Bringing High Expectations Back to Education

Summary

Steven Wilson, renowned educational leader, asserts the importance of reinstating rigorous academic standards in all schools, particularly in urban settings. Drawing from his experiences with charter schools, Wilson critiques contemporary education trends that prioritize social justice over academic excellence, resulting in diminished learning outcomes. He champions a liberal arts education for all, emphasizing the need for high expectations and an intellectually enriching curriculum. The discussion delves into the history of education reform, exposes challenges posed by societal trends, and advocates for a return to proven teaching methodologies focused on student success.

Highlights

• Steven Wilson critiques modern educational trends undermining academic excellence. ❌
• Wilson advocates for a return to rigorous liberal arts education. 📘
• Discussion on the importance of high expectations in schools. 🎯
• Criticism of how social justice movements have impacted education priorities. ⚖️
• Insights from successful charter school models in urban areas. 🏫

Key Takeaways

• Embrace a rigorous liberal arts education for all children to elevate learning outcomes. 🎓
• Reject the dilution of academic standards in the name of social justice. 🚫
• Recognize the successful models of urban charter schools in closing achievement gaps. 🏆
• Reinstate high expectations and structured environments in classrooms. 📚
• Foster intellectual curiosity and reasoned debates over ideological conformity. 🤔

Overview

In a stirring discussion at the American Enterprise Institute, Steven Wilson, a stalwart in education reform, brings a crucial message to the forefront: the necessity of reinstating high academic standards across all schools, with a particular emphasis on urban charter schools. Wilson’s commitment to the liberal arts as a foundation for a rich educational experience is unwavering, even as contemporary education trends threaten to dilute such standards under the guise of social justice and therapeutic education.

Wilson's discourse draws upon the successes of the Massachusetts education reform and the significance of the 'no-excuses' charter schools that have historically bridged the achievement gap for minority and low-income students. He argues that the recent shift towards prioritizing therapeutic interventions and identity politics in the curriculum has weakened the educational structure, advocating instead for a knowledge-rich curriculum that encourages intellectual joy and academic rigor.

Panelists join Wilson in reflecting on the challenges faced by educators today, including the ideological struggles within teaching faculties and pressures from funding bodies. The session ultimately calls for a renaissance in education, where learning is driven by curiosity and high expectations rather than conformity and lowered standards, urging a collective return to practices that unequivocally benefit student achievement.

Bringing High Expectations Back to Education Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 good afternoon I'm Robert pesio a senior fellow here at AEI and the James Q Wilson program in K12 education studies thank you for joining us for this event bringing high expectations back to education and I want to thank in particular The forom Institute and the progressive policy Institute for partnering with AI on on today's event let's begin uh it is an honor to introduce stepen Wilson a truly courageous and vision leader in
• 00:30 - 01:00 education for more than three decades Steven has dedicated his career to a fundamental question can we provide a rich and engaging liberal arts education the kind long afforded to Children of privilege to all children Steven's Journey began long before the Contemporary debates over charter schools and so-called no excuses models his work in the early 1990s helped shape the landmark 1993 Massachusetts education reform form act and he later
• 01:00 - 01:30 chaired the board of building Excellence schools an organization that launched some of the highest performing charter schools in America but it was his time as the CEO of the Ascend network of charter schools in Brooklyn where the question of high expectations in education was put to its most rigorous test Ascend schools gain National recognition for their remarkable success in closing the achievement Gap under Stevens's leadership asend students
• 01:30 - 02:00 predominantly lowincome students of color outperformed their peers across the city and state while immersed in a curriculum that included Shakespeare audin the Dutch Masters and so on however Steven's commitment to an academically rigorous knowledge-rich education led to his very public dismissal from Ascend in the wake of a controversy over a blog post in which he critiqued contemporary education Trends and education that he saw as undermining
• 02:00 - 02:30 the pursuit of academic excellence in an article about his defenestration the New York Times asked and I quote was it a racially dubious blog post or did a charter school board seize a chance to get rid of an arrogant autocrat more on that in a moment rather than Retreat Steven has transformed his experience into a powerful book to be published early next year tedly titled the Lost decade returning to the fight for better
• 02:30 - 03:00 schools in America I've had the privilege to read the manuscript in draft form and it is masterful Wilson explores the century-long struggle to bring a highquality liberal arts education to all students and exposes that's not the right word he eviscerates the intellectual and moral evasions that have hampered that critical quest in his book Steven argues that the current focus on therapeutic education and identity politics has come at the
• 03:00 - 03:30 expense of academic rigor and intellectual Joy particularly for low-income students and minority students he contends that these evasions as he calls them while well- intended ultimately fail to serve the very students they aim to help his book is a call to action a challenge to return to what we know Works in education when the times asked rhetorically if Steven was dismissed over a racially dubious blog post or
• 03:30 - 04:00 because he was an arrogant autocrat let the record show that the correct answer is neither he was fired for daring to be a voice of courage and conviction in a time when too many were afraid to speak out or were cowed into submission by what my colleagues Rick Hess and Grant Addison described four years ago as quote an incoherent illiberal agenda and a misguided assault on the very mores and habits of mind that undergird Liberty
• 04:00 - 04:30 equality and healthy communities it is my honor to welcome Steven Wilson to the stage today to share his vision for bringing high expectations back to education a vision that I know is shared by all of us by all of our distinguished panelists who you will meet in a moment but first ladies and gentlemen Steph Wilson thank [Applause] you Robert thank you for that super generous introduction I'm delighted to
• 04:30 - 05:00 be here today uh I'm going to jump right in because we have to be very careful about time assuming that this works yes I would like to begin by uh going back a century and a quarter and just Galloping through the last century because I think it's important to set the stage for what follows later Charles Elliott the president of Harvard LED in the late uh 19 1800s a committee of 10 to define the future of secondary education in America
• 05:00 - 05:30 at a time when uh very few people were going to high school and the report argued that every student should be trained in the powers of observation memory expression and reasoning which would prepare students equally for the duties of Life As for college so this is an extraordinary statement you'll see here that every subject he says which is taught at all in a secondary school should be taught in the same way and to the same extent to every student no
• 05:30 - 06:00 matter what the probable destination of the pupil may be the career going to college Etc the committee was proposing a liberal arts education for all children and at the turn of the 20th century the ideals of liberal education seem to be widely held but in 1904 the psychologist G Stanley Hall who was a Relentless critic of this report decried its quote extraordinary fallacies especially that all students should be
• 06:00 - 06:30 taught the same curriculum he said most students were part of a great Army of incapa bles who should be in schools for dards or subnormal children Elliot shot right back though he said the number of Inc capables was but an insignificant proportion of school children who are we to decide what each will become quote who are we to make these prophecies the new education fat of
• 06:30 - 07:00 course is the answer it was exactly that sorting that it soon proposed and Elliot's vision of a liberal education was forgotten there's Lewis Turman a leading education psychologist and eugenicist who in 1916 developed test to quote scientifically identify a child's fixed potential they're still for sale today by the way most immigrants he said tested at quote borderline moranti and are large
• 07:00 - 07:30 uneducable then go forward a couple of decades and you get to the life adjustment movement that claimed that only 20% of young people were suited to academic studies 60% should go to classes in dating and health and so on and life educator decried that they were still lingering College standards in high schools and then we come to the 1970s now it's no longer the the schools that are sorting students because the students conveniently do it for themselves
• 07:30 - 08:00 most students searched for bargains courses that kept them on track to graduate but demanded little of them but America awakened to the conditions of the schools with its with the bombshell 1983 report that we're all so familiar with a nation at risk it found that 40% of minority youth were functionally illiterate we have a cafeteria style curriculum in which the appetizers and desserts can easily be mistaken for the main courses
• 08:00 - 08:30 so the educational excellent movement was born Then Came Of course the standards of account standards and accountability movement culminating in the No Child Left Behind Act and two days later two decades later not two days uh education reform it is said has failed but I think that obscures striking successes on which we can build the next chapter of Reform the Massachusetts miracle was a comprehensive reform act in
• 08:30 - 09:00 Massachusetts as Robert mentioned passed in 1993 at the time I think we were 35th in SAT scores u in Massachusetts and we then rose on the nape to the top where we have remained I say we because I used to be from Massachusetts uh in every subject since then so we have to ask why did it work there and not other places and I submit to you it comes down to the shared commitments of its four Architects and you look at these guys at
