San Francisco recalls three extremely woke school board members
On the surface – because it’s ultra-blue San Francisco – this seems like a surprising development:
San Francisco residents overwhelmingly approved of a vote Tuesday to recall three of the city’s school board members, election officials said.
Critics, including San Francisco Mayor London Breed, argued the members — school board President Gabriela López, Vice President Faauuga Moliga and Commissioner Alison Collins — pushed progressive politics rather than act in the best interest of children during the pandemic, and voters agreed, according to the San Francisco Department of Elections.
They agreed overwhelmingly, and the mayor – who is also on the left, but at least for the moment seems to have been more able to read the tea leaves of public opinion – gets to name their replacements until a new election next fall.
The message in Virginia and now in San Francisco is the same, even though those two places are not the same: if leftists go too far to harm children and their education, voters will revolt. The left and the Democrats rely heavily on the support of young women – many of whom are mothers – and such voters can be activated to vote against them if they perceive them as harming children.
Of course, the definition of what constitutes “harm” to children can differ from person to person, sometimes greatly, even among Democrat voters. San Francisco is a warning, however, that these sorts of decisions (especially during a pandemic) by a school board may cross a line:
Even the Democrat-led city government of San Francisco had enough with the board. It filed a lawsuit against both the SFUSD and its board in February 2021, accusing them of ” failing to come up with a reopening plan even as numerous other schools across the U.S. have reopened.” But SFUSD reopened only elementary schools last April and didn’t return to full-time in-person learning for all K-12 until fall 2021.
Board President López claimed the long delays didn’t cause any learning loss because children were “just having different learning experiences than the ones we currently measure,” and they learned more “about their families and cultures by staying home.” Her tone-deaf comments angered many parents, who have witnessed their kids’ academic and emotional struggles at home due to the school closures…
…In 2019, the board voted to cover a mural depicting slavery and Native Americans at George Washington High School, a decision that would cost taxpayers between $600,000 to $1 million. Fortunately, the mural will stay after a San Francisco Superior Court judge overturned the school board’s decision last year….
In January 2021, rather than focusing on reopening schools, the board voted to rename 44 schools, including Abraham Lincoln and George Washington High Schools. Even Democrat Mayor London Breed expressed her disbelief in a statement, saying, “I can’t understand why the school board is advancing a plan to rename all these schools when there isn’t a plan to have kids back in those physical schools.”
…Facing nationwide backlash over the renaming controversy, the school board voted to reverse its school renaming plan in April.
There is also anti-Asian bias. San Francisco is a city with demographics atypical of the US [emphasis mine]:
As of the 2010 census, the ethnic makeup and population of San Francisco included: 390,387 Whites (48.1%), 267,915 Asians (33.3%), 48,870 African Americans (6.1%), 4,024 Native Americans (0.5%), 3,359 Pacific Islanders (0.4%), 53,021 from other races (6.6%), and 37,659 from two or more races (4.7%). There were 121,744 Hispanics or Latinos of any race (15.1%).
And so when this occurred, a very sizeable percentage of the population was probably very upset, and rightly so [my emphasis]:
In the fall of 2020, the school board voted to eliminate the academic performance-based admission process to Lowell High school, one of the best high schools in the city.
It is important to note that Lowell’s admission process wasn’t 100 percent merit-based. Due to the San Francisco NAACP v. San Francisco Unified School District lawsuit and the 1983 Consent Decree settlement, there is a limit to the percentage of students from a particular ethnic group that can enroll at Lowell.
This cap means that, to get into Lowell, Chinese Americans have to score higher than any other ethnic group because Chinese American students represent a “disproportionate” share of students meeting the school’s requirements. Still, to justify canceling Lowell’s academic-based admission completely, board president Lopez claimed grades and test scores were “biased towards Whites and Asians,” even though non-white students make up 75 percent of Lowell’s student body. Collins tweeted that “‘merit’ is an inherently racist construct designed and centered on white supremacist framing.”
