Min Chang
Elections and appointments
Personal
Contact
Min Chang ran for election to the San Francisco Unified Board of Education in California. She lost in the general election on November 5, 2024.
Chang completed Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection survey in 2024. Click here to read the survey answers.
Biography
Min Chang earned a high school diploma from Avon Grove High School, a bachelor's degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1987, a graduate degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1990, and a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 2021. Her career experience includes working as a nonprofit CEO and CSO.[1]
Elections
2024
See also: San Francisco Unified School District, California, elections (2024)
General election
Withdrawn or disqualified candidates
Endorsements
Ballotpedia did not identify endorsements for Chang in this election.
2024
Ballotpedia survey responses
See also: Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection
Min Chang completed Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection survey in 2024. The survey questions appear in bold and are followed by Chang's responses. Candidates are asked three required questions for this survey, but they may answer additional optional questions as well.
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Experience matters on the School Board, and I bring 35 years of experience in solving problems collaboratively and getting things done. This is what I do every day as CEO of a SF healthcare company with 500+ employees. Managing $1B budgets is not foreign to me. In fact, I have worked for Fortune 100 companies in six continents (speak English, French, Chinese), headed up regions and businesses, and collaborated with all types of groups to achieve financial and operational results. Having been CEO multiple times gives me the unique ability to turnaround businesses, which is what is needed given the fiscal crisis at SFUSD. I know how to grow revenues along with reducing costs. I believe strongly in education as a mother and product of public schools myself. I hold two bachelor’s degrees from Penn, two master’s from MIT and Johns Hopkins and a doctorate from Johns Hopkins. The Board needs the experience I bring to grow our schools, not close them, and bring families back to public schools as well as to push for a stronger curriculum by bringing back core subjects: math, science, languages, and the arts. Join me to make good education a right for our children.
- Closing schools is not the solution; we can grow revenues and reduce costs without impacting our schools.
- Raise the bar on performance by bringing back the basics of math, science, history, civics, languages and the arts. We need to keep language immersion and accelerated programs and elevate all schools.
- No tolerance on bullying, harassment, violence and discrimination in school and in the community. We need our kids to feel safe in order to learn.
Solving homelessness and providing food, shelter and care to the most vulnerable in the city.
I have always set my own path in terms of my career. I have had the privilege of working for 13 companies in 6 of the 7 continents and across every industry sector. I have over 35 years of experience and I am currently a CEO of a $65 million company. I have been successful in my career due mainly to hard work and the mentoring/coaching that I have been so lucky to have received throughout my career. In addition, my family has been and continues to support my career and my children. My parents in particular have been by my side caring for our children since they were born. Our lovely daughters are now 23 and 28; one a law student at Georgetown Law and the other a journalist with the Wall Street Journal. I value my family's guidance and support and the support from all my mentors.
Go to my website: voteformin.com
Integrity and accountability
Integrity, collaboration, perseverance and hard work. There has not been a single challenge that I have not been able to overcome. I have turned around failing businesses and made them profitable for the first time. I have led regions and businesses and functions all over the world.
Advising and supporting the superintendent for SFUSD.
My work is now focused very much on the community. My community is S.F. and I would like to improve our public schools first and foremost. There is no reason why our public schools should not be the very best in CA. We have over $1.3B in our budget, but we need strong management and fiscal accountability to improve and grow our schools.
I remember the launch of the first space shuttle in 1983; it is the year I graduated high school. I was the speaker at graduation and I spoke about all the advances that we as kids had witnessed in our lifetimes and the many more things that we would experience moving forward. I did not know then as a child but I know that now as an adult how important education was and how fundamental my public school education was to me growing up. I entered public school at age 8 and stayed with public schools through high school. I remember all my grade school teachers and what they meant to me. In those foundational years when I was figuring out who I was as a person, the confidence and support that these teachers instilled in me was priceless. It is this reason that I am running for the Board of Education. I want to do for public schools, what public schools have done for me.
