Opinion Roundtable
Illustration by Chloe Scheffe; photographs by Josh Eckstein, via Unsplash; Mikus and National Archives and Records Administration, via Wikimedia Commons; and Internet Archive
America’s schools have emerged as a battleground for the country’s most fervent cultural disagreements, and in many places, parents are finding themselves on the front lines. As part of Opinion’s “What Is School For?” package, three parents of public school students joined Lulu Garcia-Navarro to discuss the big questions underlying the new era of parental activism.
Letha Muhammad is a mother of three in Raleigh, N.C., and serves as the executive director of the nonprofit Education Justice Alliance, which works to dismantle the school-to-prison and school-to-deportation pipelines. Tom Chavez of Elmhurst, Ill., is a father of three who co-founded the group Elmhurst Parents for Integrity in Curriculum, which seeks to remove ideological agendas from the classroom. Siva Raj lives in San Francisco with his two sons and co-founded the group SF Guardians, which led the drive to recall three of the city’s school board members this year.
‘We’ve Awakened the Sleeping Giant.’
Listen to three public school parents explain to Times Opinion podcast host Lulu Garcia-Navarro why this era of school activism is here to stay.
Lulu Garcia-Navarro, Host of “First Person” podcast
Before we really get going, I’d like to have a picture of your family and the schools you’ve raised your kids in. So please, can you tell me who you are, tell me a little bit about your kids who are in public school right now, how old they are and briefly tell us what the school is like? Let’s start with Letha, then Siva and then Tom.
Letha Muhammad, Parent in Raleigh, N.C.
I am the mother of three children, but one currently in high school. He’s my only son. And he just started the 11th grade — 16-year-old. And he actually attends a public magnet high school in Wake County. And his high school is about 1,500 students. He is attending the engineering academy that’s a part of the magnet program that his high school has. And fun fact, I have two other children who also graduated from that same high school, as well.
Lulu Garcia-Navarro, Host of “First Person” podcast
Cool. All right. Siva?
Siva Raj, Parent in San Fransisco, Calif.
So I’m a single parent of two boys who are both in San Francisco public schools. My oldest is also in 11th grade, so he just started a school year. And my youngest is in fifth grade, in an elementary school close by. And we moved to San Francisco in December 2020, when I moved in with my partner, who has three kids of her own, so we have a big family together. Before that, my kids were in a more traditional suburban school environment. So we’ve seen different school environments. And I’ve volunteered in different schools. So I can appreciate some of the nuances, what’s similar and what’s different.
Lulu Garcia-Navarro, Host of “First Person” podcast
Tom, you?
Tom Chavez, Parent in Elmhurst, Ill.
I live in Elmhurst, Ill., which is a near-west suburb of Chicago. I have three children. My son is currently a senior at York Community High School. We moved to Elmhurst 17 years ago because of the reputation of the school system. And overwhelmingly, I’d say, we’ve been pretty satisfied. My kids are thriving. But at the same time, there are issues that need to be addressed.
Lulu Garcia-Navarro, Host of “First Person” podcast
I’m going to start with this question. School is many things. It provides a place to learn. It can provide a place to socialize. It can provide a place to get a hot meal. I want to start very simply. To you, in a few words, what exactly is school for? Letha?
Letha Muhammad, Parent in Raleigh, N.C.
School, I guess, in a nutshell, I would say, is a place of discovery. It’s a place where young people, young children as early as pre-K all the way up to 12th grade, enter into a place that oftentimes is transformative. It’s a place where they get introduced to formal learning.
And they have the opportunity to connect with other students and adults who may come from different places from them. I think it’s a place for transformation, for young people in particular, as they move through public schooling. But also, I think public schools and schools in general should be a place for young people to dream a dream about who they want to be in the world.
I’ll use myself. I was a public school graduate. I went to public school starting in middle school up through 12th grade. I love to read. And so I had a teacher in middle school that introduced me to the Hardy Boys, to Nancy Drew, to Maya Angelou. And it opened up a world for me that I didn’t necessarily have access to within the confines of the home and community that I lived in. But it helped to shape my view. And so it does create a space of discovering a new way — and maybe not even new like foreign new, just a new way of operating in the world that actually could help a young person say, “Oh, well, I could do that, too.”
