Prop. G: Why It's Bad But Got My Vote Anyway

It’s bureaucratic, prescriptive, inefficient, and inequitable but at least it's not a $1.7 million bathroom.

Introduction

Proposition G (Student Success Fund) is on the ballot next month in San Francisco. You can find the full text here and a summary here:

The proposed Charter amendment would establish a new set-aside fund in the Charter called the Student Success Fund. The Student Success Fund would pay for grants from DCYF to schools in the School District, or to the School District itself, to support academic achievement and social/emotional wellness of students.

Even if you strongly favor spending more money on education, it’s easy to dislike this particular proposition. It’s bureaucratic, prescriptive, inefficient, and inequitable.

The Case in Favor

The case in favor of Proposition G is simple. San Francisco spends far less on education than any other county in the state. Figure 1 shows all K-14 education spending meaning that it includes spending on community schools such as City College of San Francisco as well as on K-12 school districts (source: Board of Equalization). San Francisco brings in over $4,000 in property taxes per resident every year, the highest of any county. Only four other counties, all in the greater Bay Area (Marin, Napa, San Mateo, and Santa Clara) receive more than $2500 per resident in property taxes. But San Francisco devotes only about 30.3% of its money to property taxes, by the lowest of any county. No other county spends less than 40% on education. The other rich Bay Area counties (Marin, Napa, San Mateo, and Santa Clara) all spend around 60% on education.

Figure 1: Education Funding by County in California

Proposition G, when fully implemented, would spend $60m per year. An extra $60m in 2020-2021 would have brought the 30.3% figure all the way up to 32.0%. Since we know that the city and county of San Francisco dispenses public money with the acumen of a child in a candy shop (hello, $1.7m public toilets), it’s easy to justify directing more spending towards education.

The Case Against Prop G.

The impetus for this proposition was provided by one of the hottest concepts in education: the idea of a community school. Here’s how the NEA describes them:

community schools focus on what students in the community truly need to succeed—whether it’s free healthy meals, health care, tutoring, mental health counseling, or other tailored services before, during, and after school.  

Community schools identify these needs by bringing together: 

• academics,  

• health and social services,  

• youth and community development; and  

• community engagement. 

The concept of a community school has been around for a while but it has been hard for school districts to fund them because there are so many other competing priorities. As originally conceived, this proposition takes some money that should go to the district anyway and attempts to dedicate it for the implementation of the community school concept. Behind-the-scenes negotiation then gave the district some wiggle room. Money can now also be spent on “other evidence-based school improvement strategies”

Previous education-related propositions have benefited all schools. Those propositions provide money for arts and PE or to raise teacher salaries or to fund repairs at schools. Under Prop. G, only a subset of schools will receive funding and the funding will come in the form of grants from the Department of Children, Youth, and Their Families. A requirement of receiving a grant is that a school needs to hire a full-time “community school coordinator” to coordinate all the additional services.

Overhead

There is a lot of overhead. The city and district are each allowed to spend 3.5% of the money on the overhead of administering the grant application process and the required reporting. That’s a 7% tax right there.

The full-time community school coordinator at each school is not, so far as I can tell, included in the overhead. But a coordinator, by definition, is not delivering services so is properly counted as administrative overhead. The maximum that a school can receive under this program is $1 million. Let’s assume the average grant is half of that i.e. $500,000. Let’s also assume that the grant will cover the full cost of employing someone i.e. not just the salary and healthcare benefits but also a pro-rata share of the pension cost and the OPEB costs (as it should). I don’t know how much a community school coordinator will be paid. It’s hard to imagine the fully-loaded cost would be less than $75,000. That would be a further 15% of the average grant gone. It could be even higher: according to the proposition text the coordinator will “serve in a leadership role working alongside the Eligible School’s principal”. Note that the wording is “alongside” the principal not “reporting to” the principal which suggests that this is meant to be a senior position not equivalent to an entry-level teacher.

Inefficient Spending

The cost of coordination is the same whether the coordination is being done for a school of 150 students or 300 students or 500 students or 2000 students. Grants will be prioritized “to schools demonstrating low academic achievement”. The schools with the lowest academic achievement in San Francisco are also the schools with the lowest enrollment because parents don’t enroll their kids in low-achieving schools. The proposition will thus direct a disproportionate amount of money to the schools with the fewest kids.

Oakland Unified did a cost analysis to determine the minimum school size necessary to operate an elementary school based on various staffing models. The Base model which provided only what was required by federal, state, or contractual obligations) required a minimum of 304 students to be viable. The Quality Community School model demands additional staff. To pay for the additional staff, a community school needs to have more students because education funding is based on attendance which is tied to enrollment. Oakland calculated that its Quality Community School model required 596 students to be viable. San Francisco Unified has never done a similar cost analysis but there’s no reason to assume the results would be widely different here.

