Season 2, Episode 12: Learning pods for low-income learners

Hey, Michael.

Hey, Diane. I hope you're doing well. We it's President's Day today, or as it's formally known, it's Washington's birthday. I only recently learned that it's not technically called President's Day. And I learned that because we got to have my brother, who's a professional historian, come in and talk to my girls about Washington's birthday today, which was pretty neat. And even though it's a day off, theoretically learning actually never stops, it turns out. How you doing?

That is so cool, Michael. And as you noted, we're recording on this holiday and I'm reflecting on the day in ways that I never have before. I realize I used to be annoyed with what I felt like was sort of an oversimplification of like, the lesson I learned, I don't know, way back in kindergarten about George Washington never telling a lie. And you know, I have to admit, Michael, while I continue to believe it's important that we see entire real people as we study history, I also have a really renewed belief in the importance of seeking out and voting for demonstrated character and values in an American president. So this today is taking on some new meaning to me today.

Amen to that. And I would say, look, all of these searches for new meanings in our lives, you know, it's a natural result obviously of the pandemic and the pause that so many of us have been on. And obviously this is a big reason we launched class disrupted. You know, at the time we were just hoping to get through that first season and give people some wisdom. And I think a lot of folks thought, well, gee, then it'll come back to normal, and it hasn't. And the number of education topics and the urgency around a lot of those topics just continues to grow. And it bleeds into what I want to talk to you about today, Diane, which is learning pods, which was obviously a hot conversation several months ago. But I wanted talk about learning pods for low income students, which until recently was a storyline that had largely escaped the mainstream media. What's on your radar?

Well, Michael, this might be the day of little mentioned topics in the media because I want to talk to you about a somewhat throwaway comment a legislator made about the Congressional Committee on Education and labor and how I think it might illustrate the confusing and conflicting relationship we have with education in America. So let's do it. Let's dive in. Why don't you kick us off?

Sounds good. So the articles that caught my attention were twofold. One, there was this piece a few days ago from the center for Reinventing Public Education and for those who don't know them, group out of University of Washington, they do fantastic research on a variety of topics and they wrote a piece about It Takes a Village, the pandemic learning movement one year in, because they've been really, excuse me, the pandemic learning pod movement one year in, and they've been doing a lot of tracking and have had a database about learning PO pods throughout all this. And then just a day or so ago, there was a Boston Globe article called Learning Pods taking root in Black Latino Neighborhoods. And this, you know, the two together I think, really struck me, Diane, because a, you know, I will say the Boston Globe, they've obviously gotten some money to do some really in depth reporting on education. And I think it's been incredibly valuable during all of this. And then center for Reinventing Public Education, or SERPI, as a lot of people call them, has shown some interesting things, I think, from their database of learning pods, which is by no means representative of pods out there, nor does it include, you know, things like the more informal type of pod that we were running in the fall at my home, for example. But some of the findings I think from, from the two together were really interesting and just a couple ones that jumped out. One, community based organizations and adults beyond the teacher are playing an increased role supporting students and their families throughout the pandemic. That's not news, but it's just worth saying again. And according to serpi, the majority of learning operators in their database, learning pod operators, are non school organizations, which points to something we've talked a lot about, which is that school districts have not really stepped in to provide this sort of continuity or care and things of that nature. But instead it's community based organizations, businesses, city governments that are creating these in person learning opportunities. According to the SERPI database, 44% of the pods are operated by nonprofits, 17% by for profits, 10% by cities or counties. None of those touches schools. And we're talking like entities like YMCAs or science museums. 80% of these are meeting outside of school spaces. Now the next thing that I think jumped out is that we're really seeing that a lot of these pods, they're actually free. Like, you know, most of them are charging a fee, but a lot of them are free right now. And few are explicitly prioritizing, you know, about serving kids who are in vulnerable populations or students with disabilities or English language learners, you know, the children we need the most support right now. But there is a significant number of them that are. The other interesting finding I thought was that most of these pods, they're focused on younger students, not adolescent learners. And I thought that was just an interesting point. And then the last one that jumped out at me before the question I guess I have for you is we're seeing these pods provide critical services of supervision and support for virtual learning, but a small portion in the SERPI database are also providing a lot of well rounded support and enrichment opportunities for students. So way beyond the basics, in other words. Right. And just opportunities for these kids to stretch their horizons beyond the simple schooling that they're offered in many cases. And so from my perspective, I think a, it says this isn't just these learning pods aren't just an upper income phenomenon. A lot of people are figuring out how to do this. But the question I have for you is do you think any of these pods or these community organizations specifically will have staying power beyond the pandemic to give low income learners the supports that frankly they lacked in school before this all got started as well?

