Keri Rodrigues on Parent Power

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In this episode of the Getting Smart Podcast, Mason Pashia sits down with Keri Rodrigues, founder and president of the National Parents Union, to explore the power of parent voice in education. From school safety and special education to report cards, trust, AI readiness, and student data privacy, Keri shares why families must be treated as true partners in shaping better learning experiences. This conversation is a powerful reminder that meaningful school change starts by listening to the people closest to students.

Outline

• (00:00) Introduction
• (01:32) Keri’s Origin Story
• (07:26) What Parents Are Frustrated About
• (12:20) School-Parent Communication & Engagement
• (24:03) Report Cards, Outcomes & Transparency
• (31:26) Technology, Data Privacy & Duty of Care

Introduction

Mason Pashia: You are listening to the Getting Smart podcast. I’m Mason Pashia. Getting Smart tends to focus on the supply side of education innovation. This is often new schools, new tools, new learning models, and, a lot for us, is providing new powerful learning experiences. Rarely do we actually broach the subject of demand for these things. Time and time again, we see tools and innovations that are created within an “if we build it, they will come” mentality, but I’m not so sure that’s always the case. For these ideas to have real uptake, they have to exist, they have to work, and they have to be desired by key stakeholders. In our case, namely learners and their parents. So, to help better calibrate our pulse on demand today, I’m super excited to talk with Keri Rodrigues, founder and president of the National Parents Union, NPU, for probably a fair chunk of this conversation, which is an organization that unites parents from diverse backgrounds to advocate for the rights, economic, and educational needs of American children. They have an awesome slogan, “Nothing about us without us.” Keri, thanks so much for being here today. It’s great to see you.

Keri Rodrigues: Thank you so much for having me, Mason. I’m looking forward to this conversation.

Mason Pashia: I’d love to know, what is your origin story? How did you start National Parents Union? What was the thing you were responding to?

Keri’s Origin Story

Keri Rodrigues: I have to be honest with you. It really comes from the most important title in my life, which is being Matthew, Miles, and David’s mom. And, you know, to be honest with you, I wanna start off by saying the National Parents Union—yes, “parents” is definitely in our name—but we also welcome caregivers, aunties, uncles, people who care about kids, and aspiring parents.

Honestly, you know, it started off for me—I’ve been a community organizer my whole life. I didn’t have the greatest childhood. Grew up, you know, part of my time in foster care, got expelled from my public schools, so I did not have a great lived experience myself, but kind of clawed my way through it.

And, you know, I was working for SEIU as a labor organizer, but, you know, was a member of the Democratic State Committee in Massachusetts, a political organizer, worked on the Obama campaign—a lot of diverse organizing campaigns I had worked on. But I will tell you, when I was sitting at the end of an IEP table for my son Matthew, who was in kindergarten, who is a bright, talented, smart, empathetic, wonderful kid who just happens to have autism and ADHD, and I was sitting at the end of that table talking in a room of experts, and I could tell, as a mama sitting at the end of that table, that the grown-ups in that room could not stand my kid. They were fed up with him. They were furious. He was a kid who wasn’t dangerous or violent, but he just wouldn’t sit at the rug at rug time and was doing frustrating things and distracting a wonderful educator who happened to be a first-year kindergarten teacher with 30 kids in the room who hadn’t read Matthew’s IEP.

And their solution to a lot of this was just sending him to a redirect room that looked like a cinderblock cell. And me, you know, looking at all of these grown-ups, I was terrified, you know, and thinking about sending this little boy, who is literally my heart outside my body, to spend the majority of his waking hours with people who didn’t seem to like him very much was heartbreaking.

And as a person working for 1199 SEIU at the time, which is a healthcare workers union, my expertise in life is teaching people how to find their voice and advocate for themselves. And I had no voice. It was made very clear to me that I was not the powerful voice at the table. And I started looking around, not only at my lived experience—my husband at the time, who has since passed away, God rest his soul—his lived experience growing up in Somerville, Massachusetts, where he was a bright, talented guy who had a mind like a human calculator, but couldn’t get out of the first semester of community college because, you know, being literally a first-generation American, his parents not understanding the American education system—here’s a guy who’s brilliant and lives a mile and a half away from MIT and couldn’t get out of Bunker Hill.

