The Achievement Gap Scandal: How HUSD’s $400 Million Budget Fails Students While Enriching Administrators
Despite massive spending, district students score in the “Red” while officials blame everyone but themselves
After spending over $400 million annually, Hayward Unified School District has achieved something remarkable: a systematic failure so profound that the state of California has placed the district under “Differentiated Assistance” — bureaucratic speak for “your students are failing, and we’re stepping in to help.”
While Superintendent Chien Wu-Fernandez collects her six-figure salary and administrators conduct endless meetings about “equity” and “anti-racism,” HUSD students continue falling behind their peers across California. The district’s own documents reveal a damning pattern of educational malpractice disguised as progressive virtue signaling.
The Red Zone Reality
HUSD’s participation in California’s Differentiated Assistance program tells the whole story. This state intervention occurs when student groups perform in the “Red” on the California School Dashboard — the lowest performance category. Translation: HUSD is failing so badly that Sacramento bureaucrats had to intervene.
The district underwent a “Systematic Instructional Review” that identified 18 recommendations for improvement. Think about that — it took outside experts to tell HUSD administrators what any competent educator should know: their students aren’t learning.
The review found “system-wide strengths and areas for growth,” which is consultant-speak for “your systems are broken, but we’ll say it nicely.” The reality is that HUSD has failed to provide basic educational services while spending astronomical amounts on administrative overhead.
The Equity Multiplier Admission of Failure
HUSD added “Goal 5” specifically for Brenkwitz Continuation School under the state’s Equity Multiplier program. This funding targets schools with “the greatest challenges” — another admission that the district has created educational disaster zones while claiming success.
Brenkwitz serves students who have already been failed by the regular HUSD system. Rather than fixing the underlying problems that push students to continuation school, administrators create new programs and hire more consultants to manage the crisis they created.
The district’s focus on “evidence-based services to improve outcomes for the most underserved students” raises an obvious question: what have they been doing with the hundreds of millions already spent? Apparently not providing evidence-based services.
The Over-Identification Scandal
Perhaps most damaging is HUSD’s systematic misclassification of students. The district admits to “over-identification of students as Emotionally Disturbed (ED) and Other Health Impaired (OHI)” — meaning they’ve been incorrectly labeling students with disabilities rather than providing proper instruction.
This isn’t just educational malpractice; it’s a civil rights violation that destroys students’ futures. When schools can’t teach effectively, they blame the students and shuffle them into special education categories that follow them for life.
HUSD contracted with Ascendancy Solutions for $17,000 to develop “systems to decrease the over-identification” — paying consultants to fix a problem the district created through incompetence. Meanwhile, the students wrongly labeled face reduced expectations and limited opportunities.
The Administrative Response: More Meetings, More Consultants
How does HUSD respond to systematic failure? By forming committees, hiring consultants, and scheduling more meetings. The Systematic Instructional Review created a “SIR Leadership Team” that meets regularly to “build shared understanding of improvement science.”
The team has “co-created norms and purposes” including a call to “Be Brave and Bold” in taking calculated risks. This sounds impressive until you realize they’re being paid six-figure salaries to hold meetings about being brave while students fail in classrooms.
The district conducted “root cause analysis” and introduced the “Failure Mode and Effect Analysis (FMEA) tool” to brainstorm solutions. More bureaucratic processes, more consultant jargon, more delay while students suffer.
The Anti-Bias Theater Performance
HUSD’s response to achievement gaps includes massive investment in “Anti-Bias/Anti-Racism” programming that sounds progressive but delivers little for students. The district’s July 2020 adoption of AB/AR policy has produced impressive statistics on adult activities:
- Over 95% of staff report using “culturally responsive strategies”
- Nearly 3,000 instances of feedback collected across three sessions
- Multiple professional development sessions and policy revisions
What’s missing? Actual improvement in student achievement. The district can measure adult compliance with diversity training but can’t ensure students learn to read, write, and calculate.
The Spending-to-Achievement Disconnect
HUSD’s achievement gaps persist despite massive per-student spending that exceeds many successful districts nationwide. The district’s May 2025 expenditures alone totaled $37,368,365.52, suggesting annual spending approaching $450 million for roughly 17,300 students.
That’s approximately $26,000 per student before factoring in additional revenue sources — more than many private schools charge for tuition. Yet HUSD students perform in the bottom tier statewide while administrators claim insufficient resources.
Where does this money go? Certainly not to classroom instruction, given the massive contractor spending and administrative bloat documented in board meetings.
