The shocking situation at the San Francisco Board of Education left many parents wondering how the city ended these seven members. And that gave two parents from a public school in particular the motivation to push for a new way to select the group charged with guiding the education of more than 52,000 children.
They intend to gather enough signatures to put an amendment to the Charter in the June 2022 vote, asking voters to give up their right to choose school board members. Instead, the seven would be nominated by city officials – although whether all of them are nominated by the mayor or if divided among several officials is still under consideration.
The school district and the teachers’ union announced a provisional plan on Friday night to welcome some elementary students on April 12. But the agreement is not official, many questions remain and there is still no plan for elementary and high school students.
But even after all students are finally back in their classrooms and the COVID-19 pandemic is happily behind, the school board will have many problems to resolve – including the performance gap, funding crises and family retention shaken last year. City voters will have to make a big decision about whether the elected council is up to the task, and it is a choice that will shape San Francisco’s public schools in the coming decades.
Jennifer Butterfoss and Patrick Wolff have teamed up to form the San Francisco Campaign for Best Public Schools, a political action committee that will lead the task of turning the school board into a nominated rather than elected body.
Butterfoss is a former principal at Alvarado Elementary and now works for a nonprofit organization that trains school principals. She has two children, a preschooler and a third grader in Alvarado, and lives in Bernal Heights.
Wolff is a great chess master who won the United States chess championship in 1992 and 1995. A famous game of his from 1993 was shown on Netflix’s “The Queen’s Gambit”. He’s writing his memoirs. Wolff also has two children, a seventh grader at AP Giannini Middle School and a freshman at Lowell High, and lives at Sunset.
Butterfoss and Wolff are members of Families for San Francisco, the love or hate group that published an infamous report affecting the lack of facts and consistency of the nominating committee in choosing which schools needed new nicknames. In fact, Wolff wrote the report. The school council approved changing the names of all 44 schools, despite the committee’s embarrassing setbacks, but has since stopped the effort until schools were opened.
Butterfoss and Wolff say it is clear that city voters spend very little time educating themselves about school board candidates and tend to choose those endorsed by the teachers’ union and the local Democratic Party. Butterfoss blamed himself for not even remembering who voted in previous school board elections.
“I was not informed enough,” she said. “We have these really huge bills with a lot of different measures, and that 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 November elections in San Francisco could list four school board choices, meaning that 1.8 million votes could be cast in the race. More than 650,000 options have been left blank. Jenny Lam was the most voted, with 195,270 votes – or about 17% of the 1.15 million votes cast.
School board nomination for mayor is the method used by many major cities across the country, including Boston, Chicago, Washington, DC and New York – all of which welcomed some students back into the classroom, while San Francisco just now announced a vague plan to bring some students back in more than a month. Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot told the New York Times: “We would never have opened without the mayor’s control. It is quite clear. “
A 2013 report by the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, found that municipal control of public schools is one of the few ways to put education on a city’s agenda, because the mayor is directly responsible for schools. This generally means more money for schools and teacher salaries, smaller classes and a reduced performance gap, according to the report.
In San Francisco, Mayor London Breed’s only official duty related to public schools is to appoint a replacement if a school board member leaves or dies. She appointed two current members of the school board, Lam and Faauuga Moliga.
Although Breed spoke openly about the need to reopen schools, she has no say in the matter. And it is not clear whether it would support the mayor’s control, which has been suggested in recent weeks. When asked recently whether the mayor should appoint school board members, Breed rejected the idea and said he just wants schools to open.
Incredibly, a January school board document shows that when asked to list their top two priorities, only two board members, Lam and Kevine Boggess, included the reopening of schools. It appears that children in public schools in San Francisco will be able to visit Disneyland before they can return to their classrooms.
Gabriela López, president of the school council, did not want to be interviewed for this column, saying that she is “totally focused on returning to classroom learning”.
Jill Wynns, who served on the San Francisco board for 24 years before losing her seat in 2016, said the mayor’s control is a bad idea. She said that many of the people who complained about the current council endorsed them and that removing electoral control would make the average San Francisco citizen even less engaged in public schools.
“Do you want an apolitical school governance structure in the United States of America, where you are trying to protect democracy? I don’t think so, ”she said.
Separate efforts are making progress to oust three school board members and turn citywide voting into district elections, such as the Council of Supervisors. Supervisors Hillary Ronen and Ahsha Safaí are following the latter idea.
Ironically, the school council that is now considered by many to be very left and very ideological is elected by voters because of a conservative effort 50 years ago to combat the desegregation of schools. The mayor had appointed school board members for decades, but that changed after many parents were furious at the school board’s support of taking children by bus to schools in other neighborhoods to achieve racial diversity.
The parents put a measure in the November 1971 vote to give voters the right to choose the school board, and she won. The League of Voters and the NAACP opposed the move, while a myriad of homeowners’ associations supported it.
Proponents of the electoral measure imagined that the elected members of the school council would oppose boarding, but they were wrong. The anti-bus crowd had only two supporters elected to the school board in the next election, and desegregation efforts continued.
Wolff said it is clear that the system of voters who choose the school council is not working because it was not designed to work. It was designed to stop desegregation, and it didn’t even achieve that. He said it is important to turn this terrible moment for public school students into something better and lasting.
“We have a very special moment,” he said. “We are going to use our experience to fix what we did 50 years ago.”
San Francisco Chronicle columnist Heather Knight appears on Sundays and Wednesdays. Email: [email protected] Twitter: @hknightsf Instagram: @heatherknightsf