The Sunset Connection - Perspectives from SF's Sunset Neighborhood

Education as the Great Equalizer: A Conversation with Parag Gupta

• Jessica J. Ho • Season 1 • Episode 15

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In this episode of The Sunset Connection, Jessica Ho sits down with Parag Gupta — SF Board of Education commissioner, affordable housing leader, and proud SFUSD parent. Education is often called the “great equalizer,” but in San Francisco it collides with housing costs, politics, and questions of trust in public institutions. Parag shares his family’s immigration story, his career in social impact, and why “boring government” might be exactly what our schools need. A wide-ranging, personal, and surprisingly hopeful conversation about schools, homes, and the future of San Francisco.

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The Sunset Connection — exploring the stories and histories that connect us.

Jessica Ho:

Hey everyone, a quick note before we dive in. I will be in Japan for the next few weeks, so I'm releasing this episode a little earlier than usual. I'll be back in October. In the meantime, I wanted to bring you this conversation. I think it's a good one, but I'm pretty biased. All right, today, on the Sunset Connection, I'm joined by Parag Gupta, recently elected member of the San Francisco Board of Education, longtime affordable housing leader and proud public school parent. His grandfather founded a women's college in India. His parents immigrated here with just $200, and he grew up grounded in the belief that education is a great equalizer. Professionally, he serves as chief program officer at Mercy Housing, the largest nonprofit affordable housing provider in the country, and he's also a sunset dad raising kids at SFUSD. Today we'll talk about his immigration story, how he balances family and work and public service and life and I don't know how he does it and how housing and education in San Francisco are deeply intertwined. So with that, welcome Parag.

Parag Gupta:

Thank you. It's wonderful to be here, Jessica. Thank you so much for having me.

Jessica Ho:

Yeah, so tell me about your grandfather. Your grandfather founded a women's college in India and yet your parents only arrived here with $200. So can you tell me how that happened? Because I would imagine someone who had established such a you know, if I had established like a college here, I mean like I feel like I would have more than $200 to get my kids to go to a different country. But what happened?

Parag Gupta:

Yeah, no, it's a great. It's a great question. So chronologically, my father's the eldest. He left India and my grandfather was still establishing himself. Now let me be clear. My grandfather and my father come from a very small village about four hours away from Delhi college. He noticed that as he sent his daughters to school, well after my father had flown the coop from his household, that a lot of the girls, a lot of the women that would end up going to college would have to go very far away, and at the time it was not very safe for the women to go that far without having someone to accompany them and so forth. So he thought it would be better if there was a local college. And so he started, along with others, a college. This was well after my father had left. My grandfather was very civically engaged, was part of the Lions Club over in his part.

Jessica Ho:

Yes, there's a Lions Club in India.

Parag Gupta:

There are many Lions Clubs and credit to the Lions Club as well, as you know, and shout out to the Rotary folks as well, you know. But there are many of those kind of civic engagement organizations all over the world tried to provide what he could at that time, which amounted to about $200 that could then set my parents up to make their own fortune once they got to the United States. But the key thing that he set up my father with was a wonderful work ethic, an emphasis on education, and that's what was able to catapult him to have the opportunity to come to the United States and come to North America. Coming to this country, he also impressed on us the importance of education, how that enabled us to have the opportunities that we now have, and I've spent the last 25 years really working to build that with others and really working to empower community members to have the same opportunities I was able to have.

Jessica Ho:

Yes, because you went to Harvard, so you achieved the American dream, prague.

Parag Gupta:

I was very fortunate. I was able to work hard, but I think it's important to acknowledge that there's a lot of luck in this as well, but you did it and that's impressive.

Jessica Ho:

I've got a bit. I applied to Harvard for my PhD program, didn't get in. It crushed me. It changed my whole life.

Parag Gupta:

Oh no, yeah, it's okay now I'm here, so it's all right and and you're doing great, so I don't know about great, but I'm, I'm, I'm still cooking absolutely so yeah.

Jessica Ho:

So so you went to Harvard and, um, can you tell me like your path from there onwards?

