Yet in Florida, the community is still grappling with fallout from its own deadly attack at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Just last week, a first-of-its-kind criminal negligence trial got underway for a former campus police officer who failed to confront the shooter. It wasn’t until November 2022 that the now 24-year-old gunman was sentenced to life in prison and in April, a judge dismissed a criminal perjury charge related to the shooting against the former Broward County schools superintendent. 

All these events force Parkland residents to revisit the fatal day. For Ty Thompson, who was the principal of Stoneman Douglas on Feb. 14, 2018, the most pressing issue now is the need for robust campus mental health services, particularly as mass shootings become deadlier and more common. 

“You shouldn’t have to wait for a tragedy to have a wellness center,” he told The 74. “Every school should have a wellness center on their campus. That’s just the state that we’re in and we need to keep tabs on what’s happening with our youth to make sure that if there are problems, we can catch them early.” 

As a member of the Principal Recovery Network, Thompson and other school leaders who confronted mass shootings and their devastating aftermath visited lawmakers last week on Capitol Hill to advocate for additional help in long-term recovery efforts. Their appearance coincides with June being Gun Violence Prevention Month. 

Even after the national attention fizzles away and disaster relief funding dries up, Thompson told The 74, trauma remains omnipresent. Founded in 2019 and supported by the National Association of Secondary School Principals, the Principal Recovery Network works to help guide education leaders immediately after campus shootings and to promote policies that help school communities regain stability. 

The 74 talked to Thompson, now the district’s assistant director of athletics and student activities, about a range of issues, from the practical advice he offers school leaders reeling from a shooting to his support for school-based police officers, so long as they aren’t monitoring hallways with AR-15s. The conversation was edited for length and clarity. 

It’s been five years since the Parkland shooting. In what ways is that tragedy present in your community today? 

One of the things we talked about in Washington, D.C., is that while we got a large influx of resources right away, after a year or so people started to disappear as far as the resources. And so that’s one of the things that we’ve been advocating for is the fact that it doesn’t go away. It just continues. 

Even though we’re five years out, there are still things that the school needs. Trauma after an event like this comes in different forms, it hits people at different times over the course of their trauma. For some, it’s right away;  for some, it’s a few years later. For some, it’s many years later. We continue to battle that with the recovery pieces in making sure we’re providing the resources needed, not only to former students and to the staff who are still there, but also our community members as well. 

Can you provide any specific examples of how that trauma from an event five years ago manifests in your community today?

Unfortunately, we see it almost daily on the news. With new shootings, whether it’s at schools or in communities, that brings everything back. So as those things continue to happen in our country and we are constantly reminded of some of the violence happening in our country, that just brings back that day and they think about what took place with their families, friends or community members around our incident. 

It just continues to regurgitate that back up as they go through trying to heal and they are moving toward healing, but as you continue to see this stuff in the news and the daily shootings, it slows down the process.

It’s almost like you take one step forward and two steps back just because of the current environment of things that are going on within our country. 

What tangible policy changes did you present to lawmakers in Washington? What do you think are the most critical steps that we need to take right now to combat this issue?

A lot of our stance with the Principal Recovery Network is exactly that: The recovery. While gun control and all of these things are very pressing factors that are going on right now, that is obviously not our expertise. 

When you’re a leader of a school and you face a tragedy —  it doesn’t have to be a shooting, it could be a tornado taking down a building or suicides and things like that — it’s up to the school leader to be able to help move that school forward. 

Our biggest part is the recovery effort, and a big part of that is wellness and mental health. We are really pushing that part because Congress is moving in that direction, with the importance of mental health. We wanted to advocate for some additional funds in that area because we also feel that’s important not only after a tragedy, but at any time for a school. 

At Stoneman Douglas, after our event, we instituted a wellness center at our school. We had two portables brought in and we had mental health experts who were staffed in those portables and they were able to serve students, staff and community members. Even to this day, five years later, that wellness center is still on campus and it’s still servicing our community. 

One of the things that I brought to Congress was the fact you shouldn’t have to wait for a tragedy to have a wellness center. Every school should have a wellness center on their campus. That’s just the state that we’re in and we need to keep tabs on what’s happening with our youth to make sure that if there are problems, we can catch them early. 

When we look at some of the past shooters, not necessarily mine in some cases but in others, there were red flags along the way. There’s got to be a way for us to get the proper help to students that we see early on that may need some help. I think that having wellness centers on campuses would help that scenario. I’m not saying that it’s going to be a cure-all, but it certainly couldn’t hurt to have that. 

The Parkland shooter did present multiple missed warning signs prior to the attack. What lessons did you and your colleagues learn about threat assessments and early intervention efforts?

Hindsight is always 20/20. In the case of my school, he was only with me for less than a year, and so a lot of these things that we found out after the fact were prior to him being a student at Stoneman Douglas. I’m not passing the blame on anybody, I’m just saying that there are certain things that take place in a student’s educational record that we need to be sure is moving forward through their careers so that people are aware of what’s happening. 

And we’ve made strides in that since our tragedy. With behavioral threat assessments now becoming more digitized and there’s less chance of things falling through the cracks, we definitely have our lessons learned not only from our tragedy, but all of the different tragedies. 

The shooting divided the community. How did you navigate that?

That was probably the toughest part of my job for those 18 months after the tragedy was trying to make sure I put student and staff interests first. Right away, the community rallied behind everyone, they wanted to provide support. Then, after time went by, that’s when the fingers started to point. And that’s not uncommon in any situation like this, where they’re going to start to put blame and figure out who did what wrong. 

The politics are difficult, don’t get me wrong, but I also understand that’s just what happens. It can’t necessarily be avoided though I would like it to be avoided. With a tragedy like this, everyone has their emotions. Emotions get exponentially kind of out there. Someone that may have already been feeling negative about a situation, now they’re feeling that much more negative.

Following the Uvalde shooting, Texas politicians approved legislation to place armed guards at every K-12 school. Florida took a similar approach after Parkland. How do you think this move played out in your state, and how did it affect the overall safety of kids in your schools?

Look, any time you can have extra security on campus is always a good thing. In our case, in Florida, they want every school to have an armed guard or a school resource officer. 

I definitely think that it helps. It’s definitely a good thing, anytime we can increase security and having people feel safe about coming to school is definitely a positive. For the little ones in elementary, when they see people walking around with guns, I’m not quite sure how that could affect their psyche. I just know that when it came to the high school kids, when we got back to school after the tragedy, we had a mini-army on our campus walking around with the same weapon that took out some of our kids. That did not go over well. 

It’s a delicate balance between making sure you’re feeling safe versus feeling scared quite frankly. That’s something that we were able to circumvent after our tragedy, to still have this presence but not have to have people walking around with AR-15s because that really was not the best course of action. 

As far as legislation, SROs are important. It’s good to have someone on campus, at a minimum, to be able to call in resources in the event of a tragedy. There’s so much tension in the country right now when it comes to violence and how to protect kids without making them feel like they’re in jail. I mean, the school is supposed to be a school and not a prison and it’s definitely a delicate balance, but the more people you can have with eyes and ears out there, it definitely makes it a better situation for all of us.

The former school resource officer at your school was criminally charged and put on trial for failing to confront the gunman and stop the shooting. What lessons from Scot Peterson’s response can we learn about the roles and limitations of police in schools? 

Any time there’s an investigation into these kinds of things, they review all those types of policies. I remember after Columbine, they redid how they handle active shooters. Then something else took place and they readjusted policies. That’s the same scenario here. I’m not going to speculate on what he did or didn’t do wrong. I am by no means a law enforcement person, that’s not my expertise and I’m not going to pretend to know what they are supposed to do or not do. But they do review policies after things take place, whether it’s a shooting or it’s some other incident in the community, to determine what could have been done better. 

As a member of the Principal Recovery Network, have you had to make any calls with school leaders after they experienced shootings? What kind of advice do you offer? 

Unfortunately, I’ve had to make a few phone calls. First, I usually send them an email because trying to get ahold of someone on the phone is nearly impossible. So I usually send an email pretty quickly, within 24 hours of when we hear about it. I just let them know who I am and that I kind of know what you may be feeling right now and, ‘Please, give me a call when you can.’ 

Sometimes that call comes quickly. Sometimes the call never comes because I’ve reached out to a couple of principals and never heard back from them. 

And really, it’s just for me to be a listening ear to them to understand. ‘Look, these are some of the things that may start to come up that you may not be aware of.’ Something very logical like your mail is going to start to increase, so you might want to think about getting some extra staff in there just to handle mail. The phones are going to start ringing off the hook, you need to make sure you have some staff for that. You need to think about getting some additional substitutes because some teachers may not be able to come back right away, depending on the size of their school and the tragedy itself. Make sure you don’t try to get back to school before funerals have taken place.

We have a guide to recovery. It’s not like a playbook because not every tragedy is going to be the same exact scenario. But there are some commonalities across all of these things to just keep in mind. You know, you should be meeting with your staff before you bring students back so that you make sure that they’re ready to come back. You want to make sure you have mental health practitioners on campus and ready to go because there’s no way for you to predict how people are going to react.

The main goal is to let them know that I’m here to listen to them. They can call me at any time, no matter what time of day it is. We want them to feel like they’re not alone. 

In his reelection bid, President Joe Biden has made gun violence prevention efforts part of his appeal to young voters. Youth activists from Parkland became leading voices in the gun control movement. Beyond the most outspoken advocates, how do young people in your community view gun violence today and how has the shooting affected their worldviews? 

Our kids rallied very quickly and had the March for Our Lives happen in D.C. within six weeks after our tragedy. I really thought that was going to be a momentum changer, and there were a lot of people involved with that. I was hoping that was really going to make some change. 

I’m not saying that maybe there weren’t some thought processes changed in Washington, but obviously it remains a hot topic. I do know that many of my kids that were involved from Stoneman Douglas still have those thoughts in mind of changing the world, which is what we teach in high school is getting out there to debate the right way and present yourself in a positive light and try to move the country forward. 

A lot of these kids now, five years later, are out of college and some of them are just wrapping up their college careers. It’s going to be interesting to see if they are going to be able to keep the momentum and move it forward with gun control. I’m hoping that continues. 

Any time these things do come up in the news, hopefully it re-sparks them to want to try to do something, to move that legislation and those policies forward. 

What didn’t I ask that you’d like to discuss? 

It’s important that these conversations continue to stay at the forefront. That was the big thing we talked to legislators about because we know that after tragedies take place there’s a lot of attention and then it dies off. It’s like, why do we only talk about this when stuff happens? Why can’t we be a little more proactive on some of these things to make sure we’re moving forward and looking to the future versus being reactionary all the time?

That’s what I was most encouraged by in D.C. is the fact that they’re trying to move not only with the gun stuff, but also with mental health support.

The Institute of Education Sciences turns 21 this year. After five years at its helm, Director Mark Schneider is hoping to shepherd its transition to maturity.

When he was appointed by President Trump in 2017, Schneider took over an agency designed to reveal the truth of how schooling is delivered in the United States. IES houses four research centers that measure the effects of educational interventions from preschool to university, and through the National Assessment of Educational Progress — the agency’s most recognizable research product, often referred to as the Nation’s Report Card — it delivers regular updates on the state of student achievement.

But Schneider sees a new role for federal research endeavors. Through the use of public competitions and artificial intelligence, the director wants IES to help incubate breakthrough technologies and treatments that can help student performance take a giant leap forward in the coming years. Rapid-cycle experimentation and replication, he hopes, will help reverse more than a decade of stagnation in K–12 performance.

Late in his six-year term, Schneider is candid about his status as one of the few holdovers from the previous administration still serving in government. In part, he quips, that’s because education research isn’t considered important enough for a Trump appointee to be fired. But he’s also labored to win the trust of Congress and cultivate bipartisan support for a vision of educational improvement powered by data.

Now he believes that vision could soon be realized. In December, Congress approved a substantial increase in IES’s budget to potentially fund a fifth national center that some have dubbed a “DARPA” for education research (based on the Pentagon’s famous hub for research and development). Further legislation is needed to authorize a branch for advanced development in education sciences, but potential research strands are already being theorized.

Schneider — a political scientist who left academia for leadership and research roles at the American Institutes for Research and the American Enterprise Institute — has a commanding perspective on the federal education bureaucracy, serving as the head of the National Center for Education Statistics in the 2000s. His sometimes tart observations about Washington’s research efforts, and the future of IES, can be found on his frequently updated blog.

In a wide-ranging conversation with The 74’s Kevin Mahnken, Schneider spoke with surprising openness about the Department of Education (which “operates like a bank” in its grantmaking capacity), the “horrifying” reality of university master’s programs (“It’s a money machine, and so you create more of them”), and why he believes some concerns about data privacy are overblown (“If I were really worried about this, I wouldn’t wear an Apple watch.”) 

Above all, he said, the task ahead is to develop a research base that can yield transformative educational tools on the order of COVID vaccines and ChatGPT.

“The goal, using this foundation, is to look at things that pop out, that would not exist otherwise,” Schneider said. “If we can do this with vaccines, if we can use it with chatbots, then what’s our foundation?”

The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

The 74: Tell me a little about what you’re anticipating this year in terms of legislation to establish a DARPA-type program for education.

Mark Schneider: There are two parts of the legislation. The first is to set up the National Center for Advanced Development in Education, NCADE, and the other is for major reinvestment in Statewide Longitudinal Data Systems. Most people focus on the first part, but the second is also really important because we spent a billion dollars building those data systems over the last 18 years. The whole thing is a great system, but it needs to be rebuilt.

What needs to be modified in those systems?

It’s old technology. I think the first round of money for them went out the door in 2006. [Gestures at iPhone sitting on the table] Can you imagine having a technology system that was built in 2006? So they need to be modernized, but the more important thing is that we now have a much more expansive vision of what they can do after almost 20 years of work. 

The example I point to is absenteeism. States have really good records on attendance because money flows based on average daily attendance, and they have to take counts. They know who are chronic absentees, but they don’t know why. It could be food insecurity, health, migration status, could be a dozen things or more. But if we use these longitudinal data systems as a backbone and then plug in information from criminal justice, health, Social Security, we would have a much better sense of what’s going on with any student in a given school. The strength of Statewide Longitudinal Data Systems [SLDS] has always been tracking students over time.

The biggest problem, of course, is that as you merge more data, the issues of privacy become more intense because it’s easier and easier to identify people when there’s more information. We’re nowhere near good enough at privacy protection, but we’re getting way better, and there are so many more ways of protecting privacy than there were 20 years ago.

Given the lengthy timetables of federal projects like the SLDS, do you ever feel like you’re painting the Golden Gate Bridge, and now that you’ve finally established these tools, it’s already time to overhaul them?

Well, we spent a $1 billion building this, and right now, we’re spending about $35 million per year on grants to states to do things with it. What percentage of $1 billion is going back into maintenance and expansions? It’s pocket change. So you always have to remember that this is a state-owned system, designed to help them do their work. And to take an example, Tennessee is surrounded by seven other states, and they end up doing their own collaborations and data exchanges.

Is the inherent federalism of that approach, especially layered over the archaic technology, difficult to manage? How did it play out during the pandemic, for instance, when real-time data was so hard to generate?

The trickiness had nothing to do with SLDS, though. It had to do with the world we woke up to in March 2020.

For me, SLDS is like an exemplar of a federal system where the states assume almost all responsibility. But again, we have more capacity compared with most states. There are states like Massachusetts that are doing an unbelievably good job, and other states are not. Our role there is providing the resources to enable states to a) experiment like Massachusetts and b) bring states that have little capacity up to speed. 

Probably the most alarming federal data coming out of the COVID era has been the release of scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which showed huge drops in achievement in reading and especially math. Did those results match what you were expecting?

By the time NAEP landed, we had NWEA results and others that suggested it was going to be a debacle. We knew the scores were going to go down by a bunch. But NAEP is NAEP — it’s national, it’s rock-solid in terms of its methodologies and its sample. So it’s indisputable that this was an awful situation, right?

To connect the dots with SLDS: One of the problems with the system is that it was conceived as a data warehouse strategy. And I tried and tried, but nobody caught that this was a stupid way of phrasing its purpose. I said, “We don’t need a data warehouse. What goes into a warehouse, a forklift?” We want an Amazon model where we also have retail stores, and you can go in and find stuff. 

I understand that states are very hesitant to let random academics and researchers have access to very private data. But as we rebuild the SLDS, we need to make sure that there are use requirements as part of the deal — always, always consistent with privacy protections, but we have to use these more. It’s a little tricky because some states have a history of opening up the doors and letting in researchers, and others just don’t. In the state of Texas, it can depend on who the attorney general is. 

It can be striking how many research papers come out of, for instance, Wake County, North Carolina.

It’s because they’ve opened the data to more people. And that’s part of the deal, but Wake County is not the United States. We need more. 

My days of active research are behind me, but the possibilities built into these data are incredible. I thought I was going to be able to do a deal with Utah, where there’s an organization doing early childhood interventions; all the evidence is that they’re good, but we need to see if “good” sticks. Well, SLDS is perfectly designed to figure out if interventions stick. I thought this work in Utah would allow us to identify students in their early childhood interventions, work with the state to track those students over time, and find out if those very positive pre-K results — it’s a very inexpensive intervention with great results in the early years — stick. We have the means to do it. We just need to do it.

It seems like efforts like that would be complicated by the growing political salience of data security.

It’s everywhere, and for good reason. I’m not really a privacy hawk, but all the privacy protections need to consider benefits versus costs. In too many places, we’ve concentrated on the risk without considering the benefit. But that’s only half the equation. We have to be able to say, “This risk can be mitigated, and there could be huge benefits to come out of this.” 

This is what political systems do all the time — they balance risks against rewards. But we have to do it in a much more sophisticated way.

Why are you a privacy dove? There is something a little funny about how guarded people are about government intrusions when they so freely hand over their data to Amazon or whomever.

I have an Amazon Echo in every room in my house, and I know that they’re listening! Everyone has a story where they’re talking about something, and then they go on their Amazon account and see an advertisement related to the product they were talking about. It’s really scary, but I’ve only turned off the microphone on one of my devices because of the convenience of being able to say, “Alexa, turn on my lights, play the BBC.” For me, those benefits are worth getting a bunch of stupid advertisements.

If I were really worried about this, I wouldn’t wear an Apple watch or own an Apple phone. We all should be concerned about privacy, and especially when it comes to children. Obviously, the standards have to be high. But again, there are benefits to using a more comprehensive database, which is my vision of what SLDS would be. The technology issues are real, and it’s always a war of whether people hack it and we need to develop better mechanisms for protection. 

What are you trying to achieve, organizationally, with the proposed addition of an advanced research center?

IES is only 20 years old. My predecessor, Russ Whitehurst, was the founding director, and he was brilliant. He set out to modernize the research and development infrastructure, and his goal was to make randomized controlled trials the coin of the realm. I was the NCES commissioner for three years, and I argued with him all the time about his model of RCTs, which are the gold standard. The way he saw it was — and he knew what he was doing, he’s really smart — “I can’t compromise this at the beginning. If I say, ‘Maybe we do this, maybe we do that,’ then nobody goes in the direction I want, and they just wait me out.”

The problem with the model was that RCTs, as they were originally introduced, were about average effects across populations. But to use a specific example, we’ve now moved into individualized medicine — it’s about what works for you, and under what conditions. So the mantra of IES now is, “What works for whom, and under what conditions?” Of course, we still have studies that look at main effects, but our work is all about identifying what works for individuals or groups of students. This requires a lot of changes about the way we think and how we do business.

My joke is that almost every science has gone through a replication crisis. We don’t have a replication crisis, because we don’t replicate anything. Even if it works, we don’t replicate it! So a few years ago, we launched a replication RFA [request for applications]. IES was moving in that direction anyway, but we needed a much more systematic attention to replication. My mistake was we structured the replication this way: “Something worked in New York City, so give me another $5 million, and I’ll try it in Philadelphia.” Or, “It worked for some African American kids, let’s try it with Hispanic kids.” They were all big experiments, five years long. You can’t make progress that way.

Now we’re running an X Prize, which will be announced before the summer. I’m not sure how generalizable this will be, but the prize is based on using digital learning platforms to run experiments. The critical part is that you have to have 100,000 users on your platform to qualify. You run those experiments, you fail fast — that’s an incredibly important principle, fail fast — and the few things that work, you have to do multiple replications. The original plan was: experiment, replication, then another round of replications. At the end of which, the goal is to say, “Here’s an intervention that worked for these students, but not for these students.” Then you take what worked for those students and push it further. [On May 9, Adaptive Experimentation Accelerator was announced as the winner of the $1 million Digital Learning Challenge prize.]

It’s a systematic approach to rapid replication. Not everything in education research can be done in short order. Some things take a long time. But there are many, many things that last a semester or a school year, and at the end of that time, we have proximate measures for distal outcomes. This prize approach is just a different process for how we replicate. 

ChatGPT just opened up a whole world of discussion about the use of AI. But what happened with ChatGPT is like what we’re trying to do. The world has been doing AI for literally decades, but the last 10 years have seen increased computing power and more complexity in the models, and the foundational models have gotten bigger and bigger and bigger. We built an incredible foundation: machine learning, data science, AI. And all of a sudden, boom! ChatGPT is the first thing that caught the public’s attention, but it was built on this amazing foundation. Nobody knows what the next thing is that will break through, but they’re all being built on decades’ worth of work that established this foundation. It’s the same thing with mRNA research — the COVID vaccine could not have happened without that foundation.

What I’m trying to do is use IES resources to build this kind of foundation, which includes the learning platforms, rapid-cycle experimentation and replication, transformative research money. And the goal, using this foundation, is to look at things that pop out, that would not exist otherwise. That’s the goal: If we can do this with vaccines, if we can use it with chatbots, then what’s our foundation? What I hope is that, when we get NCADE going, we move this activity there and let it consolidate and interact. Then we start doing new, innovative research based on that foundation.

What are the kinds of research projects and outcomes that perhaps seem fantastical now, but could be realized in the way that MRNA vaccines have been?

The telos, the North Star, is individualized education. The first thing that is popping from this work is an AI institute that IES is launching with the National Science Foundation, and it’s designed for students’ with speech pathologies. There aren’t enough speech language pathologists in schools, so the demand for them is really high. We also do something incredibly stupid by burdening them with unbelievable paperwork.

This AI institute is funded by $20 million, split between IES and the NSF, and it has several prongs to it. The first is to develop an AI-assisted universal screener, because it takes time to diagnose exactly what students’ speech pathologies are — whether it has to do with sentence structure, vocabulary, pronunciation. Medicine has been doing this forever, by the way. The second prong is to use an AI toolbox to help design, update, and monitor the treatment plan. In other words, we’ve got a labor shortage, we know we need assessment and a treatment plan, and AI can do this. Or, AI should be able to do this, whether or not we can pull it off with this group. It’s a risk, like everything we do is a risk. But to me, this is a breakthrough.

I’m very optimistic that they’re going to pull it off, in part because of the third prong, which relates to the paperwork. It’s a lot of work, multiple forms, and it’s routine. Well, guess what can now type up routine paragraphs?

It seems like school districts, let alone Congress, could be really hesitant about deploying AI to write up after-incident reports, or what have you. Some regulatory structure is going to have to be created to govern the use of this technology.

I’m sure, like me, you’ve been monitoring the reaction to ChatGPT. There’s an extreme reaction, “Ban it completely.” Another extreme would be, “This is amazing, go for it!” And then there’s the right reaction: This is a tool that’s never going back in the box. So how do we use it appropriately? How do we use it in classrooms, and to free teachers from drudgery?

At least for the foreseeable future, humans will have a role because ChatGPT is often wrong. And the biggest problem is that we sometimes don’t know when it’s wrong. It’ll get better over time, I don’t think there’s a question about that, but it needs human intervention. Humans have to know that it’s not infallible, and they have to have the intelligence to know how to read ChatGPT and say, “That doesn’t work.”

Of course, it writes very boring prose.

But so do students.

And so do reporters.

Touché. You mentioned that you ran NCES over a decade ago. I’m wondering if you’ve noticed a change in Washington’s ambitions around using federal data to spur school improvement, especially now that the peak reform era is long gone.

It’s true that the level of skepticism is much greater. But the technology has also gotten way, way better. We hired the National Academies [of Science, Engineering, and Medicine] to do three reports for us to coincide with our 20th anniversary. The one about NCES was the most interesting one. It talks about new and somewhat less intrusive measures.

NCES is old. There are lots of arguments about when it started, but the modern NCES was actually a reaction to [sociologist and researcher] James Coleman, who was intimately involved in the early design of longitudinal studies. They’ve gotten more complicated — the original was “High School and Beyond” — and they’re all based on survey data, just going out and talking to people. Well, you know the fate of surveys: Response rates are falling and falling, and it’s harder to get people to talk. 

That’s how bad it’s gotten?

We were forced — “forced” makes it sound like it was a bad idea; and it did turn out to be a bad idea — to ask schools that were participating for a lot of information about IEPs [individualized education programs] and students with special needs. This gets back to that cost/benefit calculation because they would not share the classification of students with special needs, and they just refused to participate. So we ended up canceling that data collection. That was a leading indicator of the problem.

Increasingly, the question is what we can do to get the kind of data that these longitudinal studies generated without having to interview 15,000 or 18,000 kids. It requires a modification in the way you think, and it requires an expansive view of where the data lie. How much of the data that we’re asking students and parents and teachers about resides in state longitudinal data systems, for example? Could we drive the need for human interviewing to 5 percent or 10 percent of what we do now? It actually calls for a different thought process than, “Well, we always do ‘High School and Beyond’ this way!” But federal bureaucracies aren’t known for their innovative thinking, quite frankly. 

This adaptation might also mean that some of the unique things we get from surveys are going to have to go because no one will give them to you.

What, if anything, is the effect of changes in government on a massive organization like IES? You were appointed under President Trump, so the Department of Education has already undergone a really significant change, and now Congress has changed hands as well.

We’re not massive. We’re pretty small, actually.

We’re a science agency, and we were created when the Education Sciences Reform Act was authorized in 2002. I think the vision was that IES would grow not to the size of the  National Institutes for Health or the National Science Foundation, but on a trajectory that would put it into that kind of group. If you look at the original legislation, it’s still there. We have a board that is almost populated now, and the ex officio members include the director of the Census, the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and somebody from NIH. You don’t create a board with those kinds of people on it unless you expect it to be a big, major player.

It never got there. The budget is up to $808 million, in part because we got a pretty big chunk of money in the omnibus package. But $30 million of that was for DARPA-Ed, which we don’t have yet. Ten million dollars of that is for the School Pulse Panel. So Congress is interested in modernization, and we have to prove that this investment is worthwhile. 

What about the difference at the top? Are there notably different attitudes between Secretary DeVos and Secretary Cardona with respect to IES’s mission?

I’ve gotten enormous support from the department. We would not have gotten the money for NCADE, we would not have gotten the money for School Pulse without that support. DeVos’s goal was to make the Education Department go away, so this administration is obviously much more expansive. They’ve been careful in their support of things, but again, NCADE wouldn’t have gotten this far without the full-throated backing of the department, and of the Office of Management and Budget and the White House.

I’m reminded of the parties’ divergent positions on the federal government’s role in education, and how close the Department of Education came to never being authorized.

Jimmy Carter is a really good ex-president and a good human being, but was not a very effective president. As you know, the establishment of the department was in response to support that he got from teachers’ unions. So there is a philosophical debate about the role of the federal government in education, and it’s not a slam dunk. There are things that are worth talking about. A huge chunk of the money that the department manages is Title IV, so it operates like a bank, and it’s by far the smallest cabinet department in terms of workforce.

The other thing I’m not sure people fully understand is that the department isn’t just a grant-making operation, it’s also a contract shop. I taught public policy for decades at Stony Brook University, and when I decided that I was never going back, they asked me to give a talk to my former colleagues — almost all of whom I’d hired — and graduate students. My opening remark set everyone back on their heels because I said, “I taught here for 20 years, and every one of my students should sue me for malpractice.” Nothing I taught had anything to do with the way the sausage is really made. 

You hear this all the time, and academics pooh-pooh it. But I’ve been on both sides of it, and it’s really true: Academic research and the sausage factory are the same. In 20 years of teaching public policy, I never once mentioned contractors. And contractors run the whole show. It’s the way we do business, and it’s even more interesting than just: “I run this agency, but here’s what you, the contractor, should do.” All too often, it’s the contractors doing the actual thinking.

There’s been a long argument over the 20 years, on and off, that I’ve been associated with this stuff. We should, and must, contract out the work and the implementation, but we should not be contracting out the thinking. And that’s easy to articulate, but what’s the dividing line? When are we surrendering our intellectual capital — our control of the ship, if you will — to contractors who now design the ship, build the ship and steer the ship? 

Are there concrete examples from education research where you can point to projects that have gone off-course?

NAEP is $185 million per year, and it gets renewed every five years. Do you know how long Educational Testing Services has had the contract? Forty years. There are reasons why they get this contract — they’re good! But this is decades of either minimal or zero competition. And as the test has gotten bigger and more complicated, even putting together a bid to compete costs millions of dollars. People ask, “Why would we spend millions of dollars to compete with ETS when they’ve had the contract for 40 years and we see no indication that it will ever be different?”

To me, this is a serious issue.

Given that NAEP is the foremost product of NCES, there’s probably very little scope for reimagining it beyond, say, changing the testing modality from pen-and-paper to computers.

I agree on that, it’s largely the same technology that ETS invented 40 years ago. But the world has changed. It’s just gotten more and more expensive, but the amount of reimagining NAEP and its structure — whether or not we can do this cheaper and faster — is just lagging. It’s really frustrating. 

Even before COVID, there was a lot of pondering about the future of NAEP and the costs of administering it. The Long-Term Trends test was postponed between 2012 and 2020, right?

Yeah, but that’s an interesting case. The modern version of NAEP — which measures fourth- and eighth-grade reading and math — was authorized in 2002, I believe. It goes back to the ’70s, really, but we’ve been doing this version of it for 20 years. People love the Long-Term Trends test, but do we really need it when we’ve had 20 years of the main NAEP?

You’ve spent a lot of your career studying the value of higher education. Do you think we’re staring at a financial or demographic apocalypse for colleges and universities?

“Apocalypse” is way too strong a word. There are demographic trends such that the pool of students is shrinking, and there’s also incredible regional variation. The New England and mid-Atlantic states are experiencing much sharper declines than the South and the West. And of course, universities are not mobile; if you invest all this infrastructure in frigid Massachusetts or northern New York, and all the students move, you have to ask, “What do I do with all this infrastructure now?”

As to the value of a four-year degree, you and I operate in a sphere where everybody is highly literate. I read all the time, and I’m not talking about technical stuff. I read novels all the time because it’s an opportunity to live in a different world. But what’s the definition of literacy in the world we now live in, and what skills do we truly need? It’s still only a minority of people who go to four-year programs, but do we need to send even that many students to get four-year degrees? Most of them want jobs and family-sustaining wages, and do we need four-year degrees for that? The answer is obviously not, if you look at what’s happening in Maryland and Pennsylvania [where governors have recently removed degree requirements from thousands of state jobs]. 

The fact of the matter is, this is happening. To the extent that it’s happening, which I believe is necessary and important, the incentives for getting a bachelor’s degree start to decline. It becomes more of an individual question: “I’m going to spend five or six years at a four-year institution. It’s pretty much a cookie cutter, stamp-stamp-stamp experience, and I get a bachelor’s degree. Then, at a job interview, they ask what my skills are, and I can’t answer. Well, I can use ChatGPT!”

That’s quite grim. But is there a way to offer prospective students better information about the value they’re actually getting from college?

When I was at the American Institutes for Research, I ran something called College Measures, which was the first systematic attempt to crack all the work that had been done at the university level about what happens to students when they graduate. In the end, it’s the variation in programs that really matters — as soon as we started unpacking student outcomes, program by program, the programs that were technical were the winners. And the numbers were amazing. The first results we published came from Virginia and Tennessee, and I swear to God, when I saw the results, I didn’t believe them. I thought we had an error in the data because associate’s degree holders were out-earning bachelor’s degree holders. 

We repeated this over and over and over again, in maybe 10 different states. It was always technical degrees coming out of community colleges that had the best earnings. In the state of Florida, I think the best postsecondary certificate was “Elevator Mechanic/Constructor.” There aren’t a lot of them, but the starting wage was $100,000! Then you start looking at sociology, English, psychology, and [gestures downward with his hand, makes crashing sound].

It turned out to be that these degree programs were increasingly becoming surrogates for skills. The worst outcome for all students was for those who went into liberal arts and general studies at community colleges. They’re doing that because they want to transfer to a four-year school, but only 20 percent of them actually transfer. They come out with a general education and no skills, and the labor market outcomes were a disaster. 

I was working with the Burning Glass Institute, which has employment records for millions of people and scrapes job advertisements, to start looking for what skills were in high demand. The beauty of it was that it was such good data, and even better, it was regional. Most people don’t move that often, so if I’m living and going to school in western Tennessee, it doesn’t help me at all to know what somebody’s hiring for in Miami. It basically asked, “How much money is each skill worth?” Things have probably changed since that time, but one of the highest-demand skills in almost every market was [the customer relationship manager software] Salesforce, which was worth between $10,000 and $20,000. 

The other thing we did, which made me really popular, was look at the same outcomes for master’s programs. Colleges just create these programs, and the money goes to support everything that academics love: travel, course buyouts, graduate students. But the numbers are horrifying for most master’s programs. You create a master’s program, and they tend to be relatively cheap — and you don’t give TAs to master’s students, so it’s all cash. It’s a money machine, and so you create more of them. 

This brings me back to my previous question. If young people start seeing the value proposition of a four-year degree differently, and American fertility rates are producing fewer young people to begin with, it seems like the music eventually has to stop for the higher education sector. And if that happens, employers are going to have to rely on something besides the apparent prestige of a B.A. to distinguish between job candidates, right?

Both my daughters think I’ve become increasingly conservative because of what goes on in post-secondary education. Look at university endowments: All the money is hidden, but the subsidy we give to well-off students is humungous because their endowments are tax-free. Princeton has a huge endowment and a small student population; Harvard has a bigger endowment, but also a larger enrollment. When I was at the American Institutes for Research, we calculated the subsidy at Princeton per undergraduate student, and the subsidy was something in the vicinity of $100,000 per year. All hidden, nobody talks about it. Meanwhile the total subsidy for Montclair State University, which is down the road, was $12,000; the local community college was $3,000. This includes both state and federal money. What kind of system is this?

I testified at the Senate Finance Committee, and we got a small tax on endowments that was only for the very, very richest schools. I think it’s still on the books, but it was nowhere near as aggressive as it should have been. What I wanted was to take the money and set up a competitive grant program for community colleges because what they do is hard work, and they absolutely need the money. But what happened was that we got a much smaller tax that went into the general fund and didn’t go into improving anything. It was a disappointment.

This leads me to wonder what you make of the Biden administration’s student debt relief!

I’m not going to talk anymore. [Laughs] 

The other part of that same campaign was about property taxes. Georgetown and George Washington University, for example, don’t pay property taxes. Some universities acknowledge that they’re getting police services, fire, sewage, and so forth, and they negotiate something called a PILOT, a payment in lieu of taxes. One case was Harvard, which negotiated a PILOT with Boston that was way lower than what they would have otherwise paid, and they didn’t even fully pay it! A past college president told me once, “Your campaign to go after the endowments is never going to happen in a serious way. But if you start attacking our property tax exemption, that gets us worried.” 

