Across the nation, parents are rising up against public schools for their COVID policies and for replacing education with left wing indoctrination. Now even parents in San Francisco, one of the most liberal cities in the country, have had enough, voting overwhelmingly to recall the leadership of the school board.
San Francisco voters recalled school board president Gabriela López, vice president Faauuga Moliga and commissioner Alison Collins. And it wasn’t even close. More than 70% of the voters cast their ballot to cast the school board leadership out of office. (Specifically, the results were 79% against Collins, 75% against López, and 72% against Moliga.)
Since San Francisco is overwhelmingly Democratic and progressive, that 70% must consist largely of Democrats and progressives who believe the educational establishment has been harming their children.
These officers of the school board resisted holding in-person classes in the name of COVID long after other jurisdictions accepted that children were at little risk compared to the harm they were receiving from not being allowed to go to school. The president of the school board defended the school closures by saying, “They are learning more about their families and their culture spending more time with each other. They’re just having different learning experiences than the ones we currently measure.
Without classes being held, the board spent its time by renaming 44 schools. Schools named for George Washington were renamed because the father of our country owned slaves. Also cancelled was Abraham Lincoln, who freed the slaves, since Indian wars happened on his watch. Also cancelled was the sitting Senator from California, the super-liberal Diane Feinstein, who allowed a Confederate flag to be replaced from a civic center display after someone removed it, back when she was mayor of the city back in the 1980s.
The board, specifically refusing input from historians, cancelled historical figures for offenses they did not even commit. Paul Revere’s name was stripped from a school because of his involvement in the Penobscot Expedition of 1779. The board thought that this was an expedition against the Penobscot tribe. But it was actually an attack on a British fort that was named after the Penobscot tribe. The 19th century poet James Russell Lowell’s name was to be stripped from Lowell High School on the grounds that he opposed giving Black people the right to vote; but actually Lowell supported giving Black people the vote.
After a bipartisan uproar over the renamings, including lawsuits and a court order to halt the process until schools re-opened, the board rescinded the proposals for new names.
Lowell High, by the way, was geared for the very best students and was known for its academic quality. But the school board forbade the school’s selective admissions standards because its enrollment did not include enough Black and Hispanic students. That also did not go over well with high-achieving San Francisco parents.
And although she saw racism around every corner, the school board president herself put out racist tweets against Asians, accusing them–you guessed it–of racism. Specifically, she accused San Francisco’s large Asian population of using “white supremacy thinking” to “get ahead.”
Though the opponents of the recall framed it as an election about white privilege, accusing supporters of racism, San Francisco voters were unfazed, with Black voters–including Mayor London Breed–joining the recall effort.
The San Francisco school board recall should send a message to Democrats that far left progressivism does not sell well even to rank and file Democrats.
The election should also send a message to the educational establishment, that “woke” education has gone way too far and that its crusade for hyper-purity is alienating even liberal parents, whose overriding concern is that their children get a good education.
Image by neufal54 from Pixabay
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In