• 09:00 - 09:30 first and yes they're all white men but this was 30 years ago uh they appear to be incredibly different Bill well the Brahman Republican governor who ran against the entrenched state government epitomized by Senate President Bill Bulger who grew up in the projects of South Boston and you have uh Mark Roosevelt the house education chair who ran against Weld and called in these kinds of nasty things and then lastly you have Thomas
• 09:30 - 10:00 Birmingham uh the labor lawyer and Senate chair who grew up in Hard Scrabble Chelsea right next to to Boston but they shared something very important which is that they had all benefited from an exceptional education they knew the opportunities and joys it had afforded them and maybe more importantly they shared a revulsion at the Dismal performance of the state's K12 system and they were determined to correct it
• 10:00 - 10:30 weld announced shortly after the law was signed that Massachusetts would become the highest performing state in the country and a decade later it was so uh in 2006 forom Foundation did a study of the state standards across the states and awarded a Massachusetts the letter grade A in all subjects this was the work of Jim piser who I think is here with us uh so we should acknowledge Jim's remarkable work and Sandra statsky
• 10:30 - 11:00 who developed all of the individual standards and corresponding assessments and the new teacher assessments and so on you know we think of standards as being dry and dull and technocratic look at these if you can read them for myths in middle school they just they bristle with intellectual Joy who would not want to be that student who creates his own Heroes tale with required tasks the interventions of the Gods mythical mon ERS and special clothing that's great
• 11:00 - 11:30 that is intellectual joy and in the first annual administration's administration of the 10th grade exit exam which was tied to getting a diploma more than half of the students failed in the state and again the second year but by the time the test counted failure rates plummeted to 5% students Rose to the occasion they could absolutely do this we raised the bar and they met it it was a Triumph but
• 11:30 - 12:00 there were some problems that remained achievement gaps remained Urban schools have such a different charge and we're not allowed to say this but they do such a different charge from Suburban schools their education effects have to be so much stronger they have to be much better to achieve their purpose which is to free students from poverty and set them on the way to college and Weld and bulr knew that but they weren't able to
• 12:00 - 12:30 win all the reforms necessary to make that happen so jump forward here's Al Shanker the president aft who had a wonderful weekly column I remember this from childhood that ran each Sunday in the times in 1998 he devoted himself to the idea of charter schools which was not his own but he embraced it and he was forthright enough to say that 80% of students were not learning tinkering wouldn't work we needed wholesale reinvention LED by enterprising Ed Educators and it's not going to happen
• 12:30 - 13:00 right away a lot of the early projects He said were going to fail but eventually something would work now this is a classroom in a Brooklyn School in 1990 they are those occasions where words really fail and the picture is stronger this is a PE picture of abject neglect it also shows you that while gangs and crime and violence were
• 13:00 - 13:30 constant threats in urban schools the larger obstacle the larger threat were low-level offenses beers going off desks turned over singing Rude remarks this was misery for students to remain in such a classroom for an entire year and the schools that did succeed came to be known as no excuses schools not contrary to popular perception because they were unforgiving of student Behavior but because they said we as adult adults as professionals are not going to make
• 13:30 - 14:00 excuses for why students aren't learning these were schools that were obsessed with the quality of teaching and instruction they wouldn't make excuses by blaming families not having enough money racism poverty the Litany of explanation that schools and districts had invoked for decades in defense of low achievement they said and this is bracing within these four walls we have everything we need to succeed with every
• 14:00 - 14:30 child we will do whatever it takes to succeed it wasn't going to be one thing there wasn't one thing it was what we call the 100 1% solutions that added up to success you had to attend to each one and if you did you would end up with a gap closing School Brookings called these effects some of the largest effects ever observed in educational
• 14:30 - 15:00 study and Macky Raymond's uh Center for research on education outcomes Credo released just last year its third National study 1.8 million students and it found that in New York City if you were in a CMO and network one school your instruction was so accelerated that you would gain the equivalent of 124 days of additional instruction in math each year and 110 days in Reading versus the average School of 180 days and it
• 15:00 - 15:30 wasn't just a few schools here and there there were now thousands she reported that were successfully closing these gaps the model was successfully scaling and the report lists them Pages like this one Pages after pages of networks that were killing it these organizations together were creating 50,000 new uh seats a year equivalent equivalent to opening a district the size of Boston now look they were far from perfect one
• 15:30 - 16:00 thing that was a definite struggle was that teachers had to inhabit that very difficult space of what we called warm strict warmth uh to students but also an orderly and strict environment that was a hard place to stay in and when teachers screwed up and acted from power and not purpose they wrong their students and betrayed their school's Mission but the successes are extraordinary but then came a new generation of aspiring teachers that are
• 16:00 - 16:30 graduating from colleges with totally different commitments from those of a decade earlier and they brought these values uh to their schools to their Charter and district schools at many universities and colleges liberal education's traditional commitments were losing their Authority unwelcome speech was now violence and an intolerant Orthodoxy had taken whole Michelle fuko's ideas on Power and knowledge with a currency and remain the currency and
• 16:30 - 17:00 all of their different postmodernist adaptations of the humanities and social sciences and in that posture truth is a fantasm there is only Power objectivity and reason are merely instruments of the oppressor there is but my truth and your truth and each of us is forever isolated by our identities at schools of Education meanwhile the dominant text the one that was most often most often
• 17:00 - 17:30 assigned was Polo fr's pedagogy of the oppressed that describes the banking model of Education uh which he condemns as making deposits of oppressor knowledge into his students and in his critical pedagogy students will be awakened to the oppression and join in a overthrow of society which he expected to be violent it's a profoundly anti-intellectual work and it substitute political indoctrination for academic
• 17:30 - 18:00 learning in 2020 the murder of George Floyd by the police led to a national revulsion and the largest protest in American history in the midst of the pandemic the racial Reckoning that followed could have spurred on this transition this transformation of urban education in a drive for educational Equity it could have insisted that we only place before students worthwhile
• 18:00 - 18:30 tasks that are elevated and rigorous and engaging and that had high expectations of what every child could know and do but that's not what happened instead of spurring on this transformation it Arrested it an array of new conceptions rooted in critical theory trauma and foreign pedagogy a culture of student fragility racial essentialism overtook the sector and it was in schools and districts that we saw a radical critique
• 18:30 - 19:00 of schools and society which emphasized racial harm and healing and education was neglected we know that Robin D'Angelo and Ibraham kend's books became bestsellers nationally and had a particularly large following on campus and institutions district schools rushed to declare themselves anti-racist and join in the program of diversity Equity inclusion but the most common texts and this may be less known was written by
• 19:00 - 19:30 teema oakum and is used in virtually every anti-racist training of school and staff here's an illustration of it it's actually the written version is not a whole lot longer than this teachers and leaders learned that objectivity and urgency were symptoms of toxic white supremacy culture which is signified by the vials of toxins in case you missed it it's hard to conjure a more harmful message to Children than to say that objectivity or love of the written word
• 19:30 - 20:00 is whiteness and this launched an ideological Purity spiral in many schools and networks where the professional culture turned ranous long-standing colleagues turned on one another with vicious accusations of racism and the focus on the mission which was to educate was lost here's a school Boston Collegiate a total high flyer 100% of its graduates have been accepted to four-year colleges
• 20:00 - 20:30 since I think 2004 80% go on to graduate look at the results in 2019 way outperforming in math on the mcast the Boston public schools and even the Statewide average and same in math uh an equally striking performance but in 2019 the school hired a director of De Dei she identified four areas of growth for the school staff and they're shown here misir trauma
• 20:30 - 21:00 informed practice colorism and internalized dominance and oppression each staff member was assigned one of these to work on they had a budy who would monitor them uh and so on and so forth uh Affinity groups the history curriculum was decolonized disim practices were overhauled and fifth and sixth graders had to examine the intersection of 10 different identity groups here are the results after the
• 21:00 - 21:30 intervention the results sank now they were not only below the state but they were below the Boston public schools in Charter world the definition of mediocrity is that you do a little better than the district and in math uh also a dramatic tumble or consider Noble a networks of 17 high schools in Chicago in 2015 one of every 10 students in Chicago went to to a noble school and in
• 21:30 - 22:00 2019 uh 10 of the top 12 slots in the city for high schools uh were held by Noble schools here are the results in 2017 you can see the SAT results in math and in ela uh strikingly outperforming uh the city schools uh director of Dei was hired a de eii firm was engaged and the new CEO announced that the network would become
