A Vision for Education System Transformation

Welcome to the future of education. I'm really excited by today's conversation that we're going to have with Elizabeth Chu. She's the executive director of the center for Public Research and Leadership at Columbia University. And first, welcome. Thanks for being here.

Thank you so much for having me, Michael. I'm so happy to be here.

Well, you all put out a tremendously informative and I think important report called Rise to Thrive recently about reinventing our education system and some very important facets and that I, that I want to dig into it. Obviously, the work came out of the pandemic in many ways. But first, before we get into that, I'd love to, you know, get your background. How did you get into this field initially and tell us a little bit about the center.

I would love to. Yeah. So I am a. I'm a teacher and a social science researcher by training. I started out my career as a middle and high school teacher in the South Bronx in New York. The first school that I taught at was a school that was in the process of being phased out in the early 2000s when many schools in the city were being closed and new schools were opening. And I got a chance to look up close at what a hard situation school closure is. And so decided then to see the promising side of the school closures that were occurring and joined the founding faculty of a new school and was part of starting a high school in the South Bronx. And after teaching there for a few years, just although I love teaching, decided to get more into systems level work, joined the team that was starting up Teacher U at Hunter College, which grew into Relay Graduate School of Education, taught teachers for a number of years, got my doctorate in education policy at Columbia, which is where I learned about seapro, participated as I was wrapping up my doctoral work in its inaugural cohort 11 years ago and came back as staff seven years ago and have been with the center ever since.

Very cool, very cool. And just tell us a little bit about the center because you all are not just a research arm, which is what I found so interesting about it, as I've learned about the work you do. I mean, you're working with practitioners in the field. Yes. Doing research for them, but it sounds like a lot more. Can you tell us about the work?

Yeah, I'm so glad you asked because we are different than so many research and policy centers at big universities. We have a dual mission of changing professionals, professional education to change Pre K to 12 education. And basically we see a need for a different type of leader in the education field if we are really going to advance equity. So to do that, we take students from over 25 different schools of law, business policy, education and data sciences, and we bring them to Columbia for an intensive semester on how to manage and lead equity focused learning organizations. And a huge part of their training is working in these interdisciplinary teams on our research and consulting projects that we conduct for state departments of education, school districts, local nonprofits, national legal and policy advocacy organizations, a whole range of actors. And they're doing that work under the close guidance and mentorship of our director team, who themselves have decade plus years of experience in leadership. So we are hoping to model breaking down all the barriers that we find so problematic when you're trying to address really, really complex problems. And in our work, which means that one of those divides we have to break down is between theory and practice and get outside of the ivory tower of the academy and really roll up our sleeves and do the work that we're hoping to try and achieve.

It's one of the things that, I mean, really drew me to the work you all do. And I think the first time I got to interact with your team was around this project, Rise to Thrive. That, from my perspective at least, was born out of the pandemic, where you were taking, yes, a super research base, but really with folks in the field. So before we get into the findings of that project, I'd love you to just actually talk about the origins of that project and sort of what were you trying to accomplish in the report that you put out?

Yeah, and it's part of the reason, Michael, why we've been following your work so closely since the pandemic hit is, I think, like you, we've realized really early on that to have a good understanding of what's been happening in this moment, you need to understand both what's happening in schools and systems, where so much of our work is often located, and in families and communities. And so about a year ago now, I guess we started to really develop really strong relationships with family organizations and individual families in the northeast and across the country to try and understand what was happening. And, you know, working also with the systems and the community organizations that were so important to them to try and do two things. Number one, just help people make it through this year. So what were the resources and tools they needed to meet the moment? And how can we, as a university center, help provide those so that the people who are in the middle of it can do their best work and advance innovations on behalf of kids to the greatest Extent possible. So we released a bunch of family guides. We've been doing a lot of webinars, train the trainer type webinars and other types of support activities with community based organizations. We've been telling stories of things that we've seen that have worked well for kids and helping others to their stories. And then the second thing has always been to understand what were the needs that were unearthed and really spotlighted in this moment. And then what were the innovations both that existed before the pandemic and that surfaced during the pandemic that we could take hold of and put in place to meet those needs so that the after pandemic education system came out stronger than the one that we had before. And really it's this second goal that the rise to thrive vision is much more attached to. It's how can we both take what we've seen in very, very stark terms what the problems are in the education system and map those onto things that we see as possible solutions and then drive toward that type of transformation.

