Editorial: The San Francisco school board just might do something right

San Francisco's Abraham Lincoln High School.

San Francisco’s Abraham Lincoln High School.

Santiago Mejia / The Chronicle

As the San Francisco school board has infamously reminded us, even figures as towering as Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt were not without their flaws. The same spirit requires acknowledging that a body as habitually wrong as the school board occasionally does something right.

If the board proceeds Tuesday with a proposal to scrap the ill-considered rechristening of long-shuttered schools named after Lincoln, Roosevelt and scores of other historical figures, it will indeed have happened, at long last, into the correct decision. The trouble is the time and resources the board expended in getting to this point — and the evidence that it’s reaching the right conclusion for the wrong reasons.

The board is scheduled to vote on a resolution to cancel the renaming project to “avoid the distraction and wasteful expenditure of public funds in frivolous litigation.” The litigation in question, however, is serious enough that the plaintiffs’ representatives include the renowned attorney and scholar Laurence Tribe, a Harvard professor emeritus who has argued 35 cases before the U.S. Supreme Court.

The suit on behalf of alumni of Abraham Lincoln and George Washington high schools, among others, makes the non-frivolous claim that beyond being based on analysis and research that lacked nuance and in some cases was just plain false, the board’s vote to rename 44 schools proceeded without the public input or notice required by state law. A Superior Court judge last month found enough merit in the complaint to order the district to undo its decision or justify it in court.

Nor is this the only substantial litigation facing the board, which is also being sued by the city itself for its slowness in reopening classrooms closed as a pandemic precaution more than a year ago. That’s despite the consensus that in-person instruction can resume safely and amid such comparatively trivial pursuits as the rebranding. As for frivolous litigation, meanwhile, board member Alison Collins is suing the district and most of the board for sanctioning her over a bigoted Twitter outburst.

Reinforcing the impression that the board has learned little from these experiences, its resolution also reiterates that it is “deeply grateful” for the slapdash work of its renaming committee. If the board does get this one right, it seems, it will do so nominally.
