There is an axiom known as “Hanlon’s razor” that holds “never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” It is similar to the more well-known “Occam’s razor,” the principle that the simplest explanation is typically the correct one. As an instinctual conservative, and as someone who strives not to be constantly outraged, I find these rules of thumb quite useful for moderating my thinking. It is simply better, and oftentimes more accurate, to first assume that our political or ideological opponents are ignorant but well-meaning rather than the opposite.
Yet stupidity is not without consequence, and while preferable to malevolence, it can be just as harmful. Take, for instance, the San Francisco public school board. Most people don’t pay much attention to any school board other than the one directly involved with their children (if even then), but the San Francisco Unified School District board has managed to make national news multiple times over the past two weeks for several controversial actions, highlighting the way school boards across the country, with little scrutiny, have a big effect on what and how students learn. Each of these moves was made with an explicit purpose of pursuing so-called “anti-racism” and far-left notions of social justice, which, while bad for students’ education, is not altogether unusual. What made these local decisions become national points of discussion was how utterly inane the reasoning behind these and other similar decisions revealed themselves to be.
Put frankly: There isn’t much thought put into many decisions that shape American education from an early age. San Francisco gives us a window into how this happens.
Late last month, the school board voted 6-1 to change the names of 44 district schools, including those named after George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and San Francisco mayor and longtime California Sen. Dianne Feinstein. According to the board, anyone who had “engaged in the subjugation and enslavement of human beings; or who oppressed women, inhibiting societal progress; or whose actions led to genocide; or who otherwise significantly diminished the opportunities of those amongst us to the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” should not have schools named after them. Washington and Jefferson were axed for owning slaves, Lincoln because of the treatment of Native Americans during his presidency. Feinstein’s name was removed because when she was mayor of San Francisco in the ’80s, her administration replaced a Confederate flag at a civic center historical display after it was torn down by a protester.
To be clear, changing the name of a public school is different than, say, tearing down a statue, and school names are routinely changed to honor particularly influential teachers, principals, or community figures. But the reason for renaming matters, and the school district’s fails on all counts. Reducing Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln to a single disqualifying sin is a blatant erasure of history and of each one’s positive contributions to our country, something I believe most reasonable people outside of certain Ivy League graduate school classrooms would agree with. The criterion for Feinstein’s removal is just as hollow, albeit for a different reason, as the incident she was apparently punished for boils down to executing simple mayoral duties. Willie L. Brown Jr. Middle School, named after the longtime San Francisco mayor, was also changed because, according to the committee, he was “responsible for much of gentrification in SF while he was mayor.”
It gets worse. The district board committee published its reasoning for each of the 44 name changes in a Google doc publicly available online. Several of them rely on singular sourcing from Wikipedia — you know, that website teachers tell students not to get their information from without verifying elsewhere — and several of these disqualifying “facts” are provably wrong. For instance, as Joe Eskenazi recounted in San Francisco’s Mission Local, “While reading out a Wikipedia entry on the beliefs of 19th-century poet and diplomat James Russell Lowell, a committee member stated that ‘he did not want Black people to vote.’ In point of fact, a scholarly biography of the high school’s namesake states that … he ‘unequivocally advocated giving the ballot to the recently freed slaves.’”
Paul Revere’s name was removed from another school, nominally because of his connection to the Penobscot Expedition. This was a somewhat disastrous Revolutionary War naval mission against the British in 1779, but the committee inaccurately convinced itself during the meeting it was somehow related to the “colonization” of the Penobscot Indian tribe. “This is a telephone game-like invention of fact, and never happened,” reports Eskenazi.
One might think that consulting a historian would have been beneficial to this process. Yet committee chairman Jeremiah Jeffries openly scoffed at the idea. “What would be the point? History is written and documented pretty well across the board. … Based on our criteria, it’s a very straightforward conversation. And so, no need to bring historians forward to say — they either pontificate and list a bunch of reasons why, or [say] they had great qualities. Neither are necessary in this discussion.” Much of history is indeed documented “pretty well across the board,” yet that didn’t stop these pompous cretins from getting easily verifiable facts wrong.
In an interview earlier this month, the New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner asked San Francisco Board of Education President Gabriela Lopez about the obvious flaws in this adjudication process, including why the committee did not ask any historians to testify. The interview is worth quoting extensively because it reveals the staggering depth of idiocy at play here.
When asked about whether historians should have been involved due to the fact that the committee got facts wrong, such as Revere’s involvement with the Penobscot Expedition, Lopez replied:
“I see what you’re saying. So, for me, I guess it’s just the criteria was created to show if there were ties to these specific themes, right? White supremacy, racism, colonization, ties to slavery, the killing of indigenous people, or any symbols that embodied that. And the committee shared that these are the names that have these ties. And so, for me, at this moment, I have the understanding we have to do the teaching, but also, I do agree that we shouldn’t have these ties, and this is a way of showing it.”