Parag Gupta:

yeah, absolutely. After I actually graduated from college I did the whole management consulting thing for a bit, was fortunate to then be able to consult and work with large Fortune 500 companies, but then also work with large foundations and nonprofits, and I knew I wanted to do something where I was creating an impact. But a pivotal moment for me was when I actually went back to India to visit the village that was the home of my grandfather and father and I saw a portrait of my father or a portrait of a young looking guy on the wall of his high school and I said, hey, dad, that goofy looking guy there kind of looks like you. He said, ostensibly jerk, that is me. And I said, why are you on the wall? And it was because he had scored so well and it just made me realize that's amazing.

Parag Gupta:

It was. It was sort of this grounding moment where I think I had always assumed, ok, I'm going to do better than my father in terms of what I could. It's a bit arrogant, but it was sort of well, I'm going to do better and I'm going to be able to, you know, get a great job, et cetera, et cetera. But I think what I didn't realize until that moment was the delta in terms of where someone comes from, what are the opportunities before them, and then where are they able to go. And so now I realize that if I were able to achieve, for example, half of that journey going from, say, a small village in India to then being able to make it in the Bay Area and the United States and one of the most expensive areas in the entire world, and raise three kids and have them do well, if I were able to make that much of a journey, that delta between where my parents started and where they have ended up, I would be so lucky. So, and that's really what made me think, how do I make every career decision from now on, where I am able to impact the most people possible and give them that opportunity? Because, as we see, I mean a lot of this is birth lottery. You know how. Where are you born? What conditions are you born into? That's why I say, for me, I feel like a lot of it was luck where, yes, I did work hard. For me, I feel like a lot of it was luck where, yes, I did work hard. But I had a great set of parents who shared with me their work ethic and the amount of hard work and the importance of education and were able to support me through that. That made it so critical after graduating from grad school at Harvard and was able to bring the world's top social innovators from around the world to events like the annual meeting at Davos, which then attracts Fortune 500 CEOs, heads of states, so that we could put on stage, next to say, the CEO of Pepsi and the Chancellor of Germany, a social innovator that is doing amazing work on the ground to make sure that when we talk about improving the state of the world, that's grounded in the reality of someone who's actually doing it. So that was my first step afterwards and after that I've just continued work, started my own social enterprise in India, did that for about seven years. That social enterprise is now impacting 7,000 waste pickers and environmentally processing waste. That's still going on.

Parag Gupta:

And I came back to the United States after being abroad for quite some time, to one raise my daughter, because my wife and my daughter were here as I was starting my business and other parts, and then also because there were a lot of challenges that we face in the United States, and so I realized there was a lot I could do. So I worked at a foundation that was focused on the San Francisco Bay Area, spending about $300 million in 10 years devising the strategy for it to do so, one of which was post-secondary success. How do we get kids to and through college or vocational program, whatever it might be, that enables them to live in such an expensive part? And then I realized that housing is such a critical piece, especially in the Bay Area, of everything we do, and so many people were priced out. When I look at the journey of my parents, they were able to come to the Bay Area at a time when they didn't make a ton of money, but they could make enough to afford a down payment and then pay their mortgage payment and raise three kids. I don't really know many places in the Bay Area where you could do that anymore, and I think that's a real challenge. I think California is a phenomenal state and that's where we've fallen short and need to do better. So I worked in affordable housing and have now gotten civically engaged to try to move the needle on housing as well. So tell me about your job now. Like what does those who may be less familiar?

Parag Gupta:

Affordable housing is housing that is subsidized through government programs. It could be low-income housing tax credits, it could be Section 8 vouchers. There are a few different programs, and so I'll take low-income housing tax credits, for example. Those are distributed to the states and the states then can decide where they need to allocate that, working with the counties. Mercy Housing is nonprofit and it does development of affordable housing. It'll bid on housing contracts or be invited in by counties and municipalities to be able to build housing contracts, or be invited in by counties and municipalities to be able to build.

Parag Gupta:

But Mercy Housing also does property management, and the part that I'm involved in is resident services. So as chief program officer, I oversee national resident services. We house 45,000 residents across 21 states. In San Francisco alone, we house 8,000 individuals, or one in 100 San Franciscans. We're talking about low-income residents, and if we were to just say here are the keys, good luck and that's it. That doesn't address a lot of the social determinants of health and a lot of the surrounding needs that help to make sure someone feels empowered. So that involves out school time for children, that involves health programming, that involves financial well-being. So all of those kind of programs provide the scaffolding and are kind of this holistic wraparound services that then help to make sure that our residents are successful in what they do.

