Despite my ongoing struggle to overcome the remnants of the flu, I managed to get through an event last night with the United Educators of San Francisco. I have become very comfortable with a new format, in which I don’t give a speech but instead engage in conversation with the interlocutor. Last night, my partner was Susan Solomon, the union president. I learned from her about the difficulty that teachers have affording a place to live in one of the nation’s most expensive cities. A one-bedroom apartment typically costs about $3,500 a month, she said. Most teachers have long commutes, and many move to districts where living costs are affordable.
Teachers in San Francisco seem hopeful, as they enter contract negotiations, because the elected school board has their back. The board banned TFA because it did not want a continuing influx of inexperienced, unprepared teachers to instruct the highest-needs students. The district has few charters and doesn’t want more. What it wants is more funding from the state. Even though California is one of the richest states in the nation, its per-pupil spending is about at the national median, or somewhat below. Last year when I checked, I found that California’s per-pupil funding on par with South Carolina.
As you walk through this affluent, booming city, it’s hard to understand why its schools are underfunded. Its teacher salaries are “high” compared to poor states, but the cost of living is sky-high.
I especially enjoyed meeting school board member Alison Collins, who worked closely with Julian Vasquez Heilig and Roxana Marachi, both NPE board members, to support the NAACP call for a charter moratorium in 2016. She is a dynamo.
The weather in San Francisco was picture-perfect. Sunny, in the 60s. Perfect for everything. One morning we took the trip to Alcatraz, “the Rock.” The weather and the boat trip were delightful. I found the historic prison very depressing. Men trapped for years in squalid little cells. The pervasive sense of hopelessness, rage, and despair lingered in the air.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Just got my copy of Slaying Goliath today. Can’t wait to get into it. Will post a review on my blog soon.
I get 27000 hits per issue in Canada.
http://Www.thelittleeducationreport.ca
Doug, thank you!
Welcome sister 😁
Hello Diane: “The board banned TFA because it did not want a continuing influx of inexperienced, unprepared teachers to instruct the highest-needs students.” . . . . Now THAT’s refreshing.
FYI, the weather here (near LA) is also cool and sunny. We’re so spoiled here (except that everyone is waiting for “the big one.”)
I don’t like driving around LA, and I’ve never been to the library there, however, and though things may change, I may be able to show up at your talk. CBK
CBK, if you appear, say hello.
Diane If you are listening, what I thought would happen, happened. It’s a grandchildren thing . . . so I will have to miss meeting you and hearing your talk today at the LA library.
But I’m with those here who are telling you to take it easy about the flu thing. And “down” here in Rancho Santa Margarita, we woke to clouds–so sorry if that’s the case “up” in LA. We actually go for months sometimes without a cloud in the sky. Have a good time in LA. CBK
Thanks, CBK. The sun just broke through in LA. Will Miss you. Certainly understand the grandchild thing.
BTW, the online blog-clock is on Eastern time–so when it says I wrote at 11:38 a.m., it was 8:38 a.m. in West Coast time. CBK
Diane, I admire your grit and courage but wish you could take a week off for rest, relaxation and recuperation. When I got the flu years ago, I was unable to teach for a week+ and even then I went back not fully recovered (but I was a lot younger).
Joe, I had promises to keep.
Keep a promise to yourself. If you overdue, you can relapse or end up with a secondary infection like pneumonia.
I’m so sorry I missed this! I had a family event that I couldn’t reschedule. Luckily I’ve managed to hear you speak at least twice in the Bay Area before (UC Berkeley and Stanford).
Yes, it continues to amaze me that in this wealthy city we can’t fund the schools adequately.
FYI Balboa High’s beautiful building is one of two or three school district properties that are national historic landmarks. There are some places in the city from which you can see the tops of several hills (in built-up areas), and it’s amazing how you can see beautiful (mostly) vintage school buildings high atop those hills, reminding you that we once revered our educational institutions and other public institutions (though Balboa isn’t one of the schools high on a hill — they couldn’t all be).
(Bay Area readers — go to Fort Funston on a clear day and look around at Washington High, gleaming white in the Richmond District; Lincoln High, deep red in the Sunset; and Aptos Middle School to the east of you in Balboa Terrace. It really makes you think.)
What you said about school buildings really resonated with me. My wife and I, being schoolteachers, have often traveled. We are somewhat ill equipped to take advantage of urban tourist opportunities due to our teacher’s salaries, but we have been to,a lot of really pretty rural areas and their small towns. It is an amazement to see schools built as far back as the 1880s in small towns. To a place, these places were obviously building out of a sense of community pride. The American Great Plains are no exception. One of the tragedies of the agricultural depression of the early 1980s is the number of shuttered buildings that once formed the heart of the town.
