What Is School For?: A Manifesto for Parents

WHAT IS

SCHOOL

FOR?

A Manifesto

for Parents

JESSICA ZOU

For every child

Title: What Is School For? A Manifesto for Parents / Jessica Zou

Published in the United States by States of Matter, Inc.

Copyright © 2024 by Zou, Jessica, Author.

All rights reserved.

No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher or author, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law.

Book Cover by Henry Yiu.

Book layout and illustrations by The Reluctant Illustrator.

1st edition 2024.

Contents

You Have Power

Introduction

Chapter 1: The Catalyst

Chapter 2: Welcome!

Chapter 3: Studying vs. Learning

Chapter 4: The School Environment

Chapter 5: The Learning Environment

Chapter 6: Who Is School For?

Chapter 7: The Status Game

Chapter 8: The Power Hierarchy

Chapter 9: What Is School For?

Chapter 10: The Invisible Hand of Culture

Chapter 11: The Learning Culture

Epilogue

Editor’s note

Acknowledgments

It’s wonderful to meet you!

I’m glad you’re here.

A poem from the Carbon Almanac Network reminds me of you, reader.

You Have Power. ¹

You have more power than you think.

You matter.

Because you can organize. You can communicate.

You can establish standards for how we live and for what comes next.

Your ancestors are proud of you. The seven generations to come are grateful.

You may feel like a small drop in the ocean, but together we create currents of change. Systemic change happens with multiplied action.

You.

You matter.

Just ask a kid.

...

1. You Have Power, The Carbon Almanac, accessed November 5, 2024,

https://thecarbonalmanac.org/you-have-power

Introduction

It took two years of volunteering in the leadership team at my son’s school to learn that no decision in the public school system was straightforward or simple.

I had been worried about our neighborhood school for some time, fearing that I had made a mistake somewhere.

My worries lessened when I heard David Guggenheim’s advice in his documentary, Waiting for Superman.

The best way to support our public schools is to attend one in your own neighborhood.

Yes, I wanted to support our public schools. And yes, I wanted to support our neighborhood and community.

But now, here I was: mourning the loss of our art program, feeling both frustrated and disappointed alongside the other parents. I couldn’t help but wonder what we could do to make it all better.

Our school was divided, and unlike other parents, I had an added challenge to face. I had just joined the Building Leadership Team (BLT), and if I chose to stand with the parents by arguing with the administration, I would become the sole front-and-center target within the leadership team. If I chose to follow the school’s authority, I should simply walk away from my parent representative position on the team, right there, right then.

I chose to stay in the BLT. But throughout the effort of getting the art program back, we encountered a subtle but persistent attitude from all parties in the system: the art program seemed important, parents’ voices were declared to be important, but neither of those was important enough for the system to make a change.

The path forward seemed gloomy. I was overwhelmed with fear and uncertainty. I was so discouraged by the challenge that I started to question if it was the work I should be doing after all.

And I wasn’t alone.

If you are a parent like me, you’ve had a lot of questions about your children’s school, why things happen the way they do, and what drives those experiences. You are among hundreds, even thousands of families experiencing school in their own ways, and that same system is how you received your education as a child. Schools haven’t changed much since you were there, yet for some reason, things aren’t working out the way they should. Your children aren’t thriving as you imagine they could. Despite reassurance from the well-meaning folks at the school and within the Parent-Teacher Association (the PTA), you know something isn’t right.

In all you try to do, and everywhere you look for answers, you are seeking peace of mind that your children are in good hands. You want to make sure they are on the right path to success, past their school years into a future that’s full of possibilities. And yet, you find yourself or loved ones constantly in disagreements, lodging complaints, and even escalating into conflicts about what’s not working at school. Instead of peace, you and your children are experiencing emotional distress, fear, frustration, and hurt, which further affects their school environment.

Not only is change desperately needed, but the list of what needs to be changed has become overwhelmingly long: mediocre outcomes, a decreasing sense of safety (both emotionally and physically), and a polarized community, to name several. The past few decades have seen a steady enrollment decline, accelerated by COVID-19, which further complicated funding struggles for public schools and eventually led to school closures across the country.

So when I ask What Is School For?, I want to be clear that it is a multifaceted topic encompassing several broad aspects including personal growth and development, academic needs, and economic and societal factors. The complexity of the school system and the challenges surrounding it often leave people feeling stressed and overwhelmed. Often, it leads to the belief that the system is too big, and little can be done to change it, no matter what’s not working. And a partner belief is this: we are too small or insignificant to influence change to that degree. These beliefs are understandable, but nothing could be further from the truth.

Change is possible. First, we need a framework to help us see and understand our schools and how they work.