Jessica Ho:

What are some examples of like the services that you provide? It's like food, is it like social programs, work, job programs.

Parag Gupta:

Great question. So some programs say on the health side include partnering with food banks to make sure that there is food delivery. My daughter and I were doing that over in the Soma area, one of the Mercy Housing properties, on a volunteer basis. There are health programs or there will be health fairs to inform some of our residents as far as their health insurance options. For example, there are financial well-being programs, for example, programs that help to build assets for residents, or some of the financial management programs that are offered by some of our partners Out of school time.

Parag Gupta:

There are some great out of school time programs either where we will partner with other nonprofits to come on the site of the affordable housing, of our housing, and then provide after school time programming for enrichment or academic pieces. A great example actually is in Sunnydale. We recently opened a hub that serves over 700 students or 700 youth. That is in partnership with Wu Yi, is in partnership with Boys and Girls Club and is just a great community resource center for people to come from around the community in the southeast part of the city.

Jessica Ho:

Yeah, sunnydale, yeah, it's coming up. Man Houses are being sold above list price. Yeah, yeah, it's, I mean Even despite all of the chatter about the real estate market being like uncertain, there are some really bright spots in San Francisco in real estate, and Sunnydale is one of them.

Parag Gupta:

And the weather is always great there, it is great.

Jessica Ho:

Because you said you serve about 45,000 residents in your day job, and so there's another group of people, about 50,000 strong, that you serve in your capacity as a school board member.

Parag Gupta:

Yes, exactly, exactly.

Jessica Ho:

So tell me about how it's like being a school board member and putting both those hats on, and do you ever see them intersect with one another?

Parag Gupta:

Yes, absolutely so. Many of the challenges that, I argue, we see when we think about student performance, stem, even outside of the classroom and that is part of our guardrails, even indicate as part of San Francisco Unified School District also implicate the idea of serving the whole child. So does a child have a stable home? Do they have enough to eat? Are they coming well-rested, do they have the mental support that they require?

Parag Gupta:

There's so many other factors and we all know this in our daily lives that we need to take care of in order to go to work, go to school, to be in the best place possible, and so housing is such a critical component of that, and one of the things that I'm happiest is when we do see that intersection.

Parag Gupta:

Mercy Housing and SFUSD, for example, do work together. I was actually just at an event at the Sunnydale Hub where I was able to wear both hats, as a commissioner of San Francisco Unified School District and as an executive at Mercy Housing, and it makes me incredibly happy to see things like backpack giveaways, supply giveaways, where our families in Mercy Housing feel ready and their children feel prepared and are very excited to go to school, especially in the southeast part of the city where we know we need to do better and where we have a preponderance of our students. The other piece in terms of overlap, I would say, is the work that I've done as an executive in my career at Mercy Housing and philanthropy. Running my own social enterprise has certainly prepared me for school board leadership.

Jessica Ho:

It's hilarious to me that, like this person who graduated from Harvard that has like saved thousands of lives, that like is like a C-suite person who like worked at the World Economic Forum, has to do all of this stuff to prepare for the position that is a school board.

Parag Gupta:

My desire to work on the school board and why it's such a privilege to me is, you know, and I think this goes back to the roots of my grandfather it is how do you serve and how do you engage your community, and I feel so privileged to be able to do so on the school board. We know our schools have had challenges, and what kills me is my daughter goes to SFUSD and we as a family have had a wonderful time and continue to have a wonderful time as an SF family that has a child in SFUSD. She went to Chinese Immersion School at Diavola. We have a wonderful community at that school. She received a great education at Chinese Immersion School at Diavola. She's now at Roosevelt. She's having a great time there, and so many people look at some of the challenges we've had administratively and assume that that then means that their child is not going to get a great education, and that kills me, because that is not the case. If anything. Now what we're doing is we're trying to make SFUSD boring.

Jessica Ho:

OK Biden, we need more of that.

Parag Gupta:

I know we have too much excitement in the political world right now.