Back when I thought some of this was actually going to stick, I wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post. Washington, D.C.’s Office of Tax Revenue turns out to be a pretty good agency, and I asked them for a list of all the properties owned by Georgetown and George Washington. I just asked them to calculate the value of those properties, and what should be the payment given the commercial tax rate. It was a lot of money. The average residential property owner in Princeton, New Jersey, pays thousands of dollars more in taxes than they otherwise would because Princeton University doesn’t pay property taxes. 

Criticizing universities in the Washington Post doesn’t sound like a good way to make friends in your current position.

Well, I haven’t done anything like that in years. And of course, I was appointed by the previous administration, when none of this stuff was particularly poisonous.

So why did I survive when almost nobody else did? I don’t think education research is that important. I think I’m good at my job, and the reforms we’re pursuing — whether it’s establishing NCADE or revising the SLDS — are really strongly supported by the current administration, which I really appreciate. But I’m not important enough to be fired.

Isn’t that something of an indictment of federal policymakers, though? They should care more about education research!

Yeah, but then I would have been fired. [Laughs] 

I was affiliated with AEI [the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank], and I still have many friends there. But this NCADE proposal has Democratic backing in Congress. A lot of the work is still nonpartisan, or bipartisan. We work really hard at this, and some of the things we’re pushing are just so fundamentally important that it doesn’t matter which party you’re in.

Does partisanship make it harder to pursue the higher education issues you’re interested in, though?

I’m only the third IES director that’s been confirmed and served any length of time. Russ Whitehurst was totally focused on early childhood literacy, and John Easton cared the most about K–12. So even over these last five years, IES is predominantly still K–12 oriented.

My newest thing in postsecondary research is to collect data on non-credit activity, and I don’t think people understand how big that is in community college. A lot of it is people enrolling to use a swimming pool, or someone who takes three courses in musicology but isn’t interested in credit or a degree. But increasingly, non-credit activity is being used for non-credit certificates that are job- and career-related. Maybe you need three courses to upgrade my skills for auto body repair, or to upgrade your IT skills, but you don’t want a whole degree or to enroll in college. So you can do it on a non-credit basis.

We don’t even know how many non-credit certificates are being granted because we don’t collect any data on it. IPEDS [the Integrated Postsecondary Data System, the federal government’s primary source of information on colleges and universities] is rooted in Title IV, and it doesn’t collect information about schools that don’t take federal grants or about non-credit activity. But it’s really big, and many people are betting time and energy and money to acquire non-credit certificates. We’re trying to do some work on that, and OMB is very hesitant to mandate any collections of data because of Title IV, but they’ve approved a voluntary data collection. I don’t do research anymore, but I’m trying to broker deals with researchers and states — Virginia has a beautiful data set, for instance — to find out what happens if you get a non-credit certificate. Indiana is another opportunity. 

Launching this stuff is hard because it’s pretty untraditional, and it requires strong state data systems and the willingness of states to work with independent researchers. And of the $808 million we’ve got, none of it is walking-around money; all of it is competitive, everything’s peer-reviewed. Which it should be, but I can’t just say, “Sure, sounds great, I’ll send you $50,000.”

As the co-founder of Robin, an educational technology startup focused on improving the mental health outcomes of school communities, Thadani expanded the coaching and curriculum offered to all frontline members — from bus drivers to cafeteria workers to sanitation staff.

“Part of Robin’s platform is coaching, developing connections, building resilience and really understanding the skillsets you need to deal with life’s challenges,” Thadani told The 74. “So if we’re going to do a great job with students, we have to do an unbelievable job with all the adults in their lives.”

For Thadani, destigmatizing conversations around mental health hits home.

As a young parent, Thadani met a father from Newtown, Connecticut who opened up to him about losing his 7-year-old son in a school shooting.

That father was Mark Barden, the co-founder and CEO of the Sandy Hook Promise Action Fund, a nonprofit organization dedicated to preventing gun violence in schools.

Touched by Barden’s passion to protect children, Thadani began volunteering for the organization — which later served as the catalyst for co-founding Robin.

“As I learned more about what they’re doing, I took a look at how mental health has affected my own family and close friends,” Thadani said. “I took that as a sign and inspiration to say I’m going to do something about it.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The 74: I understand that your affiliation with Sandy Hook Promise played a large role in the creation of Robin. Walk me through how your volunteer work led to starting an educational technology startup.

I’m so proud and feel very fortunate to the team I met over at Sandy Hook Promise. It was a couple years ago and I just so happened to have a conversation with Mark Barden. I didn’t really know who he was at that very moment, but later found out as he shared his story with me that he’s not only a parent who lost his 7-year-old that day, but also happened to be one of the co-founders of Sandy Hook Promise. 

We took a liking to each other and had a lovely conversation. He shared some of his goals, ambitions, and the story of that day with me. As a young parent at the time, it really shook me to my core. I asked him how I can help and he shared with me some of the things that I could do. So I became a Promise Leader and started helping them in any way I could from volunteering to fundraising.

A lot of people talk about the gun violence prevention policy work they do, which is absolutely incredible, but a bulk of what they do that really makes a large impact is the mental health programs for kids. They have two very well known programs called Start With Hello and Knowing the Signs. When I learned more about these programs, and talked to Mark and Nicole and the rest of the team, I thought wow this is incredible and I wish this was everywhere. We started talking about how much of a challenge it is to reach every school in America and get this program out there. Sandy Hook Promise is a nonprofit doing wonderful things but they only have so much reach. 

As I learned more about what they’re doing, I took a look at how mental health has affected my own family and close friends. I took that as a sign and inspiration to say I’m going to do something about it. What I’ve learned is that there aren’t a lot of preventive and proactive programs out there that are making an impact. So that’s just some of the genesis on why myself and Scott and now a larger team started Robin.

I understand that Robin extends resources to all frontline members of school communities, such as bus drivers, cafeteria workers and sanitation staff. Tell me more about this initiative.

As any young company, you can only do so much right out of the gates. We started creating this digital online curriculum for students starting with middle school and high school and then eventually elementary. As we were out there talking to principals and superintendents and counselors, I started learning that not only was there not much for educators but they also weren’t really thinking about it in a more broad frame.

As we started to talk to more people, we realized, wait a minute, it’s not just teachers who are interacting every day with students. It’s the cafeteria worker, it’s the bus driver, it’s the crossing guard. If you think about it, the bus driver is the first person to see our kids and the last person to drop them off. They have the potential to set the tone for the day based on how they’re doing.

With one school in upstate New York, we had the opportunity to talk to their leadership team at a conference. They talked about some of the challenges that their transportation team was facing. It’s tough being a driver and having a group of students screaming or yelling or being rambunctious on the bus. In addition to administrators, unions and parents that can be challenging at times. Who’s supporting and allowing them the space and opportunity to talk to someone? Part of Robin’s platform is coaching, developing connections, building resilience and really understanding the skillsets you need to deal with life’s challenges. So if we’re going to do a great job with students, we have to do an unbelievable job with all the adults in their lives.

So we began this journey to support all frontline members starting with this one school in upstate New York who gave us the opportunity to talk to their transportation team. We did a six part coaching series with all 18 of them and asked them about the challenges they face in day-to-day work. I’m proud to report that after we finished, everybody retained their jobs, came back to school and walked in with their heads held high. This is something we’re doing now all over the country, from upstate New York to South Carolina to our backyard here in New York City. We’re supporting school communities and I think this is really critical in order to create something sustainable and have long-term impact.

Oftentimes these frontline members of school communities come from diverse and low-income backgrounds. How does Robin ensure the coaching and resources provided to them are not only accessible but also culturally relevant?

It starts with where the content and curriculum comes from. Robin comes from a diverse set of coaches, teachers, counselors and social workers that are not only mental health experts but are also from those communities and have worked in those schools we serve. The largest community we serve is in our backyard in New York City — the Bronx. A lot of students and families in the Bronx come from lower income communities. They also happen to be from Black and Brown communities where a lot of them don’t speak English. So starting with some of the basics, we have all of our content up in Spanish with closed captions available. Especially for our older students, we make sure that when they see our content not only do they see someone that looks like them or has been through similar challenges, but also in a language they can understand. 

The other thing that Robin does is really listen to the school communities we serve. No school is, of course, the same, even within New York City. The school down the street might have a separate set of challenges, opportunities and needs then the next. I think part of the reason schools are not only coming to us but coming back to us is because we are a reflection of who they are. And again, while we can’t be everything to everyone, we are pulling from a lot of different types of communities and trying to really understand what those communities are asking for. In turn, we can address them with the right sets of curriculum or coaches that they not only want to hear from, but based on the data and some of our surveys and some of our processes, is the right fit for their particular community. So it’s a little bit of a combination of using technology and data and good old fashioned listening skills to really understand the communities we serve and what they’re particularly going through.

In the wake of the Nashville school shooting, what is something about gun violence prevention more school communities need to talk about?

I happened to be in Tennessee about an hour southeast of Nashville visiting one of the schools we work with when this occurred. So I’m with the superintendent of this district and we, of course, talked about it. There are signs out there for these particular students, whether they were posting on social media or showing signs that they were stressed or angry. These students or graduates had no outlet or connection and felt an element of loneliness. And again, these are all studies that have been proven and shown out there in terms of who decides to do these horrific things. 

I think one thing schools all ought to do is understand what those things are so they could be on the lookout. How can we all be armed with information and knowledge on how to notice these signs and then know what to do? How do we get involved sooner and understand what the challenges or issues that a particular student or set of students are facing right now? I think all schools want to do that but they don’t know how to do that. They’re not trained, for example, to know the science. They’re not trained in mental health first aid. 

You bring up a valuable point in regards to mental health training. Tell me more about why it’s important for school communities to destigmatize conversations around mental health.

When we heard back from schools, they’re looking for this training. Not specifically training tailored to know how to identify a school shooter. That is very targeted and there are things out there for that. But how to better understand when you see a student of yours that might be going through a mental health challenge and how to help that student in the moment — from a simple panic attack to an anxiety attack. We do a course around test anxiety. March was SATs and ACTs in a large part of the country, and many students, and parents frankly, get really anxious and nervous. 

There are things we could do to support them in advance of that. That’s sort of the preventative nature of what we’re talking about at Robin. How do we get ahead of these things because we don’t know what life’s challenges or what mental health challenges a student may or may not face. We do know that there are skill sets to put in place today at a young age, even starting in elementary school, that will give them the ability to use those skills if and when a challenge large or small arises.

How have conversations today around gun violence prevention and mental health shaped your own views on the matter?

I look at this from the lens of a parent first and foremost. That’s my number one job and my number one responsibility. It’s made me hyper aware of the possibility that this could happen anywhere and anytime. So what does that mean for young kids growing up? It means we need to make sure they’re okay talking about it. My daughter came home, she’s in second grade, and she had her first formal active shooter drill. For me, I’m 43 and I grew up in the 80s and 90s. We had fire drills and “stop, drop and roll” and how to evacuate the building and things of that nature. But our kids are only going to know this world. Having an open conversation with them as a parent so they can understand why we do these things is important. Whether I like to or want to, this is what we have to do. 

It’s also made me want to change this. Whether it’s through Robin or through supporting Sandy Hook or through just me as an individual doing interviews and podcasts and having these conversations. I know people turn it into a political and divided commentary, but it shouldn’t be. We don’t have all the answers. I don’t have the magic answer in my pocket right now. I have elements of the answer that I think will help, but we need a lot of people to come to the table from all walks of life to solve this. Because you can’t tell me one person who doesn’t want to solve it. We need to come to the table and realize that our kids are literally dying through suicide, gun violence and other medical and mental health issues that lead to some scary things. 

Again, as a parent of young kids going through school for the next decade, this is something I always think about. I don’t necessarily think about it daily or act like this is the last time I’ll see my kids. But for the parents who lost their child, that’s what happened to them. 

For now, I’m so proud of this generation of students and leaders that are bringing this to the forefront of their schools, principals, superintendents and mental health clubs. I do believe this is changing because of the students in this generation that are raising their hands and saying we need to solve this problem.

White, the senior vice president of programs and advocacy for the Schott Foundation for Public Education, explored this through her contribution to The Ira A. Lipman Center’s Uncovering Inequality — a research project that dissects racial justice issues in education, housing, criminal justice, health and economics.

“We’re seeing an increasing narrative that we do have racial equality in our nation,” White told The 74. “I want to lift up this entire report as a counter to that prevailing and pervasive narrative.”

White’s research delves into how the promise of Brown v. Board of Education — a historic decision by the U.S. Supreme Court declaring racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional — has not been fulfilled.

In addition, White noted that there are new ways racial integration has been repealed post-Brown as schools recover from pandemic learning loss. 

“One of the key takeaways is that Brown’s promise has not been fulfilled, and there are new ways inequality is not only surfacing but also re-entrenching,” White said. “We’re seeing some of the opportunities from Brown in the integration of curriculum be repealed based on interests of the political right.”

“When we have examples like the racial identity of Rosa Parks extracted from our curriculum, we are being regressed into something that is steps before Brown,” White said.

The goal of White’s research is to show how the state of K-12 education speaks to the broader conversation of America’s racialized society.

“Racial inequality not only exists, but in every layer of our society there’s opportunity and necessity for us to enact a solution,” White said.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Your research centers around how the state of school funding, high-stakes testing and curriculum instruction today are as a result of the policies and practices made post-Brown. Tell me more about this and how racial inequities continue to persist in K-12 education.

When we took up the question posed about how racial inequality exists in our present day K-12 education system, we cannot do that separate from understanding what happened post-Brown. The very structure of contemporary K-12 education rests on the approach, or attempt, to fulfill the promise of Brown. When we begin to unpack its potential, its design and the resulting policies that came after Brown, it is then that we get to see the ways that inequality endures in our K-12 education. 

Thinking about the contemporary ways inequality persists is seminal in the education sphere because it’s not just one of the biggest policy restructurings in education, but by design it was intended to address racial inequality. So there was no question of whether or not to start with Brown because of that frame by which it was shaped in the mainstream to really undo this unequal system, unequal funding, unequal facilities and all of the things that segregated schools had endemic to their nature. So noting that we’re in a contemporary society where racial inequality has persisted, let’s fill in the gap between those two bookmarks.

As schools recover from pandemic learning loss, how does your research speak to the disparities of students of color?

The majority of students of color are attending schools, often in urban districts, that are under-resourced in terms of their class sizes, teacher turnover and limited teaching resources. When you’re in an under-resourced school, especially Title I schools, there is support for students based on various needs. Whether students are unhoused or receiving free or reduced lunch, there are services provided through schools so they can get breakfast, lunch etc. As we think about them post-COVID when schools were shut down, there were students who were experiencing the squeeze — especially within those first couple of months. There were some schools that had to really ramp up what it would look like to ensure students had food to eat. And we felt that squeeze especially for students of color to just get basic needs. 

You also have the digital divide. It wasn’t an easy shift for students to just go home and hop on a computer to engage in their classrooms. So much of the world went to Zoom-landia and that wasn’t so easy for your average student of color who either had limited technology — whether that be a laptop, phone or tablet — and/or sufficient internet to get onto those platforms. During the pandemic when a lot of industries were able to shift to remote work, there were also essential workers and many others who were still going in-person. So there was this squeeze for students of color to engage with the technology while also having limited parent support.

And then there was an overwhelming impact for students of color to get through their classwork. As the pandemic shook and shut down the world, one in three or four students of color experienced a close loved one pass away. That’s a lot of children over the last few years that are not just experiencing the squeeze of a new format of education, but also having lost people who’ve raised them. So when we think about the impact of the pandemic, there’s a particular effect on not just learning laws, but also the social-emotional aspects that absolutely had an effect on the educational outcomes of all students — and certainly for students of color.

What would you say is a key piece of your research readers should take the most away from?

There’s a lot and it’s hard to whittle down. We took stock to identify those key areas you’ve named in terms of high-stakes testing, curriculum instruction, etc. So in each of those areas, I do think there’s a key point. To zoom out, solutions are both needed and possible. We need equitable state and local policies in the education sector in order to shift all of these key areas named in the report. But we also need folks to understand the key learnings in this. 

One key learning is that inequality has endured since Brown v. Board of Education. We’re seeing an increasing narrative that we do have racial equality in our nation. There’s this counter narrative that it already exists, so why are we attempting to put in different practices and policies that would advance equity? I want to lift up this entire report as a counter to that prevailing and pervasive narrative. It is true that inequality has endured, we do not have a panacea, and all levels of society — both political and individual — are required. 

Systemic change does not get resolved by one shot policies. There are multiple and they’re persistent because of how entrenched racial inequality is in our society. So at every level of our K-12 education system, both opportunity and a necessity for action is needed in order for equity to be achieved and realized. So that is the key takeaway. It is that racial inequality not only exists, but in every layer of our society there’s opportunity and necessity for us to enact a solution.

What is something nobody has asked you yet about your research?

People often ask what can be done and what does this mean for educators. But so far, I have yet to hear about what communities and students themselves can do. There’s opportunities for policy changes and districts to use their voice to shape who is selected on school boards. However, mobilization and organizing are not just local needs. Using their voice at the state level is needed to ensure legislators are giving schools resources at the level they need so students can thrive. 

There’s also ways parents need to be supported when addressing learning loss. Parents and families are often overlooked and seen as marginal to the education system. But they’re absolutely core, their voice matters and they have agency. So that is something I want to lift up when thinking about how we see educational inequality. 

Parents, families and students themselves have agency to really be co-constructors in the type of educational experience they need. They’re the closest to it and they have the voice to really answer what it is that they want and need. So giving space for that and having them empowered to know that is beyond important.

Taking note of the anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, how should educators, researchers, policymakers, journalists, etc. apply your research to their work today?

One of the key takeaways is that Brown’s promise has not been fulfilled, and there are new ways inequality is not only surfacing but also re-entrenching. We’re seeing some of the opportunities from Brown in the integration of curriculum be repealed based on interests of the political right. When we have examples like the racial identity of Rosa Parks extracted from our curriculum, we are being regressed into something that is steps before Brown.

By design, all levels of our K-12 education system are Eurocentric and explicitly racist. So when we’re at a place where we can’t even name the histories and heroines and heroes for communities of color, we are going back to a place pre-Brown. Whether you’re a policymaker, teacher, principal or whomever, if you understand how we are repressing some of the earliest civil rights gains in education I think that is the powerful takeaway. It’s a key takeaway when it comes to curriculum, when we think about high-stakes testing and absolutely when we dive into school funding.

That’s the day Brandon Johnson, a former organizer for the Chicago Teachers Union, will lay down the mantle of progressive insurgent and take the oath of office as mayor. Last month, in the city’s closest mayoral race in 40 years, Johnson prevailed by just 26,000 votes over former Chicago Public Schools CEO Paul Vallas, a technocrat who ran on a record of support for education reform. 

The win represented a generational breakthrough for Johnson and his union, which has waged a decade-long struggle against a regime of school choice and accountability that stretches back to Vallas’s tenure. That ambitious complex of policy and regulation was carefully installed over decades, including a lengthy interval during which Chicago saw some of the fastest academic growth of any major school district in the United States — but also a steadily building resistance from educators and community members over controversial policies like school closures.

The lessons of the long reform era are detailed in a new book, How a City Learned to Improve Its Schools, released in April by Harvard Education Press. In five chapters, the text chronicles the genesis of Chicago Public Schools’ transformation — beginning with a 1988 state law initiating an unprecedented decentralization of autonomy from the district office to local school communities — and the adoption of stringent accountability measures that in some ways anticipated the federal No Child Left Behind Act.

The book’s lead author, Anthony Bryk, offers a rare perspective on the city. A veteran researcher and former president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Bryk previously served as a professor of urban education at the University of Chicago. In 1990, he helped found the UChicago Consortium on School Research, a data hub that has generated a host of influential studies on America’s fourth-largest district.

Bryk believes the evolution of CPS under leaders like future U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan and long-serving Mayor Richard M. Daley helped spur a leap forward in student performance by engaging CPS families, improving the selection and development of teachers, and allowing administrators more latitude in running their schools. The results were revealed in a 2017 analysis by Stanford sociologist Sean Reardon, which found that Chicago elementary and middle schoolers gained six years of academic benefits from just five years in school.

But he has reservations about the future of the city’s schools, and particularly the gradual establishment of an elected board that will oversee them. In an interview with The 74’s Kevin Mahnken, Bryk offered his views on what worked during Chicago’s turnaround; the warning signs ahead, including dramatically falling enrollment numbers and mounting debt; and the union’s overnight move from one of the district’s biggest critics to perhaps its most important actor.

“This might be as radical a reform in governance as one could envision,” Bryk said.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The 74: Your book depicts a long journey toward school improvement in Chicago during the 1990s and 2000s. But the years since have been marked by a great deal of tumult, obviously including the pandemic. How far has the district come, and where is it headed?

Anthony Bryk: I think about Chicago Public Schools within the broader context of major American school systems at the moment. We are clearly in an unprecedented time with respect to post-pandemic trauma and learning loss, which have been especially pervasive for those students who are most dependent on strong civic institutions. Of course, we’re also living through a period of racial reckoning as we come to better understand the vestiges of systemic racism that operate in big urban school districts. 

Then you bring in the Chicago-specific context of a new mayor and, perhaps even more important, the shift to a 21-person elected school board over the coming years. Most people don’t realize that Chicago has never had an elected board, and a 21-person board is just a huge change. Over the last number of years, there’s also been renewed conflict between labor and management in schools, and — like a number of other places, but maybe more so in Chicago — the district is experiencing a new round of budget shortfalls.

Together, these factors pose extraordinary challenges. Although the array is quite different, it appears to me in some ways like what Chicago felt like in the 1980s, at the beginning of the work to turn around local schools. [Then-Education Secretary] Bill Bennett visited Chicago and called it the worst public school system in America. I doubt if it was the absolute worst, but it was clearly one of the most troubled public school systems in the country. And while the specific challenges that had to be confronted were different at that time, their scope certainly strikes me as comparable to what the city is facing now.

The big difference, as we write about in the book, is that there is now a civic architecture that grew up over the past several decades. It’s an interesting kind of architecture in that the politics of urban districts typically tend to focus on shaping what happens at the system’s center; but a lot of the energy in Chicago’s reform push was focused on making ideas work out in schools and finding new ways of developing teachers and school-based leadership. A lot of social learning emerged around the work of school improvement, and there was space for new ideas. The district, over the period of [Arne] Duncan, was open to partnerships with the business community, foundations and lots of new organizations. It generally kept things stabilized even through the period of 2010–2017, when we saw a lot of financial issues and churn in system leadership. 

That’s what leads me to think that Chicago is still positioned well to take on these new problems. The improvement work in Chicago — keeping kids on-track through high school and onto college, developing a framework of essential supports and regularly reporting evidence — has created coherence among an incredibly diverse array of actors, and those will be resources in the years ahead. Having said all that, it’s really hard for me to discern how this shift to an elected board will unfold. In my mind, that’s the real wild card.

Can you be more specific about the steps that led to academic improvement over the last few decades?

We describe decentralization as the DNA of reform. Over the decades, there’s been a lot of attention paid to governance as a key lever for reform. What’s important to take from the Chicago story is what governance change did and the mechanisms it opened up. One of the things it did was to recognize schools as the principal unit for change: How do we get schools to get better at their core work?

The 1988 law [the Chicago School Reform Act, which formed local school committees that gained authority over hiring and budgetary practices in individual campuses] made that critical. It helped reform the relationships between and within schools and local communities, and it brought a horizontal dimension to relationships where, traditionally, educators looked vertically up to bureaucratic actors to tell them what to do. And by virtue of the fact that there were real resources made available to schools, there were opportunities for innovation to occur; a lot of them were wasted, but some very positive things emerged and eventually spread across the system. 

One of the key initiatives was all the attention to how principals were selected, supported and evaluated. Again, when you see schools as the prime mover for change, you focus carefully on the quality of leadership at school sites. Chicago is a huge district, but there are only about 600 people who do this work, and maybe 100 get replaced each year. That makes the task of identifying and developing school leaders a manageable one, and it did become a priority in CPS.

There were efforts to create more aligned instructional systems: curricular materials, professional development, assessment data to judge the progress of students and feedback systems to support teachers in their own improvement. In the past, it had been the task of central administrations to make all these pieces run and work together because it’s so hard to put them together in individual schools. Not impossible, but hard.

That’s where some tension plays out. It’ll play out, for instance, around the new Skyline curriculum that CPS has heavily invested in. From what I know of the design principles behind Skyline [an online compendium of learning resources that the district spent $135 million to develop], it’s an attempt to create a coordination environment across various systems and generate good, formative information to support improvement. But that’s a huge undertaking, and it runs the risk of the central office defining what’s to be taught, how it’s to be taught and what evidence should be used.

The tension lies in the fact that you need lots of capacity to build an integrated instructional system that has the promise of actually delivering more ambitious academic outcomes, both reliably and at scale. But then you confront this political issue that democratic localism was intended to solve, i.e., “We want to push these problems into local school communities to decide what they think is best for their own children.” So to some extent, we’re shifting back now to more centralized control.

You’re describing these organizational dynamics and players in a very different way than I’m used to hearing about them, which is always through the prism of reformers vs. unions. Do you think that debates over K–12 politics are cast too simplistically, both by the press and the combatants themselves? 

I do. When the second major reform act passed in 1995, it turned over control of the system to the mayor of Chicago, who appointed the board and the CEO. Since the mayor at that time [Richard M. Daley] also basically controlled the City Council, 49-1, you essentially had unitary politics in Chicago for a 15-year span. You just don’t see that in big, urban districts. And there was mostly peace between labor and management from 1995 to around 2011.

There were a few things that established that peace. One was that Illinois had swung Republican in 1994. We had a Republican governor and a Republican legislature, which had been very rare, and downstate Illinois was intent on taking a sledgehammer to the Chicago Teachers Union by stripping out a lot of provisions around collective bargaining. But when the mayor took over, his office chose not to use a lot of the power it had been given. They didn’t bludgeon the union; Paul Vallas actually figured out how to negotiate a multi-year contract with decent wages for CTU members. In the early 2000s, there was an element within the union that emphasized professionalizing teaching, and the system sent some resources in that direction as well. 

At that time, there wasn’t a traditional labor-management conflict. In some regards, it looked more like a European system, where they’ve got more of a cooperative relationship than you tend to see in American cities. But it broke down after 2010, largely because enrollments were declining, and we had financial issues affecting both the city and the state. Those are what led to the closure of all those schools. The conflict is quite active again in Chicago, but there was a period of time when these forces were working together in a more productive fashion.

Those long-term declines in enrollment, combined with big deficits of academic and social-emotional skills following the pandemic, seem to pose the biggest problems to Chicago schools right now.

The situation is extraordinarily challenging. In big districts like Chicago, where revenues are predicated on a per-pupil basis, it’s all fine as long as the student margins are growing. But when you start subtracting, which is what the city has been doing for years, the fixed costs don’t go down with every person who walks out of the building. They closed a lot of schools, but they’ve still got a lot of schools that are already under-utilized and will probably become more so. The way we financially support school systems doesn’t really take that into account.

It’s going to be interesting to see a mayor coming out of the teachers’ union. With the move to an elected board, I would expect the teachers’ union to organize and have a significant voice within that new board. If you get this kind of progressive alignment — the union and the mayor and school board and the governor in Springfield — I’m curious to see whether these people can actually solve these challenges. It’s one thing to go around criticizing what others do, but they’ll now be in a position to do something. What would better look like, and how would they get to it?

Would you agree that, whatever the political configuration moving forward, the urgent question is whether the district can shrink its footprint to match the roughly 100,000 fewer students it now educates compared with 20 years ago?

From a purely financial point of view, CPS has got more buildings operating than it surely needs. But one of the results of that is that the typical school, particularly at the high school level, has gotten smaller. Of course, the smaller size allows more personalized relationships to form between faculty and students and parents. Going back to the ’90s, we did see that smaller schools were more likely to engage in reform in productive ways. You tended to see stronger reports about relational trust in that students felt that adults knew and cared about them more. No one intended this, but in shrinking the size and population of schools, they actually created resources for improvement by making them less bureaucratic places. 

That certainly contributed to improved high school graduation outcomes: Reduced size has enabled more intimate relationships to form between adults and students which have, in turn, allowed more students to graduate. At the same time, you do have this financial squeeze that will almost certainly force the district to close more buildings.

Do you think that’s feasible, given the backlash that school closures spawned during Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s administration? The shrinkage that you’re describing as almost inevitable is also a politically explosive scenario.

Without question, one of the most contentious issues in Chicago politics is that of closing schools. Emanuel closed 50 of them all at once, and there had been an initial threat of something like 130 candidates for closure. It fractured political alliances, and it was a key component of the revival of the Chicago Teachers Union as a political force. 

If you go back to 1987, the union was broadly vilified across Chicago by parents and community leaders. In the opening pages of our book, we reproduce a very critical Chicago Tribune cartoon of the CPS from that era. If you fast forward to 2015 and the aftermath of the school closings, it was the union that organized parents and community members against the system. It was a fundamental realignment — but having said that, there was another shift of some dimension during the pandemic. The union was largely responsible for keeping Chicago schools closed for a very long time, which didn’t necessarily work to the benefit of all parents and children. 

Another equally important factor is this period of racial reckoning. Race has always been a big issue in Chicago, but it’s gotten really heightened attention over these last four or five years. That has made it much more challenging to form the community relationships that supported improvement for several decades.

Is the CTU now the most important single actor in Chicago Public Schools?

In all likelihood, yes.

This is brand-new territory. Teachers’ unions have organized in other cities to get members elected to boards of education, but when a teachers’ union is recognized as being responsible for how a system operates, that’s really new. The elected board is structured to phase in over the next four years, such that half the seats are appointed — but they’re appointed by the mayor. In that sense, this is positioned to be as novel a governance reform as we saw in 1987, which was the most radical decentralization of public education that had ever been tried in the United States. Chicago is positioned to have a public school system run by its teachers’ union. 

As an aside, something on the horizon that hasn’t gotten a lot of attention is the new authority for school principals to collectively bargain. Whether that actually comes into play is an open question, but if principals organize, it’s not clear to me that their union will be on the same side as the CTU on all issues.

At the same time, is it fair to say that some of the measurements of school performance in the district — including school ratings, which have relied to one degree or another on student test scores — are due to be refocused on different metrics?

I totally agree that these things are all being challenged. But they’re essentially written into regulations, and some of them are federally mandated by things like Title I and the Every Student Succeeds Act. While the existing assessments and their use will be challenged, they’re going to have to be replaced by something; I can’t imagine us going to nothing, no measures of achievement and school quality.

The question is, what are they going to replace it with? Over the last couple of decades, there’s been so much focus on being evidence-based in how researchers and policymakers do our work; but of course, that is predicated on evidence. So if you don’t like the evidence we’ve been using, what’s going to take its place? It might be hard to arrive at suitable replacements, especially in a heavily choice-based district like Chicago. In a choice district, parents have to have evidence to make their choices about where to send their kids to school — what are they going to use? 

Again, that’s the difference between being in a critic’s role, where you challenge the status quo, and being in the governance role, where you say, “Here’s what we’re going to do instead.” Right now, it’s not clear that there is an “instead.”

If you were designing a district from scratch, would you create a school board of 21 elected members?

No, I’d have to say I would not. 

Chicago Public Schools is something like a $9 billion operation. It’s a huge enterprise that has to be managed. A 21-member elected board managing a $9 billion enterprise — like I said earlier, this might be as radical a reform in governance as one could envision. There’s just no way to predict how it plays out. 

Could I imagine a scenario where this really works well? Yeah. I could imagine one where labor and management begin to come together because labor really has a stake in the success of the system. In the old days, they might have said, “Well, that’s management’s responsibility, not ours.” Now it’s all “ours.” So yes, this could evolve in a productive fashion. But would you want to be a superintendent accountable to a 21-member board? It just opens up challenges for which we have no precedent to suggest that it will work well. 

Boards erupting in chaos over censorship and assorted culture wars? Same as it ever was. Rancorous board debates over various opportunity-hoarding privileges — tracking, selective magnet schools, adjusting neighborhood enrollment boundaries, etc — distracting boards from real school governance? Standard operating practice. 

So when I read AJ Crabill’s book, Great on Their Behalf: Why School Boards Fail, How Yours Can Become Effective, I nodded when he wrote, “It is common that school boards are professionally ineffective.” (Click here to read a sample chapter.)

He would know. He’s a former board chair for Kansas City, Missouri’s public schools, and has worked with numerous boards as the national director of governance at the Council of the Great City Schools. 

Spring is school board election season in 13 states where voters cast their ballots for Board of Education members in April and May. I chatted with Crabill shortly before his book’s March 28 publication. In it, he  argues that this sorry state of school board affairs need not be permanent. He provides an incisive account of the strengths — and most common flailings — boards bring to their work, as well as a five-step approach towards making them effective. 

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. 

The 74: Let’s start with the backstory — how did this book come to be? Why did you decide to write it?

Crabill: So the intention is pretty straightforward: to accelerate the transition of school boards across the nation from focusing on adult inputs (things like staff, books, programs, and facilities) to focusing on student outcomes. That is the central premise. That’s the beginning, middle and the end. Everything else is just details. 

It does start with an account of how school boards get stuck focusing on adult inputs, and some of the harms of that. But the rest of the book is really focused on getting school boards intentionally and unapologetically focused on growing what students know and are able to do.

That’s presumably rooted in some of your time on — or working with — school boards, right? 

Certainly. And my experiences, and everything I’ve read, and the research literature also point in the same direction: the things that school boards focus on actually do, in fact, matter. When school boards focus on student outcomes, they’re more likely to create the condition from improvements in student outcomes. If school boards focus on the color of the cheerleaders’ uniforms, we’re more likely to have the proper color of uniforms. 

Or your anecdote in the book about a board that spent a meeting obsessed with a potential change to the color of their school buses, right? That was arresting. 

Yeah, I mean, one member was saying, “I’m philosophically opposed to non-yellow school buses.” I mean … look, I don’t have to make up stories. They’re all true — sadly, all true.

I believe you. I’ve sat through enough of these that I no longer have to suppress what used to be shock at what privileged families will say in school board meetings. 

In fact, let me ask you about a related tension. You suggest that the board improvement process starts with clarifying a vision and setting priorities. That requires something like a board and community consensus, but right now, there’s ample discord around American visions for public education. Boards host a lot of arguments about things that aren’t student outcomes. What if the process of electing school boards is in tension with getting members on the same page long enough to improve them, no?

Yeah. All of school boards’ natural incentives are aligned with a focus on the adult inputs. You have to acknowledge that and figure out how to solve both sides of the equation. There has to be some realism here: School boards are never going to be able to escape all of the incentives around them. Whether it’s the training they receive, mandates from the state, the demands from neighbors who want their pet interests attended to, all of that is going to have to be wrestled with. 

But that’s why I suggest boards spend half of their time on priorities around student learning, which still leaves the other half free for other priorities, whatever else the community values — finances, yellow school buses or anything else that comes up. We want board members to leverage the amount of focus that is beneficial for students, but also sustainable, given the realities of their circumstances.