• 22:00 - 22:30 anti-racist it's chaos now one Noble student said I don't think they should have change the rules honestly because there's Ruckus everywhere another said discipline collapse tardy Sky skyrocketed violent screw end results collapsed yes I hear some gasps it's astounding 4% in
• 22:30 - 23:00 math and Ela be a wonderful organization formerly known as building excellent schools trains aspiring Charter School Founders by visiting dozens of exampl schools one former BS fellow founded classical schools in New York it's the highest performing Charter network in the city it now even outperforms the extraordinary Success Academy schools here its results
• 23:00 - 23:30 but after declaring itself anti-racist the DI consultant proposed not that they visit classical schools but that they go to something called roses in concrete Charter School in Oakland California which adhered to F's liberatory learning philosophy that year California found that only 17% of students at this in that school were proficient in ela and 6% in math it wasn't just a bad school
• 23:30 - 24:00 it was one of the very worst in the state and months later the Oakland School Board refused to renew its Charter I think we mock students when we claim to empower them when denying them the tools of influence and these are not isolated incidents in 2019 Oak's document was the centerpiece of a mandatory training for all New York City administrators together respons responsible for educating 1 million
• 24:00 - 24:30 kids so what began to happen is that instead of starting with education Educators instead focused as Robert alluded to on trauma everyone was assumed to have been to have suffered from trauma and the first obligation was to heal the students well first to heal the staff so there was this solipsistic aspect of this and then after that to heal the students and only then would we
• 24:30 - 25:00 get around to actually educating kids and districts and students were urged to lessen their academic expectations rela relaxing lesson rigor easing standards lessoning homework The Savage disparities of race and class worsened and students prospects on graduation dimmed so in here really we have what becomes an inexhaustible excuse because right in the past we said in no excuses
• 25:00 - 25:30 schooling uh that we would not make excuses for low outcomes but the pledge has been revoked because racism is pervasive it's virulent it is everywhere but we can't wait until we have vanquished racism to fix the schools we have to act now and we can see how that plays out in 1848 Horus man the first Secretary of Education in Massachusetts said in this well wellknown quote that education is the
• 25:30 - 26:00 great equalizer of the conditions of men but now Massachusetts Teachers Association president Mary naami says mcast scores mostly measure the impact of structural racism so I think of this as an abdication she's apparently given up on her schools and her students but we haven't and we won't social justice is not the long awaited correction to America's procession of exclusionary
• 26:00 - 26:30 anti-intellectual School reforms it is its apotheosis it will leave students that it aims to help less educated more excluded and more vulnerable and I know that there are folks that want to try to be able to join these things can't we just put them together take no excuses and combine it with social justice education but if you look at this chart I think you'll see that they're fundamentally opposed and that can't be done so we've lost
• 26:30 - 27:00 four years it's time to change course and I think offer every student that engaging liberal arts education an education that arouses curiosity cultivates compassion and upholds reason let's establish a new ethics of care and education that says we've only met this standard of care if instruction is demonstrably effective let's double down on Urban Charter Schools the most successful intervention of the past
• 27:00 - 27:30 Century and not get distracted by new fads which is always happening in education let's venerate knowledge the achievement of humankind across all cultures belongs to our students schools will celebrate and build student knowledge not disain it let's build schools powered by curiosity that great untapped resource in schools today and let's create optimists students who
• 27:30 - 28:00 have the skills agency and optimism to succeed personally but also to contribute to solving the problems their generation will inherit and let's welcome a new generation of fire Brands who will bring the Furious energy and famous impatience that Linda Brown who we recently lost was known for they'll get to work and they'll be formidable and I explore these ideas further in in my new book as Robert mentioned thank
• 28:00 - 28:30 you very much stay up here I'd like now to like to welcome to the stage now Stephanie croi de Garcia and Doug Lov along with Stephen Wilson uh Stephen that was infuriating um for all the right reasons more on that in a moment um let me introduce our
• 28:30 - 29:00 our two uh new guests Stephanie croi de Garcia is the co-founder of Sean education Partners which launches and operates networks of public charter and Catholic schools in underserved communities across three states her work focuses on providing academically rigorous and character-rich educational o opportunities or options for parents targeting communities where Catholic schools have shuttered her career reflects a deep commitment to educational equity and excellence and includes teaching high school English as
• 29:00 - 29:30 a Teach for America core member in Oakland California and launching and leading the philanthropy roundtables K12 education programs she further honed her policy expertise at the Office of Management and budget in Harvard's Kennedy School of government uh Doug Lov to my immediate right is a renowned figure in the education world he rose to prominence with his book teach Like A Champion now in its Third Edition fourth third third third edition uh which outlines practical techniques and
• 29:30 - 30:00 strategies gleaned from successful teachers aiming to enhance teacher Effectiveness and ultimately improve uh student outcomes lov's work directly connects to the concept of restoring high expectations in education to the degree to which there's a Playbook common to all high achieving or no excuses charter schools of the past two decades Doug Lov literally wrote the book um I'll come back to that in a second but Stephen when I when I just said said I was infuriated I I I mean it
• 30:00 - 30:30 earnestly um so I'm just going to start with you I I I've commented previously and elsewhere that there's probably no field like education in terms of just being unaware of its own history and and you just put that on display for us what in God's name is it going to take for us to remember that we have been through this before answered it satisfactorily in the case of urban charters for the last quarter century and then simply forgot it why does this keep happening
• 30:30 - 31:00 yeah I wish I I wish I had a good answer I think you're absolutely right that the there is this ceaseless quest for the new shiny thing there is no sense of what has preceded us uh and what was tried and worked and what didn't work that is an immense problem we're fundamentally incurious about the past and about the the the history of education reform but I also think in and and Robert you've written about this I think we have we have lost our moral way
• 31:00 - 31:30 we have stopped and and so if I sounded a bit moralizing forgive me but I do interpret this history a bit at this level we have an obligation to the students that we serve and I think that we were ill advised by a lot of communications firms for the last 15 20 years to make nice and to keep our mouths closed and engage in anod banalities like a school that's right for for every child instead of pointing out hey we're doing this right because
• 31:30 - 32:00 the schools don't work that's why we're here and once we stopped saying that we deprived ourselves of a case for the work we do Doug I want to throw it to you right away because I I mean it earnestly you really are the author of so much of what happens or has happened inside of so-called no excuses schools which is as Stephen noticed by the way um I'm perhaps one of the last people that is comfortable with that nomenclature because I remember what it meant yes uh
• 32:00 - 32:30 which is there's no excuses for us as Educators when children fail we fail children so dou I just love to hear your thoughts about this this kind of intersection between uh social justice and and the broader goals of Education that I think we are all committed to yeah so much of it is about control of language I think this the uh the term no excuses is a classic case of that term has been one it went from meaning the adults would not make excuses for not doing right by not taking the responsibility for students and now it's
• 32:30 - 33:00 become co-opted to mean some sort of a um misappropriation of authority on the parts of adults it became code for Harsh discipline yes exactly uh the apotheos of that I just when you share that data I have been in that school not that not the exact schools that you share data on but I've been in that school a hundred times this year in the last year and a half once great schools once very good schools I'm thinking in particular of a school that I visited about a year ago this is a um High what a high performing
• 33:00 - 33:30 Charter in a small industrial city in the Northeast where if you were if you were a parent in that in that City this was the one school that you could send your kid to and know that their learning time would be respected and that they would be safe as a starting point and that someone would take their education very very seriously I went back to that school in November and it was I mean utter chaos uh just no
• 33:30 - 34:00 learning happening and the adults said two things that were really telling to me one of the things that the head of school said was just not really sure that adults should be telling young people what to do how have we gotten to that place where we uh no longer believe that is it is an adult's role to shape a student's experience in life the second thing that they said was they said that they were busy dismantling systems of Oppression in the school by which I think they
• 34:00 - 34:30 meant things like kids having to line up to you know occasionally to go places and to be silent in the hallways and that sorts of thing and my take was whatever systems of Oppression you think you're dismantling they are uh they are a lot less oppressive than the chaos that is going on in the school right now and you should reassemble them as quickly as you can you know and I have I also think there's a mistake there that schools have led themselves to believe that students are the client that making students happy is the purpose of school uh and it's very easy