You know, and we had a conversation saying, like, is this it? Like, this can’t be it, right? And I started organizing in my own community, and then across five communities, and then across 37 communities across Massachusetts. And what I found was that my experience was not unique, that parents were feeling frustrated about the things that they saw, that they were concerned about, that were not being addressed in a lot of our politics or our policy conversations, and things that really needed to be fixed and brought to light.

And too often our voices were manipulated or pushed out, or we were being spoken for, all of these things. And it was frustrating. So as a person who helps to build voice for other people, not to have a voice, I said, “Oh, hell no.” And I’m not that unique. There are pockets of parent power across the nation.

And what we have done at the National Parents Union is brought them together because we’re kind of siloed off. So these beautiful pockets of parent power that have developed on their own—I don’t need to go anywhere and tell mamas to organize. They do it everywhere. And frankly, we’ve done it generationally. I think back to how I learned how to organize. It was because my vovó helped to organize mothers in Somerville to advocate for some of the first bilingual education programs in Massachusetts and created the Massachusetts Association of Portuguese Speakers. So we’ve learned this traditionally, you know, generationally from our ancestors and from our elders. And, you know, so this exists across the country.

What we do is bring them together and show them how powerful it can be if we are all co-conspirators with each other. We can build enough power through that solidarity to force people to listen to us. And it’s not enough just to listen to us because we have voices. We also seek to make sure that we are quantifying that with data and research and evidence, because what I have learned in the organizing game is that everybody loves a good sob story, but it’s easily dismissed if you don’t show up with data and an effective solution to address the problem. So we aim to do both at the National Parents Union.

Mason Pashia: That’s great. Yeah. You said so much in there that I wanna kind of weave throughout this conversation, but one thing specifically you mentioned was the frustrations of these parents. And did you find that those were a super diverse set of frustrations? Was it kind of chunking and grouping into the same things heard over time? And, if so, what were some of the frustrations that you heard time and time again that accelerated some of this work?

What Parents Are Frustrated About

Keri Rodrigues: Well, I will say, like every school, yeah—Every classroom, every group of parents around a group of children are gonna have their own concerns, you know? And what we first started to do is literally we would go out to soccer fields and baseball diamonds and to the bodega and wherever we needed to go, where we knew parents were, because we are parents, so we know where to find them. And we had conversations to literally ask them, so what’s up? Like, what’s happening? What are you concerned about? We know what we’re worried about. What say you? And there’s a lot of commonality.

I mean, you can talk about, well, Mrs. Jones is a grouchy teacher and nobody wants her. Like, you could get to those little granular issues for sure. But overall, what parents are really concerned about are safety issues. And that can mean things from gun violence to bullying that we see online and in the classroom to our children’s mental health. We are deeply concerned that our kids are not okay.

And we can see this. We have the longest-running poll of parents in America, and we have been asking for almost seven years, time and again, what are your priorities? What are your number one concerns? Kids’ safety, childhood safety, classroom safety, all of these things. This is the number one issue for American parents. And you see this play out in a number of ways. We’ve double-clicked it so that we can give people data to say, like, if you are gonna address this concern, here are the ways that parents wanna see you do it. But that is always number one with a bullet.

Number two, you know, people don’t understand that parents in America—parents, period—we have a very different lens on education. We are very outcomes-driven. You can call it a traditional community school. You can call it a charter school. You can call it an online school, virtual. You can call it Mickey Mouse Clubhouse. We don’t care. We don’t care about the governance model. What we wanna see is effectiveness. And we want to know that when our child exits your program, that they are going to be better for it, that they’re gonna be prepared to read, they’re gonna be prepared to do math, they are gonna be prepared for the jobs and economy of the future, that they understand technology and they’re ready to harness it, but they’re protective and know how to actually engage with it in a healthy way. They are prepared for life, for economic mobility.

And so every decision, every priority, every concern that we have is based around that overall goal. And so a lot of the conversations that we have in education, and what we’ve been through—every fight you can imagine, from the science of reading to charter—the stuff that we fight about is crazy because the data is clear. I mean, even things like how brain science has evolved in terms of how children learn. The idea that this morning I got up and I dropped my freshman at Somerville High School off at 7:45 in the morning, knowing that his little brain is not gonna click on till 10:00 a.m.—but we can’t change that time—or the fact that we’re getting ready for April vacation even though we know it’s not helpful and he’s gonna regress. The rest of my four other sons are also gonna regress. And then we’re gonna take three months off for no real reason in the middle of the summer. We know the detriment that kids end up with educationally for taking off these huge chunks. We have to go back and reteach and relearn and all this stuff. But the data tells us we shouldn’t, yet we continue to do it.