A number of education reformers over the years have seen exactly what you’ve just described and they’ve concluded that school boards aren’t salvageable. Could we do more for kids with an entirely different model of governance?

This question’s been brought up repeatedly over the years. The problem is, we don’t have any evidence of other governance models that significantly outperform elected school boards. Go from an elected board to one appointed by the mayor, or a hybrid model, and all of it winds up with the same propensity for becoming focused on adult inputs. They fail for different reasons and in different ways, but they fail all the same. 

Charter school boards are wildly susceptible to becoming focused on their founder rather than on student outcomes. Appointed boards are wildly susceptible to becoming vehicles for patronage rather than focused on outcomes. So they wind up failing in very different ways, but failing nevertheless. Add up all the data and there doesn’t seem to be a compelling argument that, if we just select members in a different way, that that will solve governance problems. 

My answer is more nuanced and more practical. It’s this five-step continuous improvement process that offers a practical thing that we can do tomorrow. We don’t have to wait for legislation. We don’t have to wait for the “right” superintendent or the “right” children, the “right” parents, or the “right” teachers. We need to focus, set priorities, monitor our progress towards them, align resources with our goals and then share our progress with the community. 

How can elected boards manage controversies like the recent spate of book censorship arguments?

This is like the difference between debating the placement of a single stop sign versus debating about safety. The job of the board isn’t to pick and choose where to put stop signs. The job of the board is to get underneath arguments about stop signs and figure out, OK, what is the community value that is really at stake here? Safety. 

The same principles apply to the books’ example. The board should be very aggressive about codifying community expectations to protect the values beneath. These are what I refer to in the book as “guardrails.” On certain books, communities will differ. One might say, the value that we have around book selection is: We want them to be inclusive. We want all of our curriculum and learning materials to be representative of the diversity of our student body. But another community might say, the thing that we value about books is how they represent and lift up a view of American exceptionalism. If they don’t match that, we don’t want them in our libraries. 

These are two competing sets of values, and they’re entirely appropriate for their respective communities. The job of the board is to represent the vision and values of their community, and those values are going to differ wildly by place. So, codify the values and then let the district’s professional education team figure out what it looks like to honor these values in the daily practice of the school system. 

And I think that variety is great. Part of what’s awesome about America is that, whatever your thing is, there’s probably a geographic community somewhere for you, and you have the freedom to pack up and move to that community. When you get there, the local school board should represent the set of values you sought out. 

This gets tougher in places where the vision is contested, right?

Yeah, and you’ve got a lot of these more purple places. A lot of school districts across the country are countywide systems, and so you wind up with this mashup of urban, suburban and rural, all in the same school system. It gets a lot more challenging in those places, because you wind up with boards that have this kind of bell curve distribution of ideology with left partisans and right partisans — all serving on the same board together. Usually most people are somewhere in the purple middle.

But the work is the same. They have to go out and do a lot of listening — and then accept the reality that the final product, the final set of goals isn’t going to look like someone on either political pole might want. Their job is to represent the values of the full community.

How is it that boards get so far off track?

One thing that I often say while working with school boards across the nation is, “The student outcomes don’t change until adult behaviors change.” What can most drive changes in adult behavior? The three things that we’ve identified, the most potent levers for adult behavioral change are knowledge, skills and mindset. 

Knowledge. What do I know? 

Skills? What can I do with what I know? 

Mindset? What is my view of the world? How do I make meaning of the things that are occurring around me?

Knowledge-based board failures are basic things. Do we have goals? Are we spending time on things that are actually about what students know and are able to do? Can we distinguish between an adult input and a student outcome? These are solvable through training on state requirements and best practices. 

Skill-based failures happen when we don’t deploy time efficiently and impactfully. What skill set do we need to transition from the status quo behaviors to the behaviors that could make the biggest difference for students? 

Mindset is by far the most impactful driver for behavior changes. It’s about seeing the world differently so that I can behave differently.

What makes mindset so powerful?

Here’s an example I used in the book: Imagine a school board that believes that “this kid AJ just doesn’t want to learn.” That gives rise to one set of adult behaviors, one that can legitimize efforts to push little AJ out, because obviously anytime  AJ doesn’t perform, it’s taken as proof that he just doesn’t want to learn. Whereas if I adopt a different mindset, “AJ does want to learn, but there’s a gap between where he is and where he wants to be,” then my commitment is to help him bridge that gap. 

Nothing about little AJ has changed. My knowledge and skills haven’t changed. But now I see the universe as one in which AJ wants to learn and I am the bridge for him. Now all of my knowledge and skills can be deployed in a powerful and transformative way that actually makes a difference. And when, for whatever reason, AJ still doesn’t learn, I still know that he wants to and I’ve got to look for the next thing that I’ve got to change about my adult behavior to set him up for success. And then the next thing. And so on. 

It confers a sense of resilience in the face of the inherent challenges that come with education. Teachers work so hard because education is such a hard process, and they have to stay resilient. An empowering mindset supports that resilience, a disempowering mindset undermines it. That is just as true in the boardroom as it is in the classroom.

But it’s tough to shift to that mindset, no? It’s something that I’ve thought about a lot, because I’ve done a lot of work in early education, and we have this compelling research base around investing in very young kids, in the birth to 5-years-old range. The evidence shows that this is the most impactful time to shift children’s trajectories, because their brains are uniquely plastic — they’re still developing. But we don’t talk about the less-sunny implication there: We should intervene early because adult behaviors are way harder to shift. How can boards make those shifts — and sustain them?

I highlight research on this in the book. It shows differences in outcomes between school boards that got no training or coaching, boards that got training on being more student-focused and boards that got training and coaching on that focus. The training helped! The boards that just got the training saw some slight increases in student achievement compared with the boards that got nothing. But the boards that got both training and coaching saw something like twice the growth. So training is necessary, but coaching is essential. 

So it takes boards having a willingness to be coached and supported, and to ultimately change behavior. I’ve certainly had the privilege of watching school districts do this work and show real improvement, put real points on the board. I had the privilege of working on this during my own years of board service in Kansas City. Over a six-year period, we were able to double the percentages of students on grade-level reading, grow graduation rates by 15 points and then — for the first time in decades — gain full accreditation from the state. 

The book is full of stories like these. And they make one thing clear: When school boards get intensely focused on improving student outcomes, great things happen for the students.

Obviously, the book’s full of concrete ideas for improving a school board … but if you could share one piece of advice with elected members out there, what would it be?

Work with your board chair to identify to what extent your meetings even look at student outcomes. I conclude the book with this — telling readers that if they’re ready to take the next step, here’s a link to a time-use evaluation. Actually evaluate your recent board meeting to see where you spent your time. Then sit down with your board to ask one another, with sincere curiosity, if this is what we want. Do we want to continue this pattern? Or do we need to focus more on student outcomes to actually move the needle on student performance?

School board members want great things for their students. My experience has been, when board members are confronted with this, the conversation opens them up to an urgency around action. 

But after spending most of a school year in a role at the center of America’s education culture wars, the high school senior said he’s used his first-hand experiences to be a voice of “moderation” on the seven-member board.

In the face of extremist views, he counters with a dose of reality: “Regardless of what Tucker Carlson says is going on in Idaho schools, here’s what’s actually going on,” he’ll offer. “Only students can provide that on-the-ground perspective.”

In Boise, Rajbhandari’s election win has put in motion a chain reaction of efforts to elevate student voices. The school board now includes a brand new youth advisory council and the district this year administered a first-ever mental health survey to take account of the struggles its students are experiencing.

Meanwhile, the teen has also helped usher along a Climate Action Plan the board is implementing — a measure he had long pushed for as a climate activist with the Sunrise Movement in his days before holding elected office.

The 74 caught up with the young politician, who’s juggling the responsibilities of senior year alongside oversight of his roughly 23,200-student district, for a Zoom conversation that ranged from his efforts with the nonprofit BABE VOTE to facing off against counterprotesters wielding AR-15s.

This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

The 74: It’s been the better part of the school year that you’ve been on the Boise school board. What has stood out to you most so far?

Shiva Rajbhandari: Coming into the school board, I thought this was really the end-all be-all of problem solving. But there’s such a big team that works across our district to write good policy and to propose a strong budget and to make sure that we’re hiring the top staff to keep our schools running. Learning about the incredible people across our district has been really rewarding. 

Also learning how slow change is sometimes. Coming into this role was this transition from being an activist and really calling the shots. Like, we would meet on a Thursday and have a protest organized by Saturday. Those things were very quick. 

Now, there’s a lot more accountability — to our patrons [constituents], to our students — so things happen slower. But it’s neat to consider all aspects of the solution and think critically about how we can best prepare students for college, career and citizenship while maintaining the integrity of our district and the faith of our patrons.

That must be an interesting transition, from activist to school board member. So what are some of the issues you’re working on now where the pace of change has felt slower?

One thing I’m really excited about is establishing a permanent student position on the school board. We’ve been talking about it since January and before that, I was talking with trustees, talking with staff, about how we could shape this policy. [It’s gone to several committees including our student advisory committee and] now we’re waiting until September to take it back to the Governance Committee for review and then hopefully passing. So that’s one example.

Another example would be our district sustainability commitments. This [issue] is why I ran for the school board initially. I led this campaign with my fellow students across our district to establish a clean energy commitment and a long-term sustainability plan for our schools. We’d seen districts across the country move quickly and then our district was slow and deliberate about it. But ultimately, our efforts did lead to the passage of this commitment on clean energy by our school board. 

Some things just take a lot of time, like reviewing all the carbon emissions of our district. And then [the question of] what does the long-term plan look like that saves our taxpayers money. That’s going to take probably another year or two to craft that plan and get that through. 

Going back to the effort to get a permanent youth board member, in your view why is youth voice so important in school decisions?

Students are the primary stakeholders in our education. And yet, our school boards are elected by people who are over 18, the majority of whom are no longer in K-12. They tend to be parents or grandparents or community members, but really only students can provide that on-the-ground perspective of what’s going on in our schools. I think having students on school boards is about bringing in a perspective that is vital to policymaking.

In addition, elevating students to positions of leadership empowers an entire generation of students within your district. Because when students understand that their voices are being taken seriously, that more than anything allows students to achieve their education goals. 

How have your friends and peers reacted to your role on the board? Are they telling you things to bring up in meetings?

Absolutely. Our whole district is getting so much more engagement with students and it’s helped us think outside the box about how to engage students in policymaking. 

For example, we did a districtwide mental health survey. That’s something we’ve never done before and we found out 30% of our students have had depression or suicidal ideation. We identified stress and social isolation as key contributing factors we really want to tackle. But that’s something our district has never done before, not because our district didn’t value student voices, but I don’t think we understood how incorporating student input could help our district. 

We also put together a student advisory committee [to the school board] and we have peer feedback groups. We’ve seen so many more students attending our board meetings, asking questions of our board, bringing ideas forward. 

It’s a simple thing to have [a student] up there on the dais, but it really opens the floodgates for transformative change within a system that is often really rigid.

I saw that you made YouTube previews of the last few meetings. Was that an effort to make the board more accessible to your peers?

Yeah. I think there’s really this misunderstanding of what the board does, and how folks can give input. And so the goal of the video is to communicate to students, ‘Hey, this is what’s going on at our board meeting.’ Everybody should be able to participate.

Going back to when you won your seat, that was a victory over an incumbent who had an endorsement from a far-right group. How have you navigated extremism in the campaign and in your term on the board?

Our state is split ideologically between the far right and the really far right. And there’s this hate group called the Idaho Freedom Foundation, a policy think tank, whose stated goal is to abolish public education in our state. And so we’ve seen that come up time and time again with allegations of indoctrination or grooming in our schools. Now we’re seeing the third iteration of that, which is vouchers in the name of school choice, giving public dollars to private and potentially religious institutions with limited accountability.

I think the perspective that I’ve brought is one of moderation. Regardless of what Tucker Carlson says is going on in Idaho schools, here’s what’s actually going on. And here’s what students actually need. No one is scared about a [female-identifying person with male genitalia] going to the girl’s bathroom. What folks are scared about is their friends committing suicide, because we don’t have the mental health resources or the resiliency factors that we need. 

It’s bringing an ounce of reality back to these ideological conversations. I’m super lucky that, in our district, the problems we have with extremists aren’t nearly as bad as in the rest of the state. 

Your time on the board isn’t the first time you’ve interfaced with right-wing activists. Can you tell me the backstory there?

Yeah, gosh. It’s funny, I think nationally, when people hear about Idaho, it’s like, ‘Oh, my gosh, people are running around with guns.’ And living in Idaho, it’s almost like a fact of life, you organize a protest and folks show up with AR-15s.

The first time I interacted with the group I think you’re referring to, the Idaho Liberty Dogs, I was in ninth grade. We were organizing a protest on Capitol Boulevard and it was 70 kids who got together with signs and we blocked the street, we were playing music and it was honestly a fun day. These folks showed up with AR-15s to our rally. Not only that, but then a ton of cops showed up and they all were friends with the [counterprotesters] who weren’t even from Boise.

Then last year, a student brought a gun to Boise High, the school I’m at now, and he was suspended and not allowed to walk at graduation. This same group tried to organize this armed protest outside our school. 

The threat of extremism and militarism is very real in Boise. But we’re not afraid of them. We’ve been through so much. I think that takes away the power when people aren’t afraid of you. 

I know we’re jumping from one hot-button issue to the next, but I also wanted to ask about book bans. I saw there’s some state legislation proposed allowing parents to sue schools for ‘harmful’ books. And there have been several Idaho districts, not Boise, that have enacted bans. So I’m curious how that’s come up in your time on the board?

What’s a little humorous to me about the whole book ban thing is, it’s not parents and it’s not students asking for books to be banned. It’s generally random people who have heard something. And so, for example, in the nearby city of Meridian, there was this group that tried to get 200 books banned from the school library and I think they just pulled the list off the internet because half of the books weren’t even in the Meridian library. 

To me, I will never support any kind of book bans ever because I think free access to information is the cornerstone of democracy.

The narrative that’s being missed is that book bans, frankly, are disempowering to students. It’s alleging that students don’t have the agency to know what they should read. Schools are a resource, they’re a tool for students to learn and engage and ensuring that there’s open access to information is critical to that.

You wrote a recent op-ed about efforts to reduce youth voting, which seems like a big issue for you also because I saw you co-lead the organization BABE VOTE. Can you tell me about that?

BABE VOTE is a nonprofit, nonpartisan, voter advocacy organization promoting voter registration among young people. We just got the data back and Idaho is the number one state in the country for growth in registration of voters [18 and 19 years old] between 2018 and 2022. So the efforts that we’re doing are working and it’s really exciting. 

The [Idaho] House and Senate both just passed a bill banning the use of student IDs at the polls, which for many students, that’s their only form of ID, especially college students. 

As soon as the governor signs this bill, we’re actually going to be suing the state and protecting the right to vote. So it’s that kind of stuff, knocking on doors, registering people and reminding people, ‘Hey, there’s an election,’ and then protecting the right to vote in the legislature and across the state.

What’s it been like to juggle all this work alongside senior year?

It’s been a little bit crazy. Honestly, being on a school board is [manageable]. Any student can do it. People try to make it something that it’s not.

Senior year, you have so many opportunities and it’s such a wide world. Sometimes it’s hard to get up for first period everyday. But just keeping a Google Calendar and checking in with my friends and making sure that I’m taking time for myself. Also remembering that I don’t have to do everything right; I have this whole team of folks who have supported me in my election on board and support this climate activism work.

One of the things that’s kind of taking a beating has been my track practice. Sometimes it’s hard to get to my practices.

What events do you compete in?

I run the mile and the 800 [meters].

And do you know what your plans are for next year, both in terms of school and whether you’ll maintain the position on the board?

Yeah, I’ll stay on the board. I made a commitment. All meetings we can mostly do virtually, but I will be leaving the state for college. And I want to study public policy and maybe go become a lawyer or something. [Rajbhandari has been accepted to UNC-Chapel Hill, Whitman College and Stanford University and is still deciding where to attend. He was elected to a two-year term.]

And last, who’s one teacher who made the biggest impression on you and why?

Well, there are so many. My teachers were the best teachers ever. One teacher, Monica Church, she was my Student Council teacher and capstone teacher sophomore year. She’s just been such a mentor and a guiding force in my life. Whenever I have a problem or something I want to talk about, she’s the first person I call.

I remember one time in my capstone class, I was running for [student body] vice president and I was a sophomore, so no one had ever done that before, and I was talking about ‘Hey, the election’s tomorrow. Everyone, make sure you go vote.’ And one of my friends, who is kind of a contrarian, goes, ‘Why would you ever vote for Shiva?’ Then Ms. Church was like, ‘Well, I would vote for Shiva. And one thing I’ve learned in the last eight months has been never bet against him.’

Now that’s a source of [motivation]. Whenever I’m like, ‘This is hard,’ I remember Monica Church, someone I respect more than anyone, said, ‘Never bet against Shiva.’ 

There was an eleventh-hour proposal on that night’s agenda, but no vote took place. Instead, the meeting dissolved into a fracas, as trustees screamed at one another, members of the audience screamed at the board and police wrestled people out of the room. The board adjourned without addressing the looming deadline.

It was the fourth month in office for newly elected trustee Sue Deigaard, a longtime education advocate and the parent of two Houston ISD graduates. Now, almost exactly five years later, as the state appoints a board of managers to take over the sprawling school system, her feelings are … complicated.

The law in question — which Deigaard, like most Texans, refers to by its legislative file number, House Bill 1842 — was the brainchild of a Houston-area lawmaker frustrated by years of district inattention to the impoverished schools in his portion of the city. In 2015, a bipartisan majority voted to require the state to step in and take over when a district has had one or more “F” schools for five years. 

Lawmakers later amended the law to let districts stave off state intervention by closing the schools or giving control of them to a nonprofit partner such as a university, city government or charter school network. 

Because they can provoke vociferous opposition, school closures are among the most difficult decisions an elected board can make. And the prospect of charter school partnerships was anathema to the district’s teachers union. As Deigaard notes in this 74 Interview, the result was that small but impassioned groups of people shouted down every proposal for a local solution.

A few months after the Houston board adjourned without taking any action to head off sanctions, Texas officials announced they were investigating complaints that board members — not including Deigaard — had engaged in irregularities involving contracts and that a majority had violated state law by meeting in secret to work out a plan to replace interim Superintendent Grenita Latham. The results of the investigation also justified a state takeover, Texas Education Agency Commissioner Mike Morath said.

In 2019, the board sued the agency, claiming it had no authority to install a board of managers. In January 2023, the state Supreme Court lifted an injunction that had stopped Morath from moving forward. Dominated by new members, the Houston board voted to stop pursuing the lawsuit. Many of those who had opposed the changes were quick to claim that the ensuing takeover, which is slated to take place June 1, was a politicized move against a blue-city district by a Republican governor bent on privatization.

Deigaard will stay on after Morath appoints the nine-member board of managers, though she will be stripped of her official powers. State officials have said current board members will be asked to serve as advisers to the appointees. The state will eventually return control to elected board members.  

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Set the stage for us. You ran for a seat on a school board that had been embroiled in one high-profile controversy after another for years. You must have both a titanium spine and a vision for transformation in Houston ISD.

I wanted to try to take the politics out of it. I wanted to transform what our public education system looks like. We have a system that was created in the middle of the 20th century, in a very different time societally, economically. That system was not designed to be effective and equitable for all kids. It was intentionally designed not to. And all we keep doing is trying to tinker around the edges — in a time where our society and our economy are incredibly different. 

It’s not like I entered the lion’s den having never visited before. I had been going to board meetings. I knew who the players were. I knew we were coming through this tumultuous time. I knew we were still transitioning to a new superintendent. 

Of the nine board members, three of us were new that January. Six weeks after we were sworn in, new superintendent Richard Carranza announced he was leaving to go to New York. In June, we rejected a proposed budget in the hopes that the [district] administration would bring us back something better. They didn’t. We ended up voting to adopt the exact same proposal. We were going to have our own district form of government shutdown, because we wouldn’t be able to pay the bills. 

At that point, it was just chaos. 

House Bill 1842 was looming. Houston ISD leaders knew, starting in the spring of 2015, that we were at risk of sanctions in the fall of 2018. In 2017, the legislature had passed a policy giving districts two options to avoid those sanctions: improve the campus in question or close it. By 2018, we had a third option, and that was to find a partner. 

A lot of districts around the state, like San Antonio, saw the writing on the wall and took action. Dr. Grenita Lathan, our chief academic officer at the time, had a very well thought-out plan how to address our chronically underperforming campuses — not just the ones that were going to trigger sanctions, but the ones that were on the runway coming up to the trigger point. 

There were community meetings to help impacted schools understand what the recommendations were going to be, but they basically got shut down by a small, vocal community of people who didn’t like whatever the recommendation was for a given school. They didn’t want their school consolidated. They didn’t want to close it, didn’t want to partner. So none of it ever happened.

We were eventually presented with a potential partner for the schools that were going to trigger sanctions later that year. We never voted on it. The meeting got out of control. People were arrested. We made The New York Times. And we did nothing. We were the only district in the state, to my knowledge, that did nothing. 

I remember talking, when we first triggered the law in 2019, to somebody who had testified in favor of House Bill 1842 in 2015. He said, “Well, we never imagined that this would happen in HISD.” I said, “Because you thought they’d give us a path out?” And he said, “No, because I thought you guys would do what you needed to do to avoid it.”

We had the opportunity, and we didn’t. We interfered with the leaders that we entrusted to bring us good recommendations. We shut it down.

Do you think the things Lathan proposed would have made a difference?

If the board had supported Grenita despite the noise, and if there were real and meaningful community engagement. Grenita and her team could have worked with these communities: “Hey, we’re going to do a closure, or a restart. What do you want school to look like? What are your hopes and dreams for your children?” I think if the board had stood behind her on that, our story today would be very, very different. Student achievement would have increased. And I don’t think we would be in a position where we’d have a board of managers coming in. 

When the board decided not to endorse the plan that the interim superintendent brought forward, was there an alternate plan? 

You’re presuming nine people, plus at that point in time a superintendent, were all having constructive conversations together about a plan? I don’t think you should make that presumption. 

I was actually called the day [after the fractious April 2018 meeting] by somebody else who asked whether, if they come back next week with a partnership with another organization, would I support it? I said, I’m not going to vote for that. There needs to be a bigger, more comprehensive student-centered plan here.

This is about improving the learning outcomes for students in a way that is equitable. My objective wasn’t to save the board.

Between 2018 and now, were there more efforts to come up with an improvement plan, or was the idea to just wait for the suit to work its way through the courts?

We’ve had a lot of inconsistency in administrative leadership. We had a longstanding superintendent, Terry Grier, who left two years before I got on the board. We had an interim for a few months. We had Richard Carranza. We had Grenita as interim superintendent for 3½ years after that. We have all the battles between different factions of the board, including the five members who abruptly fired [Lathan] and appointed somebody else one day, triggering a special accreditation investigation with the state. We came finally to the other side of that and hired Millard House, who’s now been here for a year and a half. At this point, me and Elizabeth Santos are the senior board members, and we’ve only been here for five years. 

So you don’t have a lot of continuity. Which in one way was good, because in 2020, when we had four new board members and I was board chair, I’m like, we’re going to double down on governance and build a foundation and figure out where we’re trying to go so that when we hire somebody to take us there, we’ve got a plan. 

We have board members who wanted to see large-scale, systemic changes in our incredibly large, diverse and complex system. Who can see the opportunities that exist, can see where inequities exist. Your board and your superintendent don’t have to agree on everything, right? I actually think you have to have diversity of thought. But you have to have everybody centered around a core set of beliefs and values on where you’re trying to go. And we have that on paper. But I don’t feel that we’ve ever as a board been partners in that work, and certainly not our superintendent.

We just got stuck. We’re grounded in this governance model, but we weren’t seeing things come from the administration that were really challenging the status quo of what an education system can and should look like for children — and almost a quarter of a way through the 21st century. 

There’s some irony there. You had an interim superintendent who had put deep thought into systemic change and a board that wouldn’t sign off. And then you ended up with a board that wanted change but an administration that wouldn’t advance a plan. When the Texas Supreme Court decided to lift the injunction, the board had the option of continuing with the suit, as unlikely as victory seemed. But you voted not to do that. 

I’m going to say this for me, because I don’t want to speak for my colleagues on this. There’s a saying: When the elephants fight, the grass suffers. We have been in an adversarial relationship with our state agency in some ways since before I was on the board, before we even triggered 1842.

I think there was a realization that we were unlikely to win. We could either move forward in a collaborative, student-centered way or we could continue to fight. For me personally, I made a commitment to always put students first. I don’t believe that the outcome would change if we persist in this legal battle. It prolongs a period of instability for our kids.

What matters most is, how do we make sure kids are learning and growing with the least amount of disruption we possibly could have? I’ve always believed that with all of what our district has gone through in the past five years, there has to be something better for kids on the other side of it all. And how do we get to that better other side as quickly and harmlessly as we possibly can? If it’s even possible.

If the appointed board of managers and new superintendent are going to succeed, they’re going to need community support. And at the moment, there’s still a lot of shrieking.

Our public school system belongs to the public. We want the kids who have been left behind for far too long to no longer be left behind. That is a shared value between our current district governance team of 10, our board and superintendent, and our state [education] agency and therefore, presumably, whoever they will appoint. That’s a shared value.

The divergence is going to be how that is achieved. On a Saturday afternoon, not at rush hour, it takes an hour to drive from one side of Houston ISD to the other. When you go from east to west, you’re going from oil and gas plants, the shipping channel with tankers coming in and out and all of that, to the west side. That’s also oil and gas — but in shining office buildings. 

If this group can come in, understand the diversity of need and build true partnership and collaboration with communities in their pursuit of systemic changes, I think they’ll be successful. If they come in thinking they have all the answers and they’re just going to put all these things in place, nothing’s going to really be different for kids. 

It’s all about making decisions with families. That’s where the magic can happen. And we haven’t done that.

What happens to you now? You’re still an elected board member, but you don’t have any power as of June 1. Do you have ceremonial duties? 

I don’t know. I think so. Keep in mind our state agency has overseen the transition to a board of managers in other districts before. But we’re the biggest. This is not something that one new superintendent and nine appointed board members are going to be able to do on their own as quickly as they’re going to need to ramp up. They’re going to need help being introduced to the community as something other than, you know, agents of a conspiracy. 

When you have an elected board, you have people — especially if they’re viable to win — who have relationships and roots in a community. And who build more through the campaign process, through the different civic clubs they visit with, the doors they knock on and all of that. As you build these relationships, you build an understanding of the fabric of the community. 

The board of managers, they’re going from 0 to 100 while skipping that process. I think there could be value in taking a second tier of candidates [for the board of managers who do not get appointed] and creating some kind of community council that helps support that appointed board.

I do believe in democratically elected governance of public systems and public dollars. But I also know that at least in our state, long before HB 1842 came into existence, there was a process supported by both Republicans and Democrats. As a school board, you have independence from other governmental entities. But if, in cases of financial impropriety, legal malfeasance and student performance, if you’re not serving kids well, if you are engaging in behaviors that create a risk to children, then there’s going to be intervention. To make sure that kids are learning and growing and that the dollars that you were trusted with are actually being spent on the children’s learning and growth.

I don’t know that there’s an easier right thing in that equation. It’s an imperfect democracy. We’ve known that since it started over 200 years ago. It’s all about how you just keep striving for something better within those values. 

Don’t let me push you off a cliff here, but I want to know how this feels. 

Back up before we get to that, because you’re going to lose me after that. We’re so big. We’re not a suburban district with a bunch of giant one-size-fits-all schools. We know one-size-fits-all doesn’t work for all kids and it doesn’t work for all families. 

We also know that money matters, but money not spent effectively doesn’t change outcomes. The unfortunate thing about the [COVID recovery] dollars is we’re probably going to learn that in a really harsh way in the coming years. How we chose to spend it actually either made a difference for kids or didn’t. 

But we’re stuck in this conversation where it’s just about more money. We need to evolve to new school design. That doesn’t mean there isn’t room for traditional models for students for whom that works, but in a district like ours, with the number of buildings and students we have, there is absolutely room to try things out and to scale what we know works. That was always my vision. 

One of the most poignant stories from my early days of being on the board — I have all these kids’ faces in my head from visiting schools — was this little second-grader eagerly raising his hand in class. But he didn’t even have a teacher of record, he had a long-term sub. Is he going to be okay? 

I was visiting our disciplinary alternative education program, and I asked the school leader, “What’s your biggest challenge?” He said, “The kids are here for a certain number of days, so the first challenge we have is some kids start to self-sabotage so they don’t have to go back to their home school. The other challenge is kids that get back to their home school and self-sabotage so they can come back.”

That’s kids telling us what they need, and we’re not listening. The families who have left our system for charter schools, private schools, to homeschool, they’ve done it because we’re not giving them something they want and need for their kids. And until we start talking to families in a real way, we’re not going to be able to build a holistic system that meets the needs of all kids, and we’re going to keep leaving kids behind. 

So how do I feel? Angry that I couldn’t achieve that. Disappointed that I couldn’t achieve that. We stole five years from kids. Five years where we could have given all our focus to the needs of students without the distraction of a lawsuit and all the impediments that instability has brought to our system. We should all be angry about that.

Our struggles teaching the subject — whether evidenced by our middling performance against peer nations or the striking “math anxiety” reported even by young children — are a stumbling block preventing kids from reaching their goals, he has argued. And the obstacle has only grown since the generational setback of COVID-19, which triggered the greatest learning crisis in history. Scores on the latest iteration of the National Assessment of Educational Progress sank to levels last seen in the early 2000s.

That’s part of the reason why the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced last fall that it would make math “the cornerstone of our K–12 education program strategy” over the next decade. Powered by $1.1 billion in new investments, the philanthropic giant will work with its partners to devise better curricular materials, improve teacher training and professional development, and fund research and development breakthroughs that hold the potential to transform the classroom experience. 

The agenda partially reflects Gates’s personal fascination with mathematics, which dates back to his years as a student. Before embarking on perhaps the most consequential career in the history of software, the future Microsoft founder blazed through Harvard’s legendarily rigorous Math 55 sequence, only focusing exclusively on computer science because he considered it unlikely that he would become one of the world’s greatest mathematicians. Distinguishing himself even in the rare air of tech founders, he co-authored a paper that settled the delicious-sounding question of “pancake sorting” for decades.

In a broader sense, the huge bet on math also builds on the Foundation’s existing work in the K–12 sphere. Gates has proven one of the most influential actors in American education over the first part of this century, fostering a movement toward small schools and promoting the adoption of the Common Core State Standards. Even when some efforts didn’t bear fruit — such as a failed seven-year campaign to strengthen teacher evaluation — Gates’s deep pockets and commitment to experimentation have helped make the weather in education policy for the last two decades.

Other priorities are expected to take a backseat through 2026, while math programming will grow from 40 percent of the organization’s education budget to 100 percent. It’s a commitment that dovetails with the public’s own concerns, Gates says: According to a poll released this week by the Foundation, large majorities of adults believe that math instruction needs an overhaul to become more relevant and engaging.

In a discussion with The 74’s Kevin Mahnken at the 2023 ASU+GSV summit — an educational technology conference that draws thousands of educators, investors, and entrepreneurs annually — Gates talked about America’s post-pandemic math deficits and what it will take to climb out of them. He also touched on the potential rewards to helping kids overcome their anxiety and fall in love with math.

“There is a gigantic upside in improving our public education system, both economically and in terms of equity,” Gates said. “But the country’s not falling apart as much as you might think.”

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

The 74: What is the extent of the math learning crisis that’s followed COVID? And can it be compared to the aftermath of other society-level emergencies, like the financial crisis of 2007?

Bill Gates: Even pre-pandemic, what the U.S. had was very disappointing. Math is a basic skill for many areas, and your attitude and success with regard to math is very predictive of whether you graduate high school or go on to higher education.

In our K–12 strategy, the Gates Foundation has shifted to math as our biggest priority by quite a bit. It’s a decision we made around the year before the pandemic started. It’s fair to say that the pandemic worsened math scores more than any other scores. Math is kind of a specialized skill in that your exposure can drop to near zero if you’re out of school, whereas your exposure to reading — and maybe, to some degree, writing — may not drop as dramatically. So it’s not that surprising, and we also see that math decay over the summer is dramatically higher than reading decay and writing decay.

You’ve got this huge loss, but there are some viewpoints that we’re starting to see some meaningful rebound. There was an article in the New York Times on that a few months ago. Then again, because our progress in math over the last 20 years has been so modest, the scores have hardly gone up at all. They’ve gone up a little bit. I’m only saying this to note, okay, we’re back where we were 10 years ago. But that’s partly a statement about the size of the loss, and it’s partly a statement about the very, very slow nature of the gains that we’ve had in math. The U.S. is doing quite poorly compared to other rich countries, even though the amount we spend on it is higher than any other, by substantial amounts.

The losses are tragic, though there are different ways of looking at them in terms of how much is in the inner city and inequitable. Some reports show learning loss as pretty much across-the-board; others show it much more in their inner city. If you abstract out how long your classroom was closed or what degree of online access you had, that is pretty predictive of lower performance.

And sadly, that does correlate with the lower income, minority-serving schools being worse off because their ability to do online learning, to get internet access, to get a device — almost every element that has to come together for good online learning — is less present in an inner-city public school than, to take the extreme, a suburban private school. And in the U.S., we had our schools closed longer than any other country. 

What are the big-picture costs of poor math learning on America’s competitiveness as both an economic and a geopolitical force?

The shortcomings of the U.S. education system are clear in terms of the inequity you end up with: the kind of jobs, salaries, mobility you’d like to see in society. Education is the great enabler of mobility, and we’re falling short on that. In fact, the U.S. economy has done relatively well because there are so many factors that enter into it, including the ability of the U.S. to draw very talented people from the entire world. But I think the predictions that this is going to hurt us in the long run are true, and we’d be further ahead if we were running our education system as well as we’d like to. 

This is why the Gates Foundation basically has two big things we do. The global work, which is centered on health and some things related to health, is the biggest thing for us because the vacuum of resources and thinking for malaria and childhood death was mind-blowing. In some of those areas, the Foundation is almost alone.

Research and philanthropy related to education should be a lot larger than it is, but we’re not alone there. There are a lot of players, and by some measures we’re one of the biggest players. There is a gigantic upside in improving our public education system, both economically and in terms of equity. But the country’s not falling apart as much as you might think. We make up for it by having universities that are the strongest in the world, and we do get some intellectual capacity because we’re an attractive place. Almost no other country in the world has this: When people say, “Hey, China’s strong,” they’re not saying that all great scholars in the world are flocking to China or India or Japan. Other than a few other English-speaking countries, the U.S. is truly unique in that respect.

It sounds like you’re saying that America isn’t so much falling behind the rest of the world as it is falling behind its own potential. That reminds me of research from Harvard’s Tom Kane, which found that we could lose almost a trillion dollars in future wages if eighth-grade math deficits aren’t significantly mitigated.

