The Role of Parents in Recovering from Learning Loss and Literacy

Welcome to the future of education. I'm Michael Horn. Really excited about today's conversation because I think it's a perspective that all too often gets lost in the narrative around how best to engage students, how best to build literacy, and in the current moment, how to recover from all the devastation and learning losses that we've seen out of the pandemic. And so my guest today is Alejandro Gibbos degach. He's the CEO and founder of Springboard Collaborative. And I'll say Alejandro and I first got to know each other through a series of conversations about innovation in his own organization, but I've become quite compelled by his broader message around the importance of parents in this equation. That is something that we don't have to leave to chance, that they have actually figured out. I won't say quite a formula, but, Alejandro, maybe we'll use better words around how to really bring in parents into this equation of supporting each and every learner in a way that I don't see talked about. And so I think it's a really important dialogue given the amount of time that people spend at home and out of school versus in school. With that as backdrop, I will welcome Alejandro to the virtual stage. It is so good to see you. Thanks for being here.

Great to see you. Thanks for having me. And thanks for the kind intro.

Yeah, you bet. So I probably did a terrible job of outlining what Springboard itself actually does in the organization. So why don't I give you a few minutes just to lay out what is Springboard? What's the work that you have been engaged with with schools and districts over the last many years?

Sure. Yeah. You got it. The beating heart of Springboard's work is parent engagement. So I'll start there with my parents. I'm half Chilean, half Puerto Rican. My parents escaped political persecution after my dad, in 1973, he wrote a play in protest of the dictator Binochet. As you can imagine, Binochet was less than amused. So my dad became one of many political prisoners during that that time period. He was luckier than many of his friends to make it out alive. Even luckier to meet my mom. My mom is my Puerto rican half. She's one of 12 siblings and the first one in her family go to go to college. Anyhow, my parents immigrated to the U.S. like so many, so that my sister and me could have better educational opportunities. Unfortunately, didn't take long in Carrollton, Georgia, for them to realize that not every public school delivers on the promise of educational opportunity. So new Strategy was we'd rent the tiniest house in an affluent community with a highly rated public school in New Jersey. They figured, well, that's got to be the ticket. It's a great school. But it didn't work. My sister and I excelled in spite of the school, not because of it. My teachers growing up, they only ever treated my parents like pushy immigrants that didn't belong in the school system. Frankly, the same way my classmates treated me. And the school just systematically put hurdle after hurdle in front of my family all the way through junior year. I'm poised to be the valedictorian. And the high school guidance counselor tries to convince me to not to apply to Harvard to avoid the disappointment of rejection. Later that fall, she seemed disappointed to see my acceptance letter. So I share that all because for me, the experience of going to school was that my parents were the only people who were consistently in my corner who believed in me and my sister, who saw our potential and helped us to set one and achieve one goal, then the next, and the next and the next. And the school system never saw any of that value in my family. I carried that with me into the classroom. I joined Teach for America, became a first grade teacher in North Philly, teaching in a Puerto Rican neighborhood, where I saw myself in my parents, or I saw myself my students rather, and I saw my parents and theirs. But the same thing was playing out. I felt like my school and our system was approaching black and brown parents like mine as liabilities rather than as assets. People thought of a kid's home life as a. A risk to be mitigated rather than a resource to be cultivated. I knew from my lived experience that that was a missed opportunity. And then I learned from the research that shows that parental involvement in their children's learning is a more powerful predictor of academic success than any other variable, including race, including class. Families, not schools, are the biggest determinants of their children's learning. And our system isn't doing enough about that. It's a very long story short, that's why I founded Springboard 10 years ago now. To close the literacy gap by bridging the gap between home and school. And we do that by coaching parents and teachers to team up and accelerate student learning. There is actually a formula. I don't think it was a bad word to use. We.

Okay, good.

Discovered it over the over 10 years and I'd be happy to talk more about it.