Wow, Michael, it's such an important question. And you know, the Boston Globe article certainly was useful in provoking it. You know, I agree with the reporting. It's interesting. You're, you're turning me into a Boston Globe reader.

I apologize.

What we see in that story, one of the many things we see in it is so many black and brown led community organizations stepping into a significant gap in order to support the children of their community. And on the one hand, Michael, there's a long history of community organizations playing a significant role in supporting the care and education. And the education you're talking about, the sort of going beyond the traditional, the enrichment that is really meaningful and targeted to the members of a community in these community organizations, providing that to children through mostly after school programming, but certainly weekend and let's not forget lower cost private schools, usually taking the form of Catholic school schools, but you know, in communities, and you know, it's interesting as a sort of side note, but related here, one of the criticisms of charter schools is that they created a free, competitive alternative to Catholic schools and have had quite an impact on them. And so, you know, I think what's interesting here is maybe a resurgence or a stepping into this gap. You know, I certainly cannot speak for or begin to as a white woman, understand the experience of black and brown parents in our education system. What I believe to be true is that they are parents who I think all parents care deeply about their children and are seeking the best opportunities they can to provide for their kids and who are repeatedly told that the data shows that the schools in this country aren't serving their children and their children aren't thriving in our schools. I think about receiving that message just over and over again as a parent and coupling it with what has been a steady drumbeat of anti black, anti immigrant messages. And as a mother, when my child is not with me, I want him to be with people who respect him, who care for him, who understand him and want him to be successful. And so it seems really logical to me that many parents might have significantly more trust for these community based organizations that are run by people who look like them, who live in their community, who understand their experience in contrast to many of their schools. I think it's certainly possible that the pandemic will create a new demand for what these organizations are offering and for a role they can continue to play that is central. Here's the bad news. I think education is pretty much an entrenched monopoly and I don't see the system making space for or allowing community based organizations to really encroach on their territory or revenue streams, if I'm being sort of crude and blunt here. And so even if it's what parents want and it's best for students and will potentially distribute the responsibility of raising and developing our children across our community in a way that many people believe in deeply, unfortunately, it comes back to the idea of choice in education. And as we both know, that's become such a polarizing and such politicized discussion. And so what I think is warranted here is a real nuanced, thoughtful look at what, what we're talking about, which is meaningful choice for parents. And I just see this coming up all over the place. And it's the thing that came through really profoundly to me in this story, in this topic.