We’re going to be paying a price for a long time in areas that are hard to measure. We’ve seen this in terms of mental health problems, which obviously interact with young people’s persistence in education. The isolation that came out of the pandemic was a huge setback. How you map that onto economic figures — okay, there are a lot of assumptions in those numbers — but we’ve got a lot of making up to do. 

And most of the resources that help with that make-up are only going to be around for a couple of years. We will not have remedied our NAEP deficit — even to get back to where we were before the pandemic, which wasn’t an ideal situation — during the time that the ESSER money is still available. You also have shrinking school districts in many places, and scaling down while maintaining quality can be a very difficult thing. So U.S. education is a challenged space.

Switching gears a bit, you’ve previously compared the emergence of ChatGPT with the development of the microprocessor. I’m wondering how you contextualize it alongside other civilizational breakthroughs, like the Green Revolution or the emergence of vaccines.

The Holy Grail of computer science from the first time anybody did computation was how its abilities could compare with human capabilities. The so-called Turing Test was formulated before I was born, and throughout my history of using computers, there were things like Shakey the Robot or obscure things like ELIZA, which sort of tried to be a dialogue machine. Almost everybody who starts writing programs will do some random sentence generator where you have various grammatical patterns and sets of words and generate blather. It’s funny because sometimes it almost seems to make sense. 

We’ve been making progress in human sensory things, like matching visual recognition and speech recognition of humans. When I worked on AI stuff in the ‘70s and ‘80s, we weren’t making that much progress, but then there was the combination of scaling and new techniques — so-called machine learning techniques. It didn’t bother people that much that it could listen better than us or that, in a sense, it could see better than us, but there was no ability to read or write.

What we’ve got now is pretty amazing. It’s got huge limitations in terms of its accuracy and how you can train it. But given the scale of the industry and the promise — the amount of activity and the pace of innovation to take the current limitations and make it more effective — it’s pretty mind-blowing.

Its reading and writing capability has got everyone saying, “Wow.” When you sit at the computer creating models or taking a document or making a presentation, its ability to help you be more productive on those things is really phenomenal. And we’ve gone from no ability to do that to a pretty substantial ability just in this calendar year.

You mentioned your twin interests of public health and public education. Do you think the Gates Foundation’s successes in the former sphere — perhaps measured in the huge decline of malaria deaths in this century — are greater than those in the latter? And if so, why might that be?

The progress on public health, because it was so ignored, is really unbelievably dramatic. I’m not sure most people are aware of it, but if you gave a report card to humanity of what we’ve done well since the year 2000, at the top of that report card would be reducing the number of children who die under the age of five from over 10 million to under 5 million. Now, most of those deaths were in poor countries, and so the visibility to most Americans of that miracle is extremely low even though some American government aid was part of that; certainly, mass amounts of government science were part of that. And our Foundation played a fairly central role, if not a solo role. We have a lot of partners, including the U.S. government. 

There’s no equivalent in education. The equivalent would have been if the dropout rate from high schools was cut in half, that the dropout rate from college was cut in half, that U.S. math scores went up 30 percent, that we’re at the top of the lead tables. 

No such miracle took place.

With education, you do have trends that are tough. Very appropriately, the labor market gives capable women way more opportunities than it did in the past. But the education system cheated somewhat by having very talented women who weren’t given the opportunities they should have. So you have a little bit of adjustment in your teaching pool. And given where you have population growth, the average incomes of the kids going into the public school system is a bit lower, with more non-English-speaking households. That’s a little bit of a negative factor, but we’ve maintained and improved slightly. We’ve improved math scores slightly, racial equity slightly, high school graduation rates slightly.

It’s interesting. You can come to a conference like this or visit a really exemplary school and be reminded, “Wow, there are outliers!” There are microcosms where things are pretty fantastic, even at the school level. Certainly at the classroom level, you’ve always been able to go find the Stand and Deliver-style, unbelievable teacher. And whenever you find variance, you can say to yourself, “Hey, how come we can’t capture that best practice and get the average teacher to be close to that top teacher? What is it about training and understanding and incentives that makes that very difficult?”

We haven’t succeeded as much on that as we’d like. We have all this technology where, yes, you can look up YouTube videos and Wikipedia articles and sit there and do math questions for free on Khan Academy. And yet none of that — none of the seriousness about transferring best practices in terms of traditional teaching, and none of the new technology — has come in and really made that dramatic of a difference. Somebody could say, “Well, give up,” but not many people want to do that. We’re stubborn enough to believe that the improvements that have been made were worthwhile even though, compared on a per-dollar basis to what we’ve done in global health, it’s just not the same thing.

We save lives for $1,000 per life. And in education, [laughs] we haven’t done the equivalent of saving a life for $1,000. We feel like our work has been good, including helping the field find dead ends. In education, the R&D investment about “Why is that teacher good” or “Why should you insist on homework being done?” is way less than what it should be. And our foundation is one of many that’s tried to bring more understanding to what works and what doesn’t.

You probably saw the proposal to dramatically increase the reach of the Institute for Education Sciences and establish something like a “DARPA for education,” with the aim of accelerating the development of breakthrough technologies for learning. It seems like there might be a bigger role for the federal government to play in this field.

For all governments, all over the world; a lot of what we learn about education is pretty universal. But anyway, as a percentage of its size in the economy and the benefit of improving it, you could say there’s pretty dramatic underinvestment in K–12 research because the numbers are actually quite small. And if I said to you that the best math teacher was somebody 50 years ago, you could actually believe that. If somebody said that the best cancer doctor was some guy 50 years ago, you’d go, “What the hell are you talking about? That’s the silliest thing I’ve ever heard.”

So the field has changed and improved, but pretty modestly. Helping those researchers — that’s still worth investing in. I was at a middle school this morning called Chula Vista where — together with a partner, High Tech High — we do some of our math instruction work. When you get into the classroom, it’s fascinating to see what works and what doesn’t. I have to say, when you see the teachers who are really engaged in trying to help other teachers do better, it often reminds you why this is an important field and that there really is promise.

When I think about the big K–12 reforms that were launched the last few decades by both Washington and institutions like the Gates Foundation, it seems like there’s now much less political will to pursue huge projects like those. I’m wondering if you are at all worried that really ambitious ventures — you could also include vaccine development and advocacy — are going to be a little harder to launch, harder to support.

Hmm. I’d say that, both under Bush and Obama, there was a real effort at the federal level to drive change in education. Of course, the federal level has the advantage that it affects all 50 states. It also has the disadvantage that you’re writing some rule about, “Please spend the money on this thing” in Washington, D.C., and then have many layers and diverse environments in the states.

For better or for worse, the amount of experimentation and top-down system reform that’s going to come from the federal government after the Obama period will be very modest. You can say that’s good or bad, but it’s just a fact that Democrats and Republicans in Congress are not thinking, “We’re going to change the way education is done.” The action has moved, you could say, to the state, district or classroom level, or these ed tech people, or the things that philanthropists fund. 

There isn’t one common theme. Charter schools continue to advance, although they’re a modest percentage of all students. Interestingly, there’s a huge shift such that charter schools are growing more in red states than blue states now. It’s complicated to characterize the results, but they’re largely good, and they are laboratories of learning. A lot of good ideas that should suffuse themselves into the broader public system come out of that charter experience.

I don’t think it’s that people are satisfied with our current education system. We did a survey about math recently where parents were very willing to say, “Hey, instruction should be different to drive the relevance and the engagement,” so there’s still open-mindedness that education can be better. Hopefully it’s not too politicized in that, if you show that a curriculum can get better results, people view that as helping kids and helping society.

I’m sure that if you get into some political topics in the curriculum, you may run into some sort of deadlock. But most educational things can stay away from those issues. The way we teach multiplication or algebra, we can do far better. That’s certainly a belief embedded in the priority we’re putting into math and math curriculum.

A lot of our readers might not be aware that you considered becoming an academic mathematician yourself. Are you still drawn to math? 

Yes! Math is fascinating. The way these new AI models work is extremely mathematical. If you learn all this new stuff, you’re drawing more on your math skills than your coding skills.

I initially did math, I was very good at math, and that helped me do coding. My framework for the world is very mathematical. And the boundaries of math have not moved all that much: We’ve proved the Four-Color Theorem, we’ve proved Fermat’s last theorem. It’s fun to track where we’re making progress and where we’re not. But I enjoy math, and thank goodness, because otherwise I couldn’t be as engaged in the AI stuff as I am.

Even when I’m doing my global health work, or when we’re looking at the trends in these education developments, math is important. I like symbolic, complex math, but just data science — which we’re hoping to get into the curriculum and make the curriculum more interesting — that stuff is amazing now. 

See previous 74 Interviews: Sal Khan on COVID’s math toll; economist Tom Kane on the challenge of reversing learning loss; and education researcher Martin West on last fall’s NAEP results. The full archive is here. 

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provides financial support to The 74.

Every day, adults are tasked with supporting young people showing behavioral changes or experiencing a mental health crisis. The problem? Many are unprepared to do so. 

It’s a challenge Deborah Offner came up against so often, as a consulting psychologist for schools in and around Boston, she decided to write a guide. Urgency is only growing: a recent CDC report shows about a third of teen girls contemplate suicide, the second-leading cause of death for children.

Educators as First Responders: A Teacher’s Guide to Adolescent Development and Mental Health, Grades 6-12, published this winter by Routledge, delves into the adolescent brain. Offner pairs the science of what’s happening, at a given age or for those with a particular mental illness, with school-based examples she and educators have had over decades. 

Through it all, she invites readers to take off their adult hats and to see youth behavior in the context of development. How are requests for nudes, for example, registering in a 14-year old’s brain? What are they seeing as the risk and rewards? What other information do you need to know to decide whether to pull a counselor or parent in? 

“Teachers really are playing these significant roles, to help kids develop and manage their emotional lives. They should be a little more equipped and supported to be able to do that in a way that they feel confident about because they’re doing it anyway,” said Offner, who also treats children and young adults in her private practice.

In discussion with The 74, Offner reveals the best practices adults can keep in mind and how schools can meet some of students’ emotional needs beyond referral to talk therapy. 

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Please be advised that some responses reference self-harm and suicide. 

The 74: As somebody who’s done this work for decades, is thinking of educators as first responders in this way a new paradigm or shift? Why write this now?

When I tell teachers, and other mental health professionals who work in schools, it seems very intuitive. Of course, kids go to their teacher when they’re upset. But it’s not recognized or acknowledged as being such a central part of the role. 

In part I wrote the book to call attention to the fact that teachers really are playing these significant roles, to help kids develop and manage their emotional lives. They should be a little more equipped and supported to be able to do that in a way that they feel confident about because they’re doing it anyway. What are some things I can do and say? I understand these kids as learners, but how do I understand them as people?

You spend the first good chunk of the book with the social contexts that shape adolescence and the psychology behind kids’ actions. Why is that understanding critical and how might educators’ actions change as a result? What’s the danger of what you call an “adult-centric lens”?

One of the things I like to do when I work with schools is to help build empathy in adults for what kids and also parents go through. When teachers understand what’s behind the behavior, there’s a couple of things that change. You don’t take it personally when a kid isn’t paying attention, can’t remember to do something, or has a certain attitude. You recognize that it’s not something you’re necessarily doing wrong, or something that if you just were different would change. It’s what they’re going through, and also, it’s normal.

There’s great benefit to the increased awareness of mental health issues in kids, but at the same time, there’s a lot of things that all kids do that can look a little crazy if you don’t recognize why it is. They don’t have the same controls, the same ways of thinking or organizing themselves and behavior that adults do. So it normalizes some of the funny things that can be perplexing or frustrating; it helps you to have perspective on them.

I’m curious if you have an example from talking to a teacher about this. Any light-bulb moments to share, from when you explained the underpinning of a behavior?

There’s an example I use in the book about a boy who looked really indifferent, kind of lazy, like he didn’t care about his work or about his teachers expectations of him. Teachers would ask him to meet after class and he would just disappear, slink out of the room. He was getting behind and seemed really disengaged. 

As the school counselor, I got an opportunity to speak with a therapist he was working with outside of school and learned from her that he had the worst case of social anxiety she’d ever seen. And once I understood, oh, that’s why he’s avoiding his teachers. That’s why he seems shut down. It’s actually called social phobia, a specific disorder. It’s not being shy or not wanting to talk to people exactly. It’s about worrying that other people are gonna think something critical of you, or bad. He was actually so exquisitely sensitive to feeling like he was letting his teachers down that he was avoiding them. 

Once they knew that, rather than just being angry and taking it personally, they were more sympathetic and could put some plans into place. I helped him to agree to what would work for him so that he could connect with them and do better. It wasn’t a magic solution, but the energy in the room changes when you explain to faculty why a kid is struggling, right?

It’s funny you bring up that example because it’s one I wanted to ask you about. What would you have done if there wasn’t yet a therapist to consult in that case? How would you have gone about finding or meeting his needs without the context?

That’s a great question because in so many cases, kids don’t have one, let alone one that knows them so well that they can offer you that kind of input. What I recommend to anyone who’s in a counseling role, or even like a Dean or administrative role, is to try to sit down with a student and hear their point of view about what’s going on. Often, kids will tell a counselor things that they might not share with a teacher. With the kids permission, you can, in some ways, act as a liaison. Even if the kid doesn’t want you to share everything they’ve told you, if you come to a better understanding of what’s going on, you can share that.

What factors adults can look out for to keep a pulse on a student’s well being while maintaining their boundaries?

Every student has different boundaries. There’s some kids, as we all know, that will tell you everything from what they ate for breakfast to a fight they had with their best friend whether you want to know or not. And there’s other kids that keep their cards really close to their chest. You have to — this is the beauty of teachers — get to know your students. Sometimes it can be as simple as asking, how are you doing? Kids can be almost surprised and even kind of touched that a teacher is interested. That is always a starting point. It doesn’t mean that a kid is going to tell you in the moment about a serious problem they’re having, but showing that you want to know it’s an important step in the direction of kids feeling they could open up to you if they wanted to. 

Obviously if you notice any change in behavior — like a kid who’s usually alert who suddenly seems sleepy — it’s okay to say, are you feeling okay? You seem a little different or not quite yourself today, or you’re quieter than usual.

You mentioned earlier that sometimes teachers are unsure of when to not fly solo and involve a professional clinician or let the family know. What are some considerations that a teacher can think through?

The bright lines that I draw have to do with any physical or potential harm to the student. If a kid is talking about suicide, cutting themselves, or other things that have to do with concrete harm, it’s really important that you not be the only one who knows that, especially when you’re not trained to assess the seriousness, gravity or reality of such a situation. Sometimes kids cut themselves and it doesn’t mean anything other than that they’re trying to manage their distress. It’s not a good sign, but it doesn’t mean that they’re going to necessarily attempt suicide. 

In situations where there’s the possibility of self harm, whether it’s happened or might happen, it’s really important to let the student know that you need to let their parents know or let the school counselor know. You can give them a choice about how you tell their parents, whether they want to tell them and then have them loop back to you, there’s different ways to negotiate the process, but that’s again the bright line. 

Otherwise, I think if a kid tells you something and you find yourself thinking about it after you go home, it’s always great to run it by a mental health professional at the school, even without a name if you want to protect the kids privacy, just to get someone else’s take on it. Someone who’s trained and knows maybe a little more about the specifics of what’s worrisome. 

What are some best practices to keep in mind when a young person discloses something traumatic or difficult for them?

One of the first things that you always want to say if a kid confides in you about something traumatic is to thank them for letting you know, that you’re so glad that they were able to tell you, that you wouldn’t want them to be alone with this experience. Ask, have they told anybody else? Oftentimes kids will confide in a teacher, and it will be the first person they’ve told about something like this. Find out so you’re aware if you’re the only person holding this fact, or if in fact the parents already know. That’s a really different scenario, if you know that another adult is kind of taking responsibility. 

Certainly in that first conversation, do not jump to issues of reporting or filing charges are anything administrative or procedural, but focus more on how they’re doing and to maybe ask for a little bit more detail. Say something like, if you feel comfortable telling me, could you let me know a little more about what happened, is there anyone else who would like to know, or anything else that I can do to be helpful? 

Of course, if someone under 18 tells you they’ve been sexually assaulted, you’re a mandated reporter. There are those requirements, legally. But again, I wouldn’t bring that up in the first meeting. Generally speaking, you should go to your school administration and potentially the school counselor to talk about how the school wants to make the report and certainly not to do it without involving the student and potentially their family. In the moment, it’s just important to be there and sit with the kid and absorb whatever they’re feeling.

Another issue you raise in the book is this idea of compassion fatigue that some educators face. Can you share how that might show up in school and what educators can do to best avoid it or manage it when it comes?

This is a huge theme right now in schools, as we as a culture and country recognize the prevalence of trauma, of being sexually assaulted. So for example, a kid tells you they were sexually assaulted, there’s sort of a vicarious traumatization that happens when you hear a story like that, but it could also be more subtle things like their parent mistreating them or them going through a difficult depression. 

As we bring an empathic response to supporting that child, and the more we do that, it can take a toll on us. The ways to address it have to do with building a network or community, finding a mentor or supervisor or someone that you can share some of the weight. It’s sharing it with another adult or a small group and also taking care of yourself in all the ways that we’ve been told to throughout the pandemic, whether it’s exercise, sleep, making time for yourself, to prevent the kind of fatigue that can happen.

When you saw the latest findings from the CDC about the frequency of sexual assault and suicidal ideation, what was your reaction personally?

On the one hand, as a human as a parent, I was horrified. As a psychologist who works with many girls in high school and college, I wasn’t surprised at all. I would say, and I don’t think I’m exaggerating, that virtually every girl in my practice over the age of 18 has been either sexually assaulted or coerced into sex at least once. Now, I have a small practice but these are girls from all different backgrounds and different schools. It’s really pervasive in a way that continues to shock me, even though I also know it’s reality.

You’ve also worked with youth interfacing with the foster care system and underserved youth in Boston more generally. For educators whose student populations are disproportionately impacted by poverty, homelessness, or adverse childhood experiences, are there specific things you recommend keeping in mind when they take on this first-responder approach?

There are ways to be sensitive and thoughtful if you’re a person who doesn’t come from a background of poverty and you’re not familiar with some of the sort of coping strategies that families may have to use. It’s important to be sensitive, both to the economic strain on families and also to cultural preferences for ways of talking about and dealing with mental health. 

A common thing for our families from Beacon Academy — who are all students of color and low-income, some have parents who have immigrated fairly recently — is that older kids will take care of younger kids on a regular basis. They may spend many, many hours caring for their siblings in a way that more privileged families may not, and often that could interfere with following through on a commitment to an extracurricular activity or something at school. It’s important, if you find a kid who is having trouble meeting a certain expectation, to gently explore and understand. Are there family commitments that are taking up their time? That’s really different than if someone doesn’t feel like getting up in the morning. Maybe their mom had to go to work and they couldn’t afford a babysitter.

That goes back to the idea of building empathy you mentioned earlier. We also know that suicidal ideation, depression and anxiety symptoms are more common in particular marginalized student groups — girls, students of color, queer students. Are there particular supports to keep in mind for them? 

The thing to keep in mind about these identities is that they may make kids more vulnerable, or more worried about sharing information for fear of people judging or criticizing them or not being accepting. What I always have in mind for myself is the kid’s identity, as I understand it and as they claim it, and also my own identity — what the differences are in those. Then I can see and mind the gap. 

How can schools be more affirming right now outside of offering traditional talk therapy, particularly because a lot of students might have family contexts that still stigmatize care or can’t access it? 

I think mental health awareness days are always helpful. I was in a school last week that had a wellness day for the middle and high school. Kids could go to all kinds of workshops; I did one on perfectionism for high school students. They had a dance group come and other speakers to talk about things like body image and dieting. That was a very popular talk because a lot of kids have concerns about that. I think it started off as kids being skeptical and now it’s like a day that nobody wants to miss. They have therapy pets come, someone doing caricatures, but it celebrates that wellness is important for kids. It’s not just about being high achieving academically or athletically. 

There’s other ways to offer support in-school that aren’t therapy, per se. For younger kids, and this could even go through middle school, lunch groups may be held with either a school counselor or someone savvy about kids. They can talk about mental health, relationships; kids could come together and be able to chat with each other and with a teacher for no particular reason. It doesn’t have to be only kids that are having trouble. 

At the school where I am, we had someone come in — he’s not a therapist, more of a coach, who’s going to do some art projects with the kids and provide a safe space for kids to chat with him if they wish. It’s activity-based, but it’s a time for them to just be there for themselves and not have any expectations on them. Doing things that show that you value their well being can be really important and parents never have to pay or give permission for it.

Lastly, are there particular storylines, or aspects of youth mental health that you feel are being misrepresented, over- or underrepresented?

What I feel is probably not addressed enough is family life and the importance of supporting parents so that they can effectively support their kids. You see a lot about either the sort of fetishization of motherhood — maternal love as this kind of ideal, special, gendered state — or parents who are abusive. The extremes of parents. Most parents are obviously somewhere in the middle, either themselves struggling with mental health issues or ambivalent about the pressures that parent parenthood puts on them. 

For today’s kids, there’s so much about social media and the effects of that in terms of mental health, but in my experience, a lot of what determines how kids feel about themselves and how well they do is their relationship with their parents. I wish there was more attention to helping parents be more present in better ways for their kids.

If you or someone you know is having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. Additional resources are available at SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources. For LGBTQ mental health support, you can contact The Trevor Project’s toll-free support line at 866-488-7386.

What began as a modest community on the social media platform quickly grew into the political juggernaut Moms Demand Action, the nation’s largest grassroots gun control group and a primary foe of the National Rifle Association and their allies in Washington, D.C. 

After fighting in the political trenches for more than a decade, Watts plans to retire this year after a long-fought win: Last year, President Joe Biden signed into law the first new federal gun rules in nearly three decades. 

But the mass shootings haven’t stopped. On Wednesday, students nationwide marched out of their schools to demand additional gun control measures after a shooter killed six people — including three 9-year-olds — March 27 at a private Christian elementary school in Nashville. This week, Tennessee House Republicans moved to expel three Democratic state representatives who led a protest on the House Floor in response to the shooting and in solidarity with the hundreds of demonstrators, many of them young people, who packed the Tennessee Capitol.

The Nashville shooting has become the latest partisan flashpoint at the center of the country’s divisive political discourse. As students in Nashville and nationwide flood the streets to demand additional gun control measures, Republicans have latched onto the tragedy, which was carried out by a 28-year-old transgender shooter, with anti-trans rhetoric. 

In an interview with The 74, Watts — who now lives in California and whose children are grown — said the GOP’s response to the Nashville shooting follows a long history of leaning on “straw men” to avoid an honest dialogue about gun violence. She also offered insight into the power of mom-led advocacy and advice for parents advocating for changes in their own communities.

The interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. 

This week it’s students who are walking out of school and hitting the streets protesting after the recent school shooting in Nashville. But we’ve been here before. What, if anything, is different this time? What factors have made this shooting in Nashville so politically galvanizing? 

I think it’s different every time. There’s this idea that somehow there’s going to be a tragedy and everything is going to change overnight. And it didn’t happen after Columbine, it didn’t happen after the Sandy Hook school shooting, it didn’t happen last summer [after mass shootings in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas]. But that doesn’t mean that things aren’t changing. 

The system is not set up in this country for overnight change. The system is set up for people to get involved in democracy and that means that you do what I call the unglamorous heavy lifting of grassroots activism, and that forces incremental change. 

I have seen over the last decade incremental change lead to a revolution. There’s been a seismic shift in American politics. Back in 2012, a quarter of all Democrats in Congress had an A rating from the NRA. Today, not one does. They’re proud of their Fs. 

And we had 15 Republicans support the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act that passed last summer. So things are changing and I believe that after every national shooting tragedy, when people start to pay attention, you’re seeing change.

The NRA is incredibly weak. They really didn’t have a seat at the table when the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act passed. The fact that we have a 90% track record of stopping the NRA’s agenda every year, those things are only enabled by all of the change that has happened and added up over the last decade. 

When you ask what’s different this time, I think it’s that there are even more people who are filled with rage over this situation, who know we don’t have to live like this. We sure as hell shouldn’t die like this. The more people who use their voices and vote on this issue, the faster we get to a place where our country isn’t run by the gun industry. 

President Biden signed the first federal gun control measures in nearly three decades — yet these shootings keep happening. What do you see were the effects of the law that has been signed, and what more needs to be done to solve the problem? 

The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act was a very important, critical step forward, but it was just one first step on a much longer journey. 

We need to have background checks on all gun sales at a federal level, we need a Red Flag law, we need to make sure that domestic abusers can’t get guns, including stalkers. There’s so much that needs to be done, and we’ve done it really at a state-by-state level. 

Blue states in this country now have pretty strong gun laws, whereas red states don’t. We’re only as safe as the closest state with the weakest gun laws, so we need much more to happen at a federal level. But in order to do that we have to have a Congress that will make that happen. 

The idea that shootings were going to stop after the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act passed is not realistic, but I want to be clear that it is meaningful. It takes a multifaceted approach to looking at gun violence as a complex issue. It isn’t just mass shootings or school shootings, that’s about 1% of the gun violence in this country. It’s also domestic violence and gun suicide and community gun violence. 

You asked what’s happened since the law was passed. The fact that we have stepped up background checks through the FBI through the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, 119 buyers under the age of 21 have been blocked from gun sales because they were deemed too dangerous to have access to guns. Prosecutions have increased for unlicensed gun sellers. There are new gun trafficking penalties that now have been used in at least 30 cases across the country. Millions of new dollars have flowed into mental health services for children in schools and into community violence intervention programs. 

President Biden said after the Nashville school shooting that he couldn’t do more on the issue without Congress at this point. What is your response to this admission? 

I think that was a little more nuanced. I think he was basically saying that if we want holistic solutions for gun safety it really does have to be passed by Congress. I also want to be clear that the Biden-Harris administration has done more on this issue than any other administration in our nation’s history. 

Right now, the House is controlled by gun lobby lackeys. They’re not only opposed to passing good gun safety laws, they’re actually attacking federal law enforcement and they’re pushing gun extremists’ laws that would put us at risk. Just hours after the shooting in Nashville, a House committee scheduled a vote on legislation that would make it easier to buy really dangerous assault weapons that have arm braces. It’s the same device that the shooter in Tennessee had. 

So you know, I want to be clear that we’re making progress. If you’d asked me a year ago that we would have passed the first gun safety bill in 30 years that expanded background checks and funded state Red Flag laws and helps close what we call the boyfriend loophole, I would not have believed you. 

So it is possible, and I think it’s inevitable, that our lawmakers at a federal level will eventually take action on this issue because their constituents are demanding it. There was a reason that Mitch McConnell whipped the votes on the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act and that’s because he saw polling that showed the Republican Party would be decimated if they did not act after Buffalo and Uvalde. That trend, especially when you see shootings like what just happened in Nashville, will only continue. 

We’re seeing more and more gunfire on school grounds in this country and we know why. It’s because there’s unfettered, easy access to guns.

The Nashville tragedy was carried out by a person who was reportedly transgender. As such, many Republican lawmakers and pundits have blamed the shooting on the suspect’s gender identity — rather than on guns. In what ways are you working to counter efforts to divert the focus from firearms to other social issues?

We see these same straw men after every single shooting tragedy in this country. Republicans always want to make it about anything but what data shows is causing our uniquely American crisis, which is easy access to guns. You know, other nations have mental illness, they have access to video games, they have divorced parents. 

The reason we have a 26-times higher gun homicide rate is that we give people easy access to guns. You know, the vast majority of mass shootings in this country have been by straight white men. And at no point have they said that that is a crisis, that we should really look at straight white men. It’s clear that that is just a way for them to divert attention because what they don’t want to talk about is the fact that too many guns and too few gun laws have given us the highest rate of gun homicides and suicides among all high-income countries. 

Gun politics have long been divisive and you’ve found yourself the subject of sharp political critiques and, most alarmingly, death threats. There’s evidence of the country growing increasingly divided, and with that an uptick in political violence. In what ways have you experienced this change firsthand? 

When I started Moms Demand Action, I was sort of living in a bubble. I was a white suburban mom and I got off the sidelines because I was afraid my kids weren’t safe in their schools. Then when you come to this issue, what you realize is that it is much more complex and much more holistic than that. 

I was really shocked that we were having rallies and marches in those early days in Indiana and we were surrounded by men who were carrying loaded long guns in public. I was just shocked that that was legal. And in fact, open carry is legal in over 40 states in this country. To me it was a signal that something is very wrong. 

The more and more we pushed on gun extremists, the more they pushed back by behaving that way and we saw them starting to open carry in stores which is why we started corporate campaigns to change their gun policies. What we were starting to see were the seeds of gun extremism. They felt like a right not utilized and expressed in public was a right they didn’t have, and the NRA actually pushed back on this idea. In 2014 they came out and called open carry ‘downright weird,’  and said it was not something that you do in normal society. And then just days later, they had to change their position because gun extremists in Texas were burning their NRA membership cards. 

Every state has its own version of the NRA but it’s often to the right of the NRA and much more extreme. When I lived in Colorado, they’re called the Rocky Mountain Gun Owners. They believe any gun law whatsoever is an infringement on the Second Amendment. So the NRA tends to be pulled to the right by these extremists. I mean, in 1999, the NRA opposed guns in schools and supported closing the background check loophole. And certainly that’s a far cry from where they are today. 

They’ve lost control of their Frankenstein, and gun extremism is now this recruiting tool. It’s an organizing principle, it’s a fundraising tactic all for the right wing. I mean, guns excite the right-wing base about things that have nothing to do with guns. And so it is getting young white men through the door, it is radicalizing them, these groups often play in conspiracy theories. Again, some of those were originated and propagated by the NRA. 

The goal is to stoke fear, recruit new members and sell guns. Those fringe gun extremists that our volunteers were facing in those early days started showing up at state houses and anytime a statue was being removed and even threatening lawmakers and police officers and fellow citizens.

We’ve tracked armed demonstrations since 2020 and found that they’re six times more likely to be violent or destructive than demonstrations where people are not armed. It seems pretty intuitive, but the data bears this out. 

So to answer your question: Yes, I think gun extremism is on the rise and is a very dangerous threat to democracy.

Tennessee Rep. Andy Ogles deleted a recent family Christmas card from social media after you criticized the photo, which featured the lawmaker and his family wielding guns. Republican lawmakers have faced similar criticism in recent years for posting similar family portraits. Why do you think it’s important to highlight these images? Are you concerned that the attention may ultimately play into their hands? 

I think it’s fascinating when these gun extremists back down, like deleting the photo. I think it’s really important to point out that this is the culture that’s killing us. 

This idea of unfettered access to guns and treating them like toys, like putting them in the hands of children. Both of my grandfathers were World War II veterans. They were responsible gun owners, they had the highest amount of respect for those guns and in a million years would not have posed with them like they were toys as opposed to tools meant to kill things. 

It’s really important that we shine a light. Sunlight is the best disinfectant and that’s certainly the case when it comes to gun extremism because people see this behavior. The vast majority of Americans — regardless of whether they’re gun owners or not, regardless of whether they’re Republicans or Democrats — they support common sense gun laws. And I think that seeing that kind of gun extremism is a turnoff to most Americans and they know that’s not who they want making our policies. 

You began your advocacy after the Sandy Hook shooting in 2012 with a Facebook group. What is it about grassroots, mom-led advocacy — based on the idea behind Mothers Against Drunk Driving — that makes it a particularly effective gun control advocacy approach? 

Bigger picture, women are the secret sauce to advocacy in this country and frankly, in the world. If you go back to when women were first allowed to be activists in America, which was Prohibition … they [men in power] could never really put that genie back in the bottle. Once women got off the sidelines, they wanted to use their voices on issues that they cared about. 

We are often given the task of caring for our families and our communities. All the way from Prohibition up to the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, it’s really been women and mothers forcing change in this country and using the power available to them. We are the majority of the voting population, we’re the majority of the population — period.  So when we use our voices and our votes, we can affect change. 

I often go back to something that feminist author Soraya Chemaly said. She wrote the book Rage Becomes Her and she featured Moms Demand Action in there and she and I had a conversation about this and she said, ‘You know, 80% of the lawmakers in this country are men and men are inherently afraid of their mothers.’ 

The lawmakers in this country are either very, very excited to see us show up — hundreds or even thousands of us at a time in our red shirts — or they’re very, very afraid. So that can be a powerful coalition. 

Given your success in taking that Facebook group and turning your advocacy into the size of the organization that you did, I’m curious what lessons you learned about American politics and policymaking? What advice do you have for other mothers and other women who are working to inspire change in their own communities? 

I don’t think that men are as afraid to fail in public because that’s sort of seen as brave and courageous, where I think women feel like there’s blowback when they’re not perfect, or if they fail. 

If I had waited until I knew everything there was to know about gun violence or organizing, I still wouldn’t have started Moms Demand Action. I think it’s important to birth your ideas into the world. The very worst thing that can happen is that you fail and that you learn from that failure and you try something again. 

[In 2014, Moms Demand Action merged with Mayors Against Illegal Guns, an advocacy effort by former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, to form the nonprofit Everytown for Gun Safety.]

I had this great reverence for lawmakers before I started Moms Demand Action and I assumed they were very smart and committed and concerned and kind and unfortunately what you learn is that too many of them are not and they really don’t want to listen to what you have to say. But if you are an activist who is all of those things — concerned, committed, compassionate, curious — you would make a great lawmaker. I’m very proud of the fact that hundreds of our volunteers have decided to take a leap from not just shaping policy but to actually making it and running for office and winning. 

In this last electoral cycle, in November, 140 of our volunteers ran for office and won at all levels of government. We have volunteers who are now members of Congress. I think that’s a really important lesson, too, which is that women make great lawmakers. 

After more than a decade in this work, at the end of this year you plan to retire. What motivated that decision and what’s next for you?

I’ve been a full-time volunteer, it’ll be 11 years at the end of this year, and that’s a long time to do this work. But also, I’ve asked myself that question because I think it’s important for a founder’s role to be finite. I never imagined I would spend the rest of my life doing this work. I’m so honored and so proud to have sort of lit the spark, but it really is up to other new and emerging leaders to keep that going. 

This movement needs to last into perpetuity and so, by stepping back, I think I enable other leaders to step forward. I’ll still be a volunteer for Moms Demand Action, I’ll just be doing it as a California Moms Demand Action volunteer. We have leaders who are ready to step up inside the organization and outside the organization, and I think that’s really exciting. 

As for me, for what’s next, I obviously will always care about this issue and it will be very important to me and I will use my voice in different ways. Something I’m really passionate about is empowering women in all different ways, but particularly running for office. 

I don’t have an answer for you on specifically what’s next. I will be with Moms Demand Action through the end of the year, I will certainly rest a little bit and I’m going to be teaching at USC starting in January and, other than that, I’ll figure out what’s next when the time comes. 

DFER promotes education reform-minded Democratic leaders who push for innovation and accountability in schools with an eye toward improving equity, teacher preparedness, public school choice, data transparency and accountability. They support those who wish to make higher education affordable for all. The organization, founded in 2008 at a time of greater consensus around education reform, seeks these goals in a fractured 2023 political landscape where schools have become fodder for the culture wars.

