Please Speak Freely

When I met Dorothy Jungels, I knew immediately that I wanted to spend more time with her. As the co-founder and co-Artistic Director of Everett Company Stage School, Dorothy is part of an amazing “mom and pop” nonprofit community arts organization, along with many members of her family and extended family. This past year while my family and I were living in Providence, RI, my daughter Rosie had the good luck to take a Story Ballet class with Dorothy’s granddaughter Grace, I had the privilege to take an Improv class with Dorothy herself, and my wife Elia, as Executive Director of New Urban Arts, collaborated closely with Dorothy through the Providence Youth Arts Collaborative. Because of these experiences, I got to know Dorothy and was eager to talk with her for the podcast. I wanted to hear the story of this 28 year old grass roots organization and learn about Dorothy’s perspective on the world and the work. We talk about seeing beauty where others might not and how art can create life. As I discuss in the intro, this is my last podcast episode before I start my new chapter as President and CEO of LA’s BEST After School Enrichment Program! I am hoping to find the time to keep the podcast going. Thank you for listening. Enjoy!

For a long time, I have been concerned about how young children are given drugs like Ritalin and Adderal. So when I saw Nancy Rappaport‘s recent Washington Post article, “We Are Overmedicating America’s Poorest Kids,” it caught my eye. In this episode, I talk to Dr. Rappaport about many issues including the oversimplication of the headline that caught my eye. Mental health challenges in children are complex. In this article, and her book, The Behavior Code: A Practical Guide to Understanding and Teaching the Most Challenging Students, Dr. Rappaport explains many of the complexities and provides some great advice about understanding young people, preventing challenging behavior before it occurs, and using natural methods such as exercise, yoga, and self-regulation skills instead of or in addition to medication. Enjoy!

One of the great things about doing this podcast is that I get to meet awesome new people. The other great thing is that I get to sit down with some of my favorite people and talk to them for an hour or so, and this is one of those episodes. Carla Sanger, the President and CEO of LA’s BEST is definitely one of my favorite people, and also a very important mentor to me and many others. I’ve been wanting to interview her since Please Speak Freely started, and I finally got the chance! We talked about what it means to build an organization from just a few sites to 194 sites, how to deal with funders who think they know best, and why it’s so important to her to keep afterschool balanced and focused on children’s vitality and creativity. This episode is sponsored by Developmental Studies Center, a nonprofit educational publisher dedicate to children’s academic, ethical and social development. DSC is the creator of some of the best curricula available for out-of-school time programs like KidzLit, KidzMath and KidzScience, as well as many products for schools and outstanding professional development. If you’re interested in sponsoring Please Speak Freely, click here!

This is a very special episode of Please Speak Freely, a memorial to the great Richard Murphy. Murphy was a friend and a mentor to me and countless others, and he passed away on Valentine’s Day, 2013. He was a true lion in the field of youth development. Among many other accomplishments, he founded Rheedlen Centers for Children and Families which became the Harlem Children’s Zone, created the Beacon Programs when he was Commissioner of Youth Services under Mayor David Dinkins, cofounded the Neighborhood Family Services Coalition, helped to create Food and Finance High School, and founded iMapVentures. I had hoped to interview Richard for Please Speak Freely, but I never got the chance. For this episode, I recorded a memorial event held on February 14, 2014 at Food and Finance High School and edited a few clips together so you could hear what people had to say about Murphy. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to record the actual memorial service held in 2013 where luminaries such as Mayor Dinkins and Ambassador Patrick Gaspard shared funny and warm memories of Murphy. Hopefully this will give you some idea of the incredible esteem people hold Murphy in. Mostly it’s my chance to say, “Murphy, we love you.” Here is a list of the people whose voices you will hear on this podcast: Rev. Alfonso Wyatt, Vice President of the Fund for the City of New York Gail Brewer, Manhattan Borough President Jessica Mates, Chief of Staff for Manhattan Borough President Aldrin Bonilla, Deputy Manhattan Borough President Pierina de la Cruz Leydis de la Cruz Raul Radcliffe Roger Turgeon, Principal of Food and Finance High School Jim Marley, Assistant Executive Director of  Good Shepherd Services Carla Sanger, President & CEO of LA’s BEST Afterschool Enrichment Program Robert Newman, Chair of iMapVentures and Executive Vice President and COO of AmeriDream Katrice Walker, Singer Here are some links to remembrances of Richard Murphy: Richard L. Murphy, Who Aided Disadvantaged Youths, Dies at 68, New York Times Obituary 2/15/13 In the End, He Stole Nothing and Gave Plenty, New York Time 2/19/13 Mourning the Loss of Richard Murphy, NY Nonprofit Press 2/15/13 Richard Murphy, A Powerful Example of Servant Leadership 4/10/13

Thanks to support from the National AfterSchool Association (NAA), I got a chance to interview Jaime Casap at the 2014 NAA National Convention where he was the keynote speaker. Jaime is the Global Education Evangelist at Google, a company you may have heard of. In his role, he is responsible for working with schools and organizations to bring technology into the education environment. We had a lively conversation that covered Jaime’s experience growing up in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood in NYC, my terror at the thought of having my progress as a learner evaluated on a daily basis, and whether technology firms like Google are looking to change the world or simply tap into educational market. Check out the NAA website to see what other great speakers were at the convention, and join them next year in Washington, DC.  Enjoy!

