New from Our Communities

This week we shared about exciting changes at C!E, and today we follow on with exciting movements in our partner organizations and communities.

Change is indeed afoot. We are tracking subtle but significant shifts in the ways that increasing numbers of federal, state, and local leaders are thinking about education systems. Less “find the average” and more “make it work for every person.” Less “I have the answer” and more “let’s learn together.” We are excited to be part of this momentum, and even more excited to learn alongside our partners and co-conspirators in the field. Read on for some thoughts on the great work coming from the broader community.

Using ARP Funds to Redesign Schools for Whole Child Equity (Science of Learning and Development Alliance)

As states and districts begin to receive a historic influx of cash from the federal American Recovery Plan (ARP) fund for Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER), numerous experts have offered advice on the “right” projects and programs for the funds. Our stance, articulated in our Investing in Learning post back in March, is less about the right programs and more about the way funding decisions are made: specifically, to elevate local, contextual wisdom; to make investments with a learning orientation; and to constrain processes, not ideas. Having said that, states should play a role in sharing best available information about ideas and programs that might bring local districts closer toward key goals like whole-child equity. And we think the Science of Learning and Development (SoLD) Alliance has some pretty spot-on ideas in their recent brief, Using ARP Funds to Redesign Schools for Whole Child Equity. Education leaders can use the guiding principles and policy priorities in the SoLD report as substrates for the kinds of investment processes we described in March that, we believe, have a better chance of advancing equity and whole-child wellness during these complex and uncertain times.

How to Make Senior Capstones Truly Anti-Racist (Future Focused Education)

In a previous C!E post, we shared about recent developments in New Mexico to eradicate structural racism in the public education system through (in part) assessment and accountability redesign. Central to this process has been the creation of “holistic and community-based capstone assessments.” But, as Future Focused Education’s Lisa Martinez explains, capstone assessments are not inherently anti-racist. Martinez examines capstones in another place - Oakland, California - to probe thinking about what it might look like to develop capstone assessments that reflect the cultural values and identities unique to each New Mexico community - or any community, anywhere.

Linked Learning 101 (Linked Learning Alliance)

In C!E’s work to advance equity-seeking systems transformation, our questions about new approaches to assessment and accountability have increasingly harmonized with kindred questions about how industry partnerships and career pathways can potentially help drive a system to become more responsive and learner-centered. In this space, Linked Learning - who has been an intermediary partner to California in our Interstate Learning Community - is offering a low cost virtual professional learning series on developing more equitable student experiences and outcomes in pathway, academy, or CTE programs. It began last week, but we wanted to share about it in case the series is still of interest to your work. There are still a number of sessions between now and November 10 and it is open to both individuals and teams regardless of whether you are pursuing Linked Learning at your school. Learn more about the series here.

C!E Announces New Partner and Other Organizational Updates

Hello colleagues and friends!

We have been a little quiet in our communications recently as we managed a number of big projects and made our way through some organizational shifts. As we enter October and come up for air, we wanted to provide everyone with a few updates.

A New Partner!

We are excited to announce that we are welcoming Rita Harvey to our team! She comes to us from the nationally recognized MCIEA project, which many of you know is a local accountability system being developed and governed by a number of communities in Massachusetts. In that work and other work with the Center for Collaborative Education (CCE), Rita has sharpened expertise in performance assessment, balanced assessment systems and accountability systems which, as you can imagine, makes her a particularly compelling intellectual thought partner to us at C!E. She has also done research on the intersections between race and special education, which our nation is finding to be an even more important topic as COVID pulled the curtain back and revealed just how grim it can be for young people standing at that intersection. And, as you all know, how we work is as important to us at C!E as what kind of work we do, and we are thrilled that Rita is bringing to our team her curiosity, wit, and drive to transform our education systems into engines of equity.

We are excited to see how Rita shapes our team and our work. And we are certain that when you get the chance, you will enjoy partnership with Rita as well. Her email is rita@leadingwithlearning.org if you want to get in touch.

And, read on for a welcome note from Rita herself!

Organization Updates

Another big piece of news is that Gene Wilhoit and Linda Pittenger have shifted from staff roles to board roles at C!E. Each member of our team has directly benefited from the leadership, mentorship, intellectual provocation, and friendship that Gene and Linda have always given so freely. Finding ourselves on this team with these two felt like a golden ticket moment for each of us, and it is bittersweet that we have come to cash in those golden tickets and together take over the day-to-day operations of the spectacular chocolate factory that Gene and Linda built. As you might imagine, even in “retirement” they both continue to be invaluable members of our team. They remain connected and dedicated to our work, in fact, you may be fortunate enough to find them on a zoom with us from time to time.