Lulu Garcia-Navarro, Host of “First Person” podcast
Siva?
Siva Raj, Parent in San Fransisco, Calif.
That’s really well said, I think. For me, a lot of what I see from school tracks back to my own upbringing. I grew up in extreme poverty in India, living on top of a factory where my dad worked as a security guard. My parents really struggled to put me through school because government-run schools in India are pretty bad. And so if you have to get a good education, you have to put your kids through private school and pay for it.
And I know they really, really struggled every day of their life to be able to give me that education. And without that education, I wouldn’t even be here talking to you guys. And for me, at the foundational level, what school is is this opportunity to bridge some of that gap, to give every kid a chance at a successful life. And that’s what, at the core, I want for my kids, too. As a parent, for me, personally, that is probably more important than anything else I do.
Lulu Garcia-Navarro, Host of “First Person” podcast
Tom, what is school for?
Tom Chavez, Parent in Elmhurst, Ill.
I agree with what Letha said. It is sort of a discovery. And there’s a lot of learning that goes on that isn’t academic. But the reason why we moved to the community we moved to is, we look at the role of the taxpayer-funded public education system, first and foremost, is to teach children to read and write and speak and spell and compute accurately and effectively. And we — my wife and I, as parents — believe that the primary role, first and foremost, is to prepare our children for future success.
Lulu Garcia-Navarro, Host of “First Person” podcast
So Tom, it seems like for you, it’s about academics. Letha, you said that to you, school is really about more, though, than academics. It’s about this sense of discovery. Siva, you were involved in the San Francisco school board recall. What did you feel was going wrong for your child at that point? And why did you decide to get involved in changing the direction of your kids’ school system?
Siva Raj, Parent in San Fransisco, Calif.
The impetus to the recall was really seeing my kids struggle through distance learning. And the longer we stayed in distance learning, the more they struggled. Especially my older guy, who went from being an honor student to being rock bottom in terms of grades. And I think, for me, even more strikingly, he was at home, borderline depressed, barely getting out of bed. He had lost all the joy of learning because his distance learning experience was just about — every one of his peers had shut their cameras off. So he was just looking at a blank screen while this teacher was lecturing day in, day out, class after class.
When we moved to San Francisco, San Francisco had better Covid control than the rest of the Bay Area. And the schools were supposed to reopen. And then out of the blue, I get this email from the school district, saying middle and high school kids are not going to go back this whole year. And that was just — shook me up and woke me up, so to speak.
And so that galvanized me. And I started to get involved, talking to other parents and joining some of the parent groups that had formed to advocate for reopening. I started logging in to school board meetings to try and make sense of what’s going on. And that also shocked me because reopening was a priority for most parents. The majority of parents in the school district wanted the schools to reopen. And yet the school board didn’t seem to have prioritized that at all.
So we would have these nine-hour-long school board meetings where school reopening was literally the last item on the agenda. I remember waiting online for, like, seven hours once. And then you get to speak, like, for 30 minutes at the stroke of midnight. And there were 200 parents still waiting to talk about it.
Lulu Garcia-Navarro, Host of “First Person” podcast
So in that context, to build on your answer to what is school for, that it’s a place that you said should provide opportunities for children, you felt that the school system let your child down?
Siva Raj, Parent in San Fransisco, Calif.
Oh, yeah, absolutely. It felt like the school board had completely deprioritized learning and education. It was focused on everything other than education.
Lulu Garcia-Navarro, Host of “First Person” podcast
Tom, I’m going to bring you in here because I think you also felt let down by the Elmhurst school system. Why did you decide to get involved in your kids’ school?
Tom Chavez, Parent in Elmhurst, Ill.
Initially, my involvement was around reopening the schools. For me, it was not as difficult because I’m fortunate that my children were much older. My middle child was a senior in high school at the time. And she missed rites of passage — prom, her track season, her graduation ceremony. It was all gone.
But it’s a lot easier, I guess I would say, for an 18-year-old to cope than it is for somebody with a first grader or a fifth grader. So I felt very sympathetic with those parents. And I agree again with Siva, which was, what are the priorities? What are the priorities of the school district?