Baratunde Thurston is the CEO and co-founder of Cultivated Wit, a design, media, and technology company. I came across Baratunde’s book, How to Be Black, in a used bookstore last summer. It caught my eye because the title is so funny, and because I recognized his name, probably from his days as Director of Digital at The Onion, his column in Fast Company, or his more than 10 years as a standup comedian. His book is so engaging and has a really smart approach to discussing race, culture, class, and much more. When I heard him discussing his educational experience on WTF with Marc Maron and heard about his participation in out-of-school activities such as Higher Achievement and the DC Youth Orchestra, I knew I had my hook for inviting him to be a guest on Please Speak Freely. We had a great conversation about his experience going from public schools in Washington, DC to the prestigious Sidwell Friends School, then to Harvard University, and the many adventures he had along the way.

If you’ve been following the national or international news about education policy over the past few years, you’ve probably heard that Finland is a big educational success story. What’s amazing about the Finnish story is that the Finnish have basically done everything the opposite of the current education reform agenda in the United States. They’ve focused on equity over excellence, improving the teaching force, limiting student testing, putting responsibility and trust before accountability, and making sure schools and districts are led by education professionals. Pasi Sahlberg and I discussed all this, but also talked about his own experience as a student (he literally grew up in a schoolhouse), and how he came to be an ambassador, of sorts, for Finland’s schools. If you want to hear more of Pasi’s ideas, check out his compelling book, Finnish Lessons, What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland, or this TEDx talk You may also be able to catch him live because he is currently on a leave of absence from his post as Director General of the Centre for International Mobility and Cooperation (CIMO) in Helsinki and is a Visiting Professor of Practice at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education.

Selma James is a freedom fighter, fighting against racism, and fighting for human rights for all, especially women. She is best known for the International Wages for Housework Campaign, launched in 1972. She has continued her fierce activism all these years, and her most recent book, Sex, Race and Class, The Perspective of Winning, A Selection of Writings 1952-2011 (PM Press 2012) had a big impact on me personally. I was honored to be able to talk with Selma James for Please Speak Freely. The challenging part was that she is based in London, so we conducted the interview over Skype, and the audio quality is not up to our usual standards! I worked hard in editing to clean it up as much as possible for you, and I think that you will find the conversation worth it. Please check out the work of Global Women’s Strike and sign their petition to the US Congress to end poverty of mothers and children and recognize caregiving work.

