San Francisco’s $30,000 ‘Equity-Centered’ School Closure Plan—Put on Hold After Parent Uproar—Used DEI Formulas To 'Target' High-Performing, Majority-Asian School

Amid a severe budget crisis, the San Francisco Unified School District superintendent decided in March that some schools in the chronically dysfunctional, poorly performing public system needed to close. So it paid a Stanford University professor $30,000 to create an "equity-centered" formula that would determine which ones would shutter.

After the results were announced in October, parents revolted, the school superintendent was forced to resign, and the closure plan was shelved indefinitely. Two weeks later, city voters ousted their embattled mayor, London Breed. Now, as the school district tries to rebuild under new leadership, the Stanford professor’s DEI-focused closure plan is coming under increasingly harsh scrutiny, especially from San Francisco's Asian community. Asian parents are enraged that the closure plan targeted a high-performing elementary school whose students are overwhelmingly low-income and Asian. 

The now-paused closure plan, parents argue, used a custom formula that rewarded poor-performing black and Hispanic schools and targeted low-income, high-performing Asian children for cutbacks.

At issue is the fate of Sutro Elementary in the city’s Inner Richmond neighborhood. The school’s population is 75 percent Asian, 60 percent of its students come from low-income families, and half aren’t fluent in English. How then, parents asked, was it "equitable" to recommend closing Sutro, especially given that the majority of students consistently met or outperformed state standards?

"We want transparency in this process. Why is a hugely successful school, with a predominantly low-income student body, on the closure list? We are 94% enrolled," Sutro PTA secretary Kaitlin Solimine said at an October listening session.

By contrast, students at Dr. George Washington Carver Elementary repeatedly failed to meet state standards. That school, however, has a different demographic makeup: It’s 45 percent black and 22 percent Hispanic. It was not among the 11 elementary schools slated for closure.

In fact, elementary schools with similar demographics as Carver—predominantly black or Hispanic—typically scored highest on Stanford professor Francis Pearman’s formula, saving them from closure. The majority on the chopping block had predominantly white or Asian populations. Pearman’s equation ranked a wide range of factors, including test scores, facility quality, geography—and equity.

Pearman, who is black, says on his Stanford faculty page that he "focuses on how poverty and inequality shape the life chances of children." His research has focused on "anti-Black bias" and on how closing majority-black schools—which he attributes in part to racism—leads to "the gentrification of the Black metropolis" and is "emblematic of a larger spatial and racial reimagining of U.S. cities that dispossesses and displaces Black neighborhoods." 

At the time the closings were announced in October, then-superintendent Matt Wayne, who spearheaded the closure efforts, defended the plan. He said "difficult decisions" were needed to "meaningfully improve student outcomes." But Breed criticized how he handled the situation.

"I have lost faith in the superintendent’s ability to facilitate the school closure process," the former mayor said in October, weeks before she lost her bid for reelection. "Information has been provided to me one day and changed the next. It has been mishandled, it has been a frustrating process."

Wayne resigned days later, and the school system canceled its plans to close schools.

The resignation comes amid ongoing tensions between San Francisco's Asian community and the public education establishment. In 2022, voters—led by angry Asian parents—ousted three school board members in a recall vote. One of the recalled school board members, Alison Collins, who is black, was discovered to have written in old social media postings that Asian Americans used "white supremacist thinking to assimilate and ‘get ahead.’" 

The ordeal "elegantly illustrates why DEI in K-12 has increasingly come to be seen as a toxic, self-serving grift," said Rick Hess, American Enterprise Institute senior fellow and director of education policy studies.

"The biggest problem with using equity instead of enrollment or achievement is that they offer clear, performance-based reasons to close a school. Equity doesn’t," he told the Free Beacon. "The second big problem is that no one knows what equity means, making it a plaything of consultants, ideologues, and politicos."

In a Budget Crisis, San Francisco Focuses on Equity

The school closure plan was part of the San Francisco Unified School District’s solution to an ongoing budget crisis. Years of overspending caused a deficit that the school board predicted could balloon to $400 million by the 2026-27 school year, creating a looming threat that the state government could take over. 

From the outset of the district's plan to close some schools, the San Francisco school system "intentionally planned for equity throughout the entire process" and Board of Education District Advisory Committee members "raised equity concerns at every meeting," according to a district PowerPoint obtained by the Free Beacon.

In February, the school system hired Pearman to "formulate a set of guiding principles and specify recommendations for criteria focusing on equity, community impact, and educational outcomes," according to his $30,000 contract with the school district, which the Free Beacon obtained.

Two criteria ultimately determined which schools would close, according to guidance from the district: an enrollment below 260 students and scoring below the 50th percentile on Pearman’s custom equation designed to put "equity" at the center of any closure decision. 

Sutro fell just below both cut-offs, and on Oct. 8, the San Francisco Unified School District included it among the 13 schools that would close.