A lot of this stuff just doesn’t make sense to parents and, you know, we’re trying to push in and at least ask for answers. Like, you guys have a lot of power and control. Could you explain to us why you’re continuing to hold onto this antiquated system that we know is not producing the outcomes we want for kids? Like, we want answers.

Mason Pashia: From the school leader side, we see this a lot, where some of the most innovative programs in the country that are changing how this works actually don’t have a lineup of parents. Like, the demand for this thing has not reached the people who sort of—I think if you got them on the right conversation topic, they’d be like, oh my gosh, why are we not in that school? Do you feel like you have, in all this time spent with parents, an understanding of where that misalignment comes in? I mean, is that a failure to communicate outcomes effectively? Is that just how hard it is to overcome a community perception, whether that’s like a school that has a really high IEP rate or something that totally changes how that school is seen in a community compared to a school that doesn’t?

School-Parent Communication & Engagement

Keri Rodrigues: I think it’s a couple of things, right? You can have a wonderful, innovative school that is inaccessible and difficult for parents to actually utilize because, to be honest with you, I get asked the question all the time, like, why do parents pick failing schools? Like, you see the numbers online. Every state, every district does their own report card. You can go to the toolkit. They’ve got the data. Like, why would parents pick the school? Because life gets lifey. And in addition to educating our children, we have to understand the lives of parents in context. And if you yourself were underserved by the public education system and you are forced into a situation where you are working two jobs, or your work schedule does not align with the 8:00 to 2:00 p.m. schedule or after-school program that you’ve been able to piece together, you’re gonna pick a school that logistically will work, even if it doesn’t make sense for your kid, because at least school is covered and you got a lot more on your plate.

The other thing that will keep parents from picking what should be obvious is that communication issue. Schools historically and continually hold on to these terrible ideas around parent communication and building relationships. They hold on to these transactional activities that we do with parents that never get to the level of really building transformational relationships. That can be an absolute game changer for folks in a community getting behind and excited about your school.

I’ve seen too many school leaders who literally don’t understand that the idea of setting up a school in a community is to be of service to that community. We don’t need your saviorism. We don’t need your correction. We don’t need you to come in and tell us what we are doing wrong as a community or as parents. Understanding that this is a group project—we’ve gotta do this collaboratively and together, and democratically, if we actually wanna create the kind of relationships that are going to get parents excited and talking about your school and spreading the word. Because parent to parent, or having that parent leader who everybody goes to and says, “Huh, sign up for that new school,” or “This innovation school is great,” or “KIPP is coming to town and you wanna get on that list”—even at the hyper-local level, like, you better get Ms. Green because Ms. Green is the fifth-grade teacher that’s gonna get your kid where they need to go. That is more powerful than any kind of Facebook advertising you could ever do about what you’re trying to do in a school.

Mason Pashia: Definitely agree with that. Can you give me an example of one of these kind of transactional ways of engagement versus a time that you’ve seen it actually done pretty well, where a school or a community welcomed parents in in a really authentic and kind of rich way?

Keri Rodrigues: I can always tell, you know, what direction we’re gonna go in with a new school leader, especially schools that want to expand; they’ve got big ideas, all of that. I can tell when a school leader, period, is going to be successful when I ask them something as simple as: could we talk about school uniforms?

Because often I’ll get, you know, I’m gonna use a charter school as an example, a school leader that’s setting up a brand-new charter school that says to me, you know, I really wanna do the right thing. I’m gonna host this community event and we’re gonna have everybody here. We’re gonna get rides for the kids and we’re gonna have this table and the whole thing. That is wonderful. Get down to brass tacks and be like, school leader, how are you bringing parents into decision-making? Because oftentimes it’s this weird ego thing that starts to kick in. And when I ask the question around school uniforms, it always tells me whether or not that’s gonna be a problem.