RT, the number of shuttered buildings is also often a result of Walmart coming in and trashing the town’s locally owned businesses. Of course, Walmart’s operators are also determined to trash our public school system.
First, Walmart kills the local stores. If the Walmart doesn’t make enough money, it closes and leaves behind a ghost town.
Just to be clear about some of the details ICYDK: (I used to be a small business owner back in the day, before I went back to school), big business enterprises don’t play on an even field with small business owners.
My business was a florist. I was located in a shopping center with a grocery chain (before grocery stores started selling flowers). When they started carrying mum plants, we had to stop selling them because the chain-store bought-out entire greenhouses of mum plants and, because of their buying power, they put the screws to the growers/ shippers in terms of pricing.
It ended up that the chains could sell their mum plants, for instance at mothers day, for LESS than I could buy them for (and they also used them as loss leaders). I could only buy so many at a time, where they bought for an entire chain, ordering way ahead of time, and, again, had a certain amount of power over the growers and shippers (when they didn’t ship themselves).
Now, most (or all?) don’t deliver, carry wire services, service funerals or weddings; so they left the high-cost elements associated with florists to those who could maintain those elements and still make a profit.
I’m sure there are differences with different products, but the principle remains the same for many. Fortunately for me, I got a case of small-business burn-out at a good time; I sold my shops to another flower chain, and went back to school where I found, well, what I found. Just FYI. CBK
I was talki specifically about schools, which shut down due to population depletion.
Diane, you are amazing.
I’ve long had an issue with the call for a flat $15.00 minimum wage (though this would certainly be better than the current situation) because living costs differ so much in various places around the country. What we should have is a mandated minimum wage keyed to the local Cost-of-Living Index. So, the minimum will be higher in Honolulu than in, say, South Bend or Evansville, Indiana.
That is an interesting idea. It would make it very complex for the worker who moved to know what he was due. A growing problem is sub-contractors pays their employees below minimum because the workers just need a job. Investigating this abuse is like trying to stop the southern hill farmer from making whiskey.
“As you walk through this affluent, booming city, it’s hard to understand why its schools are underfunded”
Probably the same reason why there are so many homeless in San Francisco.
It’s equally hard to fathom, but not necessarily the same reasons (the staggering cost of housing and the high rates of mental illness and drug use). The city government also claims to be strapped for money, but how can that be?
The high cost of living affects both teachers and homeless (and may even have forced one or more teachers INTO homelessness)
Also, priorities affect how available money is spent — for education and homeless or for sports arenas and other playthings of the rich.
The city does spend an enormous amount on struggling with the homelessness crisis, and the culture here has largely curbed the culture of spending on playthings for the rich. The new Chase Center basketball/entertainment venue is privately funded, though of course the city spends much on public services for it.
Schools are state-funded, and of city funds provide additional support, but it’s still dismaying that we can’t pay teachers enough to live here. And the ritzy suburbs pay teachers more, which simply shouldn’t be the case.
The funding problem belongs mainly to the state. I didn’t mean to imply otherwise.
Yes, but localities can obviously make up the difference, as we know because the elite suburbs outside San Francisco pay teachers more.
“The Warriors are chipping in $19 million, but transit improvement expected to cost at least 4 times as much”
https://www.goldenstateofmind.com/2018/4/4/17191582/nba-2018-pricey-muni-stop-highlights-the-public-cost-of-a-our-new-privately-financed-arena
$60 million could help a lot of homeless people.
Remind me again whom the stadium is benefitting. Hint: it ain’t the homeless.
San Francisco may already be spendng a lot to help the homeless, but anyone who has been there recently knows it isn’t enough by a long shot. Not even close. It’s actually a disgrace that the problem is so bad in one of the richest cities in the country.
That line struck me too,SDP. See comment below.
+A one-bedroom apartment typically costs about $3,500 a month”
Teachers need to make over $100K to be able to afford such an apartment. Do they make that much? What’s beginning salary for a teacher there?
My cousin, for years a kindergarten teacher there, lived in Campbellsville, near SanFrancisco, bought a duplex, rented out the other side. To put it another way, she had to work two jobs to make ends meet, since renting out space is a job in itself. Her brother taught English up in Fort Bragg, north of the Bay Area a ways. He dug graves as a side income.