Parag Gupta:

In the world right now, it's sort of the last thing anyone should have to worry about is the school that their child goes to, and so so much of this.

Parag Gupta:

Yes, absolutely so, and I think we see this movement across San Francisco politics where it's sort of how do we just get to deliver on the bread and butter issues that people don't want to think about and would like to just assume are going to happen?

Parag Gupta:

So my child what we seek is my child will get a great education. I can walk down the street and feel safe to do so. I can have housing that I can afford and know that my children, should they choose to afford to live here as well. I mean, that is so much of the tenet of now what the DCCC is trying to do, what Westside Family Dems is trying to do, and I think our school board is now focused on how do we focus, not on political drama, but really focus on improving student outcomes, because we recognize, even though my daughter is having a great time, that does not always equate to all 45,000 students having a great time. So where do we make sure that we're not leaving any of our students behind. We're uplifting everyone to have the great education that not only they deserve, but we should be able to afford in this city.

Jessica Ho:

So in a previous episode I interviewed Han Lee, a reporter at the SF Standard, about what's been going on at the school board in terms of the budget and how Maria has been handling it and how the school board's kind of approached it. And so it was. It sounded like kind of a mess last year with potential school closures coming. Can you tell us where we are now and how what you're saying kind of fits into the reality of that situation?

Parag Gupta:

Yeah, it's a great question. So, one, what we set as our priority this year, again towards moving, towards boring. So I want to first name there's a lot that went off the rails last year and I think that's where you saw a lot of movement, a lot of energy and new school board members coming in starting in January, and so we have now focused on, if you look at our priorities, one, closing the $114 million budget gap for this year. Two, approving a new math curricula for use. Three, approving a new math curricula for use.

Parag Gupta:

Three, getting a better handle of our human resources situation and moving towards position control, which is absolutely critical, so that, not to be boring about the software, but in a district where the majority of our costs are people understandably, educators, administrators, et cetera, et cetera we need to know where credentialed folks are going, which schools are resourced with which people and where we may need to make cuts or additional hires to be able to provide the education that meets the outcome goals that we've set for students. And prior to this year, we didn't have a clear picture of that. Imagine driving on a road not having GPS and not even knowing how fast your speed is, because your odometer is broken. So it was very difficult for school board members to make decisions when we just didn't have great data being presented to us on the financial side and sometimes even on the student outcome side. So those are the boring things.

Jessica Ho:

You just needed data.

Parag Gupta:

Oh, I'm a huge fan of data.

Jessica Ho:

Oh, me too, I'm a data nerd.

Parag Gupta:

And I'd say it's political will, where we have now a common purpose, right, and I think, working as an executive in the impact space for 25 years, one of the first things I think that is critical is just aligning on the impact that we seek to create, and so we may have different perspectives as school board members, but we are all focused on the same purpose, which is our student outcome goals. How do we improve third grade reading? How do we improve eighth grade math and how do we improve college and career readiness? Those are the three goals and the lens by which we use in order to make decisions. So we're focused on those things, and so, in the broader context of where we are, so we were able to close $114 million budget.

Parag Gupta:

We're not out of the woods. We still have $50 to $60 million that we need to cut next year, but because we now have better data, we have better information on our budget, our budgetary system, we now have a new chief business officer. We now, I feel more confident in our ability to be able to close that, and it's not going to be easy. I just want to be clear this process is not going to be easy. This was decades in the making and we are now trying to get out of the woods on this, but I am encouraged by the fact that we have a board that's aligned on the hard choices we have to make, the outcomes that we seek and now can move forward towards making them.

Jessica Ho:

As you're speaking, I really can hear the vision. I understand like you. Have helped me see the intent a lot more clearly than I think I've ever seen it before. However, what you and I are missing is the dialogue that's happening outside these four walls, which is the reality that these impact human lives.

Parag Gupta:

Yes.

Jessica Ho:

Yes, and we hear that loud and clear. That's what I've been hearing, right? It's all about displacement. It's all about how it's going to affect my job. It's all about how it's going to affect my kid. It's all about how I'm going to affect my future. Right, Like it's true. And we are living in a time where you know, honestly, that's inevitable and it sucks, but we are living in a time where there are two factors, I think, that make it even more difficult for you in your role than it would in any other time in history, and A that's the advent of AI and how that will transform what it means to have a job, what it means to go to college, what it means to be successful in the future. All of that is changing In real time.

