San Francisco’s PAC, Lowell High School, and Kendi’s Arguments.
I wanted to leave this as a comment on https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/the-problem-with-just-ignore-the but it was too long for Substack. The context is a brief mention of this pair of tweets: https://twitter.com/hknightsf/status/1359382113875755011?s=19
Hi Jesse!
I re-subscribed JUST for this article, because I’ve been looking into the SF thing on my own for the last few days and was excited for your take. Having now read it, I think you missed some pretty remarkable details on this which I’d love to share with you and your audience, but unfortunately I don’t think I’m a good enough writer to communicate it well. Also, it’s pretty in the weeds, so nobody should *really* care, but your fans are all internet rubberneckers like me, and considering we normally talk about twitter drama, I think education reform drama is actually a step up from our normal hobbies.
To reiterate, as the tweets you quoted mentioned, there was a multi-hour discussion of this potential appointment, and the conclusion was to ignore the nomination of this person until there was a diverse slate of nominations to pick among, instead of filling the empty seats now… and that meeting continued for several more hours. The total length of the recorded meeting ended up being 09h 54m https://sanfrancisco.granicus.com/ViewPublisher.php?view_id=47
While the video is still currently uploading or transferring to a distribution server or whatever, the text transcript is now available, and it confirms much of what is said in the livetweeted summary: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1359276203132084226.html
The discussion on this topic, of whether to accept the nomination of “Seth” to an empty PAC (Parental Advisory Council) seat, begins at “Commissioner @FaauugaMoliga thanks PAC for work and volunteer effort, asking about issues with representation. Coordinator Jaques-Menegaz speaks to some of the difficulties with recruiting. There are still 4 regular spots and 3 alternate spots available. #BoardWatch” 2/3 down the page in the livetweet summary, or at “Let’s move on to formally item 3.” in the transcript, about 1/3 down the page.
That said, this discussion over whether or not to accept “Seth” as a volunteer was so controversial that in other, unrelated Public comment sections (they were related to PAC, but not to the nomination), people were already commenting on it. As that section completed, the President commented on the high number of public comments unrelated to the work supposedly at hand:
President Lopez: I think we found a way to circumvent the public comment process through the P.A.C.’s report. I am going to encourage people who were able to speak on an item that it’s coming up on the agenda later to hold off your comments.
It’s easier to go to the livetweet thread to summarize the mix of angry callers:
PC: Reverend Brown: this is a parent group that is not inclusive, doesn’t even mirror Joe Biden’s cabinet. Appeal is that the representatives of this panel get busy, be inclusive, stop making excuses about the pandemic. #BoardWatch
PC: Tearful speaker is speaking up in solidarity with friend who is up for appointment. This is bullying by those in power. He is a leader in his school and city community, in the LGBTQ community. If you talk about representation, he is a Gay father in a mixed-race family
PC: Discussion discredits the intersectionality of Seth being an LGBTQ parent of multiracial kids. There is a level of collaboration going forward in filling the rest of these seats. Consider the “both/and” of this. #BoardWatch
PC: Asking not to support this appointment. Ask PAC to increase representation by communities hard-hit by COVID #BoardWatch
PC: To deny someone a spot on the PAC because he is a member of a parent group you may not agree with to me feels very unfair and not representative of what SFUSD claims to be for #BoardWatch
PC: Advocating for mindset of abundance, if parents are motivated to help out should support that, but on the other hand should support more minorities and make the table bigger #BoardWatch
PC: Board members are shaming LGBTQ parents. Parents need to join organizations, not sit back while this happens. This is shameful #BoardWatch
PC: Parent who is LGBTQ parent of color. It is important to point out intersections. Bet we could find parents who are of color, and are also queer. Think it is problematic to have a white majority on a PAC #BoardWatch
PC: this is an attempt to silence the parents who are most critical of the board. Seth is clearly overqualified. Of course you should have diversity, but that is not what this is about #BoardWatch
PC: Have a book suggestion: white tears, brown scars #BoardWatch
PC: Appreciate the two boardmembers who touched on the issue of poverty. Race matters, but so does economics. Would like to remind that those communities can’t always come forward, even though they want to, but shouldn’t remove somebody who is highly qualified. #BoardWatch
PC: this is about diversity of thought. Need people who bring different ideas forward and are not scared to. See no reason why Seth should not be confirmed. Think this is a political show so that you can say you stopped a white person from getting on. #BoardWatch
PC: oppose this person because my understanding is that members of Decreasing the Distance have attempted to speak for families they don’t represent. #BoardWatch
PC: this member would be only male, only LGBTQ member of PAC, and has a mixed-race child. We are all diverse in our own way and this member brings a lot of diversity. Shouldn’t silence him because he is a member of a parent group. #BoardWatch
PC: parent is supporting nomination. He is an incredibly caring individual, a person, a parent. A dads perspective could be important. As a mixed race person, I have found that people like me are not well represented. He is a parent who cares #BoardWatch
PC: issue is with the structure of the PAC, if you want to ask people to do this work, you need to pay them to do this work. #BoardWatch
PC: not disparaging appointee. Process has been steeped in inequality for decades. Parents do not have a voice. Things have only been politicized because certain groups have always been excluded from the process. Absolutely is about race. operating under white supremacy.
