I hate recalls, but since they exist in California, I’m quite glad for this result.
The San Francisco School Board has been a joke and this recall shows that even in bright blue San Francisco, there is no room for progressive performance art.
24% turnout for a recall school board election held in February is amazing. Yes, San Francisco is a highly educated city and that does correlate with higher voter turnout, but 24% is still very impressive.
The reasons are several. Keeping the schools closed indefinitely during Covid. The hand wringing over changing the names of schools, even including Abraham Lincoln. And, of course, changing selective school admission policies to be a lottery rather than based on merit.
Next up, in June, is a potential recall of the ultra progressive District Attorney Chesa Boudin.
Since recalls are inherently anti-democratic and disruptive, my default is to vote no unless there is some particularly egregious and destructive behavior. In my opinion, the only example of that in this case is Allison Collins’ quixotic lawsuit. The rest of it is just a question of priorities that should have been voted for or against in the next election just nine months away. Instead, we get Republican manipulation of elections that they can’t win fair and square, just like the failed Newsom recall.
I pretty much agree with this, and as a resident of SF I did vote no. Sorry to see the recall succeeded, but I’m not surprised. Everyone spent so much more time worrying about the school name changes than the school board did. The paid arguments in the voters’ guide were full of “they are awful, awful people who did a bad job and had the wrong priorities” with very little detail and no explanation of why this change had to be made now.
I predict the Boudin recall will not succeed. 95% of the things said about his policies are complete BS.
The school system only has 55k kids which is really low for a city that size. It’s not that many are going to private schools , there are just not many kids.
Out of a population approaching 900K, about 120K are 18 or under, and about 82K of school age (6 to 18) as of 2020. That means that 1/3 of children of school age are either in private schools or home-schooled. I’m not sure, though, that any of this has to do with a bad school board.
This Mother Jones piece seems to have a good take on why so many parents of San Francisco public school children were pissed off at the school board - and these three members in particular.
“The budget: For a whole bunch of reasons, including a (very recently overhauled) lottery system that tried to be progressive but essentially made school segregation worse (such unintended consequences are a theme in SF politics), we have low, and declining, public school participation. That, and poor management, has led to a $125 million shortfall, one that got worse because pandemic school closures cut the district off from federal funds. You’d think that getting the budget into line would be the top priority for the board. You would be wrong. They continually kicked that can down the road, and only under threat of state takeover did they grudgingly pass a budget. And—of note re: “Why recall them now when there’s an election in a few months?”—the details of the budget, including staffing cuts, need to be hammered out by June.”
It’s nice to have an explanation, even if it’s too late to do me any good. Does it say anything about why those three in particular, when there are seven members of the board?
Many upper middle class SF residents feel like they have to move to the East Bay or South Bay once they start planning to have children because they perceive the schooling options in SF proper to be unacceptably bad. Whether that perception is accurate is an entire debate but it’s a pretty prevalent perception and is a large part a reason for the relative lack of children in SF.
From what I’ve read, it has to do with how long they’ve been in office. Only those members who have been in office over a certain length of time, one year IIRC, are eligible for recall.