David Sacks, a wealthy tech investor and President Donald Trump’s crypto and artificial intelligence czar, owns a Pacific Heights mansion large even by Billionaire’s Row standards. Spanning a city block, it sits on the site of what was once a public elementary school. Built in 1892 and rebuilt in 1921, the Grant School was sold at auction in the late 1990s.

The location of Sack’s extravagant home carries with it a rich irony: The San Francisco billionaire has been among the conservatives bankrolling an effort to undermine the city’s public schools. Included in their game plan is attacking progressive leaning School Boards for “incompetence,” the better to make the case for the privatization of public education. The tactic has been used effectively in cities across the country.

Sacks, along with William Oberndorf, the founder of right-wing political group Neighbors for a Better San Francisco, tech investor Arthur Rock and Garry Tan financed the 2022 recall of three progressive members of the San Francisco School Board. All but Tan are billionaires. Rock’s $499,500 was the was the largest contribution to that effort followed by Oberdorf’s Neighbors for a Better San Francisco, which contributed $458,800. Sacks spent a relatively modest $74,500 while Tan contributed relatively a puny $15,001. 

Additionally, the California Association of Realtors donated $84,900 to the recall campaign. Why would the state’s Realtors be interested in ousting members of the San Francisco School Board? The most logical answer is that the city’s public schools sit on valuable land that is ripe for development. 

The trio of School Board commissioners — Alison Collins, a Black woman, Gabriela Lopez, a Latina and Faauuga Moliga, a Pacific Islander — were removed from office. Their replacements were appointed by Mayor London Breed, whose campaigns were also funded by conservative-leaning tech and real estate interests. A year later, with acquiescence from the new School Board, the San Francisco Unified School District began a Resource Alignment Initiative, bureacrat-ese for the plan to close 11 public schools. 

Public relations campaigns were regurgitated in legacy media outlets to rationalize school closures using two main justifications: Budget deficits and declining enrollment. They suggested that closing schools is a practical — and easy — solution to the so-called “fiscal cliff” facing the School District  and an inoculation against “state takeovers.” 

As it turns out, school closures offer scant savings:  Public schools don’t pay rent since they own their buildings and students from closed schools still need teachers. When independent media outlet Mission Local asked SFUSD for specific savings amounts from the proposed 2024 closures, the district admitted that very little money would be saved — if any.

Arguments for declining enrollment were based on pandemic era data, but that was a time when many families relocated — and many who could afford to move to private schools did so. Using pandemic era data to justify school closures was short-sighted, deceptive and as a result, deeply flawed. With California’s housing element, mandating at least 82,000 new homes to be built in San Francisco by 2031, the demand for public schools will surely increase in the very near future.

The schools selected for closure were disproportionately those in which most students were low income, Black and/or Latine. But, low enrollment can be engineered: Past decisions diverted investments away from these schools, making them less desirable to the families of potential students.

The plan to close schools is driven by ideology, one driven by politically interested billionaires like William Oberndorf and Arthur Rock, and carried out by School Board Commissioners aligned with their interests. As for the real estate industry, it sees the dismantling of public schools as simply another opportunity to profit.

Oberndorf is a long-time proponent of “school choice,” a movement with an end goal of privatizing public education. He is the current chairman of the American Federation for Children, succeeding Betsy DeVos, Education Secretary in the first Trump Administration. The organization advocates for school choice, diverting tax dollars from public to charter and private schools. Fellow recall donor Rock is another prolific funder of school choice initiatives. He and his wife Toni Rembe Rock donated over $20 million to the Northern California division of KIPP, one of the largest charter school organizations in the United States. A common fate of closed public school buildings is to lease the property to charter schools. Another is to place the properties on the auction block. This reflects the conservative tactic of seizing and privatizing public assets, supposedly for our own good, then extracting profits from them. The process extends touting funding to public institutions and using the resulting under-performance as a rationalization for more cuts-this is essentially a self-licking right-wing policy ice cream cone.

San Francisco narrowly avoided school closures in 2024. When the list of 11 schools was made public, enraged parents fought back and Mayor Breed, facing a tough campaign for re-election, moved quickly to stop the process.  

But we are not out of the woods yet. In early October, District Superintendent Maria Su closed The Academy at McAteer, a small high school with a program that allowed students to take classes at City College. It was among the 11 schools on last year’s closure list. At about the same time, the School Board approved a 5-year extension for two charter schools.

Should school closures go forward, some of the sites will likely be sold. It may turn out that a former school will become home to another San Francisco billionaire like David Sacks.