Inequitable Funding Across Grades

SFUSD today systematically diverts money away from high schools and into elementary schools. This proposition will almost certainly exacerbate that problem.

Elementary schools are much smaller than middle schools and high schools so there are far more of them. The proposition places a cap of $1 million on the amount any individual school can receive. If ten elementary schools with an average of 200 students each receive $500,000 grants, and one high school with 2000 students receives the maximum $1 million, the elementary schools are receiving five times as much money per student. It is thus almost inevitable that a disproportionate amount of the money will go to elementary schools unless a concerted effort is made to ensure that the funding is balanced. Nothing in the wording of the proposition would encourage, never mind require, the funding to be equalized across grades.

Rewarding Failure

Education funding in California is based on economic need: students who are English learners or come from poor families bring more money to their districts. SFUSD does not fund its schools the same way. Schools with low scores on achievement tests get a lot more money than schools with higher scores on achievement tests. There are a lot of poor Asian families in SFUSD (59% of Asian students in SFUSD are eligible for free or reduced-price meals, far more than the 18% of White students and much closer to the 70% of Latino students or the 75% of Black students who are FRPM-eligible). Since Asian students tend to score better than Latino students, schools with large numbers of poor Asian students get a lot less money than schools with large numbers of poor Latino students. The hope seems to be that if we spend enough money on those schools, they will get better. Prop. G tilts the field even further in favor of the schools with low achievement. Meanwhile, the disadvantaged Asian students will lose out on funding precisely because they do well in school.

School Eligibility

To be eligible to receive grants under the proposition, a school must be “a school in the [San Francisco Unified School] District”.

Is a charter school that is in San Francisco and gets its charter from SFUSD eligible under this definition? It all depends on what “in the District” means. The charter schools are not “in the district” in the sense of being managed from 555 Franklin St, but they are “in the District” in the sense of being public schools serving the same geographical location. This latter interpretation has some precedent: most reports from the California Department of Education default to including charter school numbers alongside those of SFUSD operated schools.

The charter schools are particularly popular in the Black and Latino communities. 55% of charter school students are Latino and 15% Black. Of the charter schools, the three KIPP schools (one elementary and two middle) serve particularly poor populations. A higher percentage of their students are eligible for Free or Reduced Price Meals than even the three majority-Black SFUSD elementary schools (for more details, see here). If the charter schools are not eligible under Prop. G, this would indicate that the true purpose of the proposition is not to benefit the most disadvantaged students in the city but to increase the number of UESF employees in the city (the charter schools being non-union).

Opaque Accountability

Today, the district allocates money to schools based on a “Multi-Tier System of Supports.” Anyone who doesn’t like how the money is allocated (and I don’t, partly because it disadvantages high schools) can complain to the Board of Education which approves the spending allocations. But who is democratically accountable for this new spending? It’s not the Board of Education. This proposition sets up a new parallel funding source at the Department of Children, Youth, and Their Families. The Department is supposed to consult with the district but it has to follow guidelines set by the Board of Supervisors, and has the ultimate authority on where the money goes. Do we really want supervisors weighing in on individual grants? Are supervisors going to want to ensure that schools in their districts get an equal share of the money?

There are a lot of reporting requirements for the schools and the district to the department but they are structured weirdly. Grants are made to schools for a fiscal year, which runs from July 1 to June 30, and so is nicely aligned with the school year. But:

“the Department shall submit to the Mayor and the Board of Supervisors a report covering the prior calendar year and providing information about the uses of grants awarded under the Fund and data regarding outcomes from the grant funding”

Every report will therefore span part of two fiscal years. That seems like a recipe for obfuscation.

Is This Really The Priority?

If you were in charge of education in San Francisco and were given an extra $60 million a year to spend, would you spend it on community schools or would you spend it on special education or implementing a new reading curriculum or increasing teacher salaries or buying new books or repairing facilities? Maybe you’d like to invest in more than one of these things? Maybe you’d like to experiment with the community school concept and see if it works in a handful of schools before rolling it out. This proposition would tie your hands for the fifteen year length of the student success fund.

Does This Even Increase Education Spending?

Proposition G does not send money directly to the school district. Schools apply to the city’s Department of Children, Youth, and Their Families which decides which schools receive how much money. The money cannot be used for “core staffing”. It’s a minor matter but I wonder whether the money will even count as “education spending” given this weird routing.

Conclusion

I voted for the proposition but the more research and thinking I did about it, the less I like it. It’s too late for me to change my vote but it would be better to reject this proposition and come back next year with a cleaner one.