Last year, people across the country were inspired by the solidarity of the faculty, students, and parents at Garfield High School in Seattle, Washington. The teachers there were tired of being forced to give a test they didn’t believe in, and they decided to do something about it. They boycotted the test, and become the leading edge of a national movement to do away with high-stakes, standardized testing and move to more intelligent and human assessments of learning. Jesse Hagopian, the teachers’ union representative at the school, became one of the leaders of the boycott movement and has been the face and voice of the movement in the media, including appearances on NBC’s Education Nation and CNN. Jesse and I talked about how the boycott came to be, the connections between this movement and other resistance movements, and about how he is connecting with other like-minded activists. [expand title=”Transcription Available“] Jesse Hagopian, Teacher & Co-Organizer of Garfield High School Test Boycott and Eric Gurna on the Please Speak Freely Podcast (Transcription) download pdf Eric Gurna: Welcome again to Please Speak Freely. I’m Eric Gurna, your host, and I’m here in Seattle, Washington with Jesse Hagopian. Welcome, Jesse. Jesse Hagopian: Thank you very much for having me, Eric Gurna. I appreciate it. Eric Gurna: Thanks for doing it. Jesse Hagopian teaches history and is the Black Student Union a advisor at Garfield High School, the site of the historic boycott of the MAP Standardized Test. So you all may remember that, I believe it was last year, correct, that, basically, and… Jesse Hagopian: That’s right. Eric Gurna: And I’m going to summarize it the way I know it, but I haven’t done in-depth research so you can really tell us what happened but… Jesse Hagopian: Sounds good. Eric Gurna: Basically, the teachers at Garfield got together, created some unity there about the fact that the standardized test wasn’t an appropriate measure of learning for their students and said: we’re not going to give the test. Is that about right? Jesse Hagopian: That’s about right. That’s, yeah, and it changed my life. Eric Gurna: Well, we’re definitely going to hear about that. Before we do, let me sing your praises a little bit more from your recent bio that, Jesse Hagopian, you’re currently an associate editor of the Rethinking Schools magazine, correct? Jesse Hagopian: That’s right. Eric Gurna: And founding member of Social Equity Educators, and was also the recipient of the 2000… Jesse Hagopian is a contributing author to 101 Changemakers: Rebels and Radicals who Changed US History and Education and Capitalism: Struggles for Learning and Liberation. And is that book already published as well? Jesse Hagopian: Yeah, yeah. Eric Gurna: But you have a new book you’re working on too that we got to hear about. Jesse Hagopian: I am. I’m working on a new book about resistance to standardized testing and collecting the stories from all over the nation of people who have a better vision for assessment. Eric Gurna: Great. Well, I definitely want to hear about how your work ties in with work happening around the country, but before we get to that can you kind of briefly tell us the story of the Garfield test boycott? Jesse Hagopian: Yeah. It started from me with a phone call after school, and I’m the building rep at Garfield High School for the union so I’m used to getting phone calls from members in our building with some kind of contractual dispute that they want clarification on. So I wasn’t all that surprised that this member wanted me to come and speak to them after school, but when I got to her room and she was like peering out the doorway and ushering me in, and closing the door, and up on her tiptoes looking over the divider. I knew there was something a little more to this, this request, and Mallory Clarke, our fantastic reading coach at Garfield High School, sat me down, looked me in the eye, and told me, “”I’m not going to give the MAP Test this year.”” And it was a moment of elation for me because I’d been organizing against this test for several years. I got a resolution passed in our union saying this test was an inappropriate way to measure teachers and it wasn’t a quality assessment for students. And so it really began there but we went department by department organizing, finding out: what do the math teachers think of this test? What do the reading teachers think of this test? What do the ELL, English Language Learners, teachers think, and what do the special education teachers… and there was unanimity that this test was inappropriate for students. You know, one of the math teachers told me that they teach ninth grade algebra but they’re seeing geometry questions on the exam, an exam that our evaluations are tied to, and he told me that would be like if a Spanish teacher saw French questions on their test. Eric Gurna: Right, right. Jesse Hagopian: Okay. It’s foreign language but it’s not the same subject, right. So this was the root of some of the problems, a test that’s not aligned to our state standards is going to be used to evaluate us, so we took it to the whole school and we had all staff vote after school one day. Eric Gurna: I’m sorry to interrupt you, but all staff means all teaching staff, or who’s involved? Jesse Hagopian: Yeah. The entire… Eric Gurna: Administrators as well or paraprofessionals? Jesse Hagopian: Not the administrators. Everyone who was in our union. Eric Gurna: Okay. Jesse Hagopian: Paraprofessionals for sure. Eric Gurna: Okay. Jesse Hagopian: And all the teachers from every department. Eric Gurna: Okay. Jesse Hagopian: So we have about 90 teachers at Garfield and most of them were there