Because I know you’re listening to this and you’re like, why is she talking about that? Because school uniforms actually mean a lot to parents. I’m the mother of five boys, the three that are mine, two that are my bonus sons, so there are a lot of little boys. I’m an expert in having to buy khaki pants with grass stains on them, trying to clean stains out of white shirts because I got a kid that has breakfast, lunch, and dinner on every shirt. So actually, it’s a pretty important thing. It’s labor-intensive. If you’re not picking like a black or navy blue and you’re not getting the right pants, this can cause drama for parents and families.

So it’s a trick question. If school leaders are going to go out to their school community and give up control and understand that from a parent perspective, that it might not mean a lot to me, but, you know, I’m gonna give this piece to parents because it means a lot to them, and they’re telling me this—if a school leader pushes back on me and says, “Oh no, no, no, no, we’ve already decided what we’re gonna do and this is gonna be fine. And we have a vision for what this is gonna look like”—your vision for what it’s gonna look like in your head can sometimes cause a headache for a parent that you don’t even understand. Because, Mason, I love you, but you may not have had that scenario quite yet where it’s 6:30 in the morning and you know you’re gonna have a uniform violation. Like, that can cause drama and throw things into chaos for a parent.

So if a school leader is not willing to understand, see parents, and wanna meet them on something as simple as that, we’re gonna have a lot of trouble down the line.

Mason Pashia: Yeah. Okay. So that’s a good example of one of these transactional moments that’s kind of gone awry. Is there a version of this where you’ve seen kind of a radical inclusiveness of parents in either decision-making or the strategic building of how the community and the school are gonna interface?

Keri Rodrigues: Yeah. I’m actually thinking about a school in California who had absolutely dismal academic outcomes, to the point where parents were so afraid because they could see that their kids were not reading and weren’t connecting with math, that you had parents who were initially actually being trespassed from the building because they were showing up—Latino parents, who culturally are maybe a little bit more expressive than this white principal was ready for—showing up very concerned, very passionate, feeling unheard by the teachers, feeling unheard, and yelling. It wasn’t yelling to be violent or angry. This is coming from a place of fear and anxiety that their kids were not gonna be okay.

And the previous principal, or the initial principal we had talked to with this group of parents, was like, you know, “I’m literally calling the police. You’re not allowed to be in the building.” So imagine if you’re a parent and you have to drop your child off at a building you are not allowed to enter, and you have to give them to other adults. Like, culturally, it’s a mess. From a community standpoint, it’s a mess.

So we, you know, again, had to kind of start from scratch with these relationships and actually build a bridge and rehabilitate this relationship from the beginning. And it started as simply as, can we all agree to having a meeting with parents to just kind of clean the slate, understand where this fear and this anger and all of these emotions are coming from? Because it was like a standoff.

And the school leader said to me, the principal, “Well, we’ve already had meetings and we have a standing meeting every other week at 7:00 p.m. None of these people show up.” Seven p.m. in a neighborhood in the middle of winter that is very dangerous and known for gun violence? I didn’t know any of those parents that were willing to bring their kids out at 7:00 p.m., which is, you know, bath time, bedtime for parents anyway.

So we actually had to go back and I said, listen, I’ll pay for the janitor who has to come and open up the building. I’ll buy the donuts. Let’s do this at 10 o’clock on a Saturday morning. Like, let’s do it at a time where people can show up. And just by taking that initial step of goodwill, we were able to at least get people to show up in the room and then start to have conversations. Little by little, we were able to rebuild that.

That was such a powerful example that actually other schools that were also struggling were able to organize. And frankly, it wasn’t just parents getting angry and firing principals, but principals saying, “Oh, hold on a second. Here’s a whole bunch of context I just didn’t understand about people’s lives and what I was asking of them. Maybe I need to switch up a little bit.”

Mason Pashia: It’s really interesting. Thanks for sharing that. This is so fascinating to me because most of my personal work is in storytelling for our organization. And so I think of everything through that lens. And I think so much of this challenge between the parent and learner stakeholders and schools is this storytelling and communication problem. It’s either not being an active listener, which is part of storytelling. It’s not using the right language. It’s not crafting the right message. It is not bringing the right data, as you mentioned earlier.

You’ve done a bunch of polling and you’ve pulled all this data around everything from along the tenets you talked about earlier, which is like safety, health, economic readiness or mobility, and then education in general. And you have this question here about whether or not a child’s school is preparing them to succeed in a future where AI technology can affect jobs. So, as you talked about earlier, outcomes are a key part of this story. Over half of the parents say definitely or probably the schools are preparing them for this future, which again, we can’t tell the future, but we can start to look at things that are shifting and moving. We have this one thing happening where you have parents that are like, schools are doing maybe okay in this direction, but that means that about half the people are either not sure or don’t think that they’re preparing them adequately.