It's interesting. I'll just pause in that first goal for a moment because I think it is something that jumped out to me is like how on the ground with parents and families you were in this moment. It's not something you always see, just to be blunt, out of schools tied to universities, often, you know, they sort of spend a lot of time on the institutional side of the house, so to speak, but not necessarily on the parent demand piece of this and sort of those needs. And so I found that both refreshing but also quite frankly very critical right now in this moment. And you then came out with this report, report recently, which had some central guiding principles that you unearthed, five of them in specific that I would love to dig into. And so if you wouldn't mind speaking to those up front, I think it'd be interesting how you frame them. And what are the five key principles you all settled on?

Yeah, so yes. So these principles and the work that follows grows out of now hundreds of interviews that we've conducted over the past year, like I said, with students, a number of the interviews with high school students, families, teachers, school leaders, community members and education leaders. And one of the questions that we were asking all along is what equity means and what equity might look like after the pandemic. And what would you need for your children, or you, if you are a student, to be really, really happy and thriving at the end of your educational experience. And so we landed on five principles. The principles are, first, focus on equity to reach equality and justice the second is that learning is going to be the constant in this transformed system and operations, instruction and time are the variables in the system. The third is that getting better requires democratic participation and partnership with families, students and community members. I will say that one of the good things that has arisen out of the pandemic that we found is that there really is for the first time a building back toward trust. So instead of earning distrust, earning trust in this relationship between many schools and many families so that they can work together to support their children. The fourth is effective, not best practices drive student learning. And the last is that the student opportunity and learning has to traverse traditional boundaries.

So I want to dig in on a few of these because like I said, I thought they were all fascinating. In some ways, I think the equity one really emerged from the moment makes a lot of sense. What I would call the competency based pillar, learning is the constant, time is the variable. That second one. I've been surprised at how little attention in some ways that has gotten more nationally in the conversation, at least from my perspective. I think in some of these pockets people said now is the time, it's the mastery moment. But people seem to be just still focusing on time, on learning, and frankly the time that a lot of students haven't been spent learning. What are your observations on this one and how did you all arrive at that pillar specifically?

Yeah, well, I'm so glad you asked about it because really these first two have to work together and I think they cut against this idea of equality that we see so often in our education system to date, which is just really a focus on equality of inputs. And because it's so hard to measure and understand equality of the inputs that matter most in education, we have this long history of focusing on equality of the easiest inputs that we can measure, including things like time, time for instruction and time on task and things like that. And so what we're really driving toward is if you are going to have a system where learning we're looking for learning equality, not input equality. It means that there has to be an equity focus on having the right amounts of all of those input variables that allow students to achieve these learning and these thriving goals at equal levels. And that's what we've seen in the places that we've studied that have had the most success. A lot of them had mastery based systems going in. They'd adjusted to mastery based grading policies or competency based grading policies and things like that. It always removes a ton of bias in the evaluation systems when you make that shift. But a number of places did that were, that were farther along this year did take them up for the first time. And it was a huge shift for them. But they've seen it as really meaningful and transformative, including because once you focus on student learning above all else, that also opens up a whole new type of partnership and conversation with families and students about what they're getting in school.

It's such an important point, the way you just said it, in terms of the dependency or interdependency of those two factors. Just because from my observation and my own kids, right, like they don't need the number of hours perhaps that other families do in this time. And it seemed to me schools could be better allocating resources toward those families who need the most, whose parents can't be around. Right. Who don't have jobs that perhaps they can do from the home, like I've been privileged to be able to do. And so reallocating resources to truly make sure you're catching the kids that need the most time so that they can learn that material. Seems like such an important way to tackle the fact that, you know, there are limited resources there. It's just the reality of what we live in right now. And even with federal dollars coming in, that's going to continue to be the case that for I think at least a three year recovery period from all this. So hopefully there's still time to make that transition to mastery. I guess it gets into my next one I want to dig into though, which is you talked about. So I'm going to gloss over not because I think it's not important, but just, just to get into because I think the participation of the community is critical and you raised a really good point there. But the effective, not best practices has been one of my soapbox things, I think for 15 years now, which, and it's not just because like best practices is this consulting language that I think sounds terrible, but also because I think by definition best practices are those that work on average and they don't show you the variability of this context or the circumstance. This is when it works and this is when it doesn't. Let's get the right practice for the right need or right context. And you all this, this is the clearest I've ever seen it written in a report from a university. So I was curious how you came at that and sort of what's, what's the origin of that and how do we get a better understanding of the need to switch that framing?