Well, let's spend some time on that history a little bit. What is the formula that you do, because you're right. Right. Schools, despite all the rhetoric maybe we've heard trying to change this, they do treat people's home lives as a risk to be mitigated. And it's on both sides of the equations. Right. Like you go to those affluent districts to your point in New Jersey, and the schools dismiss the parents as too pushy and too, too involved, if you will. And then on the other end of the spectrum, a lot of districts say, gosh, if only the parents were more involved and don't really cultivate or reach out to them in any meaningful way. So a lot of what you said lands with the conversations that I have with educators and what I've seen on the ground as I travel around. So how do you change that equation? How do you work with schools that are so focused on the classroom? Right. To be able to start to engage and unlock the power of parents and guardians.

Yeah, it's such a great question and I love the way that you, you framed it. So the focus on the classroom is exactly right. It's almost an exclusive focus on classroom instruction and it has been for a long time and yet could spend 13% of their waking hours inside that classroom. 13%. There's just not enough leverage there. And you were also right to use the word cultivate because it does begin with relationship building. That's what we've learned over the last decade. It's a method we call Family Educator learning accelerators, or FELAs for short. They're five to 10 week cycles during which parents and teachers team up to help kids reach a learning goal. And they've got these six basic steps, none of which are rocket science, but together they're really powerful. So the first step to your point is cultivating a relationship. If you don't have relational trust between educators and parents, the thing is over before it even started. And it doesn't have to be more complicated than even a 20 minute virtual team building huddle is enough of a starting place to generate meaningful engagement. STEP 2. Parents and teachers need a shared understanding of where kids are in their learning right now. In the U.S. 9 and 10 parents think their kid is reading on grade level, when in reality only 1 in 3 kids actually are reading on grade level. Most families are flying blind or operating in the dark. And so that second step of doing a baseline assessment and getting a shared understanding is essential. And it lets you set a growth goal. And the growth goal is like the keystone that holds everything together. And importantly, we've learned the hard way that that goal has to be achievable within a five to ten week window. Fewer than five weeks, it's not long enough to produce a habit longer than 10 weeks. And the finish line is too far away to motivate behavior change. That's one of the things we saw during the pandemic, right? If engaging in your kids learning feels like this interminable experience, if you can't see the light at the end of the tunnel, then it's really hard to build a meaningful habit. Step four, Practice, practice, practice. Kids need to practice with their educators in the classroom. Kids need to practice with their families at home. And we developed an app to help support that interaction. And then the whole team has to practice together through a weekly or bi weekly workshop. Parents and teachers kind of sharing skills and strategies at the end of that five to ten week stretch. Step five is to measure progress. You want to see how kids did relative to their goal. And the very final step is to celebrate. Punctuating the experience with a quick win is what crystallizes lasting habits. Both for the educators who for them the light bulb goes off. Parents are the co teachers I've always had. Here are the tutors hiding in plain sight. And they begin to view families as assets rather than liabilities. And you don't put that mindset back in the box. And for parents who have the transformative experience of setting and achieving a goal with their kids, sometimes for the first time, that's what gels the habit. And we see even six months after one of these short cycles is over, parents are still coaching their kids in reading every bit as much, every bit as often. Our recommendation to schools, this kind of short goal setting cycle, it's more akin to interval training than marathon running. Rather than do it all day, every day, all year long, we recommend these short cycles three times a year, five week cycle during the summer to kind of prevent regression and instead help kids make progress. A 10 week cycle in the fall once teachers have identified who are the kids that I really need to give extra support to. And then a 10 week cycle in the spring as a sprint through the finish.

Super interesting. It, it, it also occurs to me it really mirrors what I would say should be the student's success cycle more broadly in learning where, where learners are constantly setting goals, planning how they will achieve those goals, doing the learning, doing the work and then showing evidence of, of their learning and then getting to reflect on that and then rinse and repeat if you will. It's a, it's a more productive cycle. More generally I would Argue. It's fascinating how you bring in parents into that equation and give them resources through the apps to be able to do that. What are the results? Like, what have you seen on the ground before we shift the conversation to the last couple of years in your prescriptions going forward, like, what have you seen historically? And you go into school, it's a fair amount of change management there. What do you see in the uptake in the results for students?