PC: appointee has been active for many many years. Still have time to fill other position. Please do not let this be about whatever else this is about. Consider his body of work. #BoardWatch
PC: interesting to see a diversity of perspectives. See leadership using blunt tools of process and ideology to shape the conversation. Would like to see real dialogue about race and identity instead of throwing around terms. #BoardWatch
PC: don’t know Seth, but concerned about something that keeps being stated about him having a “mixed-child” lets not focus on that but on his qualifications #BoardWatch
Vice President Lopez (might be a transcript typo, livetweet says VP Collins): First, I want to reiterate. This is about callers that have come in, and it’s not our job to respond to public comment but as a mixed race person myself, I find it offensive when folks say that somebody is a parent of somebody who is a person of color as like a signifier that they’re qualified to represent that community. I just want to tell the public, it’s offensive to me personally. You can say what you want to say, I hope you don’t say that again. It’s — we all should be representing ourselves and I can be advocating for my kids and they might have different identities but we have to be clear, like, if I’m a mom of somebody who is lgbtq or a different race, that doesn’t mean I can represent their experience. […]
I think who is on it really matters. And that’s why representation is so important to me. It’s not bean counting white people and some sort of weird — some people think it’s a weird pc thing but it’s about who has a voice in our public schools. Public schools are the cornerstone of our democracy. And right now, I kind of tried to say this earlier, the voice is not equal. I haven’t always agreed with all positions and tactics but they have a lot of power. Let’s not pretend that the folks involved don’t have power. I guess my — again, this is not about seth. Not to say if you should or shouldn’t be on the pact. If we’re creating a space intentionally as a district, how are we bringing in voices that are already marginalized. I think that’s the larger policy question. I appreciated commissioner sanchez’s suggestion that we defer the vote. I don’t think — I would love to see seth come back in a slate of candidates showing us that the pact as a whole is going to represent our kids. It’s really easy to appoint one person at a time and never get to the goal of representing the folks that we want to represent in the way we want to represent them. So anyway, that would be my — I kind of support what commissioner sanchez said earlier as a possible way of moving forward. I agree.
This person continues on for a bit longer, but at the end of it we have apparently concluded that there will be no vote, and the empty seats will remain unfilled.
Commissioner Sanchez: thank you to all those folks that spoke out during public comment. I really do appreciate the input. It’s a wide variety of views. It’s really around the diversity issue. I actually want voice ed to be on the P.A.C. That diversity of voices is really important. My bottom line is around diversity. I don’t want to reject your candidacy. I think you are qualified. I want to make sure michelle and al come back with a slate of folks that are representative and inclusive of your name. To have a more diverse body.
President Lopez: is there any objection from commissioners? Thank you everyone for this discussion. There’s a lot of work we’re willing to keep doing. We will not be voting on this item tonight. Lastly, are there any appointments to advisory committees by the board?
And with that, we get to what I actually wanted to talk about, and what I had hoped Jesse would cover, which item G1 (resolution 212–2A1) on the Agenda https://go.boarddocs.com/ca/sfusd/Board.nsf/goto?open&id=BW6NY5613C6B for full agenda and https://go.boarddocs.com/ca/sfusd/Board.nsf/files/BXSNFF5F9E6B/$file/Collins%20Lowell%202_Feb%202021.pdf for the specific resolution
Most interesting to me is that it cites Ibram X. Kendi’s statements from https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/10/22/opinion/transform-bostons-exam-schools-into-opportunity-schools/ about his opposition to tests for boston schools, with essentially 2 main points. The first is that there is unequal access to test prep services, which amounts to cheating.