at the staff meeting, and, you know, it was one of the most electrifying discussions I’ve ever been a part of. It was teachers talking about all the various problems they saw with the test. The English language learners, cultural diversity not being respected on this test. The special education teachers talking about how this test was disregarding the individual education plans of their SPED students. But the number one question they had for me was: if we refuse to give this test, if we take the step of boycotting… you know, you’re the union rep, what’s going to happen to us? And, you know, I wanted to say, oh, don’t worry about it. Let’s just do it. Eric Gurna: Right. Jesse Hagopian: Because I’d been fighting this test for so long and I was so excited that we were ready to organize against it as a building, but I couldn’t mislead them or sugar coat it because I knew if we were going to win this struggle people had to go in eyes wide open, knowing what could happen. And I said: those of you in the tested subject especially could face reprimand, up to, you know, being dismissed for insubordination. And those were not the words that inspired the staff to boycott the test. So Miss Gunn, a math teacher at Garfield High School, rose in the middle of our all staff meeting and she said that I am sick of seeing this test label my kids and me a failure, a test that’s not even aligned to our curriculum. And she said, “”I would rather be reprimanded for standing up for what I believe in than just sitting back and letting this test run over us for one more year,”” and at that moment I said it’s time to vote, and the entire staff took a vote and we voted unanimously. There was not a single “”no”” vote. Eric Gurna: Wow. Jesse Hagopian: A couple abstentions of people who wanted some more information but the entire staff spoke with one voice that we were going to refuse to give this test, and a little while later we held a press conference at Garfield High School. After the district didn’t get back to us with… you know, we asked them to talk to us about this test one more time and when we heard nothing we called this press conference, and after that my life has been in chaos ever since with just endless requests from parents, students, and teachers around the country to send Garfield teachers out to speak about our actions. Thousands of emails came flooding in, and letters, and flowers, and chocolates… Eric Gurna: Wow. Jesse Hagopian: …from families and teachers all over the country who have been abused by these tests and were so inspired by the action that we took at Garfield. But, you know, our resolve was quickly tested when the superintendent threatened us with a 10-day suspension without pay at Garfield. And, again, it was scary for everybody but especially the people we called the necks. The necks were the teachers in the tested subjects whose neck was on the line. Eric Gurna: Okay. Jesse Hagopian: And we wanted to do everything we could to defend them and we wanted to build the biggest possible movement of solidarity so that non of our colleagues would be attacked. Eric Gurna: And was that mostly English and math? Jesse Hagopian: Yeah, yeah. Eric Gurna: Is that who the necks are? Jesse Hagopian: Yeah. Eric Gurna: Okay. Jesse Hagopian: And ELL and SPED. Eric Gurna: Okay. Jesse Hagopian: But, yeah. And the rest of us were known as the backs at Garfield High School because we had all their backs. Eric Gurna: Yeah. Jesse Hagopian: And but it was… the power of our action was that it was a unified collective work, and wasn’t just of the teachers because, you know, quickly thereafter, the PTA, the PTSA, voted unanimously to support us… Eric Gurna: Wow. Jesse Hagopian: …in our action. And the student body government voted unanimously to support us, and then the boycott spread… Eric Gurna: Yeah. Jesse Hagopian: …to other schools. It went to Orca K-8, it went to Chief Sealth High School, it went to Ballard, and we got some eight other schools. Eric Gurna: In Seattle. Jesse Hagopian: In Seattle, that joined us. And the superintendent freaked out at this point. He saw a full-scale rebellion on his hands and he saw that his threats didn’t work and, to me, one of the most beautiful things I’ve every witness in my life is seeing an entire staff lose their fear. Eric Gurna: Yeah. Jesse Hagopian: It’s the type of thing I’ve taught my students about in class when I’m recounting the Civil Rights Movement or showing them interviews of people who have participated, where an entire population lost their fear and said: we’re going to stand up for what we know is right, regardless of the consequences. And going to work became a joy every morning, to get up and go to school and see these people who were sick of being disregarded. Eric Gurna: Yeah. Jesse Hagopian: I mean, you know where the education conversation has gone in this country where all the people who are consulted usually haven’t been inside a public school. Eric Gurna: Yeah. Jesse Hagopian: You know, and it was just beautiful thing to see educators say we should be consulted about what is quality assessment, and if you don’t consult us and you ignore our voice after we pass resolutions, after we ask nicely for year after year, then we’re going to stand up. We have a way to assert ourselves… Eric Gurna: Yeah. Jesse Hagopian: …into this conversation. And it was a beautiful thing to see. Eric Gurna: So I want to also get into what happened after that because it’s pretty remarkable how the situation has changed this year, I think. But I’m really interested in something you said, you just alluded to, that you’ve been working for years on fighting this test before this happened. You