One Good Question

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4/10/21 4/10/21

One Good Question: The Book.

"In what ways do our investments in education reveal our beliefs about the next generation’s role in the world?"
- Rhonda Broussard, author, One Good Question

It all started with this question. From 2015 - 2017, I interviewed global education leaders about their perspectives on my one good question. Thank you to everyone who read the interviews in this original series! Your comments, feedback, and questions have been inspiring. In the process of writing the blog, I learned so much from these leaders about my own assumptions and education perspectives, but more importantly, I learned a lot about the power of questioning.

I'm honored to start the next phase of wondering: One Good Question, the book. Later this year, CALEC/TBR Books will publish One Good Question, a reflection on these original interviews and how the dual pandemics in 2020 have challenged our education perspectives even further. Watch this space for more information about pre-sales, book release events, and speaking events.

2/7/17 2/7/17

One Good Question with Kaya Henderson: What Will Make My Heart Sing?

This post is part of a series of interviews with international educators, policy makers, and leaders titled “One Good Question.” These interviews provide answers to my One Good Question and uncover new questions about education’s impact on the future.

“In what ways do our investments in education reveal our beliefs about the next generation’s role in the world?”

The US has invested in two things in public education that are fundamentally wrong. The first one? Perpetuating really low expectations for kids. When you look at our education investments over the last 20-30 years, the focus has been low-level proficiency in a handful of subject areas. That belies a fairly low expectation about what kids can accomplish. It reveals our belief that, if schools can just get the moderate level of proficiency, then they will have done their job. We seem believe that low to moderate proficiency is the goal for some kids. For wealthy kids, we believe they also need international trips, art and music, foreign language, and service experiences. Those investments, made both by wealthy families and wealthier schools – belie greater expectations for those students.

I had the very good fortune to grow up in a family that started out poor, but transcended to the middle class over the course of my childhood. I was blessed to have a mother who had us traveling the world, insured that I spoke a foreign language, took horseback riding, and participated in Girl Scouts. But I had cousins who came from the exact same place as I did, whose parents and schools didn’t share those expectations. Some of them attended the magnet elementary with me, so even when their parents didn’t have high expectations, good public schools put us on the same trajectory.

When I became chancellor of District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS), my expectations were based on my personal experiences. I believe that schools have to inspire kids to greatness. What I saw however, was people trying to remediate kids to death. So, I inherited a district where people weren’t teaching social studies and science, and where arts and foreign language programs were paid for by some PTAs, because some parents recognized the needs even with the district didn’t. What I saw was different expectations for different kids, and the investments followed suit. Our goal was to recreate these rich experiences, both enrichment and academic, for all kids.

The second investment that cripple US education? Systems that are built for teachers who we don’t believe in. We try to teacher-proof the things that we want teachers to do. But, if what we give teachers is worthy of them, if it peaks their intellectual curiosity, makes them need to learn, pushes and challenges them? — then teachers rise to expectations in the same way that kids do.

One of the things that we did in DCPS was to significantly raise teachers’ salaries, and radically raise expectations. Lots of people were not happy about it, but the people who were happiest? Our best teachers! They were already rising to highest expectations.We reinvented our curriculum aligned to Common Core State Standards, with the idea that every single course should have lessons that blow kids’ minds. We designed these Cornerstone lessons – the lesson that kids will remember when they are grownups. For example, when we’re teaching volume in math, it coincides with a social studies unit on Third World development. So students learn to design a recyclable water bottle, in a few different dimensions, to help developing countries get better access to water. They then build the prototypes for the containers and test them out. Lessons like that make you remember volume in a different way.We wanted one Cornerstone less in each unit, for a total of five over the year. We designed lessons for every grade level, every subject area. When we designed the Cornerstones, we mandated that teachers teach that lesson. What happened? Everyone used them and demanded more! Teachers wanted to have 3 or 4 Cornerstone lessons for each of their units.

“How do we get parents to opt — in to public schools at scale?”

I had families tell me that I needed to do a better marketing job, that I wasn’t selling DCPS enough. They compared us to charter schools with glossy brochures. When I started, the product that we had to market wasn’t good enough. I didn’t want to duplicate the negative experiences parents were getting: great marketing, but then disappointment in the product.The first year that I was Chancellor at DCPS, we didn’t lose any kids to charters. That was monumental! After 40 consecutive years of enrollment decline, we had 5 consecutive years of enrollment growth. We laid a foundation with a good program, then we listened to parents. We combined what they wanted, with what we knew kids needed, and rebuilt the system from the ground up. Our competitive advantage is that we are not boutique schools. We are like Target: we have to serve lots of different people and give them different things. As a district, our challenge is to guarantee the same quality of product, regardless of location. What are we going to guarantee to every family and how will every family know that?

We started by re-engineering our elementary schools. Some schools had been operating for so long without social studies, that they didn’t know how to schedule for it. It meant creating sample schedules for them and hiring specialist teachers. Once we could tell parents that every school would have XYZ programs, they didn’t have to shop for it anymore! Then we moved on to middle school and guaranteed advanced and enrichment offerings at every campus. Then we did the same at the high school level and significantly expanded AP courses. Today all of our high schools offer on average 13 AP courses. Even if there are kids who have to take the AP course twice, they do it. We know that the exposure to that level of academic rigor prepares students for college.

DCPS was a district where families came for elementary, opted-out at middle school, and then maybe came back for a handful of high schools. So we looked at the boutique competitor schools and added a few of those models to DCPS too. You do have to sell, but there’s no better advertisement than parents saying “I love this school !” Some of our schools that were never in the lottery, now have a ton of applicants! We were careful not to build things on charismatic people, but to build systems so that these gains would be sustainable. Now parents that never would have considered DCPS are clamoring for our schools.

Kids are kids, no matter where in the country they live. The cost of education is static. If we are serious about this education, we have to make some different decisions and put the money behind it. We’ve seen ten consecutive years of financial surplus in DC, at a time when the country was falling apart. I was even more lucky that three different mayors prioritized education and but the money in the budget. You can’t expect schools to do the more on the same dollars. You have to invest in innovation funds.

Kaya’s One Good Question: Literally, my question is what is the best use of my time moving forward? When you’re running a district, you are in the weeds. You don’t know about all of the new and exciting things in the space. Right now, I’m being deliberate about exploring the sector and that’s important. I want to figure out what will make my heart sing!

Right now I’m obsessed with the intersectionality about housing, education, jobs and healthcare. This old trope that, if we just ‘fix’ education, is garbage. I’m not saying it’s linear or causal, but it’s necessary to work on more than one issue affecting families at a time, and the efforts have to be coordinated and triangulated. Some of the most exciting things on the horizon are people like Derwin Sisnett, who is working to re-engineer communities for housing to be anchored around high performing schools and the community is replete with healthcare services and job training that the community needs to improve.

Kaya Henderson is an educator, activist, and civil servant who served as Chancellor of the District of Columbia Public Schools from November 2010 to September 2016. She is the proud parent of a DCPS graduate and a DCPS fifth grader.In 1992, Henderson joined Teach For America, and took a job teaching in the South Bronx in New York City. Henderson was promoted to executive director of Teach for America in 1997, and relocated to Washington, D.C. In 2000, Henderson left Teach for America and joined the New Teacher Project as Vice President for Strategic Operations.

1/10/17 1/10/17

One Good Question with Ben Nelson: Do We Actually Believe that College Matters?

Ben Nelson

This post is part of a series of interviews with international educators, policy makers, and leaders titled “One Good Question.” These interviews provide answers to my One Good Question (outlined in About) and uncover new questions about education’s impact on the future.

“In what ways do our investments in education reveal our beliefs about the next generation’s role in the world?”

Education matters. It sounds so banal and simple. Everyone in the world says this, but I argue that no one actually believes that education matters. Here’s the proof:Imagine a high school student that has the option to go to A) Harvard or B) some other less prestigious educational institution where they will get a better education. How many people are going to say don’t go to Harvard? Effectively nobody.If people actually believed that education mattered, then college rankings, curricula, and choice wouldn’t exist in these formats. Fundamentally, no one believes that the education matters, but that the credentials matter. People think “have credential, will travel”. And they’re wrong. Credentials actually don’t really matter. Credentials ultimately are put to the test when you get to the real world. The investment – whether dollars, human capital, time and money—from government, private sector, or families—the investment that returns the most in your life is learning. It’s not getting an education.

“You’re shifting the whole paradigm here – learning matters but learning institutions less so? I still believe in "school," so help me understand this.”

We need to make a distinction between getting an education, being educated and actually learning. One of the key elements to know that learning has occurred is the concept called far transfer. Far transfer occurs when people apply learning from one context to a problem/need in a radically different context. You know that some has learned when they say, “I’ve never seen this before, but I’ve seen all of these common elements. I studied XYZ and there are patterns developed between them that I recognize here. With certainty, I know that if I do ABC I will likely get positive results.So for families wondering where to invest in their children’s success? Invest in education, not the credential.

“How do you get people to shift their values towards “education” not credential?”

Hyperbolic discounting is the phenomenon that things get better with age. Among youth and adults—if you are told “you can invest $10 today and get $100 5 years from now” most people say they would rather spend the $10 today. Similarly, when you tell an 18-year old kid, you shouldn’t drop acid/do coke, because you’re going to have a lot of fun tonight, but 10 years from now you may ruin your life. They discount it. This is so built in to human nature to think about short-term reward vs long-term benefit.

It’s hard to admit that you don’t believe in our education system. When push comes to shove and you’re at the supermarket, run into your old friend and she asks where your kid is going to school, you want to say Harvard (or whichever university has status for you). You don’t want to say she’s getting an amazing education at "unbranded institution." You sacrifice the future well-being of your child to have an easier supermarket conversation. That’s how human beings behave.

How do we have a republic that works? People understand and are informed instead of responding to their cognitive biases. They actually commit to spending the time thinking about how not to generate irrational biases. That requires long-term thinking, i.e. I’m going to spend more time pouring through this article, so that my one vote will be a beacon of light and influence others. We’re not built to think that way, even though we live in a world that requires us too. That’s the problem we’re stuck in. We’re not designed for the modern world. We’re still designed to be hunters and gatherers. The only solution I see to our problem is long-term and systemic. Minerva exists to reform education systems all over the world. We believe that reform occurs when the most prestigious institutions reset. Ripple effect goes through the rest of the system. This is a process that will take longer than my lifetime.

Don’t divorce the election outcomes from what government policy has been over the past several decades. Republicans and Democrats have focused the last 50 years of higher education policy on: increasing access, increase completion, and more recently lowering costs. The easiest way to increase college access, completion and make it cheaper – is to lower standards. It’s the easiest way. Anyone can go, anyone can finish and it’ll be cheaper.

If you actually educate your citizenry, and not just drive people towards the same credentials, more of the population will be ready to take the next step. When you apply science of learning, students are more engaged and are ready to make informed choices. Completion rates then increase. Thirdly, as education institutions focus on education, then they can shed all of the outrageous cost levels that universities are currently in the trap of doing: sports, research salaries, campus museum and performing arts centers. The cost burden of creating these country clubs falls to students and tax-payers but what’s the ROI? If higher ed actually focused on education, then we could solve this. College access and completion rates are only symptoms. You have to treat the root cause.

Ben’s One Good Question: How do you enable wise decision-making in a world with unwise people? I don’t know the answer to that. I know how to make less and less wise decisions accelerate—social media, balkanization, knowledge migration – all these trends and realities are pushing us in the wrong direction.

Ben Nelson is Founder, Chairman, and CEO of Minerva, and a visionary with a passion to reinvent higher education. Prior to Minerva, Nelson spent more than 10 years at Snapfish, where he helped build the company from startup to the world’s largest personal publishing service. With over 42 million transactions across 22 countries, nearly five times greater than its closest competitor, Snapfish is among the top e-commerce services in the world. Serving as CEO from 2005 through 2010, Nelson began his tenure at Snapfish by leading the company’s sale to Hewlett Packard for $300 million. Prior to joining Snapfish, Nelson was President and CEO of Community Ventures, a network of locally branded portals for American communities.Nelson’s passion for reforming undergraduate education was first sparked at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, where he received a B.S. in Economics. After creating a blueprint for curricular reform in his first year of school, Nelson went on to become the chair of the Student Committee on Undergraduate Education (SCUE), a pedagogical think tank that is the oldest and only non-elected student government body at the University of Pennsylvania.

12/20/16 12/20/16

One Good Question with Ana Poncé: Is School Enough for Our Kids?

Ana Poncé

“In what ways do our investments in education reveal our beliefs about the next generation’s role in the world?”

Our mission at Camino Nuevo is to prepare students to succeed in life; we want our kids to be compassionate leaders, critical thinkers, and problem solvers and to thrive in a culturally-connected and changing world. But we can’t do this work alone. We need families to be our partners. That’s why, from the beginning, when we opened our first school, one of our priorities was institutionalizing an authentic parent engagement program with a robust menu of support services. We try to get to know families and understand their needs. When a family needs help, our staff connects them with existing support services in our community. Our commitment to families is paying off: Nearly 100 percent of our students graduate and are college bound.

There is a perception that running an effective parent engagement and support services program costs millions of dollars. However, it’s all about the partnerships and how schools integrate the support structures into the day. For example, our schools are able to offer mental health counseling because we partner with a nonprofit mental health provider in the community. We also partner with graduate schools that provide us with interns. Through this partnership model, we can provide services to about 2,000 youth at a fraction of the total cost. We have similar partnerships for our students to have access to the arts, science, mentoring, and afterschool programming. These resources and services are available in many communities.