As we managed their transition to the board, we also took our time rethinking roles, and we continue to collaborate in new ways as a team. You can see some of our new titles on our website. As the Managing Partner, I have formal organizational leadership responsibility, but you will notice that we are each partners. This does not connote that we are a consulting firm with partner as a rank title, for us partner with its most basic connotation best describes how we relate to one another. We are partners with one another and with each of you in this big endeavor of transforming our systems of education. We have an unusually powerful combination of expertise in this small team, but we also count on learning from one another and each of you in each of our interactions. Our website is www.leadingwithlearning.org because in all that we do, we begin with curiosity.

And finally, we changed fiscal sponsorship. As many of you know, we were initially housed as a center at the University of Kentucky. As our work diversified, we found that there were kinds of work and types of partnerships that were difficult for the university to manage with us. To continue to be mission driven, cost effective and nimble, we needed to find a new organizational home. We landed at the Tides Center. For those who are unfamiliar, they are a non-profit that hosts smaller non-profit projects. While this transition took significant time and attention, we are now comfortable at our new home and happy to operate in a little more streamlined busines environment. Despite Tides offices being on both coasts, rest assured, Kentucky is still home for C!E. We continue to return there for staff gatherings and board meetings, and when we are able we will likely host some future face to face convenings with you there too.

In closing…

Thanks for reading our update, and more so, thanks for being our partner. One of the things Gene and Linda always imagined was that C!E would stay small because doing work in partnership is essential to doing good and lasting work. In this unprecedented time of turmoil, challenge and opportunity, our continued partnerships with you give us courage and strength and fill will us with gratitude. Thank you for being strategic partners with us.

Gretchen & the C!E Team

PS – you can always email me at gretchen@leadingwithlearning.org. For general inquiries you can also email theteam@leadingwithlearning.org. We check the general email daily.

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Getting to know Rita Harvey

We asked Rita to share a little bit about herself, what draws her to C!E, what gifts she’s excited to bring to the work, and what she’s most looking forward to learning with us. Read on!

“Doing education work through a lens of antiracism and justice is a familial inheritance for me. While the foundation was always there, my work started when my Aunt Rosie allowed me to me to engage in service-learning in her elementary self-contained special education classroom. My “service” included engaging in basic literacy activities with this group of children, but it was my own learning that was invaluable. Working under the guidance of Aunt Rosie, at the age of 16, I learned first-hand that all children have gifts and brilliance they bring to the classroom, and it is the work of educators to love every child enough to see those gifts. Over years of practice and study in special education/disability studies, assessment literacy, and critical race studies, I have come to understand that individual educators such as Aunt Rosie work in systems. We must work on both the systems and the individuals to transform education so that the gifts and brilliance of every child can truly be appreciated.

Seeing this passion for equity and justice being pursued by compassionate and thoughtful human beings has drawn me to the C!E team, and I am thrilled to have the opportunity to do this work with both the smaller team and the larger community. In this next chapter of work, I hope to always bring a deeply empathetic and analytic approach the work in which we engage together. While I will bring this approach along with the technical knowledge I have acquired over the years, I am most excited about what I will learn from the C!E team and our partners. I am excited to continue learning how educators and communities are disrupting deep-rooted patterns of inequity. In learning about your communities, your mechanisms of disruption, your ways of loving children and fellow educators, I am hopeful we can continue to reimagine and rebuild educational systems.”

Accountability, Reciprocity, and Redistributing Power

The Reciprocity Project Interviews C!E's Doannie Tran

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In our Invitation to a New Path Forward: Seeking Equity Together Through Assessment and Accountability, we suggested the need to fundamentally restructure how our education systems operate. We proposed a different approach that involves building state-to-local coalitions and discerning when to share or cede power and decision-making authority, within what structures of oversight, and with what reciprocal investments in capacity-building.

But what does look like when education systems are more reciprocal? What bad leadership habits stand in the way and how can we convince leaders of the importance of rebalancing power? In this interview with The Reciprocity Project, C!E's Doannie Tran draws on his personal experiences to offer provocations toward a better way to serve all our students and communities.

The Reciprocity Project is a coalition of nonprofits, community organizers, and education innovators that are working together to build a new kind of school from the ground up. This work is rooted in reciprocal relationships, where the voice and ownership of stakeholders will create schools that are truly in service to their communities. If you enjoy this post, check out other articles in The Reciprocity Project's blog series, “The Questions No One Is Asking.”

WHY WAS PARTICIPATING IN THE RECIPROCITY PROJECT VALUABLE TO YOU?

I was really blown away by both the power of the people who were involved and the work that they’re doing, but also really the sense that every context is deeply different. Everybody reinforced the importance of honoring local context so much.

That kind of connection to other people and that we are all part of this unique moment. The feeling like there’s an opportunity to really share power and build more power where it hasn’t been cultivated before. That’s just so rare in this world right now.