also mentioned the Civil Rights Movement, and, you know, oftentimes people reference, let’s say, Rosa Parks and her refusal to give up her seat on the bus and a lot of people don’t realize that she had been to the Highlander Center to learn about resistance and she was a skilled Civil Rights activist and that there was a whole context that she was in. She wasn’t, you know, a lady who just one day out of the blue just said, “”No more.”” There was something that led to that and that she… Jesse Hagopian: That’s right. Eric Gurna: …was linked to many other people. She wasn’t just acting on her own. Jesse Hagopian: That’s absolutely right. Eric Gurna: So I’m really curious to know, what was all that building work that you did that led to that dramatic press conference? Jesse Hagopian: Well, I’m glad you asked that because that’s the part of the story that never gets told and that I think is really important to get out if we’re going to replicate this type of action around the country and stand up for quality assessment because it didn’t just start last year, for sure. There’s been numerous organizing efforts around this specific test and around other issues related to education that I think played a really important role in our movement. First of all, Mallory Clarke had refused to give this test on her own surreptitiously for a couple of years before there was as stringent reporting requirements, but this year… Eric Gurna: She had just not done it, not really made a big deal out of it, but just not giving the test? Jesse Hagopian: That’s right. Eric Gurna: Okay. Jesse Hagopian: She knew it was not giving her information… Eric Gurna: Yeah. Jesse Hagopian: …that was useful. Eric Gurna: Yeah. Jesse Hagopian: She knew that her kids… she teaches remedial reading class trying to get kids in high school who are often at fourth grade reading levels to improve, and she knows that this test wasn’t helping her do that and that, actually, her methods were much more successful. Eric Gurna: Right. Jesse Hagopian: But this year the testing coordinating told her the reporting requirements are going to require us to give this test unless you have a better idea. It turned out she did. So, you know, I think there was a culture at Garfield where many of us had been opposing this test in different ways. I helped to pass a resolution put forward by a Ballard teacher, Noam Gundle. Eric Gurna: That’s another school here? Jesse Hagopian: Another school in Seattle. And that had happened, I believe, in 2010 when we adopted this test in the Seattle Public Schools, and we had a rigorous debate inside our union about this test. Some said that if we reject this test, if we pass a resolution saying it’s not useful, the parents will revolt and they’ll say: see, teachers don’t want to be accountable. And we argued that we do want to be accountable because we believe in quality education for everybody and that we can convince parents, that we could get them on our side because parents are seeing the curriculum being narrowed to the few things that are on the test, parents are seeing the inundation of the classroom with these standardized tests, and the fact that this specific test, the MAP Test, was brought to Seattle by a superintendent who also sat on the board of the company that makes the test but didn’t disclose that… Eric Gurna: Wow. Jesse Hagopian: …when the test was adopted by the Seattle Public Schools… Eric Gurna: And what company is that? Jesse Hagopian: …to the tune of four million dollars. NWEA. Eric Gurna: Okay. Jesse Hagopian: And it, you know, it wasn’t just us that had a problem with that. The state auditor came and found that to be an ethics violation. Eric Gurna: Sure, but, still, the decision to use the test was already in effect. Jesse Hagopian: Yeah. It went through anyway and… Eric Gurna: Did that superintendent… was he or she dealt with in any way because of that ethics violation? Jesse Hagopian: She wasn’t. Maria Goodloe-Johnson, the late Maria Goodloe-Johnson, sadly, she was run out of the Seattle schools for a different ethics violation for the belief that she knew that millions of dollars were being taken from the schools by a private entity, basically just stolen without her proper oversight. But in terms of this ethics violation, it was allowed to go unchecked, and that really bothered a lot of us educators and we knew that parents are sick of seeing no big contracts to millions of dollars go out to testing companies that are profiting off of our schools, money that we could use for reading coaches, right? You want to improve reading and math? Eric Gurna: Yeah, yeah. Jesse Hagopian: You could add one more test… we already have five required tests you have to pass on top of the MAP Test that’s given three times a year, so we could add another test or we could use that money for a reading coach, after school tutors, lowering class size so we have more individual attention, right. And these are the arguments that we knew could win over the staff. The one other thing I’d say that laid the groundwork for this boycott this year besides that activism around the MAP I think was events that happened last year, the previous year, at Garfield where the state legislature announced that they were going to cut two billion dollars from schools and healthcare in Washington state. And a group of us teachers in the Social Equality Educators, we went down to the capitol, along with thousands of Occupy activists and unions who were protesting, and we got into the House, Ways, and Means Committee meeting where they’re actually doing the cutting of the budget. And when they gaveled in the session we stood up and we mic-checked