“Without dedicated funding available, so many schools feel like they have to choose between academic supports and mental health supports. Why not just rely on community agencies to respond to these needs?”

Schools don’t have to provide every direct service. However, it is time that schools embrace collaboration and coordination. As educators, we know when families are struggling because a family member will turn to a teacher or staff member they trust to ask for help. Sometimes we find out [about a need] because a student is acting out due to the stress or trauma imposed by a family’s situation. That’s when we can connect those families with support agencies. We’ve had situations, for example, when a child’s family member has been deported, our staff has connected the student and their family to support services because we know how traumatic this situation can be for everyone. We do the same when we hear of a family who may be at risk of being evicted from their home. Everyone — from school leaders to custodians to office assistants – is trained on the referral process as well as our partnership philosophy. So, if a school’s office manager hears about a family in need, that person knows something can be done about it and knows who can connect the family to the services they need.

“When we grow up in under-served communities and teach/lead in those same communities, we want to provide our students more access than we had. Is that enough? Does today's generation of (insert your demographic here) need something different than we did?”

It gives me pause when I hear people say “Is that enough?” What is enough? What does that mean? Ten years ago I was meeting with a program officer who asked when our work would be “done” in the MacArthur Park community. [laughter]What’s happening here, in terms of the consequences of poverty, is so beyond what we can do as a school. When I think about what is enough, I know that school is not enough. We have a lot more to do and we need a lot more of us to do it. I believe that we need to create culturally reflective environments where our children are seeing themselves, and who they can become, on a daily basis. As People of Color, we come into the education space and some stay for a few years, others stay longer. I don’t think we are doing enough in diversifying the education workforce. I believe we need to do more to prepare people of color for college success so that we can recruit more teachers of color, more leaders of color in education and education adjacent fields.

It’s important that our communities support more of us coming back in some way. It doesn’t mean that you have to come back and live in the same community. You can “come back” in different ways – teach or lead in a school site, work in an education nonprofit. Our kids need to see us come back and inspire them. When they see people who look like them in positions of influence (principals, C-level organizational leaders, key board members) and engaging in different activities (in college fairs, arts programs, ethnic studies classes) – their perception of what is possible for them begins to change.Camino Nuevo students are getting a lot more, in many ways, than I or my peers did back in the day, when high school completion was the exception, not the norm, for kids like me. Is it enough? In some ways it is; more personalized attention, more wrap-around services, more enrichment opportunities, more access to higher education. However, our kids still need more because the system is so broken and set up against their success. Our students need more than a solid educational foundation to make them competitive and to help them navigate the system. Higher education needs to rethink how it supports first-generation college student to completion. We have a solid track record of getting our kids to pursue higher education options and many of them are encountering significant barriers that most often are not academically related. What we are doing at CNCA is great and it is a lot “more,” but I don’t believe that it is enough because of the barriers our kids continue to face every day due to systemic injustice.

Ana’s One Good Question: As a nation, we’re struggling with low college completion rates. We’re seeing a slight increase in graduation rates for Latinos, but a lot of our kids start college and don’t finish. Education leaders and opinion influencers are rethinking the goals of K-12. I’m really concerned that more folks are thinking about creating alternate pathways for Latinos that don’t include a college education. That’s constantly on my mind. I know that my students, my kids will need a college degree to be competitive and to be on the path to leadership and influential positions. I am committed to educating all our kids to be leaders in their communities and in their fields. When we start creating watered-down pathways to a job, we’re not setting our students up to be leaders. What does that say about what we’re really trying to do? I’m personally committed to figuring out how we move 'average students' to attain higher levels of success beyond being at top of class. Jumping to alternative pathways is a quick solution. But let’s think about the consequences and examine what we as educators and what our institutions are not getting right. Let’s not blame the kids just yet. Let’s turn the mirror on ourselves.

Ana Ponce is the Chief Executive Officer of Camino Nuevo Charter Academy (CNCA), a network of high performing charter schools serving more than 3,500 Pre-K through 12th grade students in the greater MacArthur Park neighborhood near Downtown Los Angeles. CNCA schools are recognized as models for serving predominantly Latino English Language Learners and have won various awards and distinctions including the Title 1 Academic Achievement Award, the California Association of Bilingual Education Seal of Excellence, the California Distinguished Schools award, and the Effective Practice Incentive Community (EPIC) award. Born in Mexico, Ana is committed to providing high quality educational options for immigrant families in the neighborhood where she grew up.An alumnus of Teach for America, she spent three years in the classroom before becoming one of the founding teachers and administrators at The Accelerated School, the first independent charter school in South Los Angeles. Under her instructional leadership, The Accelerated School was named “Elementary School of the Year” by Time magazine in 2001. Ms. Ponce earned her undergraduate degree from Middlebury College and a master's degree in Bilingual-Bicultural Education from Teachers College, Columbia University. She earned her administrative Tier 1 credential and second master's degree from UCLA through the Principal's Leadership Institute (PLI) and earned a Doctorate in Educational Leadership from Loyola Marymount University. A veteran of the charter school movement in California, she serves on the Board of the California Charter Schools Association.

12/13/16 12/13/16

One Good Question with Connie K. Chung: How can we Build Systems to Support Powerful Learning?

Connie K. Chung

This post is part of a series of interviews with international educators, policy makers, and leaders titled “One Good Question.” These interviews provide answers to my One Good Question (outlined in About) and uncover new questions about education’s impact on the future.

“In what ways do our investments in education reveal our beliefs about the next generation’s role in the world?”

Different communities are investing in their young people in different kinds of ways. Who is deciding how the investment is made is also an indicator of what we value of the next generation. Young people’s voices and even teachers’ voices can be included on a larger scale. Going forward, given the rapid shifts of what we need to teach our young people, and the current emphasis on personalized learning, those two groups of people are essential to include in deciding that what future investments might be.

A good investment requires a diversified portfolio. We’re going to need a diversified portfolio to figure out what we’re doing for the future. Much of our current investments are in developing cognition. So much of how we have invested our money, energy, time, human resources, attention and discourse, has recently been around testing. I do think testing does help for accountability, transparency, and promoting quality to a certain degree. But it’s not enough. We need more investments in the following:

developing a more holistic vision and purposes for education, that is child-centered
developing systems that are responsive to the needs of the present and the future
strategizing and visioneering to create systems in which parts work together
obtaining consistent, impactful leadership. Average turnover for superintendents in the US is 2.9 years, which isn’t enough to develop sustainable, responsive, or adequate systems for what the students need.
creating adequate space, time, and resources for teachers to learn while they are teaching. The technology and content is changing so rapidly that it requires continual learning, even for teachers.

We need to develop systems to learn from each other. I know lots of great examples of powerful teachers, schools, and networks like United World College (UWC), EL Education, and High Tech High (HTH) doing wonderful work. But I don’t see a lot of investment in ways to systematically identifying, cataloguing, curating, and making transparent and transferable some of these processes for teachers, school leaders, and heads of systems. What might be sustainable models for teachers to continue to learn in their PLCs, schools, district and region?

“What’s keeping us from making that kind of investment in US?”

It would be helpful to enable cultures and conditions where teachers’ voices are heard. I’ve seen this at EL Education schools in the US. Many of their schools have restructured their school time to enable more teachers to collaborate in interdisciplinary teams and let students do projects in longer blocks of time. Some EL Education schools have even restructured the spaces within the schools for the collaboration to occur. So that work is happening, but it’s not happening at a larger scale. In those places like EL Education, they have leadership that is listening to teachers and thinking about how to establish the conditions so that the real learning happens. They’re not so invested in finding the next silver bullet, but in developing whole school cultures that enable continual learning and growth in community to happen.

“In Teaching and Learning for the Twenty-first Century: Educational Goals, Policies, and Curricula from Six Nations, one of your findings is that countries emphasize cognitive domains over interpersonal and intrapersonal domains in their K-12 curriculum. Why does that matter?”

Learning is cognitive, but it’s also social and emotional. For example, we can look at Tony Bryk’s work on trust in schools. The places where student achievement increased were places with a culture of trust. These are environments where people felt able and vulnerable to say “This is what I need to learn and grow,” and felt safe socially and emotionally to do that. And they have communities that supported that vulnerability instead of punishing and hiding it. Carol Dweck’s work is about not just growth mindset for students but could be applied to teachers as well. The process of learning is not just cerebral, but being vulnerable and humble, and takes place in supportive and collaborative school culture that, listens to and learns from, and challenges each other. The more we acknowledge and understand that, and then build our systems to support not just the development of cognition, but cultures, systems, and relationship building, that’s the hard work that needs to be done now. It’s not magic.

I’ve heard too many times about cases where school districts pivoted and adopted a curriculum that’s student centered and adapted to the 21st century but without other support systems and structures to enable that change. But as several educational leaders have noted, “Culture eats policy for breakfast.” Even in China, our colleagues also found that, in their innovative schools districts, their broader district culture embraces innovations and trying new things. We might continue to recognize and cultivate leaders who pay attention to how to build cultures and environments that enable students and teachers to do this kind of work. We need a shift in the kinds of questions that we’re asking, a shift in processes and frameworks, not just in acquiring a new curriculum.In a 19th century factory model, where we you want to get the process right for mass production, quality was defined by consistency. The 21st century model is a sharing economy in which people all have the ability to be creators. The ability to cultivate systems and cultures that enables that to happen, where people feel empowered and equipped, is perhaps just as important as paying attention to individual components like curriculum. I think the cultural piece can’t be emphasized enough – values, attitudes, relationships, and structures. How do we create that kind of environment?

“How do we do this without over-testing social-emotional learning?”

The ultimate assessment is: are we going to survive and thrive as a country? Have we created students through our school systems who are going to live well together and promote their own and others’ well-being? That’s the ultimate high-stakes assessment! We may have people who have tested well in schools but may well be failing this real assessment around whether we can create a sustainable future together.This goes back to the purpose of education, which is important to look at as a guide. We’ve overemphasized assessment to guide us. Assessment is one indicator for achieving our broader purpose, but we’ve disproportionally given power to assessment to drive the entire endeavor of education. It’s a tool, but testing well is just part, not the entire purpose and end goal of education – personal, social, and global well-being are. For example, OECD is driving towards these broader outcomes with their Education 2030 plan; it focuses more on creating positive value and well-being for example. UNESCO is also arguing for education being a critical part of building sustainable futures for everyone on the planet. If that’s the case, let’s figure out how we can build a better world together, using all of our tools, and not solely rely on narrow indicators.

Connie’s One Good Question: Much of what we think is necessary for students to learn is already happening, just only in pockets and for certain students and not for others. That said, I have a lot of questions! How do we rapidly make sure that all students are receiving and engaging in this kind of education? What roles could researchers, policy makers, teachers, parents, and social entrepreneurs all play in this? Are there ways that we can all work together to achieve this for a larger population and wider range of student? How do we collect and connect good people who are already doing this work to make it grow exponentially vs. linearly?

Connie K. Chung is the associate director of the Global Education Innovation Initiative at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, a multi-institution collaborative that works with education institutions in eight countries. She conducts research about civic, global citizenship, and 21st century education. She is especially interested in how to build the capacities of organizations and people to work collaboratively toward providing a relevant, rigorous, meaningful education for all children that not only supports their individual growth but also the growth of their communities. She is the co-editor of the book, Teaching and Learning for the Twenty-First Century: Educational Goals, Policies, and Curricula from Six Nations (2016), a co-author of the curriculum resource, Empowering Global Citizens: A World Course (2016), and a contributor to a book about US education improvement efforts, A Match on Dry Grass: Community Organizing as a Catalyst for School Reform (2011). A former high school English literature teacher, she was nominated by her students for various teaching awards. Connie received her BA, EdM, and EdD from Harvard University and her dissertation analyzed the individual and organizational factors that facilitated people from diverse ethnic, religious, and socio-economic class backgrounds to work together to build a better community.

12/6/16 12/6/16

One Good Question with Susan Patrick: How can we Build Trust in Our Education System?

This is the second interview with Susan Patrick for the series “One Good Question.” These interviews provide answers to my One Good Question and uncover new questions about education’s impact on the future.

“In what ways do our investments in education reveal our beliefs about the next generation’s role in the world?”

There’s a big difference in how you would fund the education system if you were building for the longer term – you would invest in building capacity and trust. We need to take a very honest look at our investments. If people and relationships matter, we need to be building our own sense of inquiry. That’s not at odds with innovation investments. We should be about innovation with equity. That way, we can change our own perspectives while we build new solutions.The debate about top-down reform vs. bottom-up innovation is tied to the same trust issues. In Finland, they made an effort to go towards a trust based model and it meant investing in educator capacity so that the systems trust educators to make the best decisions in real-time. If we don’t start investing in trust, we can’t get anywhere.

“When US educators visit other countries, we tend to look for silver bullet programs from the highest-performing countries. What are we missing in that search?”

