Asian American Faces Yield Community Interest?
By Samson Wong

ETHNICITY IS NOT ENOUGH: Just because elected or appointed leaders have Asian American faces, doesn’t mean they act in the community’s interest. As one 1986 political newsletter for a Chinese American supervisor candidate put it, “ethnicity is not enough.”

Such will be the case when Assistant Superintendent of Public Instruction Henry Der and five other candidates will be evaluated by two Chinese American school trustees for the job of S.F. Superintendent in a school district that is half Asian American.

Parents skeptical of Asian American elected leaders should hark back 6 years ago to the beginnings of the fight to change the desegregation caps that discriminated against Chinese American students. Another pair of Chinese American school board members—Angie Fa and Leland Yee—kept the caps in place and Chinese American parents had to resort to the courts to change the admissions policy.

This January, Ho vs. S.F. Unified School District federal lawsuit forced the school district to end that obsolete 16-year policy which capped students of one racial category to no more than 45 percent at schools thus changing a policy requiring a near perfect index score for Chinese Americans admissions to the prestigious Lowell High School. Chinese Americans had to achieve higher scores than any other group, including Anglos.

The school board reluctantly settled for a race neutral plan and used other criteria such as economics (welfare recipients or rent subsidized housing), residency in the Bayview or Mission, kids who need special programs and residency near a school.

Except for admitting more students to an already crowded Lowell, Fa and Yee did kept the consent decree in place. At one point in 1993, Amy Chang, who led the fight, tried to seek a word with Fa, but ended up chasing her through a school parking lot.

Yee only changed his tune after he became Supervisor in 1996, when he no longer was a school board member and a defendant in that lawsuit.

Former Chinese for Affirmative Action director and current superintendent candidate Henry Der at the time sought to support low income, limited English immigrant students, but sacrificed other Chinese American students by denouncing the legal efforts as a reversion back to single race schools.

In another event at an April meeting of the S.F. Chapter of the Organization of Chinese Americans, school board members Frank Chong and Eddie Chin were presented with problems of bilingual access in the school district by the Asian Law Caucus’ Victor Hwang. Those programs are mandated by the state but not observed by the school district. Did Chong and Chin do anything? Nope, they weren’t volunteering to do anything that night.

After the OCA remarks of our school board members, I seethed a little at Asian American school board members, let alone a prospect of an Asian American superintendent. As ethnicity was not enough in the Ho case, it should not be the only reason for parents to support public officials.

READ MY COLUMN, NO NEW BONDS: If the school district doesn’t get its fiscal house in order, voters should cast a protest vote against future school bond measures. I’ve taken a strong stance against Proposition 26, the defeated measure that would have lowered the school bond requirement from a two-thirds vote to a majority. Keeping a two-thirds vote requirement on school bond measures is one way to keep leverage on the school district.

Bond money should not be given to a district in fiscal disarray managed by an archaic accounting system where teachers pay for supplies out of pocket and janitors are paid overtime and have larger salaries than the teachers.

Asian Americans are the greatest users of the school system and should demand a fair return. They make up 37 percent of the population and half of the student body. Nearly 50 percent of Asian American voters are homeowners and pay the disproportionate burden of property taxes, while tenant voters outnumber homeowners by over 2-to-1 in the city.

A recent homebuyer in this overheated market will be footing a greater property tax bill than long-time homeowners or tenants helped by limits on capital improvement passthroughs.

Strategically, Asian Americans make up 20 percent of voters and potentially have a veto on any new bond measures. It takes more than one-third of San Francisco voters to kill a bond measure. Bond opposition has been on the rise, with 35 percent of voters on average having defeated 14 of the 27 bond measures in the 1990s.

POTSTICKER SHOCK: Send your comments to potsticker@prodigy.net or samson@sfindependent.com. Calls accepted at 415-826-1100, ext 23.