Yeah, it's a good set of points you raised, Diane, and it brings back. I had a conversation recently with Annette Anderson, who we've talked about before in this podcast, and she just talked about how black parents are for the first time realizing their power in the system because they can hold their kids out of the system. And like you said, they've been hearing over and over again and how schools have not served their needs, their children well at all. They see the racism around them in society. And then there's an awakening with the killing of George Floyd. But they say, what took you so long? Let's fix this. And thirdly, another point she brought up was that a lot of them are looking around and Saying we've been misled on this pandemic over and over again. You know, people thought we'd be back in a couple of weeks, and then it was months, and then it was this and then. And it keeps changing. Right. And. And that's another topic for us to address at another time. But I guess against that backdrop, she had a very optimistic message, which is with this power to hold children out, you can make people listen to you perhaps more than you could in other times, and that many of these families might not go back. And the reason I bring that up is I think I'm intrigued by the notion of pods or these community organizations specifically, that have more trust, to your point, expanding scope. And we know that we need more of this in the sense that schools need to wrap their hands around children more and provide more services that people haven't historically perhaps thought of as part of school. If students are going to become prepared adults, you know, from academically, skills, habits of success, and so forth. And here's a way I think about this from outside of the school prism for a second, which is, you know, when I'm going to go into the world of computing for a moment. And when IBM made the first mainframe computers, it wasn't enough for them to just be the manufacturers and distributors and sellers of mainframes. What they realized is all the other parts of the ecosystem weren't good enough to basically just snap together mainframes. So they had to build the logic circuitry, they had to do the core memory, they had to do the operating system all themselves. They had to stretch across if they wanted to sell a mainframe, they had to do any everything. And I think it's an interesting analogy for schooling because if we want kids to have those academic skills, those habits of success, those critical thinking skills and problem solving and the like, for a lot of kids, they don't have the resources, as we've talked about in other podcasts, to come into that conversation at a place where they can absorb and learn and take on those, you know, those skills and so forth. And so schools are going to have to integrate backward into parts of life that we've typically thought of as the domain of home and so forth, if you want them to be prepared. And I guess what I. What I'm interested in is, you know, if we can move to a world. There's so many states right now introducing bills like Arizona with education savings accounts, where dollars will go directly to the families to say, where do you want to spend it? And that's Intriguing, I think, because you could imagine families in a more ongoing way paying for these community organizations to provide some of these services that are so critical to their success. And I have a little bit of concern about it because I think if you have a patchwork of services, it might not give you the coherence that a child needs in their life to really be successful. And there's another analogy for this, which is when something's not good enough, it's still immature and so forth. You don't need a bunch of arm's length services around each other. I think it's why community schools and some of these other movements haven't worked where they just bring in wraparound supports, but they keep them divorced from academics. Like these things all have to be done together. And I guess my hope, though, is that if a district or school started seeing someone peel out parts of the revenue for different services, they might say, actually we should be the hub that integrates all this thoughtfully together. And maybe they would innovate and I would think over time it would win out. And, you know, we'll have to watch. It's now it's no slam dunk. It's a long movie that I just described, but it gives me some hope that there's some power in the system that maybe could tilt the balance and help schools innovate more.

Wow, Michael. Well, couple so much there and a couple of threads that I think lead nicely into what really piqued my interest. First, this idea of the power in the system and the demand, and then second, this idea of, of hope that we still both keep coming back to and is really our touchstone. So let me jump in and describe what really caught my attention. So my topic was sparked by the coverage of the story of removing Marjorie Taylor Greene from her committee assignments. I think this is a story many people were watching, but my interest is really just a footnote in that story. And specifically, it's a comment that Representative Adam Kinzinger, a Republican from Illinois, made to CNN in which he said, the Congressional Committee on Education and labor, which is one of the committees Greene was assigned to, who many people said she should not be assigned to, what he said is not considered a good committee. What struck me is that he said it so matter of factly and it was accepted as a matter of fact. It was a total throwaway comment in so many ways. Yet it is one of those open secrets that carries so much weight and meaning. The reality that the work of education on Capitol Hill is not respected or revered. This little comment has me really reflecting on what it is about education that in one breath people claim it is the civil rights issue of our time. It is critical to the future of our democracy, and it's imperative to the reopening of our economy. And yet, on the other hand, in another breath, it's so clearly and deeply lacks prestige and respect. I just find myself, I found myself turning over and over in my head, what does that mean for professional educators, for families and for our economy and our democracy, and does it even matter? And if so, how and what can and should be done about it? You know me, I'm always about what can we do? And so consistent with all of our topics. It feels as if the pandemic is making this formally sort of invisible really visible or present right now. And so, Michael, I'm particularly interested in your thoughts on this because you seemingly live in these two worlds that have very different societal value and respect. You're in the Harvard business world, which as a society we tend to have great reverence for, and also in education. And so I'm so curious, what do you notice and experience and what do you think any of this even matters?

