San Francisco Unified: A cautionary tale of empty equity reform in school districts
Dear Allison Collins, (SF Unified School Board member, recalled)
In response to your article: https://alimcollins.medium.com/we-must-not-allow-right-wing-media-to-set-the-narrative-ba2e46dae4c1 which discusses the role of the right-wing media, and in particular, its role in your recall from the school district board:
San Francisco's school board recall wasn't a 'right-wing media' problem, just because the right wing had an opinion on fecklessness.
Do we really have to remind you that the school renaming project that sought to exclusively remove the names of white people from school names did zip to address the achievement gap in SF? Although Matt Haney introduced the school renaming proposal, YOU supported it and oversaw a bigoted and incompetent implementation that gained national coverage in the left-wing and moderate press and international coverage in the right-wing press. We would cancel Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, John Muir, Robert Louis Stevenson, Paul Revere, and Dianne Feinstein over their failings. But we would overlook those of Malcolm X. We would rush to cancel others, because they shared the same names as those who failed to meet modern standards. Where were the local Asian heroes in this process? San Francisco has many. You supported spending 10’s of millions of dollars to implement this, while it would make zero progress in closing the achievement gap.
Do we really have to remind you that YOU made astonishing, inflammatory, offensive, and bigoted statements and described Asians as house niggers…
… and broadly claimed SF's white and Asian parents were engaging in white supremacy, on Twitter, and during board meetings?
Do we really have to remind you that YOU tried to sue the public school district for $87M over the “emotional trauma” of being justly and democratically stripped of your committee position?
Do we really have to remind you that your support of canceling 8th-grade Algebra simply hurt SF students, and wasn’t supported by an honest data analysis? When it became clear that this direction was supported not just by plain bad science but also dishonesty and that it was actually harming not just academic achievement but also equity in SF, you remained silent.
Do we really have to remind you that your insistence on removing Lowells’ merit-based entry, at best, may have helped a couple of dozen Black students? This is the hill you chose to loudly die on while 85–90% of SF’s Black students were quietly failing to make grade level. What did you do to really address the causes of this? Or to improve their lot?
Let’s not even get into SF’s handling of school closures during COVID. Or the 4 years it took to get air filtration while the state suffocated for months on end from toxic air from wildfires.
All you achieved was division. You’ve driven white parents into private schools (an astonishing 50% (!) loss from kindergarten level!) and in doing so expanded economic segregation and racial segregation in education and reduced funding for SF’s public schools. I'm sorry but good intentions mean diddly squat if the outcomes are backward progress.
Do you dispute any of this?
Fox News didn't do these things. But you did give them the story and the means to undermine equity reform and make it a joke.
Yes, SF’s children deserve equity. The school district IS failing them. But they aren’t your personal political toy for furthering your personal views on how the world should be. They’re not your therapy for your anger. Personal anger at inequity alone is simply insufficient to get things done. The students’ interests were placed below your ego, and they have been harmed.
The reason that 76% of voters, including many from the Black and Hispanic community, took the extraordinary, lengthy, and costly step to recall you from your position is because your behavior was that of an unapologetic bigot, and who didn't have the self-awareness of their own harmful behavior to step down when it was clear their continued presence was harming school equity reform in SF.
Have the good sense to learn from this. Hear what the picture above is telling you.
San Francisco Unified could have developed a unity of purpose among parents. Instead, we had divisiveness and toxic equity vaporware. It could have focussed on the inequity of poverty instead of the inequity race, and found partners with shared goals. It could have pushed for expanding after-school programs (!), provided school buses (!!), and dealt with truancy and violence in the schools as the serious issue that it is. They could have listened to what parents were telling them. They could have constantly embarrassed the mayor and the city supervisors with the absurdity of world-class spending on drug enablement adjacent to subpar spending on schools and pointed out that the latter leads to more of the former. It could have constantly reminded the world that the city budget is $14B — per capita spending that is 40% larger than New York’s, but which spends far more on quality schools.
It could have spent its time and energy improving schooling at the bottom, instead of cutting successes from the top. You were the absolute caricature that the right-wing press loves. Were they wrong?