Liberal school board gets a lesson in pandemic politics
That doesn’t mean there will be a conservative swell in the hometown of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Vice Speaker Kamala Harris. But it means frustration over school closures could have unintended consequences.
Then the city kept its schools closed longer than most other parts of the United States.
âEven as early as May 2021, not a single school was ready for reopening. These people are using it to improve their careers, rather than focusing on educating our children,â said Siva Raj, an organizer of recall, to CNN, referring to the school. board members.
If fundraising is any indication of a bottom line (it often is, but not always), all three board members should be concerned.
What does San Francisco have to do with the rest of the country? It’s a valid question.
He sees a cocktail of three distinct things driving the recall effort:
- Genuine grassroots dissatisfaction with prolonged school closures during the coronavirus outbreak.
- Growing division among Democrats over how to respond to the pandemic.
- Massive funding for longtime critics of public education and some big supporters of Republican political campaigns, including an ally of Betsy DeVos, former President Donald Trump’s education secretary.
Writing behind the backlash. This frustration with Covid-19 restrictions is helping to fuel and perhaps mask something that could have a much wider effect, especially in red states.
Brownstein notes “an aggressive Republican drive to censor how public school teachers talk about race, gender, sexual orientation, and other sensitive topics.”
He likens the effort to state laws to evolutionary teaching in the 1920s and the rise of anti-Communist loyalty oaths for teachers in the Joe McCarthy era.
It’s kind of a bait and switch because while every parent is likely to have a very strong opinion on whether kids should be in school, this is a group smaller one that works specifically on the program.
Education is a big subject. Curriculum content was the top education concern of only about 1 in 4 people who said education would be an important factor in their votes.
After observing the frustrations of school boards near my home in Virginia, I think Brownstein and the polls are correct that parents are more concerned with their children’s learning than curriculum content.
San Francisco is clearly its own special political universe, but there’s also the removal of Covid-19 restrictions in several blue states and Democratic-led cities to consider.
First, a lesson in the north. Proponents of vaccine requirements may look warily at Canada, where protest by a vocal minority of truck drivers drivers on these requirements for interstate travel has taken a new turn.
More relaxed requirements in the United States. Meanwhile in the United States, Washington, DC, is among the latest places to drop a Covid-19 requirement. In DC’s case, it’s about waiving the requirement for proof of vaccination to enter businesses. The rule, which had only been in place since December, ended on Tuesday.
DC, along with several states, will lift its indoor mask requirement on March 1. Masks are still recommended inside the city and will still be required in schools.
“I don’t know if American political figures in the blue zone are canceling such mandates because their own constituents are More precisely requesting that these warrants be revoked. Rather, they may simply be responding to growing frustrations around the virus as a whole. »
She adds that people might just be ready to live alongside the disease.
âMy poll still shows a large and growing number (of) people are still worried about getting COVID! It’s that maybe they don’t think more than we do can beat COVID,â she wrote.
It sounds a lot like what New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy said on CBS on Sunday, “…as far as we can tell right now, this thing is going from pandemic to endemic.”
Always slow. You won’t hear that kind of direct talk from the federal government, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the White House â at least not yet. This means that the country is moving faster than its government right now.
The potential recall of San Francisco school board members means leaders need to stay tuned during tough times.
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