On February 15, San Francisco will hold a recall election for three members of its school board. Big contributions are pouring in from the pro-charter plutocrats.
The pro-recall campaign has collected nearly $2 million. The anti-recall campaign has raised a small fraction of that, about $30,000.
Arthur Rock, a California billionaire who has given many millions to Teach for America and charter schools, has given $399,500 to support the recall.
If you set aside the pandemic and the renaming of schools and look at the long term, one of the major issues facing San Francisco Unified School District, and other districts around the country, is the rise of charter schools.
Charter school proponents, led by the likes of Michael Bloomberg and Betsy DeVos, are in essence trying to privatize public education. They want to create a market system where parents get vouchers and can send their kids to private schools or public charters (which typically do not have unionized teachers), starving the public-school system of money.
We all know the outcome: The charters and private schools, which set their own admission policies, will take the students who have the most advantages and need the least help. The public schools will wind up having to educate, with far less money, the most vulnerable populations, who will wind up will lower-quality schools—and economic inequality will get worse, which is fine with the billionaires.
Rock is a big charter-school and voucher proponent.
Again, set aside the pandemic for a moment. The current members of the SF School Board who are facing a recall have been dubious, at best, about charter schools. That may mean a lot more to Rock and his pals that whether Lincoln High School gets a new name.
The Mayor has endorsed the recall. If the recall passes, she gets to choose the new members. If the recall succeeds, the path will open for more charter schools.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Well, obviously, the pro public school billionaires will come to the rescue and pour millions into a save our schools, (the real actual public schools with unionized teachers), campaign. Oh wait, there doesn’t seem to be any organized group of pro-the-real-public-schools-billionaires.
As usual, accusations fly to deflect
attention away from SNAFU.
One of the recall targets,
Commissioner Alison Collins,
exposed the time worn
“white supremacist thinking to
assimilate and get ahead.” in
a Tweet targeting Asian Americans.
She said Asians rely on
“white supremacist thinking to
assimilate and get ahead.”
Even though she mentioned
Asians, she let the cat
out of the bag.
We can’t have that, it’s
too close for comfort.
What could be a greater
expression of
“white supremacist thinking”
than owning slaves, the
genocide of natives or
foreign POC?
Who wrote the rules of
“thinking” to assimilate
and get ahead?
Meet the new boss, same as
the old boss…
She also began a lawsuit against her own district for $80 million, which never went anywhere but took up a lot of time. She’s terrible.
I am still against recalls unless the official is a criminal.
She is horrific and I could not be happier to see the recall.
Peter W. Cookson Jr. (ed reform advocate, attached to Georgetown, educated at Harvard’s ed. school, has a masters degree in religion) is on the web page of people at the Hearts of Fire Foundation.
Jonah Edelman is honored at the Foundation’s site as one of, “Today’s Visionaries Igniting Idealism into Action.” (Others might fashion a different descriptor based on entries at Wikipedia and the Rethinking Schools site.)
Instead of a possible nomination of Ilya Shapiro, of Georgetown and the Koch network, for the Foundation’s “visionary” list, I plan to put forward the names (there’s a form at the site) of staff and directors from the Network for Public Education.
If Charlie Kirk puts forward, as nominees, the names of those who wrote the playbook that enables him to get tax dollars for his Turning Point USA charter schools, they will differ substantially from my nominees.
Ed reformers are an incestuous group, aren’t they?
Cookson’s Learning Policy Institute is funded by Gates, Zuck-Chan,
Walton heirs, William and Flora Hewlett,….
Using the school naming debacle as rationale? Really? It’s as though this group has never even attended a board meeting. Here’s what I think is going on. Real estate.
YIMBY leader Sonja Trauss
https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/mayor-tries-to-appoint-controversial-yimby-leader-supervisor-moves-to-block-her/
Appointed by the Mayor London Breed to ABAG, which works on land-use planning. Her group, YIMBY, supports building housing, but really only for those who can afford it, namely tech workers. If we build it, they will come. Low-income housing need not apply. She doesn’t really say that directly, but clearly that’s what they want.
Gentrification is a marriage of racism and capitalism. Money and power generally win.
I read a piece a few months ago that explained why Newsome was targeted for a recall. It seems California’s recall laws are the worst in the country making it extremely easy to recall elected officials. Every state’s recall laws are different, and if you click the next link, you may discover why California makes it way too easy to cause trouble.