"In the end, our resources are stretched way too thin and no matter what, we have to reduce our expenditures next year," Wayne said at the time. "And so we're trying to figure out the way which serves our students best and that includes closing or merging some schools."

A Race-Based Equation

Parents quickly criticized Pearman’s formula and its results—a so-called composite score.

The equation was broken into three parts, each with its own weight, and composed of smaller parameters that were also weighted—sort of like how a final exam might be more consequential than a midterm, and how grades on individual homework assignments are even less significant.

Academics was one of the smaller parameters included under the school excellence category, which was worth 25 percent of the total composite score. Also included in that category were culture and climate and social and emotional learning development.

A second category, effective use of resources, also received a 25 percent weight. That included metrics like teacher turnover and student enrollment.

"Equity," meanwhile, was worth the remaining 50 percent of the composite score. Two of the category's three smaller metrics—school access and program access—might not fall under what critics often think of as equity.

But it also included a third parameter, "historical inequity." If students largely come from neighborhoods where children are less likely to surpass their parents’ income levels, as determined by the Opportunity Atlas, that school would receive a higher historical inequity score.

In other words, Sutro’s score in Pearman’s formula suffered because its students, according to the Opportunity Atlas, were largely predicted to eventually generate more wealth than their parents.

Pearman also recommended that the district incorporate "spatial inequality" as a metric to assess the uneven distribution of schools, according to a June board of education meeting. Consequently, among the criteria considered for closures were a school’s "balance of pupil demographics, including race or ethnicity," as well as the potential for closures to have a "disproportionate impact on any particular demographic group."

A community survey solicited opinions about what would go into Pearman’s formula. But answers were broken down by race and weighted to "address racial and education level disproportionality in survey responses," according to materials obtained by the Free Beacon.

Black respondents, who made up 3 percent of the answers, wanted historical inequity to receive a weight of 3.6—higher than any other race. Asians, meanwhile, made up nearly a quarter of all respondents and wanted it to have a weight of 2.3—the lowest of any race.

‘Flawed Methodology’

Given Sutro’s minority-majority and low-income population, one would think that it would score highly for "equity." But an analysis of composite scores from Pearman’s formula across multiple schools shows that the equation favored predominantly Hispanic schools from closure.

Essentially, in Pearman’s equity formula, the race with the largest share of a school’s population can often predict whether its composite score will be high or low. Of the 63 elementary schools the Free Beacon analyzed (after excluding several that had missing data), 23 were predominantly Asian. Seventeen of those schools scored in the bottom half. One had the third-highest score—the only one in the top five.

Of the 22 schools where Hispanic students made up the largest share of the population, meanwhile, just six scored in the bottom half, though so did one school that had an approximately even mix of black and Hispanic students. None scored among the bottom five.

The San Francisco Unified School District also pointed to 10 elementary schools that didn’t meet the 260 enrollment threshold but had composite scores high enough to remain open. Only two were predominantly Asian. Black or Hispanic students represented the biggest racial groups at the remaining eight.

Data were missing at 2 of the 11 elementary schools slated for closure. Of the nine the Free Beacon analyzed, six were predominantly Asian or white. One was majority black, while two were largely Hispanic.

"We believe the district’s composite score methodology is flawed, lacks transparency, and unfairly targets Sutro," Elaine Kan, the parent of a Sutro first-grade biliteracy student, said at a community meeting in early October. "We will continue to fight for our school and community."

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion policies in education have repeatedly led to discrimination against Asian students. Last year’s Supreme Court ruling that struck down race-based affirmative action in universities centered around such discrimination. Before the decision, Asian-American students took extreme measures to conceal their race, stripping their applications of activities and accomplishments that might be perceived as stereotypically Asian.

Parents Rally and a Superintendent Resigns

For Sutro parents, flaws in Pearman's equation were evident. Why would their minority-majority Title I school get closed if the district swore to center on equity? Why were schools with poor academic performance being kept open?

In response, the Sutro Elementary community launched a coalition, Keep Sutro Open, to rally against the decision. Members protested outside the school, and similar events were seen across the district.

"‘If the criteria for school closures is based on equity, how is it fair to shut down a school with a Cantonese Biliteracy Program and the only Title 1 school in the Richmond District?’ is a question asked by many members of the Sutro community," a Keep Sutro Open press release read.

Wayne, the embattled superintendent, resigned on Oct. 18 after a closed-door meeting with the school board and the closure plan was put on hold. Maria Su, the head of San Francisco’s Department of Children, Youth and their Families, was appointed as his replacement.

"Su will stop the current school closure process and focus on addressing the district’s looming structural deficit to avoid state takeover," the district said in a statement. "There will be no school closures in the 2025-2026 school year. The remaining school meetings about closures will be suspended."

Neither Pearman nor the San Francisco Unified School District responded to a request for comment.

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