Two San Francisco school chiefs paint a bleak picture of the city’s public education system — flagging chronic absenteeism, decades-old textbooks, and a new curriculum that 30% of teachers aren’t teaching. 

San Francisco Unified School District Superintendent Maria Su and Commissioner Supryia Ray shared their travails Wednesday at the American Enterprise Institute’s Solutions Summit, a gathering of national experts and San Francisco civic leaders alongside national education researcher Nathan Malkus of AEI. 

It wasn’t always this way. “Ten, fifteen years ago, San Francisco Unified School District was perceived as the school district to look up to,” Su said. “We were the benchmark for other school districts.” Today, she acknowledged, those same districts are outperforming San Francisco.

Su said she inherited a district “on the emergency room floor” and “literally bleeding.” However, she expressed some optimism. For the first time, she said, the district has full oversight of its finances.

On the things that actually matter most, though — attendance and learning — the news is lackluster.

On academic performance, Su and Ray were unflinching in their assessment. In 2022, the district set ambitious targets: 70% reading proficiency in third grade by 2027 and 65%math proficiency by eighth grade. 

“I’m sorry to say that we are nowhere near reaching them,” Ray said. 

Attendance numbers are equally deflating. Chronic absenteeism has ticked up from 23% to 24%.

Meanwhile, the district has been cutting the staff responsible for tracking it. 

“We have almost nobody working on that issue centrally,” Ray said. The district’s funding model creates a vicious circle. State money is directly tied to students coming to school. “When students don’t go to school, we lose money,” Su said. “And when we lose money, we don’t have the resources to pay for the staff that’s needed to then bring students back in.”

Both officials repeatedly cited the seismic cultural shift caused by the pandemic and the lingering impacts on kids and schools. 

“I believe we were the last major urban school district to reopen,” Ray said. Keeping kids home for a year and a half, she said, sent a telling message. “No matter what else you say, the message you’re sending is that it’s not actually very important to come to school.” 

Both school chiefs said families have adjusted their habits when it comes to attendance — pulling kids out a day before spring break or adding a day or two of vacation at the other end. 

“There is a shift in the way our families are thinking about family time, quality time,” Su said. 

Ray added: “Our adult responses to the pandemic have led to this culture among families and students that is not serving them. And that is on us as adults for creating this situation.”

Logistical barriers — like a lottery system that can force students and parents into complex early morning commutes — don’t help. Many families wake before dawn to get children onto buses to schools on the other side of the city. Su recently pledged (opens in new tab) to overhaul the lottery program.

Meanwhile, the district’s follow-up on persistent absentees has been inconsistent. Some students have gone months without contact. A social worker responsible for home visits reported that students weren’t being encouraged to return to class — they were just being checked on. “That just seems to me to be an obvious lapse in practice,” Ray said.

The district has moved to overhaul its curriculum, but implementation remains uneven. Only about two-thirds of students are receiving the newly adopted English Language Arts curriculum.

Su said she issued an administrative order requiring teachers to use the curriculum. “There are fantastic teachers in our schools who are putting in the work, learning the curriculum, doing the hard things — and then the teacher next door is doing something else,” she said. “As a team, if you’re not following the curriculum, that takes me down too.”

Neither official was under any illusion about the scale of the challenges that lie ahead. 

Targets missed, attendance sliding, teachers using textbooks that predate the iPhone, and a new curriculum still failing to reach a third of students. The to-do list is long, and the clock is ticking. 

Su, for one, was not dwelling on the gap yet to travel. ‘We’ve got to start now,” Su said of addressing the district’s challenges. “Actually, we started a year and a half ago — because there was no time.”