The state’s legislature has to change that law to make it more difficult. If you look at Florida a RED state, you will also learn that it is almost impossible to recall a governor there and other RED states make it difficult, too.
https://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/recall-of-state-officials.aspx
The NPR report on the matter this morning made it sound like there was agreement on the left and right about these school board members.
NPR is Fox Lite for orphaned Republicans who left the Republican party over Trump.
NPR is a main course of billionaire bought, fascist propaganda served with a side salad of progressivism. Many eat it all up.
Back in the early 00s I started calling NPR either National Pentagon Radio or National Propaganda Radio due to their incessant pro-war propaganda.
I still listen to it when driving around, but shake my head at a lot of what I hear. It’s better than the other talk radio (almost all dominated by xtian reich fundie programming) but the supposed experts with whom they “chat” definitely are “republican light”.
NPR has moved uncomfortably toward the left and seems to have an insular view based from an urban, elite position. I am saddened by this as a long-time NPR listener and supporter. It’s like no other news exists other than commentary on racism.
“Arthur Rock, a California billionaire who has given many millions to Teach for America and charter schools, has given $399,500 to support the recall.”
No individual should be effectively allowed to finance a recall. By definition a recall should be supported from the ground up.
School districts could easily effectively minimize the influence of billionaires on these races simply by placing a $500 limit on individual contributions either to getting a recall or to any individual candidate in either a regular or recall election.
It’s absurd that school districts essentially allow their elections to be polluted by outside big money influences.
Agreed. There should also be a limit on donations to school board candidates.
$1,000.
Must reside in district.
District attorneys races, too.
So right.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/San-Francisco-school-board-votes-to-destroy-14050025.php
Old news. It won’t be destroyed. Here’s the update : https://sf.curbed.com/2019/8/14/20805300/sf-school-board-george-washington-high-save-preserve-cover-stephon-cook
from the update: “Under the new vote, the school board is commissioning an environmental study about the feasibility of covering up the illustrations with solid panels or equivalent material. The board also promises that the work by Russian-born artist Victor Arnautoff will be digitized so that art historians can study it, “but it will no longer be on public view at the school.”
The vote was 4-3 in favor of changing the plan. Board members Mark Sanchez, Gabriela Lopez, and Alison Collins voted in the minority. Lopez accused other board members Tuesday of “not listening to students demanding the mural’s removal,” but couldn’t swing the vote.
This mural is a radical version of history by a Left artist created under the New Deal.
Hi, speaking from San Francisco and as a longtime school board watcher and groupie … the recall of three school board members passed in a landslide. The misinterpretations across the land will be wild and were already starting last night. Someone in a politics Facebook group summed it up well: The interpretation from afar will be that San Francisco is repudiating progressivism. The reality is that San Francisco supports progressivism but “don’t be a dumbass,” and another pro-recall leftist said this board practically made a religion out of dumbassery.
I would say the tiny number of anti-recall votes were split between those few who actually did thing these board members were doing a good job and those who oppose the mad recall frenzy that’s going on all around the country in a GOP attempt to undermine democracy, and view this recall as fueling and being fueled by that. That take is that dumbassery is not justification for a recall.
Charter schools and privatization really weren’t an issue in this race, so it seems like the pro-charter money that poured into the pro-recall vote might also have been based on misinterpretations of the issues. That or they decided to see if they could get some pro-charter folks appointed by the mayor, taking advantage of the rest of the situation. I guess we’ll see about that. One of the recalled board members, Faauuga Moliga, had been appointed by Mayor Breed to begin with, and then re-elected. (Moliga was the first-ever Pacific Islander elected to office in San Francisco, by the way.)
I’ll clarify some detail about the Washington High School murals. Yes, they were painted by a leftist/communist artist with the goal of highlighting atrocities committed by our founding fathers, etc. Some students of color still objected to seeing themselves — people who shared their heritage — depicted as victims and slaves in the front hall of their school, even in a work that was calling attention to the injustice and oppression. I totally oppose destroying the murals, but that’s more complex than often portrayed. (An artwork elsewhere in San Francisco is an installation outside the Legion of Honor art museum showing a Nazi death camp scene, and I well remember that when it was being planned, there were objections from some voices in the Jewish community on the same basis —the objections died down and the installation has been there for decades now.) Meanwhile, in the Washington HS situation, voices like Bari Weiss in the NYT were sneering at the students who raised that issue as “snowflakes.” So this just gives some nuance to the dumbassery.