Last night we engaged in a second meeting of our MB Cluster Task Force investigating the SDUSD proposal to close two of our campuses: CP and PBMS. We used this time to study many of the criteria evaluated by SDUSD that supported their recommendation for school closure. Some members of the meeting and the community have wondered why I do not lead with more optimism. Some have wondered why I seem to acquiesce to the proposal from SDUSD.
First, let me express that I have a long term view at SDUSD. Aside from my long term residence in the community, I have four children from preschool age to seventh grade. I am looking at a personal engagement in public education for another fourteen years with four children. Second, I have seen the budget decline for the last half of a decade. In the private sector and in the national economy, I do not see an economic turn-around that will happen soon and as such I only see the situation worsening. If we deal with the situation at SDUSD one year at a time, I believe we will head towards a situation of declining resources crippling public education. I believe we need to revolutionize how public education is delivered in our community. We created this system, we need to change this system. We cannot turn back the clock to when we were children, we need to move forward from where we are today in the conditions we have today with a different public education environment than we have today.
To be specific about school closure, in order for my to fight for these campuses, I require two things:
1. I need to feel that it is morally the right thing to do.
2. I need to feel that I have a winning strategy.
Morality
Morally, I am not clear that closing these campuses is wrong. This relies primarily on the financial situation at SDUSD. If we had lots of money, clearly there is no incentive to close the campuses. The reason to close the campuses is that this part of SDUSD is "robbing" another part of SDUSD by keeping our campuses open.
Take the administrative costs for example. If it takes $300k to keep an elementary school open and it serves 300 students, then this is akin to adding $1000/student to the contribution you are making to that student's education. The average size of an elementary school in SDUSD is 500 students. The standard deviation is 180 students, putting approximately 70% of the elementary schools between 320 - 680 students. It is pretty clear that BVT and CP are small. They are smaller than the overwhelming majority of the elementary schools. Given the administrative burden at all these campuses is not enormously different, one viewpoint is that our students are being subsidized or receiving a significant benefit that an overwhelming number of students in the district are not. Who do you think at SDUSD would argue that they like having a large elementary school? Probably none. There are many that would be justifiable jealous of the few students at our campuses. In light of the financial situation, morally this does not seem defensible.
One argument made to keep these campuses open is that they serve a community that would need to travel much farther to receive a public education. This does not seem morally defensible either. There are over 21,000 elementary school children that live in neighborhoods that do not have enough space for their residents. No doubt all of these children need to travel as far as our children would to go to a new school if CP or BVT were closed. Therefore this does not seem like a morally defensible argument.
Strategy
Regardless of the moral issues, there is strategy to consider. From my viewpoint here are several layers of strategy in order of more powerful to least powerful:
A. Use the criteria we are given and show that it was not assessed correctly.
B. Use the criteria and show that the recommendation was wrong.
C. Show that it is morally reprehensible to close the schools.
D. Show that the politicians will get thrown out of office if they close the school.
E. Create an emotional outcry that creates an emotional response in the BoE.
F. The financial situation is not as dire as portrayed by SDUSD and there are other strategies that keep campuses open and enable SDUSD to keep operating.
A. So far, we have shown that the criteria seems to be assessed accurately. This argument is nearly dead.
B. It is true that the criteria does not seem to be applied correctly. This appears our most powerful argument. We do not agree that the weight of each of the criteria is correct nor do we agree that some of the criteria are meaningful. This is a relatively strong argument because it is based on our community's input and there is no good rationale for how the criteria were combined.
C. I have yet to hear a good moral argument to keep our schools open in the face of the financial situation. Every school in every neighborhood believes that they have good programs that will be destroyed if they are moved to another campus. The BoE cannot easily choose between moving one program based upon a clear moral mandate. I cannot either. If we are to make this type of argument, we need to make it clearly in a way that demonstrates that compared to other campuses, it would be a moral crisis to close ours and morally acceptable to close others. This is tough considering we are not well equipped to pass moral judgment on a school other than our own campuses.