So, in my world of education innovation systems, we have a lot of people that are doubting our current benchmarks of how you measure outcomes, which is like grades, standards, and grades—not usually a great measurement—and they’re super dynamic. They change oftentimes from region to region, from school to school. An A here and an A here can mean radically different things. And a recent study—I’ll put a link in the show notes—from Oregon State and the University of Chicago says that parents believe grades over standardized tests as a benchmark of a student’s performance. We have this story problem around outcomes, and I don’t know that really anybody’s doing a great job of figuring out what it actually means to flourish post-graduation or to actually be set up for success.

Specifically, I want to try and figure out how leaders can better message outcomes to parents, especially if the outcome is fluid, if it’s this new thing around durable skills or a portrait of a graduate, or like you have to be nimble, not just know things, in the future. So, super messy, just threw everything at you, but curious to get your take.

Shorts Content

Report Cards, Outcomes & Transparency

Keri Rodrigues: Yeah, I would say the most effective communications vehicle that school leaders have at their disposal is the report card. We live and die by it. We believe in it, for better or worse. This is what parents believe is telling us how our children are doing, far and away much more than parent-teacher conferences or anything else.

So again, we have moved away from having a report card actually tell parents, in plain English, what it is we need to know so that we can take action. And now it has kind of turned into this convoluted mess that you are putting in front of us. And what I think is kind of weird is that there’s an expectation in the education space—there are 50 million of us. There are 50 million people in the United States that identify as K–12 parents. And the expectation—there’s only about four or five million people who identify as educators, principals, et cetera—but the expectation is that you are going to have a massive psychological and sociological shift amongst 50 million people who are screaming at you. Over 90% of American families will tell you, “Report cards, I believe that that’s what’s telling me.” You want us to change? I would argue that it is time for school leaders to change and start using this trusted communications vehicle to start communicating what it is that you want us to know and what you want us to take action on.

It is such a ridiculous mess for us to just underutilize something that is already existing. The trust is already there. You need to fix them and tell us what we need to know.

Now, I will tell you this. I’ve been in this space for about 10 years. I was one of those parents who had to be taught by folks like EdNavigator and Learning Heroes that, oh my gosh, these grades that are in front of me are not actually telling me that my child is at grade level for reading or math. And frankly, my kids went to school where they were assessing my kids on stuff that I’m not really interested in having public education assess my kids on, like, for instance, grit or heart and these skills. Those are things for me to assess as a parent. And frankly, if you can’t teach my child how to read, you think you’re qualified to teach my child how to persevere or have heart? Like, some of these— that is a bridge a little too far for families sometimes in terms of what you think that you are doing or what you think that you are responsible for or what you think you are assessing.

So again, I think there’s gotta be a lot of work. And frankly, we’ve worked with a lot of governors and state chiefs and superintendents to get them to understand, like, this is the straight dope. This is what we need. We need information on this. This is what we’re curious about. This is what we’re seeing. This is what we’re not seeing.

Even things as simple as, you know, to be honest with you, cooking the books around growth versus proficiency. Listen, I want my kid to grow, but growing toward being proficient in reading is not reading, and that’s not gonna cut it. So you can tell me on a report card that, oh my gosh, your child has so much growth, but are they proficient? And if they’re not, that’s a far greater consequence for me, and that’s information I need to know to take action.

I don’t blame educators for not being able to have effective communication and good conversations with parents and families. Frankly, teacher prep programs do not teach young teachers to have good conversations. Could you imagine a 23-year-old first-year teacher trying to have a conversation with me? God bless her. You know, I’ve been in that, you know?

But again, there’s not preparation. And I always use the example of what we do with young doctors. You know, you have to be taught an entire sequence on bedside manner and delivering a tough diagnosis and having a courageous conversation and how to interact with patients. We don’t do that with teachers, and these are some of the life-and-death conversations. There are real consequences for kids like mine, that the outcomes can be poverty, incarceration, death in some circumstances. And to not have a courageous conversation with me and to tell me you’re doing me some kind of favor by going soft and telling me my kid is a joy to have in class or has a strong sense of social justice—I know that about my kid. And to be honest, it didn’t come from school.

