Does SFUSD Need To Close Schools?

No district in California, not even Oakland, has a higher percentage of schools with unsustainable enrollment numbers

Introduction

San Francisco Unified is about to pass a huge budget cut, necessitated by poor fiscal management and declining enrollment, and precipitated by the threat of a state takeover. Oakland Unified has just passed a huge budget cut, necessitated by poor fiscal management and declining enrollment, and precipitated by the threat of a state takeover. Oakland’s plan, unlike San Francisco’s, includes multiple school closures and mergers. How different is San Francisco’s situation from Oakland’s?

School Size

The Benefit of Small Schools

Much research has been done on the relationship between school size and academic achievement. This article reviews much of the research. The authors report on studies that show socioeconomically disadvantaged kids do better in smaller schools and on other studies that show no effect between school size and student achievement. They report on studies that attempt to calculate the optimum school size:

[One paper] concluded in an analysis of 57 school size and student achievement studies that elementary schools serving a culturally diverse or majority disadvantaged student population should not enroll more than 300 students. The researchers also stated that elementary schools that serve a more balanced mix of students from advantaged and disadvantaged backgrounds should not have more than 500 students in attendance for the optimal school size.

They summarize:

“Despite an abundance of published research studies, definitive answers regarding school size and student performance remain unanswered. Decisions about school size appear to be complex and involve a variety of factors such as costs, community support, and students with special educational needs.”

The Cost of Small Schools

There are obvious costs to operating more schools. More buildings need to be maintained and insured. Additional non-classroom staff (principal, administrator, custodians, nurses) need to be employed. Shareable resources (gyms, musical instruments, art supplies) need to be provided at each school. Some staff with specialist skills (e.g. art and music teachers) have to move from school to school because there are not enough children at the smaller schools to justify dedicated full-time staff.

Less obviously, having fewer schools also saves on classroom costs because teachers can be deployed more efficiently. Consider two hypothetical districts, both of which have 6000 elementary school kids, split evenly across grades K-5, giving 1000 students at each level. District A has ten schools of 600 kids whereas District B has twenty schools of 300 kids. Both have the same policy of assigning no more than 22 kids to a classroom. District A’s schools have 100 kids at each grade level and so will require 5 sections of 20 kids each. District B’s schools have 50 kids at each grade level and so will require 3 sections of 16.7 kids to stay under the class size limit of 22. While District A has fifty classrooms per grade level, District B needs sixty classrooms per grade level to teach the same number of kids with the same class size limit. District B’s classroom costs are thus 20% higher and it also has twice the number of school sites to staff and maintain.

Oakland’s Analysis

Oakland Unified conducted an analysis of the cost of operating schools. They based their analysis on three school service models: Base, Base+, and Community School.

The Base model reflected the minimum staffing required to provide a school program and consisted of positions that are often called Base positions, reflecting state, federal, and/or contractual obligations: teachers, principals, clerical, and custodial. The Base + model included the Base level of staffing plus two additional positions that would provide wrap-around services (for example: teacher on special assignment, case manager, RJ Facilitator, and/or Community School Manager). The Community Schools model reflected the cost of a fully staffed Community School (with a teacher on special assignment, case manager, RJ Facilitator, and Community School Manager), and the enrollment required to sustain this robust level of service to students and families.

Here are the minimum school sizes Oakland calculated it needed to sustain those models:

Source: page 26 of this

The schools they targeted for closure or merger have enrollment below the Base level.

School Sizes Across California

As this Brookings Institute report points out, in a review of the research on classroom sizes:

When school finances are limited, the cost-benefit test any educational policy must pass is not “Does this policy have any positive effect?” but rather “Is this policy the most productive use of these educational dollars?”

So the question shouldn’t be “do kids do better in smaller schools?” (even if the answer were definitively yes) but is it better to spend money on keeping more schools open or on some other use such as increasing teacher salaries (which are comparatively low in SFUSD)?

There is no one-size-fits-all solution to this trade-off. Districts will end up in different places, not only because they may prioritize differently but also because of geography (I’d expect areas with lower population densities to have smaller schools) and history (I’d expect older communities to have smaller schools). Those trends point in opposite directions for San Francisco: the city is densely populated but also much older than most of the rest of the state. Where else is the child population smaller now than it was fifty or seventy years ago?

With those caveats, let’s compare school sizes in San Francisco with other California school districts.

Elementary Schools

Here’s a graph showing the average school size in all California school districts that have more than 10 elementary schools. Los Angeles Unified is so big that I had to use a log scale on the x-axis

San Francisco has a far smaller average school size than other school districts of similar size. The only district that is close, Oakland, has announced plans to close a number of schools which should raise its average school size.

All the districts identified in previous posts as high performing (Long Beach, Clovis, ABC) have much bigger elementary schools than SFUSD. The elementary schools in Long Beach, SFUSD’s preferred benchmark, average 648 students whereas SFUSD’s average 375.

Here’s another graph showing the percentage of elementary schools in each district with fewer than 300 students, the threshold considered unsustainable by Oakland.

All the overlapping discs at the bottom are not a data error: most school districts have zero elementary schools with fewer than 300 students. The top-performing school districts (Long Beach, Clovis, ABC) all fall into this category.