Elorza, 46, a Harvard-educated lawyer, served two terms as Providence mayor, from 2015 to 2023. Former Gov. Gina M. Raimondo, now U.S. Secretary of Commerce, and Elorza called for an outside review of Providence Public Schools after its 2018 test scores showed abysmal passing rates in math and English. The results released by  Johns Hopkins University were damning, paving the way for a state takeover. 

Elorza made national headlines in 2019 by bringing his 15-month-old-son to work with him in City Hall. He said in December he would not send the boy to his city’s troubled public schools.

The law school professor sat down with The 74 last week, just before his new job was announced, to talk about growing up in an immigrant community, building consensus in education around what works for students and who he can rely upon in Congress.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The 74: Tell me about your parents.

Jorge Elorza: They came from Guatemala in the mid-1970s, fleeing the civil war. They came here to Providence because there were a lot of factory jobs in the textile and jewelry industry. They were undocumented for the first 12 years of my life. (They became citizens in the 1980s under President Ronald Reagan’s amnesty policy.) My father dropped out of school in the 7th grade and my mother in the 5th grade. That’s a big part of my story. Even though I was born and raised here, I identify so strongly with immigrants because that’s the household that I was raised in and that’s the community where I grew up.

You say immigrant families put a tremendous emphasis on education, yet you floundered in K-12 before eventually graduating from Harvard. Do the problems/obstacles you faced back then have relevance today? 

All (immigrant families) place their hopes and dreams on public schools. I’d love to say I was that model student that always listened to their parents and was just destined for success. But the reality is I didn’t have a sense of direction as a young person: I got rejected from every college and university I applied to. When I was 17 years old and graduated from high school, that was a big pivot point for me in my life. I had to decide whether I was going to work in the factory with my parents, aunts and uncles or get my act together. And so that’s when I applied to community college.

You say part of your struggle was that your parents, who worked opposing shifts to manage child care, were not able to help you with schoolwork in part because of the language barrier. 

My father never spoke too much English. They would come home after work, we would have homework and they could only help us to a certain point. 

You attribute part of your success to your ability to score a seat at a coveted magnet school. It was a guidance counselor who urged you to take the admissions exam. 

So, you had to sign up for the test and then they had sent several papers home, but if they were in English, my parents couldn’t read them. My guidance counselor had seen something in me, some potential, and literally came and picked me out of my chair, took me to his office and he made me sign to register. 

You’re plagued by the arbitrary nature of that success. 

What if I happened to be absent that day or if an emergency came up and my guidance counselor just didn’t have the chance to get me? My entire life would have been completely different. We want to live in a world where every kid succeeds as a matter of course. But the reality is that so many kids who do succeed, succeed by overcoming all of the odds and, frankly, by just being fortunate at key moments in their lives.

Will your own ethnic background play a role in your leadership?

I’m absolutely a product of my upbringing and my past. When I think about the importance of education, I think about my friend Juan, one of the most brilliant, smart, sharp kids I have ever met in my life. He had those critical moments in his life where it was a combination of bad decisions and being unlucky. Juan is still a very good friend. He has a great family. He works hard every day, but he’s a laborer. He should have been a doctor. 

I think about my friend Jose … who had grown up next door, who was a year older than me and who I always looked up to. I found out that he had been murdered. I think that many of those stories, unfortunately, are still being recreated today … kids with limitless potential, having that potential either cut short or never being allowed to fully blossom.

The nation has been politically fractured for years. Where do you see consensus in education? 

Speaking about my community here in Providence, the number of Black and Latino families that support charter schools, for example, and that support common sense education policies that research has shown works, is extraordinarily high. Part of the challenge we have is lifting up their voices to make sure that voice on the ground is what’s driving public perception within the Democratic Party.

For example, there’s a lot of support for high-impact tutoring programs, especially as we’re coming out of COVID: Dedicated 1-to-1 tutoring that can help us not only make up that lost learning time, but also make learning gains. Those are things that are strongly supported across the board.

We also very much support summer learning programs that go beyond remedial to actual enrichment classes. Many of our students fall behind: They lose about two months of learning during the summer when other families move forward. 

There’s also mental health investments that make a lot of sense and pathways that can connect our students to careers. 

And you note these programs don’t just have support in Providence, but far beyond. Who are your allies now?

What’s different today than say, 10 years ago, is that there’s this critical mass of progressive and reformers of color. There are organic, grassroots efforts out there: There’s so much energy around this work. Part of my job as a leader of this organization is to organize and harness that enthusiasm and energy that we see at the grassroots level and amplify their voices so they drive more and more of the national conversation in this space. 

Your organization works with the National Parents Union, The Education Trust, Unidos, KIPP, Leadership Conference on Civil & Human Rights, Educators for Excellence, Alliance for Excellent Education and others. But who are your friends in Congress? 

Sen. Cory Booker has been an early supporter and he’s been steadfast throughout. Sen. Chris Murphy from Connecticut has been an amazing champion of this work … and Congresswoman Marilyn Strickland (of Washington state). We’ve identified about 200 elected champions around this work throughout the country.

Democrats have lost ground in education as Republicans have succeeded in using race, gender, immigration-related and transphobic rhetoric to whip up their base. How do you manage that environment?

On the one hand, you have Republicans who are infatuated with their culture wars right now: Republicans want to ban books while Democrats want to teach kids to read them. What we want to do is speak to the real issues as problem solvers. 

I get extremely frustrated hearing the way that education is being exploited for political gain and this is part of the performative aspect of politics today. But as Democrats, we’re going to continue to focus on the substance of it, call out things that are not working and propose solutions that are proven to work. And ultimately that’s what people want.

Three members of the San Francisco school board were recalled in 2022 after focusing on issues like renaming schools rather than core academic concerns as their city suffered through the pandemic. Do Democrats and progressives miss the mark? 

I’ll tell you what I know. Families want high-quality education options for their kids and they want them now: They’re just not getting enough of them. We see families continuing to apply for the charter lotteries and oftentimes in excess of 10 applicants for every one seat that’s available. It’s really clear what families want most and what they care most about is great public schools for their kids. 

Our job is to make sure that our focus remains on that, that we continue, in our party and in this movement, to always be about substance. That doesn’t mean being blind to the issues happening in society … but in order to meet the moment and what our families are demanding, it always has to be about ensuring that there are great public school options for our kids.

If a fierce reformer such as Rhee couldn’t survive in a troubled urban district, then maybe charter schools were the answer. But which charter network to pick to profile?

I had never heard of tiny San Jose-based Rocketship charters, but several savvy charter school followers pointed in their direction. I flew out to San Jose, met with co-founders John Danner and Preston Smith, and they agreed to provide me complete access to their schools and expansion plans over the next year. Over the course of that year, I earned a lot of airline miles flying back and forth to California, and even more miles as they expanded to Milwaukee and Nashville. The result, On the Rocketship, was published in 2014. I then departed for other book projects.

Today, Rocketship Public Schools has turned 15 – celebrating its quinceañera, as long-time Rocketship leader Maricela Guerrero aptly put it, considering the network’s roots in educating low-income Latino students – with about 10,000 “Rocketeers” across the country, with 13 schools in California, two in Milwaukee, three in Nashville, three in Washington, D.C. and one in Fort Worth, Texas. Over its 15-year history, Rocketship has served 27,508 students.

This seemed like a good time to catch up with Smith, who today shares the title of co-founder and CEO. Back then, Smith and I spent many hours together on school tours and sitting across from one another with a digital recorder, so for me, this was a reunion of sorts.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length. 

While I was researching the book you told me so many great stories about the early startup years, when you operated out of a tiny, unairconditioned space at St. Paul’s Methodist Church in San Jose. One of my favorites was about you having to move 40 traffic cones every morning and then move them again in the afternoon, to accommodate the parishioners. Your exact words during our interview when recalling those years: “I’ll never move a damn cone again for the rest of my life.” Do you have any better stories about that time?

You know, Richard, that is a great one. I’ll stick with that one. But once in a while, to help our school leaders during startup, I help out with moving cones. So, time heals all wounds.

Let me give you another story. In our church space we had different learning centers, a center with blocks, a center with enrichment, etc. There were all sorts of materials, carpets, tables. Every Friday the church group held a dance, so every Friday afternoon we had to clear out that space, moving everything. So it was like a huge fire drill. And then every Monday morning, we had to set it up again for the kids.

In some ways, Rocketship is a typical charter network, with an emphasis on academics and college readiness. But in other ways, you are very different, creating only elementary schools, putting parent empowerment as a top priority and keeping an eye on the biggest prize: social change around education. 

Let’s first discuss your K-5 model. The biggest charter networks have gone to K-12 models, mostly on the assumption that to make their students truly college-ready they can’t send them off to traditional schools where academic gains might be lost. Why doesn’t Rocketship do that? 

First is that it is unlikely that we, or anyone, can scale to the size of the challenge within public education, so we have to be innovative in how we think about sharing our model and impact with other kids, families and schools beyond directly enrolling more students. We do not want to be a parallel K-12 system, rarely interacting with other school systems. Rocketship does not believe that contributes to a larger ecosystem of impact.

Rather, by being K-5 it creates much larger catalytic effects for our kids, families and communities in regards to high-quality choices, district or charter. We believe that by creating a bunch of K-12 systems we would actually be undermining choice, which is a value we as a movement say that we value. That would encourage families to make the choice to opt into one K-12 network and then not make any further choices. Thus, the K-12 approach ironically undermines our value as a movement of choice.

Your theory of change has always been that Rocketship will take in low-income students, deliver a superior education, empower their parents and then send them to schools that will have to adapt to these students and their parents, who will demand better educations. And yet, at least in the early years, the traditional schools, especially the teachers unions, have fought you at every turn. Have traditional districts started to make changes as a result of your schools being in their district?

We’ve definitely seen it in each of our regions. What I’ve learned over time is this power of being only elementary, right? It starts with a great education, and then you couple that with parents who become super powerful through advocacy. From their years with children at Rocketship, they understand how to navigate and influence the system. They not only understand what a high-quality school is and what their Rocketeers deserve, but they also know how to navigate the political and leadership system and community. And that creates systemic change, community change. We’ve seen it in San Jose and every place we’re at.

Could you cite some examples?

Sure. Here in San Jose, where we have 10 schools, our kids are showing up in middle school a year ahead in academics, and those gaps actually grow in the subsequent years. They are going to be in really strong shape no matter what kind of school they choose. Several middle and high school charter schools have grown up here in San Jose and even the local traditional districts have innovated, opening up schools of choice, small autonomous schools, dual immersion schools [where English- and Spanish-speaking students learn together in both languages]. And if you look at the overall results of the surrounding districts, everyone is doing better. So I really think that has proven our theory of change.

In Milwaukee, where we now have two schools, what we saw is the district really wanted our Rocketeers, so they opened additional middle schools so they could serve our kids. Also, we used to partner with community organizing groups, but in 2015 we shifted, based on this theory of change, and made organizing part of who we are at Rocketship. Now, we have Rocketship employees who are education organizers who work with the families not just in our schools but with other district and charter schools to organize families to access power. That helps us drive this theory of change in a larger sort of community and ecosystem.

Most charter networks were launched with an end-goal of college readiness, which in more recent years expanded to college success – ensuring that students not only enroll in college but actually earn degrees, hopefully in four years. Now, suddenly, and partly as a response to the pandemic, an anti-college movement is afoot as seen in the rapidly declining enrollments. The belief that a college degree is necessary in life has begun to fade. Has that affected Rocketship?

I guess I’ll speak for our Rocketship community, that’s what I’m most familiar with, right? What we’ve seen is our parents are still all over college. They’re still very much motivated by that vision for their children. So, we do annual college visits in our schools, with the families. We’ve still got cohort names and college banners in our classrooms. This emphasis on getting a college education is something parents say is what really motivates them and what they appreciate about Rocketship. 

That college focus is interesting for us because we have to wait, right? Our kids leave after fifth grade. And it’s years before that student gets to college. Now, we have our third class of college graduates, and we have Rocketeers who have graduated who come back to visit our schools. That has been super motivating to our families, to our team. So I’ll just say within our Rocketship community, college is what our families are still aspiring towards.

I’d like to ask the college question more broadly. Education is infamous for its ill-advised pendulum swings. Remember “whole language,” which got its start in California, swept the country and triggered years of reading instruction malpractice? Considering how fast the pendulum is swinging on college, is this another trend going too far? 

I would say I deeply believe that in the United States of America we need a public education system that regardless of zip code, enables kids to have the opportunity to go to college. And if they choose not to do that, that’s fine. Right? That is their choice. But I am still deeply motivated and deeply inspired by a country that believes in public education. You should be able to attend a free school that’s high quality and gives you the opportunity to go to college.

My question here is whether this [anti-college movement] is more a reflection of the reality of how our current public system doesn’t provide that quality education to prepare students for college. If so, we still have work to do. 

A few charter networks have figured out ways to enroll better prepared students from more motivated families. In short, gaming the pool of low-income families. Not surprisingly, their academic outcome data consistently looks outstanding when compared to their close-by neighborhood schools. I spent enough time in Rocketship schools to know that doesn’t happen there. If anything, you lean in the opposite direction. And yet, that gaming has to be tempting, right? Great headlines when the test scores come out.

No!

Our challenge is serving kids in socioeconomically disadvantaged zip codes, often Black and Latino kids, right? For me, that’s the challenge, giving all those kids in those zip codes a chance to go to college. That’s what we’re obsessed with at Rocketship. The more we get into learning how to do that, the more we have to share with other schools to influence the larger system, right?

We’re not interested in designing magnet schools [that attract the strongest students]. There’s a place for them in the United States, sure. But the massive need is designing true public schools that serve all kids.

In San Jose, Rocketship clearly showed that it could succeed with low-income Latino students in ways the local traditional public schools could not. You pretty much wrote the book on that, and you could have stuck with that student population, nationally. But you didn’t. That sense of mission led you to expand into cities such as Nashville and Washington, D.C., where you started to serve mostly Black students. A lot of people (OK, maybe me as well, considering my D.C. reporting for the Rhee book) thought you would stumble at that abrupt transition. I know it was rocky, but based on school outcome data in those cities, you appear to be succeeding now. Please talk about that.

Now, I feel so blessed and grateful for the opportunity to open schools that are so disparate. Opening in D.C. meant opening in a very different community, where a third of our students were homeless in our second year. We had never seen anything like this. The amount of trauma, and the counseling that was needed was new for us. 

Think about that. Our school was the largest charter that ever opened in D.C. Our authorizers were skeptical. That was hard. We were learning how to do this. What do we do? How do we raise the bar, push the bar, for kids like we’ve never seen before? The beauty of that was reconsidering our Rocketship model. Oh, we need counselors. We need counselors who understand trauma. We need to better discern the scaffolding of our behavior management to get smarter, better and faster. 

And now, that’s all in our model, and not just in D.C., right? You fast forward to San Jose, and now we have mental health professionals in every school. Everybody should do that. We learned that. So that has benefited all kids, not just in D.C. If we had just remained in San Jose, I don’t think our model would be as rich as it is now. Being in Milwaukee, Texas, D.C., Nashville, we’re seeing very different communities, very different needs, very different learning styles. That’s how we have elevated our overall model.

Here’s the other thing. We got launched in San Jose with English language learner models we developed. And then you go into districts such as D.C., where people tell us those teaching techniques aren’t needed, because these students aren’t learning English. And meanwhile, we know that English is a hard language to learn, right? It’s not a natural language. At a young age, everyone is learning English. That skill, teaching English, and that model of teaching it, was a super powerful thing to bring to D.C. At the root of this is Rocketship as a learning organization. Always innovating, reflecting, always pushing ourselves.

For most of your startup years with Rocketship, there’s been a rocky and adversarial relationship between charters and traditional districts, especially with the teachers unions. Now, post-pandemic we see steep enrollment declines in all schools, especially the district schools. In some parts of the country, that has intensified the animosity, with traditional districts arguing they can’t afford to lose students to charters. From your perspective, how has the pandemic changed the relationship between charters and traditional schools?

There were definitely years when charters and districts were not all in this together. During the lockdowns, however, we all started sharing our resources. Overall, now there’s a shared sense of just how intense this work is trying to deal with learning setbacks. I would say at least among educators, there’s more collaboration between charters and districts, after what we all went through.

It strikes me that there’s one Rocketship practice that should be at the top of the list to share with other schools, both traditional and charter, and that’s parent involvement. You were able to do that with Latino parents, who traditionally have shied away from dealing with the education establishment. How did you do that?

It starts with making sure they’re truly treated like their child’s first teachers, making them true partners. That’s why we continue to do home visits with our families. Also, we make sure they share power, such as asking them to name new schools and help select the staff. When we hold meetings in the evening we offer food and day care to make it more accessible to our parents. Once parents are engaged with the school they are more likely to become education advocates, community organizers. That’s why we brought our community organizing in-house.

Let me give you an example. During the pandemic we established Care Corps, which placed a Care Corps coordinator in each school to help parents find the help they needed. That help included partnering with Second Harvest to deal with food scarcity, distributing boxes of produce, eggs, milk and chicken to our families.The coordinators help parents navigate support systems and get the assistance they need by overcoming language barriers, red tape and lack of internet access to connect them to vital services that are too often cumbersome and complicated.

For us, having a broader impact doesn’t always mean enrolling more students. It involves trying to share practices such as Care Corps with other districts.

Watching her older brother lead a math club from the front porch of her family’s quaint coastal home in the Dominican Republic helped foster Rosa Aristy’s love for STEM education as a child.  

Like her brother, Aristy grew up surrounded by family members who taught her the value of investing in others — a commitment she now makes to not only the students in her kids’ homeschool co-op but also their parents.

“That front porch they would sit at was the very first math club I was exposed to,” Aristy told The 74. “Seeing them laugh because they were having so much fun learning together became something I wanted to instill in others.”

Aristy’s upbringing served as the inspiration for Bridges to Science, a Houston-based nonprofit that addresses diversity gaps in STEM education through math, robotics and coding programs for homeschool students.

Through the support of the VELA Education Fund, Bridges to Science has expanded its mission to train homeschool parents on how to teach their children math.

Today, Bridges to Science serves more than 50 homeschool students across Texas with the help of local universities, organizations and volunteers.

“It’s a very near and dear vision of mine…and the intent is to support our amazing students who have so much potential but don’t have access,” Aristy said.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The 74: How would you say your upbringing and being a homeschool mother influenced the creation of Bridges to Science?

When we first moved to Texas, I noticed the school system was really focused on annual testing. It was beginning to rob my children of the joy of learning and I didn’t want that to happen. That was the one thing my parents in particular instilled in me and I want my kids to be lifelong learners. 

One day the moms at my children’s homeschool co-op asked the students to vote on what courses they wanted to learn. They pretty much said they wanted more coding, robotics and STEM classes. The moms and I just stared at each other wondering who would have the courage to teach these classes. No one seemed committed to doing this and I didn’t want to let our students down. I had done some programming before, not the kind they wanted to learn, but I thought that I could learn something child-friendly and get up to speed. 

But before I did that, I was aware that homeschoolers in my community use a curriculum and approach to math that’s memory-based and very common in school systems. I knew that it wasn’t giving the kids the math foundation they needed to go into the sciences. So I said, let me first start off with a math club like my brother’s growing up and once the foundation is set we can do coding next. That’s how Bridges to Science first started out. 

How has Bridges to Science supported homeschool parents teach their children math?

We just got a grant for that and we’re super excited. This summer we’re going to launch a math workshop for parents similar to the ones we have for students. We want parents to have the opportunity to interact with mathematicians and see the beauty of math because it takes a village to impact our children’s lives. If we get parents to bring down their fears about math, they’ll feel more comfortable facilitating inquiry-based sessions with their children. 

I think the stress around math roots from parents wanting to solve the problem for their students and that’s exactly what we don’t want to do. We don’t want to rob them of the joy of discovering the way out of those problems. So that’s our intent. We’re using a very solid approach that is backed by research, but we’re tailoring it to the needs of homeschool moms that is culturally relevant and through methods that respond well to their educational scenario.

What is something important to keep in mind when it comes to educating homeschooled families?

Homeschool communities have grown in its diversity and flavors. Sometimes I sense that there’s a stereotype of who we are that doesn’t really reflect who my students are. For example, we’re seeing more families from underprivileged neighborhoods try out homeschooling. And we’re seeing many single moms stepping up to homeschool their children too. They’re not doing it for any ideological reasons but really just for practicality. So I think the world needs to know that homeschooling, at least here in Houston, is a little more diverse than what you may think.

I understand that Bridges to Science is geared for underserved students — primarily Hispanic students. As a Dominican immigrant, tell me more about why it’s important for you to bridge that diversity gap in STEM education.

I like to envision my organization through a spectrum. On one end, we have our amazing students who have so much potential but don’t have access. On the other end, we have universities, organizations and corporations we work with that have an abundance of resources. We serve as the bridge to unite them so our students can see beyond their existing scenario. 

It’s a very near and dear vision of mine because, in a way, I see myself in them. I grew up in a very small town and my father passed away when I was 12. I had to grow up really fast during my middle school years and get a job to help my mom. You don’t have to go through a big transition like I did, but my life was always at a crossroads. I want our children to explore all the beautiful things they can do in STEM without worry.

You speak about your work with so much love and conviction. Where would you say this energy comes from?

It must be from my mom and dad. Both of them were passionate educators and people who invested into the lives of a lot of people — especially youth. The one thing I learned, particularly from my mom, was to love my students and see them as a whole.

As a kid, I vividly remember my mom stopping me one day from watching videos because we needed to go to someone’s house. I was a typical kid and complained and asked her why me? Why was it so important for us to be there? She told me that she noticed one of her students was sad and realized that her parents were thinking of getting a divorce. So my mom went there to act as a counselor and see if there was anything she could do to help the parents. That really spoke volumes to me. My mom had five kids but she made the time to do those kinds of things. It taught me how important it is to invest in others.

As Bridges to Science continues to expand its reach, what do you hope families take away from their experience?

Half of our students have some sort of adversity attached to them. It could either be due to race, socioeconomic or neurodivergence. When I started Bridges to Science, I set out to give our children the privileges they didn’t have access to. As I’ve invested in my students, I always tell them that they need to pay it forward. And little by little, that’s the vision we have moved towards.

Either one-on-one or in small groups, researchers say tutoring may be among the best approaches for helping youth quickly recoup lost ground. And armed with $190 billion in federal stimulus spending, the nation’s schools now have the resources to invest in new programs.

But launching an effective tutoring initiative requires more than just financial investment. Schools must answer key questions about how to structure the program: Which students will participate? What curricula will they follow? How long will sessions be? Will they take place during school or outside of it? Who will work as the tutors?

Matthew Kraft is an associate professor of education at Brown University and a leading voice on tutoring as an intervention to accelerate students’ learning. In 2021, he published a paper laying out a blueprint for how schools might effectively scale tutoring programs to help youth catch up after COVID. Finding the right curriculum and structure can lay the foundation for strong results — and can even ease staffing woes, he explained.

“The stronger the tutoring infrastructure,” said Kraft, “the less the program will rely on the individual skills that a tutor brings with them. And so it really opens up the potential labor supply pool to a much greater degree.”

The 74 spoke with Kraft over Zoom to find out what school leaders interested in tutoring should consider as they design their interventions and what pitfalls they should avoid.

This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

The 74: Can you tell me, in brief, why you’ve chosen to focus so much of your research on tutoring? What’s the potential to help students catch up on missed learning from the pandemic?

Kraft: I started studying tutoring as a doctoral student almost 15 years ago. Part of that was motivated because I have worked as both a volunteer and as a paid private tutor. It was a formative experience to be able to work one-on-one with students and see them make rapid gains in their understanding, whether it be algebra or reading. As a classroom teacher, you just don’t have nearly as many opportunities for sustained one-on-one interaction to develop those relationships. So from my own experience, I knew tutoring really had a lot of potential. 

As I began to learn more, it became clear that there’s a huge potential to move the spectrum of how we deliver instruction in public schools so that it’s not only group instruction but also individualized personalized instruction. So I started to study Match Charter School (where leaders had implemented a tutoring model), which led to the thought experiment of saying, ‘Why isn’t this something that we do more broadly? Why is it a service that those who can afford it pay for in the private market, but not something that we offer more widely in our public education system?’

Then the pandemic opened a larger public conversation. It created the opportunity to say, not only has there been huge potential for tutoring, but now we’re facing a moment where there’s an incredible need to support students at a more individualized level and accelerate their learning. So all of that came together to really motivate the work that I am doing right now.

You mentioned tutoring is what wealthy families turn to when their kids fall behind in school, and that resonated because it shows we intuitively know tutoring works. It’s just that not everyone has the resources.

Yes, there’s a lot of intuitive appeal to tutoring. In the antiquities, in Roman and Greek times, that’s how a lot of the privileged class were educated. And that remained the form of private schooling with one-on-one tutors in much of the Elizabethan era and even into the Colonial era. As we expanded access to education, the model moved away from that, to some degree by necessity, but there’s just the sense that one-on-one feedback is the natural way we learn.

Now, to add to that, we have a deep and growing body of evidence examining its efficacy through rigorous experimental research. And when you look at that body of evidence, it is very compelling. That said, it largely is built on evidence of small- to medium-scale programs implemented in person prior to the pandemic under favorable circumstances. And that’s not what we’re doing today, trying to scale tutoring to an entirely new level.

For school leaders trying to roll out new tutoring programs, what factors do you think they should consider when they’re picking out curricula?

The first question districts and schools need to answer is, ‘What is the intended outcome of a tutoring program? What are the goals?’ Because it may be that the goal is to support students belonging in school, their social-emotional development, as much as it is to accelerate their learning. It could be both. By first answering that question, I think that helps the program to backward map onto the type of curriculum that would be best suited to meet those goals. 

Often there’s a bit of a slippage that happens. There’s this notion that tutoring is a good thing writ large and so if we do something individually with tutors and students, that will produce positive outcomes. I think that’s wishful thinking. It requires a lot more purposeful alignment between choosing a curriculum that is both built on strong instructional materials, but that also complements the type of instruction students are receiving in their larger traditional classes. It doesn’t need to be the same curriculum, but it’s less productive to have tutoring use a curriculum that’s completely divorced from what students are doing in the classroom. They should be compliments.

Do you have practical tips for how school leaders can go about doing that? Who’s best suited to make the call on curricula? Maybe department heads?

The reality is there are a wealth of curricular materials designed for trained teachers [in a full classroom]. And then there is a potpourri of one-off materials for tutoring. And so there’s not as rich of a supply of curricular materials available that are designed to be able to be implemented by a tutor who has limited experience working with students. 

A key is to ask whether the tutoring materials could be used effectively by someone with some training and support, but not necessarily a formally trained teacher. When I’m searching for materials, do these materials feel accessible to a wide range of potential tutors?

That means they should be able to be broken down into very explicit instructional steps and should come with a scope and sequence that allow you to do very short formative assessments of students to figure out where to reinforce their knowledge and shore up their foundation. 

Materials also need a clear instructional sequence over the duration of a tutoring period. Some curriculum materials may be designed for a 60-minute class, but tutoring sessions may be for 30 minutes. And so, [leaders] need to map that on to the design of the tutoring program itself. And in every context, I think there is going to be some individualization required. 

So it sounds like I’m hearing that if schools get those structural components right — like finding curricula that align with classroom standards, for example, or designing lessons to match the amount of time for tutoring sessions — they can actually unlock a new pool of possible tutors. Which strikes me as important because teacher burnout is so high right now and staffing has been an issue for some programs.

I think that’s a key observation. The stronger the tutoring infrastructure — to support tutors with strong instructional materials, ongoing coaching and feedback, peer learning networks and a leadership team that will troubleshoot issues that come up like technical problems or attendance challenges — the more success tutors will have and the less the program will rely on the individual skills that a tutor brings with them. And so it really opens up the potential labor supply pool to a much greater degree.

So now in this current moment, we see a lot of districts actually moving to implement tutoring programs to help students catch up on missed learning from COVID. In these last couple years, what have we learned?

A huge advantage of the decentralized nature of public education in the United States is that there’s an amazing amount of innovation and experimentation that happens. A lot of districts are developing tutoring programs on their own and it looks different across a whole bunch of places. Those districts are individually learning a huge amount about what worked, what didn’t work. And if they continue to invest in those programs over time, there will hopefully be continuous improvement.

Where we fall short is in helping districts to share those best practices and [also what they learn about what] practices we should leave on the scrap pile of design improvement. There are efforts at the state and federal levels to build these networks and I think those have a huge role to play. 

At the same time, researchers like myself and a whole host of others are working in partnership with districts to study tutoring programs in dozens of different contexts. But it’s hard to do that while delivering rigorous research designs, which may not always be feasible in these Wild West contexts, at the same time as trying to roll it out as fast as we can. Research can be a slow process and is not always able to inform program design in real time.

We’re starting to see some new evidence coming out that districts are struggling to implement tutoring at scale and deliver the high-dosage model that we think is necessary. Some efforts to contract with 24/7 on-demand tutoring providers has led to less-than-expected uptake. And the uptake has skewed more toward students who may already be having some degree of success in school rather than [serving] students who are struggling most.

When you say the high-dosage model isn’t quite being hit, what exactly does that mean?

Districts are aiming to deliver tutoring on a regular basis to students multiple times per week. And maybe they’re shooting to do that for 1,000 students, but instead they’re only getting 100 students to come with regularity. Maybe that’s because there are transportation problems, communication problems, technology problems, tutor-supply challenges. All of those things are, at least in this initial rollout, expected implementation challenges. Taking an effective program and scaling it is, historically, something that our decentralized education system has always struggled to do well.

To school leaders who are thinking of iterating on these programs or rolling them out if they haven’t launched them yet, anything that, based on your research, they should really try to avoid?

There’s compelling evidence that efforts to scale tutoring by simply adding more kids to a tutoring session — while tempting because it means you can serve more students — is going to quickly lose its efficacy. It just ceases to be personalized and starts to look like group instruction. That’s one common pitfall. 

A second common pitfall is failing to eliminate the barriers to accessing tutoring on a regular basis. If tutoring is moved to after the school day, some kids have other commitments. [If it’s online], some kids may not have the support to troubleshoot technology or may not have the technology itself. The more that we can reduce those access barriers, the more successful schools will be at delivering tutoring at scale and delivering tutoring with the high-dosage frequency that we think is necessary for it to be effective.

I think schools have to be clear-eyed about the trade-offs of different design changes. [They should aim to] scaffold these programs so the program is driving success and tutors can parachute into it and be bolstered by the great infrastructure, with students showing up ready to roll, knowing the routine.

In October 2020, for instance, a Pew Research survey found that parents whose kids attended school in-person were far more likely to say they were “very satisfied” with the way school was handling instruction: 54% vs. just 30% whose kids received online instruction only.

But Patricia Brantley, who leads the 15-school network of Friendship Charter Schools in Washington, D.C., said developing and maintaining virtual learning systems will be critical to public schools going forward. Friendship began investing in virtual learning before the pandemic and has actually expanded its virtual offerings since 2021. 

The move is largely driven by parents, she said, who see the value of virtual learning for their kids. She noted one parent who wrote that her child requires a wheelchair to attend “a fair amount of medical appointments.” Online learning works in large part because classes are recorded for later viewing. The woman’s son, once an average student, is “now above grade” level, she wrote. Brantley also said the move has fostered “incredibly strong connections between families and with the faculty.”

Three years after the first pandemic closures, Brantley said virtual learning will also be key to attracting young teachers to the profession as other white-collar industries offer the option to work remotely. She’ll be talking about her experiences this week at South by Southwest Edu, part of a panel that explores the possibilities of online learning. 

The 74’s Greg Toppo, who will be moderating the session, caught up with Brantley by email in advance of the session. 

The interview was edited for length and clarity.

The 74: The panel at South by Southwest Edu asks “Is Virtual Learning the Disruptor Teaching Needs?” What’s your short answer to this question?

Patricia Brantley: Virtual learning is the solution teaching needs. There’s an age-old question: How do we best educate our young and prepare them for the world? Assuming that we can do it in the same way that it’s been done for 100 years or more, when the world has changed, is worse than naive. It is failing generations of students in ways that we may not recover. 

In my opinion, the true disruptor isn’t the availability of virtual learning, it’s the convergence of factors illuminated by the pandemic. Those factors include the rise of parent-driven schooling through pods and micro schools that often rely partially on online delivery; the decline of traditional enrollment and rise in private, homeschool, online and charter options, and the flexibility now being given in other professions that make them more attractive to young college graduates than teaching. I see these factors converging in a way that is ultimately forcing changes in the way we historically have approached schooling, especially in traditional settings. Virtual learning isn’t the disruptor. It is a critical tool to support the way education must adapt to a changing world. 

Friendship is D.C.’s first public, tuition-free online education provider. Can you talk a little about what you’ve built and what your enrollment trends are?

We began investing in online education years before the pandemic, opening Friendship Online Academy in 2015 for grades K to 8 and expanding to high school in 2019. Our original families knew that traditional settings weren’t serving their children well. The truth is we followed them to online learning as the solution. We were proud of our very specialized, small virtual community that featured incredibly strong connections between families and with the faculty.

Then, as many families were hesitant or unable to return to in-person schooling during the 2021-2022 academic year, our enrollment exploded. We went from barely 200 students to 700. Our staff grew from four full-time teachers to a staff of 40, with a faculty that includes master teachers, guidance counselors, social workers, parent liaisons and resident artists that are leading students through deep experiences in the fine arts. Our growth is an indication of the effectiveness and appeal of online learning environments.

Part of our success here is likely due to our intentional approach to design. Since 2015, our priority has been to design an online program with the learner at the center. Interestingly, by centering the learner, we also designed a new experience for the teacher, one that creates flexibility and evolves the profession. By doing this, we saw significant interest from teachers to take on this role and high satisfaction rates from those who did. This experience gives us reason to question the prevailing idea that there is a shortage of people who want to teach. Rather, what we see is that many teachers want the freedom and flexibility to evolve. In that way, virtual learning can be as attractive and impactful for educators as it is for students and families.

What have some of your early successes been?

While our enrollment trends are strong indicators of our program’s success, I’m even more pleased with the academic results we continue to achieve. Ensuring access to effective small learning environments and robust online options for students and families are absolute priorities for us. That’s why we are so proud to see results like those from the spring 2021 study from (educational consultants) EmpowerK12, which found that Friendship Online students previously deemed “at-risk” for academic failure outpaced citywide growth in both English and Math during the pandemic.

I also consider it a success that we haven’t gotten locked into one way to meet families’ needs. As we’ve continued to grow and learn, we’re piloting other learning environments that push the limits on traditional school. Our microschools and hubs, which also emerged as part of the need created by the pandemic, were a game changer for many of our families. When we looked at the data, kids who were in those pods achieved larger academic gains than their peers who were not. Some even progressed faster than they did before the pandemic.  

I understand you’re using an AI system that listens to kids’ reading and reports back to teachers. What other innovations are you able to bring to the table?

We are constantly driven by the question: “What do families, students, and teachers need right now, today?” We are always asking ourselves this question and we push ourselves to remain open-minded about where the answers might lead us. Over the course of the past few years, this has certainly included expanding our online options and microschools, but it’s also included innovations that aren’t necessarily connected to technology.

