![]() ![]() It does not help that the Board seems to have been working off wrong information about the namesakes it axed. The conservative columnist Ross Douthat described such “radical projects” as the early stages of a mission-confused power grab by the left. Abraham Lincoln, of Lincoln High School-“not seen as much of a hero at all among many American Indian Nations,” the Board of Education says-got the boot, to the shock of blue voters. (Two points to anybody who has heard of Frank McCoppin, a mayor of San Francisco for two years in the late eighteen-sixties.) Onlookers have been up in arms. The list of blighted namesakes includes Union officers, Spanish missionaries tied to California’s colonization, and people who are probably quiz-night answers more than household names. Clarendon Elementary, named for Clarendon Avenue, on which it sits, will lose its name because, as the Board of Education explained in a spreadsheet, the name “can be traced to a county in South Carolina, one of the 13 Colonies named for Edward Hyde Earl of Claredon impeached by the House of Commons for blatant violations of Habeas Corpus.” Robert Louis Stevenson, of Stevenson Elementary, gets the black spot for once publishing what the Board describes, no doubt fairly, as “a cringeworthy poem.” Everyone’s a critic now. These two facts are weighed in most assessments of his legacy. Thomas Jefferson-of Jefferson Elementary School-was a President and an early architect of this country he was also, famously, a slaveholder who preyed on his slaves. ![]() Some of the names on the Board’s verboten list, meant to prune symbols of racism and white supremacy, merit the scrutiny. News last week that the San Francisco Board of Education-a group of seven elected commissioners charged with shaping policy-had voted, 6–1, to rename forty-four San Francisco schools came with the shock and panic of an unexpected quiz. ![]()
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