How To Change the School Board
Examples of the 44 public schools in San Francisco slated for a name change because they honor people with troubling histories. A parent advocacy group reviewed the school board’s renaming process and gave it a failing grade for being “deeply flawed.”
By Joel P. Engardio
Are you frustrated by the way San Francisco’s public schools are run but don’t know what to do about it? I’ve heard from many people who are upset that the school board seems more focused on renaming schools than safely reopening them.
Most want to know if the school board can be recalled. Some have asked if we can stop electing the school board in a low information/low turnout race and let the mayor appoint competent school commissioners. I’ve compiled a list of options along with the pros and cons of each.
Tipping Point
When school board members recently debated appropriate school names, it took seven hours to bring up what should be the only topic of every meeting: how to better teach students in a pandemic. Kids who haven’t been in a classroom for a year are falling behind in academic and social development. Parents are stressed. Meanwhile, the private schools that serve a third of San Francisco's children are open.
Some schools honoring conquistadors or slave owners absolutely warrant a name change. But the widely reported incompetence of the renaming process undermined the entire effort. Without any expert historian input, it was based on cursory Wikipedia searches and riddled with errors.
This was a tipping point. How could parents expect the elected school board to handle the complexities of providing a good education to 57,000 students when the renaming committee didn’t know whether Roosevelt Middle School referred to Teddy or FDR? Its answer was to find fault with both presidents. But students need a school board willing to do more critical thinking than that.
Recall Solution
Recalling the school board isn’t easy. There are seven members and you would need to mount seven separate recalls to replace the board.
Here’s what it would take:
To qualify for the ballot, each recall requires 52,100 signatures. Online signatures don’t count. They must be pen on paper, collected in person during a pandemic.
You would ideally need 70,000 signatures for each school board member because the Department of Elections verifies the signatures and many can be disqualified for a number of reasons.
Collecting all those signatures within a deadline of 160 days will take a lot of resources. Imagine the logistics of volunteers standing outside grocery stores with seven clipboards in hand, asking people to sign seven different recall sheets. The pandemic limits where you can get lots of signatures in a short time. Muni stations at rush hour aren’t an option. A massive network of volunteers would have to get the signatures from their neighbors.
Realistically, the effort will require paid signature gatherers — at up to $5 per signature. A recall will depend on serious fundraising.
Timing is another issue. The four school board members just elected last November are not eligible for a recall until at least six months into their term. You can’t begin a recall effort for them until after July 2021. The three remaining school board members cannot be recalled less than six months before their term ends January 2023. So there is a limited window when all seven school board members can be recalled.
There’s a catch: If the effort to recall Governor Newsom qualifies, a special election in fall 2021 could complicate the timing for a local school board recall. Election law is complex and rest assured lawyers on both sides of a recall will be busy trying to get those complexities to work in their favor.
Local recall elections are different from statewide recalls. When a governor is recalled statewide, voters simultaneously decide to recall the governor and pick a replacement. In San Francisco, a recall only removes the person from office. Voters do not pick a replacement. The mayor appoints a replacement who must run for a full term at the next regularly scheduled election.
Read the Department of Election’s Guide to Recalling Local Elected Officials.
Charter Amendment Solution
A charter amendment isn’t a recall. It fundamentally changes how the school board is formed. Currently, we directly elect school board members. A charter amendment could eliminate school board elections and have the mayor appoint qualified commissioners to decide school policies. This is how schools are run in major cities like New York and Chicago.
School board elections are low turnout and voter information is even lower. Each member of today’s school board was elected by less than 17 percent of the vote. Most voters don’t know anything about the candidates, which are elected by narrow special interest groups. Many school board members over years did not have kids or any connection to education. The position is commonly used as a platform for higher office.
Mayoral appointments to the school board could ensure more qualified members who are experts in useful areas like finance in addition to education policy. The criteria for a certain number of appointments could include having kids who attend public schools. Parents would have better representation.
There would be accountability with mayoral appointments because everyone knows who the mayor is. The education platforms of mayoral candidates would have great importance and people could vote the mayor in or out of office based on how well the schools were run.
Changing the formation of the school board from direct election to mayoral appointees would be novel in San Francisco. It will require election lawyers to navigate the complicated state education code and how state law interacts with our city charter.
Here’s how charter amendments work:
The charter is the city Constitution. Amending it requires 52,100 signatures to put an amendment on the ballot. The signature collection must be in-person with pen on paper.
You have six months to gather enough signatures, but you must deliver them four months before the next election. Otherwise you have to wait until the election after that.
For timing, charter amendments can only happen on regularly scheduled elections. If there is a special election this year to recall the governor, we cannot put a charter amendment on that ballot. The June 2022 primary is the soonest we can change how the school board is formed.
Read the Department of Election’s Guide to Qualifying Initiative Charter Amendments
When All Else Fails
If a recall or charter amendment is not possible, the last recourse is to replace the incumbent school board members by voting them out when they are up for re-election in November 2022.
Doing so will require recruiting qualified candidates now and organizing parents, friends and neighbors in every part of the city to promote one slate of candidates to replace the incumbents.
It will take an extraordinary effort to overcome the powerful political machines and unions that back their own candidates for purposes beyond education. They are investing in the next generation of higher office holders. Many supervisors at City Hall over the years started at the school board. If you care about how the Board of Supervisors handles citywide issues, the current school board members are a preview of what is to come.
Sign up here if you want to receive my special newsletter for school board reform. You’ll get extra messages that only focus on schools. You will continue to receive my regular newsletter on general issues.