I need you to tell me whether or not my kid is proficient in reading because that third-grade proficiency is going to mean something for Latino kids and what their future looks like. And if he’s not ready, I am gonna take action. You’re not doing us a favor by using gatekeeping-as-you-speak. We need the information so that we can be the partner you keep telling us you need and you can’t do this without.

Mason Pashia: I also—I mean, one thing that I know that you are implying in all of this, but also it’s just important to iterate—is like, if that report card is that hard to understand for the parent, imagine how hard it is for the student to understand at all where they are on their own learning progression or in proficiency. So I think so much of this work is both figuring out how to communicate that message to the parents at the end, and at the kind of end of the line, and also the student all along the way needs to be very aware of what they know, what they’re working on, where they are, in order to actually continue to grow in that capacity, even if the growth is not the thing that’s communicated at the end.

Keri Rodrigues: I wanna push back a little bit about what you were saying around assessment and some of the statewide testing and all of that. I will tell you, in the polling that we have seen over the last six years, there is more support for statewide standardized testing than ever before because there has been a real erosion around trust. And as we learn that grades are subjective, you have to understand you’re asking a parent to bank their child’s future on a fourth-grade teacher that is subjectively observing your child and providing you a snapshot. So when you take a look at the data we are getting from standardized testing, where you’re saying, like, listen, here are the standards. Your child is either meeting the standards or not meeting the standards. That’s actionable for us, and it’s actionable for us, I would say, not only for our own children, but we need to know whether or not our schools are actually providing the outcomes that we need.

Mason Pashia: Yeah, that’s a good check as well.

Technology, Data Privacy & Duty of Care

Mason Pashia: I was on a call this morning, and the whole thing was kind of about building tools that have AI and how we approach learner data security in that. This is going to be a challenge for pretty much everyone involved in the system for the foreseeable future, which is you have a tool, they may be not super forthcoming about what they do with data or how they hold it or process it. You have schools that are much more exposed to cybersecurity risk than ever before. It just has become easier than ever to commit cybercrimes. You have all these new AI tools that are very black box and just kind of confusing. And then you have parents on the other side of this that are really leading a pretty big charge against screens, against technology, against privacy, their student data being shared, easily accessed, et cetera. So just talk to me a little bit about what you found in the polling around this privacy, and I want to spend the last little bit of time together thinking about how this conversation can actually happen between school leaders and parents. How can you actually talk about data privacy, which is something that no one reads the thing—like, if you get a MacBook, you just say agree. You are willing to give away so much for so little most of the time that we don’t have the language to really talk about this, so—

Keri Rodrigues: Well, that is—yeah, that is if the documents have even been updated. I will tell you, for my senior in high school, I got the information packet at the beginning of the year and, you know, you’re filling it out. It’s the most antiquated form I’ve ever seen where you have to fill out your address and write it out 10 times on the same form, like same information. Crazy. Technology definitely could fix that part.

What technology probably also could help with, and should help with, is the updating of the actual technology form. I am not joking when I tell you that the technology form that I signed for my senior in high school was having me authorize exposure to AOL Mail and Messenger. I don’t know anybody who’s using—I don’t—does that even exist anymore? I don’t know. But I immediately, because I’m me, ended up reaching out to the teacher and gave a call to the principal and superintendent saying, like, have you—do you know that this is what you’re giving out right now? Because this is not sufficient. And are you really—this is the level of technology my kid’s being exposed to? Of course it was not. But again, we’ve got a lot of work to do. I think we assume that everybody is just keeping pace, and they’re really not.

So I wanna start this off, in responding to your question, with something interesting that is happening in the parent community. There are folks that are anti-screen, anti-technology, but they are not the majority of parents. The majority of parents do believe that what we need to be doing with the six and a half hours we have with kids is teaching responsible and healthy behaviors with technology.

Now, Mason, you’re a young man. I am an old lady. I was in school in the early to mid-’90s, right? So I don’t have healthy behavior with technology, right? I have two cell phones, screens, I am constantly connected. Putting it down—I don’t have those behaviors. It was not taught to me. Most parents understand that we are pushing kids into a digital world and they want us to be teaching kids how to moderate when it’s appropriate to use technology and when not to.

