David Lim, Mayor of San Mateo, traces his path from teaching with constructivist methods in urban schools to public service. He grew up in LA during the 1991 Rodney King unrest, attended UCLA, and became a teacher before moving into government. He connects hands-on learning and community building to innovation in public safety and social justice.
Chapters
So how do you promote innovation and social justice as a public official? What is that all about? Because a lot of people think city council, well, you get on city council, you get to go to chicken dinners, you get to shake hands, you get to kiss babies, and then you sit up there. And I've had people ask me, don't you just sort of read a lot of boring stuff and pass the budget and keep things solid? Well, to be honest, that's part of it. Part of it is that you wanna maintain a safe, viable community, and so you have to provide the basic services like I was talking about, the toilets, the police, and the fire. But I believe there's a lot more to being a public official, and to me it's rooted very deeply in my background and my experience with social justice. I told you that I've been a lifelong career public official. I've worked always either in government for the state or for the city. And it sort of started in my background. I grew up in Los Angeles, born and raised in Montebello, California, which is a little town in east part of Los Angeles. My— who, I'm sorry, what was your name again? Kelsey. Kelsey introduced me. She talked a little bit about my family. My great-grandfather snuck into this country via Mexico. He brought over my grandfather. They worked in the grocery business for many years. My grandfather went back to China. Had got married, had my dad, who then came over. The reason they all had to go back to China every time they got married is because of what was called the Chinese Exclusion Act, where only American citizens could come into the United States, and all of the Chinese were excluded. Funny story, my great-grandfather got his citizenship because once he snuck into this country through Mexico, he was an illegal immigrant, and he was up in San Francisco, during the 1906 earthquake, or 1903 earthquake, and after the earthquake destroyed the whole city, it destroyed the Hall of Records, and so every Chinese person that was left in the city said, oh, by the way, I'm a citizen, and they couldn't prove it, right, because the Hall of Records had burned down, so he said, I'm a citizen, and all the Chinese people there said we were citizens, they had to give him citizenship, once he had that golden ticket, he was able to bring my grandfather, He had to go back, find a wife, get married, 'cause women were not allowed to come over 'cause they didn't, at that time, they felt they didn't contribute anything to the workforce. Get married, had my grandfather, then bring him over, then he had to go back, get married, come over, and by the time my dad came over, World War II had ended, China was our allies, and they lifted the Chinese Exclusion Act. But I grew up in Los Angeles, and I went to UCLA in the late '80s, early '90s, and in 1991, as I was getting ready to graduate from UCLA, Many of you probably don't remember this, but there was an incident that occurred in Los Angeles that had a profound impact on me. Let's see if it'll play. Well, it doesn't look like it's going to play. It was the Rodney King beating, and those of you who've probably seen it in the news, I hate to admit it, but probably most of you are not old enough to either remember it or were too little to remember it. It had a profound impact on the city of Los Angeles. It was something that we had all talked about growing up in Los Angeles, that the police department in Los Angeles was heavy-handed. There was an incident before that with the shooting of a young African American woman in Koreatown named Latasha Harlins. The Rodney King beating came on the heels of that. As many of you remember, was a trial that ended in the acquittal of the police officers accused of beating Rodney King, and then there was a general riot that lasted for about a week. I was a senior at UCLA at the time, and I remember for 5 days having a lockdown, martial law declared, we weren't allowed to leave our homes except to, you know, go out and get the necessities, and at night there was a curfew, National Guardsmen roaming the streets, fires burning day and night, That was the Los Angeles that was confronting me in 1991 as I graduated from UCLA. And I had 2 options before me. I thought, well, I could go into law school, I could go into business, which I was interested in. I said, or I can go try to help the world. And part of what I decided to do is I said, well, I'm gonna become a teacher. And so I went and got my master's degree in education at UCLA. I got accepted, got my master's degree and my teaching credential, and I went into LA public schools. And I went in, it was great, because I look at all of you sitting here and I think back to my cohorts at the School of Education. It was very much like what you all are doing. We would sit in rooms, 30 of us, and we would discuss how are we going to change the curriculum, because we didn't want to just become a cog in the wheel. We didn't just want to be another teacher who handed out multiple choice exams. who told the kids to read chapter 3 and then the next day to read chapter 4. And especially after the Los Angeles riots, there was a lot of discussion about what can we do better for the children of Los Angeles? How can we do better for our public schools? How can we do better for our urban schools to give them a better education? That was my first experience of how public service can be a tool for social justice and innovation because we went into the schools and we challenged the notion that you had to teach a certain way. There's a theory that you may probably even hear about, or it's probably called something different. It's a theory called constructivism. And it basically says that we construct our knowledge from our life's experiences and the things that we do, and that we are constantly critiquing the world around us and challenging the ideas. And what I love is, as I was learning about Draper University, Mr. Draper does not use the same words, but it is the same concept. That you are not bound by the conventional notions of how you grow a business or how you develop a business. But you learn from your life experiences. You bring the best and brightest of your ideas. You collaborate with the best and brightest around you. And in 1992, '93, when I was a teacher at Paul Revere Middle School, that's what I did. I couldn't resist. I had to put this picture of me, because I looked at it and I'm like, that can't be me. My gosh, how old was I? I was 23. I was 23, I was in a middle school. You can sort of see that the way that I taught my kids, we were sitting in groups, we were sitting in courts, there was a lot of discussions, barely used the textbook. A lot of original source documentation teaching, you know, so if we needed to learn about the Constitution, we didn't read a textbook that told us about the Constitution, we read the Constitution. And when we were teaching these 7th and 8th graders what did the Constitution mean, we didn't have them read the textbook to have someone tell them what the Constitution meant. They read the amendments themselves. They read the 13th Amendment, the 14th Amendment, the 15th Amendment, and they told us, what do you think it means? What do you think it meant to the slaves after the Civil War? What do you think it means to us in post-riot Los Angeles, 1993?