the room. We read out the state constitution and the King County Superior Court ruling that said that the state legislature had broken the law with regard to education funding already. So we said that we were actually in a crime scene, that they were breaking the law and that we were conducting a citizen’s arrest of the legislature. And at that point the officer didn’t believe in my interpretation of the law and… Eric Gurna: That’s shocking. Jesse Hagopian: …and arrested me instead, and I spent the evening in jail and my students found out about it. And they launched a Facebook page: Free Mr. Hagopian, unbeknownst to me. And when I got to school the next day they figured it had worked. Eric Gurna: Right, sure. Jesse Hagopian: I was freed. So they got bold and they changed it from Free Mr. Hagopian to Walk Out Against the Budget Cuts. Eric Gurna: Wow. Jesse Hagopian: And in 24 hours without any help from me or any adults, I didn’t even know it was happening, they organized a mass walkout at Garfield with hundreds and hundreds of students streaming past me in the hallway with signs with a pamphlet about what the budget cuts had done to our school and they delivered it in a march to the mayor’s office. Eric Gurna: Wow. Jesse Hagopian: And it really, I think, changed the culture at Garfield High School to where the staff was inspired by the students’ collective action and standing up for their own education. Eric Gurna: It’s really amazing what can happen when there’s some unity like that. You know, it’s incredible to hear these unanimous… I never know how to say that word right, but unanimous votes… Jesse Hagopian: That’s right. Eric Gurna: …in support and in solidarity with the boycott and then the sort of independent action, independent related action of the students and others in other schools, and then I know that there’s… the Garfield strike has been hugely inspirational across the country. Jesse Hagopian: Yeah. Eric Gurna: Before… I do want to get a little… I do have some questions about that, but I also want to sort of skip to now. So you went through this sort of dramatic part of the decision making and the public interface of it, then there’s a lot of media. If you Google your name there’s, you know, you’re on MSNBC, you’re on CNN, you’re sort of speaking out about what’s happening. But it’s also had some policy impact, at least some… Jesse Hagopian: Absolutely. Eric Gurna: I don’t know if it’s temporary or permanent but… Jesse Hagopian: Yeah, we scrapped the MAP. Eric Gurna: So sort of update us on that. Yeah. Jesse Hagopian: That was our slogan and I was shocked. At the end of the school year an email flashed up from the superintendent, and buried in the middle of this long message was the fact that the MAP Test was going to be optional for high schools next year. Eric Gurna: Yeah. Jesse Hagopian: And, I mean, when I read that out to the students it was a eruption of joy, fist bumps in the hallway, spontaneous celebrations  because we had been threatened. We had all stuck together and we won. You know, it was an incredible lesson of the power of solidarity over intimidation. And, like you said, the most beautiful thing about the struggle was that it wasn’t just a victory for Garfield High School, that this sort of took off across the nation. We saw walkouts in Portland, in Chicago of students walking out of the test. We saw 8,000 parents in Long Island opt their kids out of the test. Eric Gurna: Yeah. Jesse Hagopian: 13,000 in Texas marching against these high stakes tests. They had 15 required graduation tests in Texas and they actually knocked it down to five… Eric Gurna: Wow. Jesse Hagopian: …through this mass mobilization. They had a group in Texas that formed the… became popularly known as Mother’s Against Drunk Testing, and the movement just interrupted into what they called the Education Spring last year, and I think we’re still riding that momentum. Eric Gurna: And there’s other related activity in terms of the Chicago teachers’ strike, the work that I recently features on Please Speak Freely of the Providence Student Union… Jesse Hagopian: That’s right. Eric Gurna:  …which is similar. So where do you think this is all going in a national sense? Jesse Hagopian: I mean, to me that’s the most exciting part, that those of us directly impacted by the education system, the people that are the constituents of the education system, the parents, students, and educators are asserting our voice all across the country, and I think we’re going to see something unprecedented in US history this year, especially this spring. We’re going to see people refuse to allow Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation, Eli Broad and The Broad Foundation, Walmart family, The Walton Foundation. Those are the three biggest players in education policy. People who have never been on the inside of a public school for more than a visit, people who want to privatize our schools with charter schools who want to reduce the intellectual process of teaching and learning to a single number, use that score to label a teacher and a student so that they can close 50 schools, like you’re seeing in Chicago, or deny students graduation or fire teachers. People who really don’t know what quality pedagogy is about are directing our schools and I think this spring we are going to see the largest eruption of grassroots activism in defense of public schools that maybe we’ve every seen. I mean, I’m hearing plans for a national month of action in the spring maybe in May when the most high stakes tests are offered and I think the number of parents opting their kids out of these tests is going to be unprecedented. I think the