The second year of strategic planning in the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) is underway with work beginning to take place at the school site level. In order to support this process and to educate us all about what this will entail a “School Community Summit” will be held Saturday, November 22nd from 8:30am to 1:00pm at Everett Middle School (450 Church Street @16th St.). The purpose of this event is to explain the new strategic plan and timeline to parents and school communities and to describe the tools available for schools to use in their planning processes throughout the year.

This meeting evolves out of work that Superintendent Carlos Garcia has been undertaking along with senior SFUSD staff and the Board of Education (BOE) to develop a much-needed strategic plan for our district. What has been promised, and what hopefully will be shown at the Summit, is a planning effort that: aligns resources and programs with our district’s goals; is clearly articulated at the three core levels of our district--the BOE, central administration and the school site; and that is specific enough so that expectations of all three levels are clear and decision-makers at each level can be both supported and held accountable by the community.

Early work leading up to the planning effort itself involved agreement on mission and goals by the BOE, resulting in three “non-negotiable” goals and related objectives:


• Goal 1: Access and Equity – Make Social Justice A Reality
o Objective 1.1: Diminish the historic power of demographics.

• Goal 2: Student Achievement – Engage High Achieving and Joyful Learners
o Objective 2.1: Ensure authentic learning for every student.

• Goal 3: Accountability – Keep Our Promises to Students & Families
o Objective 3.2: Create the culture of service and support.

Central goals such as these are compelling and feel right. The much trickier part is determining the specific strategies and programs that will actually move us along in meeting these goals and ensuring that resources are actually going to those prioritized activities.

Superintendent Garcia and his staff have introduced a new tool that is intended to help track exactly that, something called the “Balanced Scorecard.” The Balanced Scorecard is a business tool used to help managers bring together their budgeting and strategic planning processes to ensure that they are using their resources (money and people) to accomplish identified business objectives. Additionally, because the Balanced Scorecard approach gets down to details of workplans and outcomes, it is possible, at least theoretically, to evaluate the effectiveness of any given approach and decide whether or not the resources put behind it should be put elsewhere.

While the business paradigm invoked by the language of the Balanced Scorecard may be somewhat grating to public education advocates, the tool itself translates nicely to a large, complex enterprise such as school districts that have clear high level goals, towards which success is dependent on the interconnected yet highly independent activities and decisions of several tiers in the district hierarchy. Additionally, as expressed in the plan itself, the Balanced Scorecard is expected to be an effective tool for the BOE to use in evaluating the Superintendent, and for the Superintendent to use in evaluating senior staff. This type of alignment and accountability could be a great boon to our district.

The first public draft of the plan developed using the Balanced Scorecard approach was unveiled last spring. As discussed in a previous School Beat column, it sketched out at a high level the areas and activities that the central office (aka the district), would be accountable for. Entitled Beyond The Talk (BTT), the plan, now in a new version dated June 2008, has inspiring language and worthy ambitions, calling us to imagine a district full of “joyful learners” who are breaking the “predictive power of demographics.” The document presents a vision of a diverse student body engaged and challenged, growing to their full potential, supported by their educational communities, with families involved in all ways that they can.

However, to date BTT has been long on eloquence and short on specifics. Painfully absent are the actual programs and educational offerings that will be (or even could be) undertaken across the district and available for schools to implement. These are not details and their lack sometimes makes it hard to take the plan as it currently stands as more than just rhetoric.

But optimism says that strategic planning takes time, especially planning that aims to take seriously the voices at all key levels of the enterprise. Which is why this moment, when the planning effort is moving to the school site where there is never time to bask in lofty turns of phrases, is so critical. So far it appears that the school level planning work will be based in the traditional governing processes vested in School Site Councils (SSC) and will initially be an exercise in turning existing Academic Plans into Balanced Scorecards, which can then be connected to the plans of other schools and those of the district and the BOE. The November 22nd meeting will be a crucial one for all concerned community members but especially parents, teachers and principals on SSCs to dig into some important areas with the district to find out what the practical, tangible rewards of this process might be for our schools and what the leadership at the top is offering to help us get closer to meeting those three goals we’ve been chasing for so long now.

Lisa Schiff is the parent of two children who attend McKinley Elementary School in the San Francisco Unified School District and is a member of Parents for Public Schools of San Francisco and the PTA and is a board member at the national level of Parents for Public Schools.