• 34:30 - 35:00 to manipulate students to believe what makes them happy and what serves their interest the client is the parent the person who sends their their child to your to their school hoping that you will prepare them for success and achievement and to accomplish their dreams in life and uh parents know most parents that your job is not to make kids happy if they ask you for ice cream for dinner you say no right you say there's uh to care about someone is to is to have high expectations for them
• 35:00 - 35:30 and I think you're unfortunately quite right that that um that has been lost and it is a long way back when you say more seats in in high performing Urban Charter Schools my biggest fear is that there is a long way back to even having those can I just say Doug that that uh crto report the study period was 2015 to 2019 that's a long time ago so imagine if it were just bumped up a few years I just I can't is just saying one thing uh following what you said which is
• 35:30 - 36:00 that rooms that are disorderly chaotic could and where instruction is not effective are miserable places to be for teers and for students for both Total misery torture and to imagine sitting in one of those rooms I mean I remember of course touring classrooms in in our own networks when you went into a room that was working the kids were joyful were learning they were feeling successful you wanted to sit in the back of the
• 36:00 - 36:30 room to the end of the day instead you were brought into another room and if it was off the hook and not functioning it was Agony to remain there I think we forget that and young people they're not only happy when they're learning but they understand that people who hold them to high expectations care about them exactly right they get that very quickly it's why they feel such commitment to their extracurricular activities like the drama program or Sports where they get that adults who care about them hold them high expectations and uh somehow Educators in the classroom
• 36:30 - 37:00 have lost sight of the fact that that includes them as well Stephanie a few years ago um when all of this this sort of social justice was was education was kind of at a at a hot boil you had the courage to say something at a Manhattan Institute convening that I have quoted countless times since then uh and I've got the quote here you said we have not had a single one of our parents saying we want you to do more of this anti-racist work what you said from
• 37:00 - 37:30 memory was that you they wanted classical education they wanted order they wanted uniforms they wanted their kids to go to college so that was about four or five years ago Ju Just so we can level set has has that changed it has definitely not changed we serve nearly 3,000 children um we serve 2,000 children in the Bronx um and we actually in our Charter application said that parents are the primary educators of their children and
• 37:30 - 38:00 that we would honor parents as the primary educators of their children and our parents want safety they want to be given respect as parents um they want their children to have better opportunities than they had and the push for anti-racism comes I think from two places one teachers who car deeply about children um and two from funders um who
• 38:00 - 38:30 at one point were really focused on academic results um and cared about those and there has been a pivot um in the funding Community to to uh tell a story about that remark I wrote about your your your comment at the time and um I called the leader of a charter a well-known charter school network which I I will not name who been very vocal on social media about the need to to do uh
• 38:30 - 39:00 anti-racist work uh to teach for social justice and as a former journalist to be blunt I was playing dial quote I wanted I knew what this person was going to say oh oh no no Stephanie's wrong we're deeply committed to this he shocked the heck out of me by saying oh no she's right we're not hearing it either and my response was dude then why are you out there saying all these things and he said more or less what you said it's it's are are are alumni the young alumni
• 39:00 - 39:30 uh who they've sent to college and it's the young teachers so here's my question is this a a what's the analogy not a gordi and not um but is this going to be difficult to unwind because you've got Charter Schools tend to rely on you know each successive generation of young teachers coming in to staff these schools if the people we need to hire are have been steeped in this ideology does that kind of put Charter uh Charter leaders on the the horns of a dilemma yeah I mean I think that the the
• 39:30 - 40:00 the this question of the foundations is just huge uh the same Dei firms that uh I mentioned but not by name are also working extensively with all the major funders so the Walton Foundation Gates Foundation everywhere you look have uh been captured and and taken over by these beliefs uh so that is is a an immense issue I mean the important thing to remember
• 40:00 - 40:30 is that the frame for children and adults they serve has to be about Hope and it has to be about agency and we teach our children that every human being has inherent dignity that What Makes Us different as human beings is we have reason and we have free will we call it free choice and that we're called to use those two gifts to make the most excellent choices and we hold our children um and
• 40:30 - 41:00 help them to make excellent choices and the anti-racist framework really undermines both hope and agency but is there a Steelman argument to be made here I mean I know uh Stephen in one of your last slides you you you said they were unre uh they were irreconcilable um but can is there a fair way to say look you can really have high expectations be academically rigorous and still teach for social justice well I think that that the
• 41:00 - 41:30 purest form of social justice is what we all thought we were doing which was to educate students because to achieve social justice we have to have a path to college uh for students who want to go to college it's a million dollars of additional income uh in a lifetime that's the most crassest instrumental view of it of course the benefits are are infinite um and and to uh and and this is just critically important that that that we understand
• 41:30 - 42:00 that we have to offer this pathway if we want to empower students so that's the the the first thing I think is to recognize that social justice is an education there's no agency uh wi without an education and if we want to empower students we have to give them the ability we have to give them the tools that powerful people have the ability to reason to expresss elves clearly orally and in writing uh to be
• 42:00 - 42:30 able to understand the views of someone with whom they might disagree and to have a spirited conversation all those things we are not empowering students by telling them what to believe and if you go into classrooms where this kind of social justice education is taking place what you see is that students are sullen depressed angry because they're not experiencing academic success they're deprived of a sense of agency and they
• 42:30 - 43:00 feel like Society is victimizing them which of course to some degree is true but those are the the messages that are constantly reinforced so that's there's no empowerment there and then if you go to the school next door which is intellectually vibrant believes in its kids has lofty expectations what you will see is a really joyful place where children feel powerful good please throw a teaspoon of optimism into the into the proceedings I
• 43:00 - 43:30 hope someone uh only a teaspoon but a teaspoon nonetheless I uh I was recently in England and I think it's really important that we recognize the different trajectory of schooling in England and in the US uh the most late the most recent round of Tims data came out today uh us Tim scores have gone down precipitously in all subject areas England continues to rise despite the pandemic despite a very similar culture despite even like they are importing many of our ideological beliefs about uh
• 43:30 - 44:00 social justice to England they are those things are quite real in England and yet their schools are uh are dramatically On The Rise I recently spent 18 months working with a group of schools outside Birmingham which is uh you know Birmingham is uh is one of the most in one of the most economically deprived parts of England these two townships outside two areas outside of Birmingham walel and sander were uh I'm working with with a program it's 18 months funded by the government of uh very
• 44:00 - 44:30 technical pedagogical training uh for teachers in the schools spent 18 months training them training the leadership giving them Rich PD we it includes both pre- and post visits and those schools at the end of this 18 months were so much better than they were 18 months ago and the provision of Education was so not just quality teaching but happy thriving students in what people would
• 44:30 - 45:00 say are the most economically deprived neighborhoods in Birmingham so I walked out of that feeling both like optimistic and depressed at the same time be optimistic because it's possible Right dramatic change in 18 months and a little bit depressed because my first thought was that would never happen in the United States what's the difference thank you a couple of things I think one that uh in the UK a head teacher said to me you almost can't meet an nqt newly qualified teacher who has been to a training program where they don't talk about the importance of uh of cognitive load
• 45:00 - 45:30 theory of understanding retrieval practice of understanding the role of of knowledge in reading comprehension so they have um broken the cartel of ideology that shapes teacher training and replaced it with a sector-wide faith in belief in cognitive science right so people make decis they can see learning or they can they can understand the things that are likely to cause learning to happen if you can't see those things of course you replace them with a with a cheap proxy um I think there's a difference in what people think it means to work for an
• 45:30 - 46:00 institution in England I think when people in England work for a school and the school says this is what we're going to do these are our initiatives we're going to try them they think it's their obligation to actually to do those things and I think in a lot of the US people perceive themselves as uh warriors on behalf of you know they're on a moral Crusade and if the school says to do something that they're not sure that they believe in they kind of think it's their obligation not to do with the school I think a lot of this has to do with uh schools that over time build a
