Education of a school board
The San Francisco school board’s selfinflicted wounds just keep growing. First came its hamhanded plan to cover up murals at George Washington High (since reversed), then its politically clumsy and historically flimsy attempt to rename 44 schools (since put on hold) and then its move to undermine the academic standards of the jewel of the system, Lowell High, by switching to a lottery system for admissions.
Could anything more be done to damage its reputation?
Oh, yes. One of the school board members who was on the wrong side of those three issues, Alison Collins, is taking heat this week with the discovery of a thread of tweets in 2016 that were decidedly hostile to Asian Americans. Those tweets were found and made public by a group of parents pursuing a recall against Collins and two other board members.
One of the recall organizers, Siva Raj, called Collins’ tweets a “naked display of prejudice and bias to the Asian community.”
It was, at a minimum, highly offensive — and all the more so for an elected official who has been championing a greater tolerance for diversity with a need to condemn historical figures with racist words or actions in their past. Collins 2016 tweets — two years before her election — took the Asian Americans to task in broad generalizations for using “white supremacist thinking to assimilate and ‘get ahead.’ ” Other tweets suggested that Asian Americans were insufficiently concerned about prejudice against African Americans and Latinos.
In response to the revelations, Collins texted Chronicle reporter Jill Tucker to say, “I’m not going to comment on social media posts from five years ago” and pointed out that she has spoken out against the wave of attacks on Asian Americans. To be fair, she also has been an advocate for more Asian American representation in curriculum.
But if she and other school board members can condemn Americans on the basis of actions a century or more ago, then surely a Twitter post from 2016 should be fair game in the assessment of an elected official.
The discovery of Collins is likely to add steam to the fledgling effort to recall her, school board President Gabriela López and board member Faauuga Moliga.
It’s hardly the board’s only problem. A lawsuit filed Thursday alleged that the board violated the Brown Act, the state’s open meeting law, when it voted to begin the process of renaming 44 schools that were named after presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln as well as notable Americans such as James Lowell and Sen. Dianne Feinstein. The plaintiffs include high school alumni associations and are backed by a legal team that includes powerhouse constitutional attorney Lawrence Tribe. The plaintiffs argue that the public was not given sufficient notice to comment before voting in January to require each of the targeted school sites to recommend a new name by midApril.
López has since announced that the process would be put on hold, but that did not satisfy the plaintiffs, who want the process to begin from scratch — which, presumably, could improve on the shoddy scholarship previously demonstrated by the board.
The easy solution, which would save the district legal expenses as well as further humiliation, would be to do just that: start over, bringing in experts to provide a fuller historical context than what is available in Wikipedia, and then bringing the community into the discussion before taking action.
It has its hands full right now with its more pressing mission of getting students back in school.