SFUSD Finance Comparison

SFUSD has more revenue and a much better student-teacher ratio than most California school districts

“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.

“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”

Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (1926)

Introduction

California’s school financing system is a mess. SFUSD’s budget crisis is real. But the first did not cause the second. The pandemic has accelerated problems that already existed. Prop 13 was passed in 1978, before some of the school board members were even born. In the last forty years, San Francisco voters have been asked to vote on 13 local school revenue propositions. They have approved all 13 of them¹. The district has money, maybe not as much as it would like or as I would like, but it has money. What it doesn’t have is self-control. When everything is a priority, nothing is.

Here’s how SFUSD’s finances compare with those of other districts.

Fact #1: SFUSD Cannot Plead Poverty

Thanks to the generosity of local voters, SFUSD receives more money per student than any other large school district in California. Some districts on the peninsula receive more per student but they are much smaller.

Fact #2: SFUSD has one of the lowest student-teacher ratios in the state

Money buys personnel. Despite the Bay Area’s high living costs and salary expectations, SFUSD has been able to hire a lot of teachers. Its student-teacher ratio of 16.0 is the third-lowest in the state.

You may be wondering how the student-teacher ratio can be 16.0 when most elementary school classrooms have around 22 kids and middle and high school classes are bigger still. The student-teacher ratio is not the average classroom size. It is calculated by dividing the total number of students by the total number of teachers. There may be teachers doing curriculum development. Music and art teachers may not be class teachers but they still count. A typical course load for a high school teacher is four or five classes whereas a student might take six or seven.

Fact #3: SFUSD is trading off jobs for salary

SFUSD has been able to afford a student-teacher ratio nearly as good as Palo Alto’s because it has paid its teachers far less than many other districts in the Bay Area. I have no idea whether this evolved by chance or there was an explicit decision at some point in the past to trade off jobs for salary but that is effectively what SFUSD and UESF have done.

SFUSD Employs Lots of Teachers But Pays Them Low Salaries

Fact #4: SFUSD teachers are among the most experienced in the Bay Area

Despite their low pay, SFUSD’s teachers have more experience than those in other districts. This is counter-intuitive as one might expect good teachers to seek out higher salaries elsewhere.

I don’t have a good theory that explains this. Are SFUSD’s teachers unaware that other districts offer higher pay? Are SFUSD’s teachers not as good as those in higher-paying districts (even if they are more experienced)? Are SFUSD’s benefits so much better than those of other districts that the pay difference is illusory? Is the mission of SFUSD so much more attractive than other districts that teachers are willing to accept lower salaries to teach here? Is the attraction of living in the city and having a short commute worth a lower salary? None of these potential explanations is particularly compelling and I’m not aware of any data that would support one over the others.

Fact #5: Salary and Benefits have risen faster than other costs

Over the ten years to 2019-20, total expenditure per student in SFUSD rose by 69%. The biggest driver of that growth was Employee Benefits which rose 116% on a per student basis over the decade. The expenditure on certificated salaries (i.e. salaries paid to qualified teachers) rose by 60% and that on classified salaries (i.e. salaries paid to all other staff) by 84%. By comparison, operating expenses per student rose by only 23% and Books and Supplies by 35%.

Employee Benefits rose so much because of the need to fund the teachers’ pension scheme. Under the new funding plan adopted by the state in 2014, the required contribution rate for employers such as SFUSD has more than doubled, from 8.25% of salary in years prior to 2014 to 16.92% in 2021-22 and might go up to over 20%. This increase was phased in over multiple years to give school districts a chance to adapt their budgets. SFUSD didn’t.

Conclusion

SFUSD has more money than many other Bay Area districts. Their examples show that it is possible to live on less money while still offering competitive salaries to teachers - those districts have learned to accept higher class sizes.

It is a dereliction of duty for school board members to whine about things outside their control instead of doing their jobs and producing a balanced budget. Their failure is going to cost hundreds of jobs.

1. Source: The Local Revenue Election Results summarized at: http://www.ed-data.org/district/San-Francisco/San-Francisco-Unified