During my Eisenhower Fellowship, I was able to meet with teams from OECD and UNESCO that gave me great perspective. UNESCO has just published an Education 2030 outlook presenting their global education development agenda that looks at the whole child. Their goals are broad enough to include developing nations who aren’t yet educating 100% of their population. When we read through the goals and indicators, the US could learn a lot from having our current narrow focus on academics. Our current education structure is not going to lead us to provide a better society. Are we even intending to build a better society for the future? We’re not asking the big questions. We’re asking if students can read and do math on grade level in grades 3-8. In Canada, they ask if a student has yet met or exceeded expectations. If not, what are we doing to get them there? You don’t just keep moving and allow our kids to have gaps.The UNESCO report specifies measures about access to quality education. Is there gender equality? Is there equity? They define equity as:

Equity in education is the means to achieving equality. It intends to provide the best opportunities for all students to achieve their full potential and act to address instances of disadvantage which restrict educational achievement. It involves special treatment/action taken to reverse the historical and social disadvantages that prevent learners from accessing and benefiting from education on equal grounds. Equity measures are not fair per se but are implemented to ensure fairness and equality of outcome. (UNESCO 2015)

Across the global landscape of education systems, there is a diversity of governance from top-down to bottom-up regarding system control, school autonomy and self-regulation and how this impacts processes and policies for quality assurance, evaluation and assessments. It is important to realize the top-down and bottom-up dynamics are often a function of levels of trust combined with transparency for data and doing what is best for all kids. In the US, let’s face it, our policy conversations around equity are driven by a historical trend of a massive achievement gap. Said another way, there is a huge lack of trust from the federal government toward states, from states to districts and even down to schools and classrooms. We ask, “How do we trust that we’re advancing equity in our schools?”

However, when you start to think about what we need to do to advance a world-class education for all students and broaden the definition of student success – you hit a wall in coherent policy that would align to better practices. There’s so much mistrust in the system given our history of providing inequalities across the education system, it is inequitable. In recognizing that our education system isn’t based on trust, therefore, perhaps we need to focus on what our ultimate goals and values for our education systems should be and then backward engineer how we get there, how we hold all parties accountable and how we could actually build trust in a future state. We need to consider future-focused approaches that work to build trust, transparency, greater accountability and build capacity for continuous improvement. We do need to assure comparability in testing to tell us whether we have been providing an equitable education. It’s just right now, this lack of trust is creating a false dichotomy of limited approaches to a future-focused education system. We’re defaulting that the only test that we trust is criterion-referenced standardized tests.We need to take a deep look at the implications that systems of assessments mean for the rest of the system. It seems that we’re only willing to trust education outcomes based on a standardized test, that we commit to locking students into age-based cohorts, and that we focus primarily on the delivery of content. What would be the long-term implications for creating better transparency, more frequent inquiry approaches on what is working best for both adults and children? Are there different ways to evaluate student work and determine whether students are building knowledge, broader skills and competencies they need for future success? Can we consider a range of future goals and backward map alternative approaches? All assessments don’t have to be norm-referenced. This is a familiar conversation with education experts globally. I’m afraid we’re not having that conversation in the US.

That’s what’s so interesting to me about iNACOL’s work. It’s global and focuses on future states for educators and practitioners designing new models using the research on how students learn best. We listen to practitioners working on next generation designs and then ask, is our policy aligned with actually doing what’s best for kids? What if you could set a vision for a profile of high school graduates that would ensure success? What goals would you want for redefining what students need to know and be able to do? And, how would you then approach aligning the systems of policy and practice with what’s right for kids? The new federal Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) law gives states the flexibility to come up with new definitions of students’ success. States can now use multiple measures — and still report data transparently. This is a really important time to engage in deep conversations between states and communities, families, local leaders and educators around what would we do for redefining success — but I’m not seeing yet any states that are having enough foundational conversations on the ultimate goals and vision of education WITH COMMUNITIES. I’m hearing educational leaders say, “All we know how to do is NCLB” . . . and wonder which other indicators a future accountability system might require. They’re uncomfortable thinking about alternatives. It’s a sort of “Stockholm Syndrome” of educational policy limited by the past. ESSA is an opportunity to engage in real dialogue with the communities we serve. Communities have been locked out of the process for years now. Community outreach has become a box that people check, but it’s an ongoing dialogue and should be about building understanding and trust. This is a really rare opportunity in the United States to engage in a broader conversation around student success with local school boards and communities. This would encourage innovation and provide a clear platform driven by communities on the clear goals and outcomes we hope to achieve in our education system for equity and excellence.

Susan’s One Good Question: Who asks the question is as pertinent as which questions they ask. Earlier, I mentioned that investment in the long-term capacity building of our education system would require building our own sense of inquiry. In other more top-down nationalistic approaches to education in countries outside the US, leaders do control the system so they are having strong “values-based” conversations about education in the context of societal goals, too. Because we are a strong federalist approach to education – this isn’t possible or even desired at a national level . . . the US Department of Education doesn’t have a federal role in that way, and quite frankly, we can’t have a national or even state-level values-based conversation in the same way. In a federalist approach, we have 13,600 school boards with local control. The unit of change in this country is the local school district (LEA means local education authority). School leaders, superintendents, CMO leaders -- they actually can drive the values conversation about what our educational goals, vision and values are and how we measure success transparently. We’ve stopped talking about values in the name of objectives related to literacy and numeracy. I believe literacy and numeracy are extremely important, but let’s not forget that foundation for reading and arithmetic (with all students having proficiency) is not enough in the modern world. For students to be successful it is a “yes, and . . . “ with literacy and numeracy being important but not enough. I don’t know how schools can address the extreme inequities in our education without having a values conversation and a re-framing of conversations around re-defining student success with broader definitions of student success.I think that our local communities should start asking themselves these two questions:

When a student graduates what should they know and be able to do?
What is our definition of student success?

Susan Patrick is the President and Chief Executive Officer of the International Association for K-12 Online Learning (iNACOL). iNACOL is a nonprofit providing policy advocacy, publishing research, developing quality standards, and driving the transformation to personalized, competency-based, blended and online learning forward.She is the former Director of the Office of Educational Technology at the U.S. Department of Education and wrote the National Educational Technology Plan in 2005 for Congress. She served as legislative liaison for Governor Hull in Arizona, ran a distance learning campus as a Site Director for Old Dominion University’s TELETECHNET program, and served as legislative staff on Capitol Hill. Patrick was awarded an Eisenhower Fellowship in 2016. In 2014, she was named a Pahara–Aspen Education Fellow. In 2011, she was named to the International Advisory Board for the European Union program for lifelong learning. Patrick holds a master’s degree from the University of Southern California and a bachelor’s degree from Colorado College.

11/29/16 11/29/16

One Good Question with Susan Patrick: What Students (and Schools) can do if we Stop Ranking Them.

This is the first of two interviews with Susan Patrick for the series “One Good Question.” These interviews provide answers to my One Good Question and uncover new questions about education’s impact on the future.

“In what ways do our investments in education reveal our beliefs about the next generation’s role in the world?”

From a student-centered perspective, what are the investments being made in the learning environments? In a rapidly changing world, we need to examine the foundations of our education both for the purpose of education and its results. Are we preparing every student for the world they are entering, or are we investing in a factory model of education designed as an assembly line? The old model of education is under question and is being challenged by educators around the world with questions of appropriateness and whether it is fit for the purpose of preparing all students for success in today’s world. The investments made in today’s education system are often reinforcing the basic traditional structures to grade and sort students, with limited exposure to one class at a time, one subject at a time, one textbook at a time, with one teacher at a time — with inevitable outcomes of ranking students. The premise of our society’s investments in an education system that is based on sorting kids remains for the most part unchallenged – rather than examining how funding could follow the student toward ensuring equity and supports to ensure every child reaches mastery of the same high standards and develops competencies for future success. The urgency of school funding debates need to consider what designs are better suited to ensure each and every student has access to the best educational opportunities, and making a case for investments in a transformed system, rather than tinkering with a system that sorts and ranks kids – designed for a world that no longer exists.

We have 13,515 school districts in the US making investments in education approaches and environments. The traditional system is based on Carnegie units and seat time, providing varying levels of learning on an A-F grading system, and whether the students have gaps or not, the clock marches on. Are these investments that we’ve been making for past 10-20 years designed to innovate and ensure student success? Are we making investments for each student to be able to have access to innovative models for equity? The investments in modernized education includes the learning spaces, but more importantly, it’s the pedagogical experience for what’s happening in learning.

We have been historically funding a system based on minimal exposure to subjects, with one way of approaching learning and it is easy to manage through a bell schedule and calendar dictating how much learning might happen. The inverse would be to realize, in a given hour of time, there might be variable amounts of learning – thus, we need to design for supporting the maximum learning in each hour – not the minimal. How do we design for how kids learn best? We need to know their readiness level, existing competencies, and how to meet them where they are. If we ask about how investments reveal what we believe about education, investing in a system that ranks and sorts kids means that we are okay with this approach. I’d argue that we should invest on identifying what every student needs and ensuring the investment reflects an approach that maximizes every student’s potential and future success. Right now, we’re not investing on understanding where every student is when they enter school. What is their academic readiness level? What are their social, emotional, needs? How do we address the whole child and their learning experiences? Today, we’re having an entire conversation in the United States about investing in summative testing as an autopsy at the end of the year instead of addressing the very needs of the students from day one.

We talk about college and career readiness as part of an important goal in our K-12 education system. Our system is designed to rank and sort kids (GPA and a class rank) to determine their college access. Is that not telling us that the system is built on an institutional fixed mindset? If we had an institutional growth mindset, we would hold the bar high for all students to learn to reach the same high outcomes. What does it take to get all students to the 4.0 GPA? This end goal would be a worthy investment for our future and our society’s future.

“How do we innovate our system for all students to be successful?”

During my Eisenhower Fellowship in New Zealand, when I walked into every school, I could see that they were focused on meeting students where they are. When I looked around the classroom, I could see the articulation of the curriculum frameworks on the importance of 21st century skills, a broader definition of student success, visibility of the language of learning about rhetoric, context, thinking critically and solving complex problems. The wall posters actually had reminders to teachers: creativity and entrepreneurial thinking, communicating and collaborating, making sense through the use of knowledge, research and synthesis, understanding the information and opportunities to identify new ways of doing things. Are we asking bigger questions on what we want our students to know and be able to do? The language of learning in modern classrooms with redesigned curriculum asks the “big questions” about core concepts of learning and it is all around you—whether in primary school or in secondary school – and the language of learning is targeted at the appropriate level. Students from a young age are learning from a metacognitive perspective: What are the ways I am thinking about this? Am I developing skills for a changing world? How is this relevant to how I might participate and contribute to a fair and just society? They ask themselves: Am I analyzing? Am I learning how to function and self-manage? Am I learning new ways of working, new ways of thinking and skills that I will need to make sense of the world?

In some New Zealand schools, they have multi-grade classrooms and the students have clearly identified learning objectives posted across multiple levels. The teachers are constantly working with every student to identify their learning goals, assess their performance on evidence of their mastery, and co-design the next steps as students move on to the next learning objective once they’ve demonstrated that mastery to the level of proficiency. Each student can see what they need extra help in and can go to other students to get help. Every school and classroom was referring back to questions about how teachers can best meet students’ needs, how to personalize instruction, how they better identify students needs, which research-based practices are most effective, and how they can improve what’s working and not working. It was a culture of inquiry in a personalized learning environment.

David Hood, former head of NZQA, has described the traditional model of K-12 as the paradigm of one: One teacher, teaching one subject, to one class, at one time, for one hour. In New Zealand in 2007, they created a different curriculum that asked what each student needed to learn and do with a broader definition of student success. It gives a lot of flexibility to teachers and students in how they reach those goals and hold all students to the same high standards. The five key competencies are: Thinking; Using language, symbols, and texts; Managing self; Relating to others; Participating and contributing. Then Secretary for Education Sewell wrote, “The New Zealand Curriculum is a clear statement of what we deem important in education. It takes as its starting point a vision of our young people as lifelong learners who are confident and creative, connected, and actively involved. It includes a clear set of principles on which to base curriculum decision making. It sets out values that are to be encouraged, modeled, and explored. It defines five key competencies that are critical to sustained learning and effective participation in society and that underline the emphasis on lifelong learning.”We know through learning sciences that all students can learn, all students can develop a growth mindset. We actually can create learning environments that will dramatically improve outcomes and do so in a way that empowers students’ own passions and interests. The education system in New Zealand includes many schools that have been designed around personalized learning and are working intently on closing the achievement gap and raising the bar for all students. The goal is that all students are not only meeting literacy and numeracy skills, but ultimately, when they graduate, they’ve built a whole set of knowledge, skills, competencies, and dispositions that will lead to them being contributive in society and help contribute to the free and open society. New Zealanders’ cultural values are deeply reflected in their education work. Maybe that’s easier to do when each school is autonomous and school can set their values clearly.

“New Zealand schools have more local control than the States, don’t they?”

Absolutely! Some education systems are top down, others are bottom up in terms of their governance and control. In New Zealand, each school is autonomous and self-managed with their own principal and each has its own elected board of trustees from the community. They set values, goals and set the accountability framework for results and metrics. How community values tie into local control is interesting. New Zealand is really a case study in empowerment of local schools and local families setting their own accountability goals. The opening presentation, of the first school that I visited, was about their annual goal to reach 1.5 years of growth for each student. That goal was set by the community. Everyone was on the same page, clear and transparent about that target and what they needed to do. All families have choices for the school they attend and they choose to go the school. It’s a nice balance in New Zealand where the top-down is having the Ministry of Education work across all schools to design a curriculum framework that will ensure a broad definition of student success and ensuring the bar is the same high bar for all students. The top down approach is simply examining the research on a world-class education to set that bar high to make sure the curriculum is right, but the empowerment is bottom-up — creating capacity for educators and practitioners to design learning activities around the research on how students learn best.I also observed how local control impacts their governance. In the US, our unit of local elections is with the local district’s school board. Anyone can run and anyone with political aspirations can be elected to the local school board (if they win the vote) as part of further political aspirations. In New Zealand, you’re only eligible to run for Board of Trustees of a school if you’re nominated by a teacher or parent in that school community. It is an interesting approach to building community engagement and capacity.

