EDITORIAL: Race to the bottom

A San Francisco middle school principal has given her students a valuable lesson on the tyranny of good intentions.

Everett Middle School staged its student council election this month, with secret-ballot voting held in homerooms to guarantee full turnout. And, proving themselves color blind and free of the influences of identity politics, students elected leadership that did not mirror their racial and ethnic demographics. A school that's 56 percent Hispanic and 9 percent black, with one-third of students being English language learners, chose no Hispanics, blacks or English learners for the top four offices.

Principal Lena Van Haren didn't approve of the vote. She decided the winners weren't diverse enough, so she refused to release the results.

"It's not OK for a school that is really, really diverse to have the student representatives majority white," she told the San Francisco Chronicle.

Talk about voter disenfranchisement.

Notice how Ms. Van Haren, who is white, gave no credence to the qualifications of the students who won election, the ideas they campaigned on or the possibility that the election winners, collectively, were ideologically diverse. For her, skin color is the most important trait in a student council member. How shallow.

Imagine if a principal took the same approach under opposite circumstances, suppressing election results because racial and ethnic minorities were elected to a majority of student council seats at a majority white school. That educator would be run out of the profession and the school system would be sued.

Ms. Van Haren finally released the election results, but not before demanding that students help create a plan to increase student council diversity. Meanwhile, she trashed concepts of democracy and completely marginalized and humiliated the white and Asian election winners by making them appear unfit for leadership.

The good news here? That this school's students aren't as hung up on race as the grown-ups are. And some people wonder why racial divides exist in this country?