Two top school leaders for this liberal city’s school district are frustrated with the state of their education system, they said in a recent interview.

San Francisco Unified School District Superintendent Maria Su and Commissioner Supryia Ray told The SF Standard that the district’s outdated materials, persistent student absenteeism, and a chunk of the district’s teachers not instructing students on their new curriculum is “unacceptable.”

Su, who was criticized for shedding “crocodile tears” as she dealt with school closures during a February teachers’ strike, said districts that once looked up to SFUSD as the standard are now outperforming them.

“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.” 

But outdated textbooks, some of which dream about the “self-driving” cars the city already has and wonders about handheld computers, are likely a contributing factor.

“The one that we are currently using is a 20-year-old textbook that still talks about, ‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful if one day we had self-driving cars?’ It still talks about, ‘Imagine a world where you could hold a computer in your hand.’ These are the textbooks that we are using to teach the future of our city. Unacceptable,” Su said.

The district set a 70% reading proficiency in third grade by 2027 goal and 65% math proficiency by eighth grade. Ray said the district is “nowhere near reaching them.”

Ray said another large contributing factor to the district’s fall is the pandemic, which closed schools for more than a year and forced students to learn from home.

“I believe we were the last major urban school district to reopen,” Ray said. “No matter what else you say, the message you’re sending is that it’s not actually very important to come to school.”

Su said families adopted different habits for vacations like spring break, yanking their kids a day before break and coming back after it ends. “There is a shift in the way our families are thinking about family time, quality time,” Su said. 

The commissioner said this way of thinking is not serving the families.

“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.”

Chronic absenteeism numbers for the district recently went up from 23% to 24%. The chiefs said students who don’t go to school lose the district money, which then moves money away from staff who are supposed to track absent students and urge them back.

“We have almost nobody working on that issue centrally,” Ray said.

“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.”

The superintendent justified her performance as the district’s leader by saying she inherited a district “on the emergency room floor” and “literally bleeding.” She was appointed the permanent SFUSD chief in November of last year.

She now says the district has at least full oversight of its finances.

But the challenges facing the seventh-largest school district in California are large.

‘We’ve got to start now,” Su said. “Actually, we started a year and a half ago — because there was no time.”

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