Yeah, it's a great question. And the framing around kind of adding parents to what would otherwise be kind of a student focused goal setting cycle is exactly right. And parents are the force multiplier. For every hour that an educator leads a workshop, upskilling families, parents deliver 25 hours of one on one tutoring at home. That's kind of the multiplier and the biggest impact driver. So what we see is that even in a five week time period, super short, working with the very same teachers, parents and kids that have been there all along, and typically we support the kids that are furthest behind grade level expectations for whom the system hasn't been working. Kids average in that five week period a three to four month reading gain, closing the gap to grade level performance by more than half in just about a month. And you do it by getting more from the people who have, who have been there all along. We took a look at the results during the pandemic. In particular, we structured an analysis where we had a group of schools and families that were participating in learning accelerators using this model, and then control groups within those schools, similar kids that were just kind of navigating the pandemic like most folks navigated the pandemic, kind of left to their own devices and parents and teachers working in isolation. And the difference was super stark. We looked at the irate electile reading scores from before the first shutdown. So February, March, and then again at the beginning of the next school year. And kids that were participating in a learning accelerator averaged a 256 point gain relative to the control group that grew just 41 points. So the fact that the treatment group made six times the progress, more than six times the progress of the control group, it's not a testament to anything kind of magic about Springboard's program implementation. It's a testament to the fact that when parents and teachers work together, they get more done. They're able to help students make progress in an accelerated way and also have a better experience doing it. It's as much less lonely and isolating and daunting to be working toward a goal with teammates than to be kind of in the dark in the wilderness trying to fend for your kid alone.

So I lied, actually, before we totally shift to the current moment, I just have one more question about this, which is what you're describing makes a ton of sense. If you can get that kind of leverage, one to 25 hours of. I mean, that's. That's huge. I don't know what sort of resources the district spend, but that kind of return on investment in terms of engagement is significant. And then 6x the control group in terms of the gains during a time of so much rampant losses is really significant as well. I'm just curious, like, in your view, why haven't other organizations or, you know, you don't hear about this, what you're doing all that often. There's other people who say we got to make better use of parents. It all comes down to parents sometimes. That's an instead of schools argument, right? You've sort of brought these together. Why aren't other people doing this? Why hasn't this been done?

It's an important question and a big one. So I'm trying to figure out at what level I want to.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you got to cover.

I'll do kind of the surface level and then the kind of root cause analysis at the surface level. There's silos within education. So family engagement is over here and teaching and learning is over there. And they're most often like literally different departments on different floors in the school district building. And never the twain shall meet in funding portfolios that they similarly are often separate portfolios led by separate individuals. We think about them as. Even if we value them both as a sector, we think about them as being fairly unrelated when the way that I see it, they're two sides of the same coin, right? Like, family engagement, in my view, is the only cost effective, scalable and culturally responsive way to increase kids access to instructional time. But that isn't the prevailing belief. If we like trace the root cause of that belief, then you get into bigger questions around, frankly, around systemic racism. Why don't we look at a black and brown parent and see a teacher? Why don't we look at them and see the very same potential we so easily recognize in their kind of white and wealthy counterpart? If you go far enough upriver, I think you get to a pretty profound mindset issue and it's really hard to train your way out of a mindset. That's why for us, the best way to shift that mindset to more of an asset based orientation is to put people into a relationship with each other, often across lines of difference. Right. Like 80 some percent of teachers are white and the overwhelming majority of families we work with are not. So put people into a relationship, give them a winnable goal and then get them that win quick enough that you can begin to shift the mindset.