For example, since the pandemic taught us that learning can happen anywhere, we’ve made investments in more experiential learning for our students. Partnering with Capital Experience Lab at Friendship Blow Pierce Academy has made the entire city part of our students’ learning journey. We’ve also developed a career coaching program for students to help them prepare for the future and discover career paths they never knew existed. In addition to their teachers and peers, our students are also learning from members of their community.

During the pandemic, we heard so much about how online learning was problematic. Yet your work suggests there’s huge interest from families. What does the conventional wisdom miss about online learning in 2023?

The first thing that’s missed is the idea that you can paint family and student needs with a broad brush. Does online learning work for everyone? Certainly not. But for those families and students who gravitate towards online learning, it can be a game changer. The pandemic forced all of us to adopt online learning, so of course there were going to be plenty of situations where that wasn’t the ideal learning environment. Now that we can integrate choice into the equation, you start to see that those families and students who opt in to this kind of learning are usually the ones who have great success with it. The idea here is that families need to be empowered to choose the best learning environment for them and we need to be prepared with diverse options to meet their needs.

The other thing that was missed in the urgency created by the pandemic is that you can’t lose human relationships in the shift to online learning. Despite what some may think, a high-quality online learning environment is still centered on people and relationships, not technology. If you leverage technology — and the flexibility it affords — to allow the student-teacher relationship to thrive, that’s when you see the kind of success we’ve been able to achieve over time.

After his administration prohibited the adoption of a newly developed AP course on African American studies, the Republican governor went even further last week, openly musing about dropping all AP classes throughout the state. Even with many Florida students and families protesting the decision, governors in four other states have announced that they would also review the content of the new course, warning that it could introduce political content into classrooms. 

Daryl Scott, a professor at Baltimore’s Morgan State University and self-described “anti-public intellectual,” sees enough blame to go around. While lacerating the College Board for acquiescing to DeSantis’s criticism and revising its product, he sees the rising GOP star as an opportunist exploiting white anxieties to build his political brand. 

Scott spent much of his career at Howard University before departing to chair Morgan State’s history department last year. He previously served as the president of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, which was founded in 1915 by the pioneering Black thinker and academic Carter G. Woodson. Along the way, he has become a kind of historian of Black studies, acquiring an insider’s view of the field’s leading figures and intellectual tendencies: multiculturalists and Afrocentrics, social scientists and humanists.

His commentary on national affairs and Black historiography bleeds over from his published work to a lively social media presence. In neither venue is Scott known for pulling punches, sometimes excoriating writers and educators for yoking their scholarship to political causes. Over the last few years, one of his most frequent targets has been the New York Times’s 1619 Project, which he recently critiqued as “an exercise in African American exceptionalism that elides the question of class.” 

In a conversation with The 74’s Kevin Mahnken, Scott turned his focus to the political clash in Florida, where he said conservative backlash is endangering the study of Black history. But he added that historians and teachers alike should be leery of wading into cultural wars that they aren’t equipped to win — and potentially alienating families in the bargain.

“We need to take seriously that white mothers do not want their kids to have their psyches toyed with in K–12, and we can’t tell those mothers to just have their kids toughen up,” he said. “If we’re going to counter this onslaught, we need to take that opposition seriously and find ways to take away their criticisms.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The 74: Let’s talk about the content of this AP course. The critique from the Right is that the curriculum, and particularly the sections that focus on more recent history, privileges radical voices and leftist critiques of American society. Do you think there’s substance to that complaint?

Daryl Scott: I’m pretty much a gadfly when it comes to that final curriculum. It’s not so much that I take issue with it. I just want to point out to the people who participated in it that it could have been a much different curriculum.

First and foremost, it’s a college course that’s taught in high schools. This is where some folks on the Right get lost, but again: This is a college course, taught in high schools, potentially for college credit. And it becomes the basis for admission into the better colleges in this country. 

I happen to have been part of the redesign of AP U.S. History, which recognized a whole lot of things that the Right now calls problematic. So maybe we should just stop for a second to see what they’re calling problematic. Half of critical race theory has to do with optimism versus pessimism about the present and future of race in America. The pessimism started in the 1950s, with people like Derrick Bell saying that things weren’t going fast enough: “These obstacles are here! We thought we were going to dismantle the structure of white supremacy and usher in equality, and it didn’t happen. Will it ever happen? Maybe not.”

When did pessimism become something you can legislate against? We’re legislating against pessimism now, and legislating for American exceptionalism? And as I’ve said elsewhere about the 1619 Project, when did racial progress become a pet idea of conservatives? I’m old enough to remember — and we should still have to teach — that it was conservatives who believed Black people couldn’t assimilate; now they’re saying they’re optimistic that Black people should assimilate, and you can’t teach otherwise.

The big point is that academic freedom in a college-level course dictates that we can debate all these things. This is why they’re fundamentally wrong, no matter what’s in the College Board’s curriculum. And this is why the College Board itself was fundamentally wrong when it allowed itself, whether through external pressure or otherwise, to be put in what I used to call “self-check.” If they weren’t being expressly censored by the state of Florida, they self-censored. And they did this for the same reason textbook publishers do it all the time: so they could get their products through state departments of education. That has a negative impact on what is being taught. 

We’re saying that we’re going to create a college course for high school students, and we’re going to limit inquiry? Can we get more backwards and un-American than that? My belief system has always been one of racial pessimism, and here’s what I mean: I’ve been of the belief that the best we could do as a society was to hold racism in check. And we could reach a set of fairly equal opportunities, and likely equal outcomes, if we could hold racism in abeyance. That marks me as a pessimist; in Black studies, there are lots of people who call themselves Afropessimists, and there are critics of Afropessimism, like Cornel West, who now has to defend pessimism [against censorship]. I don’t want to speak for him, but West used to argue that the problem with racial pessimism was that it didn’t believe in the Christian notion of human progress and redemption. 

Some people say, “Well, you can’t teach about Black Lives Matter,” but at this point, something that happened between 2013 and 2020 is pretty much a historical topic. If you can’t even teach about the facts of that movement, you’re doing something that used to be done in the Soviet Union — erasing history, saying, “That is not a valid topic of inquiry.” Black studies includes debates around reparations, and anyone who follows my work knows I don’t think reparations are going anywhere. But in a democracy, reparations can be debated.

One of the problems with the whole course is that it attempts to be a history course. But Black studies, and many studies, tend to be fairly contemporary. The content of most of these courses, if you were to ask me, should be 21st-century topics. We should be trying to figure out the consequences of assault weapons through these courses, the consequences of a society in which quality healthcare is not widespread. In other words, the need for a studies program at the college level is to be robust in debating the issues before society. What we’re being told in Black studies now is that we can’t debate things because it’s indoctrination, and yet, the people claiming this say that we should be teaching American exceptionalism. That’s an indoctrination program.

The concern of everyone in a democracy should be how we debate matters, not what we debate. Some people on the Right have reached the foregone conclusion that we’re not going to have a debate and that teachers will, of necessity, indoctrinate. They’re pretending that we’ve got madrassas out here. But nobody’s sending their kids to madrassas, and anybody who understands the teaching profession knows that they try their best not to indoctrinate. So no matter what critique I have of the content of the College Board course — and I do have a critique — the bigger issue in a democracy is academic freedom and holding teachers responsible for teaching responsibly. If they’re indoctrinating, it should be dealt with in schools, not at the state level.

You mention a few times that the AP African American Studies course is effectively a college seminar. But it’s still being taught to high schoolers, and academic freedom is strictly limited, if not nonexistent, in K–12 settings. If 16- and 17-year-olds are being taught a curriculum that Florida voters don’t agree with, doesn’t the governor have the authority to intervene?

I hear what you’re saying. But let’s put brackets around the College Board, because we know that the origins of Florida’s law [the Stop WOKE Act, passed in 2022] don’t lie with the College Board. The origins lie in the broader assault that comes in the wake of, and as a consequence of, the New York Times’s 1619 Project. 

Some genius of political persuasion put three words together that are very volatile: critical race theory. It never gets taught like that in K–12 settings, but I’m a good enough intellectual historian to know that nothing stays within its box. So elements of it have been taught in K–12, and the power of this critique is right in the name. By labeling everything “critical race theory,” it brings out three things conservatives don’t like to hear: They don’t like “critical,” they don’t like “race,” and they don’t like “theory.” Critical race theory has become the perfect foil to go after everything you don’t like in a history culture war. So it’s brilliant on their part.

The problem is that they’re effectively telling parents — Black parents, white parents, any parents — that their children cannot be taught Black history if it’s not a good-time story. To survive under this repressive regime, Black history has to shoot for [a tone] somewhere between the old-school, “We all happy negroes here,” and this other idea, “Ain’t we done great lately?” That’s the content they’re allowing to be taught, and anything else is said to be something that makes whites feel guilty. 

Now, I do hear what you’re saying, and I keep telling people to stop acting like we’re talking exclusively about college courses. We should pause and ask the question, “Are white kids being made to feel bad about America? Are white kids being made to feel bad about being white? Are they being made to feel individually guilty for slavery or any other form of racial oppression?” To the extent that is the case, white parents have a point, and they have cause for concern — in the same way that Black parents, historically, had cause for concern that their children were being taught that slaves were happy and didn’t really want their civil rights, or were being told that they were racially inferior. 

Everybody in a multicultural, multiracial democracy has a vested interest in their kids not being taught to have negative feelings about themselves. That should never be the goal of K–12 education. I’m not going to be flippant, like some of my colleagues can be, and say that white kids should just toughen up. No, we’re talking about kids! Everybody’s got ’em, and I don’t want to accept that an eight-year-old boy, or even a 15-year-old girl, should have to “toughen up.” The teacher is supposed to take care that generalizations are not visited upon individuals in a way that makes them responsible for what someone else has done. Children cannot bear the weight of all of society’s ills. We believe that self-image should not be damaged through the educational process. So to the extent that white parents have this concern, we all need to address it.

But that does not make it legitimate to go wholesale into violating what should be free inquiry. You should not reduce the curriculum to something resembling a right-wing madrassa. That is the problem with DeSantis: Rather than just saying that educators have the burden of delivering curriculum that leaves intact the self-image of all students — and most teachers do this — he is creating a fairytale effect for white folks at the expense of all students learning. And race is only one side of the [Stop WOKE] law. The real focus of that law is LGBTQ rights, because there’s a live debate about when these discussions enter education. We need to have that debate in a sane and civil way as well, but not by outlawing things at the state level and exploiting the politics to get elected.

It’s notable that this clash between Florida and the College Board just seems to keep growing. Gov. DeSantis has now said that he’s open to the state just dropping the whole range of AP courses. 

It’s been suggested that the College Board should have told Florida, “Take ’em all or take none!” I’m not a political prognosticator, but it’s also been said that DeSantis stakes out hard positions that he later reverses when no one is looking. For example, he went after Disney, but then later took the teeth out of all the measures he was supporting. So this seems like a feint of some sort, because there would be hell to pay in Florida [if AP courses weren’t offered]. There are so many kids in Florida who need the AP courses to get to the best schools in the country. 

You don’t just get college credit from the AP exams. Some schools use AP scores as a proxy to determine who’s qualified to attend. And politically, it’s not like Florida is Mississippi. People would be up in arms, whether it’s the well-heeled people or the striving people, about the prospect of their kids not having access to AP classes. 

So the College Board might get the better of DeSantis on this, but to me, the College Board should have stood on principle rather than self-censoring. Or they should have had the guts to take a look at this stuff earlier on. In other words, they brought people together, and they were trying to legitimize a class that was going in a direction they were willing to go. If they felt it was going too far, they should have had the guts to stop it before that point. Sometimes, you can feel the College Board giving you the sense of how far they’re willing to go. Having sat on a board, I know that the board is sometimes going to protect the institution. If they were disposed to doing that, the College Board should have been protecting the institution before they ultimately did. 

But once they went down this road, I really believe their decision to cave in to censorship was wrong, because it was a massive cave-in. I’ve kept telling people, “Don’t believe any of the spin they’re putting out.” You could see their spin about this, and the next thing you know, Florida releases the correspondence between them and the College Board. There was no smoking gun, but they had a clear sense all along. When the law passed, they didn’t need anybody to tell them. Between the first version of the curriculum and the second, there was that Stop WOKE law, and they must have known which way the wind was blowing.

Is it necessary that there be a widely available course for high schoolers on African American studies? And, if so, should the College Board be the ones to develop it?

Everybody is free to do what they want. I believe in an open market of education.

By the same token, another track for all of this could have been pursued by the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. It could have been pursued as well by the National Council of Black Studies. But especially when we’re talking about red states and the CRT debate, one of the issues has been finding consensus about the content for any of these courses. Whoever first took the initiative would have to fight for some kind of market share; schools would probably only adopt your particular version if, and only if, they felt it would be widely adopted. So it was likely that the College Board would be the most successful at this.

But if you know how the College Board functions, you’d know that their process was going to preserve the hierarchy of the academy. They were going to the most elite echelons of the academy and select participants from a cross-section of the discipline. It’s a multicultural strain of African American studies that I tie to the rise of [Harvard professor] Henry Louis Gates; he adopted the field as his own, as a department, as opposed to various programs that had a menagerie of people from different disciplines. 

Something else has happened since then, which I call “Black Studies 4.0,” and which goes beyond what Gates and his generation of scholars signed onto. It’s a development out of the same camp, but it’s a more forthrightly race-conscious group. So it’s not surprising to me that elements of the AP course are different from what most of Gates’s generation would have created. Even though the College Board selected people like [Harvard historian] Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham and Gates himself to be figureheads of sorts, the content looks more like that of a younger generation. They’re in the same multicultural tradition, but this new generation is more race-conscious, more committed to tangible goals like reparations and LGBTQ rights and things like that. 

This was always going to be an issue. For instance, in the College Board’s original curriculum guide, which was leaked, Afrocentric thinkers were just a marginal part of that. You’re not old enough to remember the ’90s, right?

Not really.

Well, this is where it gets interesting. People say that there’s been one continuous war against Black studies. But they’re kind of glossing over the 1990s and pretending that the political configuration is the same as it was then. 

Here was the situation in the ’90s: Afrocentric scholars were placing an emphasis on changing the K–12 curriculum in many places across the country. They had great influence in the Black community and had some success in changing the curriculum to fit their goals. They got close to having great success in New York in changing the statewide curriculum and, in doing so, a political fight broke out between political liberals about things like Egyptology and about Afrocentrism. It was a fight about education, but it didn’t involve true conservatives; we’re talking about a fight between Afrocentrics — who often said that only Black people could study Black people — and mainstream academics, most often education policy people like Diane Ravitch. The way it played out, on the academic level, was as a debate over the claims of progressive and Afrocentric scholars that the Western tradition came “out of Africa.” I’m probably misrepresenting that clash somewhat because it was never my central concern in life. [Laughs.]

Can you provide a little flavor of how this debate came to be?

When Black studies came to higher education in the late ’60s and early ’70s, it was led by Black Power-ites, who tended to be social scientists and very political. They wanted policy changes, but they never succeeded in winning the mainstream of the academy. In fact, their affiliation with Black Power turned out to mean that Black studies only functioned well at the second and third tiers of the academy. In the elite schools, Black studies was pretty much a set of programs where people really stayed in their original disciplines. No one even conceptualized any notion of Black studies as having any kind of uniform mission. The Black Power-ites at the second- and third-tier institutions did. 

They got slaughtered at the elite colleges, and most of the leading Black scholars wanted nothing to do with a departmental status for Black studies. The big-time Black scholars at elite schools were big-time within their own disciplines, not Black studies. I say all of this because Skip Gates finally moved from that programmatic style of Black studies at Yale to the creation of a proper Black studies department at Harvard, and how he got there was important: He got there by critiquing Afrocentrics. And he made the mainstream academy safe for a new brand of Black studies.

The point I’m making is that this fight in Florida isn’t just a new front in the same war. If you want to say this is the same war, you’re fooling yourself about who was fighting it all this time. 

The conservatives weren’t in that fight! You can point to people like Allan Bloom and The Closing of the American Mind, or to [Arthur] Schlesinger’s book, The Disuniting of America. But remember that Schlesinger was an old-line liberal. Where we are now is a completely different place. Nobody back then was passing laws to invalidate the teaching of certain kinds of Black history. It’s a full-on assault on academic freedom, and it’s quite a different thing from last time.

It sounds as though you’re saying that the debate over how to teach African American history essentially has essentially broken through, from the academy to society at large, with predictable political effects. On the one hand, that’s potentially destructive, but on the other, it’s a marker of the success of the discipline, right?

It’s the success of a certain strand of Black studies, exactly. But there’s a related point: Before anybody ever talks about Black studies, and before it pops up as a field in the 1960s, there had been a Black history movement started by Carter G. Woodson in 1915. Over the years between 1915 and the 1970s and ’80s, what had effectively happened is that the study of Black history made it into the school systems. People like me never felt that it was enough, and I know the criticisms that said, “We only talk about the same five people every February,” but that was an exaggeration. It wasn’t a true assessment of the progress that was made in bringing the study of Black history into the curriculum.

The Freedom Schools started during the 1960s. They included Black history. You saw textbooks changing to include Black subject matter and Black imagery. Hell, I’ve even seen books out of Bob Jones University Press that had multicultural images in them. In the ’60s, we were fighting a war for rights; but with that war came a notion that, now that Black people were in schools, they were going to be taught something about themselves. That’s how the rights war led to the culture war.

In the United States Army, I had officers who could stand up during Black History Month and lead pretty good Black history conversations. They knew the cast of characters. There was some kind of presence of it anywhere you went in society, even if you were talking about fairly conservative schools. In fact, I could take you to former segregation academies where they’re teaching Black history. The ones that survived did so because they were pretty upscale, and they ended up being integrated and hiring Black folks who would teach Black topics in courses. So let’s not pretend there was no progress being made, and let’s not pretend that conservatives were trying to purge it. Because they weren’t.

Given the existence of these laws about instruction on race and sexuality, what is the responsibility of organizations like the College Board when it comes to creating these curricula? I realize that they disappointed a lot of people by revising this course, but the legal reality in a large number of states meant that they were always likely to cave, right?

The College Board was always going to cave here, because they cannot afford to lose states like Florida and Texas. Even if they wanted to give up the “heartland,” they can’t lose those states. 

Gates was attempting to create a multicultural democracy, and so he was more attuned to people’s feelings. This younger generation of scholars believe that you’ve got to power your way through. There is this sense that the ultimate victory is theirs, and sometimes, they don’t deal with the political realities of what won’t fly in the heartland, or off of college campuses generally. Quietly, there are people in the Black community who don’t want to hear that, and they’re not too interested in that kind of compromise. 

I would have been much more open to debate within the confines of the College Board. But I become a hardcore advocate of academic freedom, particularly with a college course, once it’s been developed. And particularly when it’s supposed to represent the best knowledge we have, however we got to this position.  

But I take the meaning of your question to be: If the College Board was going to cave, should they have been the vehicle for this project in the first place? I would flip it and ask, would anyone have adopted a Black history course from the Association of African American Life and History? Would it have been the gold standard at elite institutions?.

It’s like I said: Everybody is free to do what they want. Me trying to say what the College Board should or shouldn’t do would be akin to saying that McGraw-Hill shouldn’t have a Black history textbook. That violates the liberal principle, which I share with someone like Henry Louis Gates, that inquiry and the presentation of knowledge should be universal. In a democracy, you don’t have a monopoly on studying yourself and your own group; everybody gets a chance to put forward their version. So I support the College Board and its right to create this course. But as big a giant as it is, the fact that it caved is a bad thing for all of us. 

Even with the disappointment you feel over the College Board’s reversal, I’m wondering how you feel about the development of a widely available course on African American studies. You may have designed it differently, but how do you feel about the end result?

Well, that is the shame of it all. There is no legitimacy to any course in African American studies that cannot grapple with the historic reality of the Black Lives Matter movement. Think about what it would be like if you said, “9/11 didn’t happen! Don’t talk about 9/11!” We can feel however we want about Black Lives Matter, but we can’t pretend that that movement — which has lasted for almost a decade — didn’t happen. Would you like for someone to say, “The ’60s didn’t happen”? 

It’s beyond ahistorical. It’s erasing history and saying it didn’t happen. DeSantis wants us to say, so to speak, that Black Lives Matter did not happen. But Black Lives Matter has shaped much of the second and third decades of the 21st century. How do you pretend it didn’t happen, for good, bad, or ugly? Is the next thing to say that the LGBTQ rights movement didn’t happen? You can’t talk about it, so we can’t even study the historical phenomenon now? 

The College Board will tell you, “You can do it, it’s an optional module.” But we know that optional modules aren’t tested and are rarely taught. Could you imagine a course on Western civilization where you can’t teach the French Revolution? [Laughs.]

What do you think of complaints that DeSantis’s win here was only partial — that the course still contains elements of left-wing orthodoxy that need to be expunged?

Here’s what I keep telling my friends when it comes to any of these related issues: We cannot write off the carnage that is already taking place, among both teachers and students, in places that aren’t just red states. There are cases in Oklahoma where teachers are being told they can’t teach Black history in predominantly Black schools, because they’re supposedly teaching it wrong. There was a case in Texas where CRT was used as a pretext to get rid of a principal.

So there is real carnage out here. The big losers are teachers and students. Now, the Left likes to say — and this is a lot of my colleagues — “Hey, we’re selling more books than ever!” Yeah, and that represents a fraction of the children who aren’t learning anything about topics that they were learning the day before yesterday. The impact of the anti-CRT, anti-critical analysis movement is profound. The National Review can pretend that every school district in any liberal state is teaching critical race theory, but you can get fired anywhere in Oklahoma because someone spies on your classes. So it becomes a way of going after people and purging Black history from schools in ways we’ve never really seen before. 

This hearkens back, as some have said, to the Jim Crow era, when Woodson’s disciples used to teach with his book under their desk at the risk of being fired. We won that war. It was a rights war that had cultural consequences. We win rights wars, conservatives win culture wars. But we’ve been fighting this thing as a culture war, and we’ve been so dumb and blind to not care about white kids as students. That’s the biggest mistake we’ve made.

When [Gov. Glenn] Youngkin won in Virginia, this issue of what kids were being taught was a big part of it. The notion that white kids were being made to feel bad was what flipped some people from Democrat to Republican. We need to take seriously that white mothers do not want their kids to have their psyches toyed with in K–12, and we can’t tell those mothers to just have their kids toughen up. If we’re going to counter this onslaught, we need to take that opposition seriously and find ways to take away their criticisms. It’s unethical for teachers to go after kids, and teachers typically don’t do it.

I saw a documentary last fall about how the Civil War is taught around the country. A teacher in a Boston school had a conservative kid in class. Even though he’s a conservative, I can identify a little with him: They went after him, and he held his ground. But the job of the teacher was to make sure that he had a chance to express his decidedly conservative point of view. The job of the teacher is to prevent the conversation from devolving into ad hominem attacks. 

And when we go to even younger levels, teachers have an even greater burden. You don’t let kids gang up on anybody in those settings. That’s teaching, and that’s how we should discuss it — but to outlaw things is political demagoguery. And that’s where we find ourselves now, because we served up this culture war.

If you had a high school-aged child, would you let him or her take this AP class?

I would talk to my kid and let them make the decision. 

My whole idea of parenting is to empower my kid to know how to make decisions, and then live with the consequences of what they decided. My kids are both grown now, but I don’t walk into a room and say, “Intellectually, you can’t do this for such-and-such a reason.” People have to be free, and this is part of it when we’re talking about high school-aged kids.

On the other hand, if I really thought my kids were being taught to hate themselves, or that they were guilty of something — oh hell, I’m getting into the school. Like I’ve said, we need to pay more attention to these parents. I think they’re being sold a bill of goods, but we shouldn’t just dismiss this with a sweep of the hand. “Toughen up?” You’re talking about kids who might be six or eight or 12 years old.

A civil rights lawyer by trade and an education activist by avocation, Shavar Jeffries was thrust into the spotlight in early 2010 when he was elected to a school board seat in Newark. It was an era when odd political bedfellows Republican Gov. Chris Christie and Democratic Sen. Cory Booker showed up in Newark bearing a $100 million check from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, to be spent on both charter and district-run schools.

On Jeffries’s watch, Newark’s schools posted historic gains — inviting gale-force political blowback that’s still reverberating.

He then embarked on an eight-year run as the head of Democrats for Education Reform and its nonprofit sister, Education Reform Now. He took the helm at a time when many Democrats were abandoning the centrist school-improvement policies of the Obama era, yet Jeffries — who is a distant cousin of U.S. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries — coordinated dozens of winning political strategies.

Now, Jeffries is heading up the KIPP Foundation, which coordinates a coast-to-coast network of highly regarded public charter schools. His new job is to lead 280 schools — and affiliated groups tackling everything from increasing alumni college persistence rates to recruiting and training the next generation of education leaders — out of an unprecedented pandemic crisis.  

The 74 caught up with Jeffries recently to hear what prompted him to move to KIPP, his advice about the Democrats’ education agenda and what he believes will meet young people’s needs at a critical juncture. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

The 74: How many people have hit you up in the last two months for a pipeline to your cousin? 

Shavar Jeffries: A lot. It reminds me a little bit of when I was school board president in Newark. Every time I go into my LinkedIn, there’s somebody. So yeah, we’re getting a lot.

What advice do you have for Democrats who want to shepherd an education agenda? 

We need more political infrastructure to support Democrats. There’s a heavily funded infrastructure to oppose charters within the Democratic Party. A lot of that is funded by our colleagues in the teacher unions, who we work with on many different issues. 

There have to be more political assets made available to candidates and elected officials. As long as many Democrats feel like they have to put their political career on the line in support of an issue, we’re going to have challenges. Having said all that, we continue to get bipartisan support for the charter school program in Congress. President Biden has supported that, Roberto Rodriguez [U.S. Department of Education assistant secretary for planning, evaluation and policy development] has spoken publicly about that. Many of the communities with the largest charter school shares of enrollment are run by Democratic mayors and Democratic school boards. 

Tell us about the impetus for your move to KIPP.

I’ve been a part of the KIPP family for 22 years. My children attended both KIPP elementary and middle schools. I’ve been on the KIPP national board for about five years. I love it. I love our mission. I just believe in our promise. 

Really what motivated me was how profound the impact of a pandemic has been on our country from a student learning standpoint. When the results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress came out showing that throughout the country we lost about 30 years of gains, I was convinced to use the resources and talents I have in a way that will be even more directly connected to kids and to student outcomes. 

KIPP is the largest public charter school network in the country, with 120,000 kids in 27 regions. We ought to be the model for the country in terms of how to deliver educational excellence and equity at scale.

Before COVID-19, a lot of research outlined how successful schools in networks like KIPP are with students from traditionally disadvantaged communities. The pandemic spared almost no one, though. What is the challenge for the high-quality charter sector right now?

Delivering academic good for kids, first and foremost. Given the pandemic, given school closures, given the disruption evidenced by the NAEP data and other data, all of us in public education — whether public charter schools or traditional public schools — we all have a lot of work to do to address unfinished learning, to support young people to obtain the skills, the competencies they need in order to fulfill their potential. That’s job one, as far as I’m concerned, for everybody in public education.

Throughout our network, when we’re sharing best practices, we’re able to deliver for young people. Most powerfully, we’ve seen this in our early literacy program. Several of our regions are working together to implement aligned, consistent [strategies] rooted in the science of literacy. We’ve already seen 28 percentage point gains in literacy rates for the [KIPP] regions participating in that program.

In high school, we see acute mental health challenges many young people are experiencing. In many places, we’re now seeing levels of violence in our communities coming to bear in our schools, so we’re pushing an aligned high school strategy focused on academic health, but mental health support as well.

We’re working on a middle school math [strategy]. And we’re focused on leadership. We have a principal pipeline program. We’re also excited to see the diversity throughout our organization. More than 60% of our school leaders are Black or Latinx. That’s three times the rate of what we see in public education broadly.

Policy wonks and researchers have floated lots of evidence-backed strategies for different aspects of pandemic recovery. But traditional school leaders often say, “Well, I can’t find the people.”

The teacher shortage is really a national challenge. We would love to see policymakers work with traditional public schools, public charter schools and a broad diversity of stakeholders who are committed to making sure that we have great teachers in every classroom. This is a macro-level problem, and we really need national leadership, a Marshall Plan-type level of engagement. This should be a call to arms that one of the most important things that any set of human beings can do is to go into our classrooms and educate our babies.

Similarly, there is a lot of talk about circumstance as a hurdle to student success, especially over the last three years. Many families’ circumstances are jaw-dropping. How should that inform our thinking going forward?

We have to be very clear that we’re equipping our young people with the skills and competencies they need to have a limitless future. That means we need to be unwavering in the idea that our kids are geniuses, they’re brilliant, they’re amazing. We need to hold them accountable to the hard work they need to invest in and we need to support them in. And then, the quality of teaching and learning so they actually obtain those skills. 

Our children are dealing with very difficult circumstances. And most of the communities that we work in, they’ve been dealing with difficult circumstances for generations. Notwithstanding all the macro-level, political, social, economic work many of us are engaged in, they’re likely to be in difficult circumstances for the foreseeable future. Our job is to work within the reality that the challenges they face can actually be a source of strength and power. Some adversity that actually can make you stronger, right? 

We have to be clear with all the adults who interface with our children that they do not need, or want, your pity. With the right expectations and the right practices, their challenges can be converted into energy to power them into their dreams. We have to be unwavering with the bar of what we expect students to be able to achieve. We have to make sure the adults are clear about that bar, and that we provide them the support, training and coaching they need to deliver against that bar, day in and day out.

Some people will talk about, “Just pull yourself up by your bootstraps and figure it out.” That is problematic. We have to make the investments that young people — and, frankly, adults — have the support that they need, and the coaching and training to recognize the greatness of our kids, to recognize that we have to support them as they’re dealing with very difficult and adverse circumstances.

Do you have fears about all this being subsumed by what feels like a societal inflection point?

It’s always been hard, right? When I was president of the Newark School Board, we dealt with a version of all of that. All kinds of misinformation, efforts to politicize the curriculum, to politicize accountability. We’ve been working to break cycles of poverty and the bonds of intergenerational racism for a long period of time. This work has always been challenging. In the current moment, there’s been many conversations around education, around equity and efforts by political figures to micromanage the curriculum. That’s obviously very concerning. Perhaps we’re seeing this play out in more uncomfortable ways than it has in the past.

We just want to continue to focus on children, to try to not get caught up in a partisan food fight, to really focus on what’s going to support students to love themselves, to recognize their culture and their identity as a source of power and a source of strength in order to fulfill their potential and change the world.

We’re going to ensure that student achievement and outcomes are the lodestar. And hope and hope that if we tell our story to enough of the right people, over a long enough period of time, more often than not, that’ll be good for kids.

Disclosure: Walton Family Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies provide financial support to KIPP and The 74.

By some measures, Sal Khan is the most influential math teacher in U.S. history.

The 46-year-old entrepreneur and former financial analyst is the founder of Khan Academy, a nonprofit site offering thousands of free video lessons on a range of K-12 subjects. Since its beginnings as a YouTube channel (which itself grew out of Khan’s early efforts to tutor his niece in math), the organization has blossomed into an internationally known learning tool reaching tens of millions students in over 100 countries. Among its English-speaking users, Khan’s gently probing voice has become the soundtrack to their efforts to learn algebra or geometry.

The organization’s mission grew during the pandemic, as traffic to the website surged amid widespread school closures. User minutes on the site grew steadily in 2020 while American students were largely learning in isolation from teachers and peers, and for a time, school systems across the country were attempting to recreate Khan Academy’s model on the fly.

Their efforts, while often heroic, were insufficient. Reams of COVID-era research have shown conclusively that remote instruction led to disastrous learning losses in foundational subjects, with particularly steep declines in math skills. And even after two years of doleful news about schools and learning, October’s release of NAEP results still managed to shock education observers.

The federal test, often called the “Nation’s Report Card,” showed that fourth and eighth graders both sustained unprecedented drops in math performance. The damage to older students was especially severe, with 38 percent of eighth graders scoring below the exam’s lowest level of proficiency during the 2021–22 school year. While the worst of the pandemic-related learning disruptions is behind us, a long climb remains ahead.

In an interview with The 74, Khan said that learning recovery can’t stop with a return to the pre-pandemic norm, which saw huge numbers of students ill-prepared for college and bound for frustrating bouts with remedial coursework. He believes that American math education should be more organized around the principles of “mastery learning,” a pedagogical strategy that focuses heavily on providing pupils the necessary support to address their existing knowledge gaps before moving on to new material.

Failing a shift toward more effective math instruction, he argued, the damage revealed by October’s NAEP scores will result in lasting harm to students’ prospects in life — and it won’t be distributed equally.

“My kids are doing just fine, and everyone in their school is doing fine,” Khan said. “But somebody else’s kid is on the other end of that average, doing pretty darn badly and probably unable to compete.”

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

The 74: What are your thoughts on the huge declines in math performance revealed by NAEP? Is this roughly what you were expecting, given the effects of COVID?

Sal Khan: My big takeaways are that it’s not surprising that the drops were larger in math, and it’s not surprising that they were larger in eighth grade than in fourth grade. We always talk about how math is cumulative — if you start having gaps earlier on in math, it becomes that much harder to even engage later on. Gaps obviously matter in reading comprehension, and you want a strong foundation, but you can still engage later on if you fall behind.

The silver lining on these results is that they put a spotlight on what’s happened, but it’s not as if scores went from decent to bad; they went from horrible to even-more-horrible. Pre-pandemic, about one-third of eighth-graders were proficient in math, and now one-fourth are proficient. And it’s actually worse than that in some of the large urban districts that we know need a lot of help. Detroit Public Schools went from [5 percent of eighth-graders being proficient in math to 4 percent]. If I looked up where I live — Mountain View, California, or Palo Alto Unified School District — I’m guessing those numbers are closer to 80 or 90 percent proficiency. So even though the averages are pretty bad, they also hide the problem.

The idea of math as a uniquely cumulative subject is one you hear a lot about. Can you explain how that works in greater detail?

In education, memorization and math facts are kind of nasty words, but I definitely believe that fluency is valuable. So I’ll talk about it on a theoretical level.

Say you’re a little shaky on what seven plus seven is, and you have to count on your fingers. Then you move on to multiplication, which is basically repeated addition: seven plus seven plus seven. If you have to compute those things and don’t know off the bat that seven plus seven equals 14, you’re not going to get the multiplication fluency either. All of a sudden, you start doing word problems or exponents, and you’re going to be in a lot of trouble. And this keeps happening! If you get a 70 percent on your negative numbers test, you’re going to be adding fractions with negative numbers next, and you might not even get a 70 on that test. So you compound these gaps, and of course it will eventually fail. The way I usually talk about it is with a homebuilding analogy, where if you have a weak foundation, what you build on top of it will collapse. 

This isn’t a crazy theory. I visited a school in the Bronx a few months ago, and they were working on exponent properties like: two cubed, to the seventh power. So, you multiply the exponents, and it would be two to 21st power. But the kids would get out the calculator to find out three times seven. They knew what to do, but the fluency gap was adding to the cognitive load, taking more time, and making things much more complex. And if you get to an algebraic equation where you have to get that in several steps — and God forbid someone says you can’t use a calculator because it’s just simple multiplication — it just gets harder and harder.

