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

Kaya Henderson

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.

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. 

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

Ana Poncé

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?”

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. 

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.

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

Susan Patrick

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.

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.

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

Nicole Young

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?”

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.

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

Aylon Samouha

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.

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

Nicole de Beaufort headshot

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?”

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

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

Fabrice Jaumont photo credit: Jonas Cuenin

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?”

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

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

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

Dan Varner

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.

One Good Question with Kathy Padian: How Leadership Trumps Funding in School System Improvement.

Kathy Padian

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?”

The first thing that comes to mind, is the the disparity amongst different communities and their investments.  In a recent meeting about school turnaround, we learned about Camden, NJ, where they spend $26,000 per student in a district with 15,000 students.  The majority of us in the room, our heads exploded.   Here we are, in a very impoverished state and city where housing prices are rising and we’re still investing around $10,000 per students. It’s mind boggling.  When I read that question, I was thinking overall in the US, we don’t invest nearly enough.  Kids should have the ability to go to a classroom or education environment from birth or 2-3 years if they want to (not mandatory).  In Louisiana we don’t require school until 7, which is a crazy law.  There needs to be a much greater investment. We hear all the sound bites about a different type of future and technology based innovation entrepreneurial thinkers etc., yet in many places, (not Camden) we are falling woefully short on the investment side, and education becomes the easiest thing to cut from a budget (especially early childhood education).  We’re not putting our money where our mouth is.  Defense budget is quadrupling in comparison to education.

“In the post-Katrina New Orleans education landscape, we've seen considerable economic resources invested in outcomes for youth.  Which ones have had the greatest game-changing impact?  Which investments are replicable for other underperforming urban school communities?”

From where I sit, the greatest game-changing impact wasn’t specifically economic.  There was no money that changed things.  It was more the ability to restart.  In order to get rid of what was generations of complacency, graft, corruption and no real accountability because the “people who were supposed to be holding the district accountable” were part of the graft and corruption.  In pre-Katrina New Orleans, if you were able to, you sent your kids to private or parochial schools.  If you weren’t able to, there was some relationship between not having the money for private school and lack of grassroots agency to create change.  Pre-Katrina, there were absolutely small pockets of schools and folks who were trying to do things differently, but the mentality was, “I can’t save everyone, so I’m going to save this subset of kids.” It seemed so intractable.

Getting to where you remove the massive money suck at the central office, is probably the thing that was the game changer.  I don’t know how other cities can replicate that.  Does state takeover create that space?  Outsiders think that New Orleans education recovery was flooded with funding, but the funding was targeted.  New Orleans received a federal investment and FEMA supports to rebuild schools. Like everything in Louisiana, we didn’t hire the right people.  We had people with no experience who were hired to manage billion dollar budgets. The money wasn’t managed better, however, or we could have had more buildings or better status for the construction.

“So what made the central office different?”

You need a mix of veteran and newcomer administrators.  This is one of the five recommendations in The Wallace Foundation’s brief on the role of district leadership in school improvement.  In any existing administration, there are good and hard working team members who, if they had good leadership with visionary direction, they would adapt and be great.  You also need people who are coming from the outside (of the district or region) and who have seen a different way of doing things.  These two cohorts need to work along side each other.  You need that mix: outsiders who come in with some humility and are willing to work with veterans and veterans who want to adapt.  Building and guiding such a team requires really strong leadership to get everyone on the same team and working towards the same goal.

Recovery School District was getting there, but now the pendulum has swung the other way.  We currently have a super young team with lots of energy who are now starting to try “new ideas” that, in some cases, were the same old ideas from before.  Old heads hear these “new ideas” and are loathe to work with the new staffers.  This is maddening because there was an opportunity for Orleans Parish to bring the schools back.  The bridge building that we began could have continued – to bring the fresh ideas and the institutional knowledge together in the same place.  But that’s not happening, and with the new governor, who knows how the legislature will respond. We’re not ready for change, but politics may force the hand.

Kathy’s One Good Question:  When are we really going to make the hard decisions about quality? We have had aggressive expansion and replication of homegrown CMOs and lots of discourse about market share, but it’s been at the expense of quality seats for every child.Back to my meeting about Camden, I want to know why aren’t there more women CMO leaders and superintendents? There are women running amazing schools, districts, CMOs who are waiting to expand until they reach perfection, while their male counterparts are growing mediocrity.

