SFUSD: A District That Punishes Truth-Tellers, Hides Curricula, and Bleeds Students to Feed a Pension Machine

SFUSD paid $147,000 for an “independent” review of its ethnic studies curriculum — stacked with 16 ethnic studies teachers, 15 district staff, and just 8 community members. No passing threshold was set before the committee convened. A parent’s dissenting scores were reduced to a footnote. The board voted 6-1 to adopt “Voices” anyway, with only Supryia Ray dissenting. That same night, Friends of Lowell Foundation filed a Brown Act demand letter — the same legal playbook that reversed Lowell’s merit-admissions removal in 2021.

Since 2006, SFUSD pension spending grew 538% while revenue grew 123%. Pension and retiree health costs now consume $250 million per year — every dollar flowing to retired employees, zero to working teachers or classrooms. David Crane warned the State Teachers Retirement System board in 2006 that their 8% return assumption was fantasy; the state Senate kicked him off the board. This is why UESF’s 9% demand and SFUSD’s 2% offer are both beside the point: the money is already gone.

Under PERB rules, unions can only strike after completing the impasse process — and UESF didn’t. The union walked out of fact-finding without a counteroffer, potentially making the strike an unfair labor practice under PERB Decision 2094-H. If ruled unlawful, SFUSD could recover direct strike damages. Two days before the Monday walkout, this was the legal case the district could have pressed — but didn’t, leaving 30,000 families scrambling for a strike that would change nothing.

UESF called a strike affecting 30,000 families even though union sources said they’d accept the existing 6% offer after a few days. The walkout wasn’t about SF teachers — it was coordinated solidarity with CTA, which had at least 32 districts facing simultaneous strikes statewide. UESF walked out of fact-finding without making a counteroffer, then demanded 9% raises from a district under state fiscal oversight that had already lost 4,000 students and the funding that came with them.

SFUSD’s race-based school lottery made segregation worse, not better. Before the 1983 consent decree ended, only 0.6% of SF schools had a majority single race; by 2005, over one-third had completely resegregated. The system — born from anti-Chinese quotas that denied five-year-old Brian Ho a kindergarten spot — drove roughly 4,000 students out of public schools, gutting enrollment-based state funding and pushing the district toward insolvency. Bureaucrats still refused to repeal it.

SF Superior Court ruled SFUSD illegally retaliated against Lowell journalism teacher Eric Gustafson for letting students publish a story about teacher misconduct. Principal Jan Bautista yanked him from his class; the court ordered reinstatement within 30 days under California’s Journalism Teacher Protection Act. A district that punishes teachers for defending student press freedoms is telling you exactly how it handles inconvenient truths — a pattern that repeats in every post that follows.