Essay by UESF Members on the 2022 Tentative Agreement
Teachers and other United Educators of San Francisco members are being asked this week to ratify or vote down a tentative agreement reached by the San Francisco Unified School District and UESF leadership. Central to this agreement are massive cuts to SFUSD’s Advanced Placement Program. Cutting the AP Program would have repercussions that will harm education in SFUSD high schools, and threatens to reach far beyond education in San Francisco.
Here’s a deep dive done by several UESF members on the impact of these proposed cuts. We find their analysis thoughtful and compelling:
Introduction
Members of United Educators of San Francisco the union of teachers, counselors, paras and some other San Francisco school employees are voting this week on a Tentative Agreement that UESF leadership has negotiated with SFUSD. The agreement will cause dozens of teachers and staff to be fired and will weaken the long term health of the district.
What are the financial challenges in SFUSD today?
SFUSD is in serious financial trouble. Superintendent Matthews wrote about this in his latest letter and this has been in the news for a year now. There is danger of a state takeover, because of the $125 million dollar structural deficit (about 10% of a total yearly budget of $1.17 billion). The district will have to make significant cuts. If it doesn’t, the state will take over and the person they appoint will make the cuts rather than the school board.
The short term problem is the dysfunction on the school board has caused them to do a poor job managing the budget and making cuts over the past few years and they have had to spend more on legal costs due to several lawsuits which they lost. The long term problem is that funding is largely based on average daily attendance (ADA) and enrollment has declined significantly in the last few years.
SFUSD enrollment decline
This is a long term problem. SFUSD reached a peak of 95,000 students in 1967. Enrollment dropped for decades and today is at a low of 49,500. Yet the population of San Francisco has been increasing for the few decades and while we have a lower percentage of children than most cities, it is not half of what it was in 1967. What has changed is the percentage of families enrolling in private schools. That has bumped up recently with the pandemic.
The long-term health of SFUSD depends on attracting and retaining families with children, reversing the trend of families moving out of SF or putting their kids in private schools. Who are these children? Some of them are wealthier families who can afford private school. Some of them are not wealthy, but have been able to get scholarships to private schools. So SFUSD has to compete with private schools in the city and with nearby public school systems that these families are considering. What can SFUSD do to attract those families? We need to have great schools at all levels and we need stories of success and statistics that can show what our schools can do. For the last few decades one of SFUSD’s strengths has been our AP program.
What is SFUSD’s Advanced Placement (AP) program?
San Francisco has one of the strongest Advanced Placement programs in the US. In 2019-20, students in SFUSD high schools took 10,774 exams in more than 30 different subjects. Of these exams taken, over 7,233 received a passing score of 3 or better -- a more than 67% pass rate. That is something of which we can be proud. It is something that attracts and retains families in SFUSD who might consider moving out of the district or to private schools. The reason that San Francisco has such a strong AP program is that they have funded it with the AP subsidy.
What is the AP subsidy?
Decades ago SFUSD had the good idea of trying to get high school teachers to do more work by teaching college level Advanced Placement classes. To incentivize schools, SFUSD committed to providing extra funding to a school site based on the number of AP exams that their students took the prior year. The amount has varied, but is currently $600 per exam, not indexed for inflation. Also to incentivize teachers to teach those classes, the district offered teachers of more than 25 students taking AP exams to get an additional preparation period, so they would teach four rather than five classes. Those teaching fewer than 25 students would get a $3,000 stipend. This funding agreement was made part of the bargaining contract between SFUSD and UESF.
It is important to note that many high schools which do not offer AP classes still receive AP funds, because they have students who took AP exams on their own. These supplemental funds support all the school’s programs.
Recent events
There was a bargaining session between UESF and the district in December. The district put forward a proposal to eliminate the AP subsidy and sabbaticals. They have proposed such takebacks for many years and the union has always said no. But on January 25th UESF made a counter proposal that there would be a one year “pause” of sabbaticals and the AP subsidy in return for some benefits for the membership, particularly a bonus of $2,000 for all employees. A pause in sabbaticals makes sense. It is a great program, but it is a luxury and to pause it will not cause layoffs. But a “pause” of the AP subsidy doesn’t make sense and will cause layoffs and turmoil.