It should have been a five-alarm fire. We need to get children back into school and learning because learning loss compounds and it makes it difficult for children to catch up. So that was the first time I was really paying attention in this way to what goes on in our school district.
And then the distance learning, or the remote learning, and the lack of accountability and the lack of, it really seemed to be, any real focus on prioritizing education, that’s where I said, “Wow, I have to get involved here.” And when you started to peel the layers back, you started to discover things that were unsettling as a parent.
Lulu Garcia-Navarro, Host of “First Person” podcast
So I’m hearing a lot of dissatisfaction around school closures during Covid. But once schools opened back up, there was a lot of conversation about what’s actually going on inside the classrooms. So I want to get to this big question in our national conversation about schooling. And that is how we want schools to teach our kids about what history we learn and how we understand the context of the facts that we’re given, which is where things tend to get complicated. I mean, Tom, you became an activist after your son’s teacher was instructing something you found inappropriate.
Tom Chavez, Parent in Elmhurst, Ill.
That’s correct. The difficult histories or the difficult topics have really become the center of gravity for the debate in public education. We send our kids off to school, and we believe they’re learning math and reading and science and how to compute. And learning difficult things about our history. And what we’ve come to find is that children are going into classrooms and certain topics are being discussed in certain ways that don’t align with what we believe in our home. If your child comes home to you and says, “In my classroom, I don’t believe that I can share my opinions,” that’s a problem. This forced me — or caused me — to look into the curriculum.
Lulu Garcia-Navarro, Host of “First Person” podcast
What was being taught, though?
Tom Chavez, Parent in Elmhurst, Ill.
Well, transparency means that if you’re teaching — the primary teaching tool in the high school for history is the Zinn Ed Project. It’s not in the syllabus. So it’s handouts. It’s “Watch this video.” And all of these things have a particular political ideology attached to them.
Lulu Garcia-Navarro, Host of “First Person” podcast
What is Zinn Ed, exactly? I’m not familiar with that.
Tom Chavez, Parent in Elmhurst, Ill.
The Zinn Education Project is Howard Zinn.
Lulu Garcia-Navarro, Host of “First Person” podcast
Ah, yes, “A People’s History.” Right.
Tom Chavez, Parent in Elmhurst, Ill.
“A People’s History,” right? So the overarching theme in Zinn Ed is that the United States is an irredeemable, oppressive regime. It’s been founded to marginalize people of color. And it’s the go-to resource for teaching children American history. What is that — why is that the primary piece of information that is being used to teach children about our country’s history?
Lulu Garcia-Navarro, Host of “First Person” podcast
Siva, what’s your view on how schools should discuss our difficult history, which Tom says has a particular lens that he doesn’t agree with? How do you think that needs to be addressed? And then we’ll go to Letha.
Siva Raj, Parent in San Fransisco, Calif.
So I’m not familiar with the specific material that Tom was pointing to.
Lulu Garcia-Navarro, Host of “First Person” podcast
Sure.
Siva Raj, Parent in San Fransisco, Calif.
But in general, I think no nation’s history is singular. So one of the things I certainly think we should be doing a good job of is capturing all of these different strands of history and being able to represent them reasonably well. And I think, when I look at what’s happening back home in India, we are shifting away from the polarity of history.
And India is a long civilization. There’s so many things that have happened. And there is a desire to look at it with a very singular narrative. And that is counterproductive. It means that you’re not allowing all of those different people who live in this nation to actually feel represented in the story of the nation.
Lulu Garcia-Navarro, Host of “First Person” podcast
Letha, how do you think about how and when to pull on those different strands of history? How should teachers discuss things, for example, like slavery, Jim Crow?
Letha Muhammad, Parent in Raleigh, N.C.
Yeah, as a Black woman in this country whose ancestors were brought here as enslaved Africans, I think I would have to say that the truth of that has to be taught in public schools. It does a disservice to Black students and other students if we don’t share the full historical context of America. And not from a place of demonizing or witch hunting out folks and, in particular, white people. I have to name that. It isn’t from that context that, as a parent, I would want history taught in its totality or even difficult topics addressed. Because what I recognize is that America prides itself on being the great melting pot, the great melting pot of ideas and individuals and communities and racial and ethnic groups.
