Lessons for South Bay cities from SF's ousting of school board racial equity warriors

Three members of San Francisco’s school board were recalled Tuesday in the wake of widespread revolt over their woke policies and the slow reopening of schools shut down by COVID-19. What should concerned parents whose kids attend Santa Clara County public schools glean from the fiasco, and what it took to slow down the hijacking of their kids' education? The Opp Now editorial team parses the NY Post's news coverage of the special election and warns that the recall may be but a speed bump on racial equity warriors' long march through our public schools.

NY Post: Furious parents launched the recall effort in January 2021 after arguing the school board was pushing progressive politics instead of acting in the best interests of children amid the pandemic.

Collins, Lopez and Moliga {the ousted schoolboard members} defended their records, saying they prioritized racial equity because that was what they were elected to do.

{Editors' note: The parent pushback on all the woke shenanigans started long ago in S.F. What's notable is that all the parents' letters, all the comments at public meetings did not move the S.F. schoolboard an inch. It required a special recall election to bring about change. This should remind local parents that woke schoolboard members may be *deeply committed* to their worldview, and in fact, believe they have a mandate for sweeping change based on race. Gentle, reasoned persuasion may prove unlikely to bring a course-correction.}

NY Post: “The city of San Francisco has risen up and said this is not acceptable to put our kids last,” said Siva Raj, a father of two who helped launch the recall effort.
“Talk is not going to educate our children, it’s action. It’s not about symbolic action, it’s not about changing the name on a school, it is about helping kids inside the school building read and learn math.”

{Editors' notes: Raj gets to the core of the issue--and the disconnect with woke bureaucrats. While taxpayers may think they are paying electeds and city staff to deliver core services--in this case education to their children--wokesters are working on a much broader canvas, and often view the fight for racial equity to take precedence over what they're actually supposed to be doing. You can witness this effort developing in San Jose, as city staff is starting to apply "disparate impact" metrics to city work, instead of success metrics actually associated with the work.}

NY Post: San Francisco Mayor London Breed, who backed the recall effort, said the parents “were fighting for what matters most — their children.”

“The voters of this city have delivered a clear message that the school board must focus on the essentials of delivering a well-run school system above all else,” Breed said in a statement.

“San Francisco is a city that believes in the value of big ideas, but those ideas must be built on the foundation of a government that does the essentials well.”
The school board has seven members, all Democrats, but those three were the only ones eligible to be recalled. The replacements for the three ousted members will be named by Breed.

{Editors' note: This sounds good from Mayor Breed, but be careful: she also recently said, with much ballyhoo, that she was fed up with the rampant drugs and crime in the Tenderloin. Her alleged "reforms" there did little to address the problem. Be on the lookout for Breed to replace the ousted members with activists who simply do a better job of hiding their agenda.}

NY Post: Board of Supervisors president Shamann Walton had slammed the recall effort as being pushed by “closet Republicans and most certainly folks with conservative values in San Francisco, even if they weren’t registered Republicans,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

{Editors' note: This is a classic rhetorical trick of local progressives: name-call whenever challenged. San Jose city councilmembers like Sylvia Arenas lets the "racist" charge fly when even lightly challenged. Progressive nonprofit activists float accusations of "white supremacy" with abandon. Anything to avoid actually debating the merits of their positions.}

NY Post: Collins also came under fire last year for tweets she penned in 2016 that were widely criticized as racist.

Collins, who is black, had written that Asian Americans used “white supremacist” thinking to get ahead and were racist toward black students.

Collins refused to take them down or apologize for the wording and ignored calls to resign from parents, Breed and other public officials.

In response, Collins sued the district and her colleagues for $87 million, sparking yet another pandemic sideshow. The suit was dismissed.

Many Asian parents were already angered by the board’s efforts to end merit-based admissions at the elite Lowell High School, where Asian students are the majority, prior to Collins’ tweetstorm.

Ann Hsu, a mother of two who helped found the task force, said many Chinese voters saw the effort to change the Lowell admissions system as a direct attack.

“It is so blatantly discriminatory against Asians,” she said.

{Editors' notes: It's no secret that most racial "equity" efforts are thinly disguised affirmative action efforts that discriminate against groups like Asian-Americans. These efforts were on display in the (failed) efforts of SJ progressives to dilute the local Asian vote via gerrymandering. Anti-Asian discrimination has a long history in local union activism, see here.}

Read the whole NY Post story here.

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