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Nov. 23, 2023 - Epoch Times
54:54
San Francisco Schools Abandon Student Detentions and Suspensions | Ann Hsu
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Time Text
You are not allowed to suspend students or expel students for willful defiance.
It's true that for these students, if they're not in school and they're out in the street, it's probably less safe for them.
But if you have kids who Do things without consequence, then more kids are going to do the same thing, and then pretty soon the inmates are going to be running the asylum.
So the teachers are very discouraged.
They feel helpless, and this is why so many high school teachers are leaving the profession.
My guest today is Ann Hsu, former board member of San Francisco Unified School District.
She'll talk about her experience working on the school board, as well as the new laws that are passing that will impact discipline in California schools.
I'm like, are you serious?
Really?
This is how you do things?
This is how our school district works?
If any private company were run like this, they'd be out of business a long time ago.
But school district doesn't go out of business.
Government doesn't go out of business.
I'm Siam Akurami.
Welcome to California Insider.
Anne, it's great to have you on.
Welcome.
Thank you.
So nice to be here and meet you in person.
And there is a law that we just passed in California State where we don't want to suspend kids from public schools.
And you're from San Francisco and you guys have had these type of policies in your school system.
Can you tell us more about this law?
So I believe the current law that was just passed, it will go in effect next July, right?
SB 274.
It actually seems to be an extension or expansion of SB 419.
Passed a few years ago, maybe 2019, 2018.
My friend Rex told me about it.
Rex Ridgway.
Who we had him on the show.
He talked about math in San Francisco.
That's right.
Algebra in 8th grade.
That's his issue at this moment.
But he is very up on all these school-related laws.
And there was one 2018 or 19, that is pretty much the same thing as the one that you referred to that just passed.
So it seems to be this one is an expansion or extension of that.
Other ones that, same thing, you are not allowed to suspend students or expel students for willful defiance, which is Not behaving in class.
Yes.
Not listening to the teacher, not behaving in class.
So San Francisco School District, SFUSD, Unified School District, actually discussed this back in 2009 and passed in 2016 a group of something called restorative practice.
That removed the old discipline measures of suspension, detention, expulsion, and implemented restorative practice, which is kind of like the basis for the law that was just passed.
And what happens is that the procedures were not implemented properly.
To fidelity, meaning all the restorative practices, they didn't have as many experienced practitioners in the schools to actually implement it.
So what happens is the old discipline measures were removed, the new ones didn't get implemented, or not implemented well.
Therefore, you took down the old fence, didn't put in new fences.
And then everything went awry.
So that by now, and I've seen this personally, is there's more and more chaos in schools.
At the high school level definitely, and now it's also going into middle school level.
Last year and this year already, there are multiple incidences in our public school district in San Francisco.
There's stabbing.
They actually overspill into the public buses that leave school in the afternoon.
We have middle schoolers stabbing high schoolers on the buses going home.
And there were incidents of middle schoolers with knives in the cafeteria at schools.
So in general, there's more and more chaos in our schools in San Francisco.
And I believe also there's been a stabbing incident at Van Nuys High School.
Yeah, we just had it recently, a couple of days ago.
And I think it's definitely related to laws like this that remove the culture of discipline in schools.
You mentioned you have witnessed this yourself.
Can you tell us what you have seen?
A couple of years ago, I was the PTSA president.
It's Parent Teacher Student Association president at my son's high school in San Francisco, public schools.
I have twin sons.
They're both in public schools in San Francisco.
I was the PTSA president, and I witnessed Myself, trying to learn about how a school operates, I was talking to the security guard.
I talked to everybody in the school, the principal, the assistant principal, cafeteria lady, counselors, teachers, secretaries, everybody.
And while I was talking to the security guard, I saw a group of maybe eight or ten students over there in the schoolyard and said, oh, it's nine o'clock in the morning, how come they're not in class?
And the security guard told me that, oh, it's like this every day, every year, it's normal.
I said, what does that mean, it's normal?
Students don't go to class, it's normal?
He says, yeah, every year we have eight or ten students who just roam around the halls.
I said, oh.
Why are they in school?
And he told me that actually the secretary who overheard our conversation said it's actually safer for these students to be in school than not in school.
And at that moment I realized that perhaps it's true that for these students who, if they're not in school and they're out in the street, it's probably less safe for them.
So I recognize that they're here and there's nothing the security guards can do.
