When voters ousted San Francisco Unified School District board members in 2022, news outlets attributed it to outraged parents & Asian Americans. But that’s not what happened — or how school board elections usually work.
By Vladimir Kogan, author of No Adult Left Behind
San Francisco voters staged a mutiny in February 2022, removing three sitting school board incumbents in the city’s first successful recall in more than century.
The election made headlines across the country, and with the benefit of hindsight, it is clear that the coverage suffered from many of the pathologies that plague educational journalism today.
Reporters wrongly claimed that “parents” had spoken and rushed to draw national implications based on flawed accounts of voter intent.
The reporting and ultimately debunked analysis on San Francisco’s recall show how easy it is to let a good narrative get way ahead of the facts—and illustrates that much bigger, but perhaps less viral, stories about the pathologies of local democracy often lie below the surface.
It’s useful to review what happened.
It’s easy to let a good narrative get way ahead of the facts.
The February vote came after a series of scandals surrounding the San Francisco Unified School District too ridiculous to make up.
Instead of resuming in-person learning in fall of 2020, after the initial pandemic closures, the district was too busy removing the names of alleged racists, oppressors, and colonizers—including Abraham Lincoln and the city’s first woman mayor, Dianne Feinstein—from school building.
When observers noted that many of justifications for the changes were full of historical errors—the committee in charge of the renaming apparently looked up the wrong “Sanchez” on Wikipedia, and got other basic facts wrong—the school board doubled down.
A few months later, years’ old tweets from the school board’s African-American vice president emerged—tweets in which she called Asians “house n****r[s]” and implied they were complicit in white supremacy.
The revelation could not have come at a more awkward time, as the school board had just made changes to admissions to San Francisco’s most prestigious high school with the intent of increasing racial equity by reducing Asian (and white) over-enrollment.
At his wit’s end over the board’s antics, San Francisco’s superintendent announced he was leaving in spring 2021. He was ultimately persuaded to stay, but with a new contract in which the school board had to humiliate itself by promising to stop micromanaging the district, agree to focus on getting kids back into school, and commit to actually reviewing the background documents ahead of board meetings.
By the time of the recall, San Francisco voters had had enough of this clown show and voted out several incumbents.
However, both local and national press accounts repeatedly sought to frame the election outcome around angry parents and a large turnout of Asian American voters.
In a story published the day after the election, the New York Times wrote that “the recall was a victory for parents who were angered that the district spent time deciding whether to rename a third of its schools last year instead of focusing on reopening them.”
On the basis of preliminary and incomplete election statistics, the article also claimed the election was “a demonstration of Asian American electoral power, a galvanizing moment for Chinese American voters in particular who turned out in unusually large numbers for the election,” dynamics it claimed had “echoes of debates in other cities.”
Some local journalists repeated these claims. San Francisco Chronicle’s political reporter asserted that “a new, parent-fueled coalition” had ousted the school board incumbents, while Bay Area NPR affiliate KQED reported that the election had brought many first-time Chinese voters to the polls.
Other outlets agreed. Politico described the election as a “parental backlash” and the New York Post called it “San Francisco’s Parental Revolt.” ABC World News said the election represented “parents’ anger boiling over at the ballot box.” For an interview piece with the San Francisco’s Chinese American Democratic Club, Slate chose the headline “Why San Francisco’s Asians Voted to Recall ‘Progressive’ Members of the School Board.”
When the official voter file became available a few months later, however, neither account turned out to be true. Sixty percent of the voters in this low-turnout election were over the age of 50—hardly the profile of a typical “parent.”
And consumer profile data I purchased for my forthcoming book showed that only 22 percent of voters who cast a ballot in the recall had children in their household. The share of Asian voters, estimated at 38 percent, had hardly budged from a different election held six months before that had nothing to do with the city’s school district.
Press accounts repeatedly sought to frame the election outcome around angry parents and a large turnout of Asian American voters.
