SF's School Board Must Go

It isn't the foolishness; they did not do their job

There isn’t any question members of the San Francisco School Board should be impeached. Or, if there’s another way, removed from office.

And no, this isn’t another rant about the pointless shenanigans from the Board. You can run down the list.

There’s the decision to rename 44 schools, which turned out to be so slapdash that the Board has now plans to reverse the idea . Or the gay dad who wasn't diverse enough . Then there’s Alison Collins’ vanity law suit, , in which she sues for $87 million, apparently on the legal premise of, “How dare you repeat some of the hateful things I previously said about a racial group?”

The words of a Democratic strategist back in February keep ringing in our ears, “We’ve become parodies of ourselves.”

But those are all symptoms. There is really only one core issue here.

The Board hasn’t done its job.

Facing the worst pandemic in 100 years (according to Dr. Anthony Fauci) the Board had one responsibility — to safely and responsibly make the public schools safe, and then to get them open for the sake of students and parents.

Instead they bickered and dithered. Hours were spent on whackadoodle topics while anxious parents waited on line. Meandering meetings went on for hour and hours.

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And now, today, they are going to tell you that they have finally opened the schools.

Critics will say they have only opened a bare framework of a plan.

That’s ridiculous.

This would have to improve dramatically to rise to the level of a bare framework. This is a plan that proves the old adage: if the minimum wasn’t good enough it wouldn’t be the minimum.

First, middle school and high school students aren’t included. At all. Not even half days. I think most of us would say that is exactly the age when feelings of social isolation, self-criticism and stress are likely. (Just being 16 is stressful.)

But no. The teens and pre-teens will just have to muddle through with virtual learning until next fall.

For pre-school to fifth grade the bag is mixed. A neighbor’s daughter goes to kindergarten on Mondays and Tuesdays, gets Wednesday off, and then does distant learning on Thursday and Friday. That’s an hour of virtual school in the morning and half an hour in the afternoon.

Other students are in school as many as four days a week. It all seems haphazard. And it is definitely not getting the 52,000+ students in the system back in school.

And yes, it has taken me a while to get here, but here’s the point . . .

The San Francisco Public Schools were already leaking students. Confronted with a byzantine school selection system and what looks like a dysfunctional School Board, parents have been making their own choices.

Nearly one-third of the school-age kids in the city go to private school. That is among the highest rate per capita of any major city. (Private schools, by the way, have been open for months with over 15,000 in-person attendees and no significant pandemic outbreaks.)

We’ve all know parents who simply left the city to move to the ‘burbs where the school assignment is straightforward and the drama is only at the high school musical.

The real concern here is this will only exacerbate the exodus. In the Lowell High School student newspaper an op-ed says that “around 3,000 SFUSD students have been regularly absent from classes.” They just aren’t showing up for the Zoom sessions. They’ve dropped out.

And numbers from a New York Times what-in-the-world story detailing the School Board “turmoil,” show a 10 percent drop in applications for kindergarten for 2021-22.

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Losing students isn’t just embarrassing. It costs real money. Each fewer student means less money for a district that is looking at a budget shortfall that is likely to reach $100 million.

And yet, I’d say the School Board is actively driving students and parents away.

Again, you can point to the silly school name-change controversy. Or Collins’ pointless lawsuit. But I’d say there was one real flash point that could have been avoided . . .

Changing the admissions process at Lowell High.

We can all have opinions about Lowell and whether or not a “public” school should base its admissions on test scores and writing samples. The School Board decided Lowell should go to the lottery system, like other SF schools, to increase representation among Black and Latino students.

It’s a worthy goal. But we need to include a couple of points.

First, you may disagree with the academic model at Lowell, but it has been that way for decades. It consistently ranks among the top 10 public schools in California and has been named a “California Distinguished School seven times.

So, you have to expect that some people would like to keep the admissions competitive and academic.

Also, according to state education data, 33.4 percent of students in SF public schools are Asian, the highest percentage of any ethnic group. And, at Lowell, 50.6 of students are Asian, also the highest by a considerable margin.

So, in undercutting the academic model at Lowell, the Board had to know it was walking directly into a firestorm of criticism by alienating the majority racial group in San Francisco public schools.

Yet that’s exactly what the Board did. Supporters of Collins aren’t wrong when they say Asian groups, angry about Lowell, researched her Tweets and publicized the ugly, discriminatory ones.

Granted, there is a conversation to be had about this.

But not now. In the midst of the pandemic, with Asian hate crimes in the news, this is not the time to wade into a controversy.

What really should have been happening is finding a way to get the schools open. Instead, delays have made San Francisco one of the last major cities to re-open.

The frustration has been obvious. Angry parents (many of them Asian) lined up in virtual board meetings to express their anger. City Attorney Dennis Herrera actually filed a law suit.

But, supporters of the Board will say, it is the teachers who are holding this up. And that’s true in some ways.

But other districts have found a way to work with their teachers and get a compromise. Finding a way to make this work is literally the job of the School Board. They were unable to do it. If anything, they made it worse.

Ever plain spoken, Mayor London Breed makes our case forcefully. She offered two alternatives. First, that the Board bring in “the right consultants” to find a way forward to open schools.

Unlikely. When schools Superintendent Vince (cancel the retirement party) Matthews offered a consultant, the Board turned him down. Too many ties to charter schools.

In that case, Breed offered an alternative.

“If you don’t know what you’re doing,” she said. “You should step aside.”

Agreed.

Contact C.W. Nevius at cwnevius@gmail.com. Compliments and suggestions gratefully accepted. Criticism, not so much. Twitter: @cwnevius