They would chase them and get them to go to class, and they would just stand up and leave again.
So they would just roam around the halls, and by the end of the school year, that 8 or 10 students turned into 50 or 60.
Wow.
And throughout the year, I've heard incidents where they would disrupt class.
When you have 50 and 60, they don't travel in one group.
There are many groups of 8 or 10, right?
And then sometimes they don't get along, and they get into fights in the hallways.
They go into the bathrooms and destroy the facilities so that my sons and everybody else really try not to go to the bathroom.
Boys and girls, they try not to go into the bathroom first because it's filthy, then there's the soap thing is on the floor, the toilet paper is on the floor.
It's just A terrible place that students don't even want to drink water because they don't want to go to the bathroom.
And this is in every high school in San Francisco Unified School District.
I don't know if it's true here in LA. But that is the situation that these students who don't go to class, who are in school, are causing chaos and trouble in school.
And they've been known to ride their electric scooter down the hallway while classes are going on.
They've been known to walk by a classroom and see somebody that they don't like in there, go in and start a fight with that person.
And just last year, my son had a teacher who suddenly one day was gone because he was put on administrative leave because he had tried to stop a student from assaulting another teacher.
Wow.
And he himself got put on administrative leave.
And the impact is that my son's teacher was gone for the next three months.
That impacts all the students that this teacher was teaching.
So not only do the students who don't go to class, who cause the school environment to be chaotic, they are really impacting everybody in the school by the examples that I just gave.
The lawmakers, the reason they're proposing this law is because a lot of these kids If they're not at school, and the idea that this lawmaker had was that if we don't keep the kids at school, they will go out and they will do worse things.
And then they will end up in a worse situation.
What are your thoughts on this?
I can certainly understand.
Just like when that secretary said, oh, these students, it's probably better that they're in school than not.
And then I realized that, yeah, if they're out on the streets, it's really worse for them.
So I can definitely empathize with the lawmakers who recommended and implemented past this law to say that we want to protect the kids and keep them in school.
But, by the description of what I witnessed, and also just the general chaotic atmosphere that is now perpetuating through our schools, we have to do something different.
Now, I don't purport to have the answer, but I do want to give three examples that are working.
And the first one is the Michaela Academy in London.
I don't know if you've heard.
It's a charter school in London founded by Katherine Burr-Balsing.
She's the headmistress.
She's called the strictest headmistress in the- Sounds like a strict school.
Yes.
She taught in the public school system there for years and then finally came out and said that the progressive state system is broken because it was designed not Keeping in mind the underserved minority students, it was designed to make middle-class white liberals feel good.
And she founded her own school, charter school, so it's a public charter school that emphasizes academic achievement and discipline.
They have silent hallways for passing periods.
So when you go from one class to the next, silent hallways.
Lots of students, but silent hallways.
And if you disrespect a teacher, you're sent to the principal's headmistress' office to be dealt with.
It could be detention, suspension, or whatever.
So it has a disciplined culture.
And it's all underserved low-income minority students and they have excellent results.
They're ranked number 5 in the UK overall.
They have over 90% passing rates for key subjects.
Over 80% of the graduates go to Cambridge, Oxford and such type of universities.
And they're just ranked outstanding.
by the UK school ranking authorities.
So it's academic achievement and discipline culture there.
Second example is the Success Academy's charter school in New York City.
It's a network of charter schools called Success Academies that serve altogether maybe 17,000 students in New York City urban areas and they also emphasize Student achievement and discipline culture.
Because it is public school, charter school, they have to admit everybody.
So they have students with special needs, they have a lot of minority underserved families who just flock to them because they have such good results.
High expectations, academic achievement, and discipline culture.
And the third example is Defense Department-run schools.
Our U.S. Defense Department has military bases around the world, across the country.
They serve about 66,000 students and that they are racially economically integrated you can have privates kids all the way to generals kids they go to the same public schools run by the Defense Department and they have they do better than all the 50 states public schools and the conclusion there is high expectations discipline culture so What
we're doing with these laws is lack of discipline and low expectations.
What results do we expect?
It's going to get worse.
So I would recommend that our lawmakers really look into the three examples that I gave and there are others to really think about how we want to serve the people that we claim we want to serve.
Look at the results.
Now, when you were telling me the story of the security guard, you talked to different people.
What was the perspective from the security guard?
What was his thoughts on it?
So the security guard has been the security guard for like 15 years in SFUSD at the same high school that I was the PTSA president.