Yeah, well, it's so funny you say that because when we put out the report, we had no idea the amount of conversation that would come around this fourth report principle. And it's been the one that we've gotten the most questions and the most pushback against, interestingly enough. So I think going back to what I said about the center and just what we believe, we believe that to lead effectively in the education system and to lead an equity oriented education system, you have to have a learning mindset and you have to lead learning organizations and you can't have a learning mindset and lead learning organizations if you are looking for silver bullet solutions that are going to solve all of your problems and that don't require an inquiry based approach to constantly striving to get better all the time and to look at the variability and implementation and try and shrink that variability and raise the overall quality. And so we typically, when we come up against this mindset of best practices, it's typically looking for one size fits all solution, which I think you touched on. And then the other dimension of this that we found really frustrating is this idea that once you find that solution, it's going to be the solution that lasts. So it's a problem that you've solved, done and done. What we work toward is to say let's look for a solution that's going to work in a particular context, so who is it going to work for, under what conditions? And then also let's be attentive to how it's working so that every day your job is not just to put that solution in place, but your job is to figure out how to get better at doing that work all the time.

Just tremendous. And the way you framed it is helpful, I guess. I'm not surprised that there's been a lot of pushback, but I am surprised that it's sort of been the thing that's been the most controversial out of everything that you put out. Because it's a bold set of proposals in general. The last one, no exception either, that opportunity should be and learning should not be bound by where you live. And it strikes me that in certain quarters that can get controversial. So I'm curious how that one's landed.

Yeah, also highly controversial, I guess in terms of questions. I think people understand what this last one means, whereas the fourth one, it's both a head scratcher and then hard to look in the mirror and say perhaps that's how I've been operating. But yes. So we think, especially after the past year, there are very few excuses to saying that the opportunities that any kid should have available to them are the opportunities that are available inside the four walls of their school. We've already seen that kids have access to programming that extends outside of the four walls of whatever structure they're inside. And we don't think that that needs to stop. And instead, I think we can capitalize on that moment to figure out how can we open up opportunity to kids so that a kid in one place can have access to the very, very best programming, no matter where they live. And some of the systems that have really inspired us have thought about this in their specials. Some of them have thought about this in terms of their interventions and making access open to the best interventionists that they have. And others have thought about it really creatively and are thinking about it in terms of core subject matter. And so we just don't see a reason to go back. There's not a reason to say that kids don't have. That kids have to be constrained by their school. And I will say just I know you want to turn to the practical of how this is going to be implemented and operationalized at some point. And one thing I'll say is that from a cost perspective, we've gotten questions about the level of staffing that this would take. And one of the things that we've pointed out is that hopefully we're on a path toward a place where we don't always have to be socially distanced. And, you know, kids can be in schools, and you could be participating in virtual programming from a school building, you could be participating in virtual programming for an hour out of your day. So, you know, if I have an elementary school kid, my elementary school kid could be at his school building all day and happen to take math with kids from all across the state of New York or be in a math class in California for that matter, or whatever it is, if that's the math class that my child needs to be in in order to meet those learning goals that we set are the constant.

Makes a ton of sense. And the connection, obviously to the other principals makes a lot of sense as well. But also how to do more with less if that's the case from a resource perspective, or more with whatever you have. Right. It's not going to be a cutback, but taking the resources and using them in the best possible way. But. So let's, let's take that as an invitation and turn to the practice question. You know, I'd love to know what this looks like in practice. You obviously highlighted individualized learning plans, which I think every student probably ought to have had before the pandemic, but certainly going forward. You talked about programmatic flexibility. Just illuminate a little bit more what this looks like on the ground.

Yeah, well, one of the places that we always feel like we have to highlight when talking about what this looks on the ground to also make it clear that it is not so pie in the sky that it can't happen, is that a lot of this is happening in Finland and it's not the discussed Finland model. You know, people talk a lot about Finland in terms of the professionalism of their teaching core and other things. And in fact, their teaching core is professionalized. And one reason that we do believe some actors in the education system might be invested in the rise to thrive vision. And when we've had conversations with a lot of teachers, they are, in fact, is because it does increase their level of professionalism to move to a model like this. But the aspect of the Finland model that's less discussed is that about a third of their students have these individualized plans that are governed by teams of family members and educators and others at any given time because they've set this bar where learning is the constant. So a lot of this is in practice in places outside of the US and inside the US and what we are doing now, because we've had a lot of folks come to us over the past few weeks saying we want to get this going, is we are starting with networks of districts, an amount that we can handle, and we are basically going to ramp up, building out implementation plans for what this looks like in year one, year two, year three, thinking through all the financial planning aspects so you can stretch your recovery dollars and all of those sorts of things and move to a place of sustainability. And it's been really, really exciting to see how many people are. They're looking for a framework so that they don't have to start from scratch and are taking the vision as it's laid out and starting to do what we were talking about with effective, not best practices and thinking about how do I take this and tailor it to my local system and come up with a plan that will work for us.