Put the NAEP data aside. Maybe 50 or 60 percent of American kids try to go to college, and of those who do, the majority are placed in remedial math — which is not high school math, it’s like seventh-grade math. Even college algebra is really a remedial class, essentially tenth- or eleventh-grade math, and most kids can’t place into college algebra. It shows you how they slow down around that point, and in my mind, it’s because of these gaps.

Remedial math is also kind of the kiss of death in terms of college completion, right?

Exactly. This is a whole other conversation, but we have a program with Howard University where students in Title I high schools can get mastery in college algebra on Khan Academy, and then Howard University gives them transferable college credits for the subject. That’s one of the ways we think we can get people back on track. 

Another idea that circulated after the NAEP release was that eighth-grade math is a kind of gateway to more sophisticated academic concepts, making it an especially bad year to see reversals. 

Actually, they’re both interesting years. Fourth graders are starting to integrate a lot of the arithmetic they’ve learned up to that point, and in eighth grade, you’re combining the arithmetic with pre-algebra and starting on algebraic material. The eighth-grade Common Core standards are essentially Algebra I, and Algebra I is the most popular course on Khan Academy. It’s not surprising to me because that’s where people start hitting walls.

Why? Because it’s a new way of thinking about math. But for most people, it’s because their fluency in pre-algebraic or even arithmetic-level skills is pretty weak. If you look at the curve in the national data, kids fall further and further behind relative to where they should be, year in and year out. And when students are able to do personalized practice and address their unfinished learning, it doesn’t seem like a coincidence that eighth grade is also when students see the biggest, most dramatic gains in math.

You mentioned that memorization is sort of a nasty word. But I think many people experience a bit of success with that in the early years of math, with the multiplication tables offering one example. Do you think there’s room for more of that in K-12 math — perhaps through methods like direct instruction, which places a lot of emphasis on explicit teaching methods and systematic lessons?

Yeah, although I’m actually a little bit allergic to direct instruction. I’m the chairman of two schools that I started, and for high schoolers, I think there should be no lecturing at our schools. You should be asking questions, making the students think about things, making them collaborate. With younger kids, of course there’s going to be more direction there, but it still shouldn’t really be a lecture. I think that’s really important, especially for young kids. What we call play, that’s really children exploring so that they can learn about the world. Kids love to explore and do things; they don’t love to sit in the chair with their fingers on their lips and learn to be docile. 

In the math wars, there’s the rote learning and memorization, whatever you want to call it, and there are higher-order skills and problem solving. I absolutely think it’s got to be both. Schools that only do the latter, like project-based learning schools, their kids still struggle to get engineering degrees even though they were potentially doing engineering-type lessons during high school. Because they didn’t learn fluency in some of the core skills! Meanwhile, I know plenty of people who went through traditional education systems that might have leaned a little bit towards rote learning — especially in other countries like India and China and Korea — and I don’t think that’s ideal either. But you do have to get the core fluencies before you get too conceptual, in many cases, and advocates of more progressive education don’t necessarily buy into that.

Those eighth-graders I met in the Bronx were not atypical. I just wanted to sit down with them for like 24 hours and make sure they could nail their multiplication tables. Some people think that if you make them memorize the multiplication tables, they won’t know what multiplication is. No, they understand the concepts, and they know what multiplication is. But can you imagine going through life saying, “I don’t know what three times seven is”? It’s actually a problem if you see a pair of pants that costs $70, but they’re on sale for 30 percent off, and you can’t figure out that you can save $21. You’re going to be in trouble. So I do think that math facts shouldn’t be a forbidden concept, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t also do conceptual learning.

I feel the same way about history. When people say that kids can just Google things, I think, “I don’t know, it’s pretty useful for me to know when World War II was.” These are things that shouldn’t be in competition with one another.

You used the phrase “math wars,” and I’m wondering how much those are truly being fought. What we called the reading wars were really destructive, but also constructive in that they’ve produced a huge research literature about how to teach literacy. Does it strike you that the math world hasn’t really been through the same process, and that the “science of math” is therefore something of a mystery to both educators and kids?

Yes and no. The reading wars were whole-language vs. phonetics, and again, I think the answer is both: You probably start with phonics and move more toward whole-language as kids get older. You don’t need to fight these wars. 

It’s not like there aren’t already cases of kids learning math really well. There are lots. We started talking about how math is cumulative, and the strongest evidence for that — from well before Khan Academy existed — is around the notion of mastery learning, which always gives students the opportunity and incentive to fill in any gaps they have. And it’s had something like 200 efficacy studies, all of which were dramatic in terms of what they found for student learning. That’s essentially the pedagogical underpinnings that we’ve used; we’ve had 50-plus efficacy studies of Khan Academy, and they all have the exact same narrative.

So I don’t think it’s a secret of what we should do. The kids at KLS [Khan Lab School] — and they’re not indicative of a historically under-resourced community, it’s in the middle of Silicon Valley — are growing 1.5–2 times faster in math than demographically comparable kids in local public schools. That’s because they’re doing mastery learning, and they’re doing some things in peer-to-peer and active learning that are contributing as well. I think if you let kids work in their zone of proximal development, and you motivate them, you can actually accelerate people in math pretty quickly.

What about the long-term trends in American math results? Last year’s NAEP release shows pretty clearly that, even though we’ve stagnated or declined recently, we’re still quite far ahead — in some states, massively so — compared with the early 1990s. Do you think that’s a meaningful thing to keep in mind?

The long-term trends have definitely been positive. There has been progress, for sure, and I think that a lot of that has come from things like desegregating schools. When I was growing up in New Orleans, there were public schools that didn’t have air conditioners. These were the legacy schools from Jim Crow, so I think a lot of that progress is probably basic blocking and tackling, just having some level of equality before you even start talking about equity.

And there has been improvement in teaching as well. I believe it’s now mainstream for teachers to say, “I’m not going to just lecture at my students for an hour.” It’s far more typical now, compared with when you and I went to school, for the math teacher to give a short lecture and then break the class into groups to solve problems together. But the fact remains that it’s a disaster when only one-third of kids are proficient in math and a majority of kids going to college need math remediation at something like the seventh-grade level. 

Post-pandemic, the rate of learning might get back to where it was pre-pandemic. But it just means that you’ve been set back by 15 or 20 percent, at least, and now you’re going to continue to learn at that suboptimal rate. The average American kid learns at about .7 grade levels per year, and that accumulates to the point where lots of high school seniors are closer to the seventh-grade level than the twelfth-grade level. Which, again, is exactly what the college remediation numbers show. 

It’s a huge problem, and it’s hugely unequal. My kids are doing just fine, and everyone in their school is doing fine. But somebody else’s kid is on the other end of that average, doing pretty darn badly and probably unable to compete.

The NAEP results showed that almost 40 percent of American eighth graders scored below the test’s most basic proficiency level. What does it mean to be an adult with only the most rudimentary math skills? 

That 40 percent is going to be sitting in classrooms, getting more and more frustrated and continuing to think they’re not smart. 

And the people around them are also going to think they’re not smart. Imagine you’re a well-intentioned teacher thinking that you’re explaining ninth-grade math just fine, and this kid just doesn’t get it. By that point, there are going to be two problems: One, they have all these gaps that are hard for you, as a ninth-grade teacher, to address. And two, their self-esteem is shot, and they’re checked out. Some of these kids are going to drop out of high school, not even think about college, and be that much less likely to have a good path in front of them. It’s not a good scenario. 

I remember reading one account, though I’m not sure how true it is, that because the lead time in prison planning is around 10 years, the authorities would look at fourth-grade test scores to correlate the planning. That’s about the darkest idea you can imagine, but it’s not crazy. Prison is obviously an extreme circumstance, but dropping out of high school, or dropping out of college with debt, is where a lot of these kids are headed.

You may have also seen the research showing that, based on previous data tracking math scores and economic trends, a permanent drop in NAEP performance of this magnitude could erase something like $900 billion in future earnings.

And remember that it will disproportionately hit certain student demographics. If it were my child that fell into that “below basic” category, my wife or I would probably quit our day jobs. Knowing what I know about the system and its implications, and given that we have the resources, I would go all-in to help my kids catch up. And we’re talking about 30 or 40 percent of the country. 

I was buzzing through my chest congestion (thanks to Chicago November weather and workaholism), because I’d come to his office fresh from a visit to what seemed like an exemplary bilingual elementary campus. 

After we sat down — ostensibly to talk about early education policy — I mentioned the school’s stirring atmosphere and vibrant decorations. “It’s just obviously a great school,” I gushed. 

But Regenstein, as a local, knew a little about the school, and had a question: “How’s their data look? Is that atmosphere showing up in better results for kids?” Whatever its flaws, he said, No Child Left Behind was a response to people walking onto campuses that seemed pretty nice … even if there wasn’t a lot of learning going on. And, perhaps predictably, this particular school’s academic outcomes were dismal. 

The rest of our conversation that day stemmed from that branch — what constitutes a great school? Can any of those elements be measured? How can the measurements we choose nudge schools into better, fairer behavior that advances student excellence? 

In the intervening decade, Regenstein and I have never really stopped that discussion. Our relationship has been almost entirely built around a progressive exploration of that one big conversation. Over the years, our conversations prompted me to write a few articles exploring how education reform could, well, reform itself and advance a better, more comprehensive theory of action for pursuing educational equity. 

Leave it to Regenstein to write an entire book, Education Restated: Getting Policy Right on Accountability, Teacher Pay, and School Choice, which he published with Rowman & Littlefield this fall. Early in the book, he writes that the goal is to “surface some of the hidden assumptions that are built into the current system and the ‘invisible boxes’ that constrain our current thinking.” After years — decades, really — of largely-unchanged reform thinking on testing, school choice and teacher policies, Regenstein explores how reformers and their critics might improve their debates and make some substantive progress for kids. 

After reading it, like so many other times since that first Chicago meeting, I chatted with Regenstein recently about the future of American education policy. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

The 74: First, I want to clarify terms. This is a book about updating and refreshing education policy thinking … can you help us get clear on what you mean by ‘education reform?’ When did the last wave of reform start, and how did it, uh, happen? 

Eliott Regenstein: I use ‘ed reform’ to mean pushing for things to be different and better. So I think of K–12 reformers not as a category of people opposed to some other set of people in the education space, but as people engaged in an ongoing process of trying to learn and get better and do things that are going to help children in ways that we’re not currently doing. 

Sure — that’s sort of the dictionary definition version of ‘reform,’ but there is a real thing right now called ‘education reform’ that has existed in a coherent sense, and that the book is at least in part a refinement of that intellectual tradition. And I’m curious about where you clock the history on that? Where is that reform from? Why was ed reform? What was ed reform?

Sure. That wave of reform really defined my early career. It was an interesting product of a number of centrist Democrats and centrist Republicans who had similar ideas about the role of the state, and the importance of student achievement. 

For a couple of decades, that consensus held against the extremes, and there were some good reasons that it did. One of them is that education is an issue that doesn’t neatly track with the political parties. It’s just not that big a deal at the federal level. Almost no one in the federal government is there primarily because of education — outside of the Department of Education itself. That made it easier to forge consensus.

Also, in that era, the politics of state government, while ideological, were less nationalized than they are now right, with governors who were really trying to govern. Sometimes that would require, would permit, them to bring together leaders from multiple sectors, like the business community, the teachers unions, school management officials and such. Then they’d really try to come up with policies that reflected the consensus best thinking and a recognition that schools could do better.

During that period (roughly the late 1990s through the mid-2010s), I came to see the reform movement both as extremely powerful and thoughtful, but also as having some very real blind spots. 

And those blind spots have — to mix metaphors, I guess — taken a lot of the steam out of that movement, no? Reformers have run into real opposition from a lot of folks in education. 

Well, it’s worth saying that me coming from Illinois matters here. The Illinois Education Association has a history of collaborative engagement and working with the reform community and saying, ‘Look, you have identified real problems and we want to be at the table crafting real solutions.’

A good friend from the IEA who really shaped my thinking in this book told me early on, ‘Look, all these reformers write books with interesting ideas. But then, at some point, they blame all the problems on the teachers unions, and that means I can’t share it with my friends.’ 

So I wanted to write a book that is clearly not teachers union orthodoxy, but that a union leader could read and say, ‘OK, I don’t agree with all of this, but it’s not attacking me, and I can engage with these ideas.’ 

I don’t see reformers and teachers unions as being on opposite sides. I see them both working toward improved outcomes for kids, and sharing some values, whatever their disagreements. So I hoped to identify some places where they might have common values that could lead to common change efforts in ways that they themselves have not yet articulated.

It is really hard to engage in reform, even when the teachers involved desperately want it to succeed. Hoping to succeed at reform when the teachers involved don’t want it to succeed is pure folly, a recipe for failure.

How did you pick the three themes for the book? I’m on record arguing that reformers have long been too narrow. We know more or less what reformers want to do on testing, school choice and school accountability. But there’s not been anything like a reform consensus on, say, bilingual education, school integration, pre-K, housing policy, most pedagogical questions and more. I think my argument — reformers should be broader — is in tension with your push to get them to rethink accountability, teacher pay and school choice, no?

Well, first, I am not a curriculum and instruction expert, nor am I an expert on how to develop community schools. Those are incredibly important things, and there are a lot of good books about them. But I wanted to focus as a policy writer on topics where I felt like policy was driving the wrong behaviors, and where changes in policy could lead to better behavior. So my argument is not that these topics [accountability, teacher pay and school choice] are the only important topics. They’re not. My argument is that these are important topics where policy can make a difference, and that’s why I focused on those three areas.

Right. They’re structures that are amenable to policy changes — and that changes in those areas can shift responsibility, agency, and (hopefully?) behavior. But how do you balance the real goal of changing structures and incentives to nudge educators and schools to work more equitably against the real need to give educators, local and state leaders, etc enough flexibility that they can actually feel ownership over their choices … and authentically lead?

The thing about both the federal government and states and communities is that you are constantly balancing trust and distrust. This is a big theme of the book, and in the aggregate you have to trust states to do certain things, knowing that some of them will do things that you do not like, but that in fact represent the will of the voters in those states, and the reality is that on some of these issues there is no clear right or wrong, moral or immoral answer; and that, allowing states the flexibility to try some different things might actually teach us something.

What’s the future of testing and accountability? Do they have a future? Can they still serve to push schools towards fairness?

A lot of it boils down to the question of what makes a great school, and that’s a question that I try to attack frontally. Historically, we’ve focused on schools where kids came from wealthy families who would likely have been successful, regardless of how good the teachers were. And yet, some of the best work by teachers is being done in low-income communities with students who need a lot of help: Our measurement of school quality — measuring academic proficiency on tests — was just obscuring it. So I really want us to get to a more honest appraisal of which schools are doing well and encouraging more to do well.

You used early childhood education as a foil in the book. What are some of the key things K–12 policymakers and educators can learn from early ed?

There is a lot that’s different about early childhood than K–12. And in some ways, those of us who work on early childhood policy benefit from the experience of working in an unbuilt system. In early childhood some relatively basic building blocks don’t exist, and the idea of designing them is in many ways much easier than taking a built K–12 infrastructure and reshaping it after years and years of calcification. 

For example: in early childhood, children are not obligated to show up, and schools are not generally obligated to take them. And anywhere other than D.C., there probably wouldn’t be enough spots to take all the kids who might show up. Those are a fundamentally different set of starting assumptions than K–12, where families are required to send — and the schools are obligated to take — everybody.

That shapes parental choice in meaningful ways. In early education, there’s a recognition that parents need support in making choices about where to send their child, especially because the options are so varied. They don’t always get all the help they need, but that navigational function is seen as a core value. 

It’s also the case that it is a world without standardized test results, so if you are going to measure quality, it’s going to have to focus on process more than results, because the science of getting standardized results about 3- and 4-year-old children just looks really different than it does for high school kids. That makes it intuitive for early educators to focus on things like social and emotional learning, for instance. 

That’s not to say that K–12 is wrong to do the things it does. But I’m trying to think about gleaning the best of both worlds, where we draw some of the lessons from early childhood to influence the built system of K–12 while simultaneously building an early childhood system that maintains the best values of early childhood and helps import them into that K–12 system.

I particularly appreciated your treatment of standardized testing. Tests get blamed a lot for choices that schools and teachers make, even when those are actually ineffective choices like test prep. But those bad choices aren’t the tests’ fault — better pedagogy gets better outcomes! 

Standardized testing ended up in the reform deal because there was a belief in many quarters that there were certain kids, particularly low-income kids and kids of color, who, if you weren’t watching their outcomes, would just sort of drift aimlessly away, and that the system would say those kids are doing fine when they were not. That value attached to standardized tests is a real one.

But it is also the case that having standardized testing count for so much in the evaluation of schools has led to a whole set of completely understandable behaviors on the part of those schools that are not actually good for a kid’s education. You don’t see that as much with kids from wealthy families, who are going to pass the test regardless, but you do see it in places where there are lots of kids who are close but need some help to pass the test. 

Often those schools think, ‘Oh, if we focus on this test, we can get them across the line,’ and sometimes they use good pedagogy to do it, and sometimes they don’t. That’s a capacity problem that policymakers are ill suited to solving. 

So if you get rid of standardized tests, there is a very real risk that a certain population of kids are going to be very badly served, and if you make standardized tests the end-all and be-all, you’re going to get some of the bad behaviors that we’ve seen in the last couple of decades.

That problem is real, that tension between tests’ value and their distorting effect is real. Essentially, my argument is: Look, you can’t get rid of that tension, but you can build around it and create counterweights and other things that are valued. 

While they’re waiting for their copies of the book to arrive, what can folks do to usher in a brighter, more constructive version of education reform? 

Honestly, one of my dreams for this book was that people would read it and write articles disagreeing with it, and that I would then email those people politely, and then I would have a conversation with them, and that we would both learn something. I mean, I do that to people —

Can confirm. You’ve sent me those notes. 

I mean, it  would be a thrill right if someone wrote me: “Here’s where I disagree with Education Restated. 

But look, part of why I wrote this book was for reformers to read it and think, ‘OK, I recognize this. This speaks to me and my values and orientation. But I learned something. I see things differently now.” 

Even if folks aren’t entirely persuaded by my specific arguments, hopefully they come away open minded about topics that they thought they had a settled position on. The goal is to move people out of their trenches and into a conversation about what is possible. If anybody reads this and has that experience, I will consider that a success. 

The book does have that vibe. It feels like a chance to rethink reform without abandoning it.

Well, my experience has been that it is extremely rare to change people’s minds about what they want. What you can change people’s minds about is how they’re going to act on what they want. And that part of what this book is meant to do is say to both reformers and reform skeptics, ‘Look, you’re gonna want what you want, but given what you want, maybe there are different policies you could adopt that would help you achieve what you want and make common cause with people who you haven’t always thought of as your people.’

As students enter classrooms in the days after a widely publicized funeral in Memphis, experts say educators have a responsibility to acknowledge their anger, grief and sadness — particularly as more than ever before experience symptoms of depression and anxiety. 

Nichols, who grew up in Sacramento enmeshed in skater culture and with a love for photography, was father to a 4-year-old son. On Jan. 7, he was pulled over in a traffic stop and severely beaten for three minutes by five police officers on since-released body camera footage. The officers were part of a since-disbanded special unit that policed his Memphis neighborhood. Nichols was unarmed and minutes from home. Three days later, he died in the hospital at age 29. The officers will appear for an arraignment on Feb. 17, charged with second-degree murder.

But Dimitry Anselme, executive program director with the global nonprofit Facing History & Ourselves, said it is now critical to explore Nichols’s life and humanity with young people.

“We don’t want to stay only in death. We’ve lost Tyre. What you want to begin to help [young people] think is, what’s our response? What are the ways by which we want to engage with one another to move to justice?” said Anselme, who oversees workshops and training with educators and staff internationally, guiding constructive and psychologically safe ways to discuss violence and injustice with young learners. 

Paramount in this immediate aftermath, according to Anselme, is to offer ways for students to reflect on their emotions like journaling, and emphasize the message: It’s OK not to watch. 

While graphic images, including photos of Emmett Till’s open casket and Nichols’s hospital bed shared by family, have forced Americans to contend with extreme anti-Black violence, exposure to such imagery can trigger psychological and physical reactions, such as disrupted eating, sleeping and bed-wetting in children. This is particularly for Black children who may identify with Tyre, experts told Capital B. 

In conversation with The 74, Anselme explains how Nichols’s life can be explored alongside critical moments in American history, why inviting young people to reflect is critical in this political moment and best practices gleaned from teaching violent history and genocide.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

The 74: What have you been hearing from educators and students in the wake of Tyre Nichols’s death and the recent release of body camera footage? 

Anselme: Emotions. A lot of students and teachers are sad. They are frustrated. For many of them, this will not be the first time that they have to have a conversation in the classroom around an episode of police violence or police brutality, particularly targeted toward the loss of a life of a young Black man. So there is a sense of déjà vu and people are really exhausted. Episodes like this contribute to the sense of sadness and powerlessness, like, ‘Oh my God, how many more lessons can I possibly do on gun violence, or the loss of life of a young black man, or another police brutality incident?’ It feels like it is nonstop. 

The other thing we’re hearing is, ‘I don’t want to keep my young people mired in grief, anger.’ It’s not that they’re looking for ‘give me something positive’, but it’s what can I give to young people that does not keep them in a sense of powerlessness, especially in the moment? The kind of national dialogue that’s going on in the country, the incessant fights around racial justice, give young people a sense of change does not happen. 

Teachers are looking for ways — I call it teaching for democracy. That is to say, democracies are not perfect. They require that we remain vigilant, that we don’t tire out, that we don’t lose hope, optimism and a sense of engagement. So a lot of our resources are around how do you bring students back to core democratic values? We always select a moment of fracture, usually brought on by violence, with examples of how to repair, rebuild, and what we call choosing to participate. So you don’t just stay in that moment of history that is sad, but you are looking at ways that ordinary people repair. That’s how we teach the civil rights movement, the Reconstruction period, the Holocaust, Armenian Genocide. Here’s the moment of fracture, here are the range of responses that human beings have taken on, look at all the ways by which accountability happens, attempts to have national conversation about memory and legacies, and how to rebuild.

I think a lot of teachers at Facing History know that the work is really around inspiring young people. To say, channel your grief, your sadness, into participation. It’s not to minimize the loss of Tyre. But, increasingly, our sense is we need to provide resources so young people can think about themselves, their rights and responsibilities when they live in a democracy and how they can sustain civic agency.

How might educators foster discussion in a way that it doesn’t feel, as you said, like another moment of hopelessness?

First, you move to history. So let’s use a moment that is not in the here and now, because it’s going to give us emotional distance. You don’t necessarily need to use a police brutality moment — I might say, let’s talk about the murder of Emmett Till. It’s an act of injustice, and it raises all the conversations that we want to have about the value of Black life, around the way that violence is being used to circumvent or to prevent coexistence, our ability to live. It keeps them focused on the larger themes: democracy, civic engagement, civic participation. 

One of the things that we get from looking at Emmett Till is the way that his mother responds to his death, the way that she will inspire a civil rights movement that was already taking place. That’s the lesson you want kids to take. We don’t want to stay only in death. We’ve lost Tyre. What you want to begin to help them think is, what’s our response? What are the ways by which we want to engage with one another to move to justice? 

On Wednesday, we witnessed Tyre being laid to rest in Memphis. How can educators today, tomorrow next week, acknowledge that grief?

We train a lot around the use of journals so that young people can capture, ‘what do I think before I speak?’ These are moments where I would call educators to look at our civil discussion guide or a reflective classroom guide because I would be inviting kids to be writing, journaling, reflecting on the emotions they are feeling. What’s in their mind? Reflect on the multiple identities of Tyre Nichols that we’ve learned about him: a young Black man who was also a skater, a young father. I would be inviting young people to think about him and reflect on his humanity. Rather than again, focusing on the pain, honor him. Recognize him as a human, and let’s celebrate the loss of the human life that we’ve lost.

What I’m telling you is also the way we’ve learned to teach around genocide. We use survivor testimonies to give you a sense of the individual. Who was this person? Where do they live? What kind of relationships do they have? I keep you centered on the human person that is lost. So it’s not just a number, 6 million. No, it’s about the story of Greta. It’s the story of Rena. It’s a story of this one person living in just one moment in time. I would honor Tyre in that way. Write about his identities, his multiple ones. Do you have friends who are skaters? 

Could we spend a moment reflecting on the technology aspect of this? The images of his killing can be somewhat unescapable. You might be at a restaurant with your family as CNN plays the footage on loop. How has your guidance adapted to that reality?

It’s really, really difficult. I went on a news blackout last Friday. I’m raising two young Black men and I said to all my colleagues and friends: news blackout. I definitely don’t want to see the video. I don’t want to overwhelm ourselves with images just because of the media environment we all live in. At Facing History, in all of our work for the last 47 years, when we teach about genocide, we always invite teachers not to overfocus on the images of death camps, of dead bodies. We don’t encourage that kind of teaching. Usually there’s a desire like, ‘Oh, I’m gonna show them these awful images and bang it on the head so they can understand what happened.’ We say it’s not going to be effective. And the reason why we don’t think that’s effective is because that really traumatizes kids and it leaves them in a space in the space of pain.

In this current social media environment, we would encourage teachers to encourage students not to be watching those videos, to avoid them or empower yourself. You can write a statement on your Instagram or your Facebook: tell your friends and colleagues that you’ve chosen not to watch the video, that you would love it if they could avoid sharing it with you or putting it up themselves. Give them tools where they themselves can be empowered to sort of communicate that. It’s OK not to watch the video to relive the images. It’s OK to change the channel, shut the TV off. It’s not like you’re minimizing or you’re running away from what happened. No, you’re fully aware of what happened. What you’re doing is self-care. Protect yourself. 

We cannot use the classroom and materials to cheapen, to use violence and death to get students’ engagement or attention. As an educator, I would say you should feel free never to utilize those videos and images. A lot of entertainment is centered on abuse and violence of Black bodies. We have it in sports, music, movies, law, literature or history. I like to think we have a responsibility as educators not to participate in this. 

Students and educators, particularly Black families, have felt this kind of vicarious trauma many times in recent history. Why does the conversation have to be continued, not a one-off lesson, particularly as we are amid a youth mental health crisis?

We are social beings, but we also have emotional lives that need to be recognized, realized and affirmed. I don’t think one does an educational service if you’re working with people of color, in particular Black students, to not acknowledge the emotional toll, the trauma that the content that we look at in classrooms will bring. It has to be something that’s perpetual, but you don’t want to do this in a way that is re-traumatizing or deepening the trauma. 

You want to end lessons by bringing attention to issues of identity, to collective identity, group membership, legacies and then the civic participation piece. You are trying to balance giving space for the emotion to be recognized, but also engage a larger conversation about human behavior. As young Black men, they are human beings, they have empathy for the struggle and emotion and injustice of other groups. So that moment when they are engaging with their own trauma and frustration, it is also a moment to help them see: you have experienced this, other groups have experienced this. So what kind of human societies do we want to create? What does coexistence mean? When you do that, you provide them with the vocabulary and mitigate the pain — I’m not alone, there’s something larger about the way human societies operate. There are larger dynamics. 

We have a lot of this conversation on staff at Facing History. I do not think it is fair for us as educators to teach young Black kids, you were victimized in 1619 and you are victimized today in 2023. If that is the only way we teach American history to Black kids, we’re doing them a disservice. Because if you teach it that way, you don’t teach them Fannie Lou Hamer. You don’t teach them Frederick Douglass. You don’t teach Harriet Tubman. 

Because in fact, throughout the history of violent oppression and marginalization, many Black folks chose to respond to the pain they were having by engaging. Harriet Tubman comes up with a way to help free other enslaved people; Frederick Douglass plays a key role in the key constitutional amendment that everyone in America today enjoys. That’s the amendment that gives you immigration laws that we have today that a variety of other people are using and enjoying. So I want African American kids to know the America that we have today comes directly out of the Black experience, pain and trauma. We’ve created this society of democracy and freedom, not only for ourselves, but for other groups. That’s where you help balance the pain and fracture. I don’t think it’s fair to just keep Black students in this idea of perpetual victimhood because in fact, the history tells something else. We do not do a good job in history education of helping kids see that.

We could think for a moment about the challenge and changes to the AP African American Studies curriculum, book bans removing Toni Morrison and other historic Black authors’ work. How does that context impact your recommendations and how you speak with educators? 

The reality is teachers are already finding ways to resist this on a daily basis. What I would say to educators is to continue to focus on the work that they’re doing, identifying resources and moments that are important for students. We have some shared democratic values, I think if we hold on to these, we will survive this particular political movement. There have been efforts at other moments where, for example, you couldn’t teach about LGBT experiences in the classroom. With the work of activism, we were able to create the space. We created the Black Studies movement, an ethnic studies movement, an Asian Studies movement in the country.

It’s very scary what’s happening. I used to be a teacher and a principal. I feel so much for folks who are in the classroom today, or for school principals who are just overwhelmed. I’m hearing things in Florida about doing a book review at every school. You can imagine the amount of human time and labor it’s going to take to do this. I was born in Haiti and I grew up in the Congo. My formative years were in two societies shaped by dictatorship. This is not democratic behavior. I’m very comfortable saying that; I have lived in non-democratic societies. 

This comes back to the civic agency piece. If we lose hope if we think somehow, oh, well, that’s it, this political movement doing all this book banning has won. No, they have not won and are in violation of the American spirit and democratic values. So what does that mean? We redouble our effort and our commitment to democratic values to believe that we have a freedom of conscience, that young people have freedom of conscience, they should have access to a wide range of ideas, that we are all as educators going to defend a marketplace of ideas. The idea of a marketplace of ideas is as American as apple pie. Use that as an inspiration to students. None of these bills prevent me from teaching about the Declaration of Independence; use those moments to highlight key American values. How do we preserve them today?

Critchfield has served on the Idaho State Board of Education for seven years, two of them as president. She also spent several years as a substitute teacher, and served on the rural Cassia County school board for 10 years.

Idaho, while a deep red state politically, is undergoing dramatic change as newcomers arrive in unprecedented numbers, many of them from the West Coast, where the political climate is decidedly different. This makes Idaho an interesting national case study, especially as a new state superintendent takes office, with strong ideas about strengthening her department’s support and oversight of school districts.

Under the Ybarra regime, districts reported receiving little of either support or oversight. As a result, they tended to ignore state mandates. Idaho EdNews assiduously tracked these departmental oversight failures, and districts’ flouting of state regulations.

During the former state chief’s tenure, districts failed to conduct meaningful teacher evaluations, and ignored the state’s transparency laws. Test scores stagnated, and Ybarra rarely engaged with state lawmakers. 

Ybarra, who took a job as a kindergarten teacher earlier this month, defended her record during the campaign, saying she improved state graduation rates and college and career readiness.

Critchfield, who was sworn into her four-year term Jan. 6, is pledging a new day. 

Idaho has long been a state where the concept of local control of public education is sacrosanct, where parental choice is seen as a top value and where public charter schools have proliferated and thrived.

How does Critchfield envision her new role, and the Idaho Department of Education’s place in the state’s education ecosystem? What lessons can Idaho teach the rest of the country? I recently interviewed Critchfield to get her perspective on these issues. 

The conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

The 74: What do you plan to change about how the State Department of Education operated under your predecessor?

Debbie Critchfield: Literally everything. The transparency piece is huge. And earning and deserving the respect and trust of our districts and our legislature. We have to reestablish trust around education. There are things that I believe need to happen immediately. The Department of Education is an agency designed to support schools. We need to demonstrate that we do provide that service. I’m looking at standing up some regional support centers around the state so that our folks in the most rural parts of the state and anywhere in the state aren’t dependent upon trying to contact someone in Boise.

What are some of the key issues you want to address early in your term?

I’m a big believer in the science of reading, and I believe that has been pushed to the side, and we in Idaho have not acknowledged sufficiently what it does for kids. You can expect to see that as a main point of conversation when we talk about literacy. Looking at our math scores, we’re no better than most states. I will want to work with our State Board of Education on a major math initiative. I’ve signaled to those folks that that’s a conversation that they can expect.

And then there is the workforce piece. We at the state, as well as local boards and districts, need to be initiating conversations with their community businesses and industries. One of the biggest services that we can do for our students is providing that connection — how what I’m learning in class translates to the outside world. 

I talk to people in schools and districts frequently who are interested in having us help build these types of relationships and programs for their students. They’re not sure how to go about it. Fortunately, there are lots of models out there to draw from.

What made you decide to run for the state superintendent position?

Well, there were two things, actually. First, the COVID experience really highlighted the missed opportunities that Idaho didn’t move on. We had this interesting time in education where everything, all these state and federal laws, rules, requirements, etc. were waived. That created so many opportunities to try new things. But it felt like many of the educational leaders at the state level just kind of held their breath and then it was like, “Oh, OK, COVID’s over, let’s go back to business. Let’s go back to how things were.”

So that’s the first thing that motivated me. A frustration with the lack of vision, the lack of leadership. There was this tremendous opportunity to reimagine and create a system wrapped around what is most valuable for kids. Public education is in many ways still based on an 1850s model. There are some things that still work, and many that don’t. I felt frustration over the missed opportunity.

Second, I also felt frustrated with our lack of progress. We’re moving, but is it forward and is it towards the outcomes and the goals that we have for our kids? What are we preparing our kids to know and be able to do? Having been on the State Board of Education for the past eight years, I had a front row seat. And it became clear to me that I was doing as much as I could as an appointed volunteer. I needed to change roles to really advance some of the things that I heard from communities, parents, students and teachers.

What did you say on the campaign trail that resonated with voters and allowed you to defeat a well-known incumbent?

I would ask people all the time: Can you tell me what the vision is for K-12 education in Idaho? And every group I spoke to, whether it was business leaders, parents, teachers, they’d all look at each other and just shrug. No one knew. I didn’t know. And I’ve been in a position where I should know. No one knew because there was no vision. 

So then I could tell people here’s my plan, my vision. We’ve got to prepare our kids for the jobs and opportunities of a growing state. To me, this means providing a meaningful experience for high school students, and making sure that they’re prepared at the earliest levels. Providing fundamentals of reading and math for our very earliest learners, to make sure that by the time they hit high school, they’re prepared for that next thing, which to me is less about seat time and more about the application of knowledge. I’m a big fan of any type of work-based learning, project-based learning. internships, apprenticeships, particularly for juniors and seniors.

Those seemed like basic, educational, non-political messages, and they resonated.

Idaho has been stagnant or moving backwards for years in what locally is called the go-on rate, the percentage of high school students who go on to some kind of post-secondary opportunity. The rate for the most recent year was just 37%. That might be in part because of the disconnect between schools and workforce experiences. How do you plan to address that?

 I like to reference two numbers together because I believe they tell an interesting story. First of all, the go-on rate is not a perfect measure because it does not capture everything. It misses, for example, military service. But having said that, it is a data point we have to work with, 37%. But at the same time, 80% of graduating high school seniors have taken at least one dual credit class (high school and college credit).

When I look at those numbers side by side, what it tells me is that students want to jumpstart their future. They want the ability to learn from things that are going to benefit them from outside of high school. There are a lot of opportunities that we are not bringing into the schools, that would indicate to a student that there are a lot of ways that you can be prepared for life after school, and to have early access to things that you’re interested in. That may not always look like college.

