The Racist History of The Academy at Mcateer and Ruth Asawa School of the Arts

While I’m reflecting on the systemic racism that has led to my exploitation, I am also thinking about how the district keeps using “antiracist healing practices” as a center of the work during this pandemic, and how I keep seeing people from Central Office quote Bettina Love, author of We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom. In fact my administrators used a clip of Dr. Love, Dena Simmons, and Gholdy Muhammad from a summer panel they did to “frame and guide our work for the year.” This district really wants you to believe they are committed to antiracism.

But let’s talk about the racist history of my school site, and by proxy, school district. Once upon a time, at 555 Portola Drive, there was a school called McAteer High School. McAteer was closed in 2002 because it was poorly performing and considered a ‘dumping ground’ where other schools would send their behaviorally difficult students and students with special education needs.

But let’s go back to 1982. To talk about my school, we have to talk about another school; Ruth Asawa School of the Arts (RASOTA). A school just as beloved and lauded as Lowell High School, the two crown jewels of San Francisco Unified School District.

(There’s a lot to be said about how Lowell’s mascot was the Lowell Indians until 1988 because they copied the mascot and colors of my alma mater, Stanford University, and an overwhelming 86% of Lowell’s student body wanted to keep their offensive anti-Indigenous mascot. There’s a lot to be said about how a few years ago, there was only one Black boy in Lowell’s freshman class of 500 and how Black children at Lowell already have to deal with accusations of ‘You only got in because of affirmative action’ when they are 13 years old. There’s a lot to be said about how children from China are sent to live with their relatives for middle school in San Francisco just so they can get a shot at getting into Lowell, and the antiblackness that is rampant in that school to hold East Asian buy-in to capitalism. But that’s a story for a different day.)

Anyway, apparently there was some mythical dream that School of the Arts was going to be a multi-district arts magnet to elevate the arts in the Bay Area, but only SFUSD wanted to cough up the money so they started as a school situated alongside J. Eugene McAteer High School. You can read this ‘SOTA love letter’ to see that these aspiring hopeful art-children had to endure mean, scary bullying from the Black and Brown McAteer children, boohoo. But RASOTA gave us Aisha Tyler! and Margaret Cho! and that white guy and his friend who made gentrified San Francisco’s new favorite movie, The Last Black Man in San Francisco!

The eventual dream is for RASOTA to live permanently in a $240 million dollar complex in Civic Center so the amazing, talented arts children can be right there with the center of culture in San Francisco — the opera house, the symphony, the ballet, right there.

I can’t speak to the details of this part of the story but I know that poor, hopeful dreamer RASOTA has relocated a couple times while waiting for their dreams of a multimillion dollar campus to come true. When they were gone, McAteer High School was left to fend for itself. It obviously couldn’t. According to this article about the school’s closure, “[SFUSD] acknowledges that many of the students at McAteer were placed there in the middle of a school year because of discipline problems at other campuses. Ackerman said it became a fairly common practice for other schools to funnel poorly performing students and children with special needs to the McAteer campus, rather than equally distributing those students to several campuses in the district.”

So when the big scary threat of McAteer High School was eliminated, RASOTA came back to 555 Portola. But there was a problem.

The Ruth Asawa School of the Arts requires that incoming 9th graders apply by arts portfolio or audition to be accepted into one of their many departments. Naturally, this means they can only have so many students, and their numbers at the time did not justify the entire McAteer campus. So the possibility of a charter school co-locating with RASOTA drew closer and closer…

At this point I should also point out that in order to be an artistic prodigy in ‘classical arts’ like dance, orchestra, choir, band, etc. by the time you are in the 8th grade, there’s a high likelihood your parents are a) white and b) rich enough to afford a lot of lessons for you to pursue your gifts. So RASOTA was very white, and very rich. And they were being critiqued as such. So a golden opportunity arose.

We shall create a “school within a school! It will be general enrollment so that there are more students of color and more low-income students, and we will help foster a multicultural, community arts approach! They will also have access to our afternoon arts teachers and it will be beautiful! We will call it The Academy of Arts and Sciences!

(No, not the California Academy of Sciences. That’s different. And not a school at all. Just a perennial field trip favorite in SFUSD.)

Anyway, if you couldn’t tell by my scathing tone so far, this is not what happens. More Black and Brown children join the school at RASOTA, and suddenly RASOTA children’t get to have embedded codes for their racism. Rather than saying “I’m white and affluent and I dislike sharing space with Black and Brown kids,” they could say that Academy children weren’t behaved and were just fundamentally different from SOTA kids. Academy students were eventually boxed out of arts programming, despite the fact that they were supposed to have just as much of a right to the space as SOTA kids did. But RASOTA got to use the children of colors as numbers in their own reports and say that they were just as racially diverse as any school in the district.

I should also mention that in 2016 the Ruth Asawa School of the Arts was banned by the school district from recruiting (again, mostly white and affluent) students from out-of-district, and RASOTA teachers defended it by saying “SOTA is a school for classical arts, not cartooning, graffiti art and hip-hop dance.” It doesn’t take much to hear the antiblack venom dripping from the Department Head of the Visual Arts program, a white man who lists on his bio that he “has been closely associated with Native peoples in Mexico and North America” and “is formally adopted as a nephew by the Southern Cheyenne Medicine Man, Elder and Sacred Arrow holder, Eugene Black Bear Sr., from Watonga, Oklahoma.”