So now let's make the shift to the current moment. I've already said I've already gone way over I think what we expected on the early part of this story, but I just think it's so important and powerful and I'm seeing that in some of the comments as well that people are posting and we'll return to a couple of those comments a bit later. But the, you know, the NAEP results just came out the trend line, right, Showing a really significant drop off from where students had been not just in reading but also math. There was a lot of headlines that came up about it. There have been some counter headlines as well. I'm just curious, you know, what did you make of the recent results?

Yeah, I think like everyone, I felt deeply disappointed. Right. Reading scores falling by the largest margin in three decades and disparities that were already glaring and unacceptable becoming wider. I think I also felt disappointed though by the dialogue that's ensued from these results and how narrowly focused that dialogue has been on things like tutoring, summer school and extended school day. Those are all reasonable things to do, but I think that they're fundamentally incomplete solutions that won't ever solve the problem at the scale at which it exists. And I think that fixation on educator led instruction, who can we put on payroll to solve the problem reveals kind of what has been a long standing blind spot in American education system. No surprise that I'm about to say engaging parents and their kids learning to me that that's the solution hiding in in plain sight.

So, so that strikes me as sensible, right. That and you've made the point to me that well, gosh, like we could try to hire and to our, you know, tutors tutor our way out of this problem if you will. But the reality is every sector of the American workforce right now is lacking in employees. Like they're, you know, we're in this moment because of people leaving the workforce because of, because of the generational switch that we're in like all these factors, demographic decline in terms of just raw numbers from the baby boomers on and on and on. We're at this moment where just the reality is what the reality is which Is that there are just fewer employees or would be, if you will. And we're saying, like, triple, quadruple, quintuple, the tutoring force. You know, all sorts of things you hear right now in terms of the scale. So that seems, like, difficult. So. So how would you tackle the learning recovery?

Yeah, I think. I think you hit the nail on the head that the two biggest constraints with tutoring are cost and capacity. Right. Tutors are in short supply, and the intervention is too expensive to sustain once federal funding runs out. I think there was a recent survey from the school superintendents association that most districts said that they plan to scrap supplemental support services as soon as the money dries up. What's funny is that, like, you have a group of. It's not funny, just curious. You have a group of policymakers and school administrators that are sitting there scratching their heads, thinking, well, I need a large number of caring adults to support student learning. I need enough of them, ideally one for every kid. I can't afford to pay them, at least not for long, and I'd love for them to be demographically representative of our student population. And the fact that you've got all of these constraints and the fact that we're not all looking toward families and supporting them in the role they want to play to help their kid be successful learners, that, to me, is both the biggest missed opportunity and kind of the most promising pathway to deliver the instructional time on the scale required to support Covid learning recovery. Right. Families, unlike tutors, are not in short supply. And parents don't expect compensation to read with their kids. They do it out of concern for their children. Parents love for their kids is both the greatest and the most underutilized natural resource in education. From my perspective, the way that we're approaching tutoring just ignores the fundamental reality we've had to learn over and over again that when it comes to educating kids, there's no going around. Parents, you have to work with them in order to support learning across the continuum of home and school.

Yeah. So it's interesting. It hits at a couple things. As you know, I've argued a lot that schools need to vertically integrate into the home life far more than they do. And this isn't just a school phenomenon. From my. You know, from the research on innovation that we have, Anytime, if you will, the value chain of activities is quote, unquote, not. Not developed enough, not mature enough, too unpredictably interdependent. You need to integrate backward into those other adjacent steps if you hope to deliver the service that you want to at the end. And that seems like a lot of what you're talking about here. The second piece, obviously, that, you know, parents being the greatest natural resource and wanting to do right by their kids, but. But not necessarily having the tools resonate. So I guess the question is, so you would take the resources, you know, unprecedented resources from the federal government that have been poured in, and rather than. You might spend some on tutoring, but rather than spend all on tutoring or things of that nature, you would, you would take some of those dollars and use it for schools to develop these types of programs that you've implemented at deeper scale to reach more parents. Is that, is that how you would go about it?