San Francisco has the highest percentage of small schools. 38% (27 of 72) of its elementary schools had fewer than 300 students in 2019-20 (before the pandemic hit). The only other districts with more than 25% of the elementary schools under 300 students are Oakland, which we’ve already talked about, and Marysville Joint Unified in Yuba county. Marysville is a strong candidate for the title of worst achieving school district in California. Only 13% of its students met or exceeded the standard in Math in the most recent tests in 2018-19. I suppose one could argue it’s also the most equitable school district in California because White students (15% met or exceeded the Math standard) do only marginally better than Hispanic or Latino students (11% met or exceeded the Math standard) but I would submit that this is not the sort of equity San Francisco should be aiming for.

Several smaller Bay Area districts (Berkeley, Palo Alto, Jefferson Elementary in San Mateo) are in the bottom left of the chart with average school sizes under 400 students but with only a small percentage under 300. In fact, Berkeley and Palo Alto have one school under 300 and Jefferson has two and all of them are just under the dividing line. 21 of San Francisco’s schools are smaller than the smallest school in Berkeley, Palo Alto, or Jefferson.

Middle Schools

Here is the average middle school size for every district with at least 3000 middle school students. You’ll notice that the discs appear to form a few parallel lines (or, if you prefer, concentric arcs radiating from the northwest). This is a natural consequence of districts having relatively few middle schools. A district with 4000 middle school students might average 1333, 1000, 800, or 667 students per school depending on whether it has 3, 4, 5, or 6 middle schools but it can’t average 900 or 1100 or any other intermediate value.

San Francisco’s middle schools, with an average of 720 students, are smaller than most but not egregiously so. Oakland’s middle schools, with an average of 470 students, are by far the smallest. Six of Oakland’s twelve middle schools have fewer than 380 students, the threshold Oakland identified as the minimum necessary for a viable middle school. Looking across the state, all the districts shown here have a combined total of 520 middle schools. Of those 520, only sixteen have fewer than 380 students. In addition to Oakland’s six, there are five in Los Angeles Unified, three in Capistrano Unified, one in West Contra Costa, and one in San Francisco (Willie Brown).

The other Bay Area district to have smaller middle schools than San Francisco is West Contra Costa Unified, known as Richmond Unified before it spent the best part of two decades in bankruptcy.

High Schools

Most elementary schools are alike. Most middle schools are alike. High schools are not alike. As well as the traditional high schools, nearly all districts have at least one Continuation High School (intended for kids at risk of dropping out). These tend to have fewer than 200 students and are often much smaller. Most districts also have one or more “Alternative Schools of Choice”, and there are also various other types such as K-12 schools or special education schools.

For example, San Francisco has ten traditional public high schools, two continuation schools and five¹ that it classifies as: “Alternative Schools of Choice”: SOTA, Academy, Jordan, SF International, and Independence. Long Beach has 11 traditional public high schools, 2 alternative high schools, one continuation school and 1 K-12 school. Oakland is again an extreme case. It has twenty high schools but only seven are of the traditional type: three are alternatives, three are continuation, and seven are other types.

In most districts, over 90% of students attend traditional public high schools. The biggest exceptions are Oakland, where that fraction is just 70%, Los Angeles (74%), San Francisco (86%), and San Diego (88%).

The following chart shows the average size of traditional public high schools only, ignoring the other school types.

Notice that although San Francisco Unified is the sixth largest district in the state, there are seventeen districts with more high schools students than SFUSD. The additional districts are high school districts that serve multiple elementary school districts. Among the largest are Sweetwater Union (San Diego county), Chaffey Joint Union High (San Bernardino), and East Side Union High (Santa Clara).

Los Angeles Unified has the smallest average high school size. In fact, its Alternative Schools of Choice average more students (1130) than its traditional public high schools (1040). The second smallest high schools belong to Oakland, even though I’ve excluded 13 of its 20 schools by focusing just on traditional public high schools. San Francisco’s high schools average 1400 students, smaller than most but not exceptionally so.

Oakland pegged the minimum size necessary for a high school at 520. Two of SFUSD’s ten traditional high schools, Marshall and O’Connell, fall just below that mark. Its high schools of choice and continuation schools are, with the exception of SOTA, well below the 520 mark. Some of these might still be sustainable, particularly those that share locations with other schools. For example, Academy and SOTA share a campus as do Jordan and City Arts and Tech, a charter high school.

Summary

Although there is some evidence that kids do better in small schools, the school districts that do the best job of educating kids have much larger average school sizes than San Francisco. If the minimum enrollment needed for a sustainable elementary school in Oakland is 304, it’s unlikely to be lower in San Francisco. Nevertheless, San Francisco has a much higher proportion of small schools than any other district in the state. Closing schools, particularly at the elementary level, should very much be on the agenda of the school board.

Of course, that’s easy to say. The next post will examine all the reasons why choosing which schools to close, if any, would be particularly difficult in San Francisco.

1. In parent-facing presentations, SFUSD talks about having 14 “comprehensive” high schools: the ten traditional high schools and four of the five alternative schools. Independence is not included in the comprehensive school list.