And those Asians are also white supremacists, as we’ve heard from leftists before:
…[P]eople uncovered some racially charged tweets by Collins from 2016, in which she blamed Asian-Americans for using “white supremacist thinking to assimilate and ‘get ahead.’” Several Asian-American voters told me that Collins’ racist tweets, her half-hearted apology, and her refusal to resign despite widespread criticism had motivated them to volunteer for the recall campaign.
No surprise there. Nor is this:
The three board members and their supporters claim the recall campaign was funded by right-wing big money. In truth, the recall campaign is a grassroots movement led by Asian Americans. Many of them are lifelong liberals, and some are first-generation immigrants who had never been politically active until last year.
The article goes on to describe some of their efforts. Because of pandemic restrictions, it took tremendous work to get the requisite number of signatures on recall petitions. But they were determined. Some of the leaders were immigrants from China, or the children of such immigrants (Asians of Chinese origin are by far the largest Asian group in San Francisco).
But most people – of any race, even in San Francisco – don’t want to see their children sacrificed on the non-holy altar of wokeness.
[NOTE: Actually, I see here that Collins’ tweets were even worse than that. Here’s a little sampler:
Prior to her election to the San Francisco Board of Education in 2018…[and] over the course of several tweets on December 4, 2016, Collins wrote:
“Many Asian [students] and [teachers] I know won’t engage in critical race convos unless they see how they’re impacted by white supremacy. … Many Asian Am. believe they benefit from the ‘model minority’ BS. In fact many Asian American [teachers], [students] and [parents] actively promote these myths. They use white supremacist thinking to assimilate and ‘get ahead’. Talk to many [Lowell High School] parents and you will hear praise of Tiger Moms and disparagement of Black/Brown ‘culture’. I even see it in my [Facebook] timeline with former [high school] peers. Their [timelines] are full of White Asian ppl. No recognition Black Lives Matter exists. 2 [weeks] ago, my mixed-race/Black daughter heard boys teasing a Latino about ‘Trump, Mexicans and the KKK.’ The boys were Asian-American. She spoke up when none of the other staff did. The after school counselor was Asian. Where are the vocal Asians speaking up against Trump? Don’t Asian Americans know they’re on his list as well? Do they think they won’t be deported? profiled? beaten? Being a house n****r [sic] is still being a n****r. You’re still considered ‘the help.'”
It’s hard to know where to begin to critique that. Let’s just say I find it interesting that Collins was elected to her position about two years after these tweets were published.]
The fact that these three space cadets have been given the hook provides evidence of the existence of a just and merciful God.
https://reason.com/2022/02/16/san-francisco-voters-fire-3-school-board-members/
So, San Francisco hasn’t yet gone completely wacko. Next step is to recall Chesa Boudin. Vote set for June 7.As Chesa Boudin worked for Hugo Chavez for a year, Dealing with Chavista Propaganda is appropriate reading.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=recall+Chesa+Boudin&va=b&t=hr&ia=web
https://www.caracaschronicles.com/2021/04/05/dealing-with-chavista-propaganda-in-the-heart-of-san-francisco/
This seems like the best time in years to truly reform K-12. However, the focus seems to be on charter schools, leaving behind millions of students in poorly performing districts.
The fundamental problem is the lack of meaningful competition, and the proposed solutions leave out home schooling.
We should simply create an educational endowment for each K-12 student. Student endowment funds would pay out for students who achieved grade level knowledge using something like an expanded STAAR. All states have a similar measurement of grade level achievement.
Providers for students who did poorly would not be paid, leaving twice the annual amount available next year to educators who could catch them up. Seriously underperforming students would accrue several years of catch-up funding, providing extra incentive for the type of personalized attention that would benefit them.
All students would become customers for educational services and be treated accordingly.
Opening educational services to the free market will allow for practical job related instruction, and college level courses, to be included as providers fight for market share.
Competition among educational providers will make full use of technology, will provide useful training for actual jobs, and will deliver far more education for the same money. Gamification will keep students involved in ways that existing K-12 material can’t touch.