The Consultant Industrial Complex
Rather than hiring competent teachers and administrators, HUSD feeds a thriving consultant industry that profits from educational failure:
Recent Achievement-Related Contracts:
- Ascendancy Solutions: $17,000 for “Continuous Improvement Monitoring”
- WestEd partnership for Systematic Instructional Review
- Multiple professional development contractors
- “Improvement science” consultants
Each contract represents HUSD’s admission that internal staff lack basic competencies. While other districts successfully educate students with existing personnel, HUSD requires an army of outside experts to perform fundamental functions.
The Data Manipulation Game
HUSD’s approach to achievement gaps involves sophisticated data collection and analysis that obscures rather than addresses core problems. The district tracks “disaggregated climate and academic data” and develops “data-informed prioritization” strategies.
This sounds scientific until you realize it’s mostly bureaucratic busy work. Students don’t need more data analysis — they need competent instruction in well-managed classrooms. But data manipulation allows administrators to appear busy while avoiding accountability for results.
The Labor Union Enablers
HUSD’s achievement gaps persist partly because labor unions prioritize adult employment over student learning. The district’s SIR implementation includes “active engagement with all labor unions to ensure shared ownership” of improvement efforts.
Translation: union representatives get veto power over reforms that might threaten jobs or working conditions. This explains why HUSD can’t eliminate ineffective teachers or streamline bloated administrative structures that drain resources from classrooms.
The Hayward Education Association (HEA) “offered feedback on the process and member involvement” rather than demanding accountability for student outcomes. Union priorities remain clear: protect jobs first, worry about student achievement later.
The Comparative Failure
While HUSD students struggle in the “Red” performance zone, nearby districts with similar demographics achieve significantly better results. The difference isn’t resources or student populations — it’s leadership competence and administrative priorities.
Successful districts focus on:
- Hiring and retaining effective teachers
- Maintaining classroom discipline and high expectations
- Allocating resources to instruction rather than administration
- Holding staff accountable for student results
HUSD does the opposite: hiring consultants instead of teachers, lowering expectations through social promotion, funding administrative bloat, and blaming external factors for internal failures.
The Real Victims
Behind every statistic and consultant report are real students whose educational futures are being destroyed by administrative incompetence. Students misidentified as disabled, socially promoted without learning, and graduated without basic skills face lifetime consequences from HUSD’s failures.
These aren’t abstract achievement gaps — they’re individual tragedies multiplied across thousands of students. While administrators collect paychecks and consultants write reports, students lose opportunities they’ll never recover.
The Accountability Vacuum
HUSD’s board meetings treat systematic educational failure as routine business. Members approve consultant contracts and listen to progress reports without demanding consequences for continued poor performance.
Superintendent Wu-Fernandez presents achievement gap initiatives as success stories while students remain in the bottom performance tier. Board members nod approvingly at diversity training statistics while ignoring reading and math scores.
What Real Reform Would Look Like
Addressing HUSD’s achievement gaps requires fundamental changes that current leadership will never implement:
- Fire incompetent administrators starting with those overseeing failing schools
- Eliminate consultant dependency and hire qualified internal staff
- End social promotion and restore academic standards
- Redirect administrative spending to classroom instruction
- Hold principals accountable for school-level achievement data
- Abandon failed diversity programming that substitutes politics for education
The Bottom Line
HUSD’s achievement gaps aren’t the result of insufficient funding, difficult students, or societal problems. They’re the predictable outcome of administrative incompetence, misplaced priorities, and a system that rewards failure with more resources.
After decades of progressive education policies and hundreds of millions in spending, HUSD has achieved the opposite of its stated goals. Students perform worse, gaps persist, and administrators prosper while pointing fingers at everyone but themselves.
The state’s Differentiated Assistance intervention represents a damning indictment of local leadership. When Sacramento bureaucrats have to step in to help your students, you’ve failed at the most basic level.
Until HUSD replaces failed leadership with competent administrators focused on student achievement rather than consultant contracts and diversity theater, the achievement gaps will persist. The real question is how many more student futures will be sacrificed before taxpayers demand accountability.
Students deserve better than this educational malpractice disguised as progressive reform. They deserve competent instruction, high expectations, and administrators who prioritize learning over political posturing.
The achievement gap scandal at HUSD isn’t about resources or demographics — it’s about leadership failure on a massive scale. And until that changes, students will continue paying the price for adult incompetence.
Sources: HUSD 06_11_25 Board of Education Meeting.pdf, HUSD 06_25_25 Board of Education Meeting.pdf
