The shocking situation at the San Francisco Board of Education has left many parents wondering how the city ended up with these seven members. And especially two parents of the public school get the motivation to choose a new way to choose the group that should manage the education of more than 52,000 children.
They plan to collect enough signatures to place an amendment to the Charter on the June 2022 ballot asking voters to relinquish their right to elect school board members. Instead, the seven would be appointed by the city hall officials, but it is still being considered whether they would all be appointed by the mayor or divided between different officials.
The union for education districts and teachers on Friday night announced a preliminary plan to welcome some primary school pupils back on April 12. But the agreement is not official, there are still many questions and there is still no plan for middle and high school students.
But even after all students are finally back in their classrooms and the COVID-19 pandemic is blessed behind them, the school board will have very big problems to tackle – including the performance gap, funding crises and the retention of families that have shaken. City voters will have to make a big decision on whether the elected council is up to the task, and it’s a choice that will shape San Francisco’s public schools for decades to come.
Jennifer Butterfoss and Patrick Wolff have teamed up to form the Campaign for Better San Francisco Public Schools, a political action committee that will lead the charge of turning the school board into a designated body rather than an elected one.
Butterfoss is a former principal of Alvarado Elementary and now works for a non-profit organization that coaches principals. She has two children, a toddler and a third-grade class at Alvarado, and lives in Bernal Heights.
Wolff is a grandmaster in chess who won the American Chess Championship in 1992 and 1995. A famous game from him from 1993 was seen in Netflix’s “The Queen’s Gambit.” He writes his memoirs. Wolff also has two children, a seventh grader at AP Giannini Middle School and a first-year student at Lowell High, and lives in the Sunset.
Butterfoss and Wolff are members of Families for San Francisco, the love-or-hate-it group that published a notorious report that shrank the renaming committee’s lack of facts and consistency in choosing which schools need the new monitors. . In fact, Wolff wrote the report. The school board has approved changing the names of all 44 schools, despite the embarrassment of the committee, but has since halted efforts until schools are open.
Butterfoss and Wolff say it is clear that voters spend very little time teaching themselves about the candidates for the school board, and it tends to elect those who are endorsed by the teachers’ union and the local Democratic Party. Butterfoss blamed herself for not even remembering who she had voted for in the previous school board election.
“I was not sufficiently informed,” she said. “We have these huge ballot papers with a bunch of different criteria, and it can be overwhelming.”
Wolff added: ‘How did we all choose these people just a few months ago? Something is clearly wrong. ‘
It is also true that school board members are elected with little support. The 450,000 people who voted in the San Francisco election in November could name four choices from the school board, meaning 1.8 million votes could be cast in the race. More than 650,000 choices were left blank. Jenny Lam topped the list with 195,270 votes – or about 17% of the expanded 1.15 million votes.
The school board’s mayoral appointment is the method used by many major cities across the country, including Boston, Chicago, Washington, DC and New York City – all of which have welcomed students into the classroom, while San Francisco only now has a vague plan announced to get some students back in a month. Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot told the New York Times: ‘We would never have opened without mayoral control. This is very clear. ”
A 2013 report by the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, found that mayoral control of public schools is one of the few ways to get education on a city’s agenda because the mayor is directly responsible for the schools. According to the report, this has generally meant more money for school and teacher salaries, smaller class sizes and a narrowed performance gap.
In San Francisco, Mayor London Breed’s only official duty related to public schools is to appoint a replacement if a school board member quits or dies. She has appointed two current school board members, Lam and Faauuga Moliga.
Although Breed is outspoken about the need to reopen schools, she has no real say in the matter. And it is not clear that she will support the mayoral control, which has been driven for the past few weeks. When asked recently whether the mayor should appoint school board members, Breed dismissed the idea, saying she just wants schools to open.
Incredibly, a January school board document shows that only two board members, Lam and Kevine Boggess, included the reopening of schools when asked to name their two top priorities. It looks like public children from San Francisco will be able to visit Disneyland before returning to their classrooms.
Gabriela López, president of the school board, did not want to be questioned for this column and said she was “fully focused on returning to personal learning.”
Jill Wynns, who served on the San Francisco board for 24 years before losing her seat in 2016, said mayoral control is a bad idea. She said many of the people seizing the current council endorse them and that the removal of voter control will make the average San Francisco even less involved with public schools.
Do you want a non-political school management structure in the United States, where you try to protect democracy? I do not think so, ”she said.
Separate efforts are moving forward to recall three school board members and to turn the city-wide votes into district elections, such as the board of supervisors. Supervisors Hillary Ronen and Ahsha Safaí follow the latter idea.
Ironically, the school board, which is now considered by many to be left-wing and too ideological, is being elected by voters because of a conservative attempt 50 years ago to fight school desegregation. The mayor has appointed school board members for decades, but that has changed after many parents became furious about the school board’s support for transporting children to schools in other neighborhoods to bring about racial diversity.
Parents put a measure to the vote in November 1971 to give voters the right to elect the school board, and it won. The League of Women Voters and the NAACP opposed the change, while numerous homeowners’ associations supported it.
Supporters of the vote voted that the elected school board members would take action against bus driving, but they thought wrong. The frightening crowd elected only two supporters elected to the school board in the next election, and efforts to separate continue.
Wolff said it is clear that the system of voters who elect the school board does not work because it is not designed to work. It was designed to stop desegregation, and it did not even achieve it. He said it was important to turn this terrible time for public school learners into something better and long lasting.
“We have this very special moment,” he said. “Let’s use our experience to correct what was wrong 50 years ago.”
San Francisco Chronicle columnist Heather Knight appears on Sundays and Wednesdays. Email: [email protected] Twitter: @hknightsf Instagram: @heatherknightsf