Solidarity
One of the core values of unions is solidarity: one for all and all one for. Part of that value is that it should be a top priority to avoid or minimize layoffs. Union members have often been willing to tighten our belts and go without pay increases in order to keep current positions. What is odd about the current proposal is that it does the opposite. It will cause about sixty teachers and staff to be laid off in return for a small benefit to the rest of us. Most of us organizing against this are veteran teachers. Most of us won’t lose our jobs or have to change schools. We are fighting to keep the jobs of our colleagues who started in the last few years and in those first few desperate years of teaching. We have seen their hard work, creativity and potential. We see how much they can offer our students and we don’t want to lose them.
Why a “pause” makes no sense
If the proposal goes through, high schools with AP programs will lose about $6.7M million in funding immediately. What is more, it’s a mistake to believe that only the largest high schools benefit from the AP funding supplement in the WSF process. High schools including June Jordan and Thurgood Marshall — schools that do not offer AP courses but still receive AP funding based on prior year AP exams taken — will also lose their AP funding streams. In short, any SFUSD high school whose students took the AP exam last year benefits this year from the AP Program funds through the WSF.
Who will lose their jobs?
Those teachers displaced are those with the least seniority or teaching subjects or programs that are being cut. Most of those cuts will be certificated teachers, but others will be paraprofessionals (teaching assistant), security or other site-based employees. There are currently a much higher than usual number of unfilled positions in SFUSD. UESF leadership has said that they hope that those forced to leave high schools with AP programs would be able to fill those gaps. But many if not most of those vacancies are at elementary schools where high school teachers are not credentialed to teach. Likewise secondary teachers are mostly only credentialed in one specific subject area (math, English, etc.), so they can’t take a middle school position unless that is in the same subject. Moreover many of these openings won’t be publicized until summer. Current employees who are given pink slips will not wait until then to find a job starting in August. The best of our pink-slipped low-seniority teachers will race off and find jobs at another district in the Bay Area, such as those along the peninsula which pay far more.
So the result will be that most of these dozens of teachers will leave the district. Then, if this were truly a one year pause, the AP Program funding to school sites would be reinstated for 2023-4. The high schools with AP programs would get back those millions of dollars and FTEs and would have to hire back those sixty teachers. But those teachers will already be gone. Most will be working in other districts and will not want to disrupt their lives and come back. The few remaining in SFUSD schools would also probably opt to stay where they are. But if some of them did decide to go back, then there would be a new opening at the school where they had been for a year. This kind of whack-a-mole turmoil is not good for any school. Schools need stability. This “pause” will mean two years of major instability.
Is it really a pause?
The answer to this question appears to be no. The Tentative Agreement contains no provision for restarting the AP subsidy. On what basis would a subsidy be calculated? The Tentative agreement doesn’t say. The problems we have laid out make us wonder if this is just a smokescreen for permanently eliminating the AP subsidy. UESF leadership should be candid and direct with membership if they want to eliminate the AP program permanently so that we can discuss that honestly, openly, and directly and not be distracted by claims that it is “only” a one-year pause.
The long-term impact on the AP Program
The first year the subsidy is gone, those schools will struggle to maintain their AP programs. With fewer teachers to teach classes required for graduation, there will be less room for optional AP classes. Also teachers will no longer have any incentive to teach AP classes. There are only so many hours in a day. With each additional class — possibly in an additional subject — teachers will have to cut back on tutoring students, assigning and grading essays and designing innovative lessons. There might not be a huge drop in the number of classes offered right away. The district will then say, “look, you didn’t need that subsidy after all.” But each year as teachers feel more burnt out, more and more of them will refuse to teach AP classes (they can’t be forced to), the AP offerings will plummet. Those schools with fewer AP offerings will drop them altogether. At schools that do continue to offer them, there will be fewer sections and these will no longer be available to all students who want them. More and more students who want AP classes will be locked out.
The long term impact on SFUSD
SFUSD has to compete with a large and growing number of private schools as well as the public schools in nearby parts of the Bay Area. If this Temporary Agreement goes through, it is highly unlikely that the AP subsidy would ever come back. Once the AP subsidy is gone, with nothing to replace it, the word will go around among families that SFUSD is not providing what high school kids need in the increasingly competitive world of college admissions. More families will feel forced to pull their kids out of the district. We will see a continued decline in enrollment and thus in SFUSD’s budget. Further with nearly all those who can afford it or get scholarships going to private schools, the public schools will be more economically segregated. It will become harder to get voters to support increases to their property taxes for public schools that their kids don’t attend. This is a dangerous direction. Instead SFUSD needs to consider how it can build programs that attract and retain families. In this regard, SFUSD’s AP Program is a pillar of any plan to retain families and teachers into the future.