Kathy Padian has more than twenty years of experience in the field of K-12 public education from her start as a classroom teacher to the executive management of schools, non-profit and philanthropic organizations. She is Former Deputy Superintendent at Orleans Parish School Board and is now senior partner at TenSquare focused on improving charter school quality throughout the U.S.; based in D.C. & NOLA.  She is thrilled to be the mother of an energetic 7 year old and to serve as a founding Float Lieutenant in the Krewe of Nyx (the largest all female parading Krewe in Mardi Gras history). Background on NOLA schools 2005-2015

One Good Question with John Wood: Teaching the world to read

John Wood photo

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?”

Room to Read was founded 15 years ago as a little unknown startup.  We boil our belief down to six simple words : World change starts with educated children. We truly believe that if you want to change the future, the biggest no brainer in the world, you start with educating your children. Traditionally, for parents, that means your own children. Those who have been given the gift of education then have an obligation to give back to kids in low-income countries.  We have a duty to give back and an opportunity to change things forever.  We all have an ancestor who was the one to break the cycle of poverty for our family.  Once that cycle is broken, the benefit pays forward for generations. To me, you look at the world today with over 100,000,000 children not in schools, and 2/3 are girls and women.  If you want to change the world, then education is the smartest place to start.

“Literacy and primary education have dramatic positive impact on life expectancy, overall health, and ending cycle of extreme poverty in developing nations.  Beyond making books and reading accessible, the Room to Read model has created complex local education ecosystems that are highly responsive to local needs.  What else does the ecosystem need to be sustainable for all children?”

One of the most important things is that the communities we work with are fully invested in each and every project that we do.  It’s not plunking something down for them to use, but co-building something the community is co-invested in.  We also need the government to be co-invested in the projects and have some skin in the game as well.  Our model is one of local employees, it’s not Americans flying over to do durable projects and telling local people what to do.  It’s local community buy-in as employees, volunteers, parents in the planning committee, and then the government providing the teachers and the librarians and paying their salaries.  As a result of that ecosystem, and we have the data to prove it, the model is more sustainable over time.

“How are you getting government engagement ? What strategies could other international education NGOs adopt?”

For us, we had to prove that we had a scalable model.  Government doesn’t want to work with an NGO unless they have a big vision, a scalable model, resources, and can impact serious scale.  That’s what we’ve been able to deliver with the governments.  Too many folks want to do one-off projects.  What we’re saying is that we can invest impact change at the town, region, even national level.

John's One Good Question: My question is simple.  If we know that education is the best way to change the future, and to impact subsequent generations, then why is the world not doing more about the fact that over 750 million people lack basic literacy?

John Wood is the founder of Room to Read. He started Room to Read after a fast-paced and distinguished career with Microsoft from 1991 to 1999. He was in charge of marketing and business development teams throughout Asia, including serving as director of business development for the Greater China region and as director of marketing for the Asia-Pacific region. John continues to bring Room to Read a vision for a scalable solution to developing global educational problems with an intense focus on results and an ability to attract a world-class group of employees, volunteers, and funders. Today, John focuses full-time on long-term strategy, capital acquisition, public speaking, and media opportunities for the organization. John also teaches at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and New York University’s Stern School of Business and serves on the Advisory Board of the Clinton Global Initiative. John holds a bachelor's degree in finance from the University of Colorado and a master’s degree from the Kellogg School of Northwestern University. Follow John on Twitter @JohnWoodRtR.

One Good Question with Mike DeGraff: Are Schools Destroying the Maker Movement?

Mike DeGraff

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?”’

There was a call for 100,000 STEM teachers in the US, and since then there have been tons of initiatives, and related funding, to respond to the need (some say too much).  UTEACH is a very constructivist-oriented teacher education program for STEM teachers, that began at  UT Austin and has spread across the country.  Then we saw the launch of Maker Faire™ to showcase STEAM design in informal learning space.  When I went to my first faire 3-4 years ago, I was amazed that there wasn’t tighter articulation between schools, teacher education programs, and what’s going on in this sector.

