Like most people who leave the city they grew up in and build a life somewhere else, I did not pay much attention to my hometown school board – until the barrage of bad decisions out of San Francisco became so extreme that I couldn’t turn away.
Voters there clearly felt the same. In a landslide Tuesday, they threw three San Francisco Unified school board members out of office in the city’s first recall election in nearly 40 years.
It was one in a wave of school board recalls that have taken place across the country during the pandemic, as parents everywhere deal with the frustrations of school closures, masking requirements and what feels like never-ending uncertainty. It shows what’s possible in a city where residents are hyper-politically active and elected officials demonstrate extreme ineptitude – ignoring the pleas of their constituents over and over again.
First came the school board’s move in January 2021 to rename 44 schools based on an embarrassing dearth of research. The goal was to advance equity by removing names of historical figures linked to slavery and colonialism. But instead of consulting scholars, the school board backed recommendations made by a committee whose research sources included Wikipedia, the History Channel website and erroneous interpretations of local news sites. The committee got important facts wrong about some of the people whose names it wanted to wipe from the schools.
The board also wanted to rename schools honoring Abraham Lincoln, who ended slavery, and U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who was the first woman to become mayor of San Francisco and the first woman elected senator of California. Why Feinstein? Because when she was mayor in the 1980s, the city replaced a vandalized Confederate flag in front of City Hall – though she eventually replaced it with a Union flag. Many people spoke out against renaming Feinstein Elementary, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. Nevertheless, the board decided it would get a new name.