And too often we get the lectures from a lot of people in the education space: as parents, you are letting your kids be on technology too much, too much screen time, too much screen time, too much green time. The backlash that is happening now is parents saying, “Oh, really? Because you’ve got my kid on a Chromebook four or five hours a day. So it’s my fault? It’s my issue? Because I don’t think you’re doing any better.”

And so when we go into the pediatrician’s office and we’re asked that question as parents, how much screen time is your child getting a day? A lot of us don’t know how to answer that question.

So what I will say is that what is most important to me, and to so many parents—and you can see this in our polling—is protecting kids and setting up guardrails. It is not trying to abstain from exposure to technology, exposure to AI. Our kids need to know and understand what it’s gonna have to be like so that they’re prepared for the jobs and economy of the future.

However, that is why people like me are constantly in Washington, D.C., constantly in the Judiciary Committee or in the Commerce Committee yelling about making sure we have KOSA, making sure that we, in any iteration of a technology bill that impacts kids around big tech—and our poll will also tell you that parents don’t really see the difference between ed tech and big tech. Like, that’s not a thing. Technology, period.

Duty of care. Because that is what is going to change the game. There are so many people right now who are innovating and coming up with new ideas, and they’re making a lot of money monetizing data around kids.

And unfortunately, you know, this is the way of politics, this is the way of Washington. And I can tell you as somebody who has organized with parents around this issue, around gun violence, it’s just simply not enough for us to show up with our stories. It’s not enough when we lose classrooms full of children to gun violence. Seeing that time and again, that has never been enough to move people to do the right thing and regulate. We’ve gotta hold them accountable and get the right language, or we’re never gonna solve this problem. And parents are demanding that they do the right thing on this.

Mason Pashia: Really a powerful way to bring us to a close today. So, Keri, this has been great. I think if you just think of summary things of what you said in this call that I’m gonna take with me, one of them is really thinking about the communication tools that are working and making them work even better. So the report card, something that’s already reaching parents, that they already trust to some degree, but are struggling to interface with—we have to make that easier and higher fidelity in communication. Two, what you were just talking about is this duty of care, that we have to be operating with a duty of care at all levels of the system. We’re going to keep moving forward, and more and more people are probably going to have a hand in what this learning looks like. If learning really happens everywhere, if we have to count it everywhere, if all these things are true, we need to ensure that people are on the same page with this duty of care. And then a personal just belief, and something you said earlier that we didn’t get to talk about, was your experience with community organizing. And I really think that community organizing, in some ways, is the skill of the future. I think that that is one of the most beneficial skills that anybody can have as a way to spot a problem, build a team, and go and approach it. And I think that that is really excellent, and I appreciate you demonstrating what that looks like for us today.

Keri Rodrigues: School leaders who are listening to this today, parents are your team. And if you engage with us instead of fearing us, we can be your most powerful assets. Angry parents at your door are parents that care, and if you can channel that energy in the right direction, man, you can really do something pretty powerful.

Mason Pashia: That’s a beautiful note to end on. So, Keri Rodrigues, thank you so much. National Parents Union—check it out. We’ll put stuff in the show notes for how to find that recent poll and some other reports that we talked about. Thank you so much for being here today.

Guest Bio

Keri Rodriques

Keri Rodrigues is Matthew, Miles and David’s mom and President of the National Parents Union. Called “arguably the most successful — parent organizer in education advocacy today,” her outstanding commitment to social, economic and educational equity for children and families spans decades. She serves on the US Department of Education’s National Parent and Family Engagement Council, the Children’s Equity Project Family Advisory Committee at Arizona State University and was elected to the Massachusetts Democratic State Committee. Her work, impact and perspective has been featured in the New York Times, NBC Nightly News, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, Fox News, the Washington Post, POLITICO and the Boston Globe among others. In 2022, the National Parents Union was honored as the National Advocate of the Year by UnidosUS.

Following her own difficult experience surviving the Massachusetts public school system and receiving her GED from Boston Public Schools, Rodrigues was not surprised when she struggled navigating the education system with her own children. Knowing that schools were not adequately meeting the needs of students and parents, she turned her focus to education activism, eventually helping other families across the nation to identify and use their voice and place kids at the center of the education discussion.

Links

• Watch the full video here
• LinkedIn
• National Parents Union