In schools, "making" is mostly robotics, especially at the secondary level.  School libraries may have makerspaces that are more diverse, but there’s very little happening in teacher preparation for how we prepare teachers for these spaces that are proliferating. No two people have the same vision for what you mean when you say makerspace. Whenever you talk about this, it’s so easy to get excited about the 3D printer, laser cutter and other specific tools.  At UTeach, we’re more interested in how it transforms what kids are able to do and how teachers are empowered to teach differently.  Not to dismiss the tools, but ultimately, what’s so exciting about all of this stuff is how it connects to this lineage of progressive education dating back to Dewey and meaningful, authentic, relevant work.  That’s what’s so powerful to me about this whole maker movement.  It really champions student voice in a way that I don’t see in any other movement/innovation/fad.  How can we replicate that for every kid?  One of the biggest hurdles in education and industry is to get kids curious.  Makerspaces can get them to a point where they can start wondering.

The maker world and project-based formal education don’t seem to respect each other enough.  The maker world which is super auto-didactic, self-sufficient, diy, vibrant and very curious. The maker world sentiment is that schools are going to destroy the maker movement by embracing it and standardizing it.  It’s not an unfounded fear.  Look at the computer labs in the 90s.  The way that education works is in compartmentalizing.  My biggest fear is that it becomes a space where you go and do « making » for an hour completely separated from (or only superficially connected to) science, math, language arts, literature, art, etc.

The formal education world is coming from a perspective that we’ve been doing « making » well before Maker Faire started in 2006, but have called it other things like project-based instruction.  Colleges of Education see the value in makerspaces, but in public education we have to focus on serving every kid.  While the Maker Education Initiative motto is « every kid a maker » colleges of education and educators in general are asking what do we do with kids who aren’t motivated by blinking a light or don’t identify with the notion of making? How does PD play out in these different areas and what does it look like as these spaces develop?

“Do you think that schools/universities would be adopting Makers Spaces if it wasn’t tied to funding?”

These spaces have always existed in universities, but they used to be highly articulated with coursework. Making in a university is usually housed in the college of engineering, which makes sense for digital fabrication and electronics.  You were typically a junior before you got to that level of coursework and only accessed the equipment for specific, course related projects. If you talk to industry, a big complaint is that universities are producing engineering graduates who can calculate, but can’t use a screwdriver and a hammer or connect that academic experience to the real world.

A makerspace is more similar to a library type model so it’s open and you can go in and make when/what you want.  UT opened a Longhorn Maker Studio and when I went there in November it was full of kids making Christmas presents (like ornaments, a picture frame, and other highly personal artifacts).  There’s a lot of class projects, but it’s more about figuring out what they can do with it.  That’s what’s exciting.

Something that I see as very similar to the makerspace idea in the College of Science is open inquiry where students choose what they want to learn more about, design an experiment, and analyze results. In UTeach, one of the nine courses is totally dedicated to this process. Instructors have noticed that the hardest part of the process is to get students to become curious.  Get students to develop their own questions that can be addressed by experiments.  In education, we have identified content, but the gap is how we inspire students to be curious and engaged and motivated and passionate.  It’s so well connected in general to how we get students to think and be self-motivated and have internal drive.

“One could argue that Makers spaces are going the way of MOOCs — only reinforcing the privilege and access of middle-class paradigms and still largely unused in lower-income/marginalized communities.  If we really belief that Makers spaces improve creativity, critical thinking and STEM, what will it take for the movement to reach a more diverse audience?”

Why I see maker movement as being fundamentally different, is that I see it as hitting on different things, namely on student motivation and constructivist education, with what we know about how students learn best, project-based instruction, and the evolution of progressive education.  At the UTeach conference last May, we had several sessions about making in the classroom. It’s important for us is to embed this into regular coursework.  Right now, a lot of the robotics and electives are afterschool activities, but in order for this to be truly democratized, we have to make it part of our classes—science and math that every kid takes.  NGSS and CCSS math standards demonstrate value for persistent problem solvers, design cycle and implementing inquiry. Makerspaces can support these standards for all students.

As part of the maker strand at our UTeach conference Leah Buechley gave the plenary talk contrasting mainstream maker approaches with tools and techniques designed to support diversity and equality.”  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. We’re already seeing that the demographics of youth-serving maker spaces are much more diverse than that of Maker Faire.

