Race, Class, Legacy, and Logistics: The Failed Project to Rename San Francisco’s Public Schools

Abraham Lincoln High School was slated to be renamed by the San Francisco School Board. Photo by Wikimedia Commons.

On January 26, 2021, the San Francisco Board of Education voted 6-1 to rename 44 public schools named for individuals who “engaged in the subjugation and enslavement of human beings; or who oppressed women, inhibiting societal progress; or whose actions led to genocide; or who otherwise significantly diminished the opportunities of those among us to the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” 

More than one-third of the city’s schools met the criteria, with 44 of San Francisco’s 114 public schools slated to be immediately renamed—among them George Washington High School, Abraham Lincoln High School, Dianne Feinstein Elementary School, Roosevelt Middle School, and Paul Revere Elementary School. All five schools—indeed, every one of the 114 public schools in the city of San Francisco—have been shuttered since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in March of 2020; middle and high schools still have no set reopening date for the majority of students. The decision to rename the closed schools, which sparked swift, strong reactions from both sides of the aisle, catalyzed a fresh wave of debate on American historiography, the structural entrenchment of white supremacy, the “right time” for racial justice work, and those we choose to remember—and forget. 

Efforts to rename San Francisco’s public schools began in late 2017, in the immediate aftermath of the violent white supremacist attacks in Charlottesville, Virginia. By May 2018, the San Francisco Board of Education passed resolution 184-10A1. Co-authored by former Board president Mark Sanchez and Stevon Cook, the resolution established a “blue ribbon panel to oversee a formalized process that reviews San Francisco public school names.” The panel was to be “responsible for considering the relevance of schools names and appropriateness of these names when they honor historical figures.”

Despite being established in 2018, the panel convened for the first time in January of 2020. Consisting of 15 parents, teachers, two students, and community members, the panel had all “applied” to the superintendent and been “approved and ratified by the Board of Education.” The group met 14 times during 2020, with a brief pause in meetings due to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Schools named for anyone directly involved in colonization, who had owned enslaved people, who had perpetuated genocide or slavery, extended human rights or environmental abuses, been known racists or white supremacists, “exploit[ed] workers or people” or “directly oppressed or abused women, children, queer or transgender people” were all slated for renaming. No historians were consulted or included in the 17-person decision group. 

“This is an opportunity for our students to learn about the history of our school's names, including the potential new ones,” current board President Gabriela López wrote in the San Francisco Board of Education’s initial statement. “We are working alongside the rest of the country to dismantle symbols of racism and white supremacy culture, [and] I am excited about the ideas schools will come up with.” López noted that the Board’s larger goal was to take an “opportunity to uplift things that we normally aren’t uplifting in our public-school system [and] in our society.” In a school district that serves more than 46,000 students of color–representing over 85% of San Francisco’s public school enrollment–the effort took on particularly symbolic poignancy. 

The San Francisco School Board’s school renaming committee made a conscious commitment to honor BIPOC voices and leaders in choosing new designations for each of the schools slated to be renamed, listing the “heritage of unceded ancestral homelands, Indigenous nations and Indigenous communities” as a guiding principle for renaming school sites. Mari Villaluna, a parent volunteer and Indigenous activist who took part in the renaming committee, noted in an October 2020 Zoom call that “one of the reasons this work is so important, especially as a parent of a four-year-old and a future San Francisco Unified School District student, is because I want my kid to enter into a school that represents our school district’s core values … And if my kid is going to a school that is named after someone who committed genocide, or a massacre, or who was a slave owner of Black of Indigenous peoples or members of another group, then that’s not something that reflects our core values.” 

Moreover, the San Francisco School Board was far from alone in its re-evaluation of American idolatry; universities, school districts, and state capitals across the United States have removed hundreds of names and statues honoring those who engendered America’s legacy of colonization and racial discrimination. “Dehumanizing symbols of pain and oppression continue to serve as backdrops to important government buildings, halls of justice, public parks, and U.S. military properties, including 10 bases named after Confederate leaders across the South,” Lecia Brooks, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Chief of Staff told The New York Times in February of 2021. As renaming efforts have grown, so have their successes—San Francisco’s efforts among them. In 2019, the city’s Fairmont Elementary was renamed for the civil rights leader and labor rights activist Dolores Huerta; the same year, the Chinese Education Center (which serves newly-arrived students) was renamed after San Francisco’s late mayor, becoming the Edwin and Anita Lee Newcomer School. “Our city has a rich history of looking at our school names and changing over time,” former school board president Sanchez stated. “We had Hawthorne Elementary which is now Cesar Chavez Elementary, Douglas Elementary which is now Harvey Milk Elementary, and Sir Francis Drake High School which is now Malcolm X Academy,” noting that in all cases the “community organized, and rallied, and essentially forced the district to change the name of the schools.” In this renaming process, Sanchez argued that the board “knew that there were still school names out there that really needed to be looked at but whose school communities, for whatever reasons, weren’t going to do it on their own.”