Instead of leaving dropouts to fend for themselves, the funds would remain on deposit indefinitely, allowing those who got their act together after some time in the adult world to get an education.
Troubled students would have teachers and mentors who had a financial stake in the outcome.
The dramatic difference in quality based on differences in community income levels would end.
Modeling the idea will show that existing school structures and transportation fleets will be used, possibly more than with charter schools. Most school systems will continue as they are, but a new element of potential competition will focus their efforts.
A major early effect will be defunding of many inner-city school systems, with the carry-over of endowment funds providing an incentive to corporate providers.
Providers will be renting space and transportation for their offerings in most cases from existing school districts.
Home schooling pods will explode, but those kids will still participate on local sports teams, and transportation to practice (and back) will also be rented from existing fleets by their parents.
It could be done at the Federal Level by putting all Federal funding into individual student endowments. That would probably cover the cost of most home schooling materials.
Individual states could redirect all state level funds to endowments in a simple implementation. Special needs students would still have the extra funding, but at an individual student level.
Let’s move to a free market. Unleash technology but pay only for results.
Hallelujah! A time for celebration. Just yesterday I was beginning to despair that the left had so thoroughly won the long term cultural and political wars. I recognize that was overly pessimistic and histrionic, but now and then I wallow in self-pity-particularly about California. A breath of fresh air; people aren’t *all* totally crazy, nor totally commie wishing to burn things to the ground.
The demo breakdown was of whole populations. I’d guess the households with children are more skewed toward non-white than the population as a whole. (I used to live in Seattle where the population is overwhelming white and the public school population is majority non-white. Bill Gates went to a private school)
And that the children in two-parent households are heavily skewed toward whites an Asians. But to notice that and think it might make a difference is racist.
Of course, the definition of what constitutes “harm” to children can differ from person to person, sometimes greatly, even among Democrat voters.
It can. I think for the vast majority of people, what harms the young is opportunity cost, which is any allocation of time in the classroom and time in home study to any task other than (1) learning to read and write and to have a grasp of proper English grammar and spelling; having them read venerable works of literature would be a conduit to that end; and (2) master arithmetic and elementary algebra; and (3) master the fundamentals of American history, geography, and civics. Note, latter-day recipients of BEd and MEd degrees fall into two categories: those who suffered through their program in order to be able to teach one day and those who have scant interest in those three tasks. This is the course list of one teacher-training program with which I am familiar:
EDUC 101 – The American School
EDUC 202 – The Teaching of Reading
EDUC 204 – Child and Adolescent Development
EDUC 205 – Race, White Supremacy, and Education
EDUC 207 – Inclusive and Special Education
EDUC 214 – Theories of Teaching and Learning
EDUC 219 – Education and the Ethical Imagination
EDUC 220 – Ecojustice and Education
EDUC 226 – Uses and Abuses of Educational Research
EDUC 231 – Inquiry Based Teaching in the Schools
EDUC 241 – Queering Education
EDUC 245 – Globalization’s Children: The Education of the “New” Immigrants in the United States
EDUC 246 – Forced Migration and Education
EDUC 291 – Independent Study
EDUC 303 – Decolonizing Development: Gender, Power & Education in International Development
EDUC 308 – Global Anthropologies of Education
EDUC 309 – Philosophies of Education
EDUC 310 – Racial Capitalism and Education Policy
EDUC 312 – Women and Education
EDUC 315 – Pedagogies and Publics
EDUC 317 – Democracy and Education
EDUC 318 – High-Needs Schools
EDUC 321 – Psychological Perspectives in Education
EDUC 332 – Disability, Difference, and Inclusion
EDUC 335 – Studies in Sound
EDUC 339 – Feminist Disability Studies
EDUC 391 – Independent Study
EDUC 440 – Special Topics in Educational Studies
EDUC 450 – Senior Seminar Capstone
EDUC 451 – Seminar on Curriculum and Instruction in English/Social Studies
EDUC 453 – Seminar on Curriculum and Instruction in Science/Mathematics
EDUC 454 – Diagnosis and Remediation of Reading Problems
EDUC 455 – Student Teaching
EDUC 456 – Dignity in Schools
EDUC 460 – Honors Seminar
EDUC 491 – Independent Study
EDUC 556 – Dignity in Schools
EDUC 591 – Independent Study
EDUC 593 – Special Project
EDUC 594 – Thesis
There is a reason that Bill Ayres became a professor of Eduction to teach future K-12 educators….