It wasn’t until I started to write this book that I realized I was creating a process to understand the school system as if I were branding it. This is how I help businesses and organizations reveal the purpose for their existence, help them see their core services, identify their survival challenges and opportunities for success, and create messaging that is consistent between what they say and what they do.

I am offering you this framework as a lens to see the school system more clearly.

How can you decide what’s best for your children, your family, or your community? When can you trust your experiences, and when does it create blinders around your ability to see clearly? How can you make small but effective changes without needing the system to change first?

What is school for?

Whenever we are faced with layers of challenges, doubts, opportunities, and choices, we need to know where to look, which questions to ask, and what to evaluate.

In this case, we need to understand what’s really going on within the school system. For example, a good captain is experienced with icebergs, how sea ice behaves, and the best practices for navigating icy waters. Rather than focusing on the tip of the iceberg—the symptoms—they work to understand the entire system of icy conditions in deep water. If we learn what school is for, how the education system works, and best practices for navigating human learning beneath the surface, we get to see what’s driving our children’s school experience, whether or not it’s working.

The purpose of this book is to do just that: to explain how the school system works, what our children need to succeed in school, and what might improve their educational experiences and outcomes.

I am proposing a general approach and potential solutions for improvement. You can use it to support your children, advocate for change in your schools and local community, and better understand how to ‘be the change’ for this movement.

But this book is NOT about political debates. I am sure there are plenty of people out there who are more qualified to do that.

This book is also NOT about finding an individual or organization to blame, but seeking the collective solutions that will help our children and their schools.

Losing the art program was a catalyst event I experienced with the school system. As we will learn together, it was just a symptom that can guide us to go deeper. You might not care about art programs (although I hope you will change your mind about that by the end of the book), but that’s not the point. Once you see how interrelated each factor is, and how we, as parents, contribute to our children’s school journey both in positive and negative ways, you can replace the art program with your own experience, trace those symptoms down to their root cause, and draw your own conclusions about what to do next.

Layer by layer, we will see the system as a whole.

In my interviews with parents, I realized most of them had no problem coming up with their own answers to the question What Is School For? But very few had learned to see how their school would answer.

Until we learn to see our schools for what they truly are, we can’t say we agree with what they are here for.

Chapter 1:

The Catalyst

I still don’t know how the news got out.

The 2019–2020 school year had just ended—the fourth year at our neighborhood school for my son and our family—leaving parents and children with an extended break to process what the pandemic had done and still might do. Schools had moved everything planned for the physical classroom to the online world, which barely worked, especially for smaller children. We needed to sit with them to manage their technical difficulties and monitor their naturally short attention spans. The amount of screen time, parent involvement, and online homework had been taxing for everyone.

The next school year, my younger son began kindergarten in an online environment. By the end of the year, his unfinished online homework numbered over 100 items, and none of us had the energy to get them done.

It was amid these circumstances, with parents trying to put the tears and frustration of the school year behind us, that we learned we had lost our art program.

It was like a bomb got dropped on our usually quiet neighborhood.

As a parent representative for the school’s Building Leadership Team (BLT), I was immediately pulled into the heated discussions among parents. People were beyond angry.

Who made the decision? How come we didn’t hear anything about it?

After all the volunteering and donations, is this what we got in return?

My children are so upset about losing art. It was their favorite subject!

Is it too late to get it back?

I had no answers for them; I hadn’t even started my role in the BLT yet.

A few months earlier, a friend approached me offering all the volunteer positions in the PTA (Parent-Teacher Association): the president, the vice president, and the parent representative for the BLT. I turned it down at first because I had struggled in school. Not when I was a student, but as a parent. On the surface, I had volunteered in the classroom and at school events as much as I could for the past four years, but I wasn’t sure how I felt about the PTA. I couldn’t figure out how to show up—how to be both grounded in who I was and fit in or be helpful to other parents at the same time. I had questions about our school, the PTA, and how everything worked. Lacking clarity made it challenging to step forward any more than I had to.

Then the pandemic started, and our city went into lockdown. The whole world stopped. Physical schools were no longer available, and everything was moved online.

Like everyone else, I did a lot of inner work amid the pause. For the first time in my life, the outside world became a true danger. Everything out there was filled with a deadly virus, and the question of life and death was closer to us all in here than ever. Inevitably, I came to this question: if tomorrow were to be my last day on earth, what would I regret?

It was such a sad question. I thought about my children and their lives in the world without me. I thought about the challenges they would face. The virus, the unpredictable climate, the polarized society we have become, the misinformation and mistrust, all the complicated issues that divide us, and for sure, many more than I could imagine today.

I also realized that, for this moment, I would regret not paying enough attention to my children’s schools. If I had a chance to do something to help prepare our children for the future but didn’t take it—if I kept looking away instead of staring at the problems head-on—I would regret it.

Meanwhile, my friends who had