This is, of course, not an answer to Chotiner’s question, but just a regurgitation of woke buzzwords. And to his credit, Chotiner continued with this line of questioning, explaining, “Part of the problem is that the ties may not be what the committee said they were. That’s why I brought it up.” To which Lopez replied:
“So, then you go into discrediting the work that they’re doing, and the process that they put together in order to create this list. So, when we begin to have these conversations and we’re pointing to that, and we’re given the reasoning, and they’re sharing why they made this choice and why they’re putting it out there, I don’t want to get into a process where we then discredit the work that this group has done.”
Lopez believes that pointing out factual errors is somehow “discrediting the work” done by the committee, when, in fact, it is those errors made by the committee that discredit the work. Imagine being a student and telling the teacher grading your exam that marking wrong answers is “discrediting your work” and thus unacceptable. Worse still is that Lopez and the committee are completely uninterested in the work being factual, thorough, or thoughtful, but rather simply that it was done, and done by members of certain communities — that is, with a focus on identitarian box-checking rather than expertise.
“So, none of the errors that I read to you about previous entries made you worried that maybe this was done in a slightly haphazard way?” asked Chotiner. She replied:
“No, because I’ve already shared with you that the people who have contributed to this process are also part of a community that is taking it as seriously as we would want them to. And they’re contributing through diverse perspectives and experiences that are often not included, and that we need to acknowledge.”
An increasingly common observation is that “anti-racism” is treated like a religion by its woke adherents. This is undoubtedly true, but oftentimes, it is more blind and thoughtless. Christians and Jews and Muslims hold their beliefs to be true, but they do not assume that others must believe them too simply via fiat; instead, they marshal arguments to defend or convert. The way that Lopez and others of her ilk employ empty, anti-racist dogma is more like magic than religion.
In the interview, Lopez doesn’t seem to understand why Chotiner continues to question her on whether it matters if the committee’s facts are accurate because she already said the magic words: “We did the work.” Magic does not have to have internal logic because it’s inherently a cheat; it trumps the normal operating procedures of reality. It’s not a thing you question; it’s a thing you accept and move on from.
Like magic, these anti-racist tropes and woke buzzwords are employed, almost purposefully, to cheat the need to explain yourself beyond invoking the special words. But in the real world, words mean things (at least for now). Vague assertions without fact or acknowledgment of process or error are not how education is meant to function.
Will Wilkinson, formerly of the Niskanen Center, recently tweeted, “I don’t understand why people get so hyperbolically distressed about a school board somewhere they don’t live changing the names of schools for dumb reasons. It’s embarrassing to see.” For starters, pointing out that something stupid is, in fact, stupid is not the same as getting “hyperbolically distressed.” But more importantly, people have focused on this issue because they understand that slippery slopes are the way of our world. The slipshod method and specious reasoning employed by the San Francisco school district to remove Washington and Lincoln from schools is straight out of the anti-racist playbook and is not limited to one district or state or to the issue of school names.
These bumbling activist educators are more than happy to make sweeping changes on what is and is not acceptable to teach students based on nothing more than their inaccurate and unverified notions. Along with renaming the schools, the district also voted recently to abandon the academic admissions standards for Lowell High School, the city’s highest-achieving public school. The resolution explicitly sought to move the school’s focus away from academic excellence toward anti-racism, instead “framing its work around questions” such as “Where do we see tenets of white supremacy culture and patriarchy showing up … at Lowell High School?” and “How can we leverage Ethnic Studies, Equity Studies and Black Studies in this work?”
In October, the San Francisco Board of Education’s vice president, Alison Collins, spoke about the need to move away from ideas of “meritocracy” and academic achievement: “When we’re talking about … meritocracy, especially meritocracy based on standardized testing, I’m just going to say it, in this day and age we can’t mince words: Those are racist systems,” said Collins. “If you’re going to say that merit is fair, it’s the antithesis of fair, and it’s the antithesis of just.” Claiming that meritocracy and achievement are somehow related to whiteness is a preposterous yet pervasive idea in anti-racist circles. The KIPP charter school network recently abandoned its founding “Work Hard, Be Nice” motto because, it claimed, it was at odds with being “actively antiracist.” And marshaling such arguments, leftist reformers have taken aim at standardized tests and admissions criteria in schools from San Francisco to New York. Never mind that admissions methods that don’t rely on standardized test scores are actually often more discriminatory and subject to abuse — magic words spoken, analysis over.
In the background of all this leftist moralizing nonsense is the crucial fact that district leaders in San Francisco and elsewhere still refuse to open schools. As San Francisco Mayor London Breed stated following the school board vote to rename the schools, “What I cannot understand is why the School Board is advancing a plan to have all these schools renamed by April, when there isn’t a plan to have our kids back in the classroom by then.” Meanwhile, as reported by the San Francisco Chronicle, the district’s black, Asian, and Latino students are suffering tremendous academic learning setbacks at the hands of ineffectual online remote learning.
These are blatant ideologues, yes, but even the most ardent zealot can be interested in what is in students’ best interest. The bigger issue for parents to realize is that a great many of the people in charge of their children’s education are simply too stupid to know what that is.
Grant Addison is deputy editor of the Washington Examiner Magazine.
