San Franciscans are being told they’re stepping into a classroom. What they’re actually entering is a political pipeline. The ConnectedSF Institute promises “balanced viewpoints” and “non-partisan education,” but delivers direction. Flagship sessions such as “Helping Shape SF’s Next Police Chief” and “The Family Zoning Plan” are presented as neutral primers on governance; in practice, they indoctrinate: More police power, looser land-use rules privileging developers, and the consolidation of executive authority in the mayor’s office.

The trick is rhetorical: If you teach those positions as civics rather than politics, they begin to feel like common sense.

This is not a classroom divorced from power; it’s infrastructure. The Institute sits inside ConnectedSF, which is organized as a 501(c)(4) advocacy nonprofit — the category that mingles education with politics. Public filings show how the model is financed. In 2023, ConnectedSF reported more than a million dollars in revenue, including a $475,000 grant from Neighbors for a Better San Francisco Advocacy.

That number matters because it identifies the larger ecosystem at work. Neighbors is the conservative funding engine that has shaped recent recalls and underwritten a constellation of right-wing groups across the city. When ConnectedSF insists it is simply teaching residents how San Francisco works, the financial record tells you what’s actually being taught: The prerogatives of a donor-driven bloc, translated into the language of civic virtue.

The hand-off from “classroom” to “campaign” is seamless. On the back end, ConnectedSF publishes what it calls “THE non-partisan guide to fixing San Francisco.” The phrase appears at the top of its November 2024 voter guide, which is written in the vocabulary of independence and good governance.

Then you read the endorsements. Daniel Lurie is the no. 1 mayoral pick, Mark Farrell the no. 2 — both wrapped in outsider branding while carrying the advantages of billionaire-class backing. For district attorney, the guide champions Brooke Jenkins, a former Neighbors employee and the clearest law-and-order signal on the ballot.

And in school governance — where the city’s ideological battles were nationalized during the recall era — ConnectedSF lines up behind “moderates,” taking pains to reassure readers about a partisan label: “Yes, Min is a registered Republican, but we here at CSF look beyond Party affiliation.” That sentence is from their own Citywide Candidate Endorsements page. Indeed, their Executive Director Marie Hurabiell herself was a lifelong Republican and Trump Appointee to the Presidio Land Trust before changing her party affiliation to Democrat when she unsuccessfully ran for the City College Board. Call it what you want; ConnectedSF is not nonpartisan. It is a curated slate, formatted as a civics product.

The method is subtle and therefore effective. A participant who thinks they’re attending “Politics 101” is not primed to push back as they might if they were handed a campaign mailer. They’re more likely to absorb the framing: that “public safety” equals more policing and broader police discretion; that “housing solutions” require loosening democratic controls so the market can “work;” that “good governance” means strengthening the mayor’s hand at the expense of community oversight. None of those phrases sounds extreme. That is the point. When a political project successfully captures the language of civics, it wins the argument before the argument begins.

If this sounds familiar, it should. San Francisco has already lived through a recent cycle in which donor-driven “good governance” outfits tried to remodel the city through recalls, charter tinkering, and ballot slates. The novelty now is not in the goals but in the delivery system. TogetherSF burned up precisely because it was too obvious — too closely tied to its billionaire patron, too careless in its coordination, too proud of its visibility. The current ecosystem learned from that failure. Today’s approach is cleaner: More professional branding through one arm; “civic education” through another; the same funders behind the curtain; fewer faces to scandalize; more euphemism to anesthetize. Call it consolidation by pedagogy.

There is a deeper cost that outlives any single election. When “moderation” is redefined to mean austerity and executive centralization, the city’s political spectrum narrows to the right without a vote being cast. When “education,” such as TogetherSF’s Politics 101 course led by Joel Engardio at Manny’s Cafe, becomes the vehicle for that redefinition, the narrowing is internalized by the very people who believe they are learning how to be better citizens. That’s how a liberal city drifts into authoritarian habits without ever declaring itself to be as such; not by seizing institutions overnight, but by instructing people — quietly, patiently—to mistake power for virtue.

The receipts are not ambiguous; the political advocacy 501(c)(4) structure, the self-described “non-partisan” voter guide, the endorsement language including the Republican reassurance, the scale of mobilization it advertises across districts. That combination is not civics; it’s a campaign architecture that found a softer door into the lives of residents who are seeking to be more proactively engaged.

So the stakes come into focus. San Francisco’s political fight is not merely over who wins the next race or which charter tweak passes in November. It’s over who gets to define civics itself. If ConnectedSF’s model becomes the template — if “education” is the permanent delivery system for donor priorities — then we will still be arguing about the candidates while the culture of democracy is quietly re-written beneath us. The ballot line will look the same. The electorate won’t.

That is why the classroom matters. It’s where narratives are set before votes are counted. It’s where “balanced” becomes a synonym for “pre-decided,” and where residents—earnest, frustrated, wanting a way to help—are taught to move in lockstep while believing they learned to think for themselves. You can call that many things. Just not civics.