number of students who will be refused to be labeled a number and the possibility for boycotts beyond Seattle I think is very real. So I’m optimistic that those of us who are the backbone of the education system will reclaim it and decide the direction we think it should go in. Eric Gurna: And that’s a big question, right? Because you mentioned pedagogy which is not often talked about, the actual process of learning… Jesse Hagopian: That’s right. Eric Gurna: …is not often even discussed in these sort of education reform conversations. If you, you know, look at the recent Education Nation… Jesse Hagopian: That’s right. Eric Gurna: …on NBC, which I know you were featured on, there’s not a lot of talk about how learning happens in the classroom, outside the classroom. And there’s a lot of talk about assessment, and accountability, and all these other things, but a criticism of those of us who are fighting against high stakes testing and all of the stuff that you’ve been talking about, Diane Ravitch being the most high profile activist, a criticism of Ravitch and others is that are defenders of the status quo. Jesse Hagopian: Right. Eric Gurna: That they want to bring us back to some horrible yesteryear, you know, and to be honest I sometimes relate to that criticism because I hear people talking about how we need to get back to something, and I often feel like I don’t know if it was ever so great. Jesse Hagopian: Right. Eric Gurna: I never got to experience anything close to my vision for what education could be except in these little moments: this one teacher in sixth grade or this, you know, these little glimpses of, wow, it can be like this, you know? But for the most part, it’s like I don’t know if we really want to go back to something, but we want to go forward to what, right? Because there’s this vision that Gates and, et al, Duncan, Bush have laid forth and their vision is pretty clear, you know. Jesse Hagopian: Yeah. Eric Gurna: The vision of those who oppose that vision doesn’t seem to get much airtime or are sort of anti-this and fighting against that. So once we have that… like, say next spring is how you just prophesized, right. Where do we go then? Jesse Hagopian: Yeah, excellent. The first thing I should say is that those defenders of corporate education reform who claim that Ravitch, or me, or this movement as defenders of the status quo I think need to be put in check very quickly by saying that the No Child Left Behind Act has now been in place for over a decade. Eric Gurna: Yeah. Jesse Hagopian: So maybe you could say that we were defenders of the status quo in the first year, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, but once you get over a decade, now you’re policy is the status quo. Has it worked? And we can say definitely that we have seen a disastrous policy of test and punish, right, ravage the school system. So at this point Secretary Duncan and the corporate reforms are the status quo, and I think you’re right. We need to have a vision to undo the status quo and to move us in a place that we’ve never seen public education in this country go before and that vision has to be intimately bound up with a vision for what is quality pedagogy. And so I would say a couple things about what that vision would look like. First of all, with assessment we need to move away from standardized testing as the god we pray to, as the sole arbiter of intelligence, in our society. Eric Gurna: What do you think about the current focus on college and career-ready and are you talking about a way of reframing the purpose of education away from that? Jesse Hagopian: Absolutely. I think that the focus on college and career-ready and giving grades to schools and to colleges, it’s all about ranking and sorting our children, and I’m about empowering them. I think we need to completely reframe the purpose of education, that first and foremost the purpose of education has to be to solve real problems that we face in the world today. If our world was humming along doing well we could talk about… Eric Gurna: It’s not. Jesse Hagopian: …we could talk about a different purpose for education but the problem is we face immense social crises in the world today, right. I mean, there’s an epidemic of violence against women in our society today that goes unchecked, and this sort of sexist misogyny is just peddled in the mainstream media every day that feeds into this abuse. We have endless wars in the Middle East to where our country can spend untold amounts more to bomb children in the Middle East but not to educate them here at home. We have economic collapse so that in the world’s richest country we have one out of four kids living in poverty. I mean, that’s obscene. That’s just absolutely outrageous, and to me possibly the biggest challenge is climate change, right, because if we don’t figure out how to develop problem solvers in our world today we won’t have a world that’s hospitable to humanity anymore. And this is a medium term to a short term problem that we’re going to face with millions of people projected to be climate refugees from island nations around the world in the near term and then the future of humanity threatened in too distant future. And I think that if we don’t reframe the purpose of education to be about developing visionaries, imagination, to foster collaboration so that we’re working together, I mean, hello? Government shutdown here. We could use more collaboration in our world today, people that know how to work together to solve the problems that we face today. If we can’t figure out how to make our schools about critical thinking rather than rote memorization and fill-in-the-bubble