It’s often said that San Francisco is a one-party town. The SF school board is doing its best to change that, resurrecting an American party from the 19th century: the Know Nothings.
This is not a whole-cloth resurrection. The Know Nothing party traded in nativist xenophobia, which the current school board does not reflect. We’ll give them that much.
But the body overseeing schools deserves the comparison because its members have shown a willingness to ignore scientific consensus, data, and expertise, while shutting out voices that are inconvenient to their agenda. Meanwhile, many students are suffering social isolation, learning loss, and mental health crises. Parents and caregivers are suffering too.
The pandemic would have brought major problems no matter who was steering the ship, but the board’s pattern of know-nothingness has caused controversy and diverted attention and resources from the main goal: getting kids back to school as quickly and safely as possible, which all the science says is possible without vaccines if proper protocols are in place.
The board isn’t the only factor. The teachers’ union has set the bar for return higher than health officials have, for example. Parent enthusiasm for a return has been fairly strong, but unevenly distributed.
But the board sets the district agenda, and during COVID, instead of focusing 100 percent on a safe return, we’ve had a flawed push to rename schools; a shortsighted rejection of a reopening consultant; a two-hour public shunning of a gay volunteer parent advisor; and the abolition of Lowell High School’s special admissions process.
You might agree with some actions, you might not, yet there’s no arguing they’ve taken their eye off the ball. Even board president Gabriela López said so, in a February 21 tweet to announce that the school renaming push has been shelved until the pandemic ends: “There have been many distracting public debates as we’ve been working to reopen our schools. School renaming has been one of them.”
The admission came a few days after a fundraising group emerged to explore a recall of school board members or other reforms.
But the pattern continues. Earlier this week, López retweeted an opinion piece from UCSF doctors calling for teacher vaccinations pronto to break the “Gordian knot” of getting kids back to school. Reasonable, right?
The op-ed, however, included these crucial lines: “There is robust data to show that schools can operate safely without vaccinating school staff as long as appropriate mitigation measures are in place, including masking and social distancing. However, after 12 months of public health messaging that we are safest at home, teachers, other school personnel, and parents are understandably frightened.”
In other words: We could do this without vaccines, but fear, not science, is driving policy. So let’s reduce the fear.
López didn’t underscore, let alone mention, the message that our schools could open safely, like many public and private schools have done, with low infection risk even without vaccines. (The city attorney’s lawsuit against the board and district for a lack of a reopening plan cites these low-infection data. They’re not some big secret.)
Instead, she misrepresented the doctors’ message and hinted that conspiratorial forces were at play: “We’ve been saying for months vaccines are CRUCIAL, not only for a safe return to in-person learning, but above all, beating this pandemic! Holding it up as political plays doesn’t actually help us get back.”
The last time an elected official grumbled about vaccines being deliberately delayed for political reasons, it was Donald Trump. López had an opportunity to praise teacher vaccinations and amplify scientific consensus. What we heard, however, was chest-thumping and what seems like a hazy conspiracy theory.
The Frisc asked López: Who exactly has been holding up vaccines “as political plays”? She declined to elaborate, saying instead “we are fully focused on returning to in-person learning.”
Responsibility evasion
The deflection and lack of curiosity didn’t start there. Let’s go back to the school renaming push: As documented, the board’s renaming committee didn’t dig too deeply before judging certain names unfit to adorn buildings, notebooks, and hoodies, which led to several misreadings and blunders. The committee chair, when asked about turning to historians for help, said “What would be the point?”
Even those who support changing some names criticized the sloppiness. (This Frisc-moderated conversation delved into the need to both change names and do it properly.)
When López announced the halt, she also took responsibility that “mistakes were made” — a new twist on a time-honored tradition of responsibility evasion. (She did say that historians would be consulted if and when the process restarted.)
More dismissiveness came in January, when her own school district reported that kids of color and lower-income kids were disproportionately harmed by distance learning. López, like the entire district, condemns racism and consistently champions the needs of Black and brown and other underrepresented kids. But she brushed off the report: “They are learning more about their families and their cultures, spending more time with each other. They’re just having different learning experiences than the ones we currently measure, and the loss is a comparison to a time when we were in a different space.”
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These data didn’t come out of the blue. There have been many other reports, from management consultants to the NAACP, on COVID-19’s impact on students and families of color. What’s more, the board’s previous president, Mark Sanchez, who is still a board member, saw what was coming after only a few months of distance learning. He told the SF Chronicle last summer: “The sad fact, and nobody wants to say it out loud, is that if we continue with distance learning, the vast majority of students will not get anywhere near what they would get in the classroom. That is doubly so for students who are already vulnerable.”
In the February 21 statement to pause school renaming, López finally conceded what everyone else has long known: Distance learning has been harmful. “I know families are hurting,” she wrote. “I hear it from each and every parent I’ve spoken to.”
Never asked to speak
It’s not just about ignoring or misrepresenting UCSF doctors, historians, and their own school district.
A month ago, the board declined to seat a Parent Advisory Council candidate who was recommended by the current council members. He was a white gay dad, with kids in district schools, and there are no men or LGBTQ council members at the moment. (Diversity is a big deal for the board, as it should be.) But some school board members, including Alison Collins and Matt Alexander, objected because the PAC, which has several vacant seats, already has too many white people, and his candidacy was shelved. One suggestion was that he could reapply as part of a broader slate with nonwhite candidates.
The candidate was in the meeting for two hours and was never asked to comment. Why bother potentially learning something new?
This week, Collins complained about the slow pace preparing classrooms for return: checking for broken windows, stuff like that. Last summer, though, she and colleagues rejected the superintendent’s request to hire a reopening consultant who could potentially scan the horizon for these very problems. Their reasoning: The consultant also worked with charter schools, and that “central office leaders should be directly involved” in the work. (According to the Chronicle, Matthews told the board the rejection would be “a body blow.”)
I asked Collins about her vote last summer, and whether she was having second thoughts. She declined to comment, except to say “we’re focused on reopening the schools.”
The know-nothingness of the board has spread to new members as well. Last week, during a school reopening discussion, it came up that middle and high schools haven’t been part of the district-teacher negotiations. That caught Alexander, elected last fall, by surprise: “I just learned that the current negotiation doesn’t even include middle school and high school, and that was rather disturbing to me,” he said during the meeting. “That process needs to start immediately. It’s not a difficult task. It’s just about people power.” (Alexander then called for a full return to school in the fall, five days a week.)
The absence of the upper grades has been no surprise. That the early February framework agreement between the district and teachers only included elementary schools was noted in reports at the time. The district also said in late January that middle and high schoolers were unlikely to return this school year, then in a February 9 update to the reopening blueprint it made no mention of those schools, either.
Perhaps Alexander has had trouble focusing during the board’s recent eight, nine, even 10-hour marathon meetings, in which reopening updates have come toward the end.
I asked him about what he had said. Alexander declined to comment, deferring the question to López, then added, with only a slight variation on the responses from Collins and López: “I’m really focused on in-person reopening right now.”
Sounds like the know-nothing school board does know something after all. When the pressure is on, learn one line and keep repeating it.
Alex Lash is the editor in chief of The Frisc.
