Across the nation, and here in California, education leaders are facing extraordinary challenges — and opportunities. The COVID-19 crisis has stretched out further, and cut us more deeply, than most of us imagined.

While so many did the best they could to pivot in the latter weeks of March, the crisis harshly revealed how our educational system is leaving students, families and communities behind. It was becoming more apparent how this system was harming communities of color, even to people who until this point had not understood how our education system is designed with the same structural racism found all through our history and society.

The 74