WHY IS IT IMPORTANT TO PARTICIPATE IN “BLUE SKY CONVERSATIONS”?

There are so many pressing things in front of us and that urgency to solve those near-term problems never gives us a chance to dream. Being a part of The Reciprocity Project is an opportunity to step back from that and actually leave some of that urgency of the now behind in order to dream a little bit and commune with people who have a lot of shared experiences and commitments but in different contexts. We just never get those opportunities in our daily life because we’re so embedded in our specific contexts that the opportunity to do that is really priceless.

I’VE HEARD A LOT OF PEOPLE SAY DURING THIS CRISIS THAT IT’S AN OPPORTUNITY TO ASK ABOUT THE PURPOSE OF EDUCATION. WHAT DO YOU THINK OF THAT SUPPOSITION?

We do have a special moment now, because parents know more about the educational experience than they ever have before. I talk to families all the time that are seeing their kid do some pretty inane things during remote learning. They need support and dialogue with other families. They need different experiences to make meaning of that and to coalesce it into energy for change. I think leaders should be wanting to lean into that dissonance and cultivate it. But, I think a lot of leaders paper over it because everybody wants to return to normal. Even people who are badly served by “normal” who don’t want to return to that are just tired. They’re tired of the moment we’re in now.

WHY IS IT SO DIFFICULT FOR SYSTEMS LEADERS TO EMBRACE RECIPROCITY IN THEIR LEADERSHIP APPROACH?

We live in a world where two things are simultaneously true. First, we distrust experts and you only need to look at public health right now to see evidence of that. Simultaneously, experts often seek to control the narratives and the terms of the debate. Experts create the narrative that reinforces their expertise. So it’s a bad dynamic because experts live in a world where no one gives them the latitude and the trust to do what they’ve been trained to do. Then, people who are not seen as experts are constantly reminded of that and they are kept at the gate.

In that kind of world, power is scarce. So people hoard what they can. Experts hoard power by controlling narratives, controlling tools, and those who are kept at bay because of their non-expertise are trying to constantly tear down the foundations of the thing.

That’s keeping experts and regular people separate and apart. Everybody uses power to try to get a little more. But, I think that that power is usually poisoned. It’s tainted because it’s not born out of justice and sharing, it’s born out of exclusion. In this context, leaders who want to share power put their expertise at risk and that’s connected to their influence, their relevance, their stature, their self-respect. I really wish that every leader was sort of ego-less and able to do that gracefully, but that’s just not realistic.

WHAT DO WE NEED TO MAKE THE EDUCATION SYSTEM MORE RECIPROCAL?

When I was an assistant superintendent in Boston and in Fulton County, Georgia, I was not accountable to making those communities healthier and more prosperous. My accountability was connected to the number of APs (Advanced Placement courses) that were going to be offered at each school. The percentage of kids who were scoring above X, the number of dual enrollment students—it was connected to a set of outcomes that had unclear collective benefit.

I think it would have been better if I had felt a sense of reciprocal responsibility to the community members that were in our neighborhoods. We should have been talking to them about what it would take for our community to be healthy and more prosperous, more joyful and more successful. And, we would say, “that’s the thing we’re going to do and you should hold us accountable to that.” But the machine of accountability was not organized around that.

HOW DO THE BAD HABITS OF SYSTEMS LEADERS MAKE IT HARD TO FORM RECIPROCAL RELATIONSHIPS WITH COMMUNITIES?

When leaders are only concerned about garnering support, instead of working on co-construction, you get focus groups. You get surveys or hand-picked advisory boards that supposedly have legitimacy in the community. Those mechanisms are the bad habits of leadership. When the survey says 95% of people say this is a good idea, that’s not co-creation, that’s trying to claim legitimacy. So many mechanisms like that are part of the habits not rooted in reciprocity. They’re rooted in power imbalance.

HOW DO WE BEGIN REDISTRIBUTING POWER?

When we ask, “How are we going to get these people to give up some of their power?” it feels weird. It’s strange to care so much about the needs of the privileged, when there’s so many people who’ve been marginalized by the system. But if we’re doing justice, we’re supposed to be with those who have been marginalized. We do the movement a huge disservice if we don’t consider our messaging and our promises to those who have a lot to lose and will fight desperately to maintain the power that they have. To solve this problem, we must uncover the abundance in the world. Because the narratives are dominated by scarcity.

When power is shared, the broader benefit is abundance, right? We’re saying give up something now that was ill begotten anyway. And, if you give it up in the right way, we are promising more, we’re promising something better. How do we do that? That’s where we begin.

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Doannie Tran is an Equity and Strategy Fellow at the Center for Innovation in Education and former assistant Superintendent in Boston and Georgia.