Mike’s One Good Question: How can we use this space to address community needs ? What we’re doing is making things, but why are we making them?

Michael DeGraff is the Instructional Program Coordinator at the UTeach Institute. His work includes coordinating the Instruction Program Review process for all UTeach Partner Sites as well as supporting instructors to implement the nine UTeach courses.Michael has been a part of UTeach since 2001, first as an undergraduate student at UT Austin (BA Mathematics with Secondary Teaching Option, 2005), then as a graduate student (MA Mathematics Education, 2007), and finally as a Master Teacher with UKanTeach at the University of Kansas. He was also instrumental in launching Austin Maker Education.

One Good Question with Tom Vander Ark: Can Design Thinking & Rethinking Scale Boost Ed Equity?

Tom Vander Ark

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?”

We’ve inherited a sedimentary system made up of a series of 100 years of laws and policies and practices that for us in the US are federal, state, and local.  This is in contrast to an engineered system designed to produce a set of outcomes.  So, that’s the first problem: our investments, speaking about our public education system writ large, is this product of a democratic process, and not a design system.  It’s many and mixed intentions, it’s compromises both good and bad, it’s consequences both intended and unintended, working itself out over time.

The US has a number of anachronistic fixations with local control and reliable and valid assessments.  This fixation has the advantage of vesting investments closest to the kids, but the disadvantage of it is linking it to community wealth.  This is a great example of a well-intentioned design principle that has produced outrageous inequities in US education.  Education funding and, to some extent, quality are now zip code specific because we vested power in local governments.When Arne Duncan announced his departure as Secretary of Education, I wrote a blog post suggesting that we mark that day as the end of standards based reform.  From Dick Reilly to Arne Duncan, we had an unusual 20-year arc in the US, where federal government had unusually strong influence from a policy (NCLB) and investment standpoint (AARA, Race to the TOP).  It was a great moment in US education that marked a national, bipartisan consensus for equity.  As a country, we could no longer sit by and accept chronic failure for our nation’s children.

NCLB was designed as a framework for school accountability to make sure that every family had access to good educational options.  In retrospect, almost everyone agrees that the steps and measures used were flawed, but if we had used an iterative development process -- kept what was good and fixed the obvious problem -- the country would be in a better place.   One of the problems with NCLB, was that when faced with a choice between measuring proficiency or measuring growth, we latched on to proficiency because it was easy to measure with valid assessments.  We largely ignored growth in the law and now we can see the consequences of it.  NCLB had a strong focus on getting underperforming kids to grade level which created two unintended consequences: discouraged schools from teaching students who were furthest behind (over age, undercredited), and weaker administrators fixated on the test.  Rather than offering a rich, full, inspiring education, they offered test prep.  Not only did that not produce lasting academic results for kids, it led to educators trying to game the test, with examples of cheating and embezzlement in the worst cases.

“In the past few years we’ve seen funders, media, and eventually schools rally around the next big tech innovation (1:1, MOOC, coding, etc).  How much does the next big tool matter for lasting academic outcomes for all students?”

The reason that I’m so passionate about public education and investment in innovation is because I think that it’s the fastest path to quality and access to quality in the US and internationally.  In my previous Ed Reformer blog, I wrote about education reform, making the system that we have better.   Getting Smart reflects the new imperative, for every family and neighborhood around the world, to get smart fast.   Innovation is critically important to improving access and quality.  It’s why I’m really optimistic that things will get better, faster in the US and accelerate international change as well.In the US, innovation investment allows us a design opportunity.  The design experience that I’m most passionate about, is people who are conceptualizing LX+IT (learner experience + integrated information technology).  They’re not just developing new school models but also integrating information systems and student access devices. 

