How We Choose the Board of Education: the Case for Reform March 2021

How We Choose the Board of Education: The Case for Reform March 2021 • The election process for choosing the Board of Education is not meeting the needs of San Francisco • The school renaming debacle illustrates why the election process of choosing the Board of Education isn’t allowing San Francisco to get the right people with the right priorities • Many large cities successfully use an appointment process to choose a Board of Education that focuses on education outcomes • The election process we use today was put in place in 1971 as an effort to stop school desegregation • San Francisco successfully used an appointment process to choose the Board of Education for over seventy years from 1900-1971 • It is time for a citywide discussion to develop a new appointment process to choose the Board of Education Is the election system of choosing the Board of Education meeting the needs of San Francisco? We believe the answer is no. The fundamental problem is how difficult it is for voters to be sufficiently informed. Nearly every voter today opens the voter guide, looks at the candidates for the Board of Education, and wonders how to decide. You read the brief statement, then look at the qualifications. This one is a teacher, that one is a parent. How to choose? Unlike the election of mayor or supervisor, where there are usually no more than three or four candidates and voters have some understanding about who they are and what they would do, the Board of Education may have ten or more candidates about whom voters have almost no information. To make matters worse, San Francisco ballots are notoriously long and filled with complex decisions. In addition to all the normal races, the November 2020 ballot featured 12 state ballot measures and 13 local ballot measures. The San Francisco voter guide was 233 pages long. As a result, voters choosing Board of Education commissioners tend to default to incumbents, who nearly always win reelection1. For the candidates who are running for open seats, voters lean on 1 By our review, since 1998 only two incumbents have ever lost reelection, and one of those was Jill Wynns in 2016, who had served for 24 years. 1 Campaign for Better San Francisco Public Schools third-party endorsements over first-hand knowledge of candidate qualifications and policy preferences. These endorsements are generally determined by a small number of insiders whom most voters do not know. And since virtually all candidates and voters are Democrats, the political party system provides little useful information for voters to use. Smaller cities generally have less complex elections, allowing citizens to learn more about candidates running for their local school board; they also have less complex school systems. The San Francisco Unified School District has over fifty thousand students and ten thousand employees, yet we have less information to choose the Board of Education than the residents of a smaller city have to choose their local school board. San Francisco has a school board election system where incumbents nearly always win and candidates for open seats only need to win the endorsement of a small number of insiders. This makes it hard for voters to make informed choices and hold incumbents accountable. The school renaming debacle illustrates these problems. School Renaming Debacle Illustrates Deficiencies of Citywide Election The project to rename schools was an epic fiasco. There was substantial criticism of the effort when the recommendations were published, including a blistering critique by Mayor Breed. Then in January, a comprehensive analysis was produced that explained in detail the deep flaws of the process and output of the School Names Advisory Committee. Resistance intensified via numerous local opinion pieces and public protest. Undeterred, on January 26 the Board of Education completely ignored all the feedback and adopted the recommendations of the School Names Advisory Committee in full: not a single school name was removed from the recommendation list, and no errors were acknowledged. The Board of Education did not even care to correct a single one of the numerous factual mistakes that had been identified. The result was condemnation both locally and from around the world. No school board in living memory has ever become a laughingstock to this degree on such a national and international scale. It has been a humiliation for all who care about the reputation of San Francisco. On February 21, in an op-ed published in the San Francisco Chronicle, Board of Education President Gabriela López finally acknowledged that “mistakes were made in the renaming process,” they need to “slow down,” to “provide more opportunities for community input,” and develop “a more deliberative process moving forward, which includes engaging historians at nearby universities to help.” Less than three weeks earlier, in a February 4 op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle, López had said the “prevalent narrative” that all the focus by the Board of Education on renaming had caused delays in reopening school buildings was untrue. But in the February 21 op-ed, she reversed 2 Campaign for Better San Francisco Public Schools course. Claiming that school renaming was “a process begun in 2018 with a timeline that didn’t anticipate a pandemic,” she said that process would now be paused, and “reopening will be [the Board of Education’s] only focus” until the schools are reopened. Apparently, to hold this Board accountable and force them to change course it requires the combination of worldwide denunciation, multiple lawsuits, and the launch of a recall campaign. And accountability is the key issue here, because all the details about the flaws of the renaming project were publicly available before the election, and the renaming project’s champion was running for reelection. Here are the facts: • Mark Sanchez co-sponsored the original 2018 resolution for the school renaming process, and was the only one of the three co-sponsors up for reelection in 20202. • Mark Sanchez was President of the Board of Education throughout 2020, the period during which all the work of the School Names Advisory Committee was done. • The chair of the School Names Advisory Committee was Jeremiah Jeffries, who is a longstanding supporter of Mark Sanchez and was his campaign manager in 2020. • All the relevant meetings of the School Names Advisory Committee took place during the spring, summer and fall of 2020; every single meeting was posted online in its entirety for all to see. • Mark Sanchez appeared in person at the September 23 meeting of the School Names Advisory Committee to offer his enthusiastic support for their work • All the recommendations of the School Names Advisory Committee were made public in mid- October. • Mark Sanchez was quoted on October 16 dismissing criticism by saying, “Predictably people are going to be upset no matter when we do this.” He also appeared in a video interview made by fellow commissioner Allison Collins lauding the school renaming process on October 19, three days after the Mayor’s critique. Given the extraordinary unpopularity of school renaming, one would think Sanchez might have paid some political price for his intimate role in championing the school renaming. 2 Matt Haney had become a Supervisor by 2020, while Stevon Cook did not stand for reelection in 2020. 3 Campaign for Better San Francisco Public Schools But in fact, Mark Sanchez easily won reelection. He and Jenny Lam were the two incumbents, and as usual for incumbent Board of Education commissioners they garnered the most votes in the field. The President of the School Board was so confident of reelection he felt free to pursue a wildly unpopular pet project in full public view during a public health emergency, even with all the relevant facts in the public domain. Clearly, our election system is having problems attracting the right people to serve on the Board of Education and holding them accountable to focus on the right priorities. Is there a better system? Appointment System Used by Many Large Cities Successfully San Francisco’s public schools are not adequately serving its residents. Our city has one of the highest opt-out rates among all major US cities, and our schools suffer from a persistent achievement gap for its low income students of color3. Many large urban school districts over the last several decades have shifted from an elected school board to an appointed school board. These include such prominent cities as Boston, New York and Washington D.C. They are doing so in an effort to address similar issues of school performance that bedevil San Francisco’s public school system. And it appears to be having a positive effect. A 2013 analysis conducted by two leading academics who have studied this subject in depth provides promising evidence that shifting to an appointment system can improve student outcomes and improve the way resources are managed. Some of the key benefits listed are: • Higher investment in teaching staff • More spending on instruction • Smaller student-teacher ratios • Improvement in academic performance relative to average school district performance statewide • Narrowing of the achievement gap Additionally, cities with an appointment system such as Chicago, New York and Washington D.C. have managed better through the difficult issues raised by the pandemic, as noted by the Washington Post Editorial Board on February 18. Chicago’s mayor, Lori Lightfoot, specifically 3 For the high opt-out rate, see this 2017 story by the New York Times, which states, “Around 30 percent of San Francisco children attend private school, the highest rate among large American cities.” The achievement gap has been repeatedly documented; underlying data can be found at the California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress website.

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