He says, oh, they've had this problem for a long time.
So I believe teenagers have been teenagers.
For a long time and he used to just make friends and talk to them and then find out what is the issue or what they're feeling and then maybe talk a little bit of sense into them and encourage them or guide them in a direction from a well-intentioned adult perspective.
And he said over the years he was able to, a few students, kind of become their friend and help them out.
But now, I say in the last five years, He was instructed by the principal and the deans to say, don't talk to them.
You're not allowed to talk to them.
Why?
He doesn't know, but he's not allowed to talk to them anymore.
So he's just, the only thing that he can say is go to class, and then they don't go to class, and there's nothing he can do about it.
So that he feels like is cutting off An opportunity for a reasonable mature adult to have a relationship with the youth who are experiencing life's difficulties or whatever circumstances they're in.
They don't even have a mature, reasoned adult to talk to.
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Now let's go back to the interview.
What about the teachers?
What was their perspective on all this?
So the teacher that stopped a student from assaulting another teacher, he's an ex-Navy SEAL, and he intervened to stop that assault, and he was put on administrative leave.
And I saw some emails from the other teachers To the principal.
To tell the principal what message this is giving the other teachers.
It's basically, we can't do anything.
We're not allowed to do anything.
Even in a situation of a potential assault, we're not allowed to do anything.
What do I do?
See my colleague get attacked by a student?
The teachers are very discouraged.
They feel helpless, and this is why so many high school teachers are leaving the profession.
Down to the middle school teachers are leaving the profession.
They feel helpless, and they get burned out.
Now, based on what you're saying, it seems like we don't trust the people that are in the education system.
Essentially, our teachers and security guard and people that have been there.
We don't trust our own adults that we have in the system.
I talk to a lot of parents, and most of the parents, including myself, that our children's teachers that we have a relationship with, we go and meet with them once or twice a semester, and I think the teachers, almost all of our parents would say that teachers are great.
As people, as teachers, that they really care about the students.
They do a relatively good job in teaching the students, right?
But then we have this system that the parents just throw up their hands on because they see that the teachers are trying really hard as individuals to do their jobs, yet they are handcuffed by the policies that the school board people pass.
The school board people are not teachers.
The school board people have their own political agenda.
That they're not focused on students or the teachers.
They're focusing on their own political careers.
And that's what really made me and many parents very, very angry that we got together and we called the school board.
Can you tell us more about that?
Because you guys did a recall in San Francisco and there was like a few members that got recalled.
Can you tell us what was that school board like?
What the members of the school board were doing at the time of the pandemic is not so different than what they have been doing in SFUSD school board for maybe a decade or two before then.
The difference is that when the pandemic hit, all the parents paid attention.
We just didn't pay attention before.
You were not, right?
I didn't pay attention before the pandemic.
The only reason I and all those other parents started paying attention is because when school shut down and all our children were at home on Zoom school, then we saw first what they were learning and how they were being taught and saying, you know, some kids, I have twins, Zoom school worked for one, it did not work for the other.
And I thought that this one is just playing video games for 15 hours a day, every day.
No, he didn't even care that there's school going on.
And the other one was also playing 15 hours of video games a day, but at least at some point he got his work done.
This one just didn't care that there was any work to be done, right?
Just pure video games, 15 hours a day.
And I thought, wow, if how many, 50,000 students in our school district, how many are like this son that get some work done?
How many are like this son that just Completely disengaged from school.
And sure enough, a lot more students were like this one.
They had various issues.
Maybe girls had depression because they couldn't see their friends.
Young kids didn't know how to operate the computer.
They just, I don't know what they were doing, and the parents were trying to work at home.
And a lot of parents were just saying, okay, Can we have school again?
Can they go back to school?
And then we all paid attention to the school board, which was responsible for deciding whether to open the schools or not.
So that's when everybody paid attention, and what did we discover?
Is that the school board, were they talking about these issues?
No, they were talking about changing the names of schools.
To remove George Washington's name because he owned slaves.
To remove Lincoln's name from a high school because he wronged the Native Americans.
He freed the slaves, but he wronged the Native Americans.
Remove Dianne Feinstein's name from a school because when she became the mayor, there was some objectionable flag that was flying in front of City Hall, which she didn't put there.
She just got to be the mayor and it was flying there.
All these what we believe are silly reasons given the pandemic situation in front of us.
