The Recall of three San Francisco School Board members, which qualified for the ballot yesterday, doesn’t directly impact Oakland. But for “progressives” sprinkled throughout our city’s government, there are important lessons to be learned.
Lesson number one: progressivism is losing credibility. Not just among rightwingers, but among ordinary citizens, who simply want effective government, and who witness the antics of progressives and are offended and disgusted.
The school board’s antics are, of course, well known. First, they tried to rename 44 San Francisco public schools, on the dubious proposition that they honored racists. Ordinary San Franciscans scratched their heads and wondered how icons such as George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson, whom school children had been taught for generations to revere, could suddenly be turned into anti-American criminals. It was the sort of rewriting of history that novels like Brave New World portrayed in terrifying, dystopian starkness.
The head-scratching soon turned to anger, which was compounded when the same school board decided, in its wisdom, to end merit-based admissions to Lowell High School. Not only did that insult and offend Asian-American families, it had the same impact on most San Franciscans, who by now were wondering if the cost of so-called “racial justice” was not becoming too high. By dumbing down Lowell, the progressive school board seemed to be stating they valued racial quotas over high-quality education.
Oakland doesn’t have quite the same issues as San Francisco, but here too, progressives consistently run amok by imposing (or trying to impose) their crazy ideas on us. Probably the most notorious of these screwball notions has been “defunding the police.” It’s likely that the same three San Francisco school board members who are being recalled are ardent advocates of defunding. Indeed, the member who is most likely to be recalled, Alison Collins, last year led the board’s efforts to cut its contract with the San Francisco Police Department, an agreement under which the cops not only provided security at troubled schools, but fostered positive services to students through its youth and school resource programs.
Oakland progressives are always trying to think up weird ways to advance their social justice agenda. I remember the brouhaha that erupted when the Oakland Unified School District declared Black English, or “ebonics,” as a legitimate second language. As the blog “Beyond the Fourth Floor” noted, “The Oakland Ebonics Resolution was forward-thinking, progressive, practical, and scientifically and pedagogically sound. It addressed a major source of inequality in the school system and sought to lessen the Black-White education gap dramatically. But the public hated it.” So outraged was that public, in fact, that the Oakland School Board soon was forced to ditch the proposal.
You’d think that progressives would be more careful about imposing crackpot policies on a public that doesn’t want them. But one thing you can say about progressives is that they never stop trying. The progressives on the Oakland City Council have been repeatedly rebuffed this year, especially concerning their defunding efforts. But don’t expect them to learn from their mistakes. They’ll keep fighting for the same deranged things, using the same stale clichés, convinced that they’re smarter than ordinary people. That’s the danger of woke-ism: you have people who actually are less smart than the general public, but who are in positions of power to force their shenanigans upon us. Until, that is, we fight back.
Steve Heimoff