We’re still in the early innings now of new tools and new schools. There are thousands of good new schools, but there are only dozens of schools that are doing this fundamental design work of reconceptualizing learning environments and learning sequences and the tools that go with it.  This is the opportunity of our time: to find ways to scale both the work and the number of folks benefitting from it worldwide.Internationally, we have the first chance in history to offer every young person on the planet a great education. When we first started investing in scalable models in the US, funders and founders had grand ambitions that assumed linear replication.  Over time, we’ve learned that scaling nationally or internationally is much harder than maintaining strong regional programs and outcomes.   We’re starting to see a shift in replication and inspiration across geographies.  Take Rocketship for example.  They run an amazing model that everyone has flocked to see in the past few years.  Among the visitors, were two young MBAs from Johannesburg, who took the lessons learned from Rocketship and created SPARK Schools ins Johannesburg.  SPARK is as good a blended learning model as I’ve seen anywhere on the planet.  Rocketship didn’t have to cross the ocean for that to happen and now students in South Africa are benefitting from a model that was created in the US.Summit Public Schools has taken a different approach to scaling ideas before scaling schools.   This year they have about 19 school partners with their Basecamp model and next year it might be 10 times as many.  They have created a powerful Personalized Learning Platform, partnered with Facebook and Stanford to figure out how to scale it broader use, and now team with schools across the country to implement this pedagogy into existing models.  We hope that hundreds of schools benefit from their fundamental design work.  Seeing these types of growth gives me a tremendous sense of optimism that things can get better worldwide faster than most people realize.

Tom’s One Good Question:  Will we actually achieve equitable education access?  I’m concerned that things will get better faster for young people who have engaged and supportive adults in their lives.  I’m worried about young people that don’t have engaged parents/adults in their lives. Parents who get powerful learning are raising confident, equipped  well-informed young people.

Tom Vander Ark is author of Getting Smart: How Digital Learning is Changing the World, Smart Cities That Work for Everyone: 7 Keys to Education & Employment and Smart Parents: Parenting for Powerful Learning. He is CEO of Getting Smart, a learning design firm and a partner in Learn Capital, an education venture capital firm. Previously he served as the first Executive Director of Education for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Tom served as a public school superintendent in Washington State and has extensive private sector experience including serving as a senior executive for a national public retail chain.

One Good Question with Susan Baragwanath: The Only Way to Break Cycle of Poverty.

Susan-Baragwanath-New

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?”

I have never been into deep thinking on education and I am not much of a philosopher. As a practitioner for 37 years I saw immense change from rote learning to the touch of an iPad. Show me a young person who knows the times tables and can write a sentence in the imperfect tense? But does it matter when they can use a calculator and Google ? As a teacher I have always felt it was  my duty to challenge a student to believe that they could do anything they wanted. It was up to me to provide the mechanism so they could achieve to the best of their ability. But now, in the 21st century, what mechanism is it exactly?

There has been huge investment in technology in recent years. This has facilitated both teaching and learning in ways that we previously couldn’t imagine. The change is so dramatic that the traditional teacher now struggles to keep up.  We used to joke we needed to be ‘a page ahead of the kids’. Now the joke is on us. Older teachers, with all their wisdom, are so many volumes behind social media, fantasy games, apps etc etc they will never catch up. I see colleagues still trying to put coins into parking meters while a kid is paying with his smartphone.

Many countries have national curriculums and the Education Ministries are given a sum which is then passed on down the line eventually ending up in a school for implementation.  Those curriculums which were once worked on by very clever and sophisticated people are now struggling in this technological world.  Change can be slow and national curriculums can easily end up a dinosaur in their relevance to the next generation. But yet the poor teacher has to implement it and will have a performance review based upon it and may be under the regime of merit pay.

Perhaps we should distinguish between policy and law.   The law in most countries is that every child is entitled to basic formal education for a number of years. But government policies create inequities in implementation of those laws. It can also depend on who is in power at the time and if they allow policy to take over. Most countries manage to run reasonable schooling systems within the constraints of bureaucracies.   But one terrible example of a country that doesn’t [run a reasonable schooling system] is  Yemen. Pre-1994, they had a half decent school system left over from the British.  But then the President of the day said that young people didn’t have to go to school anymore. In other words basic formal education was ‘off’. One of the results is that the Yemen is the most dangerous and shambolic country on earth. Young people who should have had the benefit of a basic formal education now appear on our TV screens wielding guns and chopping off peoples heads.If we don't believe in investment  and follow the law and make sure our teachers are given every assistance possible to be up with the play in the digital world, then we should remember the example of extreme and utter chaos of the Yemen, because it can get that bad.

“We have so many marginalized youth (teen parents, adjudicated youth, etc) who need different supports to access mainstream culture in order to break the cycle of poverty.  What role can education — in and out of school — play to support them?”