The directly cited piece has a notable chain of bad logic: “This [unequal access to test prep] is the elephant in the room that the people claiming the standardized test is fair do not want to discuss. They will claim white and Asian kids on average score higher on tests because they are smarter or work harder. Meaning Black and Latinx kids are not as smart or not as hard-working. Meaning white and Asian kids are superior. And all these racist ideas from people claiming they are not racist.”
I am deeply confused by the definitions of “smarter” and “work harder”, and their relation to “superior” and the test scores. Putting aside “superior” and “smarter”, I suspect that I am supposed to imagine that a white or asian student enrolled in test prep simply unscrews the lid to their head and the instructor gently pours knowledge into their head for a fee, and that a black or Latino kid without access to such a service looks in through a window in envy before shrugging his shoulders and doing…. something else with his time? I’m not sure what I’m supposed to imagine the person unwilling or unable to pay for a tutor is doing with whatever number of hours the test-prepped kid is forced to spend on homework/worksheets. Do the hours spent in tutoring count as play time? Is there no “work” being done in a test prep class? And what are we supposed to imagine the student that doesn’t spend those hours in tutoring is doing for the same amount of time per week? Are they independently studying free materials for equal periods of time, or are they doing something unrelated to academics? Is the average student not enrolled in test prep “working” as long or “hard”, or do they do some hobby activity for the same period of time.
If we’re going to go with the more anecdotal stuff, here’s my lived experience (well, sort of. It’s a couple towns over, but it was always a very clear line for us Asian kids): https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/26/nyregion/reforms-to-ease-students-stress-divide-a-new-jersey-school-district.html Is it really true that spending summers grinding out basic requirements so you can overload your regular school year with 3+ AP classes is not “working harder”? When you have done that another hasn’t, saying you have “worked harder” has nothing to do with smartness, it’s a factual statement of a historical fact. Why does this amount of work necessarily mean that you are superior, or that another is inferior? That is a leap in logic with no basis. I’m sure there’s plenty of confusion among people as to the difference between a person currently having mastery of or access to larger piles of knowledge than another person, vs a person being “smarter” than some other person, but being either too young or poorly educated/trained to have those piles of current knowledge, but that just means we should separate the “has worked hard” claim from one of “smart” or “educated”.
In the model I have in my mind, the primary difference between students is how much time they spend on their regular routine classwork, and the grades they get on their regular routine quizzes and tests are primarily a reflection of the amount of time invested. I recall back when Amy Chua was under fire for having a totally normal parenting style (at least, according to where I grew up), someone consulted time usage survey data and found out there were huge disparities between the races in how much time was spent on homework when quantified by either days on which homework was done, or number of hours per week spent on studying (which, now looking at it again, looks like half-baked shit https://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/archive/newsrel/soc/5-4-11tiger_mother.asp). According to this, Asians are working twice as hard as everybody else, in a quantitatively measurable way that has nothing to do with their skin color or “smartness”. It saying “spending a lot of time on studying” the same as “working harder”, and is it really such a RACIST view to think that maybe the number of hours that students report spening on studying is positively correlated to their scores on the tests? The people of San Francisco and Boston seem to think so.
Note that we haven’t done ANYTHING to say that systemic racism doesn’t exist, or is not the cause of poor perfomance on tests. What if you can’t study because you don’t have a quiet place to do so, or can’t easily find access to the study materials? Are either of those correlated at all along class or race difference? How about if you have to work to support your family, or have an abusive family, or if you have to take care of younger siblings while your parents are working, or any number of things? How many of those types of things are more likely to effect one race or class vs another, through no fault of their own, in a way that can be traced directly or indirectly to historical circumstances?
If a “test” literally only measured how many hours a day for a few months you chose to sit in an empty “study chamber” doing nothing at all, I bet Asians would ace that test if it meant getting into the school that was more likely to get them to Harvard. I’m sure in Kendi’s view, such a test is a racist one. After all, success on such a test is more likely to reflect the family’s socioeconomic status and therefore race. I can completely understand the origin and usefulness of such a definition, but I find it difficult to prefer this definition when the tests in question aren’t measuring time spent doing nothing in particular… they’re measuring mastery over basic literacy and mathematics, so that the students will be confirmed for their preparedness for next level of difficulty in more advanced subjects.
