One Good Question

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2/7/17 2/7/17

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1/10/17 1/10/17

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

Ben Nelson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

11/29/16 11/29/16

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

11/8/16 11/8/16

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

Anna Hall

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

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

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

“Why does equity matter in school design?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

10/11/16 10/11/16

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

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

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

“How does that level of engagement start?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

9/6/16 9/6/16

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

8/23/16 8/23/16

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2/9/16 2/9/16

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

“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.

1/12/16 1/12/16

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

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

Our investment in accountability structure and high-stakes standardized testing reveals the fact that adults think of kids as problems to be solved, rather than assets to be nurtured. In Jal Mehta’s, The Allure of Order, he outlines how the investment in accountability at the back end of the system is an effort to make up for the fact that we haven’t invested as aggressively in the front end. We don’t put enough time, energy or strategy into good school design, preparation of teachers, or capital development. Because we don’t put enough resources into those areas, we try to make up for it in accountability structures.

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

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

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

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

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

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