One Good Question

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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?

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.

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.

4/5/16 4/5/16

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

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?”

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.

1/12/16 1/12/16

One Good Question with Tony Monfiletto: Are the Right People in the Education Redesign Process?

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

Our investment in accountability structure and high-stakes standardized testing reveals the fact that adults think of kids as problems to be solved, rather than assets to be nurtured. In Jal Mehta’s, The Allure of Order, he outlines how the investment in accountability at the back end of the 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.

“From substitute teacher to education policy, you’ve worked in practically every level of education impact and have deep understanding of how all of these roles influence opportunities for all students. What is standing in the way of deeper, effective collaboration for public education in this country?”

We were working off of an old industrial model of education and when that industrial model stopped getting results, we had different expectations for what schools could do, but we never changed the design of the schools to catch up to the new expectations. When we didn’t change the design of the schools or invest in the people who could populate the new generation of schools, we started accountability structures instead. If we’re going to deal with the lack of effective design, it’s going to mean dealing with both the accountability structures to make sure that it’s rethought around clear design principles. We have to do both at the same time. You can’t have accountability structures built around industrial factory schools when that model isn’t solving the problem. You have to get both right and right, but now we’re not doing either. People are trying to deal with the metrics questions but aren’t willing to give up on the design. Even those who are thinking about innovative school design, they’re still doing it within the confines of the existing model i.e. replacing teachers with blended learning. These are add-ons, not really answering questions for what’s happening in the instruction.

“Do you think we have the right people in the conversation about school design?”

I don’t. What’s happened is that we’ve let two camps develop: traditional education interest groups/educators vs. high-stakes standards educators. The traditional camp is dominated by teacher unions, school administrators, Diane Ravitch, etc. and the high-stakes camp is dominated by those who believe in econometrics. They think that if you get the econometrics right, then align the systems and create the right incentives, everything will come out in the end. The discourse on school design is dominated by those two camps and they’re not the right people to be in the conversation. The trappings of the existing system make it difficult for both camps to imagine anything else. We need youth development advocates, neuroscientists, community leaders who are not from education sector, social service providers who understand cognitive and non-cognitive human development—those are the people who ought to be in the conversations. If we had them in the discussion and designed backwards, we’d have a much differently designed school than our current models. At Leadership High School Network in Albuquerque, we operate and founded a network of schools built around 3 pillars: learning by doing, community engagement, and 360 support for kids and families. All pillars are equally important and they all hold up the institution. What we found is, when any two of the three pillars converge, the impact for kids is exponential. It’s the convergence that creates the impact, but they have to be seen as equal partners in their work in the schools.

Tony’s One Good Question: Can we give the community a new mental model for what school can look like? And then, can we create a new assessment system that allows for people to have confidence in that new model?

Tony Monfiletto is Executive Director of New Mexico Center for School Leadership. He is a father, husband, educator, visionary, thought leader, and ambitious builder of ideas and schools. He is charming, focused, intense, productive, and deeply committed to both his work, his family, and our community. Tony grew up in Albuquerque with both parents as teachers in the South Valley, family roots in northern New Mexico as well as Chicano activism and Catholic social justice as part of his life.