• 46:00 - 46:30 culture a lot of this is around uh the role of unions in schools but if you can't cause people to get to to do things in a school and follow through you get cultures of intransigence I think there is less confusion about the difference The crucial difference between Authority and authoritarianism in England they are very comfortable with the idea that like you you are an adult you're in charge of the room and it should not be violent and it should not be disrupted and it should be safe uh I think in the US people have lost that definition and any exercise of authority appears to them to
• 46:30 - 47:00 be authoritarianism authoritarian and the last thing I would say that assessment is very different in the UK there are you take your gcss you are accountable for your GS GCSE results as a student they're in every subject area which reinforces the idea of a knowledge Rich knowledge driven curriculum uh that takes students seriously and when students are taken seriously in the classroom they feel the difference those four or five things I think are have been profound difference makers England
• 47:00 - 47:30 has been like the success of the of Western Societies in their educational system they have a very similar culture to us and those are I think achievable public policy initiatives that could change the trajectory of our schools we had Nick Gibb the former education brilant on this stage if there's one person who gets credit for all that it's Nick GI Nick Gibb yeah uh so we we and we discussed some of this but my my question for you is the same question that I had for him how much of this is uh National culture how much of it is
• 47:30 - 48:00 teaching or educational culture plenty of both okay I mean I think they they work I think the interesting thing is that I think a lot of people know that it's not I think there's a there's an illusion of consensus people are afraid to speak up and say this really isn't working because it's risky to speak up but I think a lot of people know that it's not working inside schools okay appropo of what's not working I I have a pet theory about how we lost our way which I'll I'd love to run by each of you and it's it's
• 48:00 - 48:30 also predicated in a conversation that occurred uh on this very stage even before I worked at AI I was a a panelist um we had the new head of of of teacher America at the time um and she was describing uh tfa's shift to be more we didn't use the term anti-racist but to teach for social justice and I remember her saying um that we we're we're having a difficult time overcoming structural racis and it sounded for all the world like listening to say a Diane ravit or
• 48:30 - 49:00 Richard rusin 10 or 15 years ago saying look if you want to fix schools you got to fix poverty and it sounded to my ears and I challenge her in this it sounds to me like you're saying if we want to fix schools we have to fix racism she of course denied that but here's what I wonder Stephen with with with the exception of some Urban Charter Schools right it's fairly common now is that Charters as a whole have not necessarily outperformed district schools and and and if we look at the Ed Reform movement as a whole over 30 years we don't really
• 49:00 - 49:30 have a lot to show for ourselves right nape scores have been you know more or less more or less flat so what I've always wondered is if we were not right for the picking so to speak because we failed as education reformers and we needed an explanation for why we failed and the explanation couldn't be well our incompetence because we're all the best and brightest so it must be some other force that we are powerless to control oh it must be structural racism well I I would go even further than that and say that I think that there's an element of of nihilism at
• 49:30 - 50:00 play in this uh and and I think that there is a sense of um of defeatism that is leading to some of the more extreme dimensions of social justice education uh the idea that um in some utopian future Merit won't matter you won't have to have conventional academic training uh that there will be this um uh utopian world where these things
• 50:00 - 50:30 won't be required uh and I it's I think it's a very a very dangerous and of course in some ways silly conception um because it's not going to happen uh and what we need to do is to prepare students for the world as it is and to uh to survive and potentially thrive in the world as it is you have to be good at something you have to find your gifts and develop
• 50:30 - 51:00 them and all the rules still apply but so I I I'm saying that I sense in some of this ideology um a desire to to C to kind of create a new uh playing field where the majority culture um rules don't apply and I think that that is a form of giving up and I think it's tremendously sad because there's no reason to give up at all as students of of every back background and income we know can Thrive because in the schools that are working
• 51:00 - 51:30 we're proving it and reproving it every day and I would just like to invite everyone over to that project because that we can do Stephanie Stephen criticizes the idea that certain pedagogical approaches like like emphasizing the written word for example are indicative of of white supremacy culture have you seen some of those tensions at work in in your work at Sean with with young staff who might find the arguments of a kendi or a D'Angelo compelling and persuasive yeah
• 51:30 - 52:00 I and I think that this this started before the murder of George Floyd um and I remember seeing a proposed um PD for teachers um that included microagressions and I said like this is not going to be helpful to the culture of the school and it's not focused on actually helping children to achieve and succeed and there's limited time in schools in the
• 52:00 - 52:30 school day if you're going to do PD it has to be focused on how to become an excellent instructor um so I I think that that this happened prior to this started happening many years ago am I remembering this story correctly that uh you said yes you can do the PD but you can't use any text by authors that are not in the classical Cannon um I challenge them to use so let me just say that our schools are classically
• 52:30 - 53:00 inspired and by inspired our children read The Odyssey and they also read esparon arising and so they are um a broader tent but in that particular instance my challenge was um find there are plenty of texts before the 1900s that deal with issues of race and if you're going to have that conversation with teachers model a great Socratic dialogue that that they can then use with with the children that they're serving um but
• 53:00 - 53:30 um my my worry was that this was going to be divisive not unifying and it was going to move the needle away from what really matters which is moving children forward academically uh we're going to go to audience questions in a short amount of time and I've been remiss in not giving out the the hashtag uh which is # AI standards for those who are following online so within a few minutes we'll take some of those questions um Doug I I I found myself over the years the last
• 53:30 - 54:00 couple of years getting angry on your behalf um and I hope I'm not putting you on the spot by by saying this because um I meant what I said before earnestly that that this this entire sector of schools really is in a sense you know you're the author of what happens in a lot of these schools and and yet for for a while I was I was seeing your your work described as carceral pedagogy and you know practice for prison and ter ped right which I'm not sure what it means I can infer what it means um again I don't
• 54:00 - 54:30 want to put you on the spot but I but I found myself again getting angry on your behalf like all this guy has done is set Untold tens of thousands maybe hundreds of thousands of disadvantaged kids on a path to college um I I just want to give you a couple of minutes to see if you'll you're willing or interested in responding to to to to that characterization of your work well I mean obviously I think it's a massive Mis character ation uh and I think it's the kind of thing that people do when they uh what
• 54:30 - 55:00 does Mary wilcraft say very few people choose uh evil for its own sake they mistake it for the good they seek that um people say that because they are asked to do something incredibly difficult when they are asked to build just to build High achieving classrooms but build High achieving classrooms that uh reverse the equation of inequality like that's that's a really really hard thing to do and it's scary and most
• 55:00 - 55:30 people fail at it and when you give smart people the option of doing that or doing something that can make them feel instantly successful and valid and kind of affirm their membership in a group of people you know would most people choose to go to a go to a cocktail party and be uh lauded and approved by their peers at the co cocktail party for doing great and moral work with young people even if that moral even if that work
• 55:30 - 56:00 with young people didn't actually change their circumstances in life would they rather do work that really changes young people's circumstances in life and have people at the cocktail party wonder about their um their moral stature for doing it very few people have the courage to do B most people choose a it's easier and in the end people are motivated by um their desire to feel connection with
• 56:00 - 56:30 with uh with ideological peers or with what they perceive to be their membership group I think the first step is for us just to have the courage and coherence to say that is not the model I had to explain to my children what carceral pedagogy meant and why people said that about me online you know and why people you know Dad why do people say these things about you um but they got it pretty quickly and I think one once you have exposed the myth um it's not as
• 56:30 - 57:00 scary anymore I not I am uh people can say what they want uh and you know I think that Stephen has really laid down a very clear charge for us here which is there is an immense opportunity that is at risk for thousands and thousands of young people who we are on the brink of serving better and on the brink of creating a truly Merit erratic uh Society for them and that is
• 57:00 - 57:30 slipping away and I think um there are enough of us who see that that we can stick together and affirm each other and start the work of rebuilding what we started excellent so how are we going to do that what's the next step I actually think I think why do people get so persuaded by ideolog by you know I think we talk a lot about the influence of social media on young people profoundly important we don't talk enough about the influence of social media on adults uh it shapes all of our
