Lessons missed in renaming effort
Imagine a project led by history teachers at San Francisco’s Abraham Lincoln High directing students to study their school’s namesake, including the good and bad in our 16th president’s legacy. Each student could write an opinion piece about whether Lincoln’s name should remain emblazoned on their school.
Imagine a debate in which students who wrote the most compelling arguments squared off in front of their classmates, teachers and parents. Maybe the student council could host a schoolwide vote on whether to keep or scrap the Lincoln name and choose representatives to speak before the Board of Education to make their case.
Imagine the learning — about history, about the presidency, about how to judge the merits of someone who lived in a different time, about public speaking, about persuasion. About America’s history of racism and the leaders who practiced it.
But no. For some reason, the San Francisco Board of Education is scheduled to decide which names to strip from schools this month, but hasn’t given the schools themselves a say in whether to keep or scrap their names. The school board will have its
first reading of a resolution from president Mark Sanchez on Tuesday to “review and sanction” the list of 44 school names proposed by a volunteer panel to be tossed and will likely decide on the names to be removed on Jan. 19.
The school communities that lose their names can propose alternatives to the panel by April, and the panel will
consider those before forwarding its list of new names to the school board for a vote.
Many families — and Mayor London Breed — have slammed the school board for engaging in this process at all during a pandemic with schools shuttered. But it could have served as a spark in the otherwise dull days of distance learning if kids got to research their schools’ namesake and help decide its fate. Frankly, they probably could have done a better job than the adults.
There’s no question some San Francisco school names should be relegated to the scrap heap of history — here’s looking at you, Father Junipero Serra. But the way the panel has landed on 44 names including Lincoln, U. S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein and abolitionist poet James Lowell would surely not pass muster with a high school history teacher. It’s been short on research, arbitrary and factually inaccurate at times.
It demonstrates that politics is sadly more important than education in this city. And that making adults feel good is more important than teaching kids.
“It’s somewhat indicative of the school district where they have these topdown processes that don’t engage with the classroom teachers or the students or the families,” said Michael McCarthy, whose son, a junior at Lincoln High, was too busy with yet another day of Zoom school to talk for this column.
The school board unanimously passed a resolution in 2018 to create a panel to examine the historical figures our schools are named for and recommend which ones to keep or ditch. That’s certainly an important effort, especially now as the country undergoes a long overdue racial reckoning. And it’s been great to see schools in recent years get new names — because the schools wanted them — like Fairmount Elementary becoming Dolores Huerta Elementary.
Sanchez didn’t respond to requests for comment. Neither did Jeremiah Jeffries, the chair of the volunteer panel. Former school board members Stevon Cook and Matt Haney, who coauthored the 2018 resolution with Sanchez, declined to comment. Haney, now a supervisor, typically comments on everything.
Perhaps the fact that I couldn’t find anybody behind this effort who wanted to talk about it publicly is a sign the effort isn’t working.
Families for San Francisco, an advocacy group, watched recordings of the panel’s Zoom meetings from the past year and published a report outlining major concerns. The original resolution called for engaging San Francisco in a “sustained discussion” about renaming schools, but that hasn’t happened.
Instead, the panel took the decisionmaking entirely upon itself. The panel opted to put Lowell on the removal list because his views toward Black people “wavered,” but Families for San Francisco found a biography of the abolitionist poet that stated he “unequivocally advocated” for Black people to have the right to vote. Why not let Lowell students research the truth for themselves?
And the problems go on. The panel voted to scrap James Lick for funding the awful Pioneer Monument, but he was dead by the time it was funded. The panel didn’t know which Roosevelt — Teddy or Franklin Delano — it was talking about when it came to Roosevelt Middle School. Turns out it was Teddy, and he was nixed.
The panel didn’t seek
the guidance of historians, instead doing its own research in a cursory fashion using mostly Wikipedia entries and Google search results including “10 Things You May Not Know About Paul Revere,” according to the report. ( Revere? A goner.)
It also opted to remove a name if that person had one problematic incident in their life rather than taking in the full picture.
Except for Malcolm X. The group had a full, interesting discussion about his misogyny, including working as a pimp in his youth, but opted not to recommend removing his name from the Hunters Point elementary school because they said it was fairer to judge him for the entirety of his life.
But the panel’s forgiving views of Malcolm X, it seems, didn’t apply to anybody else — including U. S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein. Feinstein got the boot from the panel
largely because she briefly replaced a rippeddown Confederate flag from a display at City Hall before permanently removing it.
Mayor George Moscone, on the other hand, did nothing about the same Confederate flag during his tenure preceding Feinstein’s, but Moscone Elementary is not in jeopardy of losing its name. Why not? Who knows?
A group of families from Feinstein last week wrote a lengthy letter to the panel, the superintendent, school board members and others explaining why they want to keep their name. They pointed out she was a trailblazer for women’s rights, authored 500 pieces of legislation and wrote the only assault weapons ban ever passed in the United States.
One letter signer was Bryan McDonald, who has a kindergartner and secondgrader at the school. He said the school was confused to get a notice it had to change its name — especially since the school board just approved the Feinstein name 15 years ago. Previously, it was called Parkside. ( Sanchez, a longtime school board member, even has his name on the school’s dedication plaque.)
“They don’t care what people think,” McDonald said of the panel. “It’s, ‘ we’re going to make this decision for you because we don’t think you can make a wise decision on your own.’ ”
His 7yearold son, Travis, shared his views on the matter.
“I like it the way it is,” he said.
I asked Travis if he knew Feinstein was the city’s first female mayor.
“No! I didn’t know that!” he exclaimed. “But I do know there’s a woman vice president now! And she’ll probably be elected president.”
Kamala Harris Elementary does have a nice ring to it. Maybe that can replace one of the scrapped names. And in the meantime, kids like Travis should be taught about who their school is named after and have a say in deciding whether to keep it.
Isn’t that what school is all about?