San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Black, brown parents don’t fail kids — the system does
It’s been just over two weeks since San Francisco school board member Ann Hsu’s comment on a school board candidate survey ahead of the November election sparked uproar and calls for her resignation.
When asked how she would improve the education outcomes of marginalized students, Hsu wrote that a challenge “especially in the black and brown community” is a “lack of family support” and a “lack of parental encouragement to focus on learning.”
Hsu, a former tech worker who was appointed to the school board by Mayor London Breed in March and whose experience in education stems almost entirely from having children in public school, succeeded in perpetuating the weathered stereotype that parents of marginalized youth don’t value education.
Hsu has since apologized multiple times. She has even admitted how it was based on her own “inherent biases.” And on Tuesday, when the school board voted to admonish her, Hsu voted in favor of the action.
Yet in the mad scramble that has become routine when a new scandal breaks in San Francisco — with political factions using the moment to castigate their enemies and defend their allies — there hasn’t been enough oxygen given to Hsu’s answer was problematic.
For one, it simply isn’t true. Black and brown parents push their kids to achieve
academic success, despite the education system having been designed to keep them from achieving it.
A July 2020 survey by the National Center for Education Statistics found that Black and Hispanic parents were just as involved in their kids’ education as white parents, with 88% of Black parents and 87% of Latino parents saying they attended a general school or PTA meeting.
Randy Seriguchi Jr., executive director of the local Black-led nonprofit Urban Ed Academy, which works to diversify the teaching profession, sees these numbers reflected in real life. Urban Ed was founded in 2010 as a “Saturday school” program where marginalized elementary school students were provided extra tutoring for math, reading and other subjects.
“Hundreds of kids participated” in the program during the six years it existed, “Black boys in particular,” Seriguchi said. “This notion that Black and brown parents don’t care about school is immediately rebutted by the fact that so many were willing to send their kids to Saturday school for four hours per day.”
Saturday school ended in 2016, but Urban Ed has gone on to create programs such as Smart+ and Focus on Continued Success, both of which provide marginalized students with additional classroom time to study science, math and other subjects. And these programs continue to be accessed by parents of more than 600 students in San Francisco alone, according to Urban Ed’s 2020 annual report.
Despite parents’ best efforts, jarring proficiency gaps remain between white students and students of color, as a performance analysis released in June by the San Francisco Unified School District showed. The causes involve legacy inequities that date back to before America was a nation.
“The story goes back to the moment (Black people) got here in 1619 and how from 1619 on, specifically around education, the goal was to keep the slave uneducated, unknowledgeable ... because a smart slave was one to be reckoned with,” said Brett Andrews, co-chair of the
S.F. school board member Ann Hsu voted in favor of her own admonishment for her comments on Black and brown parents.
S.F.-based Black Leadership Council. “Black and brown people value education in a way that’s matched against all the ways it was not offered or presented to us, historically, in the same ways the general population was receiving it.”
Black children were banned from public schools in California as part of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1852. San Francisco opened the state’s first segregated school for Black children two years later, and by 1860, California codified a ban on Black, Asian and American-Indian students attending public schools with white students. It wasn’t until the 1880s that California truly began eliminating some of its anti-Black and anti-Asian education laws, yet today “tens of thousands of students
currently attend segregated schools, including many that are disproportionately Black,” according to The Chronicle’s reporting of a UCSF study.
School populations are shaped by the demographics of the areas around them. And because local property taxes go toward school funding in California, the more affluent the neighborhood a family lives in, the more likely their kids will have access to high-performing, wellresourced schools.
But, as the state’s reparations task force reported at length, California has a sordid history of using racially restrictive covenants, redlining, urban renewal and outright violence to keep nonwhite people from setting roots in these communities.
We see that history today in San Francisco. According to a study by the Bay Area Equity Atlas, 164 of the Bay Area’s more than 1,500 census tracts are concentrated areas of white wealth, and over half of these segregated neighborhoods are located in San Francisco.
Feeding into this disparity in affluence levels is California’s modern racial pay gap. According to the California Civil Rights Department, at private employers with 100 or more employees, Black and Latino people are overrepresented among the lowest paid, while white and Asian people are more likely to be the highest paid.
All of these trend lines converge in the classroom, where historically marginalized families are still being forced to make do with less.
Hsu was asked in that questionnaire about disparities in academic outcomes and tried to explain why they exist. She gets an F for effort because placing blame on parents shifts focus from systemic injustices that allow the disparities to exist in the first place.
The truth is, Black and brown parents have always been working to address them. They just rarely get the credit they deserve.