• 57:30 - 58:00 worldview the medium is the message uh it's very easy to assemble an ideological um thought bubble that you you know Echo chamber that you live inside of one of the reasons why people are so persuaded by that though is they are part of Institutions that they don't feel an a connection to they don't feel um decline of faith in institutions is one of the most profound Trends in American society in the last 20 years people no longer believe that the institutions that they that they are
• 58:00 - 58:30 part of or that serve them are effective and useful and as you Val Lan has written about people don't people often see those institutions now as tool as platforms for their own expression of IDE ideology and beliefs that starts with me with organizational ineffectiveness when you're not good at teaching reading when you're not successful when you don't run a great School of course people don't believe in the school the most important people we need to have faith in institutions are the employees of those are the are the stakeholders in that institution so for me it starts with
• 58:30 - 59:00 like it starts with where we started before 20 years ago we've lost a lot of that work but school by school you know reducing reducing the barriers to people being able to start Great Schools creating incentives for Great Schools and then school by school starting Great Schools uh and creating existence proof I think you uh Stephanie you told a great story about a journalist who came to your schools and the big it was from a public maybe where you weren't expecting uh generous treatment yeah the
• 59:00 - 59:30 New Yorker but when they came to the school and they saw it in in you know they saw it in action and they saw what it looked like and they saw how happy and how thriving the children were that changes people's minds and I just think like the only way to do it is school by school great school like start with three and then the next year will be five and the next year will be 35 although I'm troubled by the story you told earlier Doug about the school uh where there was chaos yeah cuz if I'm remembering correctly a lot of those schools that I've seen this
• 59:30 - 60:00 year Well 25 30 years ago the the whole no excuses movement was a direct response to that chaos nobody can learn these conditions but now if I'm understanding you correctly we're we're hearing of schools valorizing those conditions uh interpreting or I I think that's if I may I I don't think they're valorizing them I I think that they they recognize they're EXC using them and weirdly and I didn't include this many of the instigators of the interventions
• 60:00 - 60:30 are claiming that they're publicly claiming they're successful I mean it's deeply odd they'll go and say that we've turned it around you know meanwhile it's totally broken this can't last I mean we we um yes this stuff is fairly deeply institutionalized in in districts and schools but it's also very plainly not working and I think there's a growing public awareness across
• 60:30 - 61:00 ideological bubbles that this this kind of ideology is uh is is absent is is is broken that creates an opportunity and so it' be fun to discuss about how do we then respark activity I do think we need as my last slide said a new generation of of fire Brands we do need people like Eva mosovich who is willing to stand up and say definitively what she stands for what like what you do and what you do
• 61:00 - 61:30 Doug I mean this is this is this is what has to happen we have to create uh a setting where people feel secure and emboldened to step forward now how how we make that happen I'm not I'm less clear on um but I think there's a lot of intellectual work to be done at this moment we have to remake our case in Stark terms we've been cowering and we need to stop cowering I hate to be the skunk at the picnic
• 61:30 - 62:00 however I was speaking just this week with a uh a a charter leader in a large US city who said they're having a difficult time attracting what you just describe as the next generation of fire BRS that that that school leaders who in a previous time might have been attracted this work no longer are attracted to this work right and that's because we've let the critics of charter schools attack Charters as the Billionaire Boys Club so on in the case of Diane ravage
• 62:00 - 62:30 with the uh Fury of the apostate uh and that's what has consumed the airtime and meanwhile we haven't responded I think um partly because as I said we've been advised not to I think it a terrible mistake instead we need to in a respectful way we need to respond and because otherwise what students know on graduating from college is that we are the bad guys we were the
• 62:30 - 63:00 good guys to a generation before but we're now the bad guys so if you talk to um the high-flying Boston Charters and you ask them about this they will say they have a hard time recruiting teachers because the teachers have moral qualms that they're engaging in something that is bad we have to fight back against that we have to reposition what we do we're we're sitting in a in a policy institution I mean I completely agree with you that we
• 63:00 - 63:30 need to to sell these ideas to the next generation of teachers and kind of push have the good ideas push out the bad is there a policy play here to to to revive the the the charter sector one of the first things I would want to do is to I think there is a cartel for um education for certification and preparation of teachers uh and that cartel lead is highly ideological one of the most important things that happened in England that changed the foundation of
• 63:30 - 64:00 the of uh of what teachers thought and believed was um policy changes that allowed operating organizations to certify and train their own teachers basically so that um they didn't have to go through schools of Education uh and so that early teacher training could be aligned towards what makes people successful the other thing that makes teachers amenable or or suggestible to Broken ideologies is they are not
• 64:00 - 64:30 successful in the classroom you're getting beaten up every day you know you're not successful and so now you're looking for reasons to explain it and you're looking for uh you're looking for other things to believe in but if I can get you for the first year of your career and help you give really clear directions to students so it's clear what you expect of them and then with a smile you can tell them uh thank you Jason thank you Jose thank you Carlo right to so that they know that I see whether they follow through and suddenly students are following directions in my classroom if I can teach a teacher to be successful in the classroom they are
• 64:30 - 65:00 much more likely to be focused on the craft of teaching and much less likely to be amendable to um ideological persuasion so maybe the first step would be allowing schools that believe in this vision of like to love students as to hold them to high expectations to love students as to teach them well let them train their own teachers and certify their own teachers uh that resonates with me so much as a former public school fifth grade teacher uh there's
• 65:00 - 65:30 nothing that feels better than that connection with kids when when it happens when you know you're winning you're you know no one is going to talk you out of and and this also connects through to the what what I describe is the therapeutic evasion right and one of the several ways in which we depart from doing the work that we need to do which is teaching kids is that in the therapeutic evasion educators mistakenly assume that they need to tend to the therapeutic needs of their
• 65:30 - 66:00 students uh because if students feel better about themselves they will then learn better and the causality and there's substantial research on this really runs much more strongly in the other direction if students have frequent experiences of success they feel great about themselves and they're much too smart to be condescended to by teachers telling them they're great when in fact they know know that their skill level is very low and uh you know the epitome of this was the self-esteem
• 66:00 - 66:30 movement of the 19 uh early 1990s California uh declared that it has to be had to be implemented in every school it was a total failure and it turned out to be based on a fraudulent set of research but the idea was that we would we would work to persuade students that they are terrific and should feel good about themselves and then learning results would follow it's really the other way around Stephanie how have you managed to resist these trends at
• 66:30 - 67:00 se um we're really clear about who we are and what we believe in and so as part of the recruitment process as part of the recruitment process and we just become very explicit about our values our mission um and we want people to select out if they don't align choice is as important for teachers as it is for parents and students can I say most American School are a muddy mix of philosophies and beliefs because I can't select teachers
• 67:00 - 67:30 for their alignment to a set of principles so I can't really operate on it but if I can say this is what we believe in right if all schools could do this this is what we believe in this is what we think works we actually think that um the written word is not um a fetish but the written word is actually a really critical tool towards uh creating desirable difficulty that it causes students to encode things in memory and remember them better and articulate their own beliefs and so we want to do writing in every classroom every day like that would be a really
• 67:30 - 68:00 powerful belief if I can select teachers for that then I can test it and 5 years later I can have a demonstrably effective school and I can and people can say wow what are you doing it's so different and I can say writing but right now for 99 90 some per of American schools they can't even we never learn we just argue because they can't test an idea because they can't select teachers based on alignment around a set of beliefs I think that people focus on Choice from the parent perspective it's
• 68:00 - 68:30 very important from a parent perspective it's almost as important from a teacher perspective I think that's what you're describing which is we're selecting people who believe in what we're trying to do and just to this this question of having a clear belief system that everyone in the building subscribes to like what you're describing in your own schools I mean if you look at the other the few schools in the Boston Charter sector that I was mentioning that have stayed with very high there schools like the brook Charter Schools where the co-founders are still there and they are
• 68:30 - 69:00 just Rock Solid on their beliefs their academic beliefs and the kids are just soaring um let's go to questions and by the way I'm not being rude checking my phone I'm getting questions from our online audience here just to be clear uh we'll take a few of those online questions in a moment but but first let's uh a microphone or and just do do do me the kindness of telling us your your your name sure my
