City Hall Digest: Parents Sue SFUSD Over Math Curriculum and DSHS Admits It Can’t Solve Homelessness

City Hall Digest is TogetherSF Action’s weekly dispatch from San Francisco’s City Hall, broken into bite-sized pieces—because understanding local government is your fundamental right.

Parents Sue SFUSD To Reinstate Algebra in Middle School

Last week, a group of parents filed a lawsuit against the San Francisco Unified School District over the district’s mathematics policies—specifically, the controversial removal of Algebra 1 from the middle school curriculum. The goal of the lawsuit is to get an order against the district to halt its current practice of delaying Algebra 1, instead reinstating the course in middle school. 

It’s an extreme measure, though the district has not been moved by any other form of advocacy over the last eight years.

Originally enacted by the district in 2014 to balance equity concerns, the policy has demonstrably had mixed results. According to data analyzing the outcomes of de-tracking algebra, it has also widened the achievement gap while holding back students who are ready for more rigorous math in middle school. The district has pushed back against this notion since the beginning, saying the policy is working as intended. 

The same exact day that the lawsuit was filed, a study on the math policy change by Stanford  showed that student participation in Advanced Placement (AP) math courses fell 15 percent after the policy was enacted. The study also showed that the central goal of the policy— increasing Black and brown student representation in higher math courses—was not met. 

With the release of this study, SFUSD seems to be listening to parents’ concerns. SFUSD has experimented with this failed policy for too long and it's unfortunate that it's come to a lawsuit instead of being resolved with the Board of Education making the decision itself.

Is Homelessness Too Big a Problem for the City’s Homeless Department?

Is homelessness too big a problem to solve? The city’s Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing (DHSH) seems to think so. 

Last week, the Board of Supervisors held a hearing on a recent DHSH report, in which the department outlined their plan to solve homelessness, but admitted it was unrealistic and probably impossible to execute. The price tag they assigned to solving the problem was staggering—$1 billion in dedicated funding to create permanent housing and temporary shelter options, on top of the existing $600 million budget the department has—and then $410 million annually thereafter to maintain the new shelter. More disturbing was the fact that DHSH Director Shireen McSpadden all but admitted that her department couldn’t figure out how to execute the plan under the parameters given, blaming short staffing and an inability to “execute contracts” because of it. McSpadden said: “I think what we’re speaking to with our concern with our ability to [execute the plan] is really about…our staffing system. ... It’s an uphill battle in many ways, especially knowing that we’re going into a situation where we may not have as much money in our budget as we need to have to do that.”

McSpadden also said that her department was “still not fully developed” and blamed a “fairly new executive team.” 

Contributing to the pessimistic attitude of the hearing was Supervisor Hillary Ronen's statement that after “13 years,” she was “out of ideas” on how to tackle the problem. 

Supervisors who often disagree on most things even agreed that this report and the attitude surrounding it was unacceptable. . Supervisor Rafael Mandelman—who called for the hearing—and Supervisor Dean Preston excoriated DHSH for displaying a lack of clear direction on the issue they’ve been tasked with solving. Mandelman said that he did not “believe this department is serious about ending unsheltered homelessness in San Francisco,” while Preston said “it makes no sense whatsoever” to have assigned a numerical value to ending the problem while also saying it was impossible. 

This hearing made clear that our most pressing problems like homelessness can be perpetuated by the “all or nothing” ideology, pervasive in this city’s political structure. In this case, DHSH advocated for permanent supportive housing over anything else to solve the problem, like increasing shelter space—they argued that more shelter space would actually increase homelessness over a longer period of time. Supervisor Mandelman took issue with the negative tone, as he has   previously lamented that “HSH has doubled down on the same approach that we have been trying for decades, the same approach that has made our sidewalks waiting rooms for new permanent supportive housing.”

From this hearing, we would like to see the Board of Supervisors push the DHSH to come up with a realistic plan instead of presenting what they deem an impossible task.

Supervisors Approve More Money for Police—But Not Without Voicing Reservations

Last week, the city saw a win for public safety when the Board of Supervisors voted to approve a $25 million budget supplemental for the San Francisco Police Department. This wouldn’t have happened without hundreds of San Franciscans speaking up, led our organizing and advocacy efforts, as well as other groups like United Democratic Club, RescueSF, and the Chinese American Democratic Club. . Although the vote went 9-2 in favor of the supplemental (needing eight votes to pass), some of the supervisors who voted yes nonetheless had criticism for the department and how it was allocating its budget. 

Watching this vote unfold was a perfect example of how a vote in favor of something could be undermined by the Supervisor’s attitude toward that topic—and it shows some elected officials’ actions sometimes belie their vocal stances. Our takeaway from this is that holding an elected official accountable for their record requires us to understand the complete picture: what they vote in favor of or against in addition to what they say about particular issues.

For example, even though Supervisor Connie Chan voted in favor of the supplemental, she had criticized the idea of it just a week before, asking who the city was “robbing” to pay the police. She also asked if there was fiscal mismanagement within the department. Additionally, Supervisor Hillary Ronen had harshly criticized the supplemental a week before, saying that the police had misprioritized existing funding by protecting the interests of downtown shoppers over residents in her district. However, Ronen also voted in favor of the supplemental. 

Supervisors Dean Preston and Shamann Walton (who voted against the funding, and have vocally opposed similar law enforcement measures) had similar criticism for the police for spending to cover “luxury retail stores and tourists in areas already saturated with coverage.” 

Ultimately, we’re grateful to the Board of Supervisors for passing this crucial piece of funding and for listening to the overwhelming demand for action on public safety priorities. However, we would also like for our supervisors’ words to be consistent with their actions.

TogetherSF Action is making advocating for an end to the drug epidemic in San Francisco a top priority this year. Our first step? Flooding inboxes at City Hall. We need thousands of concerned San Franciscans to send letters to their leaders demanding they end open-air drug markets in 2023. Are you in?