In my experience the only way to actually bring a marginalized young person out of the cycle of poverty they live in, is to provide wraparound services via the school.  In one college where I worked (the poorest in NZ with the highest Pacifika population at the time) we tried all manner of things to improve educational achievement.  Most of it didn’t work because students came to school hungry and there was no government sponsored food program. You cannot teach a hungry child. The family would often be in crisis and children were regularly bashed up by angry  or drunk parents who had no work. Communicable diseases (yes, even in beautiful, peaceful New Zealand) was rife.  Scabies, boils, rheumatic fever, tuberculosis – I saw it all. Try to teach a troubled child from that background the history of the Tudors. You may as well bark against thunder.

In this extreme case, food, pastoral care, health care and education in that order became a solution to the problem of marginalized youth. It sounds easy, but I received a letter from the Minister of Education forbidding (strong word that) me to pay for food out of the ‘education’ budget. I was publically scolded by officials from the Department of Health for ‘making a scene’ over a scabies outbreak affecting 70% of the 800 students as they said that ‘scabies didn’t happen in winter’.  It most certainly did as I and other teachers got it. It became so bad (many students became infected and hospitalized) they considered calling in the military. The blind eye approach to ‘no scabies in winter’ cost the country buckets of money to get it under control. It was real head in the sand stuff. I solved the pastoral care problem by hiring retirees who were not brain dead at 65 but tired of classrooms full of kids who were too distressed to learn anything.

Eventually in my own little world I managed to shame, cajole, shout, stamp etc and I got all those things above that broke the cycle.  It took me ten very long years and I probably neglected a lot of other things including my own children (who thankfully have grown up into amazing adults) but you need to ask the question – why did it have to be so difficult and take so long ?

Once you get over that, education is filling that enquiring mind.  And it is a joy to see the fruits of your labour.

Susan’s One Good Question :  I am still thinking about it!

Dr. Susan Baragwanath works as an independent consultant. She was a career secondary school teacher and administrator who taught internationally. Dr. Baragwanath is the founder of He Huarahi Tamariki Schools, Maori for ‘a chance for children’. Her program plan was to provide basic formal education and training for teen parents to graduate from high school. These include high quality pre-schools. The highly acclaimed schools were honored and became models, replicated in more than 50 locations around New Zealand.

One Good Question with Susanna Williams: Is Higher Ed the Equalizer We Think?

Susanna Williams

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?”

Higher education has seen wholesale disinvestment since 2008.  The majority of students in our country attend public universities, and 26% attend community colleges.   Liberal arts & research institutions serve a very small population of US students, and their funding challenges are unique.  As the economy has recovered, the funding has not returned to state-funded higher education.  Part of this is a function of discretionary spending at the state level because very little funding comes from federal government.  Most states have mandated spending that has to be accounted for, but higher education is one of the few discretionary lines, so states tend to turn to the public universities and say «  charge more tuition. »  At the same time as tuition is increasing, we’re getting the message that the full pathway to life is through college attainment.  Universities are then seeking outside students—foreign nationals and out-of state students who will pay the sticker price for tuition as opposed to the in-state rates.  So there are fewer seats available for lower-income applicants.

Employers then use the college name as a basis for hiring. So community college students are at a disadvantage on the hiring market, unless they are health care assistants, and the hospital has a relationship with their specific college program.  Connections become pathways to employment and prosperity.

When we do not fund quality education, yet hold people’s lives accountable as though they have received that education, we’re actually saying that we don’t believe that education is something that everyone in our country should have equal access to. And we’re ok with some people being poor and we’re ok with some people not having access to opportunity.

“How did the funding become discretionary?”

Higher education and public policy hasn’t caught up with modern times.  When state constitutions were written, basic education was just K-12 through the 1970s.  At that time, you could get a great manufacturing job or vocational training and make solid money. Then the world changed. The only thing slower to change than education is government.  There is a strong case for community colleges to be a part of basic education and should be included as K-14 education.  The State of Washington’s constitution’s first prioirity is to fully fund basic education, but they’re not meeting basic expectations.  Look at funding formulas driven by property taxes and tax code and no one wants to tackle the tax code.  It’s not sexy and doesn’t win you elections.

“Who’s actually having this conversation?” 