In normal times yes you can discuss these things but the pandemic was abnormal times and we had a huge problem in front of us and these school board members were not even discussing it.
They were still doing their political things and that's when we got really really And when they removed the merit-based admission system from Lowell High School, which is one of the top 50 high schools in the country that had merit-based admissions, they removed that.
Just like that.
Then, that was the last straw that just got all of us parents up in arms as you guys have got to go.
You don't deserve to be there.
You don't care about the students.
You only care about your own political career because school board is usually the first step in launching somebody's political career.
And that's what they were interested in.
So they go there to go to another position?
Yes.
In San Francisco, the normal path is school board and then the supervisor and the city because city and county supervisor and then the assemblyman And then the state senator, and then maybe the congressman, and then the U.S. senator, and then, I don't know, all these different publicly elected official seats.
School board is the first one.
It's the mini first step.
And you got appointed to serve on the school board after the recall.
What was that experience like?
Very interesting, to say the least.
So I jumped into the recall, along with many other parents in San Francisco, and we orchestrated a landslide victory.
And I was one of the leaders.
Was it 70%?
70 something.
Yes, 70 plus percent voted to recall the three school board members.
We wanted to recall the whole board, but only three were eligible to be recalled.
So we unseated those three and I was appointed by the mayor to be one of the replacements.
And it was a brand new experience for me.
And I was very honored.
Unexpected.
I didn't do the recall because I wanted to be on the school board myself.
I just didn't think they deserved to be.
But when the opportunity was given to me by the mayor, I felt very honored.
And I became a school board member and really learned about Behind the scenes going on in our school district, including some of these discipline measures, or lack of discipline measures.
As you got involved with the school board, what did you see?
Because you come from a business background, right?
Yes.
All of my career, 25 years, is high tech and entrepreneurship.
Private sector.
I'd never been involved in government or education industry, so becoming a school board member was very eye-opening.
And in that, I found out how government and schools worked, which was so different from private sector.
I talked to a lot of school district people in trying to learn how things work when I first got down to the school board.
The questions that I would ask them, normal questions from my perspective as a business person, the reaction was like, nobody has ever asked that question to them before.
Like what kind of questions?
Do you have examples?
I said, you know, how do you implement such and such program?
And they would tell me how they implement.
I said, well, who's the target audience?
Who's your customer for this program?
They tell me.
Then I ask a little bit about just normal business stuff.
You've got to identify your customer.
You've got to learn about what they need and try to solve their pain points, right?
There was none of that mentality.
It was like this is the program.
We have the funding and then we do it.
But who are you doing it for?
Are you actually attracting them?
And what is their real need?
This kind of line of question.
When I ask them, it's like nobody has ever asked them these questions before.
And when they tell me how they do it, I'm like, are you serious?
Really?
This is how you do things?
And this, not one person, not two people, all the district-level people who are in charge of different departments I talk to, I had this kind of experience.
I'm like, holy cow, this is how government works?
This is how our school district works?
I also realized that the biggest problem I discovered was lack of priorities and goals.
Meaning, you're some department head.
You have lots of things to do.
Which one do you do first?
What's your first priority?
Well, I may have a school board member breathing down my neck to do this particular pet project that is in my sphere, so I do it this way.
And then some other department head has a different school board member breathing down her neck, and she does that.
It's just there's no cohesive vision and goal for the district that says these are the goals.
So we should do this first, this second, and this third.
None of that.
So no goals and no priorities.
That was the first problem.
Second problem, no processes and procedures.
So when you have a competent person, he or she does a pretty competent job for this department.
When you have a not so competent person, you get a not so competent job.
We mistakenly fired some bilingual teachers.
And I said, what do you mean by mistakenly fired?
The HR head tells me, oh, the last time we laid off people was back in 2013, and this is 2021.
Nobody who worked then is here now.
And I'm thinking, Is that an excuse for mistakenly laying off a group of people?
I said, do you have a checklist that says what you should do before you lay off somebody, before you send a notice out?
No checklist.
Everyone's like, well, how do you know if you're supposed to lay off somebody or not?
Again, people who worked, the last layoff is no longer working.
That is not a valid reason for making that mistake.
So the mistake defied some people.
Yes, because there was no process and procedures that says you should do this, this, this, and this before you can fire or lay off some people.
There's no checklist.
I said, come on, pilots have checklists.
People, every department should have processes and procedures.