Parag Gupta:

Yes.

Jessica Ho:

And the second piece is a political aspect that, outside of San Francisco, of trans rights, of what it means to be, you know, a human these days. What can we teach in schools? What do people want their kids to learn? How will they learn? So, you know, easy questions for you to answer Right. So, like how are you going to deal with that? For you to answer right.

Parag Gupta:

So, like, how are you going to do with that? So and you're right In a way we have to both build the tracks. Well, or rather, let me use another analogy we need to build the plane while we're also flying it.

Jessica Ho:

It never works out well when that happens. Have you just seen Boeing it? You know like they're not doing that well right?

Parag Gupta:

We're yes, we are not using any Boeing parts in this plane building, but we are both trying to get the basic functions right after, again, decades of a lack of management within the school district or substandard management, I should say and so we are both trying to write the plane, if you will, and at the same time, we also need to look ahead, because it's not enough to say, ok, now we're back to the standard of the education that was provided in, say, the 80s or the 90s. It has to be one that's geared for modern day. And so I think that's where in this process and it's not necessarily just me saying, hey, this is what we should do, or any board member, not even the president this is where, when we came up with the goals around literacy, around math, around college and career readiness, those were with engagement from the community. That was done with the community, where the community is sharing what those values are, and that's what our role as board members is is to reflect the values when we make those decisions.

Parag Gupta:

So, if it's, say, a three-legged stool, one leg of that stool, of course, is the budget that we have to work with.

Parag Gupta:

The other part of that budget are what are the values and how are we, as board members, reflecting the values of the voters that that brought us into office stool is the data. What is the data saying as far as how our students are doing when it comes to math, when it comes to education, when it comes to college and career readiness? Where do we have dark spots? Where do we have bright spots? What can we learn amongst our 125 sites and where do we need to improve? Where do we need to push more resources to better train educators, to provide more staffing, whatever that might be, so that we're reflecting those values in this budget. Provide more staffing, whatever that might be, so that we're reflecting those values in this budget. So that's how those three pieces all fit together to then reflect and take the wisdom of our community in both what they seek to see as well as what they're seeing right now, with everything coming forward in the future.

Jessica Ho:

But people don't predict the future, so people have all different types of predictions that contradict with one another. So how are you taking that into consideration?

Parag Gupta:

So it's a great question. And so if say, for example, I'm a parent, in true case I'm concerned. What are the skills that my daughter will need to be able to thrive in the workplace of the future? Right, and just be a productive human being that's happy, right. And so I think I see a couple of different pieces that I'm a bit concerned about. One we didn't have phones when we were growing up. Our prefrontal cortexes were able to develop in a normal fashion, I don't Fairly, fairly normal.

Parag Gupta:

But, but I don't know if that, if that can happen, if kids are always glued to their screens, and I think there's some research around that that has shown.

Jessica Ho:

It's changing our brain elasticity, how we're developing our neurons and how we're connecting and, yeah, absolutely it's changing how biologically our brains function.

Parag Gupta:

That's exactly right, thank you. And with the advent of artificial intelligence, then what are the skills that my daughter will need, or all of our students will need, in order to succeed? It's not going to be computational skill. They're never going to be able to beat artificial intelligence in terms of, you know, being a human calculator if you will. But what are the problem solving skills that then will be necessary, that will set them up for success?

Parag Gupta:

And to me, this is where I look at where we are and I say we should be able to solve this.

Parag Gupta:

We are the epicenter of artificial intelligence, for example.

Parag Gupta:

So what do we need to do to bring in those resources we have as a community and those concerns that people have, and be able to hear them, be able to understand what those values are that people are bringing into these conversations, to these?

Parag Gupta:

But if they're voicing these as concerns, then when we revisit the visions, the values, the goals and the guardrails that we set up as school board members, we then can make sure that these are things that we need to address and bring in the resources, whether it be our staff, whether it be experts from the outside that are helping us to look at these, so that, again, going back to if I'm a person, if I'm a community member, if I'm raising a family in the San Francisco Bay Area or in the San Francisco, I don't have to worry about that. I know the school is thinking about that, I know the school district is thinking about that. Right, that is one less thing that we want our families to have to worry about, because they should feel like the San Francisco Unified School District does care about that and is taking that into consideration.

