Q&A: SFUSD leaders explain ‘courageous’ stand for kids
Teachers in schools undergoing reforms and posting academic gains spared from layoffs
Published: March 20, 2012
“Sometimes a school district’s leadership takes such a strong and courageous stance on behalf of their most vulnerable students that it takes your breath away,” noted Education Trust-West Executive Director Arun Ramanathan after the San Francisco Unified School District Board of Education voted Feb. 28 to ignore the traditional last-in, first-out priority for layoffs and spare—or “skip”—14 of their highest-poverty schools, where teachers have received more intensive coaching and training since 2010, from teacher layoffs in the coming year. The agonizing decision was a controversial yet “logical next step” in supporting the district’s strategic plan goals to make social justice a reality and to keep promises made to students and families, said Superintendent Carlos Garcia.
California School News spoke with Superintendent Garcia and board member Jill Wynns—who is also CSBA’s president this year—about the action and the lessons that other districts may use to support their own reform efforts.
CSN: The San Francisco board recently made what some have described as a very “courageous decision” regarding layoffs this year. Can you tell us what action the board took, and why?
Wynns: The board, sadly, for the third year in row, had to vote to send layoff notices. On the superintendent’s recommendation we have sent a ‘may not renew’ letter to more than 135 site and central office administrators and 300 teachers. … Remember that our union has already agreed to skipping as a principle.
Garcia: Right. But it was already in the contract.
CSN: All right. So if there are other districts already skipping certain teachers from layoffs, what was so unusual about your decision on Feb. 28?
Wynns: The superintendent’s recommendation was that we also skip the teachers in the Superintendent’s Zones. We have two zones, which many large school districts have. These are groups of chronically underperforming schools that have special support, and also special accountability.
We’ve got this “Prop. A,” this parcel tax, which we negotiated with the teachers, where we designated a group of 25 hard-to-staff schools where we identified that, over time, turnover is a problem in that school. And all of the teachers in those schools get a stipend [for agreeing to be assigned there].
Could we have taken the position that we wanted to skip all the hard-to-staff schools? Yes. But we also have these zones that we’ve designated. Everybody has been in on the planning and the work on the Zone schools, so that’s the group we picked to say stability is one of their main challenges, so we want to do something about that.
One of the things that was persuasive to me was that the Zone schools have four times the rate of turnover as the rest of the school district. Actually, the district’s average includes them, and they still have four times the rate of turnover. In other words, the schools that we’re not skipping that the union is concerned about, they have a very high level of stability, I think in our district probably even more stability than other places because we have a very experienced work force. We don’t have a lot of young teachers. So those teachers who never are going to get a layoff notice are concentrated in high-achieving schools.
CSN: Why is it so important that you don’t disturb staffing in the Zone schools?
Garcia: First of all, those schools had a revolving door of teachers. So we took some of those schools and used the different turnaround models for the [School Improvement Grant] schools. In some cases we either replaced the principal or we replaced half of the staff. With those 14 schools, the district has made significant investments in recruiting, selecting, and developing employees, including investing $1.3 million in professional development for all Superintendent’s Zone teachers and nearly $6 million in instructional coaches, academic acceleration teachers, and equity release teachers. Teachers in the Zone were provided 8 hours per month of early release days.
So our fear was that after investing all this money, if we’re going to lose all those folks in those schools, then we’re going to go back to square one. We believe the reason those schools have been such low-performing schools is that we continue to do the same thing over and over again and we get the same outcome, which is there’s no stability. We get our newest teachers going there. They don’t stay there very long because they get layoff notices. So we’re never going to turn around those schools unless we can create some stability.
The real reason why we did all of this was for the benefit of the children who need stability to turn around those schools. I will tell you that in the short time they’ve been working to do this now, last year the rate for improvement in the Zone in both content areas was higher than the district’s rate and the vast majority of schools showing the greatest gains in API were in the Zone. So we know that good training and good support for these folks really will turn around the schools. We have the evidence to prove it.
We’ve complained about these schools for decades. If we’re really going to do something about them, we really have to make a tough decision. This is not anti-union, by any means. All of us here are very pro-union. But we also think we can accommodate both. We can do great things for kids and support the unions.
CSN: During the board’s deliberation, several of the members spoke about “keeping their promise” to the affected schools. Why is that significant?
Garcia: Because one of our main goals is accountability. How we define accountability in San Francisco is keeping our promises to parents and students. Our promise was that we’re going to make social justice a reality in their schools by closing the achievement gap. The only way we’re really going to keep that promise is to keep those teachers who are doing the work.
Every teacher who went to a Zone school actually signed a commitment letter saying that they’d be willing to go to additional training—that they’d be paid for—that they’d be willing to work longer hours if need be and do whatever’s necessary to turn around the school. And they agreed to it.