Well, we have some of the biggest HR laws here in California, and they didn't follow, they didn't really think.
Upon recognizing this, I thought, you know, SFUSD has 10,000 employees, 50,000 students.
If any private company, General Electric, some company, were run like this, they'd be out of business a long time ago.
But school district doesn't go out of business.
Government doesn't go out of business.
It's really eye-opening for me to learn that and see that firsthand.
And I was very frustrated after two months of learning about how our school district worked.
You actually made some comments that caused that you came under a lot of heat.
Oh, that too.
Yes.
Can you tell us more about that?
So, yes.
So, I was appointed as a replacement school board member to serve out the terms of those who were recalled which was uh by the end of 2022 so about 10 11 months and then the deal for the appointment by the mayor was that the three of us who were appointed needed to run for our own term of four years so by november of 2022 we needed to run for our election so in july or so we started the campaign
And me being a novice politician, a newbie, and I'd been a school board member for four months by then, and I was asked the question that says, how do you propose to help the marginalized students in our district?
And I qualified by saying, having only been on this job for four months and learning about the various parts of our district I feel that our marginalized student population one of the biggest challenges facing them is the lack of family support especially in our black and brown communities food insecurity housing insecurity and lack of parents emphasis on
education cause Some of these students to be not focused on education.
And if that is the case, then what can our schools do about it to make up for the lack of family support?
Well, for that, I was painted a racist for saying that all black and brown families do not value education, which if you read what I said is not what I said, and didn't get to the second part of proposing different solutions.
I was I called to resign by one supervisor, two supervisors, I think a total of six out of eleven supervisors who called for my resignation.
And a whole host of Democratic clubs across San Francisco.
I was the most famous or infamous person in San Francisco for three weeks straight in July of 2022, that they called for my resignation.
I didn't even know what happened.
But I did not resign because, from what I understand, I received actually 200 emails to my school board Official email, which were all the people that I don't know, because my friends all have my personal email.
So these 200 emails came from people who didn't know me, but they saw the news every day of me being canceled.
Some of them called for my resignation.
Majority of them said, Ann, the only thing you did wrong was to say something that nobody else dared to say.
That you told the truth, that that is the problem, which is the lack of family support.
I had black and brown families who told me who they are and said that is exactly the problem.
I had about 200 emails.
The proportion of supporter emails versus detractor emails was about 15 to 1.
Wow.
So I learned.
First of all, I was like, what did I say?
I was just trying to analyze the problem and trying to think of some solutions, and everybody's calling me a racist.
But then after a number of months, after seeing these supporters' emails, I said, you know, okay, I didn't do anything wrong.
I simply stated some facts that people all recognize but are politically incorrect to say, and me being a newbie, I said it.
And there's no reason that I should resign, and I'm not going to resign.
And there were probably people waiting for you to say something.
Yes.
In this political arena, people are just...
And because I was a recall school board leader, The supporters of those recalled school board members were just waiting to take me down.
And even if I hadn't said that, I'm sure they would have picked something else that I would say later in the campaign season.
So I felt fine.
I just kept on campaigning.
And I lost by 4,000 votes out of 680,000.
which is very thin margin so that tells me that there's a lot of support a lot of people see the hypocrisy of the progressive agenda in San Francisco in our school district that if I were a little more experienced politically I probably could have won but I actually thank those 4,000 Because I get to do what I preached before.
I get to do it now by starting my own non-profit school.
Can you tell us more about this school?
It's a combination of me wanting our school district to do the things that I think should be done and they either cannot do it because of bureaucracy or will not do it because of ideology.
That's part of the reason I started the school.
The other part is from my personal experience.
Myself and my sons actually went to elementary school in China.
I spent 10 years in China when my kids were 6 months old to when they were 10 years old.
So they went to elementary school in Chinese public schools.
And then they came back and went into the American public schools in San Francisco, and me seeing the difference, and recognizing that there are good aspects and bad aspects of both systems.
And the good aspects of the Chinese education system is the emphasis on knowledge acquisition and skills mastery.
You memorize lots of things to gain knowledge, and then you practice practice To master something.
I grew up in Iran, it's very similar.
Same thing, I'm sure, yes.
So that's good in itself, but if that is the only way you learn, then it's not good.
The American Approach is it encourages critical thinking and creativity, which is great in themselves, but if you don't know anything, how can you critically think about anything?
If you haven't mastered the basics, how can you move on to more sophisticated, complex abstract things, especially in math?
