Presidents Day, 2022

Still good enough for San Francisco schools (npr photo)

The recall of three San Francisco education commissioners last week has prompted different opinions about what it means for progressive political rule in California.

On one end is the Chronicle editorial board, which said the recall vote has no implications beyond dissatisfaction with San Francisco public education:

Tuesday’s vote was not, in fact, a broader referendum on progressive politics or mask mandates or the ills of a hyper abundance of wokeness.

It was a plea for basic competence and for politicians to listen to the needs of their constituents.

Peggy Noonan opines that the vote is a rejection of woke Progressivism by moderate Democrats:

This was a vote against progressive education officials in the heart of liberal San Francisco. It is a signal moment because of its head-chopping definitiveness, its clarity, its swiftness and its unignorable statement by parents on what they must have and won’t accept. It was a battle in the Democratic Party’s civil war between liberals and the progressive left...

While the board was failing to open the schools it was doing other things. It produced government by non sequitur. The board focused on issues of woke antiracism and oppression. The problem wasn’t whether the kids were getting an education, it was whether the boarded-up schools had unfortunate names. They spent months researching the question and proposed renaming a third of the system’s 125 schools. Many were named for previously respectable people like Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Francis Scott Key and Robert Louis Stevenson. Their names were “inappropriate” because their lives and actions could be connected with charges of racism, sexism and colonialism.

On this Presidents Day we reflect how San Franciscans believed that naming schools after all the presidents on Mt. Rushmore, plus a few other dead white guys like Robert Louis Stevenson, John Muir, and Paul Revere, was still "appropriate," or at least not objectionable enough to change.

It may not seem like much to the rest of the country, but last week's vote gives hope to those of us who care about the City by the Bay that it can yet be saved from self-ruin.