Wynns: So it would be very difficult for us to bump teachers into those schools in the layoff process. It would really undermine the work that we started there.
I think one of the other issues is that it isn’t like we haven’t tried these things before. When these schools are identified—by us, by the feds, by the state government, by anyone—as persistently underperforming, that’s historically where the students have not done well—and we have tried various strategies in the past. One of the things we’ve identified many times in these reform efforts is that having experienced staff and stability—leadership and teaching stability—in those schools is a huge issue.
CSN: Do you expect the union to challenge this decision, and if so, how do you plan to respond?
Wynns: As in all layoff processes, this is going to go before an administrative law judge. In my view, this is an area where there isn’t any need for them to sue us, or take legal action, because it already is under legal review, or will be, by law—it’s part of the regulations.
And that’s one of the reasons that we chose the schools we did. We wanted to minimize the negative impact, maximize the positive effect, but also look at something we think is legitimate and legally defensible.
Garcia: That’s why, because of the investment, we feel we have a very strong position. … That’s why we’re able to skip bilingual teachers and all those, because there’s a provision in [the Education Code] that allows you to skip people for hard-to-fill areas. But also if you’ve provided special training, then that’s a criteria that can be used. So that’s our argument as we go into the hearing, and ultimately the judge will have to rule on it.
CSN: So if there are other districts that have SIG grants or have done similar investment in specific schools, could they take similar actions to skip those schools from layoffs?
Garcia: First of all, we’re doing this because we’re very data-driven. If those schools were not showing good results, maybe we would not be pursuing this. But the fact is that they are showing double-digit growth, they are showing that they’re making a difference. So you’ve got to let your data do the talking for you.
This was very well thought-out in terms of our return on investment. We only have one more year of SIG money. We want to be able to have the people we’ve trained and supported in these schools that have been the persistently lowest-performing schools in our district—they’re in the bottom 5 percent in the entire state. We want to invest our money strategically so that once the SIG money is gone, we have really well-trained individuals there who will carry this on even without the SIG funding.
So [our decision] was very well thought-out, research-based and academically sound. That’s why we decided we had to say something, otherwise we’d give all that away and then we’d be complaining next year, ‘why are these schools doing so poorly?’ We know why if we don’t stand up for them.
Wynns: I also think another issue here is that—as a model for other districts, or something to discuss—this, like pretty much all of our reform efforts, we have tried for the last 10, 12 years to make them as collaborative as possible. I would make the case this is a more nuanced and more positive way of looking at the issue of teacher quality and cohesiveness as a key to school improvement.
We think the way to do it is to say we want to help you do this work together in partnership with the district and with other people in the community, and what can we do to support that, even with the shamefully low resources that we have?
CSN: Is there any advice you can give to other districts that are struggling to maintain reform efforts despite budget cuts?
Garcia: We have some advantages that other people didn’t have. One, in 2008 we rolled out our strategic plan. Then, in 2008 we had Proposition A, where we agreed that we would pay teachers more to go to the 25 designated hard-to-fill schools. So in some ways we were already doing something different than a lot of people, in that we had an agreement in place to do this.
Then, on top of that, we have an agreement that if you’re a mentor teacher and you go to those schools, you also get an additional stipend to be a coach with teachers there. So in some ways this seemed like the logical next step. All of that’s in place, we’re attracting better teachers to be at those schools, so how do we retain them?
You’re never going to improve student achievement at low-performing schools if you continue to have this gigantic teacher turnover.
Could it have been done differently? Yeah, under ideal circumstances we wish we could have just sat down and negotiated this, possibly, with our unions, but it didn’t turn out that way.
CSN: So you just needed to make a tough governance decision.
Wynns: We have consensus and total agreement about our plan and how we’re moving forward. In fact, the creation of the Superintendent’s Zones came out of board retreat discussions about how we needed to focus on those schools. On the other hand, in a question like this, including support from the teacher’s union for board members and their elections, we were not necessarily together. The five people that you saw vote for this are not all allies.
CSN: But on this issue they came together?
Wynns: Yes, and that was tough.
Garcia: This is my 37th year in education, and I have to tell you: Never in my life have I been more proud of a school board than that evening. Because as tough a decision as they made—which was a very difficult one, especially in a union town like San Francisco—it actually said we respect the union, but we really do have to respect children too. We really do need to respect teachers who are working in those conditions. They made a commitment to us, and it really showed that the board and the district was showing a commitment to them.
Yeah, in retrospect, in an ideal world, could it have happened in a different way? Possibly. But we were running up against the March 15 deadline and we had to act.
It was a good moment to see that for once, kids won.