Seventy-eight percent. Seventy-four percent. Seventy-one percent. These are the vote percentages in favor of recalling all three San Francisco school board members who were eligible for removal from office in last week’s special election, the first recall election in San Francisco since 1983.
San Franciscans, perhaps the most politically liberal voters in the country—the very same ones who previously had voted in progressives Alison Collins, Gabriela López, and Faauuga Moliga to the school board—have now had it with progressives, at least within their school system. By ditching these three school board members, voters are now acknowledging their mistake in electing those who placed political silliness ahead of childrens’ learning.
What happened was entirely predictable, though San Francisco voters had to learn this the hard way. When it comes to receiving public services, what voters want and expect from government is what they want and expect from private service providers. A quality product, provided at a fair cost, without politics getting in the way. You hire an electrician to rewire your home, you hire a roofer to fix a leak, and you implicitly hire an education system to train your kids.
But SF voters picked school board members with highly idiosyncratic and personal agendas that had little, if anything, to do with providing San Francisco kids with a quality education. For this board, it was all about antiracism and their vision of what that means. It was the board’s way or the highway, and their highway was one of almost comedy-level silliness, of trying to rename schools whose existing names they objected to, of wanting to paint over or tear down long-standing pieces of artwork they didn’t like at district schools. Anything but worry about learning, or, as we will see, their budget.
And while SF’s school board members were busy imposing their personal political and social views on all SFUSD stakeholders, child learning was suffering. And suffering mightily. A major mistake was the board’s refusal to reopen SF schools early last year, despite strong policy recommendations to do so from the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health. SF mayor London Breed asked the board in early 2021 for a timeline for reopening, indicating that kids were being damaged significantly by remote learning.
When that timeline didn’t appear, Mayor Breed took the unprecedented action of suing the board for not reopening schools. The lawsuit filing revealed that the board had not really gotten around to having a plan for reopening. No protocols, no discussions with parents and other stakeholders of how kids and teachers would be brought back. Nada. Unless you count “ambiguous empty rhetoric” as something.
The lawsuit didn’t pull any punches about this lack of planning, arguing: “It is inadequate for children, who need and deserve in-person education now that the scientific consensus is that it can be done safely. It is inadequate for families who have been trying for almost a year to juggle the impossible demands of parenting, home-schooling, and working. It is inadequate for the City, which is trying to support SFUSD’s reopening efforts, and has had to step in to fill the void left by SFUSD’s inaction by spending tens of millions of dollars to operate ‘Community Hubs’ to serve the City’s most vulnerable children. And most importantly here, it is inadequate under the law.”
By failing to do their jobs, the country’s most vehemently antiracist school board had managed to abandon its most vulnerable kids, those children from poor Hispanic and Black families who sat at home learning little if anything while the parents of these kids implored them to reopen schools. It wasn’t until last fall, after thousands of kids in other Bay Area school districts had been back in classrooms for months, that SFUSD schools were fully reopened.
So what was the school board doing while the district’s poor kids sat at home? Coming up with new names for San Francisco schools named after those whom the board judged to be objectionable, including Presidents Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln, Senator Dianne Feinstein, and that midnight rider Paul Revere. Apparently, the names we call our schools, and not the names of the district’s children—and the future lives of those children—were the priority for those on the school board.
But even fully occupied with their righteous labor of love, renaming schools, the gang who couldn’t shoot straight messed up, and messed up badly. They mistook the name of the Alamo Elementary School for the Texas battle, when the school was in fact named for a poplar tree. They wanted to cancel Paul Revere for trying to take land from Native Americans in Maine, when Revere had gone to Maine to fight the British, who were the ones who had taken such land. The Argonne School was to be renamed, as its original name was derived from a forest in France where some San Franciscans had distinguished themselves by fighting in a World War I battle. Since when is the name of a forest objectionable?
What was Dianne Feinstein’s cancellation sin? When she was mayor in 1984, she authorized replacing a Confederate flag, part of a city historical display, that had been torn down. Meanwhile, the César Chávez School was somehow spared from renaming, even though Chávez was one of the most severe opponents of illegal immigration, telling his United Farm Worker members to turn in all illegals to immigration control and have them returned to Mexico. Chávez pejoratively referred to these individuals as “wetbacks,” referencing those individuals who would swim across the Rio Grande from Mexico to the United States. But this inconvenient bit of history seems to have slipped past the SFUSD board censors.
The silliness and incompetence were in plain sight all along. Recalled school board member Alison Collins had previously referenced Asian American kids who were succeeding at a high level in school as the product of families that used “white supremacist thinking” to get ahead. Really?
When other board members cast a vote of no confidence for Collins based on her social media posts about Asian Americans, she responded by filing an $87 million lawsuit, one that included poetry as part of her legal argument, had several typographical errors, and was labeled by one legal expert as “an op-ed pretending to be a lawsuit.”
But the real cost of having the school board run as an amateur hour is its fiscal mismanagement of the district, to the tune of a $125 million deficit. It is funny how one can lose track of dollars and cents when worrying about the names of schools. Now the district is making enormous budget cuts, which will likely further reduce school quality in a district in which many students are light years away from competence in math, reading, and science.
The recalled board president predictably called the recall vote the result of “white supremacy.” But it was Asian American parents who led this charge, not Whites.
When it comes to color, the school board lives in a bubble world of Black, White, and Brown, in which White oppresses Black and Brown. But in this fantasy world of so few hues, they missed that most important color: green, the color of money, a color that can’t be squandered without consequences. Only now do they learn.
