The recall is supported by a diverse coalition of mainstream Democrats, progressives, and Republicans. Critics call it a power grab.
San Francisco voters will decide today whether to recall three progressive school board members, a proposal that has drawn support from across the political spectrum, but that also has driven a wedge between Democrats in the overwhelmingly liberal city.
The year-long effort to recall President Gabriela López, and board members Alison Collins and Faauuga Moliga is being supported by a coalition that includes powerful Democrats like Mayor London Breed, as well as some prominent San Francisco progressives. The race, which has drawn about $2 million in donations, has also piqued the interest of some wealthy conservative donors, including David Sacks, the founding chief operational officer of PayPal, who has contributed $74,500 to the recall effort, records show.
The leaders of the recall insist their efforts are not partisan. Instead, they say, they are focused on reforming an incompetent board that has prioritized social-justice politics — renaming schools named after prominent American figures, painting over an outdated mural — over more pressing issues, such as reopening schools last year and restructuring the district’s finances.
“We’re not trying to shift the balance of the board from left to right or right to left,” said Siva Raj, who spearheaded the recall last year with his partner, Autumn Looijen. “It is not a partisan effort at all. We’ve been seriously nonpartisan from day one. And I think that’s exactly why we are here, in this place where so many different people are able to agree to the same thing.”
Opponents of the recall are painting it as part of a national effort by conservatives to politicize public schools, and a power grab by Breed, who will be tasked with appointing new board members if any of the current members are recalled. They call the recall an antidemocratic effort designed to take advantage of a low-turnout election.
“These people are basically trying to take advantage of parents,” recall opponent Brandee Marckmann, co-president of the San Francisco Berniecrats, told the Washington Post.
In an email to National Review, Moliga predicted a close finish. He said he rejects the claim “completely” that as a school-board member he’s been overly focused on culture war issues. “My focus before and during this pandemic has been on increasing enrollment, fiscal responsibility, and improving learning and health services for students and families,” he said.
Attempts to reach López and Collins on Monday were unsuccessful.
Heading into Election Day, Raj and Looijen said they are confident that the voters will support today’s recall. Fundraising, a significant signal of support, has clearly gone their way.
“The grassroots energy has not dimmed,” Raj told National Review. “If anything, it seems to have only gathered momentum as we’ve kind of crossed each milestone.” He noted that the recall effort boasts more than 2,000 donors.
As they did last year when they were initially gathering signatures to get on the ballot, recall leaders have been strategically stationing volunteers at tables across the city to talk to voters, Looijen said. They have a task force focused on registering the Chinese-American vote. She said they’ve also registered hundreds of noncitizens, who are allowed to vote in the school-board election if they have school-aged children.
Asian-American students are the largest demographic in the district. Looijen said the Asian-American community has been mobilized in part by a board decision to end the competitive admissions process for the highly competitive Lowell High School, replacing it instead with a lottery-based system. The change in admission practices was part of an effort to include more black and Hispanic students at the school, and to lower the number of Asian and white students. The Chinese American Democratic Club in San Francisco is supporting the recall.
“There are a lot of Asian immigrants who come here, who have nothing. A whole family is living out of a single-room occupancy apartment, and they want the best life for their children. They don’t have connections. They don’t have money. The only thing they’ve got is the ability to work hard and do well in school, and that’s been the pathway to a better life for Chinese immigrants for generations,” Looijen said. “You have kids who spent their entire childhoods studying and working, studying and working so they can get into Lowell and get a better life. Now, all of a sudden, the rug was just pulled out from under them.”
Collins was stripped of her committee assignments and her title as board vice president last March after recall organizers unearthed a series of anti-Asian tweets from 2016, in which she chastised the Asian-American community for not speaking up sufficiently against Donald Trump.
Raj and Looijen, both of whom are parents and Bay Area tech professionals, decided to pursue the recall last year over a plate of Valentine’s Day brownies. They’d grown fed up with the board, which they say was not focused on reopening classrooms, but rather on social-justice efforts: changing the admissions process at Lowell; scrubbing Americans the board found objectionable — including Abraham Lincoln and George Washington, and even Senator Dianne Feinstein — from the names of dozens of schools; and a proposal to paint over the Depression-era mural The Life of Washington, which the board said contains outdated stereotypes.
The recall is focused on the three school-board members who are eligible to be removed from office. The three seats are up for grabs again in November.
Raj and Looijen have been running the campaign from their Haight Street apartment. Raj’s kids attend San Francisco schools, but Looijen’s don’t.
They believe their efforts already have made a difference. This year, the school board did not close schools during the Omicron wave of the coronavirus. Looijen and Raj believe that may be in part because of the recall.
“It does feel like the pressure that they’ve felt over the last year, and the recall being there, has maybe forced them to actually listen to parents for once,” Raj said.
But Looijen and Raj still have plenty of concerns. Looijen said that unlike some neighboring districts, the San Francisco board didn’t provide high-quality masks and Covid tests to students before the winter break. And last year, the state threatened to take over the board if the board members were unable to approve a budget that would close a $125 million deficit. The California Department of Education sent in an expert to help the district close the gap. Raj called the budget deficit evidence of “pretty severe negligence.”
Looijen dismissed allegations that the recall is being driven by rich conservatives and charter-school proponents, calling it “intentional misinformation from the other side.” What’s leading parents to pull their kids out of San Francisco schools is bad decisions by the board, she said, adding, “I don’t think there are that many right-wing charter school supporters in San Francisco.”
They believe the reason the recall has such a politically diverse coalition of supporters is because people across the political spectrum believe that public education is important.
“I think this is one of those issues that’s really a unifying force in this time when we are very divided as a country and as a city,” Looijen said.