Three San Francisco school-board members who prioritized woke virtue-signaling and racial-equity initiatives over opening schools and improving education for all students were recalled Tuesday in a landslide vote.
While any school-board election is by definition a local matter, this vote was watched and reported on nationally. It is yet another sign that parents fed up with school closures, mask mandates and ideological battles will be a force to be reckoned with at the polls in the upcoming midterm elections. Each member was voted off with more than 70% of the vote.
While children in San Francisco were locked out of their schools, kept off of playgrounds and generally living under one of the strictest quarantines in the country, the school board decided to debate renaming 44 schools, including the Abraham Lincoln HS, before they got around to discussing school closures. Priorities, people!
Renaming schools
The stated reason for the lengthy debates on renaming was that the names had connections to slavery and colonialism, but the board members got historical details wrong and debated the merits of renaming for hours on end while frazzled parents tuned in to learn if, when and how schools would reopen.
As I watched the insanity raging at the San Francisco school-board meetings, I felt a certain relief — at least the school board I presided over at the time was not the craziest in the country!
My school board had made national news when one member screamed at another that it “hurts people when they see a white man hold a black baby and they don’t know the context” and that other members needed to “do the work!” and “read ‘White Fragility’!” to weed out their white-supremacy thinking. But I also saw the similarities.
The commonality between what I experienced on my school board and what voters rejected in the San Francisco recall vote is pervasive wokeness: the self-indulgence of those board members who decided they are morally superior to those who have different viewpoints and ideas for improving schools and helping students learn better.
The other commonality is what a bad job both school systems do to educate poor, minority students. In New York City, only one-third of black and Hispanic students were grade-level proficient in reading and math (2019 rates were 28% and 33% in math and 35% and 36% in English language arts). These pre-COVID rates have almost certainly decreased due to the many failures of remote learning. In San Francisco, only 38% of African-American students were considered proficient in 2020-21 while district-wide proficiency was 67%.
Another hard-to-miss similarity is the incessant attack on merit-based admissions and Asian-American families. The “Stuyvesant of San Francisco” Lowell HS lost its ability to admit students based primarily on GPA and standardized tests, which was an equity effort designed to lower the number of Asian students and increase black and Hispanic enrollment. A similar effort failed in New York City, but not for want of trying by left-leaning school-board members and politicians, including the chancellor and mayor.
The ousted San Francisco school-board commissioner Alison Collins tweeted about Asian students getting ahead with “white supremacist thinking.” The same accusation is made against academically driven and successful Asian students in New York — many of whom are immigrants or first-generation students whose families struggle to make ends meet.
Leaving in droves
Despite today’s rosy claims by Chancellor David Banks that graduation rates are up (for all but white students), families like mine see what is really happening — students are leaving a failing school system. My son’s kindergarten class is smaller than it was in September, and across New York City there is a 12% drop in K-8 students (14% in kindergarten) from pre-pandemic years.
The San Francisco recall and plunging New York enrollment makes clear that families want something better and different from the racially driven ideological battles of recent years. Parents are voting with their feet and at the ballot box. It’s time to listen.
Maud Maron is a Democratic congressional candidate in Manhattan’s 12th District and mom of four public school children.