And if we are a country that is a melting pot of all these different parts that sum up to the whole, then all these different parts have a right to be represented fairly and accurately in our public education system.
And so that means that there should be honest historical context shared in a classroom setting, in the curriculum that is used, in the materials that students are introduced to, as an opportunity for everyone to be fully actualized in that space. We do ourselves a disservice to continue a lie.
Lulu Garcia-Navarro, Host of “First Person” podcast
I think the challenging thing here is that none of you are saying, “Teach this. Don’t teach that.” But the question, of course, of what to prioritize is where things get complicated. Letha, I’m going to follow up with you: Should parents expect to agree 100 percent of the time with the values their kids are being taught in school?
Letha Muhammad, Parent in Raleigh, N.C.
No. How is that possible, to have 100 percent agreement? So I’m not striving for 100 percent agreement. For me and my husband, as parents, it’s important for us to carve out space within our home that allows for us to have deeper conversations and interrogate ideas that are introduced, histories that are introduced, that may be new and are foreign to them. So that they have always this baseline of grounding that comes from who we are as a family and the community that we’re a part of.
Lulu Garcia-Navarro, Host of “First Person” podcast
Tom, you started with your story about not liking something that your child was being taught. And so I put it to you: Should parents have to agree with everything their child is taught in school?
Tom Chavez, Parent in Elmhurst, Ill.
Well, it’s not whether they agree. What we’re really trying to get to is, when people say they’re in favor of diversity, because that’s used a lot in — District 205 talks about diversity, welcoming, inclusion. And I agree with all those things. But what does it mean?
And I think diversity in a school setting should not just be about diversity of skin color. It should be about the diversity of ideas and opinions as well. So every student that walks into York High School or any school in our school district should feel free to express the opinions that they have about all these difficult topics. But in many instances, the opinion is not appreciated.
Lulu Garcia-Navarro, Host of “First Person” podcast
Can you give me an example of that?
Tom Chavez, Parent in Elmhurst, Ill.
Well, the viewpoint in this particular classroom and in certain classrooms are viewpoints that are not what we value in our home and not how we want to teach our children about history. They’re unbalanced. Let’s go back to the Zinn Ed Project and what his overarching theme is. I believe there is racism in our country. I’m Hispanic. I’ve experienced it. But I don’t believe that racism defines who we are.
The idea that parents like me want a sanitized version of history taught — that’s not accurate. Do talk about slavery and Jim Crow and the Civil War and Reconstruction. And talk about them in their full context. Talk about slavery and where it’s existed in other parts of the world.
We didn’t invent slavery in the United States. And should children walk away from a history class thinking, “Wow, I really learned a lot about the historical facts about slavery, but I’ve also learned about historical facts about the progress we’ve made in this country”? And are we living up to equality under the law for everybody? Have we been moving closer to that over the last 250 years, or are we going backwards?
Teach history. Call it hard history. Wonderful. I think those discussions need to be had. But they have to be had in an intellectually honest manner.
Lulu Garcia-Navarro, Host of “First Person” podcast
Siva, I want to bring you in because you’ve got an interesting perspective, obviously, as an immigrant. You yourself didn’t go to school in the U.S. You have kids who do. Should parents expect to agree 100 percent of the time with the values their kids are being taught in school? Where do you stand?
Siva Raj, Parent in San Fransisco, Calif.
So if I could just briefly comment on Tom’s comment there.
Lulu Garcia-Navarro, Host of “First Person” podcast
Please.
Siva Raj, Parent in San Fransisco, Calif.
One of the things we found when we were speaking to parents — and through the recall process, we’ve spoken to literally thousands of parents. And we spoke to people across every part of the city, from different ethnic groups. And people have a lot more in common than we appreciate.
We were able to find common ground between people who are polar opposites, from a political perspective. And I’d say to Tom’s point, what we are seeing and hearing is that people want history to be taught and want history to be taught accurately. But how you do it is as important as what you’re teaching.
There is obviously a need to help kids appreciate that just because we, with one stroke of the pen, said no to slavery or no to segregation in the ’60s and we took away a lot of those discriminatory laws doesn’t mean that things immediately changed on the ground. The legacy of those institutions still exists and still influences the life of people today.