“In the discourse about preparing youth for jobs that don't yet exist, educators fall into two camps: skills-focused (STEM, design thinking, makers, etc.) and people-focused (critical thinking, global sensitivity, socio-emotional learning). To what extent are we creating a false dichotomy?”

I think it’s a false dichotomy. Learning is an incredibly humanistic pursuit. We’re talking about helping each and every child work to their full potential which is tied to relationships, understanding student interest, student goals and how to to achieve it.In the world that we live in today, you can access a lot of content—it’s all available to you. But what’s more important is having a baseline knowledge on how content fits together and how you can approach critical thinking, creativity, problem-solving and questioning the ideas and perspectives presented to you. That’s really important in terms of being relational and contextual in the idea of people focused – how do we challenge or explore ideas effectively? Cultural responsiveness, global sensitivity, and social-emotional learning (SEL) are becoming more important than ever. Having those deep people-focused skills doesn’t mean that you can’t also be approaching STEM or creative design or “makers” together.

Back to New Zealand, I visited schools with more interdisciplinary approaches to learning. Students are able to identify big conceptual projects, design learning experiences that respond to community or students’ needs, and then map which standards and subjects they’ll be addressing in these projects.For example, in one school, I walked over to the closest student, a 15-year-old boy, and asked him about his project. He said he was studying Artificial Intelligence (AI) and he explained his full plan to me: he would first conduct a literature review on how AI has evolved over the past 30 years; then, we wanted to explore what trends were likely to occur in the next five years in AI; and, finally he wanted to finish the project with an analysis of the societal and ethical implications of AI in the future. He explained how he would be able to be evaluated across many of the key competencies and develop mastery of standards — he shared that he is mapping his project to the attainment of science standards, some math standards, some English/text/communication standards, and social studies standards for the ethical implications. The variety of ways he was able to build an understanding of the world, but at the same time earn attainment of competencies and credits for his qualifications toward a degree. That’s a great example of how an education system can be both skills-focused and people-focused with interdisciplinary approaches using multiple perspectives contributing to deeper learning – that is highly personalized for each student.

Even in their elementary schools, I witnessed New Zealand’s teachers asking students to take on big questions and build the capacity for learning in their own classrooms. This means really giving students agency and empowerment with the language around learning through analysis, perspective, and ethics. It was really amazing how young students were very focused on knowledge and the range of skills that they were developing. As David Hood noted, “Literacy and numeracy do include the ability to use language, symbols and texts; but these are only tools – it is the ability to use these interactively, in a connected way in context, that the OECD identifies as most important, as it does in being able to sue both knowledge and information, and technology, in interactive ways.” Teachers were trying to not only give students the language, tools, and strategies to address academic issues, but the strategies that would help them solve more complex problems and ultimately be successful in college, career, societies and their communities.

Susan’s One Good Question: I’m a positive person with a positive outlook, but the future of our country has never been more at stake. We have some hard decisions to make right now. We have successfully under-educated our population in such a significant way that we really need to address this gap. We’re investing a lot of dollars in education but is it based on the research for how students learn best? Are we investing toward a more open and just democratic society in a global context where issues will become more messy, more challenging than ever? Will we be investing in the capabilities of thinking critically, creatively and problem-solving with the deep cultural responsiveness we will need to navigate an increasingly changing world?

11/22/16 11/22/16

This I Believe — Change is Possible Now.

Anu Passi-Rauste, (Finland '14), George de Lama (president of Eisenhower Fellowships), Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka (executive director of UN Women), and me! Photo credit: Elias Williams

When invited to talk about the importance of a multilingual America, I’m the last person that anyone expects to see walk up to the podium. As a Black American with unaccented English, people are surprised to learn that I grew up in a language-minority community in the US. My family is frequently stopped and asked what language we’re speaking and what country we’re from. By now, my children (11 and 7) are accustomed to these questions and are starting to understand the nuance of our Louisiana history.

My grandparents’ generation spoke Creole French as their home language and learned English in schools. English quickly became synonymous with education. Even after university study, my grandmother still regularly slipped into Creole for her phone conversations, Friday night card games and Sunday morning coffee. I felt like she was happier in Creole than in English. As a child, I wanted to be in that language with her and decided that I would be bilingual and I would raise my children in our language as well. I didn’t know that embracing my family’s language would put me on a path to championing diverse, integrated environments later in my life.

Soon after giving birth to my daughter, I began to realize that just raising my children to embrace a vision of integrated, multilingual America wasn’t enough to shift how the world would treat them. How can bilingual, bicultural kids grow up and not feel like outsiders in our country? I became clearer that they would need stronger community models than the walls of our home and that our public schools have the biggest opportunity to promote an integrated future. A few years after my daughter was born, I founded a network of intentionally-diverse, public, language immersion schools. When we opened the French, Spanish, and Chinese schools, I narrated a long-term future vision for how our integrated schools would eventually unite the region. I knew that, as our kids from all backgrounds grew up together, they would have a more nuanced, inclusive view of the world into adulthood. What I didn’t expect was that our work would make profound changes for the adults in our community at the same time.

One day, Ms. Elizabeth, a mom from a lower-income Black community, called me about a project. Her video production class had an assignment on immigration. She admitted that, before our schools had opened, she would have focused her project on how immigrants make life worse for working class Americans. After one year of witnessing her daughter make friends across race, language, and neighborhood lines, she was inspired to film a positive perspective on the value of immigration. During that one call, Ms. Elizabeth reminded me that, with the right opportunities, change is possible for us now. We don’t need to wait for the next generation to get integrated communities right.

This is What I Truly Believe — Only when diverse people have opportunities to learn, live, and love together, will we fully embrace our multilingual, multicultural America.

This essay is excerpted from Building Bridges One Leader At a Time: Personal Essays by the Women and Men of Eisenhower Fellowships. I'm thankful for the EF community for encouraging us to think about our own deeply held beliefs.Rhonda Broussard, USA ’14Rhonda Broussard has a passion for education and has been a leader in diversity and international education initiatives. She helps schools transform their practices and align adult culture with key beliefs for teaching and learning. Prior to launching The Ochosi Group, she founded a network of language immersion, International Baccalaureate schools serving an intentionally diverse student population. Rhonda explores her own wonderings about education reform at her blog One Good Question.

11/8/16 11/8/16

One Good Question with Anna Hall: Can You Break Up with Your Best Ideas?

Anna Hall

This post is part of a series of interviews with international educators, policy makers, and leaders titled “One Good Question.” These interviews provide answers to my One Good Question (outlined in About) and uncover new questions about education’s impact on the future.

“In what ways do our investments in education reveal our beliefs about the next generation’s role in the world?”

Our field collectively is investing in new school development and in the engines that can generate new designs for school. Those two things sometimes happen simultaneously, and sometimes run on parallel tracks. In the new school development work, there are districts and cities around the country that have invested very heavily in opening new schools to change the paradigm for what high schools could be — NY, DC, and NOLA come to mind. Deeply embedded in that investment is a commitment to equity and choice - as a system we are committed to creating great opportunities for young people and ensuring that they and their families have a range of choices for where they want to go. That’s urgent, exciting work.But in addition to offering more great high schools, we know that we also need to make sure that we have evolved high schools – with designs that advance as quickly as the world we live in. It’s important to acknowledge that creating a truly world class system of 21st century-ready schools will require a multitude of design solutions – or models. It’s inspiring to be able to work simultaneously in new school design efforts that focus on that challenge.

“Why does equity matter in school design?”

Learning is part of becoming a fully formed, socially- and culturally-engaged human. We all have a right to do it, and our society has a responsibility to create those learning opportunities. All kids should have a chance to go to a great school, designed to support them and give them opportunities to shine. I came to teaching, in fact, because in my 20s I worked for a child welfare agency whose stated chief academic goal for the young people in its care was that they achieve their GED. I was deeply disturbed by the inequity and unfairness of that premise – by the idea that our system would organize around such low expectations for young people who had already navigated so much trauma and struggle in their lives. I knew kids could do more, given the right opportunity and support. I joined the NYC Teaching Fellows, and have been an educator and a school designer ever since, because I believe we can and must create better systems, better schools, better choices and supports for young people and their families.

“When working with educators on school redesign, how do you narrate the new design process for them?”

It depends. If you’re working with a team attempting to open a new school but not a new model, that’s an easier soup to dive into because things seem known. You’re taking the core of someone else’s practice and building a design around it. We recently published a collection of some of the questions and experiences from the design process that our partners have found most relevant and helpful – but to sum up here, we’ve found that the real challenge for completely new model design is actually reframing the task at hand – understanding that you are trying to create a custom-built school that maps to and builds upon your specific students’ ambitions, dreams, strengths, and needs, not just curating a set of great ideas that could be engaging to any group of kids. And we recognize that “design” is work that school leaders and their teams may engage as part of the process of creating a new concept for a school – but that it continues in perpetuity after the school opens, as part of a robust iteration cycle.

“Stop for a second. Look at the young people in your schools. Consider what path those young people need to get to where they want to go. Then build.”

Step 1: Breaking up If you accept the premise that schools should be built uniquely to serve the students in them, then new school model design requires designers to begin the work without a preconception of what their school will be. In this context, designers don’t have to be married to a certain schedule, or course sequence, or bells, lunch, etc. Instead, we encourage them to launch their design work by developing a deep understanding of the students and families their school will serve, and build from there. This “frame-breaking” work can be challenging, but it can also be really creative and fun. It lets us think about how to organize school around what our kids need.
Step 2: Wow! We have inspired the most beautiful design! Often, design teams come up with inspiring, innovative design concepts that look great on paper. But the act of translating the design into systems that work for faculty and all of the families and young people is often when folks hit the second wall. Again, we encourage design teams to look at their designs through the lens of student needs and assets, and prioritize based on local context and realities.
Step 3: Oh Crap! This is often how teams react when they have to decide how to actually bring their designs to life. They have to answer many questions: In which order will we create and roll out each design element? Which people do we try to hire and recruit who will be willing to do this? What is the enrollment pattern around our school and its ecosystem? How do we both navigate logistics and protect our model? It’s an intellectual puzzle—arranging the pieces and putting everything in place. It can be a messy exercise.
Step 4: Euphoria When schools open for the first time, and through the first few weeks, team often feel like they’re walking on air: “We made a thing! A real thing! People are here! Children are here! They’re doing things that look like school. It’s amazing!!!!!” It is really a lovely moment, while it lasts.
Step 5: Breaking up (again) Shortly thereafter, things start to break or not work. The ideas that were awesome might not fit because a team couldn’t predict what their students would need or want or respond well to, or what might not work in practice. We help our partners navigate that first wave of struggle: my original ideas were not perfect, so what’s the path forward? How do you break up with the parts of your idea that just don’t fit your current reality? How do you deal with that emotionally? Then, practically speaking, because you have young people in the space and adults who are trying to do their job well— how do you make shifts strategically, without causing too much disruption and stress? Consistency is important - how do you maintain a baseline of quality for your kids that you can sustain, whatever your changes?

“I love that students are your starting and ending point! How much do students participate in this process?”

Our position is that we want students to participate fully and as much as possible in the process. When we started this work, our first school partners already knew which communities their new schools would serve and where their feeder schools were. This was a great opportunity, which meant teams wouldn’t have to design in abstract – they could solve for specific challenges. So as we developed our process, we saw that student knowledge as an asset and designed a process that capitalizes on that information.

Given that, as I mentioned before, we believe that every school design team needs to start with a deep immersion in the process of understanding the community and families and students that the new school will serve. Instead of starting with an academic model, we encourage designers to spend time talking to families and kids. What are their ambitions, dreams, hopes, skills & knowledge? What do they hope the school will be? We pair that process with qualitative and quantitative data exploration. Brainstorming sessions with families and kids from the feeder schools can also be valuable. Some schools go beyond and have students as full members of the design team and/or the launch team. That involvement varies depending on each school’s constraints.

Anna’s One Good Question: The thing I’m always trying to figure out when looking at new school design is: Does this new design create opportunities for kids or does this design prove/support an idea?We’ve got to continuously ask this of ourselves when designing schools. And we’ve got to be careful not to be too rigid in school design. It’s pretty straightforward to read a book about a strong school model, or to visit and observe one – and then to distill the model’s concept or “rules”, and commit to executing the idea with precision and perfection. But that approach can be limiting. We need to always be willing to analyze which parts of any given school model will work for our kids, which don’t, and which we need to change.

Anna Hall is Senior Director of Springpoint: Partners in School Design. Anna is a seasoned educator with experience developing and leading a range of institutional, state, and national initiatives. As a founding teacher of a highly successful small New York City public high school, she collaborated to design and build an innovative and rigorous secondary program for students in the South Bronx – and then, as principal, she led the school’s expansion and redesigned its academic programs. Prior to teaching, Anna spent nearly a decade working as a writer, researcher, and project manager in a range of policy, politics, and technology firms.Anna holds a B.A. from the South Carolina Honors College at the University of South Carolina, and an M.S. in teaching from Fordham University. She is a graduate of both the New York City Teaching Fellows Program and the New York City Leadership Academy.Download a copy of Springpoint’s School Design Guide here.

10/11/16 10/11/16

One Good Question with Nicole Young: Can Students and Teachers Impact Ed Policy?

