Who's Supporting This Innovative Effort to Boost Literacy in San Francisco Schools?

Liderina/shutterstock

Discussions of reading assessments, curriculum alignment and achievement outcomes rarely make the heart beat faster, but something exciting is going on in San Francisco schools. A unique coalition of funders, nonprofit groups, the school district and local government are working together to enhance literacy outcomes among the city’s students. The effort highlights local philanthropy’s capacity, using relatively modest resources, to move the needle and improve lives. 

The San Francisco Literacy Coalition (SFLC) was established in 2022 as schools and students alike were struggling post-pandemic, and in response to dismal literacy outcomes in district schools. The San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) ranks in the bottom 7% of literacy rates in California. Black and Hispanic student outcomes are particularly low. The coalition’s goal? To strengthen and coordinate services and align approaches to reading and writing across city schools — including for early learners — to improve overall literacy outcomes. 

Last month, the coalition received a big boost: a $3 million commitment from the Crankstart Foundation. The San Francisco-based foundation was created in 2000 by Sequoia Capital’s Michael Moritz and sculptor Harriet Heyman. Crankstart keeps a low profile and its website is spare and image free, but as IP’s Michael Kavate pointed out in an in-depth profile in 2022, its pockets are deep. “The grantmaker’s assets nearly doubled to $4.2 billion in 2020, vaulting it into the company of storied institutions like the Kresge Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation of New York,” Kavate wrote. As of 2022, its assets were close to $4 billion, according to Candid. 

Among the foundation’s focus areas, according to the website, are “critical issues concerning economic mobility, education, democracy, housing security, the environment, and medical science and innovation.” Equity is clearly another major foundation focus: “Crankstart envisions a vibrant, thriving Bay Area, where our region’s prosperity is strengthened and shared more equitably by all who live here.” The foundation reports that it gave away $204 million in grants in 2023, with just over half of that going to Bay Area organizations. 

Crankstart’s $3 million grant to the San Francisco Literacy Coalition will be transformative, according to Ann Levy Walden, CEO of the San Francisco Education Fund (Ed Fund), one of the coalition’s leading drivers and its fiscal sponsor. But she credits several smaller funders, including the Hellman and Stocker foundations, with helping get the effort off the ground in the first place and providing essential support along the way. 

The Hellman Foundation, which was created by investment banker Warren Hellman and his wife Chris, is “committed to building equity and opportunity in the San Francisco Bay Area,” according to its website. The Stocker Foundation, a family foundation based in Ohio, invests in literacy and STEAM-focused programs. (See a complete list of coalition partners). 

“The Crankstart grant is going to help us build this work, but I want to give a shout out to our early funders,” Levy Walden said. “Early on, they said, ‘This is interesting, let's see what we can do to help you.’ Those grants weren’t in the millions at all, but they were so instrumental in getting us to where we are, and they were a big part of our ability to go to Crankstart.” 

On the same page

The San Francisco Literacy Coalition is a big group. A number of the nonprofits that now make up the SFLC steering committee were already working with students before the coalition was formed, including 826 Valencia, Raising a Reader, Reading Partners, Springboard Collaborative and Tandem Partners in Early Learning. In the wake of the pandemic, these groups, which were working in separate silos but shared similar goals, realized it would be far more effective to work together, according to Levy Walden. “The groups got together with the Ed Fund and they said, ‘This is crazy. We're all in the same spaces. Why are we not talking? You know, we can do something much better if we're working together.’”

That realization led to the creation of the coalition in 2022. Other partners include the city’s Department of Youth, Children and Their Families (DCYF), San Francisco Unified School District, the San Francisco Public Library, the African American Parent Advisory Committee, and the San Francisco Parent Coalition. 

Part of the problem the coalition is responding to is a lack of local coordination on curriculum. For years, SFUSD’s approach to literacy has been decentralized: Individual schools each chose their own curriculum, and some were more effective than others. 

Other factors have contributed to low literacy scores, including high teacher turnover rates — and students of color have been hit the hardest, Levy Walden said. “San Francisco Unified has been struggling particularly when it  comes to African American, Latinx and Pacific Islander students, in terms of reading outcomes, which are abysmal. But we know what to do, and now the district is doing it, with a standardized literacy curriculum for pre-K through eighth grade. Of course, I wish we had done this 10 years ago, but we’re doing it now.”

