No to Student Outcomes Focused Governance.
Yes to Better Oversight of District Finances.
The San Francisco Education Alliance is committed to educating the public on the tragic outcomes of this undemocratic model, which is based on the toxic climate of high stakes testing and prioritizes input from a corporate consultant over community input from our families and educators.
We demand that the school board immediately cancel its expensive contract with the Council of Great City Schools, which has pushed this corrupt board governance model.
The SF Education Alliance believes in low stakes, diagnostic exams as a necessary component of a well-rounded, meaningful curriculum. We will not stand for these scores being used to punish our teachers, close our schools, and narrow our children’s curriculum. Our students and educators are more than just numbers and test scores and should not be evaluated as such. We believe in an approach to education that serves the whole child through music, the visual arts, theater, social studies, science, and challenging, culturally relative curriculum.
What is the Student Outcomes Focused Governance Model?
Moira Kaleida, national director of Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools, writes:
“The ultimate goal of the Student Outcomes Focused Governance (SOFG) model is to dismantle public education through realignment and transformation (school closures and privatization).”
How has Student Outcomes Based Governance impacted SFUSD?
After the billionaire-backed February 2022 school board recalls, former Board of Education President Jenny Lam introduced a dysfunctional, undemocratic school board governance model known as “Student Outcomes Based Governance (SOFG)/Vision Values Goals and Guardrails (VVGG)” that has decreased transparency and attacked democratic values by:
Eliminating oversight committees.
Decreasing transparency through elimination of public meetings and limiting public comment.
Setting unrealistic goals based on standardized test scores and using those test scores to create narratives around why schools should close.
Tragically, in 2022 the San Francisco school board’s adoption of SOFG eliminated the school board’s oversight committees (Budget and Business Services, HR & Personnel, Program and Curriculum, Building and Grounds). The lack of oversight and decreased transparency is the structure that has created the mayhem and budget mismanagement in the school district, which has been used to build a narrative suggesting that schools need to close.
“This governance model prevents school boards from holding their district accountable to community concerns. This improves the job stability for administrators, but it creates conditions in which corruption can flourish and the community can be ignored.”
–Uriah Ward, school board member in St. Paul, Minnesota
More Insight about SOFG
A Critique of Student Outcomes Focused Governance
SOFG is an antidemocratic model which only on student outcomes which can typically only be measured by standardized testing.
This leads to other important outcomes, such as school safety or transportation accessibility, being completely ignored.
SOFG prevents school boards from holding their district accountable to community concerns, creating conditions in which corruption can flourish and the community can be ignored.
SOFG makes it nearly impossible for members of a school community to advocate for changes that might be inconvenient for those in power.
The good news is, there are alternatives! These involve creating student outcomes goals, programmatic goals, district relations goals, and internal goals.
Houston, we have a problem! & his name is AJ Crabill
SFUSD’s SOFG consultant AJ Crabill travels from school district to school district, working to school boards of their power, leaving it all in in the hands of the superintendent
Crabill’s work is funded by the Gates Foundation and the pro-charter school industry
SOFG is pushed by billionaires, who fund school board candidates and superintendents who will contract millions of dollars out to their companies
AJ Crabill wants to take away people’s rights, steal billions of tax dollars a year, make our educators quit, and deliver a subpar education to our children, all in the name of profit
They can get away with this by sowing conflict within our communities, allowing them to slip their contracts through uncontested
We can all agree, across the political spectrum, that billionaires likely do not have our students’ best interests in mind
We need to fight the billionaires, not each other!
“Unproven School Board Governance Training is All Hat and No Cattle”
The Texas Education Agency has recently required some schools to start using “Lone Star Governance” — an SOFG model.
The author tracked accountability score changes between 2018 and 2023 for all districts that had been involved in Lone Star Governance in 2018 and 2019. In this time, overall district accountability ratings for Lone Star Governance districts declined 12.4 points, a much steeper decline than those districts not using that model (7.4-point decline).
The gap in average accountability ratings actually widened between districts using Lone Star Governance and those that didn't. In 2018, the average accountability rating in Lone Star Governance districts was only two points below other districts (84 vs. 86 points). By 2023, this gap widened to seven points (74 vs. 81 points).
“How Did the Seattle School Board Lose Its Way?”
Four years ago, the Seattle School Board implemented a Student Outcomes Focused Governance Model.
So far, it has cost the district around $300,000 in sham membership fees, conferences, and mandatory trainings with Texas based coach AJ Crabill.
In the meantime, academic outcomes have barely budged. The board has slashed its monthly meetings from two to one. And, student safety has been deprioritized: two students have been murdered on campus in two years.
Under the SOFG model, the family engagement policy created by the community was archived: board members are more unaccessible than ever.
Unsurprisingly, things like school safety, culturally welcoming schools and smaller class sizes are not considered student outcomes.
Now, after 3 years and $50,000, the divided board is vacating its contract and will select a new provider in the fall.
Domínguez and Tome-Warito stated that CGCS didn't offer enough to help students who are minorities, specifically Native students, and Benavidez took issue with the divisiveness caused by coaching .
"I would like a coach that is not going to pit board members against each other; that's going to foster cohesion," Benavidez said. "I think that needs to start with the board, the board members. We cannot be productive as a board if we don't get along."
“Student Outcomes Focused Governance is Impuissant”
SOFG ignores important metrics like school safety, class size, such nutrition, and more in its assessment of “success.”
The creator, AJ Crabill, scored a seat on the Kansas City School Board: in the first year, he closed 29 schools and laid off 185 teachers.
Crabill: “School systems do not exist to have great buildings, have happy parents, have balanced budgets, have satisfied teachers, provide student lunches, provide employment in the county/city, or anything else.”
Letter Opposing SOFG by 412 Justice, Advancement Project, and Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools.
“SOFG3 is a corporate-style school board governance model marketed to school boards across the country by consultant AJ Crabill and the Council of Great City Schools. The model is fundamentally anti-democratic because it severely restricts the public’s ability to provide input and feedback into decision-making and limits the policy-making power of the elected officials who the community voted into office.”
“There is no evidence that SOFG has a positive impact on students or their educational outcomes”
Pittsburgh Federation of Teachers, Letter Opposing SOFG
“The citizens of Pittsburgh elected you to think deeply, consider divergent viewpoints, and work through conflicts. We want you to listen to the diverse lived realities of students, parents/caregivers, community, and school staff. We want you to debate the important issues, not run to “one voice”. We want you to make the policy level educational, business/finance, and personnel decisions. That is what democracy looks like. That is what the state regulations require you to do. We have—and we hope you have—a greater devotion to democracy than to a particular decision with which people of goodwill might disagree.
Do not betray our participation in the democratic process by using your authority to dismantle your authority and thus diminish our voice. We are seeing too much of that these days.”