San Francisco parents issue a warning to school leaders across the country

As a proud Miamian, you won’t hear me say this often, but there’s a lesson to be learned from San Francisco. Last week, voters recalled three school board members by a 3:1 margin, and the reason was quite simple: They ignored parents.

Thankfully, Miami has leaders who don’t fear education innovations that help serve families. Recently, Mayor Francis Suarez announced a new partnership between the City of Miami and Madeline Pumariega, president of Miami Dade College, to launch a new Miami Tech Charter School. Together, this partnership represents their combined effort to creatively establish new education pathways for students.

Unfortunately, not every student in Florida or across the country is blessed with such leadership, and it’s a big reason why I hope the San Francisco recall election makes a national impact. It should serve as a wake-up call to those charged with overseeing local schools and a valuable reminder that families and students in their community are their constituency, not the special interest groups that write checks.

The San Francisco School Board members were recalled when parents became frustrated watching the board members focus on issues that had nothing to do with the purpose of education. Even before the pandemic, the school board spent more time debating abstract issues than addressing, for example, falling literacy scores. But during the pandemic, like parents all across the country, the disconnect became more apparent as the school board spent hours debating and then voting in favor of renaming Dianne Feinstein Elementary, Roosevelt Middle School and Abraham Lincoln High School (among 44 other schools) while not addressing that students assigned to those schools and all schools across the city remained at home, while students across the country were returning to in-person learning.

Sadly, although not surprisingly, this out-of-touch approach isn’t exclusive to San Francisco. In Los Angeles, hypocrisy was on display concerning masking. The nation watched as celebrity after celebrity attended the Super Bowl without a mask, and the city’s mayor absurdly claimed he held his breath when photographed indoors and maskless. Meanwhile, children in Los Angeles County Schools were required to be masked, despite what three scientists recently wrote in The Atlantic, saying that mandating masks on students “provides little discernible benefit.”

But, whether students should be masked or not, the bigger issue at play is that families are largely shoved to the side when trying to sincerely express their frustration or simply gather more information. They’re treated as a necessary nuisance.

A case in point is Minnesota, where school districts complained of being besieged by freedom of information requests from parents. A new report by The 74 claims that information requests could cost districts millions of dollars in expenses. Minnesota’s proposed solution? Either have the state give districts the funds to cover those requests or allow the districts to charge parents more money for public information. The commonsense solution? Transparency. Make public as much information as possible, as easily as possible. When parents are concerned about school performance, don’t make it harder to access public information — pull back the curtain and restore trust.

Last month, I wrote about my idea for a Students Bill of Rights. While it’s a powerful concept to enshrine the rights of parents and students into law, the underlying policies are a tool for education leaders to regain trust with parents. Transparency is one of the three principles in my Student Bill of Rights, and it’s a meaningful, good-faith effort that school districts can take to better serve parents and students.

Another principle is access. Publicschool systems shouldn’t deny students access to education alternatives, period. In fact, they should proactively work to open as many pathways to success as possible. Polling tells us time and again that parents are hungry for more education freedom.

Access was recently put at risk in Tampa. Only months before schools were set to reopen in the fall, the Hillsborough County School Board voted to close four thriving charter schools and voted not to approve an application for two additional charter schools.

Why would they make such a hasty last-minute decision? School Board member Nadia Combs defended the board’s decision, “If we stop five or six charters from coming here, we’re saving the district millions and millions of dollars.”

Sadly, it’s this zero sum-game mentality that ignores what parents want, ignores what’s best for students and acts as though serving the system is what matters most. And it’s why access is a right that I believe students deserve. Instead of scheming to find ways to limit students, school boards and education leaders should be looking at every creative way to expand access.

In the first six weeks of this year, at least 11 states have moved forward with education-choice legislation. Listening to parents is good policy, and as we’ve seen time and again, it’s good politics.That’s a win-win scenario.

The question remains whether other politicians and school leaders throughout Florida, and other states and communities recognize this singular lesson: Ignoring parents has consequences.

Jeb Bush was the 43rd governor of Florida. He is founder and chairman of ExcelinEd.

Last week, it was peanuts. Unsalted, roasted in the shell, to be exact. But lately, it’s always something, some commonplace commodity that suddenly cannot be found at the store. Strawberries. Peppers. Ground turkey. And Lord, don’t even get me started on Ore-Ida Golden fries.

I used to enjoy grocery shopping. Weird, but true. In fact, I enjoyed it so much that I once wrote a column rhapsodizing how foraging at the local warehouse store satisfied some primitive masculine need to hunt and gather.

But in this era of supplychain disruption, shopping feels less like an act of manly provision than an exercise in national mortification. Once upon a time, to be an American was to feel impervious to forces of supply and demand. Oh, you might occasionally have to pay more, but if you wanted a thing, by God, you could have it. There was always enough. Indeed, having enough — and then some — was a sacred national entitlement.

Until it wasn’t.

Those who waited hours in line for gasoline during the energy crisis of the 1970s may recall that close behind the annoyance one felt, there was also a sense of disbelief, even betrayal, as if some fundamental law of the universe had been violated.

Out of gas? How could we be out of gas? This is America. We’re never out of anything.

Substitute Ore-Ida Golden fries for unleaded, and this moment feels much the same.

There’s a scene in Robin Williams’ 1984 film, “Moscow On The Hudson,” where a group of Soviet performers visiting New York are allowed by their KGB handlers half an hour to shop at Bloomingdale’s. These citizens of dull, gray Moscow surge into the shiny temple of American capitalism — Clinique! Jordache! Calvin Klein! — like children set loose in Santa’s workshop, swarming over a rack of blue jeans the way hungry teenagers do pizza. Not even the KGB man is immune. “My God,” he breathes happily, “what decadence!”

That scene opened in me a primal, patriotic pride. It seemed to validate every lesson I had ever learned about the exceptionalism of my country. America was a land of plenty and, therefore, a land of good.

But things are — as the movie itself soon makes clear

— more complicated than that.

America remains a land of plenty, of course, but the present shortages are a poke in the eye to any sense of sacred national entitlement. It turns out this ability to have whatever, whenever, is fragile enough to be undone by idling trucks or an unruly virus.

Maybe it’s not the worst thing to be reminded of that every now and again. As is often observed, Americans use far more than their share of Earth’s resources. We are home to less than 5% of its population, but use 24% of its energy, with similarly outsized impacts on food, water and the environment.

Meantime, ocean levels are rising, the planet faces hundred-year floods and thousand-year droughts and, as is so often the case, the poor bear the brunt first and worst. If being unable to find one’s preferred brand of French fries is frustrating, what is the word for being unable to find clean drinking water? And how long before that question, already relevant in other parts of the globe, finds its way home?

Maybe we should ask the good folks in Flint. Or Jackson. One suspects their responses would provide pungent commentary on the idea that being a land of plenty makes us a land of good.

If we are good, it is not by dint of what we have, but what we do with it.