It’s exactly like in India; we have a caste system. In ’47, we gained independence. There was no more caste system, presumably. But the reality, if you go to rural India, is that those structures very much persist. Things take time to change. And I think it’s important for people to appreciate that those influences are much more pervasive and much more persistent than we sometimes want to believe.
Lulu Garcia-Navarro, Host of “First Person” podcast
But Siva, just briefly, though, do you think that you need to approve of everything that is being taught in your kids’ class and the way that it’s being taught?
Siva Raj, Parent in San Fransisco, Calif.
[LAUGHING] That’s a great question. That is a challenging question. The school district just changed the start time and the end time for elementary schools. And obviously there was an outcry. And some people are happy. Some people are unhappy. It’s a challenge on anything that you do when you have such — and we have obviously incredible diversity in San Francisco. And so getting everyone to agree on something even as simple as what you teach in school is an incredibly challenging task. It doesn’t mean that parents shouldn’t have a say.
You want parents to have a say. We should be able to voice your opinion and have that heard and acknowledged. Yet at the same time, if every parent has to agree to the coursework, then we’ll never get that job done. It may take us decades to even figure out what’s the right thing to teach.
So we have to be able to balance the two. And so a lot of the issue here, I think, is a lack of trust. There is a breakdown in trust between the parent community and the institutions that are running our public schools. And it’s that breach of trust that is causing a lot of anxiety in the minds of parents.
Tom Chavez, Parent in Elmhurst, Ill.
I think that was well put. The breach of trust is the reason why parents are getting more involved.
Lulu Garcia-Navarro, Host of “First Person” podcast
Letha, I just want to follow up with you on the idea of parents’ trust being breached in schools. I’m curious if that’s something you’ve felt, maybe in a different way than Tom or Siva?
Letha Muhammad, Parent in Raleigh, N.C.
Oh, most definitely. I’m so glad you called my name because I was about to hop in here and say, a breach of trust of who and when? When I think about my own experiences as a parent early on, which was my now-23-year-old entering public school in the first grade and me being a parent who was heavily engaged in the school, was in there all the time, on the P.T.A. Because I didn’t have that trust that the school would do for my Black Muslim girl child all that it needed to do in order for her to thrive in that environment.
And so a breach of trust for Black parents goes way back in the history of this country, in the ways in which racism has impacted Black communities and has shown up in our schools. And so I just find it an ironic conversation to have, now that some parents are just now getting on the bandwagon when it comes to this idea of a breach of trust. When Black parents in particular have been fighting for many years to make sure their young people just stay in the building.
When we think about the disparity when it comes to who is suspended or expelled or referred to law enforcement from our schools, it’s overwhelmingly, across the country, Black students. And I know — because I’m a Black person with Black children and have been a Black child — that we don’t behave any worse than anyone else. But we oftentimes get the punishment in a different way.
And to Tom’s point about just teaching the basics, academics — but if I’m a child in a classroom who is being taught the basics — reading, writing, arithmetic — and I don’t see myself anywhere in that curriculum, how do I get to connect to that? If all of the images and the stories are grounded in another culture or another ethnic group, where do I see myself? How do I thrive in that environment?
And I love Siva saying that we have so much in common, because we do. I could close my eyes and listen to Tom talk, and many of the things you said, Tom, I could agree with. Like, yeah, that’s me. There are things you said that I don’t necessarily agree with. But I do think sometimes it’s hard for us parents — just people in general — to put ourselves in the shoes of others, to hear other people’s stories, experiences in this country and the ways in which it impacts them.
And I think if we could really create those spaces to have those honest, open dialogues, I think we could transform our public education system to one that allows all young people to thrive, even if ideas are taught that are anti to what we may believe within our own family homes.
Lulu Garcia-Navarro, Host of “First Person” podcast
I want to shift the lens a little bit. All three of you are heavily involved in your schools. So what then is the role of you all, of parents in the school?
I want to stay with you Letha because I know you and your husband made the choice for you not to work so that you could be active in your school. Can you talk to me a little bit about how you see your role in your child's school?
