Navjeet Banga has spent seven years teaching in Oakland's public schools. He came in as a substitute, stayed through a pandemic, moved through continuation settings, and landed where he is now: managing a full secondary special education caseload, teaching English and study skills, and sitting at IEP tables of every level of complexity.
Special education is not one interest among many for him. It is the center of his working life. He chose it because the stakes are immediate and human, the families are often carrying more than schools recognize, and the work demands range: legal fluency, pedagogical care, clinical judgment, and the patience to stay with complexity instead of flattening it.
"An IEP is just paper. What matters is whether anyone in that room truly believes in the kid."
He works with students and families navigating disability, institutional systems, and the gap between what the law promises and what schools actually deliver. He tries to close that gap the only way it ever really closes: student by student, meeting by meeting, document by document.
His reading and writing life runs through history. Not as a second career, and not quite as a hobby either, but as a companion discipline. History sharpens the habit of asking better questions, noticing what official accounts leave out, and understanding that institutions usually behave according to their incentives rather than their ideals.
He studied history formally, earning a graduate degree while teaching full time. His research interests have settled around the history of science and ideas, particularly the question of how knowledge moves: through networks, institutions, correspondence, and the structural conditions that make transparency more durable than secrecy.
"It is rarely superior people; it is arrangements that handle information better, tie personal wins to group goals."
It is a habit of mind he finds just as useful in schools as in archives: look closely, read the language carefully, and pay attention to what a system rewards.
He has taught in Oakland's public schools since 2018, through remote learning, through the reopening, through staff turnover and shifting leadership and all the ordinary disruptions that wear districts down. He stayed because the students are worth staying for, and because time inside one district teaches you things no orientation ever will: how decisions actually get made, where systems break down, and who still shows up anyway.
Oakland is one of the most linguistically and culturally diverse cities in the country. He works with multilingual and newcomer families regularly, navigating school systems in languages other than English, translating institutional logic into terms that make practical sense for parents trying to advocate for their children.