文章来源：经济学人推荐人：王梦源编辑人：邬露睎

A recall election

A successful school-board recall punishes left-wing excess.It is a welcomevictory for basic competence

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Clad in his bright yellow campaign shirt, Kit Lam and hisfellow supporters of the effort to recall three members of the San FranciscoBoard of Education fanned out across Chinatown. They were making a finalelection-day push, eagerly speaking in Mandarin and Cantonese to passers-by. “We are going to win today, and it won’t be close,” says Mr Lam. He soon proved his chops as a pundit aswell as a campaigner. The three commissioners—Alison Collins, Gabriela López and Faauuga Moliga—were soundly defeated on February 15th. It is the city’s first successful recall campaign since 1914.

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San Francisco was an unlikely site for a school-boardbattle. It is a Democratic Party stronghold. Among America’s 100 largestcities, it has the lowest population share of children. Some 30% of them areenrolled in private schools. The emphatic rejection of the board points to adeep discontent. This stemmed from the lackadaisical approach to reopening public schools amid the covid-19pandemic, coupled with an excessive focus on symbolic racial-justice issues.

Siva Raj saw the toll that remote learning had inflictedon his children. “Our kids were falling further and further behind,” says MrRaj. Neither speeches, nor petitions, nor protests seemed to have any effect.In February Mr Raj and his partner, Autumn Looijen, began collecting signaturesfor a recall.

While students struggled, the board toyed with renaming44 schools, some of which honoured infamous villains like Abraham Lincoln. Itrejected a candidate for the parent advisory council because, as a gay, whitemale, he would not add sufficient racial diversity. Meanwhile, the city’sracial-achievement gap only widened during the pandemic: African-Americanssuffered higher rates of absenteeism and learning loss than others. With a$125m schools-budget deficit looming, San Francisco’s mayor, London Breed,supported the recall. She will now appoint three replacements.

Many Asian-Americans were incensed by the decision toswitch from merit-based admissions at the academically rigorous Lowell HighSchool to a lottery. The board justified this change as necessary for racialjustice. After the share of Asian-Americans in the subsequent freshman class atLowell dropped from 50% to 42%, Ms López lauded the school’s “most diverse studentpopulation arguably ever”. “People in the community were just fed up,” says MrLam, a Chinese-American parent of two. Precincts in predominantlyAsian-American neighbourhoods voted for the recall by almost ten percentagepoints more than the city at large.

Opponents tried in vain to tar the recall as a right-wingtakeover. “This was a revolution for competence,” says Ms Looijen. It is awarning to radicals in school boards across America.

This article appeared in the United States section of theprint edition under the headline "Total recall" (Feb 17th 2021)