I’m not sure people are connecting the dots.  The only way it’s happening is through lawsuits over K-12 education.  State legislatures have been held in contempt of court because they haven’t figured it out.   That’s another conversation that we don’t want to have.  What is it that families do?   We need to be asking what does it actually cost to educate a child who does not grow up with the benefit of house with books, afterschool curriculum, print-rich nursery school environment?  What does a middle class child have as ancillary benefits?  What are the habits that their families inculcate and the culture that they grow up in? How can we provide those standards for all children?

“In our analog/digital divide, higher ed institutions are working feverishly to incorporate new tech tools and communication paradigms into their pedagogy and engagement.  Do the tools really matter for this generation?  How should post-secondary institutions position themselves for responsive/inclusive engagement?”

With respect to the founding of higher education in Europe, the primary function was to train priests.  Higher education today retains the vestiges of that holy process.  It is serious and magical and spiritual, and you can’t touch that or dirty that with technology and money is the worst kind of profanity.  People keep calling for the end of college.  Colorado had a major freakout about MOOCS, which challenges the delivery of higher education.  I think there’s a big disruption coming.  Competency-based education is going to shift the paradigm and project based learning will change instructional practice.  Badges of proficiency will change that option.  When we remove the Carnegie credit hour and let students show what they can do, then we no longer need to have institutions as arbitors of confidence.

We say that institution and pedigree matters, yet people still hire based on who they know and how comfortable they feel with that person.  Take the example of The Wire and the network of the dealers on the street.  That show demonstrates that networks are equally powerful in dark economy and formal economy. Our challenge is to figure out how to teach and give networks to other people.  If you win the lottery and leave East Flatbush, and make it to the Ivy’s, there’s no guarantee that you will be able to access the network of the Ivy League.  Again, this assumes that access and equity are goals of education.   There’s a big divide in education philosophy between those who are warriors for justice through education and those who are gatekeeprs to keep marginalized people out of power structures.  I forget that others use education as a sorting tool.

Susanna’s One Good Question: How do we effectively move people to opportunity in our country, if we don’t agree that everyone should have opportunity?

Founder & CEO of BridgEd Strategies, is a lifelong educator and communications specialist with over 15 years of experience as a teacher, administrator, and strategic leader in K-12, higher education, and the philanthropic sector as well as political campaigns. Susanna led marketing, communications, and government relations at Renton Technical College, while also serving as the executive director of the Renton Technical College Foundation. She joined the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's Postsecondary Success team in 2012 after connecting with the director through a blind message on LinkedIn. Active on Twitter since 2009, Susanna is a strong advocate for the power of social media and the power of networks. A 2011 German Marshall Memorial Fellow, Susanna received a Masters in Education from Bank Street College of Education and a Bachelors in Politics from Earlham College. She lives in her home borough of Brooklyn, New York.

One Good Question with J.B. Schramm: Is College Still Relevant?

J.B. Schramm

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?”

Every school success paradigm I’ve seen involves similar components: excellent educators, school leaders, data and measurement, standards, etc.—but what you never see is “students” as part of the solution.  We have this sense that students are vessels into which education is to be poured.  In order to move forward in our communities, we need young people from our communities to take charge.   They need to have confidence and be equipped as critical thinkers, problem solvers, strategists, and risk takers.  They need the motivation to challenge power structures and be problem solvers in the broader community. We don’t win, and our nation doesn’t become a more just place, simply by informing students. We need to offer them the responsibility to take charge of their education and future.The fact is, young people are most influenced by their peers.  Young people today are taking responsibility for more and more parts of their lives, either because adults are abnegating obligations, or because technology is giving youth more opportunity to control their own communication and networks.  Young people influence young people, tremendously.  We are missing a huge opportunity when we define students as the objects of education.  The key that we need in our investments is to show that young people can be drivers of their education.  They can take charge of improving achievement in their schools.  The paradigm changes when you start with the premise that the young people are on your side, that they can be driving education gains not only for themselves but also for their classmates.I learned these lessons working at College Summit, the nonprofit championing student-driven college success.  They coined the phrase #PeerForward, which means to find and train a community’s most influential students in college access and leadership so that they run campaigns with their peers to file FAFSA, apply to college, and explore careers.  In this model, the peers are owning the outcomes, not just following adult voice.  That’s a very powerful model.  We all care more when we own something. When you’re talking about under-resourced institutions, the most powerful resource that schools need is already there in abundance – the students!! They can solve their problems. They want to achieve and they want to be challenged.  For teenagers especially, just when they are hungry for greater challenge, we so often keep them in the same sort of structure as elementary school.  Let’s take off the training wheels and give them the chance to take on bigger challenges.

