Schiff on BeyondChron: A Back to School view of the good, the bad and the alarming

September 7, 6:34 PMSF Education ExaminerCaroline Grannan

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San Francisco public school started Aug. 24; I was just returning from taking my firstborn to college in Ohio and didn't mark the occasion with a special post.

SFUSD parent/advocate Lisa Schiff more than made up for my lapse with an eloquent summary in her    weekly BeyondChron column    of the bright sides and challenges facing San Francisco schools -- and our schools statewide (afflicted by Prop. 13 and an unsupportive governor) and nationwide (with the wrongheaded U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan wreaking potential harm with his misguided Race to the Top). Go to Lisa's original on BeyondChron for embedded links to all kinds of further information.

By Lisa Schiff 

The first day of school in San Francisco came and went this past Monday, bringing with it both new experiences for families throughout the city and fresh opportunities to dive back into some overly familiar challenges. With a second year of increased enrollment numbers, a healthy influx of new families and their young students are joining San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) school communities. There they will experience for themselves what so many of us have already found — solid educational experiences, dedicated teachers and school staff, and a wide variety of opportunities in and out of the classroom to help children thrive.

These positive aspects are generally not what people are led to expect from public schools these days, and will no doubt come as welcome surprises. But as real as these strengths are, they don’t erase the just as real and more frequently touted difficulties that often overshadow them. This year, as in years past, we will continue to tackle some serious issues.

First among these is the public education budget, locally, statewide and nationally. School finance has felt like a desperate matter since the passage of Proposition 13 back in 1978 decimated funding for schools, but the current economic meltdown, heightened in California, has brought a new level of concern. San Francisco’s Rainy Day Fund and a relatively recently passed parcel tax have provided significant measures of cushion, preventing layoffs and decimation of schools for the current fiscal year.

But the health of the economy is still in extreme jeopardy and with a Governor intent on grabbing every penny of education money he possibly can, public school dollars can never be considered secure. The California budget fiasco that lingered long into the summer will no doubt repeat itself, as the underlying conditions that helped create it have not changed. Even before this current recession, California’s revenue stream was insufficient to comfortably support basic public services like schools. Proposition 13 plays a central role in this, as do the “no-tax” compact Republican legislators swear to; the continued tax breaks for wealthy individuals and corporations (such as the oil severance tax that was rejected in the budget compromise); the 2/3 super-majority required to pass a budget or tax increase; and the false perception that we are a state of beleaguered over-taxed citizens and businesses.

As written in stone as Proposition 13, the no-taxes pledge and the super-majority appear, it may be the collective skewed perception of over-taxation that is the binding ingredient holding this entire mess together. The mythical California tax burden is supposedly driving businesses and well-off individuals out of the state in droves. However, according to the Public Policy Institute of California, not only is our tax burden not out of line (about the 10th highest), but it’s the poorest among us, not the wealthiest, who are leaving California. In addition, corporations in California, like corporations everywhere in this country, benefit from a tremendous number of loopholes and tax breaks, as testified to by the non-partisan Citizen’s for Tax Justice earlier this year.

Changing how we think about the taxes we pay and who should pay them is an essential, but long-term project. The immediate situation calls for getting resources where we can right now. Federal stimulus monies are here, although the SFUSD has no new public information about how that money is going to be used. In addition to this one-time emergency influx, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is attempting to foster competition among states to go after pots of money in his “Race to the Top” program, which is supposed to spur innovation and new solutions.

As San Francisco School Board member Rachel Norton aptly describes it, this is really a case of “golden handcuffs,” since these new innovations must come from states willing to be tied to the old-style high-stakes, standardized test-score metrics of the Bush administration. California is one of the states that would be disqualified on these grounds, unless our policies about separating teacher evaluations from test scores can be stretched in some way, which seems a very dangerous game indeed. The window for public comments on this program ends tomorrow, so take your chance now to get your opinions in.

Another source of revenue for San Francisco Schools is the Public Education Enrichment Fund (known colloquially as “Prop H”). This is money from the city that pays for expanded access to preschool; sports, library, art and music supplementation programming in K-12 schools; and provides a flexible “third-third” portion of money to support K-12 students. The Prop. H advisory committee is currently conducting a survey to gather information about community priorities for this money.

As serious as school finances are, there are other topics to be concerned and involved with, such as addressing the persistent achievement gap and developing a more transparent and equitable student assignment system (now slated for implementation for students entering school in August of 2011). An additional goal is to expand and strengthen parent involvement at school sites and in the district as a whole. Bringing parents to the decision-making table is a necessary component of successfully tackling complex challenges such as the achievement gap. School Site Councils (SSC’s), which as the governing body of schools are the formal mechanism for this, but their efficacy is highly dependent on the climate at a given school and of course the limited discretionary resources that schools have to work with.

As parents and guardians who need to be involved in identifying problems and then developing and implementing solutions we can’t turn away from any of this, not the work to forge meaningful partnerships with principals and teachers as hard budget and educational choices have to be made or the work to make sense of the political and financial maelstrom that surrounds us.

Lisa Schiff is the parent of two children who attend Everett Middle School in the San Francisco Unified School District and is a member of Parents for Public Schools of San Francisco and the PTA and is a board member at the national level of Parents for Public Schools.