Did the majority of voters object to the school curricula or to the treatment of children and anti-asian bias?
If so and nothing in neo’s post indicates otherwise, San Francisco voters will vote in another set of radicals who push CRT and the officially approved narrative. Just ones that understand that imposing onerous conditions on children is verbotten.
The indoctrination will continue, count on it.
}}} she blamed Asian-Americans for using “white supremacist thinking to assimilate and ‘get ahead.’”
Ok, pardon my language, but this kind of fuckwitted thinking is the real serious problem holding anyone — but particularly blacks — back.
The whole set of behaviors which are being classed as “white” have nothing to do with SKIN.
They are about WHAT WORKS. About what makes a citizenry successful, prosperous, and consistently provides financial rewards. They will operate in mostly the same way no matter your skin color. It does not matter if you are black, “yellow”, red, white, or albino — and the fact that “orientals” and other asians (Indians in particular) do very well is because they are adopting those parts of “white culture” which WORK at making people successful and fairly consistently provide financial rewards.
Clearly, they manage to maintain a lot of their own cultural backgrounds, so you don’t need to “become white” or anything. Just assume that maybe whites do something RIGHT which has nothing to do with RACE, and see what parts of that you can fit into your own cultural qualities.
Q.E.D. — It has nothing to do with skin color at all.
And as long as you reject WHAT WORKS because you connect it, totally incorrectly, with “skin color” and reject it for that reason, guess what WON’T WORK?
Right: YOU, you dumbfuck idiots.
On the surface – because it’s ultra-blue San Francisco – this seems like a surprising development:
SF is like Seattle – it elects ultra-blue muni fonctionaires out of voter disengagement and media disinformation, but when the voters’ kids run into the consequences, they wake up and take belated action. London Breed has gotten herself quoted with a few lines against other consequences of the ultra-blues, and they may serve as smokescreens. But she’s as blue as the rest of them, and after all the non-prosecutions of the resident (and opportunist out-of-town) barbarians, she should be on the block as well.
Looks like the backlash may well have begun.
Hopefully it will begin to snowball.
When POC families will discover that these woke/progressive/Democratic Party/racist/call ’em what you want/ CRT policies are PRECISELY what’s holding THEIR children back and preventing THEIR children from succeeding—then it may well become an avalanche.
But it’s started.
Parents have started to wake up to the fact that the Democratic Party—among them many comfortable WHITES—are pushing this poisonous garbage…and when they will put two and two together they’ll discover that these comfortable WHITES are advocating policies that are keeping THEIR kids uneducated, down and impoverished…that these comfortable WHITE people are PREVENTING their kids from getting an education and getting ahead.
In short, they will have discovered that these “educators” don’t give a hot damn about THEIR kids.
At that point things should become very interesting.
(Though—count on it— the Democrats will accuse the Republicans of “politicizing education”, of “playing politics on the backs of kids and poor families”, etc. It’s one of those things that the Democrats really do well….)
Don’t mess with affluent liberal mothers’ educational and career-building plans for their children.
Single issue voters. They always protect their own while screwing everyone else. Nothing of any consequence will change.
OBloodyHell,
I’ve been saying the same thing for many years. In the aggregate, minority groups in America’s socioeconomic success closely tracks the degree to which a group embraces, neglects or rejects WHAT WORKS. Which at base consists of just 5 secular values. Education, acceptance of parental responsibilities, delayed gratification, familial loyalty and a strong work ethic.
Our Christian Capitalist dominated world civilization is dominated by capitalism, economically, because it’s the most productive and peaceful AND most allowing for hard, smart, lucky workers to get ahead.