• 69:00 - 69:30 name is Mark I'm not affili anyone um my question is when you present this data particularly Boston Collegiate and be best to the funders the foundations that are funding all of this or the teachers colleges it seems the data is clear it's not working scientific method you try something it didn't work you said that schools that stuck with the old way it did work so it would seem they have an
• 69:30 - 70:00 obligation to respond in some way and I'm curious what they would say to you when you give this presentation to them because maybe I'm naive but I had assumed that the Dei um the slide you showed with the the column of Dei that it was more diversity for English um more diversity of sources and for social stud a little deeper understanding of racism in the country
• 70:00 - 70:30 that had been neglected and it but a little more sensitivity to students but that Math and Science in particular would not be affected when we added uh girls Athletics that didn't reduce SC test scores for math science math or English do you know what they would say to you that I'm just as curious what they would say as you are uh I I think you have to remember this this was an extraordinary ideological moment in
• 70:30 - 71:00 Circa 2019 2020 we've kind of forgotten about it but some there was a there was a moral Panic of A Sort and people were terrified of saying the wrong thing of being ostracized shamed ultimately cancelled these were a very real phenomenon and and it didn't have to happen to a lot of people you were on notice if someone uh saw it uh and so I think that the the
• 71:00 - 71:30 foundations and the funders that so important to all of this made a choice they decided to embrace uh this approach they're in it deep it's clearly not working and it'll be enormously interesting to see how they respond they believe in the scientific method hope well they they they they certainly don't want to be in the position of running and funding low performing schools so will they make a forceful
• 71:30 - 72:00 intervention uh I think they will Michael patrello who I'm pleased to introduce as a a co-presenter of today's event thank you Robert all right let me provide a tablespoon of optimism and then you can tell me if if I'm wrong about it f first on the nape scores let's say from the 90s until 2010 we made enormous progress especially in math especially for the youngest students lowest performing students black Hispanic I mean like two grade levels of progress so there was enormous progress uh Once Upon a Time uh what
• 72:00 - 72:30 about the argument that says this all this that you've described happened but it was mostly concentrated in a few of the big cities on the coast maybe Chicago it largely passed over the Midwest the South uh and it is largely in the rearview mirror now you know the the peak woke crested in 2020 and and now it's receding uh true false do we know I think it's partly true uh Mike I think that the uh you're right that they're they're really important parts
• 72:30 - 73:00 of the country the the south for the most part where uh this did not happen at least not to the same degree I think it's also true that people say that Peak woke I don't like using that term because it's a pejorative uh has passed um but I don't think we should underestimate how deeply institutionalized these beliefs and practices are in schools and districts and also in unions uh and funders and dislodging that I think is going to take a long time
• 73:00 - 73:30 that's why I say a lost decade it's it's not it's because the dislodging and the Turning Away that we've just started to talk about is going to take a long time I'm surprised St you didn't mention in your presentation the decision to eliminate the mcast in Massachusetts yeah well I I I had only so much time afraid that that this guy over there was going to be looking at me but yeah it is worth mentioning that Massachusetts the high flyer and it's a kind of terrible Omission on my part has been dismantled
• 73:30 - 74:00 through a succession of about five different actions most recently eliminating the mcast test for the diploma who is it think and so there you have Mike um an extraordinary success and yet uh it has not been sustained that's incredible I was mentioning it because uh there's some sort of tech Guru who says advances execution are almost always proceeded by advances in measurement right and we uh the first step is like we can only have these
• 74:00 - 74:30 arguments about the scientific method if we're actually able to look at what's happening in schools I don't think it's a coincidence that yes the um the movement was uh asymmetrical and focused on Urban cities is probably where we had you know the best and most reliable data um and uh yeah I think I think you know one of the first steps is to make sure that we have measurement infrastructure so that we can MH continue to look at quality Mike just for what it's worth um
• 74:30 - 75:00 Texas Ohio very different scenarios for us than than New York City here's a question from our online online audience would you say the core issue with social justice education is the curricular content the professional development the underlying victimology or all of the above all of the above I I might add to that the distraction right the fun the most important thing we can be doing in schools if we love and care about
• 75:00 - 75:30 children and want them and want the best for all children is like let's start with reading and every time we're in a professional we're in a PD session and we're talking about microaggressions uh we are not talking about reading and Math and Science and History and those are the most important things you know and I I just want to say that I think that there is there is good that has come from this as well and I don't we should shouldn't Overlook it so the the CMO sector was was guilty of of some important failings myself included
• 75:30 - 76:00 uh one of them was disparities in promotions of leaders within Charter Schools uh deans of students were much more likely to be chosen from among people of color from black people especially and uh deans of instruction from white people that is inexcusable they're explanations but it doesn't make them right uh the broadening of the curriculum to uh to include a much broader array of authors that relate
• 76:00 - 76:30 more to students lives is entirely a good thing um the sensitivity to uh ensuring that every representation of students is positive and affirming this is great so I I want to be clear there's a lot of good things my concern is the Turning Away from the obsession with good teaching because if you're not not obsessed with making classrooms great and I just want to also personally add to what Robert said Doug
• 76:30 - 77:00 we are so fortunate he's here because Doug did so much of that creating a taxonomy that would prepare novice teachers to be able to be effective quickly is one of the most important contributions of the century in education so we need to get back to that we we need to get back to being obsessed with are kids learning we taught them yeah but did they learn and then going deep on where were the failure points in
• 77:00 - 77:30 the lesson what do we know about what our students got and didn't got what was wrong in our lesson design how do we fix it how do we better prepare for the next lesson because we want every child to succeed to have an experience of success every hour that's a great school I think people conf uh people assume that the relationship between inputs and outcomes is linear with most things so a great example of this would be should you water your plants if you want them to survive yes you absolutely yes you
• 77:30 - 78:00 absolutely should but if you overwater your plants you will also kill them uh you know and I think this is true about a lot of like stress is a great example of this like can you have too much stress and everyone thinks that stress is toxic stress is not toxic excessive stress is toxic actually you need a certain amount of stress in a learning environment to create optimal learning I think people tend to see the relationship between things that they believe in and think more of it and is inherently better if I just if I keep emphasizing this thing that's important
• 78:00 - 78:30 to me it will it will lead me in a positive direction and every curve turns so I agree like there's students should see themselves in the curriculum they should feel loved and supported by the by this like by the school we should be aware of uh disparities in our own hiring practices and uh there there are a thousand things we should be aware of can we overdo those things can we become so obsessed with them believe that by going down uh further and further down this uh the spectrum that we are that at
• 78:30 - 79:00 some point the curve turns and we're no longer serving students I think that's what's happened I'm I'm reminded of something from 20 years ago uh a colleague of mine in a low performing Public School in the South Bronx who one day said uh look you know reading in math is important but I teach the whole child and what she meant by that at least how I interpret it she's giving herself permission frankly to not be very good at the job that we were paying
• 79:00 - 79:30 her to Doh um I mean our executive director in New York City is an immigrant from Panama who raised her children in the Bronx and she is constantly saying literacy is Justice yes numeracy is Justice and so um and it it can be very powerful to have somebody with that experience and emphasize that y Stephen you you address this a little bit but let's let's talk a little bit more about it it's an online question
• 79:30 - 80:00 what are some areas where you think the recent social justice movements may have made some improvements yeah so I I mentioned I mentioned uh a couple of them I think that the the focus on broadening the curriculum um and ensuring that the the curriculum is representative of the cultures of the students being educated not entirely you you know as the old expression education goes uh you want windows and mirrors right you want to
• 80:00 - 80:30 you want students to be able to see themselves in the stories that they read the novels that they read we all do you know as a result of of our entities identities that's just that's our nature we feel connected we we feel affirmed we understand ourselves better but we're also very curious people we also want to learn about far away cultures with different values different approaches different traditions and children are
• 80:30 - 81:00 just as excited by that so it requires a balance but I think that that we didn't do enough of that in the past and that that is has gotten better uh where it goes wrong is where you say as happened at one recent uh major Network that uh a a writing instruction book for middle school that was U highly esteemed by the network was thrown grown out because it's written by two white women you know that makes no sense so yes I think there
