and as a graduate of SF public schools, I know how important they are for our kids.

Today I am directing a new team… pic.twitter.com/dAKDlgvBcr

— London Breed (@LondonBreed) September 22, 2024

The current crisis goes back to a problem that has been obvious to most observers since the start of the year. Simply put, San Francisco public schools have been losing students by the thousands and the district has not reacted by closing schools or laying off teachers who were no longer needed. Instead, the the district has been digging itself into a financial pit with bankruptcy becoming a real possibility. This report is from June:

An audit by state fiscal monitors released last week revealed that SFUSD will need to lay off more than 300 employees by the end of the month and move forward with closing schools to avoid bankruptcy, all as the district projects a $420 million deficit next year.

The audit said SFUSD’s bankruptcy risk is high. The California Department of Education revised SFUSD’s March budget report to “negative” last week, stating that the school district will be unable to meet its financial obligations.

So job number one for the school's superintendent was to put together a list of schools that could be closed/merged in order to keep the financial situation from getting worse. Over the summer, the district sent out a letter to parents asking them to help decide which schools should be closed via an imaginary equity exercise.

If you are a public-school parent, you received a survey over the summer in which you were asked to weigh in on the pending closures. This was not a straightforward survey, however: Parents were asked to imagine that they had 12 coins, and could divide them into buckets marked “equity,” “access” and “excellence.”

As you would expect, most every parent who bothered to answer the survey likely attempted to allocate these coins in whatever manner they interpreted would lead to the SFUSD central office passing over their kids’ school. But there’s no satisfying and intuitive way for a parent to engineer that outcome. And there is no satisfying and intuitive method to reverse-engineer the tangible list of 10 to 14 schools presented to school board members based upon how desperate parents allocated their coins to the Cap’n Crunch or Count Chocula or Toucan Sam baskets. 

But, God help us, we’re told that district officials are defending this process. How parents divided their coins among the Lucky the Leprechaun or Trix Rabbit or Tony the Tiger baskets is actually a serious explanation the district was apparently ready to provide to affected public school families as to why their kids’ school was on the list.

A majority of parent who bothered to respond to this survey were white, so the district weighted the results to make them, what else, more equitable.

 ...as you’d expect, the parents who’d take the time to fill out an online-only, voluntary survey skewed disproportionately white, educated, and financially stable. 

The district weighted for that, giving more emphasis to responses from Latinx parents like Villa and Padilla or Black parents like Parillon. But this doesn’t really work — because while the results were corrected for race, they were not corrected for income or educational attainment. This created a homogenizing effect for Black and Latinx participants.

“Look, I’m a Black parent,” says Parillon, who used to develop credit-risk models and now works in affordable development. “But there is a certain type of parent who has the access and time to fill out your stupid survey. You are not getting a real cross-section.” 

After this ridiculous process, the district was supposed to reveal the list of schools facing closure last week. But at the last minute the announcement was delayed. In fact it turned out there hadn't been much of a process at all behind the scenes which is why Mayor London Breed was forced to jump in and try to salvage this mess. An emergency meeting was held yesterday and the school board decided to keep superintendent Matt Wayne. 

The weekend session to decide the fate of the district’s leadership came as the the city schools face one of the most difficult and tumultuous years in memory, including a fiscal crisis that is edging toward a state takeover as well as a plan to close schools to address decades of declining enrollment, leaving 14,000 empty seats across 102 San Francisco Unified sites.

Alexander said at the start of the meeting that he called the unusual if not unprecedented emergency session because several issues have “come to light” in the past couple of weeks that have been very concerning regarding the leadership in the district.

The head of the San Francisco school board resigned in August and last week she explained that she was frustrated with superintendent Wayne not doing his job. Her take on Wayne was backed up by an anonymous former staff member.

The superintendent, she said, “hasn’t delivered.”

“If someone proves themselves not up to the task, you’ve got to cut bait,” she said. “I think there’s a road map, but it’s not one he’s offering up.”...

A former staff member, whom the Chronicle agreed not to identify due to their fear of retaliation, said in Wayne’s administration, there was a “deep culture of dismissiveness” related to finance, the budget, human resources and other basic functions of government, including payroll.

There was a lot of talking without decision making, the person said.

SF schools are in a crisis situation and they have a guy who is thinking about imaginary coins being put in an equity bucket instead of someone making the hard but necessary decision to keep the district from going bankrupt. And even knowing the current superintendent isn't up to the job, they are sticking with him rather than finding someone who will get the job done. This sounds like a recipe for disaster.