Jessica Costescu of the Washington Free Beacon highlights the latest uproar in a major left coast city.

Amid a severe budget crisis, the San Francisco Unified School District superintendent decided in March that some schools in the chronically dysfunctional, poorly performing public system needed to close. So it paid a Stanford University professor $30,000 to create an “equity-centered” formula that would determine which ones would shutter.

After the results were announced in October, parents revolted, the school superintendent was forced to resign, and the closure plan was shelved indefinitely. Two weeks later, city voters ousted their embattled mayor, London Breed. Now, as the school district tries to rebuild under new leadership, the Stanford professor’s DEI-focused closure plan is coming under increasingly harsh scrutiny, especially from San Francisco’s Asian community. Asian parents are enraged that the closure plan targeted a high-performing elementary school whose students are overwhelmingly low-income and Asian. 

The now-paused closure plan, parents argue, used a custom formula that rewarded poor-performing black and Hispanic schools and targeted low-income, high-performing Asian children for cutbacks.

At issue is the fate of Sutro Elementary in the city’s Inner Richmond neighborhood. The school’s population is 75 percent Asian, 60 percent of its students come from low-income families, and half aren’t fluent in English. How then, parents asked, was it “equitable” to recommend closing Sutro, especially given that the majority of students consistently met or outperformed state standards?

“We want transparency in this process. Why is a hugely successful school, with a predominantly low-income student body, on the closure list? We are 94% enrolled,” Sutro PTA secretary Kaitlin Solimine said at an October listening session.

By contrast, students at Dr. George Washington Carver Elementary repeatedly failed to meet state standards. That school, however, has a different demographic makeup: It’s 45 percent black and 22 percent Hispanic. It was not among the 11 elementary schools slated for closure.