If you still have to count on your fingers, how are you going to do multiplication, division, and algebra, and calculus?
So you have to have some basic mastery of skills.
So my school actually takes the best of both.
We do knowledge acquisition and skill mastery when you're young and then we, on top of that, add in the critical thinking and creativity later.
And is it a private school?
Does it cost a lot?
How does it work?
It's a non-profit Private school.
I actually wanted to start a charter school, but given my history You would not be able to go in front of the world.
Exactly.
Charter schools need the public school district's approval to have that license.
And given my history and experience with San Francisco Unified School District, I'm sure I would not get a charter license.
You could get one.
Probably not.
Probably you too.
Right.
So really I had to start something outside the system, so I started a non-profit, private school.
And it is really terrible that parents in San Francisco only have basically two choices.
Public school, which costs nothing, or private schools that cost $40,000, $50,000, $60,000 a year.
And I said, why is there nothing in between?
And actually, the thing that's in between are Catholic schools, religious schools.
But many parents don't.
They're not Catholic, or they don't want their children to go into that system.
But there's no other choice.
So my nonprofit school tuition is half or a third of the independent schools that cost $50,000.
It's $18,000 a year, which is on par with Catholic schools, but it is an independent school that offers, I say, academic, cultural, and character education, with a lot of my philosophy, as I mentioned, adopting the best of both the Chinese and the American education approaches.
Now going back to this suspension and misbehaving, you mentioned character education with your school.
How does this kind of policies impact the normal students that are not causing trouble?
Is it teaching them it's fine if you behave this way and it's okay?
I think just like in a family if you have kids you know that parents are supposed to set boundaries for kids because they're kids they don't know as they're growing up right and if parents don't set boundaries and when you have siblings somebody does something bad and the parents does not say anything then this one is going to do something similar right so same in schools same in schools if you have kids who Do
things without consequence.
Do things that disrupt the environment and cause chaos in school and they have no consequences.
Then more kids are going to do the same thing and then pretty soon the inmates are going to be running the asylum.
I can't even believe that I have to say these things.
It's so logical for adults, especially parents, to realize this.
Why do we even need to say this?
Yet in our school system we're actually implementing these policies.
Any parents know these principles.
That's how you raise kids.
Well behaving kids who contribute to society rather than disrupt society or schools or any community that you're in.
That is what my school tried to do, is that we are a big family.
We set boundaries for kids, and actually we only have boys right now, which is more needed.
Boys are generally less mature than girls of the same age, and they need boundaries to be set.
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It wasn't long ago, people from everywhere wanted to move to the Golden State to enjoy a better life.
Sadly, the standard of living has been dropping in the past decade.
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And one of the things that comes to mind, you mentioned character training and kind of discipline and character.
And some of the things we don't, I don't know if we teach them in schools anymore.
Like if you should do the right thing, you should be kind.
What do you think is the impact of this on the future of these kids?
I want to say that my school has six values that we try to teach our students.
Integrity, self-discipline, and resilience.
These are three individual ones.
Then the ones that impact others are respect, gratitude, and service.
This is what we try to, throughout the day with the various activities and little opportunities we get, we try to teach these to our students.
I don't know and I don't think our public schools are anywhere near in teaching these kinds of values anymore.
And I think they used to.
When I was in public schools 35, 40 years ago, somehow I got these things.
I'm an immigrant, so I didn't know anything about American society.
I landed in Erie, Pennsylvania in 1979.
As a middle schooler, like a sixth grader.
And somehow I got these values, American values, traditional American values.
So it was in our public school system, because I didn't get them anywhere else.
I'm either at home or I'm at school.
But when I look at our public education system now, the primary value that is taught is equity.
Equity is same results for everybody.
That, I think, is actually quite un-American.
In America, if you work hard, you deserve the things that you get when somebody does not work hard.
You should have equity of opportunity, not equity of results.
and that is when I got when I got appointed to be the school board I actually had somebody educate me on what equity means in SFUSD and oh well equity is equality opportunity equal opportunity for everybody no it's equal results and I said that doesn't make that doesn't really make sense I think I
think we can give more help to people who need more help, but that is to give help, not to give the The result are the actual goods, right?
I will help you if you help yourself.
I will help you more if you lack the opportunities as the others.
Definitely I will be willing to do that.
But I don't think it should be that if you don't work as hard that you get the same thing as somebody else who work much harder.
