San Francisco Mayor London Breed has been publicly critical of the SF school board before but always stopped short of endorsing their recall. That’s no longer the case according to Jill Tucker as the SF Chronicle:

San Francisco’s Mayor London Breed is backing the effort to recall three school board members, saying she is supporting “the parents’ call for change.”

Breed’s endorsement of the recall of board President Gabriela López, board Vice President Faauuga Moliga and board member Alison Collins counters critics who have argued the recall is a Republican-led effort to dismantle a progressive school board…

“Sadly, our school board’s priorities have often been severely misplaced,” Breed said in a statement. “During such a difficult time, the decisions we make for our children will have long term impacts. Which is why it is so important to have leadership that will tackle these challenges head on, and not get distracted by unnecessary influences or political agendas. Our kids must come first.”

The recall is not an effort by GOP critics, it’s an effort by parents who mostly seem to be left-leaning. Nevertheless, the board members have attempted to frame the effort as one led by Republicans because in San Francisco that’s the laziest way to convince voters your opponents are wrong. Mayor Breed’s endorsement of the effort should kill off that talking point for good. Now the board members will actually have to try and defend their records.

The only real surprise here is that it took Breed this long to join the recall effort. I suspect that’s because she didn’t want to sign up for something that might turn out to be an embarrassing failure. But now that signatures have been gathered and approved and a recall election date has been set, this looks more like a sure bet. As other papers have pointed out, it also makes sense because if the recall is successful, Breed gets to pick all three replacements:

It’s a pretty simple equation. If organizers succeed in recalling school board members Gabriela Lopez, Alison Collins and Faauuga Moliga, Breed will have even more control over the Board of Education than she did before.

As mayor, she would get to choose a replacement for all three of them, including her previous appointee, Moliga. The successors would then serve until the next election, potentially paving their way to higher office and widening the Mayor’s base of political allies.

To be fair to the mayor, she’s not really jumping on this bandwagon at the last moment. In fact, Breed called for Alison Collins to resign back in March, not long before Collins sued the board for $87 million. But even long before that, Breed was publicly critical of the board’s focus on renaming schools. Last October she tore into them:

Schools have been allowed to open in San Francisco under public health orders issued at the beginning of September and while many private schools are open today, our public schools have still not yet made a firm plan to open. Parents are frustrated and looking for answers. The achievement gap is widening as our public schools kids are falling further behind every single day…I know there are tough choices to be made, but the School District and the Board of Education need to do what needs to be done to get our kids back in school.

And now, in the midst of this once in a century challenge, to hear that the District is focusing energy and resources on renaming schools — schools that they haven’t even opened — is offensive. It’s offensive to parents who are juggling their children’s daily at-home learning schedules with doing their own jobs and maintaining their sanity. It’s offensive to me as someone who went to our public schools, who loves our public schools, and who knows how those years in the classroom are what lifted me out of poverty and into college. It’s offensive to our kids who are staring at screens day after day instead of learning and growing with their classmates and friends.

As I’ve argued elsewhere, the same frustration with schools that helped Republicans recapture Virginia is on display in San Francisco. This isn’t just about CRT in schools. It’s about leftist extremism including removing Lincoln’s name from a high school, covering a mural a few found offensive, ending competitive admissions at Lowell High School and one board member saying Asian parents were acting like white supremacists.

What Breed’s endorsement highlights is that this left-wing culture war nonsense, which might have gotten a pass in a normal year, was too much in the midst of kids being stuck at home for more than a year. Even progressive parents in San Francisco can’t stomach it. They are ready to throw the bums out and now they’ll do it with the mayor’s approval.