So first, Diane, thanks for pointing out the dichotomy of my two worlds. But you know, in seriousness, I think you raise a really important set of points, and I don't know that I have the answer to it. But I also don't know that what you're pointing to is unique to our country, which I think is interesting. As you know, I've spent a fair bit of time abroad studying other countries education systems and helping out in some places, and in many, not all, but in many, the minister of Education is thought of as the low rung of the totem pole, and the other ministries sort of openly roll their eyes at them. And you know, again, it's not universal, but it's not as correlated either as you might think it would be with the respect for educators that a particular society holds or not. And what I mean by that is, you know, there are certain countries that hold teachers in greater reverence, I think it's fair to say, than America does. But that doesn't necessarily mean it extends to the Ministry of Education, which is, I think, interest. The second thought I have is I do wonder to some extent, does this speak to this sort of experience versus expertise debate that we often see in education? And what I mean by that is we've all been through schools and therefore everyone thinks they're an expert on schooling, and there's some sort of arrogance that we hold around that. Right. And that's about experience. It's not about expertise. Right. Of studying, you know, the sciences, of learning as you have and figuring out how do you apply them into your school. And, you know, this is a topic I'll talk about in a little bit. It's literally the topic I'm reading about in a book right now about physical education. But it's something we do all the time where we think we're experts, even though we really just have experience. I think there's another dynamic in this also, which is specific to the US to some degree, which is federalism and the way our system of government works. Because in education particularly, states are the ones that wield the power. As you know, as we've talked about, federal spending in K through 12, education certainly isn't that significant, much more so in post secondary education. But in K through 12, it's a line item. It's like 9 to 10%. And relative to the size of the federal government's budget, it's very small. Yet in states, education is a major category of spending. That and healthcare and pensions basically make up the lion's share of a state's budget. And so you have education governors and people who stake their whole careers in state government around education. And I do think it does carry more respect in those places. And it's where, I guess dollars to some degree follow. There's a cultural attache, if you will, to that, of following to respect. I don't know where the causality is in that, but it's definitely a connection, I think. And yet against that backdrop, and again, this is where I don't have any answers, but we do have some anomalies. I think we have people like Lamar Alexander, who just retired from the Senate, who clearly picked that committee. Right. And he was well respected. He was also someone who was focused on policies over politics, I think it's fair to say. And it relates to just this one last aside that I'm struck by, which is, you know, we're obviously coming off the impeachment hearings for President Trump. And if you look at the Republicans who crossed party lines and voted to convict Trump in those hearings, five of the seven are members of the Senate HELP Committee, so the Higher Ed Health Care Education Labor Committee. That's interesting to me. I don't know what to make of it, Diane, but I think it's interesting because is that a place of more bipartisanship? It doesn't directly connect to your question around respect, but I don't know. I think those are pretty respecting members who made a very principled choice. So what are your thoughts?

