San Francisco — the city that can't keep fentanyl off its sidewalks or students reading at grade level — has identified the real threat to public education. It's not failing test scores. It's not drug dealers camped outside middle schools. It's adults. Being adults. They've coined a term for it: "adult supremacy."
I wish I were making this up.
A San Francisco social justice organization called Teachers 4 Social Justice recently hosted a workshop for educators titled "Youth as Knowledge Producers: Challenging Adult Supremacy Through Ethnic Studies." The workshop, led by Jennifer Sanchez, a third-year ethnic studies educator from Central Valley, taught teachers that their authority over students is inherently oppressive. According to materials from the session, "due to systemic power dynamics, the relationship between students and educators is inherently an oppressive one."
So telling a kid to sit down, open a textbook, and learn long division is now oppression. Got it.
Teachers 4 Social Justice isn't some fringe group operating out of somebody's garage. The organization was founded by Jeremiah Jeffries, a local teacher activist who previously led the push to rename San Francisco schools during the pandemic — you know, the initiative so absurd that it led to three school board members getting recalled. Jeffries and his crew wanted to strip names like Abraham Lincoln and George Washington from school buildings because apparently the Father of Our Country wasn't woke enough. Voters disagreed. Loudly.
But did Teachers 4 Social Justice learn anything from that humiliation? Of course not. They doubled down and pivoted to "adult supremacy." The workshop also framed academic rigor itself as "Eurocentric and harmful." So not only is being a grown-up a form of oppression, but expecting kids to actually learn things is apparently a tool of white colonialism. We've officially run out of real problems.
One San Francisco parent nailed it, as reported by Hot Air: "We have knowledge and life experience, and it is our job as parents and teachers to impart information on the next generation." Revolutionary concept, apparently.
Another parent pointed out the obvious: "Given that a large percentage of students in the district do not meet grade level standards in ELA and math, our focus as a school district is clearly way off track." That's putting it politely. SFUSD is burning time and resources on workshops about whether adults should have authority over children while their students can't read.
SFUSD district spokesperson Laura Dudnick offered the bureaucratic equivalent of a shrug, telling reporters that "outside organizations can use and rent SFUSD facilities for events." In other words: we didn't pay for it, don't blame us. Technically true, but when you're handing your school buildings to activists who think grading papers is oppression, you own the optics.
This workshop connects to California's broader ethnic studies mandate, which now requires all high schools to offer the subject. What was sold as "teaching diverse perspectives" is being used as a Trojan horse for ideology that says adults knowing more than children is a power structure that needs dismantling.
They've run out of -isms, folks. Racism, sexism, ableism — all taken. So now being a functioning adult is the new frontier of oppression. Next up: "homework supremacy." San Francisco will get right on it, just as soon as they finish not cleaning up the Tenderloin.