“Given all of the contemporary discourse about the ways that traditional K-12 education is not preparing students for the new global economy, is college still relevant?”

A year ago, I co-authored a white paper with Andy Rotherham and Chad Aldeman that outlines today’s post-secondary paradox.  On the one hand, college is more valuable than ever. In immediate term the wage premium is about 70%, the highest it’s ever been.  From a medium term perspective, the number of jobs requiring postsecondary education is climbing. Today, just 45% of Americans have a post-secondary degree, and by 2025, 65% of jobs will require one.  If you want to be in the running for that set of jobs, education beyond high school is essential. (For more information, see Lumina Foundation’sA Stronger Nation report.)At the same time, college is riskier than ever, with historic debt loads, and employers questioning the value of many postsecondary programs.So how can students handle the post-secondary paradox? Young people need to be smart shoppers about their post-secondary education. You can no longer blindly get a degree from anywhere. Some colleges do a much better job of educating and graduating students than others; plus students need to navigate a wider array of options for quality postsecondary education today. You can no longer meander across majors, without considering career goals. That’s not to say students should lock into a career path in 9th grade. Teens are not going to all of a sudden know what they will want to do in 20 years; data suggests that they change jobs even more frequently than previous generations. Students benefit when they consider careers that interest them, and the economic potential of those fields, and then thoughtfully explore them.As smart shoppers, students can consider which range of careers intrigue them, which postsecondary programs will get them on the right path, and which institutions most effectively graduate students from similar backgrounds.  Unfortunately due to budget crunches, school districts are dedicating fewer and fewer resources for college and career planning. Just as the postsecondary paradox leaves students more in need of college-going know-how than ever before. Not surprisingly, college-going rates are down, especially for low-income students.

Students, parents and community organizations need to step up, help schools prioritize college and career planning, and access the resources—including influential students, recent college grads, and volunteer mentors — close at hand. (Check out: College Advising Corps, College Possible, and iMentor)The need for postsecondary education, and in fact deeper postsecondary education, becomes more pronounced the farther out we look. Some labor theorists predict we’re on the verge of the greatest workforce shift since the Industrial Revolution. Over the next few decades, large employment sectors will disappear, they say, due to automation, robotics, artificial intelligence, etc.  How can we prepare for a world like that?  I think we need to be skeptical of hyper-focusing on training students for what the job market requires right now.  Narrowly directing students to fill today’s job gaps may lead to employment and aid certain industries in the short term, but it’s not in the service of our kids, nation or industry in the long term. Rather, we need to raise the conversation about the future of work with students, employers, education innovators, and technologists. Also, I believe it’s a smart bet that this brave new world will favor people who can lead, create, problem solve, work in teams, and persevere. We call those attributes Power Skills. These are the skills employers cite today as being most in demand.  The most effective colleges develop Power Skills well, as do challenging work experiences, and demanding community service work—for example, we have seen Power Skills develop in College Summit Peer Leaders running peer campaigns in their high schools. For America to prosper relative to advancing economies around the world, we need to develop this kind of deeper learning in all students, in every corner of our nation. The question isn’t “whether” postsecondary education. It’s which kind of postsecondary education. Now is not the moment to soften ambitions, especially for students from low-income and under-represented communities climbing uphill. Nor is it time to resign ourselves to status quo postsecondary education.  We need to challenge our students, educators, employers and technologists to stretch, figuring out better ways for students to learn and take charge of their future.

J.B.’s One Good Question:  How can young people drive their education and improve student achievement in their communities?

J.B. Schramm chairs the Learn to Earn initiative at New Profit, a venture philanthropy and social innovation organization that provides funding and strategic support to help the most promising social innovations achieve scale. J.B. leads the organization’s ecosystem innovation work for college access, postsecondary education and career, helping colleagues in the field equip 10+M more Americans for career success by 2025.

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

Tony Monfiletto

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?”

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.