SF School board recall: an anomaly, a schism, a shift, or old-fashioned local politics?

A local school board election held on February 15 made national headlines. Three members of the school board in San Francisco, one of them the president, were recalled in a special election. Alison Collins, Gabriela López (the president) and Faauuga Moliga were all on the ballot to be recalled. And so it was, by 72% of cast ballots or more (it was 78% for Alison Collins), that these three were turned out, leaving the mayor, London Breed (who supported the recall effort) to fill the vacancies by appointment.

Source: recallsfschoolboard.org

A lot of reasons for how the recall election went -- and what caused it -- have been offered in the numerous postmortems written in the press, on Twitter, or discussed by talking heads on cable or public television. The media ecosystem, much like our politics and our culture, frames every issue around either/or postulates; however, the commingled reasons for the outcome of the recall -- and for it being held at all -- boils down to:

Backlash against a school board doing little or nothing to address the prolonged school closures during the Covid pandemic, while at the same time putting energy against a program of efforts to demonstrate commitments to social justice, racial sensitivity, and reparative equality measures; chief among them, the renaming of some 44 schools in the district that currently are named after historical figures deemed racist or having not done more to prevent racism and inequity. Sprinkle in a few 2016 Tweets from Alison Collins calling Asian Americans "house n***er[s]," the removal of a merit-based system for admittance to the city's most prestigious public high school (where Asian Americans frequently out-test the rest of the population), the resultant activation of that Asian American constituency, and an ill-fated attempt in 2019 to officially physically destroy a mural painted in 1936 to adorn then-newly opened George Washington High School (one of the schools the board had voted to rename), and, well... you get one tossed salad of agitation.

Oh, and I forgot to mention declining enrollments and financial challenges in the school system.

A few voices on the far Left claimed that it was a vocal minority, a group of right-wing racists and big tech oligarchs, that drove the outcome. People who came out and voted were “closet Republicans and most certainly folks with conservative values in San Francisco, even if they weren’t registered Republicans,” according to San Francisco Board of Supervisors President Shamann Walton. In San Francisco, calling someone a Republican is like calling them a racist baby-seal-clubbing Nazi. More left leaning voices sandbagged those voting in favor of recall as if they were the same or similar to the Canadian truckers (who themselves were being painted with a broad and unflattering brush), which concurrently figured prominently in the media.

Some have argued that the turnout for the election was not meaningful, and but a fraction of SF voters weighed in, tempering any meaning to be drawn from the outcome.

There are just over 500 thousand registered voters in San Francisco.¹ There was about 35% turnout, or approximately 175 thousand votes. At 72 percent at the low end in favor of recall, you get about 126 thousand votes, or around 25% of registered voters in San Francisco. There are plenty of local elections around the nation that have similar turnouts or less. Rare does a pundit suggest the outcomes of those elections don't mean much. Only 21% of registered voters cast ballots in the recent NYC elections that brought in a new mayor, new council persons, and a new district attorney for Manhattan. Nobody suggested that those elections were in some way illegitimate because of it.

But even considering the relatively small turnout when compared to, say, national elections, consider the number of voters relative to the number of kids in San Francisco public schools. The district serves 50,000 students. That's out of 90,000 school aged children (3-17years old) in San Francisco. There's no way to easily break out voters by those with kids in the system from those without kids in the system -- or without school-aged children at all -- but the total number of voters who cast a ballot probably run close to the number of voters with a direct connection to the school system.

No matter how you look at it, margins of 72 percent and up are not ambiguous. It's true that off-cycle elections see relatively low voter participation. It's also true that, unlike your typical school board election, this recall effort garnered nearly $2 million from a variety of donors who supported it. But instead of the reasons being cabalistic and nefarious, perhaps it's just good old-fashioned passion, with money being put where the mouths are. 

Another fact rarely mentioned in any of the coverage on the recall is that the three school board members recalled were the only ones eligible for recall due to time on the board. It's possible that ALL the board members would have been recalled had the opportunity for such action been legal.

Even when accounting for all the probable reasons the recall election went how it did -- "wokeness" overreach, an emergent Asian American voting bloc, frustration with endless school closures -- something to consider is the even bigger issue of just what school is in American society. 

The pandemic brought what and how school is to the foreground in a visceral way it has not been for some time. Parents got front row seats -- and sometimes the driver's seat -- to what public education consists of and how public education is conducted. The exposure is partially what was behind this movement, but is also demonstrated by growing attention to schools and school boards, teachers and teachers’ unions, class curricula, etc. Important note: it was the teacher's union that was responsible for the school closures in San Francisco, but they have no address to which an angry letter can be sent. So, the dog closest to the foot got kicked. 

But even still, in this case, we are talking about San Francisco here. This isn't a community that rallies for Trump or rounds up the homeless and ships them off to another town, or marches around chanting "you won't replace us!" This is a community with plenty of parents sympathetic to the “why” of school name change, or the teaching of racial inequality, or the codification of LGBTQ+ forms of address, or any other progressive proactive responses to changing social mores. The point was that these parents had been IN THE CLASSROOM, so to speak, and saw the bureaucracy not being attendant to their primary responsibilities at a time when doing so was more incumbent than it had ever been. 

Perusing the San Francisco subreddit (r/sanfrancisco), a lot of people posting made the point that the reason they supported the recall was less about the attempt to rename schools and more about a sense of mismanagement, which the renaming effort stood in for. When it comes to elections, there are any number of reasons a voter pulls the lever. Unfortunately, it's almost always because there's something they're angry about. And when it comes to governing bureaucracies, incompetently misplaced priorities usually rule the day.

Political stakeholders and the media that cover them will continue to postulate and gesticulate over what shifts in the electoral landscape mean. Our cultural bipolarism means the short-cut conclusions will consist of "either this, or that." Because media's machinery isn't well suited to the multifaceted nuance of registering phenomena and deliberating on their meanings. "Wokeness" backlash, Covid fatigue, a newly mobilized Asian American constituency, frustration with bureaucracy, anti-liberalism. It's all these things, some of these things, and none of these things. 

Cicero once wrote: 

“Men decide far more problems by hate, love, lust, rage, sorrow, joy, hope, fear, illusion or some other inward emotion, than by reality, authority, any legal standard, judicial precedent, or statute.”

There are lots of different reasons people vote but they can share common goals. That's what civic engagement is all about. You don't have to like the outcome, but you must respect the process. 

1. Voter data comes from www.sfelection.org. Student count estimates come from www.kidsdata.org