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Nevilledog

(50,659 posts)
Wed Feb 16, 2022, 09:26 PM Feb 2022

What Pundits Don't Understand About the San Francisco Recall

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/02/san-francisco-school-board-recall/

All politics is local. And that’s especially true of the San Francisco school board recall. Last night, SF residents overwhelmingly voted to oust the only three board members eligible for recall, including the particularly divisive Alison Collins (79 percent voted for removal), board President Gabriela López (75 percent), and even Vice President Faauuga Moliga (72 percent), the first Pacific Islander elected to citywide office, who tried belatedly to distance himself from the others. Within minutes of the results being announced, national news outlets and pundits of all stripes began breathlessly trumpeting this as a blow against excessive wokeness, a vote to “return to normal,” a “three-alarm warning for Democrats,” a “parental backlash for pursuing the renaming of schools and other progressive policy changes.”

Kinda/not really. If I had to boil it down, it was a for vote to put performance over performativeness.

But let’s review the array of irritants.

Remote learning: Against every other issue I’m about to name, some of which were on a slow boil before the pandemic, you need to understand that SF schools stayed closed until the fall of 2021, longer than most districts in America. Now: SF takes the pandemic damn seriously. Because of the AIDS crisis, because we have a truly multiracial city, because we have a lot of Asian American residents who mask up even in non-pandemic times (thanks to SARS, etc.), we took collective measures early and often to safeguard each other. And we did so across racial and class lines. So, it’s not just that the “schools were closed.” It’s that the board and the district didn’t do much planning back in the summer of 2020 to reopen them or distribute laptops or make substantive contingency plans, and they didn’t make much progress even a year into the pandemic. Parents started freaking out because there was seemingly little effort to even talk about scenario planning. Instead, in interminable Zoom meetings, the board focused on…

The murals: For years, there’s been debate about murals in George Washington High School, some of which show Washington standing over Black and Native peoples who are being subjugated. Students protested that the murals were racist. At least at the onset of this debate, most students were probably unaware that the heretofore obscure WPA-era painter Victor Arnautoff, who depicted Washington overseeing these horrors, did so as a way to critique racism and colonialism—a very progressive take for the 1930s. Again, rather than use this as a teaching opportunity, maybe even something to build a curriculum around, the board voted to paint over the murals, then backtracked, then decided maybe they should be covered—at a cost of $815,000. This alienated art historians, the local NAACP, actor Danny Glover, and even Matt Gonzalez, the uber-progressive who ran against Gavin Newsom for mayor in 2003. “Don’t whitewash history,” he warned in an op-ed.

*snip*


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What Pundits Don't Understand About the San Francisco Recall (Original Post) Nevilledog Feb 2022 OP
The recall campaign was organized and funded by charter school profiteers Fiendish Thingy Feb 2022 #1
K&R. There's a lot more going on here than at first glance. WhiskeyGrinder Feb 2022 #2

Fiendish Thingy

(15,361 posts)
1. The recall campaign was organized and funded by charter school profiteers
Wed Feb 16, 2022, 09:36 PM
Feb 2022

I guess we’re about to find out how SF will enjoy having its public school funding gutted to fund for profit charter schools, while the rich get vouchers for private schools.

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