A sign in support of public school is seen outside a home next to Sutro Elementary School in San Francisco on Oct. 9, 2024. The school is among the 11 schools previously proposed for closure within San Francisco Unified School District amid decline in enrollment and budgetary woes.
Credit: Stephen Lam/San Francisco Chronicle via AP
San Francisco must do everything it can to avert a state takeover of its schools.
That’s the stark message brought by Carl A. Cohn, the only outside educator to be brought in to help the team of city administrators set up by Mayor London Breed to help the school district overcome multiple crises, including a looming budget shortage, declining enrollment, and the departure of its superintendent, the second in two years.
“I remain a huge fan of local control,” said Cohn, a revered figure in education circles in California and nationally. “I fundamentally believe that if historically underserved students are going to be rescued, it is going to be by locals, not by state government or higher levels of authority.”
The challenges facing the 48,000-student district are being experienced to some degree by many others around the state. Just across the San Francisco Bay, Oakland Unified and West Contra Costa Unified, which includes Richmond, are grappling with comparable challenges.
San Francisco’s, however, seem especially acute.
“I think the loss of federal pandemic relief funds, coupled with declining enrollments will make things difficult for most districts, but San Francisco is probably ahead of the curve on this,” he said.
There’s little that Cohn, who projects calm and reassurance but can also be disarmingly direct, has not seen in his 50 years in an array of roles in public education.
He was superintendent of the San Diego and Long Beach school districts, the second- and third-largest in California after Los Angeles Unified (LAUSD). His 10-year tenure at Long Beach was especially noteworthy for fostering academic excellence and accountability, resulting in the district winning the prestigious Broad Prize For Urban Education.
He was appointed to the State Board of Education by then Gov. Jerry Brown, who later recruited him to lead a new state agency, the California Collaborative for Education Excellence.
He has been brought in to deal with various trouble spots over the years. He co-chaired a commission of the National Academy of Sciences to look into whether District of Columbia schools had exaggerated their academic results under the leadership of Michelle Rhee, then arguably the best-known, and most controversial, school superintendent in the nation.
He was the court-appointed monitor overseeing a consent decree to improve special education in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Currently, he is co-leading an initiative with Harvard professor Jennifer Cheatham to prepare school superintendents to cope with the political polarization roiling school districts across the country.
He has also been a mentor to generations of school superintendents, and trained many of them as a professor at Claremont Graduate University, and at the University of Southern California before that.
Cohn has never had to close schools himself and says that San Francisco must do everything it can to find alternatives to doing so. That is similar to a mindset Breed appears also to have embraced, and was a major reason behind the resignation of Superintendent Matt Wayne last week.
For now, at least, school closure plans are on hold. “The challenge with closing schools from a symbolic point of view is that it can be seen as the beginning of the death of a community,” Cohn says.
“There are multiple ways to cut a school district budget,” he says. “And if you have to, there are ways to do it so it is not a huge negative.”
He recalls being sent to Inglewood Unified a dozen years ago by then-State Board President Michael Kirst to take stock of the deep financial hole the Southern California district was in.
He found a lackadaisical attitude among school officials about the prospect of a state administrator with the power to overrule local decisionmaking. “They seemed to think the takeover wasn’t such a big deal, that after the bailout they would get their authority back,” he says. “And here we are, 12 years later, with the district nowhere near having an elected school board with any authority.”
The district is still overseen by an administrator appointed by the county.
Cohn has yet to meet Breed, but two weeks ago he came from Palm Springs, where he is based, to meet with the mayor’s School Stabilization Team made up of top San Francisco officials, co-led by Maria Su, the longtime head of the city’s Department of Children, Youth and Their Families. In an unexpected move last week, the school board appointed Su to be the new superintendent, at least until June 2026.
He points out that, unlike other large urban districts in California, the city of San Francisco commendably contributes funding to its schools, which means it has a more direct stake in their functioning.
What is essential is strict oversight over how the district spends its money, he says. He recalls the first day he was given a tour of the administration offices at Long Beach Unified as a 31-year-old educator in the district.
On the second floor was a tiny office with a sign on the door reading “Position Control” right next to the budget office. He was told it was the most powerful office in the district — one that determined what staff could be hired at a school. “Even if you were the superintendent you could not get a position filled unless Position Control said it was in the current budget.”
In addition, each year the district’s research office issued what was called a “quota bulletin,” which decreed how many employees a school qualified for based on its enrollment. Its edicts, he says, were “treated as a sacred document that had been handed down from Mt. Sinai.”
A similar parsimonious ethos is in place in parochial schools. “What is notable about these schools is that they are not over resourced,” said Cohn, who advises the California Catholic Conference on its schools. “You won’t find an assistant principal, a counselor, a reading specialist unless the school has the enrollment to support it.”
“My impression is that these types of controls were not present in the San Francisco school system,” he says. “It’s important for spending to be based on actual enrollment and not on wishful spending.”
He says it would be important to bring all key parties together — the mayor’s stabilization team, incoming Superintendent Su and her deputy, board representatives, State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond, and the Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team, a state-sponsored oversight agency — and put them all in the same room to have a “candid conversation.”
“Getting a handle on what exactly they need to do to retain local control seems like a real important value,” he said.
One thing schools can have no impact on is declining birthrates, Cohn points out. So other strategies to attract and retain students will be needed.
He notes that San Francisco has many private, parochial and charter groups — more than most communities. He suggests conducting focus groups with people who are opting out of more traditional public schools to find out more precisely “what it is that those schools are offering that San Francisco isn’t.”
That could suggest strategies that San Francisco could offer — from more child care to innovative magnet schools — to support families and to encourage them to enroll their children in district schools.
San Francisco schools are especially vulnerable to being taken over by the state. In recent years, when the state bails out a district financially, authority to appoint an administrator has been delegated to the county offices of education. But because San Francisco is both a city and a county, it would be subject to, in Cohn’s words,”an old-fashioned state administrator.”
With Mayor Breed up for reelection in two weeks, and with four of seven school board seats also on the ballot, the district faces many unknowns.
Regardless of what happens on Election Day, Cohn says a fundamental issue the district has to address is “what kinds of resources a school gets based on its enrollment so that future spending doesn’t spiral out of control because someone thinks ‘I need this’ or “I need that.’”
