Has SFUSD Been On A Secret Hiring Binge?

Or why can't it report accurate employment numbers?

A couple of years ago I did a deep dive into teacher compensation at SFUSD and concluded that:

• SFUSD salaries were below average, even though we are in a high cost location;

• SFUSD appeared overstaffed i.e. it employed far more certificated employees per 1,000 students than most other districts;

• SFUSD offered extraordinarily generous benefits to its retired workers.

Those three are obviously interrelated. Because it employs so many people and has such onerous obligations to its retirees, it can’t afford to pay its current employees as much.

In 2023, SFUSD signed new contracts with its unions that delivered large salary increases. I thought it would be interesting to revisit the analysis to see how SFUSD’s current salaries compare with those in other districts.

The standard source for school salary and benefit information is School Services of California which gets all districts to fill out what’s called a J-90 form. The J-90 is very detailed. A teacher’s salary is generally determined by her educational qualifications and her experience. The qualifications determine which column of the salary schedule applies to her and the years of experience determine which row in the schedule applies to her. The J-90 lists the salary at each column and step and shows the number of FTEs (full-time equivalents) getting paid at that column/step combination. It also lists how many teachers received each type of bonus offered by the district, the cost (to the district and the employee) of each health care plan offered by the district, and the number of employees and retirees who have signed up for each.

To help make sense of all this information, School Services of California publishes custom comparative analyses of salaries and benefits called SABER reports which districts (and, presumably, unions too) use to inform their bargaining positions. Fortunately, all the underlying data for these reports is collected in a database and published here by the California Department of Education. I have verified in the past that it is possible to use the data in the database to reproduce every number in a SABER report.

The database for 2023-24 was recently published so I downloaded it. The salary amounts at each step and column of the SFUSD salary schedule in the database exactly match the numbers published here, as they should. Unfortunately, I simply don’t believe the number of FTEs that SFUSD reported. A simple way to compare staffing across districts is to look at the number of certificated employees per 1,000 students. If we do that for all Unified districts in the Bay Area with at least 5,000 students (as measured by Average Daily Attendance, which is the only measure in the database), we get the following chart:

Having done a similar analysis two years ago, I was expecting to see San Francisco near the top of this chart but not right at the top, way above Palo Alto. The reason San Francisco is at the top is that it has been reporting a huge increase in the number of certificated FTEs it employs over the last two years.

After bouncing in a narrow range between 3,600 and 3,700 for six years, employment apparently jumped to 3,916 in 2022-23 and 4,389 in 2023-24. That’s a 20% increase in two years. I don’t believe SFUSD is employing 20% more teachers than it was two years ago. If the district had gone on a hiring binge, we would have heard about it. I’m guessing this is some strange data error, perhaps caused by the disastrous payroll system implementation.

San Francisco is not the only district reporting bizarre numbers. Oakland reported that its FTEs were down 19% over the last two years but that the number of employees enrolled in health plans had increased by 78%. Apparently, there are over 4,000 employees on health plans but only 1,667 certificated FTEs. According to SSC, this is because Oakland’s HR system is unable to distinguish between certificated employees and others.

While SFUSD’s numbers are so obviously wrong, I’m going to hold off on doing a new salaries and benefits comparison.