I worked at Procter and Gamble right out of college (University of Pennsylvania). It was a wonderful and rewarding experience because I got to supervise 7 highly experienced individuals as part of my team. I worked in customer operations and had a chance to learn management skills at the age of 20. My father always said that managing people was the key to success and he was right. I learned that valuing and leveraging those around you and to inspire and lead them was the best way to get things done. Understanding their strengths and weaknesses and to manage with those in mind was also really important. We oversaw all of P&Gs customers in the Northeast: the supermarkets, bodegas and the retailers that carried P&G products. Customer operations handled all the shipments in terms of billing, collections, damages, returns and all forms of customer service. You really get to know the customers in our jobs. Managing my team was the best part of the job and we were a well-functioning team with lots of energy and passion for our work. I learned at a very young age that teamwork and supporting each other was a great way to succeed.
The one that I am writing on "how to do strategy right". I am a big believer in strategic planning and have a different way of approaching strategy. I am in the process of writing this book and hope to have it published.
I would love to be a character that travels in space and explores other planets and life forms elsewhere.
I would very much like to continue to learn and build my career as a result of it. I have 5 academic degrees: 2 bachelors, 2 masters and 1 doctorate. My dream would be to continue to go back to school and learn more and be able to work until I am unable to do so.
To ensure that parents and school perspectives are understood and that the school system reflects this.
Key stakeholders are: parents, students, educators, communities.
• Bring solutions that address the near-term fiscal crisis and longer-term growth.
o Closing schools is not the answer; it will only make things worse and drive more families away from public schools. It will also make the existing schools more crowded and class sizes even larger; the schools that are targeted for closure are the smaller schools and specialty schools that are much needed in our communities. Closing schools also does not solve the budget deficit.
o We need to address the fiscal crisis in the next few months and will need to make hard decisions in the near-term so that SFUSD survives; costs will need to be addressed, both direct and indirect costs. The administration’s costs have grown exponentially while enrolment has declined drastically over the past several years. We need to reduce the administration’s costs and manage the district’s assets more effectively.
o In parallel, we will need to invest in the longer-term growth of enrollment, investing in schools, upgrading of our curriculum, raising performance of educators, and working with our communities to implement change.
o This is solvable and I know how to do this; I do this everyday as CEO. Balancing the budget, managing multi-billion-dollar budgets and organizations of thousands is not foreign to me. I have the necessary skills and experience; I have turned around organizations many times. We need people like me who can do this and do it on Day 1. Experience matters at this time to solve the near-term fiscal crisis.
• Increase enrollment and bring families back to SF public schools.
o Assess the 125+ schools in our district and really understand their needs. In business we always start with the customer in mind and work backwards to develop the right solutions. The SFUSD “customers” are the families, students, teachers, and schools.
o Develop the improvement areas for each school with the “customers” and then overlay it with the SFUSD administration needs. This needs to be both a bottoms up a Our customers are the parents, students, families, educators and communities. The best way to build these relationships is to spend time to listen and learn from them and to clearly understand their needs. Then we should build the school system that best fits their needs.
Great educators are ones that can inspire as well as teach and to bring out curious minds.
I would like to bring back core subjects like math, science, history, foreign languages and the arts. In addition, we should have accelerated programs and maintain the language immersion programs. I would like to also see foreign languages being introduced earlier in a child's development. In fact, as much as possible, we should have core subjects introduced to children as soon as possible.
We should institute zero-based budgeting and always have a balanced budget. We should also have a robust forecast and a strong strategic plan for at least 3 years.
There should be no tolerance for bullying, harassment, violence and discrimination in our schools.
Mental health is important and we need staff to trained to recognize as well as to address this.
I am terrible at jokes but I do believe that humor is important at work and in relationships.
I would like to work more closely with the Mayor's office and the police and sheriff's departments to support on safety and security.
ConnectedSF, The Marina Times, Sheriff Miyamoto, SFGOP, Briones Society, Log Cabin, Lincoln Club, SFYR, Republican Club of SF.
Students should learn in a safe and secure environment and one that encourages engagement with educators and peers.
SFUSD closed schools for over 2 years. This was detrimental to our students and parents.
We should see our educators and staff as talent within an organization and to plan out a career path for them as well as to support them to be able to live and teach in S.F.
Need to improve this significantly.
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See also
External links
- ↑ Information submitted to Ballotpedia through the Candidate Connection survey on October 1, 2024
