Once known for its scenic beauty and cultural attractions, San Francisco in recent years has acquired a less picturesque image as a mecca for the homeless and drug addicts, whose used syringes and feces plague city sidewalks. And now the City by the Bay can add another item to its ugly list: the public school system.

{snip}While 70 percent of the city’s white students are proficient in math, just 12 percent of black students are, according to statistics released last year. One would think that public officials in such a bastion of progressive politics would jump at the chance to rectify this dismal disparity, but the city’s education establishment has other priorities. On January 26, the school board decided to rename 44 public schools because their namesakes were presumably more evil than Satan—or perhaps even than Donald Trump. Paul Revere, Thomas Edison, Daniel Webster, Abraham Lincoln, Francis Scott Key, and assorted other historical miscreants were guilty of anti-woke crimes. Malcolm X got a pass, however; the elementary school bearing his name will not undergo a change. Why would a one-time drug dealer, thief, and pimp be exempted? Because the school board said that he should be “judged by the entirety of his life”—a courtesy it declined to extend to Lincoln and the others. Facing a lawsuit, the board has since decided to put a hold on the renaming campaign.

In early February, the art department of the San Francisco School District decided that acronyms are “a symptom of white supremacy.” Around the same time, the city took the unprecedented step of suing its own school board in an effort to get kids out of virtual learning mode and back into classrooms. In March, it came to light that San Francisco school board vice president Allison Collins had made some nasty comments about Asian-Americans on Twitter in 2016, accusing them, among other things, of using “white supremacist thinking to assimilate and ‘get ahead.’” The school board had to do something, of course. But it didn’t fire her or dock any of her six-figure salary; it merely removed her as vice president and stripped her of committee assignments. {snip}

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