An Interesting Development in the San Francisco School Board

(Featured image is “Golden Gate Bridge sunset moment” by davidyuweb and is licensed under Creative Commons 2.0.)

From The San Francisco Chronicle:

San Francisco voters overwhelmingly supported the ouster of three San Francisco school board members Tuesday in the city’s first recall election in nearly 40 years.

The landslide decision means board President Gabriela López and members Alison Collins and Faauuga Moliga will officially be removed from office and replaced by mayoral appointments 10 days after the election is officially accepted by the Board of Supervisors.

The new San Francisco school board members are likely to take office in mid-March. The three were the only school board members who had served long enough to be eligible for a recall.

Those are the facts that are not in dispute. To explore *WHY* this sort of thing happened, there are a handful of narratives that are competing with each other.

On the one side, the argument is that this was the deep pockets of the astroturfed alt-right going out of their way to purchase an election. (Apparently, $2 million went to the pro-recall effort.)

On the other, the argument is that this was a backlash against a San Francisco school board that was more interested in performative displays than actually doing the job a school board is elected to do. (This is the school board that, in late 2020, pushed to rename 44 schools, which included the ones named after Abraham Lincoln, Paul Revere, and Dianne Feinstein. Meanwhile, the schools were closed and remained closed for months and months longer than the other districts in the city, in the state, and the overwhelming majority of districts in the rest of the country.)

The two stories that *I* went to in order to get a basic idea of what really happened came from two sources. One from Matt Welch at Reason Magazine and one from Clara Jeffrey from Mother Jones.

Reason, unsurprisingly, explores the whole school naming thing for a while before getting to the nut graf:

Yet most San Francisco public middle schools and high schools remained closed throughout the first half of 2021, even as private schools all around them, and public schools in much of the Bay Area, were open.

There is then a lot of focus on the three school board members’ quotations given in defense of their decision to focus on what they did as well as their decision to keep the schools closed as long as they did.

In an unintentionally remarkable pre-election series of written responses to the Chronicle, the recall targets were alternately defiant (López: “I believe we were able to open schools for our priority students as soon as it was safe to do so”), delusional (Collins: “I filed the lawsuit because I needed to protect myself, my family, the work of the Board of Education. My position on the board and my right to free speech were affirmed”), and incoherent (Molinga: “Being the first Pacific Islander on the school board and elected in the city, I’ve taken up the charge of making sure the foundational pieces in place so that we can begin to see improvement in classrooms for Pacific Islanders”).

Welch concludes that, even in San Francisco, the “if you’re against us, you’re with Trump!” defense has stopped working.

But, you know, Welch works for *REASON*, of all magazines. If you want someone with less of an ideological tilt, you need to go to a much less right-leaning magazine like Mother Jones.

Clara Jeffery opens by quoting Politico, the LA Times, and a tweet from a Bulwark Online writer:

Within minutes of the results being announced, national news outlets and pundits of all stripes began breathlessly trumpeting this as a blow against excessive wokeness, a vote to “return to normal,” a “three-alarm warning for Democrats,” a “parental backlash for pursuing the renaming of schools and other progressive policy changes.”

She goes on to say: “Kinda/not really. If I had to boil it down, it was a for vote to put performance over performativeness.”

She then rattles off what the recall was *REALLY* about: Remote learning, School names, The murals, Lowell admissions, The budget, The consultant, LGBTQ representation, Alison Collins’ racist tweets, The $87 million lawsuit, and (finally) Meetings.

Seriously, read the article. She goes into detail over each one of those.

But here’s the part where my ears perk up:

In summation, this recall was a vote about a lot of issues, but overall it was a vote against incompetence. The coalition that came together to recall the board members was an extremely unique patchwork. Some people cared deeply about Lowell. For others, that was way down or not even on their list. And yes, San Francisco parents were anxious about school reopening and safety plans. But what really set them off was that the board had no plan, and that it stopped Matthews and other officials from making a plan.

All of these issues are fraught and complex and required care and consensus-building. Instead, it felt like the board was playing politics, very ineptly. They prioritized performativeness over performance, and they brushed away any critique as coming from people who were insufficiently radical.

See that last part? “they brushed away any critique as coming from people who were insufficiently radical”.

I hold that up against Welch’s article where he says: “One of the most definitive conclusions about the recall is that the ‘blame Donald Trump’ strategy just will not work anymore for embattled Democratic politicians.” I notice that, for all the places where the two narratives differ with each other, there’s a lot of overlap on that particular point.

A silly little election about San Francisco school board doesn’t necessarily mean anything at the national level, of course. But if there were anywhere in the country where stuff like accusing anyone opposed to Progress as being allies with Donald Trump would work? I’d say it was there. And it seems to have stopped working.

And November is coming.