Reality was in attendance at Tuesday night’s San Francisco school board meeting. Following a presentation during which school district officials lauded the highest-ever rates of “student belonging,” Superintendent Maria Su acknowledged that the district cannot reach its educational goals. Commissioner Matt Alexander pointed out, “We are making no progress,” as the school board voted to give the district an additional six years to meet its five-year educational goals, and immediately acknowledged that the extra time was also insufficient.
The school board decision came before a virtually empty meeting room and appeared to be motivated as much by the district’s inability to engage the public in educational goal-setting as by its inability to achieve the current goals. Updating the current educational goals, set to expire in October 2027, requires over a year of community engagement, an effort for which the district said it lacked both the time and the resources to complete. Superintendent Su stressed that the delay would give her team a “longer runway for community engagement for the next set of goals.”
In 2022, the school board established ambitious five-year educational goals focused on significant improvements in literacy rates of third-grade students, mathematics proficiency of eighth-grade students, and college and career readiness of twelfth graders. At the time, the school board was responding to thousands of parent and public comments it received, calling for higher academic goals. Establishing these goals also meant that the board pledged to align its budget decisions with meeting them and to hold district officials accountable for classroom results.
The five-year goals were clear and straightforward. By 2027, 70 percent of third graders would read at grade level; 65 percent of eighth graders would reach the statewide proficiency level in mathematics, and 70 percent of twelfth graders would meet California standards for readiness for college or career.
The goals were also considered ambitious. When they adopted the goals, district officials knew they would have five years to increase literacy by 18 percentage points and math skills by 23 points. But instead of improving, literacy scores among third graders are dropping. In 2022, 52 percent of third graders were reading at grade level. In 2025, the figure dropped to 47 percent. The latest math proficiency report also shows a slight drop from the 2022 level of 42 percent.
Superintendent Su said it would be “a very, very big lift just to get on the right path” to meet the 2026 expectations, let alone the higher 2027 targets.
Accomplishing what the district set out to do in 2022 is now “an unrealistic expectation,” according to a district staff member speaking at Tuesday’s meeting. Superintendent Su admitted that it would be “a very, very big lift just to get on the right path” to reach the expectations for 2026, let alone the higher 2027 targets. She pointed to a new literacy curriculum, intensive tutoring and more professional development for teachers as reasons for optimism potentially producing 3–5 percent annual increases in student outcomes. The district staff member cautioned, however, that an increase at that high rate might occur one time but the best most urban school districts similar to San Francisco typically achieve is a 1 percent or 2 percent annual increase. At that rate, current students will be well beyond school age by the time the district’s current goals are achieved.
Once the realities of falling short of its current educational goals and lacking time to establish new ones set in, it should have been easy for the district to decide to extend the current goals for one year. That was Superintendent Su’s recommendation. No commissioners expressed disagreement. However, the difficulty in reaching a vote exposes an additional and repeated problem facing Superintendent Su and the school board — staff independence or recalcitrance. While commissioners and Su were aligned on extending the deadline, a high level staff member suggested giving the school board new goals to vote on in less than a month. Citing the already mentioned importance of public input and community engagement, School Board Vice President Jaime Huling rebuffed the suggestion and was joined by other school board members including Commissioner Alexander who also decried the absence of data that could guide making educational improvements. Ultimately, the school board voted to extend the deadline for a year, as requested.
Superintendent Su still faces hurdles to developing and carrying out strategies for the current and future educational goals the school board adopts. At the March 24 school board meeting, Su’s staff reported that one-third of teachers observed in classrooms were not using materials for the new literacy curriculum. There has been similar resistance to using the new math textbooks. At an earlier board meeting, middle school principals spoke out against her plan for eighth-grade algebra. Last spring, Su had to reverse a commitment to pause the ninth-grade ethnic studies course after key staff raised logistical and other objections. A non-educator, Su has worked without a deputy superintendent since last June. The harsh reality for Superintendent Su and the school board is that changing adult behavior remains a prerequisite to changing student outcomes.