Circling back to “superior” and “smarter” seems like a waste of time, but I would encourage everyone to be sympathetic to my assertion (without evidence) that the easiest way to ace a standardized test is to have mastery over the material on it, rather than being “smart” enough to figure it out on the fly without any prior exposure to the subject material. I’m sure someone could do it, but that person probably isn’t anyone you know, so just understand the material if that’s an option, and it probably is for most people. Similarly, people can define “superior” flexibly for all kinds of contexts. If we’re talking about getting into a school via a test, then yeah, for the context of that conversation we’re going to define a “better” outcome as one in which you ace the test and get into the school. I don’t really think most adults define a person as “better” based on what fucking highschool they went to, that would be nuts. They obviously measure status based on the highest level of educational attainment and the level of prestige of that place, so if you get stuck going to bumbo high, do yourself a favor and get a PH.D from an Ivy. The joke here is that both are equally ridiculous, but not equally true in the real world. The not-joking way to address superior is to say that I suspect some conflation between “greater than” and “superior to” is going on, as in someone may say that one kid or group of kids has scores greater than some other kid or group of kids, and having a high score is good, but most people are not so foolish as to assume one high score among infinitely many measurable things is really the correct way to look at the value of a life. Even for kids, the Valedectorian is probably pretty cool, but unlikely to be “the coolest”, and everyone in the school likely has a different “favorite” person. I don’t buy this leap from “best scores” to any kind of widespread interpretation of genetic superiority, and don’t know why some other arbitrary score wouldn’t be use instead, like “scored most points in some sport” or “went to most parties”.
The second claim and complaint is that standarized tests are eugenicist and racist in origin and maintain their status as “the most effective racist weapon ever devised to objectively degrade Black and brown minds and legally exclude their bodies.” I had a brief twitter thread where I made two points on this.
The first point is that it’s bad logic. “A eugenicist 100 years ago first had this idea, therefore it’s bad” is just so obviously an incorrect way of understanding the world that I find it shocking that it even came out of Kendi’s mouth. Newton was a fucking alchemist. He was probably 100x more racist (and in weirder ways) than Lewis Ternman, but calculus still works and was “created and popularized” by him (yes, yes the history of it is more complicated, but so is the IQ/SAT). The veracity of a claim or a method doesn’t really have anything to do with what it was invented for, or who invented it.
The second thing here is that I find it even more sad/amusing that we’re bringing up “bad man thought of it first” as if there aren’t hundreds of scientists and scholars working diligently at the College Board or in academic research to try and remove racial bias from their tests and measures in the present. To assume that standardized intelligence tests (no described relation to current admissions tests) carry their racist biases and mission after 100 years, with no changes in tools, viewpoints, or objectives requires just a stunning amount of faith in one man’s antiquated vision. It’s ever more shocking because women and black people take up larger shares of psych and education PHDs than other fields. Maybe they don’t tend to specialize in psychometric measures or making tests… but they’re in the same field to be doing that work, and Ed schools are famous for their highly progressive slant. https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf21308/report/fields-of-study Table 16: Women are 69.3% of Education PHD in general, and 69.6% in “Educational assessment, testing, measurement”. Table 24: Black is 14.1% of “Education research” subfield, which is quite high compared to their fraction of other sciences. Knowing the high relative proportions of women and black people receiving education and psychology PhDs, both groups historically believed to be less intelligent, is the takeaway that women are the most racist testmakers? Should the takeaway be that that the College Board (or whatever test maker for these more local admissions tests) is systematically hiring unqualified people and racists or maybe not even trying? Does the high fraction of black PHDs in this field have 0 effect on the tests, even after 100 years?
Why is it that Kendi wants us to conclude “Either there’s something wrong with the test takers or there’s something wrong with the tests.” Kendi’s false dichotomy is dumb here. Why can’t we say that the tests accurately reflect the current mastery of a particular academic subject, but that due to systemic racism the current mastery of black and latino kids (in those particular academic subjects) is less than that of their white or asian peers? Isn’t that also an anti-racist stance? Look! We just quantified the amount of existing work left to be done to bring about equity.
To me, it’s just so blatantly not racist to say “in the present, some kids spend more time working on things that will help them pass these tests, these tests really are measuring current ability, and we should help students that perform poorly on these tests to get more proficient in their academic skills”, but Kendi and San Francisco apparently has no room for this option. Good performance on a racist test, cheating by hiring a tutor, more hours spent studying, and genetic/racial superiority are all “synonymous” in the Kendian view, and removal of the test is the only reasonable solution. And, now, the San Francisco view for Lowell High School.
