Even San Francisco . . .

 . . . has had it up to here with identity-politics militancy in public education:

San Francisco residents recalled three members of the city’s school board Tuesday for what critics called misplaced priorities and putting progressive politics over the needs of children during the pandemic.

Voters overwhelmingly approved the recall in a special election, according to tallies by the San Francisco Department of Elections.

“The voters of this city have delivered a clear message that the school board must focus on the essentials of delivering a well-run school system above all else,” Mayor London Breed said in a statement. “San Francisco is a city that believes in the value of big ideas, but those ideas must be built on the foundation of a government that does the essentials well.”

Breed will now appoint board replacements who will serve until another election in November.

And what were these school board members focusing on instead?

Racism against Asian Americans has come under a renewed focus since reports of attacks and discrimination escalated with the spread of the coronavirus, which first appeared in late 2019 in Wuhan, China. 

Collins said the tweets were taken out of context and posted before she held her school board position. She refused to take them down or apologize for the wording and ignored calls to resign from parents, Breed and other public officials. 

Collins turned around and sued the district and her colleagues for $87 million, fueling yet another pandemic sideshow. The lawsuit was later dismissed. 

Many Asian parents were already angered by the board’s efforts to end merit-based admissions at the elite Lowell High School, where Asian students are the majority. 

As a result, many Asian American residents were motivated to vote for the first time in a municipal election. The grassroots Chinese/API Voter Outreach Task Force group, which formed in mid-December, said it registered 560 new Asian American voters.

Ann Hsu, a mother of two who helped found the task force, said many Chinese voters saw the effort to change the Lowell admissions system as a direct attack. 

“It is so blatantly discriminatory against Asians,” she said. 

In the city’s Chinese community, Lowell is viewed as a path children can take to success. 

Hey, once you start dividing Americans up by race and ethnicity, some of the races and ethnicities so divided are not going to stand for getting what they perceive as crummy treatment.

San Francisco may have begun to have a bellyful generally speaking. Mayor London Breed has done an abrupt turnaround regarding her position on defunding the police - albeit with a bit of pushing. 

And America generally is undergoing a reassessment of the role school boards play in the life of communities. You see it on the east coast. You see it in the hinterland. 

School boards might want to take heed. Homeschooling is a growing trend and students so educated do better on average than those in public schools. 

The state is losing its access to the insides of citizens' noggins.