Siva Raj,
Parent in San Fransisco, Calif.
That’s a good question. I think we had huge parent mobilization during the recall. We had over 1,000 volunteers getting signatures across the city and many more helping in so many other ways. But that’s not sustainable, though. And not all parents can sustain that level of interest. If you’re a single parent, working three jobs a day just to put food on the table, there’s no way you can call in to school board meetings. There’s no way you can wait for seven hours to talk.
So the process of engagement filters out those without means. You have to have some time or have the luxury of being able to work from home to even be able to participate in things like this. And in San Francisco, especially, I think what we’ve seen over time is that, actually, the people speaking for parents are not really parents. A lot of political activist groups that say they are speaking for us. But they don’t faithfully represent our views. They represent their interests.
And I think a lot of the dysfunction we’ve seen on the school board, especially the school board members who were recalled, were the worst of the lot. But that dysfunction has been there for a while. And it’s because the school board has been a stepping stone for politics. It’s a quick way to get into public visibility, be there for a few years and then go on. So many of those who are currently serving on the board of supervisors in San Francisco, for example, or who have stood for election for mayor started on the school board.
And, in fact, when we started the recall, our call to action was to get politics out of education. We are fiercely nonpartisan for that reason, because we see the overpoliticization of education as contrary to doing the right thing for our kids. In fact, it distorts the perspective.
And so for us, really, if we have to solve the persistent problems in San Francisco, which is essentially that we have a school district that has incredible diversity. We have, literally, kids of multimillionaires and homeless kids going to the same school district. We have incredible diversity in terms of ethnicity. And we have also huge disparity in terms of educational outcomes.
And the people coming in talking social justice and equity have not solved this problem because they have not focused on doing the things that are necessary to run a public education system well. They focus on the things that get them names in the press and so they can get on to the next job. They focused on advancing themselves, not advancing our children.
For decades, we’ve had this issue of persistent gap in educational equity and outcomes. And you’re setting up so many kids for failure. We’re passing them through the public education system. Eighty percent graduation, but only 60 percent are actually ready to go to college. And so a lot of what we are doing right now is putting the focus on those hard problems.
We want the school district to focus on student outcomes, to spend more than half of the time in board meetings focused on how are we going to actually improve student outcomes. Not on performative politics, which has really been the curse of the San Francisco school board.
What we don’t have today in the public education system is accountability for outcomes. Who is accountable for those kids not getting a good education? Who is going to get fired?