The announcement of the renaming of San Francisco schools thus came on the heels of a national reckoning and a year-long process of more than a dozen meetings. The degree to which such a process of renaming the 44 schools was made accessible to San Francisco Unified School District’s families and educators, however, is unclear. The Board of Education has not announced how it chose or “approved and ratified” those who made up the council, nor has it made clear the ways in which it communicated the panel’s intention and goals. Across 14 of renaming committees’ meetings, an average of three people showed up to make public comment; for the first six months of meetings, no member of the public showed up to speak. “Leading up to the school board making the decision, I didn’t know what was going on—I was 100% isolated and didn’t know this process was happening,” said Renee Moyer, a school psychologist with the San Francisco Unified School District and a parent of a McKinley Elementary 1st grader. Diane, a parent of an Aptos Middle School eighth-grader, echoed the lack of communication: “All I heard is, in January, school renaming was voted on and it’s happening.” For many families and community members, the San Francisco Board of Education’s January 26th announcement of the 44 schools’ renaming thus came as a shock. 

Logistically, the San Francisco Board of Education substantiated January’s press release with a now-infamous public spreadsheet of rationales. Dianne Feinstein Elementary was to be renamed because she ordered a torn-down Confederate replaced while she was mayor; Robert Louis Stevenson Elementary was to be renamed because of his “cringeworthy poem” that included words like “Eskimo.” Wikipedia was cited as a source seven times; and a history.com article entitled “10 Things You May Not Know About Paul Revere” was cited in the renaming of Paul Revere Elementary. A.P. Giannini Middle School was slated for renaming because “A.P. Giannini founded Bank of America.” According to The New Yorker, one renaming committee member, when asked why no historians were included in the group, responded, “What would be the point? History is written and documented pretty well across the board. And so we don’t need to belabor history in that regard. We’re not debating that. There’s no point in debating history in that regard. Either it happened or it didn’t.”

Senator Dianne Feinstein, the controversial namesake of Dianne Feinstein Elementary School. Photo by Senate Democrats

Notably, the San Francisco Board of Education’s Google spreadsheet of rationale—which was ridiculed and shared dozens of times across a variety of media outlets—has been quietly deleted. Its link now greets users with the apology that “sorry, the file you have requested has been deleted.” The move, which remains unacknowledged by both the Board of Education and the San Francisco Unified School District, is emblematic of the renaming committee’s larger public inaccessibility and seclusion. It also serves as a reminder of the tremendous level of immediate backlash the school board’s renaming committee faced once their plan was made public. 

Promptly following the Board of Education’s January 26th announcement that 44 of the city’s public schools were to be renamed, fierce, cross-party backlash ensued. San Francisco parents pointed to the fact that San Francisco’s public schools are nearing the one-year mark on their closure; 399 days have passed since they closed on March 12, 2020. Progressives lampooned the city’s “performative activism,” while conservatives made mockery of the school board’s “backwards” priorities. Fox News breathlessly covered the development with several segments entitled “Failing Our Children,” Breitbart News published a near-dozen articles on the effort, and the San Francisco Chronicle’s Editorial Board argued that the School Board had “largely quit the education business and rebranded themselves as amateur historians.” Seemingly everywhere, the renaming committee—ridiculed for its historical inaccuracies and hampered by its poor timing—was scorned. The effort—and, more revealingly, its backlash—divulged several underlying themes of San Francisco’s politics: policy-driven racism, socioeconomic violence, and the city’s dubious self-identity as a progressive utopia with the reality of it being one of the most economically inequitable cities in the United States. 

Adding urgency to the backlash against the school board was the fact that many of San Francisco’s private schools have been operating in some in-person capacity since September of 2020. San Francisco has the third-highest rate of private-school enrollment in the nation, with more than 19% of students attending private school—nearly twice the national average. And, although nearly half of San Franciscans identify as white, the city’s public schools are less than 15% white. More than 70% of the city’s white families opt for private educations. San Francisco’s public schools, by contrast, serve mostly low-income students of color—85% of public school students self-identify as students of color, and more than half are low-income. For months, both private and public school populations were afforded the same treatment; from March until September of 2020, no schools were permitted to operate in-person per the city’s Covid-19 safety restrictions. In September, when the city lifted its restrictions, private schools decisively reopened. Public schools, hampered by the Board of Education’s lack of a reopening plan and a teachers’ union dispute over the reopening’s safety measures, remained shuttered. The ongoing eight-month disparity between private and public schools’ re-openings has decisively exacerbated racial and socioeconomic inequities in San Francisco. It has also added an acute dimension to the debate surrounding the renaming of its public schools, with many arguing that the school renaming committee’s goal of “social & economic justice” would be better accomplished by simply allowing the school districts’ underserved students access to in-person education. 

Thus central to many critics’ argument was the School Board’s irreconcilable—and, many would argue, hypocritical—focus on renaming schools rather than reopening them. San Francisco Mayor London Breed, a Democrat and the first African-American woman to serve as the city’s mayor, echoed the sentiment after first noting school renaming was an important conversation. “What I cannot understand,” Breed asserted, “is why the School Board is advancing a plan to have all these schools renamed by April, when there isn’t a plan to have our kids back in the classroom by then.” (The San Francisco Unified School District has since released a plan to offer the option of in-person learning at Elementary schools for six weeks of the remaining school year; only a small number of priority population students will be allowed back to any middle and high schools this year.) Felicia Alvarez Mazzi, an educator and parent of a 5th grader at Alvarado Elementary, noted that she “absolutely does support looking at our existing institutional structures and renaming our schools through a lens of equity and social justice… But we’re coming up on an entire year of distance learning for kids in public school. And students are suffering, and students of color are suffering … Renaming schools costs $10,000 per school. Is this the best use for money? Or for time?”