Having completely misidentified the key voting blocs responsible for the election outcomes, journalists compounded their errors and made grandiose predictions that also turned out to be wrong.
The Los Angeles Times asserted that “Democrats and Republicans alike see the city not as an outlier, but as “a potential bellwether,” with parent complaints about pandemic-era schooling “resonat[ing] far outside San Francisco and underscores Democrats’ precariousness as they head into the midterm elections.”
The Washington Examineragreed that the recall “bodes ill for the Democratic Party in 2022” and, in an otherwise sensible piece for Mother Jones pushing back against over-reading the election, editor Clara Jeffery predicted “a massive wave of anti-incumbent fever this fall.”
Neither the red nor anti-incumbent waves ever came. Abortion and inflation, not education, ultimately dominated the November 2022 election, and Democrats massively outperformed expectations.
Abortion and inflation, not education, ultimately dominated the November 2022 election.
To be sure, journalists’ temptation to interpret individual events through the lens of broader trends and try to contextualize them is an understandable and generally a healthy one.
When I covered local education at the Voice of San Diego, my colleagues and I jokingly referred to the requisite “Comes At a Time” section of the story—as in, “The [topic of article] comes at a time of … [fill in the controversy or hot topic of the day].”
But insightful analysis is hard to execute well in the context of elections, because election outcomes rarely have monocausal explanations, and because trying to discern what really mattered in an election is a bit like reading tea leaves or interpreting an inkblot in a Rorschach test.
Unfortunately, getting it wrong has real-world implications. As political science research shows, media narratives about electoral “mandates”—real or imagined—often become self-fulfilling prophecies and influence what elected officials do in office.
The other danger is that, by trying to discern the message conveyed by a particular school board race, reporters may overlook many of the disturbing patterns that hold consistently across elections.
By trying to discern the message conveyed by a particular school board race, reporters may overlook many of the disturbing patterns that hold consistently across elections.
The San Francisco recall, for example, was hardly an outlier in terms of the demographics of the electorate.
Parents almost never represent a majority of those casting ballots and the typical voter is much more likely to be a senior citizen without school-aged kids or much direct skin in the game tied to the outcome of the election.
This may explain why student academic considerations rarely seem to matter much to who voters ultimately support in these contests.
The real story in San Francisco was not what happened that February but how such a dysfunctional school board, so focused on the performative, came to power in the first place.
It is a story that too rarely gets told, but one that deserves much more attention.
Local control is a core value of many people, but as it turns out such control may stand in the way of effective schools.
In my forthcoming book, I show that voters who participate in school board elections routinely prioritize symbolic politics, employment concerns, and home values—even if doing so comes at the expense of students and their education.
The mismatch between voters’ concerns and the student needs is widespread in our highly decentralized system. Local control is a core value of many people, but as it turns out such control may stand in the way of effective schools.
Many school districts that educate overwhelmingly students of color—as is the case in San Francisco—fill their school boards through elections dominated by elderly, white voters without school-aged children. This is what we get in a system that relies largely on low-turnout, off-cycle elections and it is arguably the source of many of the governance challenges public education faces today.
Students and families, a numerical minority, lose out and their interests rarely get represented. As the former president of the Brookings Institution once wrote, “government has not solved the education problem because government”—or, arguably, local democracy—“is the problem.”
Focus on these dynamics rather than the flavor of the month and you’ll provide deeper analysis for your readers.
Vladimir Kogan is Professor of Political Science and (by courtesy) Public Affairs at the Ohio State University. His book, No Adult Left Behind: How Politics Hijacks Education Policy and Hurts Kids (Cambridge University Press), is coming out later this summer.
Previously from The Grade
How to prevent meaningless controversies from dominating school board coverage
How school board protest coverage over-emphasizes violence and ideology
What if school board races don’t really matter the way we think they do?
‘The backlash was the story’; an insider looks back at school culture wars coverage
The ‘red wave’ that didn’t happen