I think that's right. And it doesn't have to necessarily be one or the other. It's just that that any effort around Covid learning recovery, it must include upskilling families, because that's the only thing that will sustain impact, kind of once the funding dries up. So whether it's teachers partnering with families as part of their core work during the school year and tutors supporting not only the kid, but also including the family kind of on a weekly basis in that recurring workshop over that short time period, that's going to be the multiplier that bears fruit not only in the short term in terms of turbocharging, the rate at which kids make up ground, but also over the long run in terms of families building habits that persist long after the tutor's gone. And in terms of what it means for a family to get into a pattern of setting and achieving goals with their kid, that is the difference maker in a kid's life that creates kind of the. The virtuous cycle of winning small wins lead to big wins rather than kind of internalizing the failure of the school system as a personal failure.

Yeah, well, it speaks to the dirty secret you mentioned up front in your own personal story around how the success of schools often aren't, unfortunately, because the teachers there are any better than teachers elsewhere, but because of the parental structure that is put in place by the parents themselves, not in an intentional way. Right. So I guess I want to ask two questions about the parent involvement then. One is, I suspect a lot of people will listen or read this conversation that we're having and they'll say, yeah, but parents are overwhelmed right now, right? Like they're barely getting by. So aren't they just too overburdened to participate meaningfully in their children's learning? What have you found against that question?

Yeah, I'm so glad you asked because I am among the overburdened parents and in my life I've gained privilege I didn't grow up with. So you can only imagine the way that wealth inequality and structural racism and a tattered social safety net make the task of parenting in the face of poverty a herculean challenge that disproportionately affects marginalized families. So it's a fantastic question, and you're right that the pandemic schooling experience was brutal, as brutal for parents as it was for teachers. Learning Heroes did a survey that oversampled marginalized families and found that parents were averaging two and a half hours a day supporting their kids learning at home, or at least trying during school closures. That is not sustainable. I think we should be asking parents to do less, not more, but we should be supporting them to make the most of the time that they're investing. And that's kind of the. The critical difference. There's research that shows there's a meta analysis of about 10 million kids that found that 15 minutes a day of reading with your kid at home is the magic number above which kids sustain gains in reading. 15 minutes well spent goes a lot further than 2 and a half hours of this kind of frustrating experience that so many families had. But the challenge is that parents report that their biggest unmet need is personalized guidance to support learning at home. No one's equipping them to make the most of the scarce time they have to invest in their kids learning. And that, I think is both the role and the opportunity of the school system. If we equip families with the tools that they're asking for, they're able to take relatively few minutes and use them well in order to accelerate student learning.

Learning. No, that makes sense. So I want to flash a question from Betsy Springer, who's tuning in, saying how can schools work with parents with respect for the family? Her experience as a parent who is also a teacher in her case was that she could only participate on the school's terms. I think the related question there, so I'd love you to have address that, but I think the related question is, you know, can we really expect teachers, given all that they're under right, to, to be able to enter into these conversations first and foremost, then do so in a respectful way and build up this parent capacity. What's your take on those two questions?

