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Strategic Plan Summary

A one-page summary of SFUSD's strategic plan, Beyond the Talk.

Beyond the Talk: Taking Action to Educate Every Child Now

A Transformative Plan for Ensuring Quality Schools

We know where we stand – our schools are good and they are not good enough. For seven consecutive years San Francisco public schools have delivered a greater percentage of students to proficiency levels than any other large urban district in California. At the same time the district’s achievement gap, the discrepancy between the academic proficiency of students by sub-groups, has continued to widen.

The three primary goals in Beyond the Talk, SFUSD’s new strategic plan, are a reflection of our relentless focus on closing the achievement gap and diminishing the predictive power of demographics:

  • Access & Equity – we will make social justice a reality by ensuring every student has access to quality teaching and learning.
  • Achievement – we will ensure that every student graduates from high school ready for college and career and success in the 21st century.
  • Accountability – we will keep our promises to students and families and enlist everyone in the community to join us.

SFUSD will use a results-oriented approach, foster district-wide strategic alignment, and encourage site-level innovation by developing balanced scorecards throughout the district. The first set of balanced scorecards, to guide the work of the Board of Education and senior leadership, was approved unanimously by San Francisco’s Board of Education in May 2008. Over the next year, each school site, district department, and many community institutions will develop scorecards. Learning from what actually works in schools, central office leaders and the school board will realign systems, policies, structures and resources to support site-level innovation.

In addition to the work defined by school communities, three major initiatives within the SFUSD strategic plan will be the key drivers of San Francisco’s school, district and community transformation over the next five years.

  1. The Performance Management Initiative: to increase the personal and professional capacity of every employee in SFUSD and redesign the central office and district itself.
  2. The Equity-Centered Professional Learning Initiative: to develop powerful, effective professional learning communities at every school site, using data-based inquiry to improve learning results for our students.
  3. The 21st Century Learning Initiative: to transform the curriculum in order to truly prepare students for full participation in economic, social and political life.

It is our moral imperative to ensure that every student has a rich and rewarding education experience that will prepare them to be productive world citizens - it is the foundation of democracy and this plan is our call to action. From this point forward you will see our progress every step of the way as we keep our promises to students and families to engage high achieving and joyful learners, and make social justice a reality.

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We have provided multilingual copies of the Strategic Plan Summary document so you can easily share them with families who don't speak English.  Please select from the following to download a PDF file in the language indicated:

We hope you find these resources useful. Please don't hesitate to post any thoughts or questions as a comment below.

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plan

Posted by man yin at Nov 21, 2008 06:00 PM
way too long, too many political undertones and ignores students part in fulfilling the plan, what are their responsibilities ?
How much did this plan cost to put together ?

Re: plan

Posted by Ben Glazer at Nov 25, 2008 02:00 PM
Man -- Thank you for your note. You have raised several big issues here, and I'll do my best to address them.

Length: The strategic plan is a comprehensive and detailed analysis of our current conditions and the changes we must make in response. By nature, it is a lengthy document. That's precisely the reason we have provided this very web page, a one-page summary of the strategic plan -- to help people without the time to digest the entire plan to get up to speed.

Too many political undertones: To be sure, public education is a controversial and heavily politicized issue. Moreover, the issues of social justice and equity arouse the interest of even the most reluctant activists in a city as progressive as San Francisco. There is essentially no way to completely escape the politics, but we have done our best to objectively focus the strategic plan on the problems identified by the available data points. The fact that virtually every other large urban school district around the country is struggling with the same issues suggests that we are probably not too far off target.

Ignores student responsibilities: We are here to serve students, not the other way around. We have spent years blaming students for a situation into which they have been unwillingly thrust. Fundamentally, we as a district must force ourselves to focus on what we can to improve student achievement and diminish the predictive power of demographics rather than ascribing blame for our failures. Fortunately, there's plenty of evidence around the country and the globe that our goals are attainable by improving the way we do our job.

Cost: The strategic plan is intended to be central to all activities of the district. As such, in a very real sense, you can think of its cost as equivalent to the district's total budget.

The reality of the situation is that nobody has solved the daunting challenges facing public education. San Francisco is unfortunately no exception. But we must do a better job of focusing and aligning our efforts as district to directly address our challenges.

Please let me know if I can clarify any of these. Thanks again for your comments and questions.

strategic plan

Posted by Don Krause at Nov 27, 2009 07:17 PM
What progress has been made on the three objectives up to now more than 2 years into the Plan? Frankly, I don't see any fundamental differences in the way the district is doing anything in espect to the three objectives. The sharing of successful strategies is something that can happen now so convene summits to ng the key players together to offer advise to those schools that are failing. Just moving the kids to other schools will not make every school a good school.