D. It is unlikely we can create a voter revolt. I would love to succeed for other reasons, but I am not optimistic. The only strategy that seems convincing is a voter revolt that threatens to recall the existing BoE in the next few months, not to wait until Nov 2012. It seems likely that the BoE will act prior to Nov 2012. However, it seems unlikely that we can catalyze the voters in city of San Diego to recall the BoE if we do not get our way.
E. An emotional outcry is the most effective strategy. It is the most often used in this district, from Title 1 to Special Education, to VAPA have used demonstrations at the BoE meetings to advance their agenda. I am the wrong person to lead this emotional outcry. The BoE has responded strongly to community speakers, the number of people that attend a BoE meeting, and how passionately they speak. I will speak passionately about how the BoE is choosing a teacher contract over our schools. I will speak passionately about how our community feels the BoE is just going to sell our school property to the private sector and how that will destroy our community. I do not think either of those arguments will convince them to leave CP, BVT, or PBMS open. To create an emotional outcry, we need an emotional leader for this effort and that needs to be somebody other than me.
F. There are many that think that the financial situation is much better than what SDUSD and the BoE portray. I am not one of them. I have seen nothing credible from SDUSD that indicates that we are doing fine and do not need to close campuses. In general, I will believe the administration on this issue unless I see another group that has analyzed the situation and has come up with another conclusion or I see that their assessment does not match my observations at the classroom level.
The simple "sniff test" is to add up the costs to teach a classroom and SDUSD does not pass this test. A teacher salary tops somewhere around $70k. Assuming 30 students per classroom, this means $2.3k/student. The total gross outlay to salaries (without benefits and pension) for 135,000 students in SDUSD is only $315 M. Our SDUSD budget is $1800M (see pp 36-37 of The Budget Book for SDUSD on http://mbcluster2010.blogspot.com/2011/10/sdusd-budget-book-20112012.html ). This seems like a very high overhead to pay. As you likely know, overhead rates (GA + OH) in the private sector for large companies create a salary multiplier of 2X-3X. The numbers at SDUSD indicate 5.7X. This seems to indicate that it costs a lot more to deliver education to students than just the teachers' salary from benefits to additional people. Why does it take so much more money than the actual teacher? I do not fully understand the answer to this question. However, benefits are over 25% of the entire budget of SDUSD. Is this mostly pension? Classified salaries (non teachers) are over 15% of the budget, while Certificated salaries (whether in the classroom or not?) are over 45% of the budget.
There is something huge about the overall budget that I do not understand. I am willing to speak passionately on this issue. I just think that making this argument to the BoE will not result in saving our schools. They feel that they have already reviewed the budget thoroughly.
The root cause of our problems is that the obligations (contracts and legal requirements) for SDUSD have outpaced the revenue that taxpayers are willing to pay (e.g. Prop 13 and property tax surcharge). The infrastructure we have created, that 5.7X multiplier on top of what every teacher takes home in a paycheck, creates an enormous burden. The reason I am so passionate about breaking up the district is because we need a smaller community to deal with these problems. Clearly we can't deal with them on the state level (e.g. Prop 13 is popular and the lottery was supposed to provide us money and does not). We do not seem headed towards success as the second largest district in the State of California. Potentially a smaller district will be able to change its obligations (renegotiate the contract), reduce the overhead (fewer layers of administration), and be able to assess local taxes to pay for education (like Mello-Roos?).
Where do we go from here? I think the only strategy for convincing the BoE is (B). We need to go to our meeting with SDUSD and tell them that their criteria make no sense and that under other criteria, different schools should close. I am not particularly optimistic because I expect every other cluster to fight just as hard to keep their sites open.
I am willing to tell them about (F) as well and express that I am sorely disappointed in how much more it takes to run the district outside of really paying teacher take-home pay, but I doubt it will be effective.
Brian Catanzaro
MB Cluster Chair
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