Hard workers choose to work hard.
Being smart is an unfair gift, but choosing to use your God-given smarts in a smart, success oriented way is part of one’s Free Will. Or Not.
Lucky is hugely important in many small ways, and often in a few big ways – but most people’s luck mostly washes out (minus canceled by plus).
All are influences, to one extent or another.
Christian values, of loving your neighbor and the 10 Commandments (do YOU know them all? enough to list them? I had to check …), are the social optimal values for peace and prosperity among non-peaceful people.
It’s not “White” privilege, but American privilege. Allowing, but not guaranteeing, success. Yet allowing, more than any other system or society, in history, to achieve more success.
Unlike Euro commie countries of the past, anybody is “Free to Leave”.
If you can find a better country, you should go there. Probably.
For me, the country where my wife would be most happy is Slovakia – happy wife, happy marriage, happy me. And lucky; & smart enough to follow the opportunity; and fairly hard working. Harder working than my kids seem to be…
But I wanted them to have a better life! Easier, more secure, more full of love. It’s not clear they appreciate it very sincerely – for most kids, most of their own life is what “normal life” means.
Blacks hating Asians will get worse before it gets better.
It won’t get better unless Dems lose more elections – and might not get much better even after that, sadly. Winning the election – and then winning the policy battles, are both important.
But most important is culture. Yes, there is luck, and luck is unfair. BUT, hard work is available to all, and all who want to be successful should be doing the hard work to prepare for success.
Tom: “It’s not “White” privilege, but American privilege.”
Ding ding ding!! Great phrasing. Great insight. Where we need to place our emphasis.
And even those of us with a non-religious orientation can appreciate that the peacefulness of Western civilization within the wider world civilization comes from the adoption of Christian (and by extension Judaic) cultural elements.
To repeat my prior mention, see:
Larry Siedentop: Inventing the Individual
Tom Holland: Dominion
Looks like the backlash may well have begun. –Barry Meislin
I forgot to do my Pollyanna job and note this San Francisco School Board recall is a big indicator that things are changing strongly in our direction. (San Francisco!)
I believe a tidal shift has occurred and the Democrats and elites won’t be able to stem the tide easily. Though they certainly will try.
It might be a good moment to relax and consider what we want, rather than what we fear.
For the time being we have the wind at our back. It will not be always so.
That said, I am concerned what our opponents may try out of desperation, as they see their advantages dribbling away. So a watchful eye is necessary too.
“Our Christian Capitalist dominated world civilization…”
Eh?
“Officer, I didn’t inhale!”
Z is back to praise Xi and the CCP. Because the last 20 (?) years sets the stage for the great leap forward (part duex). Making the world safe for the Han, As it should be, eh Z?
Yo Om. Missed me, didya?
RE: “Making the world safe for the Han”
Considering you’ve just lived through 76 years of making the world safe for the Never Again Brigade… with every serious attempt to dam let alone reverse the rising tide of Western degeneracy and civilizational decay being slandered as a step backwards towards the ovens… perhaps you’d better hope that the Han do a better job of keeping the flame.
As David Goldman himself will tell you, there are more students of Western Classical Music in China than in the West.
Enjoy your Kanye…
PS: Where *is* this Christian Civilization? And of the top 1000 Oligarchs, errr ‘Capitalists’ excuse me… Just how many of them are ‘Christian’?
Not all gloom and doom. A man can live well in Babylon. The trick is to know where you are and not imagine you’re where you’re not.
Do you remember an Inn?
Never more;
Miranda,
Never more.
Only the high peaks hoar:
And Aragon a torrent at the door.
No sound
In the walls of the Halls where falls
The tread
Of the feet of the dead to the ground
No sound:
But the boom
Of the far Waterfall like Doom.
Z loves his Xi, and just like Herpes, Z is forever.
The real reason Z loves his Xi and CCP?
https://cdrsalamander.blogspot.com/
“THE STRATEGIC CONSEQUENCES OF CHINESE RACISM: A Strategic Asymmetry for the United States.”