San Francisco Strike Points to School Funding Crisis

February 16, 2026

San Francisco school workers have ended their strike, which began on Monday, February 9 and shut down all of the district’s 120 schools for a week. The tentative agreement reached by union and school district negotiators still has to be ratified by the workers.

The agreement provides pay raises and, starting in 2027, full-family health insurance premiums. But the future is still uncertain for San Francisco school workers. The raises, 8.5% over two years for the lower-paid, non-teaching staff, and 5% over two years for teachers, will still leave California’s highly expensive Bay Area unaffordable for them. And the prospect of layoffs and school closures, which the district has been threatening, is still hanging over their heads.

District officials blame the ongoing crisis on cuts in government funding. Whatever extra federal funds school districts got during the COVID pandemic have expired, they say, and they also point to the drop in enrollment since the pandemic, which has caused state funding to decrease as well.

School districts across the U.S. have been seeing a decline in enrollment. At least in part, this is a consequence of policies school boards adopted during the pandemic. They not only shut down the schools, but also stopped hiring and training teachers and other school workers. So, when in-person education started again, schools were even more overcrowded, and even more in disrepair, than before—which caused many parents to look into alternatives, such as home schooling.

The crisis in education is not universal. Schools in well-to-do areas have in fact been thriving with small class sizes and state-of-the art facilities—thanks to higher tax income and donations from parents. But in working-class neighborhoods, classrooms with more than 40 students and decrepit buildings are the order of the day.

School workers have been trying to fight back, and not just in San Francisco. Teachers in Richmond, California, near San Francisco, went on strike in December. In Los Angeles, San Diego and Sacramento, teachers have voted to authorize strikes.

In San Francisco, many parents expressed support for the strikers and joined the picket lines, despite the difficulty of arranging day care for their children during school closures. This shows that these struggles have the potential to spread to other workplaces and sectors of the economy. If that happens, working people can begin to push back on the authorities’ decades-long, severe underfunding of working-class schools.