School boards are important governance bodies. They embody local decision-making guidance for the critical responsibility of educating today's children to become tomorrow's citizens.
The role of governance is markedly different from the role of management, however. Governance involves strategy, direction and oversight on "big picture" matters. Management is constantly "in the weeds" of overseeing day-to-day operations and properly allocating resources.
It's the school board's responsibility to keep the focus on education as job one. Unfortunately, some school board members deliberately overstep their governance role in blatant abuses of power that relegate teaching behind and below activist agendas.
As with any governing body, a well-performing board is an outstanding asset to a school district, and a lousy board can often be an insurmountable liability. Indeed, states and school districts can learn from one another, and the latest lesson in ironic absurdity comes from the City on the Bay in California.
The San Francisco Unified School District's board of education made a mockery of research, history and governance last Tuesday night in voting 6-1 to approve an advisory committee recommendation to rename 44 schools.
The committee was formed in 2018 to "engage the larger San Francisco community in a sustained discussion regarding public school names, their relevance, and the appropriateness of schools named for historical figures" who engaged in certain presumably disqualifying activities.
The board resolution's list was broad and sweeping:
• subjugation and enslavement of human beings;
• oppression of women, inhibiting societal progress;
• actions that led to genocide;
• significant diminishment of opportunities to the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
The resolution also called for establishing "blue-ribbon panel" to lead the committee, which it defined as "a group of exceptional people appointed to investigate, study or analyze a given question."
Conveniently, the committee Zoom meetings were recorded, and interested viewers can go watch the panel in action.
In one session, a member wonders aloud whether historians should be brought in to advise them.
"Definitely not," the chair declares. "What would be the point? History is written and documented pretty well across the board ... we don't need to belabor history in that regard. We're not debating that."
Thus it was left to committee members to do their own historical "research," which was chronicled in a Google Sheets document shared on the Zoom screen and available for public viewing.
Not surprisingly, the non-historians got a lot of history wrong. The level of scholarly study was showcased in discussing whether Paul Revere's name should be struck from a school, when a committee member, seen typing on her computer for about a minute while the chair is attempting to put the committee's guiding principles on the screen, raises her hand.
"Um, I just found something right now," the amateur historian committee member says eagerly.
She then proceeds to lead an inept conversation that confused Revere's participation in a military battle fought at Penobscot Bay in Maine with the fate of the Indian tribe after which the bay was named.
"Paul Revere was actually commander of the artillery against the, with the Penobscot, what they call expedition," she says, as a crying child is heard. She picks up a little girl and continues over the wailing, "which is basically when, one of, what they called colonizing, they basically say, like take over land of the Penobscot people."
The committee member is apparently reading from an entry on History.com, which is the link she later shares. She's literally making this stuff up in real time.
So 75 seconds of Googling is what passes for critical thinking and study on a school board of education-sanctioned committee charged with exceptional investigation?
Cue the laugh track.
A few moments later, she confidently names the guiding principle Revere was guilty of violating: "the taking of lands." So Paul Revere K-8 school was marked "yes" for renaming.
The trouble is, he wasn't. The Penobscot Expedition was an early U.S. naval disaster. Neither it nor Revere had anything to do with colonization of the Penobscot Nation.
The 7-minute discussion of Paul Revere reads like a dissertation compared to the short shrift given Abraham Lincoln's consideration, however. It took fewer than 6 seconds to approve removal of the 16th president.
Before the chair had even finished pronouncing Lincoln's name, several members said "yes!" loudly and simultaneously. That was the extent of commentary.
The committee fumbled over which Roosevelt (Teddy or Franklin) that school was actually named for, but ultimately listed disqualifying reasons for both in choosing "yes" for renaming.
There are literally dozens of hours of this tomfoolery captured on Zoom video. Stretches were made to find cause to remove figures such as Thomas Edison and Robert Louis Stevenson, while other overt violations were glossed over, such as Malcolm X's oppression of young prostitutes as a pimp.
Criticisms of the whole process are mounting, including its folly while classes remain closed for covid and dozens of SFUSD schools perform below state proficiency averages. An online petition opposing funding to change the school names has already garnered more than 20,000 signatures.
File under "funny if it weren't serious."
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Dana D. Kelley is a freelance writer from Jonesboro.