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brooklynite

(93,840 posts)
Wed Feb 16, 2022, 09:12 AM Feb 2022

San Francisco school board members ousted in parental backlash

Politico

San Francisco voters have recalled three school board members who spurred a parental backlash for pursuing the renaming of schools and other progressive policy changes as classrooms remained empty during the coronavirus pandemic.

Initial returns Tuesday night showed that voters overwhelmingly voted “yes” to recall Alison Collins, Gabriela López and Faauuga Moliga, three of the board’s seven members — 79 percent voted to remove Collins, 75 percent to remove Lopez and 73 percent to remove Moliga. The early results were dramatic enough that backers quickly declared victory and Moliga acknowledged his apparent defeat..

...snip...

“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,” said San Francisco Mayor London Breed, who supported the recall, 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.”

...snip...

Schools in San Francisco remained shuttered longer than in most other cities, even in California. Students there did not return full time to the classroom until last August

As distance learning dragged on, school board members drew national ridicule as they moved to rename dozens of institutions, including Abraham Lincoln High School. A push to end merit-based admissions at the prestigious Lowell High School infuriated some parents and drew derisive national coverage; Collins raised the temperature further by suing the district for $87 million after she was penalized for an old tweet accusing Asian-Americans of “using white supremacist thinking to get ahead.”


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San Francisco school board members ousted in parental backlash (Original Post) brooklynite Feb 2022 OP
Okay. I am a progessive. nycbos Feb 2022 #1
Alison Collins deserves to lose her seat in S.F. dalton99a Feb 2022 #2
She seems like a nice person. nycbos Feb 2022 #3
They thought real life was Twitter Sympthsical Feb 2022 #4
Yup nycbos Feb 2022 #7
What a great article Sympthsical Feb 2022 #8
NOT in favor of recalls in general stopdiggin Feb 2022 #5
As somebody said above Twitter is nothing like real life. NT cinematicdiversions Feb 2022 #6

nycbos

(6,033 posts)
1. Okay. I am a progessive.
Wed Feb 16, 2022, 09:18 AM
Feb 2022

But removing Abraham Lincoln's name from a school and accusing Asian-Americans of 'using white supremacist thinking to get ahead' makes me roll my eyes.

nycbos

(6,033 posts)
3. She seems like a nice person.
Wed Feb 16, 2022, 09:32 AM
Feb 2022


And in terms of "assimliation and getting ahead" is she implying that immigrants want to integrate into American society? Is she saying that they want their kids to have it better, making a new immigrant group truly part of the broader American society. I thought that was the whole point of America. Silly me.

nycbos

(6,033 posts)
7. Yup
Wed Feb 16, 2022, 10:55 AM
Feb 2022
https://newsletters.theatlantic.com/deep-shtetl/61e06b2c55e52500217add01/your-bubble-is-not-the-culture-lin-manuel-miranda-harry-potter/


This article discusses how some time journalists and another analysts mistake twitter for real life. It mostly discusses pop-culture but it also discusses politics, gives the example of how Joe Biden had fewer Twitter followers then many Democratic candidates but had more voters in the primary.

Sympthsical

(8,928 posts)
8. What a great article
Wed Feb 16, 2022, 11:48 AM
Feb 2022

Thanks for highlighting it. It should be required reading before anyone logs into social media.

If my posts on this website could be said to have a theme, it would be consonant with this. The idea that this is a bubble, what is actually happening out in the world is not the carefully nurtured and manicured depiction of it here. This is Plato's cave wall, and the shapes being carried past the fire are highly filtered and selected to reinforce confirmation biases and narratives. Questioning them can be very hard and met with scorn or even sanction.

But again and again, I find the preoccupations of Twitter world just do not resonate in real life. No one cares about most of the stuff that goes on there. One problem we have is that we have a lazy MSM who are themselves on Twitter all day, and who decided reporting on that is a lot easier than doing actual, shoes on the ground reporting. Sitting at a desk in front of a camera all day talking about what goes on across Twitter is a dream job for anyone.

But it isn't a useful guide in understanding where most people are in this country.

As the author notes, bubbles are fine as long as you are aware you are in one. When people don't venture outside of them, it's hard to consider them to be informed people. I mean, someone who hangs out on Star Wars forums all day is super informed about Star Wars and has strong ideas about that. But that doesn't make them informed people in general.

"I'm informed, because I read about politics all day." Ok, but if what you're reading is only a very narrow band of political thought that you already agree with, are you really informed in the broadest sense? I see stuff everyday where I'm thinking, "This person literally has no idea what they're talking about, but they seem to think they do," and then it gets taken up by others because it has been mistaken for good information.

We're talking daily.

And it's why polarization is getting worse. How can you fix a problem if you can't even figure out that there is one?

stopdiggin

(11,089 posts)
5. NOT in favor of recalls in general
Wed Feb 16, 2022, 09:57 AM
Feb 2022

but this was kind of a (sad) illustration of - complete progressive (I don't know what else to label it) overreach - and a peculiar brand of focused tone deafness. (and if San Francisco is ready to put a fork in you .... )

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