“In what ways do our investments in education reveal our beliefs about the next generation’s role in the world?”

Particularly for children of color and low income students, we are not creating students who can invent a new system, but students who can perform well in the current system. And we know that the current system is flawed. We need to be creating youth who can create a new system, and disrupt this one.Beyond the structural school redesign needs, I actually question how we include students’ voice in the creation of that new system. What would the outcome be if we had student voices at the table and not elective to the conversation but essential to the conversation ? What if we didn’t know anything about how the policies were made and we could just invent the systems that our kids need?

“How does that level of engagement start?”

It starts on individual schools and campuses. We’re thinking about it more on our campus, but we’re not great at it yet. We have an advanced seminar this year and the students brainstormed what they want to do to complete their capstone assignment. Instructors took their ideas and synthesize them into 8 great options that students could choose from. We have to think about how to make those not moments of isolation, but the norm.

Other questions that we’re asking ourselves: How do we have student/alumni voice on our Board? How do we have students direct change? As our students are starting to organize, we wonder if their role is to create a glorified social club or to help us drive changes on campus. These strategies are not just for my 11th and 12th graders. Elementary students have voice that can influence their learning space. So many adults are thinking about hallway transitions and how to avoid 20 kindergarteners piled up on each other every time they leave the room. Could kindergartners think through that ? I think so! And as a result, their investment in that solution could work. It starts at the school level and then upwards to state policy.

“What keeps us from shifting student voice from being a “nice to have” to an essential element?”

Socialization. We were raised that the younger you are, the less important your voice is. The same way that you have to break down biases in other realms, we have to put as much emphasis around the limitations of age. It’s important to recognize the science that, yes, youth brains are not developed in the same way as adults, but different doesn’t mean deficient.

“Are we talking about youth-led change or youth-informed change?”

In practice we start with youth-informed and then move towards youth-led. I don’t know that we could get to a state or federal policy that was youth-led. But I think if you had a really progressive group of people, on a campus or in a district—you could get true youth leadership there. Start by giving students real problems to solve, asking for their ideas/needs and then draft a few models that might respond. Bring your drafts back to the youth council to test it with them.

“What do education policy makers need to know about school leadership?”

We’ve had backlash around sweeping federal education policies, but I think it’s less about the content and more about the idea generation process. With No Child Left Behind (NCLB), teachers didn’t feel that it was informed by real-life experiences in the classroom. I wonder if educators would have felt differently about NCLB if the process included youth and current teacher practitioners? Even a little bit of distance from teaching and school administration means that you’ve lost some memory of that experience.

Policy makers occasionally visit schools and feel like that glimpse is enough to inform their decisions. Everyone knows that when the Feds come to visit your classroom, it is going to be the best day. Even students know it! I would encourage policy makers to spend more time on listening tours and hosting idea generation sessions with teachers and administration.Teachers and school leaders have to feel like their ideas can move from idea generation to real policy. Great ideas about what works on the ground may not translate directly to a policy. The gap is that policy makers think that, just because a teacher isn’t talking policy, they don’t have anything to contribute. At the same time, teachers feel like since they don’t speak the policy language, they are disempowered to offer their ideas.

“It’s almost like some parent-teacher dynamics.”

Yes! Parents know their children, but don’t have the language around pedagogy to advocate for specific changes. Practitioners need more thinking about how to translate their ideas into policy.

Nicole’s One Good Question: If you ask parents what success looks like for their kids, they may say “a happy, healthy life where they are secure.” Many may place happiness at the center. When those same parents talk about other people’s children, the success gets murkier. If we’re focused on all children, then we should be able to back map their needs. What role does education play in realizing the parent’s dream of success and happiness for every child?

Nicole Young is Executive Director of Bard Early College, New Orleans (BECNO). Young graduated from the University of South Carolina in 2007 and immediately began work on the Obama Presidential Campaign. After 2008, she lived in Washington, DC for four years working at the U.S. Department of Education and the White House Office of Presidential Personnel. Before coming to BECNO, Young served as the Associate Director for Social Justice at the College Board where she worked to evaluate, support, and expand the College Board’s work for students of color. Young received her Master’s Degree in Education Policy at The University of Pennsylvania.

9/27/16 9/27/16

One Good Question with Denese Shervington: How do We Re-Engage the Black Middle Class in Public Education?

Denese Shervington

In what ways do our investments in education reveal our beliefs about the next generation’s role in the world?

I think the investment is in trying to find a formula that can get more kids children in line so that they won’t be a nuisance anymore. We’re not creating learners and thinkers. We’re creating an underclass of Black children who can step in line and can continue to serve the service industry in New Orleans. It’s really hard as a middle class Black person here, because then you have to question your own stuff. Enough of us in the Black middle class have gotten out of public education, and now we’re oppressing those youth and families who still rely on public education. When I go into the schools and see the kids, I hurt.

I’m too old to not speak the truth.Schools here now are such a disappointment. My kids went to public schools in New Orleans. At that time, in the 80s,90s, early 2000s, if you were poor but you had encouragement around education in the home or your community, you could still go to the public schools and be ok. You can’t do that anymore. Our schools are actually traumatizing the children. I was in an elementary school two weeks ago observing kindergarten and 1st graders. They were nervous. I can’t imagine how you learn when you are so nervous. A few kids, based on their personality style, those who do well under pressure, will do well, but that’s not most children. They had to stand in a line and do these rote things like « track the teachers with your eyes.” The schools do these standard things that they think creates discipline, but it’s not personalized. It feels like you’re in a military school, or, at worse, in a prison.

The Black middle class, we have abandoned our children. I don’t know any Black middle class parents who are sending our kids to these schools, they’re sending their kids to the private schools. That means we don’t care about what’s going on with those who are less able to advocate for themselves. I don’t think that White middle class New Orleanians would tolerate that kind of treatment to their children either. It bothers me when we’re talking about how great the charter schools are here when this basic level of humanity does not exist.

Schools are beginning to implement trauma-informed care models to support students with chronic negative behaviors. Is this work best for individual cases or can entire school communities benefit from trauma-informed pedagogies?

There are two things that all schools need to consider when implementing mental health supports: overall school climate and accurate diagnoses of root causes.If you want to deal with mental health, you can change 80% now by addressing the school climate. Don’t feel sorry for poor black kids. Love them and have really high expectations for them. I’m borrowing from Andre Perry who says that you don’t have to punish our kids into learning. The no excuses school models have a disrespect and disregard of our children’s humanity. Start with changing those practices.

Eighty percent of our kids are being misdiagnosed in special education. Most progressive school communities provide behavioral health, but the root causes are not behavioral, they’re emotional. The behaviors are the end products of things happening inside. These kids are traumatized. When a kid is displaying a lot of behavioral dysfunction, it’s usually because there’s something happening that they don’t have any control over and they can’t communicate it. They don’t have the language sophistication to talk about their feelings, so they show you. Until a student is properly diagnosed, s/he won’t get the proper treatment. This goes back to the first condition: you have to care about the student and love him/her as an individual to wonder why he’s misbehaving.

Schools with strong student support teams will, at the very least, ask about motivations for student behaviors before they start a functional behavioral assessment. The majority of school-based practitioners have never heard of #Sadnotbad. How do we get practitioners to understand this?

It’s like we’re trying to do “fast mental health.” You really have to spend time building relationships for the children to trust you and feel safe. If you start with the attitude that Black children are not inherently bad, or inferior, then it makes you want to do some stuff differently. A high-level of love and caring means that you don’t stop at the first question. You are driven to ask why and keep asking why until you really get to the source. That heart is not unique to Black educators. At Jean Gordon School, my children had a White principal who deeply believed that all children deserved to be loved, and cared for and educated.We also need to pay attention to our adolescents, male and female, who are gender non-conforming. We’re doing a Twitter chat focused on LGBT teens for suicide prevention month. If the kid is in a school where there is at least one adult with whom they can connect, it makes a difference. We need a safe space for the kids to interrogate what’s going on in their lives. One of our health educators tells the story of a kid, who was having a lot of challenges at school, asking “Can people be gay? Can boys be gay? Can I be gay?” That could be a benefit of the TFA corps. They are more likely to create safe space for kids to be different and may themselves be gender non-conforming. Most traditional and/or older Black educators still struggle with this.Whenever I talk about trauma in schools in NOLA, it’s not just due to Katrina or community divides. For many of these kids it’s about the intrafamilial violence that they’re experiencing around identity. Every community can benefit from these practices.

Denese’s One Good Question: For me, I think the progress is going to have to start with us. What do I contribute to the process of healing and becoming whole for us in the Black community? This new integration has not served us : so, how do we get back to a collective consciousness and feel responsible for all of our children? Mine have succeeded, yours will succeed. But until every child has the capacity, your children could be dragged down by others. These are all of our children.

Dr. Shervington has an intersectional career in psychiatry and public mental health. She is the President and CEO of The Institute of Women and Ethnic Studies (IWES), a community-based public health institute, and Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Tulane University. At IWES, Dr. Shervington directs the community-based post-disaster mental health recovery division that she created in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. At Tulane, Dr. Shervington provides psychotherapy supervision for psychiatric residents. Dr. Shervington is a graduate of New York University School of Medicine. She completed her residency in Psychiatry at the University of California San Francisco, and is certified by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology. Dr. Shervington also received a Masters of Public Health in Population Studies and Family Planning from Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine. In 2006, she was awarded the Isaac Slaughter Leadership award by the Black Psychiatrists of America. In 2012, she received the Jeanne Spurlock M.D. Minority Fellowship Award from the American Psychiatric Association.

9/20/16 9/20/16

One Good Question with Peter Howe: Are We Incentivizing the Right Behaviors for Teachers and Students?

“In what ways do our investments in education reveal our beliefs about the next generation’s role in the world?”

I trained as an economist (then an art historian, then an educator), so I’m fascinated by this question. In Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational, he gives us the bad news first: economics is built upon the entirely false premise that people are rationale. The good news is that people are irrational in a predictable way. His experiments demonstrate how financial incentives to “do good” actually backfire. The implication is that, as soon as you provide monetary reward for “doing good,” the action becomes transactional. People’s sense of being valued is entirely different. When we think that we’re acting on behalf of shared humanity, we do more. When we anticipate compensation for the same behavior, we calculate our value and actually refuse to perform for lower compensation.

Earlier this fall, Paul Tough’s article in The Atlantic pointed out the distinction between teachers who raise test results and those who raise character attributes. The teachers didn’t overlap much across groups, they were either in one camp or the other. What he found was that the teachers who raised test scores were the ones being rewarded by their schools, but that the skills students really need for college readiness are the social emotional ones. That’s a great example of how our investments obscure what we project as the best outcome, in this case college persistence.When we apply Ariely’s premise to schools, the incentive should be placed on building community. If we build the real community expectation, all of our members are more likely to contribute to each other’s success. When we apply financial incentives for some members, for example compensating teachers for student test results, the teachers narrow their focus and supports, and as a result fewer students achieve at high levels. It’s literally a waste of money and creates the wrong incentives at the classroom level.

My favorite professor used Hegelian dialectics to teach a course in behavioral accounting. He would post on the door how well we were doing in recounting, connecting, synthesizing, and using connections to build something new—at which point you were at the pinnacle of learning. Even though our content was economics, he rewarded our thought process over discrete test scores. To go back to our example, make sure that the finances are rewarding the behavior that you want. Then you don’t waste money with incentive programs that go fundamentally against people’s needs. People want to feel valued and our investments should reflect that.

“If schools could only accomplish one outcome for all students, and could guarantee that outcome for all students, what would it be?”

Every kid has to have that sense of safety and security – however we define that. Research shows that the traumatized or stressed brain is not a thinking brain. Kids in poverty have higher indicators on the ACE scale of trauma and also higher suspension rates. Being a part of a community is the most important contribution to safety and security. Creating a sense of security isn’t only about environmental stress, but engendering intellectual safety as well. The classroom is not about individual student success, it’s about collective success. No student pisses me off more than the top student who stops coming to class close to the exam because they would rather study on their own. At that point, they’re no longer modeling engagement, and their peers don’t benefit from the tough or complex questions that would have been asked. How do we address needs on both ends of the spectrum? We should focus the first two months of the year on community building and not curriculum. Once you have the community established and students are in inquiry-based learning, the curricular work will move more quickly. All of the students will have that sense of safety, trust and willingness to admit that they don’t know something. That’s when learning can really occur!

Peter’s One Good Question: Why are you here ? I ask this to every student who comes to my office, which is usually in a disciplinary context. I think that you can extend the question to education institutions too – Why are you doing X? Why are you doing it in that way?

Peter Howe is currently Head of College at United World College’s Maastricht (NL) campus. He recently was appointed to the role of Principal of UWC Atlantic College in Great Britain, effective 1 March 2017. Peter joined UWC Maastricht after spending seven years at UWC Adriatic in Italy, four of which as the Head of the college. In the course of five years at UWC Maastricht, Peter has managed a student body of approximately 850 students, in a school that has grown by more than 40% since 2012. Peter brings an eclectic background to his position. Following an undergraduate degree in Finance and Economics and 2 years working at Procter and Gamble in his native Canada, he returned to study graduate Art and Architectural History for 7 years before embarking on his teaching career.

9/6/16 9/6/16

7 books, 2 talks, 1 TV show and Al Pacino – What One Good Question Folks are Reading.

