K-12 Education

For years public school families in California have been poorly treated by elected officials. That’s because they haven’t had political muscle. Fortunately that’s changing.

Yesterday San Francisco Mayor London Breed made a gutsy appointment to the presidency of the SF Board of Education when she selected Phil Kim, who served as the national director of STEM education for the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) and is a charter school champion.

Governor Newsom postponed the annual State of the State address scheduled for today, apparently (according to Politico) until the final results of Proposition 1 are known.

It’s election season. Citizens looking for questions to ask of candidates or state officials might consider the following two.

Last week I reported that Governor Newsom falsely told an interviewer that the state was unable to reopen schools during COVID because the state constitution requires local control of schools, which isn’t true. After my email, some local school officials contacted me to report that Mr. Newsom’s statement actually contained two fictions.

Earlier this week, students in my public policy class at Stanford talked about their experiences as high school students during COVID. Several attended California public schools that were shut down longer than anywhere else in the country. The consequences went well beyond learning loss to include depression and greater difficulties for poorer parents who relied on school lunches or could no longer drop kids at schools while they went to work.

Unlike their counterparts in California, poor students in Texas and Florida didn’t fall behind in math during the pandemic. That’s because they were allowed to attend school in person. According to a new study by Harvard University,

Whenever I use Medicare, the government pays a health provider of my choice even if the provider is not operated by the government. The same goes for Medicaid, which uses public funds to pay for the care of 15 million Californians.

San Francisco Unified School District spends up to 250% more than the average CA school district on OPEB, which are insurance subsidies for retired employees.

Dear Legislators,

The Legislative Analyst’s Office is filled with talented people who occasionally take on impossible tasks. Take LAO’s recent Fiscal Outlook for Schools in which it boldly predicts that “capital gains revenue [will be] strong in 2022‑23.” I can’t predict the stock market next week much less next year but unlike the state I’m not depending on it to finance schools that require stable annual funding. If I did, I’d keep loads of cash on hand. That’s because the annual performance of stock markets looks like this:

When it reported a deficit last year, San Francisco Unified School District blamed Special Education. This year, SFUSD is blaming declining enrollment. Not being blamed is the real culprit.