That is un-American.
Do you have any recommendations for our leaders?
People might say that I come from private sector to say this, but I would encourage our leaders to focus on results, not so much on ideology.
Just look at the results.
If you really want to help this group of people, see if they're really being helped.
Part of what I saw when I got to be a school board member is that the communities in our school district that had been asking for help.
When I sat on the dais, they came here asking.
The three new appointed school board members got there.
They came asking and screaming.
Saying, we want, you know, more resources.
And I'm thinking, does that mean you haven't gotten resources before?
That means you haven't gotten the help before?
And then as I learned, they have, or the resources were spent, but these people did not get helped.
These students still had bad achievements.
They still had The same problems that they've had.
And I'm thinking, okay, there's a special group in SFUSD called Ali.
The African American Leadership and Initiative that tries to help our African American students in SFUSD, which everybody supports.
They have, I think, the budget is in the millions and they were Established in 2014 and this was 2021 or 22.
I'm sitting on the board and parents from our African-American student community come asking for more resources and I'm thinking have we not been spending money to help the students who need helping?
Well we have been, yet No results.
So my question to the person who presented the report was, by what metrics have we been measuring the outcomes of these programs?
And the answer to me was, we're working with Stanford to come up with those metrics.
And I'm like...
That's seven years after spending the money.
Yeah, this is 2022.
Ali was created in 2014.
Does that mean for the past eight years we haven't had metrics to measure?
Are success or not of the programs?
Silence.
This is what I mean.
When I ask a question which I think is reasonable, nobody's ever asked that question before, and then the answer that comes back to you may say, what?
That's a concrete example of the earlier question.
Now, do you have any advice for parents in San Francisco and California?
Because California is kind of following San Francisco.
Yes, yes.
So I have lots of good friends, including my friend Rex Ridgeway, who introduced me to come here.
Who are fighting for the system to do the right thing, whether it's eighth grade algebra or merit-based admissions at Lowell High School or a host of other issues.
They go to the school board meetings every two weeks.
They make public comments.
They write emails and letters to the superintendent and the board members.
I really admire them.
They're fighting.
But I would say the vast majority of parents, especially parents in immigrant communities, where in San Francisco, I would say the majority of our students, at least half, are from immigrant families.
Those parents are trying to make a living in a new country.
They don't even know what is going on.
They cannot go and advocate for themselves.
What their rights are, what they can do, yeah.
Right, right.
So they just, if they have the resources, they vote with their feet, right?
The immigrant parents don't, but a lot of the parents who do have the resources either just take their kids out of public school or they do home school.
Actually, there's statistics recently that home school has authorized 70-something percent compared to last year.
So I think that is a sign that the system is not working.
Going back to five minutes ago, the lawmakers should look at the results.
Forget the ideology.
If we really want to help the students, focus on what actually helps them.
And the parents, the immigrant parents who don't, understand what is going on who don't have the resources those are the ones actually I'm trying to help is to let them know to give them give them an option because public school should be the default we should be educating everybody in the society providing a solid education
but unfortunately Public schools are not doing their job anymore.
They did when I was in public school, but I think in the last 20 years it has gone down with lower and lower standards and more and more chaos.
Parents, if you have the time and the ability and the resources, I try to encourage the public schools to do the right thing, but in reality I think a lot of parents are just voting with their feet, taking their students out, and the only ones that are left are the ones who don't know, who don't have the wherewithal to understand the system, no less to fight the system.
And their kids are the ones languishing, that are not being served By our public education system and that is really why I'm starting my new school.
Do you have any other thoughts for our audience?
Being an immigrant, we tend to, when we come to this country, we tend to kind of try and Just survive and understand and learn about the society, right?
And get a good job, provide for our family.
We don't really engage with the political process until some epiphany or something happens.
You see something.
In my case.
I think for the ones who, like myself and yourself, who Realize, have an epiphany and realize that we can do something to help the rest who need help but may not have the wherewithal to deal with this.
I think we should be more engaged politically to represent our respective communities and to really push for our rights in this society because As I'm even learning through this whole process, democracy needs citizen participation.
That the people who have the ability and the resources to do it, we have an obligation to do it for the rest.
So that's what I'm doing, that's what you're doing, and we hope to help more people by doing what we're doing.
Ann Xu, former San Francisco school board member and founder of Birch Xu Academy.
It was great to have you on California Insider.
Thank you for having me.
Great to be here.
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