During every One Good Question interview, we have awesome side conversations and anecdotes that don’t make the final edit. I’ve noticed my reading list grow in direct relationship to our side bars. As you start planning your personal fall syllabus, here are a few titles that might resonate:

On design — Aylon Samouha: The End of Average: How we succeed in a world that values sameness, Todd Rose

Rose opens his Ted Talk and book with the following poignant anecdote : In the 40s as planes where getting faster and more complex, there was a spike in plane crashes. They checked the planes and said the planes were fine, but the pilots were making errors. They tried to solve for the pilot errors and began designing the cockpit for “the average pilot.” They took some average pilot demographics and size to adjust, but there were still no improvements in performance. They quickly learned that none of the 400 pilots sampled actually measured the average size of their calculations. The cockpit wasn’t designed for any real person. Eventually they tried to fit the system to the individual and invented adjustable seats, etc. things, that we take for granted now. In the book, you learn that that’s the secret of all design: any system that is trying to fit the individual is actually doomed to fail.

On elite education — Peter Howe: Excellent Sheep, William Deresiewicz

Deresiewicz is a first generation immigrant whose father was a professor. His basic premise is that elite education in the US is producing intellectual sheep who are terrified of failure. These youth grow up with model CVs from birth, but have no resilience, creativity or desire to think outside of the box. Without giving it all away, he concludes that « If we are here to create a decent society, a just society, a wise and prosperous society, a society where children can learn for the love of learning and people can work for the love of work...We don't have to love our neighbors as ourselves, but we need to love our neighbors’ children as our own...We have tried aristocracy. We have tried meritocracy. Now it’s time to try democracy.

On local funding — Susanna Williams: Parks and Recreation, NBC

With national elections on the horizon, we focus on national policy and the influence of national lobby groups. The general public has little understanding about how state and local funding decisions are made. State government deals with the important daily stuff, but it’s not sexy, so there’s a lack of TV/entertainment exposure to those decisions. If you want to learn about local funding issues, watch Parks & Rec. In most states, local legislature is limited to those whose jobs allow them to have flexible jobs for 6-months – ranchers and farmers in western states and self-funded individuals who are so wealthy that they don’t need to work. That’s who’s making our local policy and funding decisions.

On creating coalitions — Dan Varner: Any Given Sunday, Oliver Stone

My favorite movie inspirational scene is this great speech form Any Given Sunday. Al Pacino’s in the locker room and giving his football team the encouragement to get back out and turn the game around. « The inches we need are everywhere around us. On this team, we fight for that inch. » His point, and the way that it inspires me, is that when creating our coalition, we had to recognize that “the inches we needed” were already there -- in our schools, green space, food service, healthcare -- and it was up to us to harness that power.

On diversity in ed tech — Mike DeGraff: Making Good: Equality and Diversity in Maker Education, Leah Buechley

In Leah’s talk, she highlights the imperative we have to define maker education separately from the mainstream Maker Magazine and Faires. Those events tend to be homogenous groups that reflects the values and interests of it’s audience. To me, this is exactly why we, in education, need to systematically develop opportunities around making for a more diverse population, which, early indications show, is working.

On questioning — Anu Passi-Rauste: A More Beautiful Question: The power of inquiry to spark breakthrough ideas, Warren Berger

I was a visiting a small non-profit in Boston and the ED recommended this book to me. It’s all about how to make a good question. My one big takeaway is that I need to figure out my One Good Question before I start my next project. What is the most beautiful question that I want to raise ?

On accountability — Tony Monfiletto: The Allure of Order: High Hopes, Dashed Expectations, and the Troubled Quest to Remake American Schooling, Jal Mehta

Mehta outlines how the investment in accountability at the back end of the education system is an effort to make up for the fact that we haven’t invested as aggressively in the front end. We don’t put enough time, energy or strategy into good school design, preparation of teachers, or capital development. Because we don’t put enough resources into those areas, we try to make up for it in accountability structures.

On solving complex problems — Tom Vander Ark: The Ingenuity Gap: How can we solve the problems of the future?, Thomas Homer-Dixon

Dixon's work centers on the fact that we seem incapable of addressing our basic problems. The problems that we’re facing in society grow in complexity. Their interrelatedness with each other and our civic problem solving capacity is diminishing. We’ve created enormously complex systems, but we have more and more black swan events that we can’t predict or solve. If you’re trying to figure out how to address complex system needs, this book helps to order your thinking.

On AI — Tom Vander Ark: The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, Ray Kurzweil

People have a linear memory and we assume that the future will be like the past, but the future is happening exponentially faster than we appreciate. In The Singularity is Near, Kurzweil posits that computers will be smarter than people, and that, while we know it’s happening, we can’t fully understand the implications of that trajectory.

On bias — Rhonda Broussard: Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People, Mahzarin Banaji & Anthony Greenwald

This is the psychology behind the Project Implicit research and it’s fascinating. Through clever analogies, card tricks, and pop culture references, the researchers teach us how our brains create bias, how that can convert to prejudice or discrimination, and how to make peace when our aspirational beliefs and implicit biases are at odds.

8/30/16 8/30/16

One Good Question with Darren Isom: Are you Preparing Your Students to Become Your Peers?

Darren Isom headshot

“In what ways do our investments in education reveal our beliefs about the next generation’s role in the world?”

I back away from the “education” conversation because I think of my work as more about youth development than formal schooling. The pivotal and catalytic moments in my own learning and development happened outside of the regular school day. Even though I attended rigorous academic institutions throughout my life, it was my out of school experiences, often afterschool and summer activities and programs, that offered me the opportunities to suture my academic experiences and make them real and relevant. I recognized my talent for writing outside of school and recognized my ability to lead and manage via summers working at Summerbridge/Breakthrough Collaborative. We spend so much time thinking about academic performance and that comes from a place of privilege. When you’re white and privileged, all you have to do is to be smart to succeed. When you’re black, privileged or otherwise, you recognize that being smart is necessary but not sufficient. Being able to navigate the world successfully and achieve both professionally and personally requires more than academic preparation. I’m not saying we should downplay the role of academics, clearly they are critical, but we can’t sell kids this false promise that being smart is all that you need. Youth development makes kids fuller – it gives them the tools they need to navigate the world with those smarts.

Our education perspectives are really based on the education that we received, which then informs what we see as the drivers of success. What we need to be asking ourselves is “What actual role do we want our youth to play in the world?” I educate the kids in our program expecting them to become my personal and professional peers. I remember when my first student from Summerbridge went to Howard, my alma mater. A fellow white teacher said “Isn’t that impressive! Did you ever think that she could go to Howard?” And I replied “That was the whole point of our working with her, no?” We have in many ways these unarticulated hierarchies that manifest themselves in our expectations of our students. Even when we’re serving kids to help them academically, we don’t do so with the belief that they’ll become our peers. We do so with the expectation that they’ll “do well for their setting.” I feel very strongly about upward mobility. That’s what America has meant for me and my family. I don’t just believe in it, but I think that certain kids have obligations to it – folks are counting on them. We’re raising these kids with the expectation that they’re going to do magic – jumping numerous social tiers and integrating and succeeding in worlds their parents didn’t even know existed. If we expect them to do magic, we have to be prepared to give them the tools, tricks, and confidence they need to do so successfully.

“It's become common for schools to position arts programs as supports for academic gains (i.e. music improves math), but is that the most important function of arts education?”

Kids should be allowed to be kids. You have your whole life to be an adult and adulting ain’t fun or easy. I’m a cinephile and the theme that always gets me crying is when kids are forced into adult situations at a young age, like in Life is Beautiful. Those situations are just so unfair. Life is tough and you should have a good 15 years where you can be a child. There’s something to be said about giving kids space to be playful and young and youthful. We have to give children a space to dream before we start telling them what they can’t do. You’ll spend your whole life with people telling you what you need to be, what you can’t do, where you can sit, where you can live. Can you have some years to push the boundaries? Children excel at having fun. It’s an asset. We should leverage it.

At Memphis Music Initiative, we give kids fun, meaningful, high-quality music opportunities. Very often we go into black and brown schools with well-meaning white Boards and leadership and when we talk about what we’re trying to achieve, they’ll say “That sounds great, but we don’t want to distract the kids from academic learning with music and arts.” It’s problematic because these same rich, white folks would never be on the Board of [insert fancy private school here] and characterize arts and music education as a distraction.In youth development, we should be working to create the world that we want our children to be in, not somebody else’s poor children. You have to think about it selfishly. Seeing music and arts engagement as a “distraction” speaks to a disconnect in how communities experience art. Wealthy families see art as a distraction, a way to fill your free time, an activity of leisure. As Black Americans – wealthy or not – art is much more than that. It’s the way we navigate life, diffuse anger, celebrate successes – it’s a way of creating beauty in a world that’s often everything but. A white home without music or art is simply bland or boring. A black home without music or art is without joy. Our ability to give our kids these opportunities is necessary in their development, critical to their joy.

An organization that I admire is the Sesame Street Foundation. I’ve been enamored by their campaign to send puppet trucks to refugee camps as part of their belief that children have the right to be children no matter what their situation is and that the most dire and desperate situations only mandates these youthful opportunities for youth. There’s a recent article questioning when schools became such joyless places that resonated so strongly for me. As a child, I loved school, my school and teachers loved me. I was good at school and my teachers did a stellar job of creating a protective environment for me – an awkward, nerdy, gay kid. As educational elites, we’re so busy experimenting with what schools for poor black kids should look like. I just find all the experimentation really confusing. We’re experimenting when we actually know what works. Why don’t we recreate for them the type of education that we had growing up? The kind that worked for us? The kind that made us smart, empowered, and world ready? Are they not worthy of it? Do we think that they can’t digest it? I recognize that education reformers would say that we haven’t changed schools since rip Van Winkle, and question what we should be doing differently to prepare kids for a fast-changing world and not handicap them. But what’s fundamentally broken? Is it the model or the implementation that’s failed?

Darren’s One Good Question: There is something inherently wonderfully beautiful in all of us. How do we support our youth to manifest that beauty? I worry that we are encouraging our black kids, our gay kids, our poor kids to literally cover elements of their beauty for the sake of integrating and giving them one path to success and forcing them to abandon their uniqueness, their greatest asset, to get there. How do we enable kids to embrace and showcase that thing of beauty while readying the world to accept and embrace it?

Prior to leading Memphis Music Initiative, Darren was a manager with the The Bridgespan Group where he was a strategic advisor to nonprofit and foundation leaders in youth and community development, foundation strategy and education policy.Before Bridgespan Darren worked in direct services in New York, with funding for public art and performance initiatives throughout the Times Square District (Times Square Alliance) and youth services (Groundwork). Darren worked as the director of Global Logistics for CSI, an international trade finance group, where he managed strategy, organization, and change management projects in Belgium, Spain, France, The Netherlands, and Germany.A seventh generation New Orleans native, Darren is a graduate of Howard University, Institut d'Études Politiques de Paris, and Columbia Business School’s Institute for Nonprofit Management. As a volunteer, Darren has been an activist around issues concerning disconnected youth and LGBT communities of color. He has served as an advisor to the leaders of several Bay Area and national foundations and currently serves on the board of Horizons Foundation.

8/23/16 8/23/16

One Good Question with Aylon Samouha: Is There a Silver Bullet for the Future of "School"?

This post is part of a series of interviews with international educators, policy makers, and leaders titled “One Good Question.” These interviews provide answers to my One Good Question (outlined in About) and uncover new questions about education’s impact on the future.

“In what ways do our investments in education reveal our beliefs about the next generation’s role in the world?”

Thankfully, there is a lot of investment in education, both public and philanthropic dollars. The sheer quantity of investment is a clear signal – we believe that our generation plays a critical role in the future world and deserves deep investment. That siad, where does it go? There are lots of human capital investments that funders are making in all sorts of ways to attract, evaluate, and train educators. These investments are animated by a critical need in creating great learning environments ; namely, kids need caring adults around them who are effective at teaching, coaching, motivating, etc.On the other hand, human capital funding by itself may unintentionally reinforce the idea that the only or best way for kids to learn is through teacher-centric models where students have little agency over their own learning. With School in the Cloud, Sugata Mitra challenges the role of educators in the learning process. Basically, he was a web developer who said « What would happen if I just put a computer in the wall here? In a low-income neighborhood in India. Kids started using it and they had never touched a computer before. They looked up stuff and started learning things. Then he said, let me do it somewhere where there aren’t a bunch of techies around. And this time he gave the users a question to figure out. When he asked for their feedback, they said We have to learn English in order to use it. And they actually did learn English to figure out how to keep accessing the tool!

This is an extreme but very instructive example that, with the right tools and motivations, students will self-direct their own learning. So we have to ask ourselves, is it enough to invest in human capital when the underlying traditional model, by its design, under-leverages the innate motivation of students to self-direct their learning ? And what might that say about how we conceive of their place in the world ?Another important and laudable category of investments go towards scaling good schools. This comes from a very good place and should continue – if we’re seeing a good learning environment in one place we should try to replicate that in more communities especially where educational opportunities are poor. That said, an unintended consequences of scale investments is that half-baked things grow before they’re really proven and successful operators sometimes grow faster than the quality can keep up.

Scaling education models is an efficiency play and lots of students and families have had significantly better education choices and experiences as a result of these investments. Counting and expanding quality seats is critical work. That said, what unintended narratives might animate these investments? To what extent are we saying that we need quality seats so that our students can be competitive in the global marketplace? Instead, how might we expand quality seats while reinforcing a narrative that an American student from New Orleans should be working with her brothers and sisters in China to make the world a better place and not merely trying to outcompete them? And when we scale into new communities quickly, to what extent are we going fast alone vs. going further together? This is all a tricky balancing act and I’m heartened to see so many in this work asking these questions more often and more publicly.