• 81:00 - 81:30 have been important things but I think that we but but even in in areas where uh there was a correct identification of a problem that as I said earlier that inhabiting that warm strict teacher stance that was so Central to no excuses the fact that that was hard the solution is not to to do away with discipline not to throw out Merit and demerit systems
• 81:30 - 82:00 as Noble did not to throw out uniforms not to most importantly abandon the idea we sweat the small stuff so we don't have to sweat the big stuff which is a very powerful idea um that was the mistake we could simply have made a correction in the no excus of spirit we could say we have a problem here we're not there yet we need to fix this our cultural systems are not what they need to be that would have been an appropriate response we didn't need to throw everything out do you guys agree do you know what
• 82:00 - 82:30 I'm saying that yeah yeah think that's well said and that's why we go into to schools like the ones you're describing uh uh Doug and you see you see chaos and and kids are very unhappy Ian row my uh AI colleague uh sends in this question uh well I I'll summarize it he points out that as he said it's amazing that a discussion on raising expectations immediately devolves into social justice anti-racism racial Equity Etc uh commenting on our
• 82:30 - 83:00 previous conversation uh about uh how do we spur change here he asked is One path forward expanding the aperture to show that white students are being failed by the education system and the reasons for that failure are likely what's causing underperformance for all kids MH 100% Yes exclamation point uh okay um we have oh lots of head Jim piser you're
• 83:00 - 83:30 next thank you uh and thanks to all of you for this incredible an incredibly Rich conversation um two things one is maybe a a a sign of hope that change is possible I think what's happened with the science of reading over the last several years even during covid um and during all of this sort of uh cultural upset has really been remarkable yeah um and I think there some lessons learned maybe just Emily Hanford needs to do a podcast about this um but nonetheless there's something there which says
• 83:30 - 84:00 things can actually change and change fairly quickly um the other is uh more of a a question and a comment is that the Zeitgeist at the moment uh especially in at the secondary school level is really much more around Vocational Technical education career Pathways um you know trying to figure out how to make education more purposeful and more focused on career and not College which s brings to the question about whether the liberal arts uh and Humanities
• 84:00 - 84:30 lens is a is sort of striking the right CHT at this moment or whether there needs to be a broader definition of what that uh sort of educational experience looks like to incorporate more of career oriented Education Without somehow abandoning the the sort of more liberal arts um so Jim this is this is a a great question and I I I think of the Massachusetts reforms again of which you were such a significant um driver what I find so
• 84:30 - 85:00 striking about the Massachusetts reforms is that the the vog tech schools were among the most improved by the Massachusetts reforms so now we're at a point where those schools often outperform the surrounding Comprehensive High Schools uh and part of that is because and I should back up and say that when the Act was being debated the votech schools were very strong opponents to the proposed legislation
• 85:00 - 85:30 and they said their student should be exempt from the the 10th grade exit um exam they didn't get their way but the schools changed they brought Shakespeare in they brought a liberal education to complement the professional skills education many of these schools it's a week of of Trades educ ation um and it's a week of academic education and the kids are killing it uh in these schools
• 85:30 - 86:00 so I I don't uh believe that we should lessen the uh our intellectual Ambitions for children even if they're not planning to to go to college and moreover in communities like Brownsville New York where we ran our schools there was no path to college so we we at a minimum have to at least provide a path to college for those families that want it in communities where there is none at
• 86:00 - 86:30 all so I think that both of these things can happen our schools are prek through 8 and so it's really important for us that once our kids graduate from 8th grade um they have the option for college but the value proposition of college is very different now than it once was and even for my own children I don't actually know that college is the right path for them um and I am very excited about rigorous um career in technical education I think that there are
• 86:30 - 87:00 opportunities for that and I actually think you can live a life of great meaning and purpose without going to college the Gentleman Just to Jim piser is right I believe had a question as well yes sir hi everyone uh my name is Jonathan I'm a teacher in DC public schools but don't let my title make you think that's all I know in education I mean I did my masters in Helsinki Finland I went to school in trinada Tobago I mean I taught English curriculum the the UK curriculum on a ship so I'm very much exposed but my question is cuz I'm I'm looking at
• 87:00 - 87:30 the constant in the middle of the change right and if we go back to the father of American Education horse man and then we go over now to the Progressive Era with John Dewey in Teachers College then the GI Bill era we have technology era and we have this inclusion era my question is though what I keep noticing though is that there has not been a philosophical change where we con constantly notice that it's almost as though the epistemological foundation of it all is that man is inherently good versus man being inherently evil so my question is how do we look at that philosophy with
• 87:30 - 88:00 regards to influencing the Mind between uh the mind which is really driving the policies that we have today I'm struck by how grounded your question is in history and is so powerful right uh uh and maybe I can just pick up on a tiny piece of your question because it's so thoughtful the is man inherently good or is man inherently bad uh and I would say man is inherently a bell curve that I think that this is
• 88:00 - 88:30 like this is one of the people say all the time kids are blank I'm if you're a DC Public Schools teacher first of all thank you uh and second of all like I'm sure you know they are the most beautiful incredible kids in the classroom and there are kids who uh God bless them given an opportunity they will bully other you know that there there are there's every type of child just like there's every type of adult in every room full of classrooms and the I think we have to design our classrooms to honor and respect and support the best Instinct in every child
• 88:30 - 89:00 and to shape and to bring out and shape the best version of every child um one of my just I think like one of the most important ideas in uh in education is just is just recognizing that um the fundamental attribution error right we presume that people are who people do what they do because of who they are but often they're doing what they do because of the situation that you're put in keep going back to that picture you showed of that classroom in the what would you do if you were put in that classroom you
• 89:00 - 89:30 would take on a series of behaviors that would be adaptive to be able to survive in an environment like that to First make sure that you weren't victimized second to make sure that you had connections to other people so you didn't feel isolated that people people react to environments so much more than we recognize so I think the first step for me is I like we want to build classrooms that break the best out in everybody and disincentivize every single person's the side of every single person that can be
• 89:30 - 90:00 non-constructive just in terms of yeah in terms of like large scale social changes one of the other like generational changes I think about all the time is you know every school is a collective action problem every classroom is a collective action problem we have to get a group of people to make small sacrifices to not be able to do what they want to do in any moment in order to unlock the multiplicative great common good for everyone in that classroom and a generation ago I think people understood that notion of like personal sacrifice for shared benefit
• 90:00 - 90:30 much more clearly and like if if I had come home you know my father U made it clear to me that like if the principal called it didn't matter if I was right or wrong he wasn't my story was not going to be very important to him there was going to be hell to pay uh maybe you know right right or wrong but I think now uh there are a lot of parents out there who want the school to op optimize the individual well that policy isn't right for my child that might be true and yet
• 90:30 - 91:00 it still might be the right policy because it's it it's best for the greatest number of students in the greatest number of situations and I think that that is very not 2021 Zeitgeist of I might be this is another one of those like nonlinear relations individualism is is a good thing right you only have to look at China and North Korea and Russia to you know have any questions about that but can there be an excess of IND idual individualism where we're so individualistic that we destroy the entities that allow us to create community and greater and greater common
• 91:00 - 91:30 good I think that's also possible and I think that it's happening in schools I don't know if that was a that might not count as aist epistemological but I tried it's a better question than my answer no we are unfortunately at time and and that is a a good note to end on Doug thank you um I I started this conversation by expressing that I was somewhat infu infuriated Stephen listening to your presentation so I guess I'll end on the same note because it is infuriating right we had the right
• 91:30 - 92:00 answer and we lost it um some on our way to the right answer or a better answer yeah Amendment accepted you're exactly right there are no right answers but there's a process um some years ago I listened to the the historian John meum uh make a comment about um how we should not judge uh figures of the past by contemporary standards instead we should ask what are we doing today that will make future Generations say my God what were they thinking and that's where I feel like we are right now we had it my
• 92:00 - 92:30 god what have we been thinking for this past lost decade and how do we get back to what we know Works Steven Wilson Stephanie sroi de Garcia Doug Lov thank you very much