Well, you always make me think, Michael, which is why I love bringing these questions to you. I didn't see that last one coming, that's for sure. And so I'm having a moment right now and also realizing that in many ways, listening to you helps me sort of put my finger on what's been niggling me ever since reading that quote. And it's the paradox of it, I think. Here's where my mind's currently going, and I know I'm going to be thinking about this for a long time. But, you know, a democracy, our democracy, is really nothing more than a set of values and beliefs and ultimately social contracts that a group of people buy into and choose to uphold. You know, we've seen recently what happens when groups of people decide not to do that and what that looks like and what that means to me, that the people of our nation, their values, their beliefs, their knowledge, their experiences, their expertise, those are truly the foundation upon which our democracy rests. And like, like so many things during this pandemic, twin, triple, whatever you want to call it, we have laid bare the fragility of our democracy. And in doing so, in a way that I don't think has ever happened, at least in my lifetime. And we've revealed that as a nation, we are falling short when it comes to education. And I'm not talking about for any particular group of people or kids or demographic. I am literally talking about for everyone. Our education system is not, we can't say it enough. It is not designed to support the development of our children as citizens in this age and in the age that we are facing. And so I think about my understanding of what happens when we as a country discover that our military equipment isn't modern enough, it doesn't meet the demand of the times. What do we do? We, like, redesign it. We rebuild it. We innovate because we know how critical it is to keep our nation safe. And we have got to do the same thing in education. We can't simply return to what we've been doing. It is not working for so many reasons on so many levels and for many, so, so, so many people. And quite frankly, it doesn't matter if we're tired from the pandemic. We've got to do better. We've got to do better now. And so, you know, when we started this podcast at the beginning of the pandemic, I think, as you have noted, we were both really hopeful that it would be an opportunity and a catalyst to redesigning and rethinking. And you know, now nearly a year in, I think we've both gone through our ups and downs or a little bit more cynical about people embracing the opportunity. And yet I think, I think we both realize it is just so imperative. And so I think maybe at this moment I'm perhaps trading in my hope for persistence because we've got to double down and figure out how to get out of the side taking and the political fighting and instead come together in a third way approach that is needed. And right now we're so distracted by not getting along, we're not actually making any progress. And so I will just my, my thought that is really sticking with me right now is I do not think it's hyperbolic to say that the future of our nation actually depends on, on this. And this is a critical moment. And so I'm just really reflecting on my role and what I need to do in order to make that happen.

Yeah, no, those are big thoughts, Diane, and nothing with which I disagree, but a call, I think, for us to continue to professionalize the profession, frankly, of educators to show that we are following the latest evidence that we have and as you said, remaking and transforming the system in line with that. I think that's those are steps that all of us on the ground educators can take to get that respect and authority and hopefully change that narrative. It's a good segue, I think, to what you've been going through in your organization this week, if I'm not mistaken. So let's shift as we final words from both of us about what we're reading and thinking about.

Yeah, this is really, I'm excited to shift here. You know, this week is a professional development week historically in our organization and we've organized around a really inspiring conference for, you know, our 500 plus employees focused on, on our own personal journeys of learning and our organizational journey to become more anti bias and anti racist. And you know, I have the honor of leading one of many book club discussions that will take place during this week. My book is Cast by Isabel Wilkerson and I like Wilkerson's previous book, the Warmth of Other Suns Cast has taught me so much about the history of our nation that I never learned in any class and really provoked me to think and act in different and more equitable ways. So I'm so excited to be, you know, honored to be leading a book club conversation. I can't wait to dig into it with, with so many People. Yeah. And. And curious to hear what you're reading about this week. Michael, you gave us a little preview a moment ago.

Yeah, I gave you a preview. So the book is called Survival of the fit. It's by Dr. Dan O', Neill, and it's a book about how basically we've lost our way as a nation with physical education, and we treat it as this side thing that's not all that important. It gets very little time in most schools. It's not done particularly well. The time in it is mostly wasted. Kids aren't moving that much, and this is against an epidemic of obesity and all these Western diseases that are born out of our diet and our lack of movement as a society in, in essence, and just the importance of PE toward not just health, frankly, that's a big calling card. But also, like, kids who move, they learn better, too, right? Like, there's a lot there. There's some good evidence that if you do 30 minutes of exercise and then sit down to work, your brain is way more primed to absorb and be active in the learning. And many ways, this has reinforced much that I believe, but it has some provocative ideas about how to restore the importance of pe, as well as just one section that I want to call out, because it's something we've talked about, which is it tackles the sports versus physical activity dichotomy. And so he basically is asking, you know, does sports really need to be part of school? And by sports, I mean organized sports. So team sports, you know, basketball, football, things like that, because they suck up a ton of resources from which. Which most students in schools don't actually benefit. And he says, shouldn't we instead make sure that every single child is getting to move and learn to be healthy? And that's something that I would say is an important idea to hold on and why don't we leave it there? DIANE and I'll just thank everyone once again for joining us on Class disrupted.