The new funding boost from the Crankstart Foundation will allow the SFLC to staff up and measure progress. “We think that the human capital aspect as well as the coordination is going to be a huge lever to pull when we're talking about getting literacy rates to improve,” Levy Walden said. 

The SFLC is a unique effort. Other literacy coalitions exist, of course, but Levy Walden did some digging and was unable to find an initiative involving as many diverse players anywhere else in the country. The initial focus will be on six of the city’s highest-need schools; the coalition’s short-term goal is a 10% increase in reading and writing skills in those schools by 2026. SFUSD is aiming to have 70% of third graders reading at grade level by 2027.

From seed funding to a major investment

The Hellman Foundation was already supporting the San Francisco Education Fund when it provided a two-year, $120,000 seed funding grant to the San Francisco Literary Coalition. “One of the things that we recognized right away was their collective strength as a public-private partnership,” said Dorian Luey, associate director of Hirsch Philanthropy Partners, a philanthropy advising firm that staffs the Hellman Foundation. Annie Ulevitch, a senior director at Hirsh, is the Hellman Foundation’s executive director.

“The coalition is working lockstep with the district.” Luey said. “They understand what the gaps are, they're filling those gaps with all of the community-based organizations that are working in literacy. And then with groups that are also at the table, they're engaging the parents and families to hold the district accountable for student success.” 

Ulevitch said that SFLC’s work aligns with the Hellman Foundation’s priorities. “Achieving grade level proficiency in literacy is one of the pillars we support through the education portfolio. We also support early learning in the zero-to-five early childhood space, and youth development in the out-of-school time and expanded learning spaces, as well.”

The Crankstart Foundation, meanwhile, was already working with 826 Valencia, Springboard Collaborative and Reading Partners as part of its commitment to students’ out-of-school time when they learned about the coalition’s work. They began to have conversations with Levy Walden when she started at the Ed Fund last year.

The Crankstart Foundation offered this in a statement via email: “Our new partnership with the San Francisco Education Fund to lead the Literacy Coalition is in response to declining reading rates among students furthest from opportunity. Last year, just over half (~53%) of SFUSD third graders were proficient in reading. Reading rates are far lower for students facing economic barriers and have continuously declined since the outset of the pandemic. Under Ann Levy Walden’s leadership, the Literacy Coalition has made reversing this trend a priority in San Francisco, and Crankstart is proud to support this work.”

Levy Walden said that Luey and the Hellman Foundation have been providing ongoing ideas and support for the work, and more recently, the Crankstart team has played a similar role. “They've been so thoughtful and helpful as we're doing this work to build out the operational strategy and to think about how we are going to be evaluating this work in the long term,” she said. “It’s great to be able to call them and say, ‘Hey, should I be talking to this person? Should I be talking to that person?’ They're an added resource to us not just in funding, but in ideas and support.”

Levy Walden is hoping that more funders will step up to support the Coalition’s work; it is seeking at least three additional anchor supporters, according to the announcement.

Unjust legacy

The San Francisco Literacy Coalition’s enhanced efforts come at a good time, because SFUSD faces a serious budget deficit, and a recent analysis concluded that its risk of insolvency is high. 

A number of factors contributed to this crisis, including declining enrollment in city schools, but California’s Proposition 13, which severely cut and capped property taxes, has also played a fundamental role. The proposition, passed in 1978, helped plunge California public schools — once among the best in the country — to the bottom half of states in one recent ranking. 

“Unjust Legacy,” a 2022 report by the Opportunity Institute, found that Proposition 13 not only slashed funding for education, but has also contributed to housing and wealth disparities across the state. Despite this cost, Proposition 13 continues to be wildly popular (a proposal to reassess commercial property at market value almost passed in recent elections, however, and is likely to be reintroduced).

The San Francisco Literacy Coalition illustrates how philanthropies — large and small — can play an essential role in building local public-private partnerships to support an undeniable public good: improved literacy for children. While philanthropic dollars can’t replace public education spending, philanthropy-backed coalitions like this one can, at their best, offer stakeholders new ways to tackle stubborn challenges like lagging literacy. The Bay Area, of course, benefits from the fact that it has many deep-pocketed funders like Crankstart on the ground, but it’s not the only place where this kind of relatively modest backing is on tap.