“Education leaders around the world are asking themselves « What’s next ? » Our industrial model of education is no longer preparing youth for today’s careers or knowledge economy. Is there a single answer, silver bullet that will emerge in the next iteration of school?”

I definitely don’t think there is a silver bullet in terms of one type of school or kind of pedagogy. But there are some very provocative ideas and shifts that I think will help us massively improve learning across the world. Right now, I’m enthralled by Todd Rose’s work and The End of Average. I won’t do his work justice but a core premise is that « any system that is trying to fit the individual is actually doomed to fail. Waking up from what he calls the « myth of average » seems critical to redesigning the traditional model which essentially holds the average student as a foundational principle. And just like there is no average student there are likewise no average communities. Taken together, we need to build models that respect and leverage the uniqueness of each student ; and, we need to scale those models and ideas in ways that communities can adopt and adapt into to fit their unique values, assets, etc. Generic, cookie-cutter replication may work for enterprises where people have very basic expectations and where the stakes are low (i.e., Starbucks, Target). We don’t want schools or learning experiences to be like that. Communities creating and adapting school models for their context – school models that provide students to adapt and create learning for themselves…maybe that’s a silver bullet?

Relatedly, I’m getting more and more excited about the potential of truly leveraging learning science to advance the way that we construct learning experiences. Research on learning and motivation point to new insights every year -- and we need to systematically use these insights in real daily learning environments! To do this right now, educators – who are already stretched in terms of capacity – would need to wade through endless research papers, discern the usable knowledge and then figure out how to apply that knowledge with students. What would it mean for us to systematically create the bridge between research and application? What if people designing learning experiences could benefit from and contribute to an ever-growing learning agenda for the field ? What if more learning engineers were building and iterating school model components based in the science that educators could readily adapt into their communities? Ok, maybe that’s another silver bullet after-all!

Aylon’s One Good Question: How can we ensure that schools are wildly motivating for all students?

Aylon Samouha is Co-Founder of Transcend Education, a national non-profit committed to building the future’s schools today. Transcend works with school operators across the district, charter, and independent school sectors. They provide and develop world-class R&D capacity that supports visionary education leaders to build and replicate breakthrough learning environments. The co-founders and founding board members published Dissatisfied, Yet Optimistic to put forward their theory of change.Prior to co-founding Transcend, Aylon was an independent designer providing strategy and design services to education organizations, schools, and foundations. Most recently, Aylon has been leading the “Greenfield” school model design for the Achievement First Network, which is being piloted in the 2015-16 school year. He also led the field research for Charter School Growth Fund and the Clay Christensen Institute for the 2014 publication, "Schools and Software: What's Now, What's Next". In 2013, Aylon pioneered the Chicago Breakthrough Schools Fellowship in conjunction with New Schools for Chicago, NGLC, and the Broad Foundation.

8/16/16 8/16/16

One Good Question with Nicole de Beaufort: What if We Built Ed Funding on Abundance, Not Scarcity?

Nicole de Beaufort headshot

“In what ways do our investments in education reveal our beliefs about the next generation’s role in the world?”

I try to look at this question through multiple lenses, those of foundations, government, and direct services side, as well as that of the ultimate end user -- families. Ultimately, I want to know how well people are informing stakeholders about problems and solutions. In Detroit, much of my work is in early childhood. One of the questions I hear a lot from practitioners is Why are we always just at minimum? Why is funding minimum? What would happen if we built formulas for the abundance, not the scarcity? We’re always working on minimums of state and federal funding and that has a negative effect on the system.When we mold to the minimum, we’re building for somebody else’s kids. It’s discrimination against poor people. When an early education professional with two master’s degrees makes $10-12 /hour, the system is broken. When every month or quarter early childhood centers have to justify their existence and they have already stretched every dollar, the system is broken. We have normalized these low investments and expect people to make miracles happen for the next generation without sufficient capacity.

What would change things?

Universal Pre-K that’s not defined by your zip code. No matter who you are or where you live, you should get the same education.
Pay equity. Early childhood educators are barely paid more than fast food workers. We can’t deliver high-quality universal pre-K until we start respecting our educators.
Remove institutional barriers to early childhood access. Models like half-day pre-K are false choices for low-income families. In places like Detroit, where there’s not much transit or cars, there are structural barriers to such models. It takes 90 minutes to drop your kids off, then if you’re a few minutes late, your child is turned away, and you have to take them home on the same 90-minute bus ride. At some point parents decide that it’s not worth the trouble.
Make parent involvement about partnership, not compliance. The lack of transit infrastructure is compounded by punitive compliance-driven practices at the school level. Successful universal pre-K will have parent engagement goals that are relevant and focused on developmental supports for their children.

“Earlier in our conversation you said that it takes at least 10 years for structural change to happen. What do the next 10 years of this work look like in Michigan?”

In the beginning, focus on state and local partnerships. Engage in common visioning and develop common understanding of the realities of local, state, and federal funding streams. This Citizen’s Research Council catalog is a good start. Data creates space for decision-makers to identify our strengths, our capacity, and our inadequacies. For example, a recent IFF study shows the gap between the available quality seats in early childhood education and the kids in need. The highest need goes in a band around the city and into the suburbs. If we were all reviewing that information, we would see that this is not a Detroit problem, it’s a regional problem.Once there’s a shared understanding of where to go (vision) and why (purpose), tackle the question: How do you turn a regional issue into a workable issue? For example, with their Science and Cultural Facilities District, Denver created a tax which enabled some regional thinking about the solutions. A proposal like that could be helpful for building a regional conversation on early childhood. At present, Dearborn and Detroit don’t think that they have the same problems.Finally, focus on impact metrics: How will we know that universal early childhood is working? When we see parent demand for quality early childhood rise. When quality early childhood programs don’t have empty seats. When you have robust public conversation about quality of life for parents with young kids. When the conversation is actively about learning, no longer bemoaning the fact that we don’t have good options. Once the focus is more on the nuance of what/how our children are learning and less on how the institution is performing, we’ll know that we’ve achieved universal access of acceptable quality for all families.

Nicole’s One Good Question: The Flint water crisis is fueling many questions for me, and while we don’t hear about it every day, I wonder about its long term impacts on society. How do we create cities and communities where we don’t have decisions made solely on economic terms? How do we address the divide between the Dollar Store community and the Amazon community? People are our biggest educators. How we live and how we organize our communities is a key part of our education too.“We have too many Americas where people are never seeing each other”.

Nicole de Beaufort is a social entrepreneur based in Detroit, Michigan. She leads EarlyWorks, llc., a strategic communications and community engagement consultancy focused on building awareness and public support for children’s issues.She is also co-founder of Cadre Studio, a service design collaborative using human-centered design methods withphilanthropists to increase impact and effectiveness. De Beaufort co-founded the Detroit Women’s Leadership Network, a mentoringnetwork of more than 1800 women in the Detroit region that was formedpromote inclusive and diverse women’s leadership. Prior to this, deBeaufort served as vice president of Excellent Schools Detroit, an education coalition. She previously founded and led Fourth Sector Consulting, Inc., and served as communications director of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. Find her at @NicoledeB and earlyworksllc.com

8/9/16 8/9/16

One Good Question with Derwin Sisnett: Which do you Build First, Schools or Communities?

This post is part of a series of interviews with international educators, policy makers, and leaders titled “One Good Question.” These interviews provide answers to my One Good Question (outlined in About) and uncover new questions about education’s impact on the future.

“In what ways do our investments in education reveal our beliefs about the next generation’s role in the world?”

To me, investment is all about bringing opportunities to others that we’re given to me when I was a kid, whether it was from my parents, community members, or business folks. What I think we should bring to the table is time and thoughtfulness around this work. My work is not just about education. It is about the whole community. In the education reform movement, we’ve somehow convinced ourselves that if we overdo the classroom work, we’ll somehow address all the issues that we need to address because of kids’ “perseverance” and “resilience.” If we get that part right, the students will somehow make it out. The problem is – they make it “out” and you’ve left another void in the community. Education investment has to be more about compassion and more about giving something that actually represents a sacrifice.

“Building the infrastructure doesn’t necessarily ensure that people will take advantage of the service, that requires a shift in mentality. What you’re building in Memphis, a mixed-use development for schools, affordable housing, and performing arts center, will be a massive statement about the positive value on school and bigger community. If you build it will they come?”

I don’t believe that if you build it they will come. I believe if you build them, they will come. As much as we wanted to build the Town Center as quickly as possible, it was in our best interest to actually build the capacity of the school, families and community first. We almost had to realize this lesson over time because it took us years to raise the dollars. When we open the campus this fall, we’re literally just transferring a school from one building to the next. It’s not a difficult transaction for our organization. We’re not wondering if we’re going to meet enrollment and we’ve developed a broader facilities strategy where Power Center Elementary will move into the older campus. Therefore, it you build them, the people in your community, to a place where they see access to education as the first step to change, then they will protect and engender sustainable change for others.

“There is some discourse that high-performing schools lead to gentrified communities. How does that fit in the community development model?”

In Atlanta, I met with an African-American developer, who understands African-American community, and he gave the best analogy about mixed-income communities. He said, this is like Orbitz, you don’t know how much that person sitting next to you on the plane paid, but they got a seat on the plane. Education access should operate in the same ways to increase access for all youth. I grew up in New York where everybody paid $1.25 to get on the train. That train is accessible to everyone and eventually even Mayor Bloomberg got on that train. From millionaires to folks for whom it’s hard to get $1.25, they all understand the value of the train and it gives them access to everything. We are all on the same vehicle. That’s where we need to be with education. High quality schools represent an opportunity to eliminate gentrification. It actually can inspire diverse communities. People start to value what the school is itself and they recognize that this is not some thing for poor people or rich people, this is something for people.This is a human issue. That’s quite frankly my concern with education reform, we call it a civil rights movement, but we don’t actually have a call for humanity to this work. It’s just simply “all kids need a great education” and we don’t drill down to why. The why is because of humanity. When I think about gentrification, the reason that happens is because somehow, we believe that this “thing” is so good now, this person shouldn’t have it (anymore). We convince ourselves that we somehow earned this public good. No one in NY feels like they “earned” the A train. That’s just the vehicle to get from point A to point B. and that makes it a right.

Derwin’s One Good Question: Why do we so clearly understand the problem with Blackberry when the iPhone came out, but don’t understand the problem with ed reform? It’s so easy for us to see how Blackberry missed the mark—they couldn’t catch on to the personalized aspect of the phone. But with schools, we still think we should focus solely on schools– not community development or community revitalization. I wonder why we’re missing that mark? Do we have the wrong people asking the questions?

In 2015, Derwin Sisnett founded Maslow Development Inc. (Maslow), a nonprofit organization that develops communities around high performing schools. Prior to creating Maslow, Derwin co-founded Gestalt Community Schools (Gestalt), a charter management organization that manages the growth of high-performing, community-based charter schools in Memphis, Tennessee. Maslow was established in order to extend the community development and real estate practices that are a core part of Gestalt Community Schools’ mission to other high performing schools across the country. To date, Gestalt serves 2,300 K-12 scholars across 6 campuses in Memphis. In addition to his work at Maslow and Gestalt, Derwin serves on the Power Center CDC Board of Directors, the Crosstown Arts Board of Trustees, the Martin Institute for Teaching Excellence Board of Trustees, the Methodist Extended Care Hospital Board of Directors, and the Memphis Light, Gas & Water Board of Commissioners, where he serves as Chairman. Derwin has earned a BA in Psychology from Emory University and a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Hollins University. Derwin is also a Pahara-Aspen Fellow and a Broad Academy Fellow.

8/2/16 8/2/16

One Good Question with Fabrice Jaumont: How Parent Organizing Leads to Revolution.

Fabrice Jaumont photo credit: Jonas Cuenin

“In what ways do our investments in education reveal our beliefs about the next generation’s role in the world?”

Part of my research, and the recent book that I have published[1], focus on philanthropy and American foundations, particularly those that make financial investments in education development in Africa. I also work with philanthropists on a regular basis through my work in bilingual education in the United States. I raise funds for my programs which provide services to schools and support the needs of dual language students in various settings. Coming from France, which has a tradition of state-controlled support to education, I have always been intrigued by the U.S. philanthropic culture and tradition of “giving back to the community”, which encourages people, wealthy or not, to contribute financially or by volunteering their time and expertise. This, I find, can have a tremendous impact on children, schools, and communities. I believe it creates better chances for the next generation and help it access quality programs, equal opportunities, and the right conditions to grow and play an active role in society. I find it inspiring to see people giving money willingly – on top of the taxes they pay - to improve a city’s or the country’s education system. The fact that these individuals want to make a difference through their actions and financial contributions is a social contract that I find worthy of our attention. If done well, with the buy-in of communities, it can have an impact on hundreds of thousands of children that would not necessarily have these chances - even within the context of a strong centralized system. This tradition of giving also sends a very strong and hopeful message which is carried on from one generation to the next. As a child, you might have received support from the generosity of someone, perhaps even someone who you never met. As an adult, you might want to be that generous donor and help a child experience things that he or she couldn’t experience otherwise.

We can criticize this tradition too. In recent weeks, a lot has been said about the Gates Foundation’s failure to improve education despite its best intentions, ambitious programs, and the billions of dollars that it poured into transforming schools and educational models. One could ask why, in the first place, foundations and wealthy individuals try to change school systems. Should we not tax these individuals more so that wealth be redistributed through a more democratic process rather than an individual’s pet projects? Surely, the future of our children should not depend on the largesse of the Super Rich.