Letha Muhammad, Parent in Raleigh, N.C.
As a partner, first and foremost. And again, this started out way back when that 23-year-old was entering first grade so many, many moons ago. And let’s be clear: The decision not to work wasn’t because we had money, because we didn’t. What we had was a community of grandparents around us who helped supplement and take care of things so that I could make that particular sacrifice.
But I think, overwhelmingly, schools and families should have a space for a partnership. For building trust. For even interrogating difficult ideas and thoughts. So even this idea that we teach, in the classroom, different ideas and viewpoints, like Tom was talking about earlier, and allowing space for our young people to see different points of view. I think sometimes we adults fail at that. And so we don’t model that in the best of ways, even sometimes between the school and parent interface.
Not every school has wanted to see me come through the door, because I am a parent who will ask the difficult questions, who will lift up when something doesn’t quite seem equitable or right for all students. And so not everybody has been open to that idea. But I will tell you the schools that my children have been in and the teachers and administrators that we have dealt with who have been open to that critical conversation of the good, the bad and the not so good — that is the places where I think my children have thrived the most.
And so I think that partnership model has to be one that we lift up across the country in order to transform our schools, for them to be the best place that they could be for young people.
Lulu Garcia-Navarro, Host of “First Person” podcast
OK, so Letha, you see it as a partnership. Tom, as someone who also started an organization, I’m curious how you think about so many parents with competing visions being now so heavily involved in schools. You know, I’ve spoken to teachers and administrators. And I’m sure you’ve heard this, too. It’s become really hard for them to navigate this era of parent activism.
School is becoming a magnet for national races, political money. And I’m just curious if you think it moving into the political sphere is beneficial. We’ve seen people like Glenn Youngkin of Virginia being elected off the back of parents’ rights and school issues. How do you feel about that?
Tom Chavez, Parent in Elmhurst, Ill.
I do think it’s a good thing. And listening to Letha speak, I appreciate her perspective and where she comes from. And the things that she wants out of a school system might be a little bit different than what I want or where my priorities are. But that doesn’t mean we can’t agree on certain things. So at the end of the day, yes, I’m involved. And I think more parents should get involved.
I think what happened in Virginia was very similar to what happened in San Francisco. Virginia was a blue state that turned red over parents’ concerns about what kids are learning in school and curriculum. And in the state of Illinois, much of what’s being pushed into local school districts, these progressive ideologies, are mandated through policy in Springfield, Ill.
So when you push back against the school district, in District 205, many times, their comments back to you are, “We’re teaching to the state standard.” So the politics, unfortunately, have become part of the education system and very much so in the state of Illinois. That information is available to any parent that wants to go read what the requirements are.
Lulu Garcia-Navarro, Host of “First Person” podcast
So Tom, you seem to be saying that politics might be inherent in some of the things around schools because, of course, some of the decisions are made by elected officials. Siva, I’m going to turn to you now. You left your day job in tech to run your school community organization full time. You’ve talked about how you’ve spoken to so many parents. Have you seen parents see their role differently now? Has your view of your own role changed over time?
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?
Lulu Garcia-Navarro, Host of “First Person” podcast
Do you think that this era of parent activism is a blip? Or do you think that this is now the way things are going to be? Letha, then Siva, then Tom.
Letha Muhammad, Parent in Raleigh, N.C.
This has been the way in my community since way back when. So it’s not a blip. We will continue, parents that I work with and know in community, to fight for the schools that we know our young people deserve to have in order to thrive.
Lulu Garcia-Navarro, Host of “First Person” podcast
Siva?
Siva Raj, Parent in San Fransisco, Calif.
It’s just beginning. I think the way in which people will interact won’t always be the same way. But parent engagement I don’t think is going away. And I think this is not just about parenting. It’s just about shared democracy.
I think the way in which we practice democracy is changing, where we are not just electing someone and trusting that person will do the job. That trust is broken. That’s what happened during the school closure. And so when that trust breaks, then you get very engaged in paying close attention to everything that the institution is doing.
Lulu Garcia-Navarro, Host of “First Person” podcast
Tom?
Tom Chavez, Parent in Elmhurst, Ill.