Jessica Ho:

But parents are going to worry.

Parag Gupta:

Absolutely. I mean parents absolutely will worry. There is not a day that I don't worry about something with my daughter, and I also want to have the comfort of knowing that, when I send my child to school every day, that there are leaders, there are educators, there are administrators that are taking care of her well-being, both for that day and also thinking about her future alongside me I mean that was a really nice response.

Jessica Ho:

I mean, I don't know, I that was a really hard question. So, thank you, yeah, of course. Yeah, that these are not easy, easy things to to rustle through. Let's talk about something like to close it out, like what's, what's one thing that you think would be a good closer, because this is like a very expansive, yeah conversation. So, yes, anything you want to talk about, that would be good. To close out. Your train of thought on children and housing and your DCCC work. We haven't really touched upon that.

Parag Gupta:

You have a lot going on, yeah.

Jessica Ho:

Yeah, it's amazing. I feel like we need a few more hours to really go through it.

Parag Gupta:

I wouldn't bore you or your listeners with that. I've had the benefit of living in, you know, on four different continents and traveling all over, and the intellectual horsepower that we bring in, we care as a community like San Francisco.

Jessica Ho:

It attracts a certain type of person.

Parag Gupta:

It attracts a certain amount, a certain type of person. And you know, I fundamentally believe, like we are the biggest small town, like you know, look at our. You look at our population size Less than a million. Indianapolis is bigger, jacksonville is bigger Wow, I didn't know that, but no one is.

Parag Gupta:

You know, it's not like people are looking to Indianapolis or Jacksonville for innovation or looking at it at the world's, on the world stage, the way San Francisco is. So I look at that and I look at our leadership that's now coming up in the city and of course, we need to continue that pipeline. But, you know, I think we have an opportunity now to show the country, the rest of the country, that we can make government work, we can deliver on services on a daily basis, we can make the lives of our residents better and we don't have to be jerks about it. Like we can do it in an inclusive manner that promotes good conversation. Reasonable people will disagree and, at the end of the day, we can still be neighbors, we can still be friends, we can still work together. We can still work together to make the city a better place.

Jessica Ho:

OK, parag, before I let you go, we're going to switch gears. You've answered the big policy questions, so now let's see how you do on a little Sunset and SF schools trivia. Ok, so question number one yes, what year did the Sunset District officially get its name? Sunset District officially get its name A In the 1850s, b In the 1880s, c In the 1910s or D In the 1930s, I'm going to guess.

Parag Gupta:

so I'll explain my logic. I know it was outside lands before because I was told when I moved into my home that it used to just be a bunch of sandhills. And we're only the second family to move into our home because it was freshly built the old family. So I'm going to guess it came after that and I'm going to guess 1930s 1880s.

Jessica Ho:

Wow yeah, isn't that crazy, that is crazy.

Parag Gupta:

Yeah, I didn't know that either. Wow, I wonder how it got its name.

Jessica Ho:

I actually looked into that because I was curious too. So who was the person who coined the Sunset District name in the 1880s? A John McLaren, the Golden Gate Park superintendent. B Adolph Sutro, the Westside land baron, and he actually became SM mayor. Oh, I did not know that. Aurelius E Buckingham, a real estate developer, or George Turner Marsh.

Parag Gupta:

I was going to go with Sutro the answer is Aurelius E Buckingham.

Jessica Ho:

He was a real estate developer who coined the Sunset District because it was like obviously sand dunes, and so he's like, if I call it the Sunset District, maybe people will be tricked and come out here and buy land and buy homes. And that happened.

Parag Gupta:

Broker babble got people again.

Jessica Ho:

Yes, that's it for today's episode of the sunset connection. Huge thanks to perak for sharing his story, from his family's immigration journey to raising kids in sfusd, to connecting the dots between housing and schools in san francisco. As always, thank you for listening and being part of this community. Subscribe, share and come say hi, I'm. J'm Jessica Ho, and this has been the Sunset Connection.

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