What Lies Beyond Taking Sides?

Last year, for the Martin Luther King Day holiday, I wanted to be involved in some kind of community event around social justice. 

I joined a small local march to our school. Inside the theater, we heard from community members, including the superintendent of my school district. She spoke about their struggles with inadequate parent engagement, and I got to meet her and speak to her directly to learn more about the issue.

A week later,  intrigued by my meeting with the superintendent and looking for ways to be more involved locally, I went to a school board meeting. It turned out to be a major meeting—budget cuts were being voted on. When I learned that night that most of the cuts were connected to poor student attendance, the feedback loop clicked: the low attendance affecting the budget and the low parent engagement spoken about by the superintendent are both signs of a deeper problem. We had a community-building problem, and it had big consequences!

That realization inspired me to get involved in a new way—both as a teacher and a parent—bringing people together across the district.  I started a community group, slowly building a team of volunteer parents and teachers, and reaching out to a few thousand people in the community over the next couple months. They amplified the energy at the school board meetings and increased the volume of parent feedback sent to the inbox of the superintendent!

A random choice about how to participate on MLK day led to a yearlong engagement for me. It became a central challenge in my life, merging my personal and professional lives profoundly.

What Lies Beyond Sides

The experience has changed me. I jumped in enthusiastically, thinking these were problems we could solve together. But I was stepping into a system in which people even on the same side of the issue would often tell very different stories about what was going on. It was a living laboratory for polarization; it was fun and enriching, but painful too.

A climax of the experience was a teacher's strike that we held, and I felt hurt when my local co-teachers stuck to the "party line" of the Union as a whole, rather than explore any nuance or complexity in the situation. My friend suggested that I should step down off the school leadership team if I didn't like the messaging. To many it was as simple as "We deserve a raise and the administration doesn't support us!", but I was aware from doing research that our Union had a long history of labor negotiation wins, and had negotiated some 30% in raises over the past 10 years. I didn't feel comfortable that the Union didn't share these facts with their members. They flattened out the argument for the sake of solidarity, which felt to me counter to the purpose.

School communities are vulnerable places where our most treasured hopes and dreams are invested. Financial instability of a school district affects people deeply, and it affected us all personally, though in different ways.

What lay beyond "taking sides"? For me, it was a sense that literally every person is different, and so there is no clear, simple "truth" but rather a mix of contexts. The boundaries between groups of people are not well-defined!

Proving Facts Doesn't Prove Importance

I'm left with a sense of discomfort. At first I was youthful in my expectation that if we could just come to a shared set of facts, we would be able to find a common narrative. This would bring people in our community together.

But promoting clarity about the budget facts hasn't had the effect I thought it would. I'm seeing that people don't all have the same goals because every situation has many "truths" going on simultaneously.

For instance, if I have data detailing how the county officials would react to a strike, and she just wants to focus on winning the negotiations with the school board, we don't have the same goals, even though we are on the same side.

There are many ways to explore truth! My data was true, but not very meaningful to her.

Respecting people's experiences as truth

I'm seeing many situations in my life differently. With all the many layers to human interactions, people's stories about what's going on can vary with the slightest difference in context or perspective between us.

It is still important to me to find a limited-scope “truth”. For example, I am looking into what is actually the main cost driver causing California public schools to have huge deficits this year, because what I have found through my own advocacy is different from what I'm hearing in the news. It matters to me because the standard explanation is decreasing population, but I suspect we are uncovering systemic accounting problems that are incentivized by the fiscal sector. (More on this soon!)

But even if I capture all the data, I don't expect that everyone will have the same feelings or interpretations about it that I do, or agree with me that something should be done. No matter how compelling it is to some people, it just might not feel the same to others. People live in different frameworks, and they are not wrong. Data is not immutable.

The truth that I can count on is understanding another person's experience for what it is.

I invite you, along with me, to keep valuing and seeking real data behind the conclusions your mind draws. It's not just about budgets or news cycles, it's also about how our relationships feel to us.

I'm seeking to build more feedback loops into my relationships, so I can more consciously guide what data I gather and the stories I tell from it.