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Even dad and mom in liberal San Francisco have limits – Press Enterprise

San Francisco is arguably America’s most progressive city, so the lopsided recall of three school-board members on Feb. 15 stunned political observers across the country. Voters ousted Alison Collins, Gabriela López and Faauuga Moliga by margins of 59%, 48% and 42%, respectively. Other members were spared because they weren’t on the board long enough to qualify for a recall vote.

It’s not hard for anyone outside of the social-justice-warrior hothouse to understand what happened. Instead of trying to get the city’s schools running after the COVID-19 shutdowns, the city’s school board championed symbolic, far-left political issues that even most San Franciscans — including its liberal political leaders — found distasteful.

“My take is that it was really about the frustration of the Board of Education doing their fundamental job,” said Mayor London Breed. “And that is to make sure that our children are getting educated, that they get back into the classroom. … They were focusing on other things that were clearly a distraction.”

That’s spot on. As the pandemic raged, the board was fixed on renaming 44 San Francisco public schools. It abandoned the effort in April 2021 when the blowback became too much to handle. The effort was absurd, as the board sought to remove names of figures including Abraham Lincoln, naturalist John Muir and Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein.

To highlight the idiocy, the board tried to change the name of Alamo Elementary School after it “mistakenly assumed that (it) was named for the Texas battle and not for the Spanish word for ‘poplar tree’,” SFist reported. The board also tried to paint over a historical Works Progress Administration mural at George Washington High School — an act that brought comparisons to the Taliban.

More substantively, the board changed a merit-based admissions policy at a top high school and replaced it with a lottery system to promote diversity — something that annoyed the city’s large Asian American community. Most of these battles resulted in litigation — not to mention contentious public meetings centered on the imperfections of 18th century founders.

This ideological insanity obviously diverted attention from basic educational concerns. The city’s schools remained closed. The board and its allied teachers’ union seemed to be in no rush to resume regular schooling, thus allowing the city’s students to fall further behind in their studies. Parents seen with anger, which culminated in the rare recall campaign.

Even political analysts on the mainstream left viewed the vote as a wakeup call for progressives, seeing it as a chance for them to understand that, fundamentally, public schools are about educating students rather than pushing for vast cultural change. But the reactions of the losing parties suggest that they remain in their ideological slumber.

“Don’t be mistaken, white supremacists are enjoying this. And the support of the recall is aligned with this,” López tweeted after her loss. The teachers’ union continued to chide venture capitalists and billionaires, who helped fund the recall campaign. Left-wing commentators saw the vote as the result as part of a conservative political campaign — never mind that Republicans comprise less than 9% of San Francisco’s voter registrations.

The San Francisco recall proves that parents everywhere want their schools to provide quality education — and that elected officials should knock off the fringe nonsense.

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