I love that you hearkened to that finished example and not what's commonly known. I think something else that's also part of that, that's implicit in your guiding principles is the amount of trust that is put on students also as part of that model, and that students might not be in school the same amount of hours, you know, they Leave at different points, they have different schedules, even within the same household. There's a lot of trust and as you said, you know, time variable, but learning constant sort of expectations. I'd love to just go one step deeper then. And because you just mentioned you're working with districts, networks, it almost sounds like in the report that you expect to have almost your own network as well, or a super network, if you will. Right. Because you talk about, you know, schools that are in the rise to thrive model, if you will, will have, you know, will be doing these sorts of activities. So to go deeper with us on that, like what, what does that mean? What does it look like to have this network of practitioners and what's the sort of support that you're giving them to see these changes happen?

Well, we are figuring all of that out right now. So it's the million dollar question, partly because, like I said, there's been more interest than we had initially anticipated just to take a step back and really open up the hood, perhaps more than I should on a program like this. And you know, we had initially anticipated putting out this vision, putting out all of the evidence and the data that underlies the vision, and putting out some mocked up operational plans all in May. And then in early March, some of the leaders that we had been engaging really closely with started to, I think, understandably so, everyone's so tired and it's been such a long year, you know, walk back some of their energy for real transformation. And what we started to feel as a center, I think really driven by a lot of our work with families and our equity focus, decided let's just put ourselves out there and put the vision out, because that's the part that was done. And put the evidence, we still will be publishing an evidence brief in May, put that out later, but get the vision out as a conversation starter so that we can really first give ourselves and give other people to have permission to think really big and to think about what transfer means, even as things like tutoring and summer school, which are really important things to have become more available. And in the first couple weeks after putting this out, basically the only responses we were getting was, you are so radical. Try and come back down to earth and think about what we actually might do in the next year. And. And then the complete opposite has happened. And even people who initially had those tough conversations about how radical we were have come back and said, actually I took another look and we've had some meetings with our stakeholders and we need to think bigger. And so we are now holding a lot of things in balance, just trying to figure out. We're an organization of 20 people, so we're trying to figure out what do we do, how do we support others in taking up some of this work. We're also committed to academic freedom and all of those sorts of things. So what can we put out that will just help people take this up? So whether there becomes a formal rise to thrive, meta network or model, I think some of that is all to be worked out in the coming weeks as we manage the amount of demand that we're seeing.

But it's terrific. I'm so glad to hear and grateful to hear that demand and that sort of change in the sentiment and what you're hearing, because I think it's something that needs to happen. It's something that I've been tremendously worried. There were so many statements, as you know, we all went remote over a year ago now, and people said, oh, when we come back, you know, we won't do it the same. And I've been very worried that I'm not sure there's a lot of evidence that people aren't going to come back the same. So I think that these bright spots, you know, you hearing that and people saying, we got to do better, we got to shoot bigger, that's encouraging. As we wrap up, I guess I'm curious for your prognostication as you look forward into the fall or maybe the next couple of years, what sorts of changes do you expect to see? Do you expect to see widespread change? Where, how. What do you think it's all going to look like as it unfolds?

Well, I'm an optimist at heart, so I will say I think you have to be if you're going to be doing this work all the time. So I think the conversations that we're having with students, with families, with so many teachers, teachers who have been teaching for 25 years, and some of our recent interviews have said things to me such as, I know I'm not supposed to be saying this, but I never want to go back. And there are real things that I've been doing this year that have allowed me to be a better teacher than I've ever been before, things like that. You know, we talked to a principal in, you know, one of our big cities yesterday who was saying her biggest fear is going back to normal and that she wants to shift the conversation from things like schools need more money, schools need more resources, schools need more instructional materials to what can school look like for kids who are in my building and who have the context that my kids have. And so all of those things lead me to think that the level of transparency, the level of energy that families and people on the ground are having right now is going to just put more and more pressure on the system or quite frankly I think our public education system is really going to break once and for all and we're going to see a level of splintering that I think is going to be deeply troubling for the fabric of our country.

Yeah, no, everything you just said resonates. So look, on behalf of parents and educators around the country, I just deeply appreciate the fact that you all put this out there and the work that you continue to do to brighten the future for our kids. So thank you.

Well likewise and thank you so much for having me today.

Yes, thanks so much. And we'll be back. Next time on the FUTURE of Education.