San Francisco Mayor London Breed, a proponent of social justice who has expressed skepticism over the School Board’s timeline. Photo by Gage Skidmore.

Indeed, running a $75 million budget deficit, the San Francisco Unified School District has estimated that total renaming efforts could run close to $1,000,000. “I do support the renaming effort,” noted Renee Moyer, a psychologist with the San Francisco Unified School District and a parent of a McKinley Elementary first-grader. “But if this renaming process is hinging on parents, I don’t have the bandwidth to put a good amount of thought into people I want McKinley Elementary to be renamed after. It’s so low on the priority list. My priority list, during lockdown, is to make sure my kids are fed and hopefully log into Zoom.” Doctor Adam Davis, a parent of a kindergartener and second-grader in San Francisco’s public schools, noted that he didn’t “know anybody personally who doesn’t think it’s embarrassing … [school renaming] is a caricature of what people think liberals in San Francisco do.” Siva Raj and Autumn Looijen, also public school parents, have taken their criticism a step further, launching a movement to recall three eligible members of the San Francisco School Board. 

The pair, both of whom work in San Francisco’s technology industry, received an “outpouring” of support for their campaign Recall SF School Board, garnering more than 6,000 sign-ups for their effort—and a 500-person “volunteer army” of a Facebook group—in less than 48 hours. In an interview with Fox News, Looijen noted that the San Francisco School board “hadn’t made school re-opening a priority when so many parents are hurting across the city.” Looijen and Raj have filed the necessary legal work to begin the recall process; once approved, they will have 160 days to garner the 70,000 signatures necessary to get the recall item on the ballot. In an emailed statement, Siva Raj and Autumn Looijen both argued that the core issue was “not that the schools are being renamed, but that the board is not prioritizing education.” Raj and Looijen also noted that the “process they used to rename the schools was terrible. We think it should be up to each school's community to have hard but necessary conversations about race and class. Avoiding those conversations leaves the wound unhealed and communities unheard. America needs to reckon with its past, but it's not the school board's job to force this change … They failed to do their one job, which was to educate our kids.” 

The San Francisco School Board, however, pushed back against the popular premise of mutual exclusivity. In a later 2020 Zoom call responding to initial concerns about the renaming effort, Sanchez stated, “I can tell you this: the amount of time that we’re putting into this has nothing to do with whether we can open schools back up again.” Sanchez continued by noting that the “undercurrent out there that’s being amplified by some in the media – and, unfortunately, our mayor and other elected officials—that for some reason, because we’re in a pandemic, and because [Sanchez turned to air quotes here] ‘we can’t open schools right now,’ that we shouldn’t be looking at anything else, that we should pause or put on hold our racial equity work. I don’t buy that argument—and I think it’s a minority argument – but it’s an amplified one that we need to address.” 

Moreover, despite the San Francisco Board of Education’s explicitly poor timing, largely closed-door process, and historical fallacies, some worry that the Board’s cacophony of logistical missteps is wrongly overshadowing its larger intent. “No matter what—how broad we are, how long we take, how much we connect—people will always have a problem with the discussion of racism. That is what I know. That is why I’m getting death threats,” San Francisco Board of Education president Gabriela López told The New Yorker. While news outlets, and particularly right-wing news organizations, have been quick to cover the renaming committee’s historical inaccuracies, there has been no coverage of the committee’s overarching intention: to ground San Francisco’s school names in the five values of the school district: “Student-Centered, Fearless, United, Social Justice, and Diversity Driven.” “Of course, there is never the ‘right time’ to change a school name,” Sanchez noted, “And I think there are a lot of folks out there who—no matter what—will never be with us in a name-changing process.” 

Still, the San Francisco School Board, under growing pressure from local, national, and international outcry, announced on February 21, 2021 that it would be “canceling renaming committee meetings for the time being.” Board President Gabriela López stated that reopening public schools would be the board’s “only focus” until schools reopened, and that the board “will be revising our plans to run a more deliberative process moving forward, which included engaging historians at nearby universities to help.” In her last public statement on the matter, López wrote: “I acknowledge and take responsibility that mistakes were made in the renaming process. We recognize that we need to slow down. And we need to provide more opportunities for community input.” López also highlighted the work of the renaming committee, stating that the board was “deeply grateful for the work of the renaming committee and many schools are as well. They are excited about the opportunity to uplift communities that have been previously underrepresented. This work is anti-racist and we’re proud of that.” 

Olympia Francis Taylor is a sophomore at Barnard College studying international and global history. Hailing from San Francisco, California, and passionate about educational equity, labor policy, and international politics, she's thrilled to be starting her journalism career with the incredible Columbia Political Review team.