In May 2018, San Francisco’s Board of Education adopted a resolution to create a formal plan for renaming the city’s public schools. The resolution specified that the process should be led by a blue-ribbon committee.

In January 2021, the board voted 6-1 to accept the committee’s recommendations to rename 44 schools, about a third of the city’s total. But after evidence emerged that the panel’s findings were based on poor methodology and historical inaccuracies, the controversy became national news.

For this episode, I interviewed Joe Eskenazi, who covered this story for Mission Local where he’s the managing editor. 

To bring us inside the committee’s faulty decision-making process, you’ll also hear audio captured from their Zoom meetings, along with selections from a Google spreadsheet they created to justify their decisions.