I agree. I think that this is a sea change. I think we’ve awakened the sleeping giant. Parent engagement is here to stay. I use myself as an example. Many nights when I’m sitting at my computer and working till 11 o’clock at night, writing comments to go to the school board meeting. They say learning is lifelong. I’m not an educator. I do something completely different. But I’ve taken a lot of time to read information about what’s going on in public education.
If there is a silver lining to Covid, it is that parents have become more aware of what’s going on. I think at the end of the day, we all want the same thing. We want our children to be educated, and we want them to thrive. When they leave our house at 18 and they go into a trade or to college or university, we want them to be well-adjusted, smart kids that are equipped to go out and do something big in the world. We all want the same thing.
And I think what has to happen — and I think will happen — is that parents need to begin to hold the education-industrial complex in this country accountable to produce results, because it isn’t just in my community. It’s not just in Letha’s community. And it’s not just in Siva’s community. It’s a nationwide problem.
Lulu Garcia-Navarro, Host of “First Person” podcast
I want to end with this: What is working? What do you like about your school or a teacher your child has had? What about you, Tom?
Tom Chavez, Parent in Elmhurst, Ill.
Well, I said earlier that we’ve been here — this month is our 17th year in Elmhurst with kids at District 205. And overwhelmingly, I’m happy. I love my community. I love my school district.
There are teachers that have been instrumental in making my children who they are. The day I first walked into our high school, for orientation for our first child that was going through York Community High School, I almost fell back in my chair at the resources, and the building is just beautiful. And so I have a lot of gratitude to be in this community, in this school district. That’s why I’m passionate about wanting to improve it.
Lulu Garcia-Navarro, Host of “First Person” podcast
Letha, what works great in your son’s school?
Letha Muhammad, Parent in Raleigh, N.C.
Options. In our district, we have traditional schools, we have magnet schools, we have year-round schools and schools that are on modified tracks. So there is a diversity of options available to you. And then when I drill down to my son’s school in particular, one of the main reasons we chose this school for him, because he said early on, in middle school, he was interested in engineering.
And so he was able to then be placed in a magnet high school that had an engineering focus, so that then he can do a deeper dive into an area that he thinks he’s interested in before he graduates. So it’s been an, overall, overwhelmingly positive experience for our family. And I would say our school board, the current members that are on the board, have been open to dialogue and feedback and criticism about the ways in which the district isn’t helping. So it’s overwhelmingly a positive experience for our family.
Lulu Garcia-Navarro, Host of “First Person” podcast
OK, Siva, last word to you. What do you like about your school? What is great about it?
Siva Raj, Parent in San Fransisco, Calif.
So when I moved from Pleasanton, which is in the East Bay, to San Francisco a few years ago, I did it because I wanted my kids to have the experience of having a diverse student body. And so he’s getting an education about the world while just living in this small pond right here.
And especially over the last few years, as we’ve kind of had — public education is something you take for granted. At least some of us have. Hearing from Letha, I can appreciate that it was not something that everyone in this country could take for granted. And I think that totally makes sense.
But many of us have taken that for granted. And suddenly we had that taken away. And so it has obviously jolted us up.
And the last few years were exceptionally challenging, and especially challenging for both my kids. Even after they returned to full-time school, things were not the same. They still had really lost a lot in terms of just their basic, daily structure that school brought. The joy of discovery and learning that Letha was talking about. All of that had just gone away.
And this year, I’m seeing both my kids be excited about going to school. They’ve made a lot of friends over the last year, friends they didn’t have. And they’re also really excited about learning, which is awesome.
That’s really what you want to see in your kids, this joy of discovery and learning coming back to them. And for me, as a parent, that is very rewarding to see them come back every day, excited about things they learned or things they did in school. And it’s nice to see that returning to their faces and smiles.
This Times Opinion round table was produced by Lulu Garcia-Navarro, Phoebe Lett, Kristin Lin, Derek Arthur and Cassady Rosenblum, with help from Shannon Busta, Olivia Natt, Aaron Retica, Eleanor Barkhorn, Alison Bruzek and Anabel Bacon. Original music and mixing by Isaac Jones. Fact-checking by Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker and Michelle Harris.
Siva Raj photograph by David Topete for The San Francisco Standard.
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