For the past eight years, the Department of Education has not fulfilled its accountability role. How do you turn that culture around?

It is going to be a process. Over the past few years, local control became this pat answer, and a cover for a lack of leadership. When our districts asked for support with something, they’d often hear, “Oh, sorry, that’s a local control issue.” Local decision-making the way I define it does not mean being left alone. 

I celebrate local decision-making. But how about if I help you look at and have access to all the best information that’s out there? So before you choose curriculum, which is your decision, and I don’t look to change that, why don’t I offer you some information that might help you make a decision? Did you know that there are several factors that you could consider before you decide? Did you know that these other districts are having success with this particular curriculum?

I’ve heard all over the state that districts have really felt left alone, they feel as though they’re in silos and it really has been every man for himself. Again, it’s under that guise of, “Oh, sorry, local control, can’t help you.” I don’t accept that.

What’s your view of the impact charter schools have had on Idaho public education?

I think there are missed opportunities here. What I mean by that is that we have charter schools that are doing incredible things across the state, and these are things that district-run public schools can do as well. But here’s a real disconnect. I hear about this not just from parents, but from people involved in education. “Well, they’re a charter so they get to design their start and stop times and they get to design the projects that they do.” And I tell them: so do you. You get to do that same thing. 

I believe I can do a lot of matchmaking between innovative charters and district schools. But we have to break down some of the misconceptions, that charters aren’t public schools, and they are not held to the same if not higher standards of accountability.

Finally, what makes Idaho a special place that other states might want to look to for ideas and inspiration?

We’re geographically spread out and diverse in our communities in a number of ways. But statewide we’re talking just over 300,000 students. That gives us the ability to really impact and effect change quickly. We don’t have to wait five or 10 years to really see the result of the work that we’re doing. That’s something that I believe makes Idaho unique. We’ve just lacked the leadership to make it happen.

It’s not easy to be a first on the Minneapolis School Board. The board has had Black and Latino members for decades. It has had Asian, Muslim and LGBTQ members, and the country’s first elected Somali official. Its first Native American director, Peggy Flanagan, is now Minnesota’s lieutenant governor. 

All this diversity notwithstanding, Sonya Emerick is a first, elected as the board’s first autistic director in November. When Emerick, who is transgender, took the oath of office Jan. 3, they became, it’s believed, the second autistic school board member in the United States and one of four transgender people elected to a school board in 2022.  

Emerick, 41, decided to run after spending most of the pandemic trying — and failing — to secure basic instruction for their son Foxy, who is homebound and communicates with assistive and augmentative technology. The boy got in-home therapies but never received the hundreds of hours of interaction with a teacher for kindergarten, and now first grade, mandated in his Individualized Education Program — the legal document that determines a child’s special education services. The resistance Emerick, a community organizer and activist, encountered sparked the unique campaign that propelled them to office. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

By law, children whose disabilities prevent them from leaving home are entitled to the same free and appropriate public education as other kids. Your experience trying to get support for Foxy tells a different story. 

My younger child, who is 7, has been a Minneapolis Public Schools student since he was 2, when he first started receiving special education services. My early experiences of advocating for him were challenging, but overall positive. As he got older, the advocacy got more challenging. Then there were the additional challenges of the pandemic and the state of the city of Minneapolis in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder. Everyone started to have to advocate a lot more on behalf of themselves and their families.

How that played out for my particular kid, because of the nature and complexity of his disabilities, is that he basically stopped receiving the educational services that were in his IEP — services he is legally entitled to. I did what, as a parent, I am empowered by the law to do, which is to use the alternative dispute resolution process to try to work collaboratively with the school and district to figure out how to get my kid’s education delivered.

I worked really hard for a whole year and went to 40 hours of IEP meetings to try to get it done. We were not able to do it. Though my direct dealings with the IEP team weren’t 100% free of conflicts, the real difficulties didn’t lie with a teacher or a building administrator or anyone who I had direct access to. The barriers to getting my child’s most fundamental, basic educational needs met were much more at the systems level, above the pay grade of every person at the IEP table. 

I had two choices: to move into litigation with the district or to try to move where I had access to influence systems-level problems and barriers. I chose the latter. When you litigate in special education, it’s a significant amount of time and financial resources. It’s very, very draining on a family emotionally. Even if you get the best possible outcome, it still begins and ends with one kid, typically. I decided I can do something with a bigger impact. That’s why I decided to run.

There’s a second layer. The systemic form of oppression called ableism has a very dehumanizing impact. As a disabled parent of two disabled children, advocating in the school system for one of my kids, these really traumatic — I don’t think I’m being too extreme when I use the word “traumatic” — experiences occur. I experience that trauma as a disabled person trying to navigate these systems, and as a parent, watching my child have to experience this oppression. 

The deficits-based narratives we impose on kids who receive special education services — we have to use those narratives in our conversations about our children, with parents, families, caregivers. It can really start to impact your relationship with your child. You sit down to play with your kid or hug your kid or read to your kid or put dinner in front of your kid and it’s there all the time as something that you’re either choosing to mitigate or to ignore or choosing to believe or work not to believe. It builds something that exists between you and your kid. Think of the violence of putting something between someone and their baby that interferes with their relationship and the developmental support that exists for that child. That will exist for that family forever. It’s generational. 

I was in an IEP meeting and a special education director said, “For kids like your child, who are difficult to engage…” I had to interrupt and say, “If we’re having difficulty engaging my child, educationally, that’s a problem with our instruction. That’s not a problem with my child. My child is extremely engaged.”

The way we talk about disabled kids, no one even thinks about it. What if I didn’t interrupt? I think about all the times that I haven’t interrupted, and then I think about as a white person, as an English-speaking person and as a person who has expertise, the safety that I believe I will still experience after interrupting — those are privileges a lot of people trying to navigate these systems don’t have. 

I have seen some pretty amazing videos of Foxy you made for his teachers. Why did you start doing that?

I actually created a website of video and images of him and got the district to agree as part of his IEP that it would be an official tool for evaluation. That the evidence that I upload onto this website is used to determine his services, because I just don’t trust that traditional tools always capture everything. 

Foxy has been literate since the age of 3. But he is also non-speaking and has significant communication difficulties. He can type the entire book “The Very Hungry Caterpillar.” He can type many books. He can use capital letters and punctuation and spaces. But I was told when he was 5 that we didn’t need to put academic goals into his IEP because a functional IEP [one that addresses basic self-care skills] would be fine. The idea was that we wouldn’t even make an investment in his academic instruction because it wasn’t worth it, we would just teach him life skills like hand washing or picking up toys. 

So you changed people’s beliefs about him. 

I don’t know that I did. Where that type of advocacy has been effective is with educators. When I show his teachers what he can do, it definitely informs what kind of instruction they provide. They can observe where he has skill and plan for that. But I don’t know that it has necessarily had a significant impact when you go above the educators who are directly teaching my child. Sometimes I almost feel like it’s a cute party trick: “Look at what my kid can do. He’s so skilled and amazing.” “Wow, that’s so great. He’s so cute.” Yet it doesn’t alter programming or prioritization or get them to hire a teacher or anything like that. It’s frustrating to get really creative and spend a lot of energy designing advocacy mechanisms and then have a system that’s so broken it’s impenetrable. As an individual parent, there is no amount of advocacy I could do that would have the impact that my child needs just at, like, baseline level.

When the idea of running first came up, was there an “aha” moment? 

No. Honestly, my initial response was a feeling of shame. That I would think that something like that was for me — an autistic person with other disabilities, who was not successful in school, didn’t go to college, tried to pursue a few different career paths and was not successful, and ended up living in survival mode, parenting in acute poverty for a couple of decades. I have never in my life gotten messaging that this kind of opportunity was for me. 

So my initial experience wasn’t “aha.” My initial experience was, “How foolish am I that for one second I would think this is something that I get to do.” That’s painful to think about. 

You did not run a traditional campaign, yet you credit its novel aspects with helping you win.

Filing to run is easy. You fill out a one-page form, you pay $20. But actually running? I’d never been involved in electoral politics before. I’d been a community organizer and an activist, but I’d never worked on a campaign. My participation in electoral politics began and ended with voting. 

I talked to somebody who said, “You need a kitchen cabinet, a group of people you meet with maybe every week to help figure out your campaign.” I found a very small group. We tried designing a big field strategy where we mapped out every week, phone-banking, door-knocking, fund-raising — really specific goals. It wasn’t something that we held onto because we found we couldn’t plan that far out. Part of that was resources. And part of it was the way that my body and brain function because of my disabilities. 

Autistic people do not yet have a disability support services system anywhere in the country, as far as I know, that really takes a look at adaptive support needs [daily living skills that may need to be taught or approached differently], which is where many autistic people have significant need. And it’s also an area of need that’s quite easy to mask [by working to appear as typical as possible]. 

Autistic people can do many things, but we can’t do many things. I can do 10 things, but only two of them today. The other eight I have to outsource, because I run out of processing power, because I get tired, because I need a lot of recovery. That’s hard to assess.

For us, what worked was to do something, evaluate it and then decide the next thing. We planned out a week. Let’s try phone-banking. Let’s try an event. How many events can Sonya do in a week? How many hours can Sonya do in a day? I don’t know. 

I found out I can’t door-knock, which is hard if you’re a candidate. Things like steps and walking on inclines and those types of things I can do for a few blocks, but then I’m at risk of falling, of going to grab a handrail and missing. Then the other challenge of knocking on a door as an autistic person is not knowing if I would be talking to somebody, if I talk to somebody, who are they going to be, how they are going to receive the fact that someone’s knocked on their door to have a conversation. Then having to try to be effective — that elevator stump speech at the door was just so far beyond what my social communication skills are capable of. As an autistic person, there was too much uncertainty. 

What I could really do well was go to community events and talk to people there. I had no problem going up to folks, giving them my literature. I didn’t have to do as much coordination because I’m just walking around a parking lot or a blocked-off street. If I go out door-knocking for an hour, I might talk to 10 people on a good day. But I can go to an event for an hour and talk to 100. I started doing as many events as I could. There were weekends where I hit eight events. 

There was a time where I was told we would need to hire a social media person because the job was too big to ask anyone to do it without compensating them. I didn’t think that’s a priority in terms of our limited spending. I was like, Okay, let’s game it out. We need someone to create a calendar, someone to create the graphics and to create the text. And then we need somebody to post the posts. That’s four jobs. Can we get four volunteers? Are those jobs little enough that it’s reasonable to ask someone to do just one part? 

I did the graphics, and we found three volunteers to do the other pieces. Not only was nobody feeling like it was too big of an ask, we got feedback that it provided more ways for folks to plug into the campaign. There was one person who took care of her kids during the day but was happy to schedule our social media posts late at night. She was like, “I’ve really wanted to volunteer for the campaign. I can’t do events or door-knocking, but this is something I can do.” 

We made a variety of little volunteer opportunities. It was a great way to get folks to help us out, because we didn’t ask them to be in a certain place at a certain time. By the end of the campaign, we had almost 100 volunteers, not counting people who came to a meet-and-greet or got a yard sign. 

When I think about special education, I want opportunities to be differentiated [presented in different formats for people of differing abilities] like this so everybody can be involved. There should be a way for everybody who wants to plug in to plug in. A lot of this came from the principles of the Disability Justice Movement and around dismantling white supremacy culture. 

We had a saying: The means is the work. It’s where the real work is. 

But you didn’t start out centering those principles or your needs. 

I grew into myself over the course of campaigning. Early on in a kitchen cabinet meeting, I was apologizing for something that didn’t require an apology. Someone said, “This is the second time during this meeting that you’ve apologized. I get the feeling that you think that we are all going to abandon you. I need you to know that we’re not waiting for you to do something wrong so that we can decide that we don’t support you after all.” She wasn’t just being nice, she was being really clear. 

I had impostor syndrome. I was so afraid that these people who are investing significant money, time and energy in me being in this role were going to find out that I’m not who they think I am. But what actually happened is that I found out that I wasn’t who I thought I was. I saw myself as unworthy. Maybe able to mask well enough to convince people that I had some value or skill. But they saw me as someone who could bring something needed to this role. And they were right. 

Their belief held me while I was figuring out how to believe in myself. I’m changed because a group of people decided unequivocally that they believed in me and decided to act from that belief, consistently, 100% of the time, regardless of how I acted. If there was a day where I had a symptom flare up and couldn’t get out of bed, they still believed in me. If I made a mistake, did something I shouldn’t have done or forgot something, they still believed in me. 

Once I got a taste of what it felt like, for the first time in my life to feel believed in, I was like, this is what every student in our district — and everywhere — needs to experience. What would it be like if our students experienced this unshakable belief in their goodness, their worth, their abilities? That wasn’t conditionally based on how they act today in school, or this test score, or this assignment, but because they’re worthy of belief because they are here. 

There is a particular experience a lot of disabled people have where we’re thought to not be capable. It becomes part of the story we tell ourselves about ourselves. There’s so many kids, some because of disability and some for different reasons, who we’re teaching that they are not worthy of belief. We talk about the belief gap as racism, and it certainly is. We have kids of color, Black kids, Indigenous kids, who are not believed in because of who they are. 

Think about how inextricably tied ableism and racism are. You don’t have to be disabled to experience ableism. It’s a set of beliefs that some bodies and minds are more worthy than others. We decide that some children are capable of learning to read and some are not, some children are worth academic investment, some are not. Some children are worth the support needed to stay in a classroom even when they’re having a tough day and some are not. That is ableism. 

I could talk to you all day about this, and the trauma of the thing that gets inserted into the parent-child relationship, but I should ask you about your yoga ball. 

I’m glad you asked. The majority of the campaign, I didn’t expect that I would win. I really had to think about what our goals were other than winning to keep us going. I had prepared myself for if I didn’t win, how I would deal with the fallout. But I didn’t prepare myself for if I did win. 

I called the person who had probably been my closest support in terms of disability and access and said I’m in this dark place because I’m alone now. I’ve had this whole team directly supporting me every single day. Now, that part is over, and I’m going to go be a school board director and I have to do it on my own. I am a disabled person who will always need significant support to execute my considerable strength. I don’t think I’m going to be able to do it.

She said, “Who told you that you have to do this on your own? You needed a high level of support to campaign and nobody thought something magical was going to happen if you got elected and you wouldn’t need it anymore.” 

There’s this adage I like — I don’t know who it’s attributed to — if you feel like you’re walking in circles, look down, because you’re probably moving on a helix. It may look like you’re back in the same place, but you’ve come to a new plane. I experience my life like that a lot. 

I have to build out what that support looks like now. I was successful campaigning because I let it have breathing room. And I can feel now, because of the state of crisis that our school district is in, that it can feel like there’s no space, there’s no time to do anything like that. So I have to ground myself. I go back to my campaign experience and say, we were able to be successful, giving ourselves room to figure out how to be authentic and not leave anyone out. The means is the work. 

So, the yoga ball. If I have to sit for a meeting or any sort of situation where there’s a lot of information, a lot of executive functioning, I can modulate my processing experience through continuous rhythmic movement. Sitting on a yoga ball behind the dais will give me a way to support my processing so that I can integrate all the information and the discussion and the presentations, and be super present and effective. 

I already have the ball at district headquarters because I know I’m going to need it. But what happens if I need a sensory break during a meeting? What happens if I need somebody to repeat something? I don’t know if I will. If I do, we’re going to have to have a conversation about what does that look like. I can’t identify all the needs beforehand, because it’s experiential. It’ll be an adventure to figure it out. 

I’m not saying everyone should be expected to do this by any means, but there is value when people choose to do this in public. Disabled people are supposed to be invisible. Institutionalization is a primary mechanism through which disabled people have been kidnapped out of society and put away so that no one sees us. If I can’t be a visibly disabled person and be a school board director, then I’m not included. It doesn’t do me any good to try to hide my process as a disabled person.

I hope that having an identifiable disabled person behind the dais will let kids who receive special education services see an example of what kind of life they might prepare for. And I hope that having a visibly disabled person behind the dais will show caregivers and educators of students who receive special education services what kind of future they might need to prepare their kids for. 

Michael Hinojosa left one job this year as superintendent of the Dallas Independent School District only to take on a few more. In one, he’ll be coaching superintendents on how to survive the culture wars and stay focused amid broadsides from local school boards. In another, he’s taken a leading role with a consulting group that he said alleviated some of the “pain points” he faced in Dallas. 

He also seriously weighed a foray into big-league urban politics, citing a desire to give back to the city that raised him. But on Dec. 4, he announced that he won’t run against Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson. Aside from the incumbent’s strong odds of winning reelection, Hinojosa said he’s got enough consulting work to stay busy. 

But colleagues who know Hinojosa well have no trouble seeing him as a politician. He already has a track record of staring down powerful opponents, including defying Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s May 2021 executive order that banned districts from mandating masks.

“He’s a respected voice in the legislature,” said Chris Wallace, president and CEO of the North Texas Commission, an organization devoted to developing the 13-county Dallas region. “People listen when he speaks because he really excels in empowering people. That’s a leadership art.”

A Mexican immigrant, Hinojosa is a product of the Dallas schools and worked as a teacher and basketball coach until moving into administration. He started out leading smaller Texas districts before landing his dream job of heading up the Dallas schools in 2005. After one term, he left to lead the Cobb County district in metro Atlanta to be closer to his son, who lived in the area. But in 2015, he returned home for another run as chief.

He originally planned to stay through the end of this year, but chose instead to leave in July, saying he had confidence in successor Stephanie Elizalde, who was chief schools officer in Dallas before serving as superintendent in Austin.

Recognizing leadership potential in educators is one of his strengths, said Chaundra Macklin, principal at Joseph J. Rhoads Learning Center, a pre-K site in the district. He interviewed her for her first principal’s job in 2007. She worked at a top-rated school, but then he tapped her to lead one that was struggling.

“He encouraged me as a leader even in my darkest moments, when it wasn’t going so well,” she said. “He said, ‘You just keep doing what you need to do.’ ”

He’s currently serving as the new chief impact officer for Engage2Learn, which guided the Dallas district through several challenges, including passage of a $3.2 billion bond issue the fall after the pandemic began. 

He’s also “head coach” of a new effort by the Council of the Great City Schools to support superintendents at a time of unprecedented turbulence in the profession. 

“His commitment to urban education has been proven time and time again,” said Ray Hart, executive director of the council. “He is already playing a pivotal role in the organization’s efforts to train the next generation of leaders and ensure educational equity in the nation’s big-city school districts.”

In an interview, Hinojosa discussed his 27 years of leadership and his desire to share his expertise with other superintendents. He also had tough words for charter schools, discussed the “pitfalls of big urban systems,” and recounted the controversy that drew protesters to his house (It wasn’t mask mandates or critical race theory).

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The 74: Why did you leave six months before originally planned? 

Michael Hinojosa: There’s never a right time. I love being superintendent. I love the city, and I love the district. But I finally had an epiphany. I could do this to the end of my contract in 2024, but I couldn’t do it for another 10 years. I was being selfish. I didn’t want to be just some guy chasing some kind of record. I’ve seen too many people hang on too long, and they ruined the good they did. I didn’t want to be that guy.

There was an expectation that Susana Cordova [who left the superintendent’s job in Denver to become deputy in Dallas in 2021] would be your successor. But that job went to Stephanie Elizalde. What happened there? 

The board put in my contract to bring in somebody for a succession plan, and I chose Susana. I told her from the beginning that I don’t get to make this decision. She knew that on the front end. The board gets to hire the person they want, and they were very fortunate they had two great candidates, obviously Susanna, and Stephanie, who had worked for me before.

I’ve always argued that if you don’t know Dallas, you can get eaten up alive. They had five superintendents in the 1990s — five superintendents in five years, and one of them went to prison. If you don’t know the pitfalls of big urban systems, and particularly Dallas, then you can really stumble. The board had options, and I thought they both were ready. I was upfront with Susanna, but it was a bit of a surprise to me that she didn’t get that opportunity.

What makes Dallas unique? 

It’s had a history of urban race politics and you have some very strong, powerful stakeholders. Some of the previous superintendents did some things that were unforgivable. Everybody was upset and they deserved to be. Performance was not good, so there was very little trust. 

In big cities, you deal with the media, and even though Texas is a right-to-work state, you’ve got to work with labor. If you don’t know the players in the community, that can eat you alive. Not every district is like that, but Dallas is. Now, we’ve had some stability. I was there for 13 years over two terms. Dr. Elizalde knows the community. She was there for five years, so she understands where the landmines are. 

Would you consider a run for mayor in the future? 

I am keeping all options open. The only thing I have going against me is that I am 66 years old but as healthy as ever.

How much did the political battles of the past two years influence your decision to leave the district?

None at all. In fact, I don’t get stressed. I give stress. I’m a carrier. I love being in the fight, and I enjoyed every bit of that. First of all, there was the pandemic. In Dallas, we also had a tornado. Other people [in Texas] have had hurricanes, and then you have the cultural wars. As urban superintendents, we’re used to taking the heat, but that’s not true in the suburbs. In fact, now I’m consulting with the Council of the Great City Schools and out of their 77 members, only 20 of them have been in the chair since 2020.

They’ve got all these people lined up, yelling at the school board, yelling at the superintendent.

You’ll be a superintendent-in-residence with the Council. Can you describe your role a little more?  

Since so many superintendents are brand new, there’s going to be a great need out there. One superintendent may need operational help. We’ll have someone who has that expertise. A lot of them may need instructional help. A lot of them have never dealt with school boards. We’re going to have a variety of tools that can help superintendents have a fighting chance to be successful in this environment.

You worked with Engage2Learn in Dallas, and now you’re going to be consulting with them. What did they help you accomplish?

People want problem solvers. They don’t want whiners, so if you don’t have the capacity, you’ve got to have someone help you do it. That’s why I’ve taken these opportunities. Even with the talented team I had in Dallas, there were things we couldn’t pull off. Engage2Learn helped us develop a long-range technology plan. That was the backbone for our bond program. Engage2Learn helped us talk to people — students, staff, community members. They synthesized all that information and put it together into something that was actionable for us. 

We have a partnership with Apple to redesign all of our libraries to look just like Apple stores. They’re going to do 50 schools a year over the next four years, and the goal is to make the library the center of traffic for students and community members. Engage2Learn was able to pull in people to help develop and execute on those plans.

The third thing they helped us with is Achieving in the Middle (an improvement initiative focused on middle schools). We’ve done great with our high schools because of our P-TECH program (a STEM-focused program in which students can earn a postsecondary degree or certificate while still in high school). We’re doing very well with our elementary schools, but our last frontier was middle school achievement. Parents make decisions from grades four to eight, and they’re going to vote with their feet. One time I asked leaders, “What’s our best middle school?” And it was like crickets in the room. 

On the library redesign, did you get any pushback from librarians?

Some of our principals quit using the libraries, and then they traded in the librarian for another instructional coach or the assistant principal. This is bringing the librarians back. They’ve had to rethink how they do business, but it’s gotten them very excited about the library. Even the principals that gave up librarians now want librarians because it’s going to be a way-cool model. 

I’m sure with all these superintendents you’re going to be coaching, the topic of enrollment loss and how to attract families into district schools will come up. Talk about your work in Dallas to reverse that trend.

We had this mantra that if you had 300 students or less in your school, you were on the endangered species list. People aren’t picking you. Some Democrats whine about charter schools. I’m not a fan of charter schools. I’m a fan of great schools. I just don’t happen to think that many charter schools are great schools. We have more capacity, we have more intellect, we have more horsepower. We need to beat the charters at their own game and provide Montessori schools, STEM schools, single-gender schools, biomedical schools. 

We have a northern suburb, and every year, we would lose about 75 students to them and we would gain about 75 students from them because they went to our specialty magnet schools. This last year, during the pandemic, we lost about 60 kids to them, but we gained 500 kids from that school district. We stopped the hemorrhaging.

Those are some tough statements about charter schools. Is that just your experience or your view of charters in general?

We don’t get to pick our kids. We take all of God’s children. That’s my belief system, but I don’t whine about them. I just try to beat them at their own game. 

What was the roughest period you went through as superintendent?

The low point was 2008 when I had to lay off 1,000 teachers. Luckily, the board let me stay. I told him they could have fired me, but I said, “If you fire me, then you’re going to argue for six months about who’s going to be the interim. You’re going to argue for six months about who’s going to do the search. You’re going to argue for six months over who’s going to get the job. I could solve this thing in nine months.”

In fact, we re-hired 600 of the 1,000 teachers that were laid off. We just had to make sure we were solvent. I didn’t eat for two months until we figured it out. I had to go face the music. People were protesting at my house. It had an impact on my family, but I was very blessed that the board let me stay. And then when I left, they brought me back.

That was a lower point than the pandemic and your conflict with the governor?

The pandemic was tough, and we didn’t have a playbook, but that’s what leaders do. Leaders step up in a crisis. The board criticized me a little bit because they were finding out about stuff on CNN. So the next time I took on the governor, I had to step back, pause, and call every board member and tell them what I was about to do.

Command decisions are easy to make, and hard to implement, and consensus decisions are messy. They take a long time, but the implementation is much deeper. When you’re in a crisis, you’ve got to make command decisions, but you also still need to inform people of why you’re making these decisions.

Democratic incumbent Raphael Warnock was re-elected to the U.S. Senate with 51% of the Georgia vote, besting his GOP challenger Herschel Walker. Warnock became the state’s first Black U.S. Senator after winning a special election in 2020, and now becomes Georgia’s first Black U.S. Senator elected to a full six-year term. Skye Oduaran covered the race and published a Dec. 7 story with Scholastic Kids Press.

Skye Oduaran was reading a Scholastic Magazine in fifth grade when she noticed a section inviting youth to apply for positions as kid reporters with the magazine. It intrigued her, so she sent in an application.

Fast forward six months and the Atlanta 12-year-old now has zig-zagged across her state, scoring interviews with a sitting governor and a U.S. senator, among others, as a reporter for Scholastic Kids Press. She met former President Barack Obama on the campaign trail and is now angling for an interview. In November, she reported from the White House — the first time a youth with press credentials had ever done so, Secret Service members told her.

Many of the budding journalist’s stories focus on education, schools and other youth-centered topics.

“I like to write articles to bring awareness to issues that impact kids,” said Oduaran, who attends Kennedy Road Middle School.

It doesn’t hurt that Oduaran lives in Georgia, a state that has been at the white hot center of American politics for the past several years and will now host a runoff Tuesday in the U.S. Senate race. In-person early voting has been exceptionally strong in the contest between Democratic incumbent Raphael Warnock and Republican challenger Herschel Walker, with more than a million voters already casting their ballot. Oduaran has been out speaking to many of them. State law in Georgia requires winning candidates to surpass 50% of the vote, but on Nov. 8, neither Warnock nor Walker hit that threshold.

While Republicans in January will take control of the U.S. House of Representatives, Democrats maintained control of the Senate. A Warnock win would give the party additional breathing room in that chamber, breaking a 50-50 split that afforded West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin extensive nay-saying power over the last two years.

Knowing the 12-year-old reporter would be busy on voting day, The 74 caught up with Oduaran a few days prior. Her mom, Erica Oduaran, sat next to the young journalist as we spoke over Zoom about the inspiration behind her work, her advice to the national press corps and her plans to return to the White House someday — only not as a reporter.

This conversation has been edited lightly for clarity and length.

The 74: You have been all over the state reporting. How has that been?

Skye Oduaran: It’s been very exciting. I’ve met a lot of candidates who are running for different positions. It’s been very fun. I’ve learned a lot about how politics works in the state and how candidates become elected to their positions.

When you think about these last weeks and months, what are some of the moments that stand out most?

Well, I met [former President] Barack Obama at a campaign rally in College Park, Georgia. I enjoyed that. And I’m thinking about reaching out to his campaign to see if I can get an interview with him. 

I’ve also met Stacey Abrams on the campaign trail when she was campaigning to become governor. And I had an opportunity to exchange a question with Brian Kemp at his Kemp for Farmers campaign rally. 

Also, Sen. Raphael Warnock, I had an interview with him. And I asked him about what he plans to do with education in the state of Georgia and how that can help other states.

There aren’t many 11-year-olds who can say that. 

I just turned 12. 

Happy birthday. When was your birthday?

Nov. 9.

The day after Election Day. Happy belated. Well, there aren’t many 12-year-olds who have done all those things. When you’re in those interviews, what’s going through your head? How do you come up with your questions?

How I come up with questions is I think about how these candidates can impact education and things that impact kids around the state and in the country. And once I know how it can impact kids, I come up with questions that suit that perspective.

You have a unique perspective as someone who’s still in K-12 education. How does that inform your reporting?

I would say, for instance, last week on Monday, I went to the White House to report on the pardoning of the Thanksgiving turkey. According to the Secret Service, that was the first time that they had a kid with press credentials coming to report an event. Apparently, before that, they only had adults.

First of all, congratulations on that. But second, how is your coverage different because you’re a young person?

It is different because it’s writing from a perspective that impacts kids. Scholastic Kids Press is where you report by kids, for kids. And when a kid writes, they are addressing what a lot of other kids think of because they are in the same age group and they have the same perspective.

I like to write articles to bring awareness to issues that impact kids so that they can change what is going on.

Now we’re just a few days away from the runoff. Based on the conversations you’ve had in the election cycle, what’s on the minds of Georgia voters right now?

I’d say a lot of Georgia voters that I talked to, they talk about how the election is very close, for the reason of the polls being very close. 

A lot of voters told me that instead of voting for the party line, they want to choose who they think is best for the state. So not choosing based on party, but they are looking at the candidates and what they stand for.

Fast forward to Tuesday, what’s your plan for coverage on voting day?

My plan is to go to different polling stations and ask voters questions. For instance, I’m going to be asking them … [if they] voted with the party line or across party lines. And asking them why did they feel the election was important, and why they decided to vote. 

Today, I’m going to go to a campaign rally with Barack Obama again. I intend to meet him and ask him for an interview later. So I’m going to use information from that to also put it into my article. 

My article is going to include what voters say at the polling stations, the Obama event, the trial when Sen. Raphael Warnock sued the state of Georgia [over early voting restrictions] and also early voting on Saturday, [Nov.] 26.

How does your reporting work dovetail with school attendance? Do you get excused absences or are you doing all this outside school time?

My reporting works very well with school. My skills from reporting improve my academic performance and my learning in school — particularly in areas such as social studies, [English language arts] and math — help my understanding of numbers, politics, economics and how to best communicate these to others. 

I conduct my reporting before and after school, as well as on weekends. There was only one occasion where I had to use an excused absence to conduct my reporting. My mother picked me up early so that I could cover a campaign event with Gov. Brian Kemp in Moultrie, Georgia that required several hours of driving to get there. On the same day, I also covered the campaign event of Democratic challenger Stacey Abrams in Jonesboro, Georgia. These were the only events that necessitated an excused absence from school. 

For the runoff election on Tuesday, I will be in school. In Georgia, schools are open on election days. I intend to go to the polls before school on Tuesday to interview voters and then return to the polls to continue reporting after school finishes.

To rewind a little bit on your own story, how did you initially get interested in journalism?

I’ve always enjoyed writing. And one day in fifth grade, I was reading a Scholastic Magazine to complete an assignment and I saw that there was a section that said that they were looking for kids to apply to become Scholastic reporters. The articles inside of the newspaper were all written by kids who were my age. 

I said that next year, I should try to apply for the position to report on events because I wanted to bring awareness to issues that I believe are important.

That was about six months ago.

And now, boom, you’re reporting on the runoff, talking to senators all that. How does that feel?

It feels amazing. And it’s also fun.

[At Scholastic Kids Press], I could report on anything I want, so once I started as a reporter, I went straight to the gubernatorial election and I started to work on my articles.

You’ve not wasted any time.

Erica Oduaran, Skye’s mother, chiming in: She got the position at the end of September. So essentially, the beginning of October is when she started being a kid reporter.

Skye, you really hit the ground running. It sounds like a key goal for you is interviewing former President Barack Obama. Obviously an interview with a former president is phenomenal as a journalist. But what made you set your sights on that particular goal?

Well, I have decided that I would like to interview Barack Obama someday. This is because he is doing a lot of good things for our country and I would like to bring awareness to that. I also want to interview Michelle Obama, because I see that she is also doing a lot of things to help kids and families around the country. 

Who in the world is your biggest role model?

Michelle Obama, because she encouraged kids staying fit and active. And she and her husband, they started the program Race to the Top (the White House education agenda that directed federal money toward more rigorous standards and testing, accountability and turning around low-performing schools) as well as a lot of other things that helped to improve education in our country.

Are there any teachers you’ve had who stand out to you for making a big impact on your path?

My parents. My mother and my father, they homeschooled my brother and my sister and me [through third grade].

They taught me everything. Mommy has a Ph.D. She is amazing at math and science and she makes it very interesting. My father also has a Ph.D and he is amazing at social studies, history and reading. And he also loves to teach them in amazing ways. So that’s why they’re my favorite teachers.

They cover all the subjects between them. 

Yes. 

You’ve covered a lot of education issues. I read your piece on the teacher shortages. What drew you to those topics?

Well, at school, a lot of kids talk about how they see education as a very top priority. I’ve interviewed a lot of kids, too, and they say that education is most important to them. 

So I decided that if I started writing about it, I can make education [politics] more accessible to them. A lot of the candidates want to make sure education’s more accessible for kids around the country, too, and so I decided to write about it.

What do you think adult journalists could better understand about how to cover youth issues?

I would say, for instance, I went to the White House last week on Monday. And a lot of the reporters were really only focused on getting the top story. There was a lot of pushing and shoving to get to the front where they could see the event, some even got on ladders, so that blocked the view of other reporters. 

So is maybe what you’re saying they could be a little nicer?

Yes.

Do you have any advice for other young folks who might be looking to get into journalism, but not know how?

I would say that they should be curious. They should observe the world around them. And they should have fun. And they should find issues that they think are important to them and see how they can use it to impact kids their age.

How is the kind of learning you do when you’re out in the field covering, for example, a campaign rally different from the kind of learning you do in the classroom?

I’ve learned that when you interview someone, you need to look them straight in the eyes. You must ask them the question very directly. You get straight down to the point of the question and you must enunciate it. I’ve also learned a lot about how journalism works and how you write your articles so that they attract the audience of who you are trying to get the attention of.

Taking those things in mind, what do you think should be different about the current education system?

I would suggest that there are teachers who are certified to teach their certain subjects, so students are engaged and are understanding the subject.

And also teachers could maybe do an activity with students to get students engaged and make sure that not only do they understand it, but they’re having fun with it. 

For you, what’s next?

I’ve started my own school newspaper [the Kennedy Road Cougar Column] and I’d like to extend that to other schools in my school system. I also intend to stay in Scholastic until I’m 14 because you can stay in Scholastic until you are 14. I’ve heard of another reporting company for teenagers, so when I turn 15, I would like to do it. And on top of that, I would also like to start my own newspaper for Georgia.

I also intend to, after I graduate from high school, go to college. And I will go to law school afterwards and I will become a lawyer. And I will become a judge because you have to become a lawyer before becoming a judge. And then I’m going to run for president of the United States in 2048.

Wow, awesome.

Yes. I’ve also started my campaign right now where I printed stickers that say for people to vote for me in 2048. My mother’s going to go get them right now so I can show them to you.

Long game for 2048. You’re getting an early start.

Twenty-six years. It’s really not that long.