Yeah, they're both fantastic. So in terms of respect, that's why the first step in the process is relationship building. If you don't kind of build that relational trust at the outset, then you can't meaningfully engage that. The power imbalance kind of continues to persist. And so in that first step, just to kind of double click on that, in the days of yore, it might have been a home visit or the past couple of years, it's more often been that virtual team building huddle. But either way, that's a conversation where the teacher gets to know the family. They ask them, what are your dreams for your child? They get to know the learner, right? Every year, for the most part, teachers change and by the time you get to know a kid, they're off to the next one. Only the family gains like meaningful expertise about a child cultivated over years. And you have to value that. You have to ask about it. And it's incredibly beneficial to the teacher with respect to their own efforts in the classroom. And then they forge the partnership. The teacher says, I've learned how to teach kids, but my class, I've got 25 kids in my classroom. It's hard to individually give every kid the support that I'd love to give them. I need you. You as a family member are the expert on your kid. Nobody knows your kid like I do. Nobody loves your kid, or nobody knows your kid like you do. Rather nobody loves your kid like you do. And you also have the opportunity to support them on a one on one basis at home. So let's make a commitment to each other. Let's pursue this goal together. I will share resources and strategies with you. You'll know what I know, and you commit to using those strategies with your kid on a daily basis at home and telling me what you learn. That kind of partnership and camaraderie and asset orientation toward families is just a very different interaction than most folks have with their school system. In terms of your question, Michael, around teacher capacity, that is also a huge concern. Parents are overwhelmed, teachers are overwhelmed, and they're leaving the profession in droves under the weight of having to single handedly help kids recover from the pandemic. It is an impossible task to ask of the teacher and the teacher alone. And most folks are right to feel enormous frustration about that. So partnering with families, you can't frame it as like some extra thing that you have to take on. You have to build it into your set of responsibilities and pull something off the plate in order to be able to go further with camaraderie in a way that makes a job feel more sustainable and, and less isolating. It's no longer you against the world in your classroom, it's you in partnership with a number of families, and together you're each able to do what you do best and help kids reach. Reach learning goals. That's just a much more sustainable and a much less isolating way to think about the role of the teacher. And it's the responsibility of the school to structure that in a way that doesn't. That doesn't add to the plate, but instead helps a teacher to work smarter rather than harder.

I think that's an important point. Right. And you know, from my new book, From Reopen to Reinvent, that I'm passionate about teachers feeling part of a team on a daily basis and that collaboration. I think the argument you're making here, which lands for me, is for a little bit more upfront time, you can create so much more leverage that it will actually save you time, if you will, in the long run. And so the behavior change, perhaps on their own, they couldn't do, but with a partner like you, you can coach them through that to make that shift. It leads me to where I want to end up, which is this story, the argument, the thesis, the work that you have done is extraordinarily powerful. People are chiming in with comments along those lines. And the question I want to bring up, or the comment I want to bring up, Rich Feller says, you know, this is a brilliant discussion and idea, but how do we tell your story? What. What. What are the resources available to best explain your research or. Or, you know, the. The kernel of your story, to take this at scale. So this isn't a question perhaps you thought about, but, like, if you're directing people to check you out to be able to tell this story, where would you point him?

I appreciate the question. So there's obviously our own website, springboard collaborative.org. but that might not even be the place I point him. I might point him toward a website we created called felamethod.org that's F E L A method dot org. That's the place where we just open source our methodology. What we've learned over the last 10 years about how to help parents and teachers collaborate and help kids reach learning goals, it's there. And when I think about, like, what is Springboard's role in the education system? What is. What will have been Springboard's legacy 100 years out, hopefully sooner, Kind of my vision for systemic impact is not that, like, our own Springboard LED programming will kind of become this enormous empire. It's not. Not that I want to catalyze a shift in the education system so that parent teacher collaboration becomes the standard practice, the new normal, the rule, not the exception. People won't even remember the day when parents and teachers had to work in isolation rather than working together, even if nobody remembers what springboard was. So the feel of method and kind of sharing all we've learned from our programming and making it kind of at the service of the field, that's the dream. And as we've talked about, Michael, we're innovating to figure out what are the right levers to pull in order to catalyze that broader systemic shift.

Well, you and I will perhaps get to have another conversation once you have more news on that front and results about the innovation that you're doing along that. But for now, Alejandro, thank you. Deeply appreciate the work you're doing. But thanks for coming on and telling your story, telling the story of what you're developing and I think painting a different vision for the way that we can recover that maybe more practical and have a little bit more long term leverage that won't fade away just beyond this moment. So deeply appreciate you. Thanks everyone else for tuning in. And we'll be back. Next time on the Future of Education.

Thanks for having me.