Amid the school closures, there is one thing that almost nobody has talked about: safety.
For decades, the district has pinned safety measurements on attendance. Every school in the system has a continuous improvement plan that lists all the crucial goals schools set out to achieve. Among these goals, there is one for safety.
For 2023, the safety measurement remained based on the attendance percentage at our neighborhood school. It wasn't until 2024 that we started to see the change; instead of measuring attendance, it shifted to measuring something else: the percentage of children favoring this statement, "At school, I learn how to speak up for what I need," as the mark of self-advocacy.
Measuring attendance didn't help our schools build safe environments. Would measuring self-advocacy change that, especially for emotional safety? The answer is it depends.
In an environment where everyone can be their true self without fear or pressure to fit in, self-advocacy is not only a social norm but encouraged and nurtured (without being measured) through all the activities. Schools that focus on building an environment where everyone can get ahead, not just students' self-advocacy, but organize everything differently, from differentiating learning from studying to encouraging dreams and purpose in life to creating a reward system leading with values.
However, that's very different from my experience with our neighborhood public schools. When I interviewed parents for my podcast, Duct Tape Rocket Ship—Changing how parents help the US public schools, the number of people I interviewed and reached out to was twice as many as the episodes that went public. Many interviews weren't published because people just wanted to talk without going public about what they said due to fear of repercussions afterward or chose to avoid answering questions altogether. This highlights the challenges we currently face in our school system.
In an environment where compliance and discipline are highly valued and rewarded, speaking up for what we honestly need sounds risky. Until we change the environment, measuring students' self-advocacy won't help anyone.
