Proposed District Election of School Board Members Dilutes Minority Voting Power and Weakens Parent Access and School Governance
By John Trasviña
Our San Francisco public schools have many challenges including recovering from COVID, closing student academic performance gaps, paying teachers, reverse enrollment declines to closing a historic budget gap. Addressing each of these is essential to the families and future of San Francisco. The method of electing Board of Education members is not such a problem.
Yet, a Walnut Creek lawyer is threatening litigation to force the School Board to hold district, instead of citywide, elections. The lawyer is using the California Voting Rights which will bring him attorney fees but dilute the voices and votes of Asian Americans, Latinos and African Americans.
Since 2000, Asian American, Latino and African American candidates have won two-thirds of citywide School Board elections. In the same time period, they’ve been less than half of the district elected members of the Board of Supervisors. Asian Americans have been 36% of the School Board and 25% of the Board of Supervisors. African Americans have been 16% of the School Board (and 18% of the district-elected Community College Board) but only 13% of the district supervisors. For Latinos, the gap is 9% at the Board of Supervisors to 14% at the School Board. Representation of these constituencies dates back to the first citywide elected School Board members in 1972. From 1985 to 2022, the School Board consistently appointed a superintendent who was either Asian American, Black or Latino.
San Francisco has also made other changes to increase minority electoral participation including, for the School Board, authorizing non-citizen parents to vote. District election of Board of Education members will fix a non-existent problem and make matters worse for all voters, especially public school parents. Because of the School District’s student assignment system, a Mission District parent may have an elementary-age child in an immersion program in one part of town, an older student at a middle school closer to home and a high schooler enrolled anywhere. Currently, they can go to any of the seven School Board members with a concern. In the future, will they have to go to the School Board member they elected or the ones where the schools are located?
The School Board may vote on a closed-door settlement of this threatened litigation with no suit filed, no public input, and no consideration of the record as early as Tuesday. School Board members may feel that defending the record of electing minority candidates citywide as better for minority voter access than districts will be a costly distraction from the challenges it faces.
But this change, under the guise of improving minority community access, will actually damage it. It runs totally contrary to the School Board’s commitments to transparency, anti-discrimination, and focusing on student outcomes.
The Superintendent has warned the Board it faces a $421 million deficit next year. Increased revenue is not expected from the city or state. Increased revenue would come if the School District increases student enrollment. But a chaotic and baseless change with no public input will increase chaos and spur more parents to leave the School District and make closing the budget gap even harder. With seven Board members elected by district, the hard budget choices will be even harder. Some Board members will fight against school closure in their neighbors no matter what while other Board members may “gang up” on another and vote to close schools elsewhere. In these circumstances, a citywide vision is lost.
Instead of a behind closed doors settlement, the lawyer should provide any voting data he has with the public and the School Board should solicit the views of all San Franciscans. It’s the right to vote we are talking about here. We hear about vote dilution in the South and in Republican legislatures. The lawyer may not have intended or even known about the negative impact this plan has on San Francisco. He could be motivated by something else. But we should not allow it here.
Write to School Board members and demand they stop action on this plan until San Franciscans of all backgrounds can be heard:
Lainie Motamedi, President — lainiemotamedi@sfusd.edu
Matt Alexander, Vice President — mattalexander@sfusd.edu
Kevine Boggess — kevineboggess@sfusd.edu
Lisa Weissman-Ward — lisaweissman-ward@sfusd.edu
Jenny Lam — jennylam@sfusd.edu
Mark Sanchez — marksanchez@sfusd.edu
Alida Fisher — alidafisher@sfusd.edu
John Trasviña, a graduate of SF public schools, is immediate past dean of the University of San Francisco School of Law and immediate past president and general counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense & Educational Fund (MALDEF).