Sometimes foundations are seen as having a corrosive impact on society. In my book, I analyze these critics’ views of U.S. foundations in Africa. I also provide a new understanding of educational philanthropy by using an institutional lens that helps me avoid the traps and bias that I pinpointed in the discourse of foundation opponents. In my opinion, grantors and grantees have an unequal relationship from the start. As a result, the development agenda is either imposed by the money holders, or “adjusted to please the donor” by money seekers who just want to secure the funds or win the grant competition. To reconcile this discrepancy, I propose that philanthropists and grant recipients place their relationship on an equal footing, and engage in thorough conversations which start with the needs and seeks input from all actors. This can generate more respect and mutual understanding, and strengthen each step of the grantmaking process: from building a jointly-agreed agenda to tackling the issues more efficiently.

“Too often in public education, language immersion and international education are only offered to children from middle class environments. The community of bilingual/dual-language schools in New York make an effort to promote immersion for students from diverse backgrounds. What could that choice of intentional diversity mean for New York's future?”

In several contexts of education, immersion and international education is too often reserved for children of the affluent. The community of public bilingual schools that I have helped develop in New York and in other cities provides access to quality programs to children of diverse socio-economic and ethnic backgrounds. Dual language programs have existed for about 10 years and are gradually replacing traditional models of bilingual education programs which focus on teaching English to immigrants. This original model was created in the 1960s through the civil rights movement when immigrants asked that their children be taught in both English and their home language so that they were given equal chances to succeed in American society.

The new model of dual language education focuses on bilingual education for all. At least that is how I see it. Children of all linguistic backgrounds spend half of their school time in English and the other half in a target language. They learn to write and read in both languages as well as study content such as math, science, social studies through both languages. For the last ten years, I have helped linguistic communities create dual language programs in French, Japanese, Italian, German, Russian, Arabic and Korean. The families that I have met are motivated by a strong desire to maintain their linguistic heritage - more so than develop English which children are acquiring naturally through their surroundings. For these families, schools should put more value on children’s heritage language and culture, and help them make an asset of their bilingualism.

Also, I see an increasing number of American families - who only speak English at home - value the benefits of bilingualism, bi-literacy, and biculturalism. They, too, ask that schools help them grow multilingual competences in children, and encourage students to acquire new languages as early as possible, preferably through dual language or foreign language immersion. That's good news for any country whose citizens are willing to open their minds to the world and the world of others by mastering languages and discovering new cultures. In my view, this learning process has the potential to foster more respect, tolerance, and understanding of others. Ultimately, I believe this can foster more peace. Moreover, when parents demand that schools provide this kind of bilingual education, it becomes a true revolution. A Bilingual Revolution. And this is the title of my next book[2].

Fabrice's One Good Question: Through both my research on strategic philanthropy in Africa, and my work in bilingual education development in North America, my thinking has revolved around one good question: whether we help improve a public school in Brooklyn or a university in Dar es Salaam: How can we make sure that all actors in the communities that we try to impact are consulted and given an equal voice in the conversation, so that the solutions that we may bring are indeed conceived together and do correspond to real needs?

Fabrice Jaumont holds a Ph.D. in International Education from New York University. His research finds itself at the intersection of comparative and international education, education development, educational diplomacy and philanthropy, heritage language and bilingual education, and community development. He currently serves as Program Officer for FACE Foundation in New York, and as Education Attaché for the Embassy of France to the United States. He is the author of Unequal Partners: American Foundations and Higher Education Development in Africa (Palgrave-MacMillan, 2016). His book, The Bilingual Revolution, features the development of dual language programs in public schools in New York. More information: http://www.FabriceJaumont.net

[1]Unequal Partners: American Foundations and Higher Education Development in Africa (Palgrave-MacMillan)

[2]The Bilingual Revolution

7/29/16 7/29/16

America Already has Integrated Schools — Here's How We Can Have More.

In his Will America ever have integrated schools ? blog post yesterday, Neerav Kingsland asked for ways to better understand the story for school integration advocacy. Here at One Good Question, I’m usually talking to other people about their perspectives, but since I spend a lot of time wondering about his question myself, I have a few thoughts to share.Dear Neerav,I love that you’re thinking about this from personal, policy, and practical perspectives ! I am a firm believer that no culture is monolithic, so to be fair, there are parents all over the country, who go to great lengths to live in integrated neighborhoods and/or enroll their children in integrated schools, like this recent study of DCPS demonstrates. We could provide personal testimony from thousands of Black, White, and Latinx parents who advocate for integrated schools and related civil rights/social justice equity in their communities. For the sake of this conversation, let’s assume that you don’t mean them. Let's also assume that we're only talking about high-quality education — no one is advocating that we send children to low-performing schools for diversity's sake.

Top-down policy does not create lasting change when the people living through the change are oppositional.

We definitely see that, as court-mandated integration programs end, most communities revert back to segregated schooling. We have bright spots in places like Wake County, North Carolina where the community – White and Black students & families – advocated to maintain their integrated school options after the court mandates ended. In St. Louis majority-white school district leaders maintained their commitment to their desegregation program for 10 years after the court mandate ended. Those decisions take personal conviction and local advocacy/political support. You could also look to communities like Tucson Unified (no pun intended) that achieved unitary status after 30 years of court oversight (it is a long, hard battle), and still needs an ongoing comprehensive plan to remove the traces of the forced segregation in their past. A scalable solution has to include ways to build public will and shift personal attitudes about diversity.

Location, location, location.

To your point that “White parents won’t send their children to poor neighborhoods” Frankenberg and Debray (2011) also argue that we should focus integrated school efforts on deconcentrating low-income housing and starting the work in more affluent communities. White families wouldn’t have to “send their children to poor neighborhoods,” Black/Brown kids wouldn’t have to be bused all over town, districts/coalitions wouldn’t incur the exorbitant cost of said busing, and the community would avoid the White Flight tipping point that happens in more racially tense/fragile mixed communities. I don’t know that any place is actually trying this, but it’s an interesting position.New schools – district or charter – that are intentional about their diverse population are just as intentional about location. I’m most encouraged by the strategy at Rhode Island Mayoral Academies where they locate schools on the borders of the stratified communities that they intend to serve. No one has to leave their greater neighborhood for a quality, diverse education. That's a scalable practice that districts/regions could implement when they create neighborhood school assignment zones.

Rural bright spots.

For the long-term integration argument, I would actually be more focused on census projections. Not in the antagonistic – White people you’re going to be the minority by 2044 ! way, but in the spirit that, if we don’t figure out scalable solutions to integration, our society will implode. I would look to our rural communities, like Beardstown, IL and Carthage, MO, as bellwethers over urban examples. Rural communities are becoming majority-minority at a faster rate than the nation, have relatively few financial resources to respond to the shift, and are using school integration to address the community’s needs.

We’re in a catch-22 here.

What makes resistant families more apt to support school integration ? Positive experience with school integration. To go back to the DCPS study, when everything is equal, families are more likely to choose integrated and high-performing schools. Get the public school quality right, get the location right, launch local campaign on the academic and social benefits of New XXXXX School model and many diverse parents will come.Creating diverse schools as the new normal will take generations, but it is incumbent upon us to promote such integration now. Sustainability of diverse schools and diverse communities requires that the people who live in them have a shared value. What's the best place to teach those shared values on a large scale? Our public schools.Looking forward,Rhonda

4/5/16 4/5/16

One Good Question with Dan Varner: Is Gender Bias Keeping US from Investing in PreK?

“In what ways do our investments in education reveal our beliefs about the next generation’s role in the world?”

What do we believe the purpose of education is ? I’ve come to the conclusion that there is no singular answer. I don’t think our society holds a single answer. One of the reasons that education is as contested a subject as it is, is because the answer to this question is different for different people. Education is one of the few places where we actually tax ourselves as a community and contribute funds willingly for some perceived greater good. Our investment in education reveals one thing : the next generation has such a significant and important role to play in the world, that it is worthwhile for us to invest in them as kids in order to prepare them for that.

Secondly, education is necessary to help folks govern themselves more effectively. How democratic is our democracy ? Education has always been important to access that franchise effectively and stay informed about the political process. We believe in the next generations’ role in governing itself and us as a community. I won’t take it too far, because we don’t actually invest in citizenship classes/government, that’s not where we end up targeting our education investments. But the notion is that a well-educated public governs effectively.

As interestingly, we see the increasing notion over the last century that we educate to help people get better jobs. When factories and line jobs were the standard, education was a system that prepared those workers—cohorts that move along the factory floor together, it did not prepare students in large numbers for inquiry and critical thinking. Emergence of old-style career and vocational ed over last 60-70 years is proof of that as well. There is a small and growing movement around 21st century skills—deeper learning folks, CCSS, — who believe that actually what’s important are critical thinking skills, collaboration, and teamwork. Increasingly there are investments that reveal our belief in the importance of those things in comparison.

The US is unique in the way that we invest in early childhood and post-secondary education. Our historically high level of investment in post-secondary education reveals a fundamental belief in the value of thought- critical thinking, liberal arts, renaissance thinkers. In contrast to the investments in our K-12 system, however, I don’t think our investments in post-secondary education reflects so much the belief about the next generation, but rather the current generation. We do a remarkably bad job at investing in early childhood education. We have evidenced a fundamental misunderstanding about the role of early childhood, and I suspect that is driven by a misbelief about the role of women in the current generation and their role as primary care providers and caregivers, and not as educators. It’s a huge miss and a huge fail on our part. I focus on how do we move from where we are to where we want to be. In the early childhood discourse, I don’t hear people refer to the social reasons and the perceived role of women in the workforce that contribute to low investments in early childhood education. Women in the workforce is a fairly new phenomenon in our country. For centuries, we assumed that women would care for their young children. And there was a gender bias associated with it. If childcare had been the same role of men, countries would have changed a long tome ago to give lawyers paternity breaks and years of pay. Our social and gender stereotypes and norms have influcenced policy. It wasn’t until the 1960s that we started HeadStart. That had something to do with our lack of any real belief in equitable treatment of folks, regardless of economic status and race. I suspect it’s a combination of all of these beliefs and biases that have gotten us to where we are.

“The creation of Excellent Schools Detroit marked a significant mindset shift into seeing the success of all students, regardless of school format, as the responsibility of the full community. What are your early lessons and how can other communities replicate/improve upon a similar investment in preK-12?”

1 : You need a broad coalition of stakeholders and they have to be in it for the long haul if you’re going to win the effort or redefine the paradigm. There are a whole set of stakeholders who are vested in the current system, regardless of outcomes. They are on the right and left and run the political gambit.

2 : Governance matters AND, more importantly, governance can only hope to solve a small subset of the challenges that need to be resolved. Our experience in Detroit that led to the creation of the coalition is that we have low and high performing district and charter schools. Yes, governance can play a role in all of it, but it’s not the magic bullet. In the whole picture, success matters more than the governance model.

3 : Recognize that these are community challenges, not school challenges. The solutions we need are all around us. My favorite movie inspirational scene is Al Pacino’s locker room speech in Any Given Sunday. A step too soon or a step too early and you miss your block, the inches we need are all around us. The creation of our coalition was a recognition that the inches we need are all around us—we need them in schools and green space and food and healthcare and the whole network of services that matters.

4 : Recognize the multiple and competing purposes for which education exists. We knew that we wanted a scorecard that measured the performance of schools and Michigan didn’t do that. Parents would be faced with lots of data to understand their choices and we need to enable parents to make those choices. Test data told us something, but scores weren’t the only data point--academic data only tells a small sliver of the whole story. We wanted to try to capture information to tell some of the larger story for folks. To do that, we needed closer partnership between community and schools. So we organized unannounced community site visits to schools based on the criteria that matters to the community. Part of that model is to help school leaders understand that they’re ultimately accountable to the community, parents and kids. These visits created a bridge for the community. Education can be pretty opaque for the average person, so this was an effort to help community increase their understanding of what’s going on in school buildings.

“What advice would you give to a new community who says: Let’s start doing pop-up school site visits !”

Schools loved it, both in theory and in practice. Schools knew that they weren’t performing well on the standardized test, so this was one way to showcase their other value-adds that tell additional stories of school success. That was the theoretical buy in. Then in practice, schools were pleased with our process. Schools had to opt-in to the process (86% participated) and we promised that, for the first year of visits, none of the data would be public or real-time. We trained community members on how to walk through a school building during the day. Schools have now figured out that they need to get parents to walk through their buildings, especially for enrollment in the transition years. Our biggest lesson from the school visits ? The site visit data was not strongly correlated to standardized test data. As a result, it’s hard to fund the site visit model.

Dan’s One Good Question : What would it take for all kids to arrive at school ready for school, at a much more advanced minimal standard than the one we currently have? The subquestion there is : Why do we assume, like in the traditional cohort model, that all kids should start school at the same age?

Dan Varner became Chief Executive Officer of Excellent Schools Detroit in 2011. Excellent Schools Detroit is a non-profit organization dedicated to ensuring that every child in Detroit has an excellent education. ESD defines an excellent education as one where 90% of children are prepared for kindergarten, 90% graduate from high school on time, 90% of graduates enroll in a quality postsecondary program, and 90% of enrollees succeed in the program without remediation. Prior to that time Mr. Varner was a program officer with the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. In this role, he worked with both the Michigan team and the Education and Learning team at the foundation to develop programming priorities, identifying and nurturing opportunities to affect positive change within communities.