In one of the malls here, in Memphis, I got into a conversation with one of the cleaning ladies of the mall, who told me that she, in fact, was a teacher but she needed to do this to pay for her kids’ daycare. Here, a one bedroom can be rented for $500/month.
“As you walk through this affluent, booming city, it’s hard to understand why its schools are underfunded.”
One of the things that fascinates me about this blog is that some one always seems to think about some of the things I do. This statement is illustrative of such an idea. Every time I go to Nashville, I think of the big hotels going up (a reported 9000 rooms now under construction) and the huge price per night on these(100s of dollars). But it Davidson County, once lauded as the model for cites, one of two metro-style governments, cannot seem to fund its schools and is in a budget crisis.
What is wrong with people? Nationally, we are into the longest continual recovery on record, but we are spending more than we are taking in in taxes. I do not understand any of this? How can it continue?
When the rich gain control of their government, bye-bye taxes and regulation. Our own discomforts with education and housing are probably just the early disturbances of a later revolution, if things don’t change. CBK
I have a couple conservative friends who are continually bemoaning what they see as the liberal-based squalor of San Francisco. (Their hackneyed formulation actually seems to be the same long-running cliche that has been around for generations -at least for some Americans: cities = bad, dangerous; the country = clean and virtuous.)
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
So, I’m interested to read Diane’s account of San Francisco (Diane being someone whose perceptions I trust.)
I was in San Francisco 30 years ago on a trip. Yeah, a lot has changed since then, that’s for sure.
BTW I had a friend who worked for Children and Youth Services in rural Pennsylvania for many years. It was in one of the most conservative counties in the Keystone State….we’re talking one of those super-reliable red areas that helped put the Donald in the White House.
The stories from my friend were harrowing…tragic. She drove around with a “It shouldn’t hurt to be a child.” bumper sticker. And, a Pennsylvania State Trooper would sometimes meet her at the homes she had to walk into, often way out in the middle of nowhere. Gun at the ready.
I lived over there for a while and, sure, there are also lots of wonderful people living in Trump Land America. There are good people everywhere just like the monsters. Absolutely. But rural poverty is so often hidden from plain sight.
The red state/blue state, rural vs. urban thing is a load of crap used to divide our nation, to divide us. Meanwhile, so many people face the same problems.
I watched the entire Democratic debate Friday night. I’m curious as to what people on here thought about the responses to that question at the end about child poverty?
According to George Stephanopoulos referencing the Children’s Defense Fund, it’s, a topic that hadn’t been touched in a Presidential debate since 1999. That’s a long time ago.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/02/07/democratic-debate/
Note: the video clip at the top of the Post article is a summary of comments from throughout the debate.)
For specific responses to that final question about child poverty, see https://www.wmur.com/article/2020-new-hampshire-democratic-presidential-debate-s-final-topic-ending-childhood-poverty/30820637
John: Your perceptive comments are always impressive. You are correct. Rural and small town poverty are out of sight of the many. One of the oddest things I have noticed is the tendency on the part of rural people to assume that everybody could have a job if they really wanted to work. I think this is because they do not wish to see themselves as exceptional. If they admit that they got the job they got through a complex social system that rewarded them for their incremental steps, they have to admit that it mig be true that they might never have gotten a job at all.
When I was young, rural poverty was dramatic and grinding. Houses without boards, their one-bulb light source penetrating the walls to send tiny stripes into the yard on cold winter days. The family wandering the bare yard in rags you recognized from seeing me in school and their wood-stove leaking the smoke they smelled of when they came to school.
Now we have to know when a family is down on its luck. Now we need time to get to know the children lest they get by our ability to help out. Instead we get tests. So it goes.
Yes, RT. Poverty of the 21st century. Very true.
Take care,
John O: I didn’t hear anything in the debate about the deficit either. Thanks for the links. CBK
Of course, the Republican hypocrisy about the deficit/national debt is stunning -but then again it isn’t -you know? I mean, the whole G.O.P is one big hypocrisy these days. So, what’s a few more trillion dollars heaped onto that?
Except our kids and their kids etc.. will be cleaning up this colossal debacle in all its many manifestations -financial, environmental, ethical… on and on…
I remember how Republicans attacked Obama over deficit spending. Wow.
John O Ever since John McCain died, Congressional Republicans seem to have drunk some kind of poison, a mix of duplicity and mendacity, spiked with hatefulness . . . though Mitch has always seemed a consummate degenerate to me. And as sexist as it sounds, I have to wonder how some of the Congressional women actually got elected. . . . bleat bleat bleat . . . .