Oh! and let’s not forget that until 2018, RASOTA is a school that had its own nonprofit, called Friends of School of the Arts that “brought in $3.2 million in mixed revenue between 2010 and July 2015, including some $1.1 million in government funding from 2010 to July 2014, according to the most recent tax filings available.” According to the school’s own WASC report, FoSOTA has since 2008 “raised $5.8 million in support of the school and the art departments.” (Somehow it is not the only school with a nonprofit wing in this godforsaken district, but I have no idea how to tackle that issue.)

So Academy and RASOTA eventually decided to part ways. But not. What happened was that they decided renovate the campus in 2016 so that it would be, as I was told, “two-school friendly”. When I told a friend, he wryly quipped, “So separate but ‘equal’?” The Academy of Arts and Sciences changed its name to the clunkier and vague The Academy — SF @ McAteer, to hearken back to the school that existed beforehand. (The Yuri Kochiyama School for Liberation was an option and unfortunately did not gain much traction. Maybe that’s a good thing since I am already losing my shit over how racist and antiBlack this school is without dealing with the hypocrisy of it being named after one of my radical heroes.)

Today, 98% of RASOTA’s student body is not socioeconomically disadvantaged, as they state in their own WASC report. They have a SPED population of 12%. RASOTA’s white population is 39%, triple that of SFUSD’s 11% white student body. In the meantime, Academy has one of the most truly diverse populations in the school district, including one of the highest Black populations, and our SPED population has increased by 10% over the last five years to a very illegal and impossible 22%, the third highest in the district.

They occupy the top two floors of the 555 Portola campus, in addition to four science classrooms on the basement floor, where The Academy @ McAteer is relocated. They have priority access to the auditorium and basically forced us to reshuffle our entire assembly schedule last-minute, even though our staff had worked hard to send them a schedule prior tht beginning of the school year. They join Academy’s sports teams while Academy students cannot join their arts programming. We can’t drill holes into the gym floor for new volleyball nets because it would “mess with the acoustics of SOTA’s dance studios downstairs.” Their academic teachers only teach in the morning and have all afternoon to prep because students go to arts practice, while teachers all over the district like me are being forced to take on obscene amounts of work with a severe lack of prep time.

Their students call our kids ‘ghetto.’ When the fire alarms go off, SOTA students have loudly blamed it on “Academy students smoking weed”, even though the vast majority of the time it’s been well-established that the fire alarms are triggered by vaping on a RASOTA floor bathroom. They said they felt ‘threatened’ and ‘unsafe’ when our students ran through their hallways on our homecoming spirit day for all of a minute, which occurred in retaliation for literal years of SOTA Field Day, wherein their students tore up our field, played music so loud we couldn’t do instruction, and they year after year raucously run through our hallways screaming and shouting. Or they do shit like make the Black and Brown security guards to respond to calls for the most useless errands. Or if they get phone calls in Spanish they redirect it to our office. One time there was a Snapchat rivalry between Academy and RASOTA students because of the geotags, which culminated in white students at SOTA posting things about “fuck n — — rs” and posting pictures of egg whites divided from egg yolks with the caption “whites only.”

Academy is not the first choice of the majority of our students. In fact, in my experience coaching volleyball or just dropping by middle schools, we are rarely properly included on the list of high schools students can consider on posters in the hallways. If incoming freshmen have heard of Academy (they usually haven’t nowadays, blessedly), they say people tell them it is “ratchet” and “ghetto” and “there are a lot of fights.,” that people call it a “barnacle on SOTA’s side” or “Diet SOTA.” They quickly learn this is not the case, that a small number of adults have furiously worked to craft a safe space for students at a small school. Meanwhile, RASOTA students have the reputation of doing drugs and drinking, and a health teacher there has said they struggle with RASOTA students insisting they need to do drugs “for their art.”

Academy exists so that RASOTA has a punching bag for their white supremacy and that they can show they know how to play nice with children of color. Academy has been run by the same white man for all of its nearly twenty years of existence because the district has no interest in caring for a small school where they can dump all their “problematic” Black and Brown kids, just as they did to the original McAteer school. It’s also a dumping ground for white male teachers who don’t care about their job anymore, as a number of Academy staff and alumni can attest to white male teachers who slept in the middle of class, refused to do their jobs, have slapped students’ behinds and still continued to work there despite a number of Title IX investigations, etc. These men work at Academy until they can retire, terrorizing children with their white masculinity.

Academy exists so that they can tell families whose children have IEPs that they can send their child to a small school where their child would get personalized attention, omitting the absurd increase of SPED population or the complete failure by the district to provide adequate support and staff to SPED programming all over the district. Academy exists so that SFUSD can point to our ‘high graduation rates of African American students’ and include it in their numbers, while failing to see that a number of racist teachers at this school only pass children because they are too tired to deal with them, or if there is genuine success that that comes at great cost to educators who truly care about students.

For as long as SFUSD schools continue to be racially segregated. For as long as schools get money for AP classes offered and tests administered, and teachers continue to perpetuate the myth that AP classes are meaningful and not just a moneymaking scam for the College Board that doesn’t even guarantee college credit, which forces schools like mine to be even further racially segregated and ableist in design. For as long as Lowell gets to racially segregate by maintaining their GPA and test score standard for acceptance and RASOTA gets to racially segregate by maintaining their arts portfolio/audition for acceptance.

Fuck out of here quoting Black women abolitionists. To believe that SFUSD is committed to ending systemic racism is a fucking joke.