then we’re going to be lost as a country, more importantly as a world, and I think that if we take that as our starting point that education has to be about empowering our youth to solve the problems that they’re seeing in the world today. Then we can develop much better public policy around education, and much better forms of assessment, and much better ideas for how we go about empowering them. Do we want to straightjacket them with 14 standardized tests for a kindergartener, as one mother in Chicago told me that her family is being subjected to, right? Or do we want to lower class size, give great instruction to our educators and professional development that shows how to foster collaboration and move towards forms of assessment that can look at many of the skills? And I think that’s the crossroads that we’re at today and I hope that that kind of repurposing of education can enter the mainstream debate through all this activism that’s coming this year. Eric Gurna: Earlier you told the story about the superintendent in Washington who was on the board of the testing company for the test that she brought in to use in that district, obviously profiting the company that she was on the board within. As you said, that was an ethics violation. That’s one example but there’s a lot of corporate and commercial interests in the world of education… Jesse Hagopian: Yeah. Eric Gurna: …particularly when it comes to curriculum, textbooks, and testing. Jesse Hagopian: That’s right. Eric Gurna: And oftentimes those are one and the same companies that are putting those together, and lately we see this sort of feeding frenzy of consultants and others around a common core, right. So all of a sudden everybody’s an expert on integrating common core into your classroom even though it just came out. So I guess I want to ask you, do you give much thought to the corporate and commercial interests and do you see a connection between that and the sort of hyper competitive, hyper hierarchical sorting system that you mentioned that the tests actually, the tests and the ranking systems, actually encourage? Jesse Hagopian: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, our superintendent was part of NWEA but that’s small potatoes in the world of the testing industrial complex that’s just become a behemoth. I mean, it’s a multi-billion dollar industry led by Pearson, and we know that the common core initiative is really just a windfall for these testing companies because if you have the same standards in every state, then you can develop one test and sell it to every state and the profit margins go way up. And I think that many times the assessments that we’re given, the tests that we’re using in our schools, are not driven by: what’s the best way to assess what our kids know? But about who gets the contract and who’s got the lobbying power? And I think that that gets it exactly wrong. I think that we need to challenge these testing companies. We need to look into the money that they’re spending on influencing our politicians and we need to raise our voices against that. Eric Gurna: And you just made me think of that. I never thought about this before but there’s a real parallel here between the drug laws that were passed in the 80s and 90s with the over sentencing of minor infractions, drug infractions, the disproportionate sentencing for, say, crack versus powder cocaine that were advocated for by the prison builders, essentially. Jesse Hagopian: Absolutely. Eric Gurna: There’s such a parallel between that, which is so sad when you think about it. Jesse Hagopian: I mean, it shows you why we need to repurpose education to solve problems… Eric Gurna: Yeah. Jesse Hagopian: …because when you have, you know, wealthy prison industrial complex lobbying to get prisons made and then you have testing companies lobbying to get their product into the classroom, you create severe social crises and I think I’m glad you raised that specific case because I think the two are actually linked in a very dangerous way because high stakes testing has been shown in a new study, in a peer reviewed journal, to actually increase incarceration rates in our country. And so our kids are being tested out of school and into prisons, and it happens in several ways. The first way is when their skills, their knowledge, and what students really value is not respected in our classrooms and instead a very narrow ability to eliminate wrong answer choices is the skill that’s valued kids rightfully tune out, and when they tune out in the classroom then you see more behavioral problems and discipline problems, and then you see the suspension rates rise, and then you see kids not graduating because they miss school, and then you see an increase in the prison population. And I think that’s one very real consequence of these standardized tests. I think beyond that, the graduation requirements, the ELCs or end of course exams that are required to pass to graduate are fueling the school to prison pipeline. The kids who aren’t passing these end up in higher rates, according to the most current research, in prison. And I think Arne Duncan and the rest of the corporate education reformers have to be held to account for that. What do you say? That the policies that you are pushing are leading to higher incarceration rates, right? Arne Duncan has said that education is the Civil Rights Movement of our time, and that’s a lot for me to take from a guy who also said that Hurricane Katrina was the best thing that ever happened to the New Orleans Public School System because it wiped out the schools and allowed it to be charterized. But I do think he’s right, that it is the Civil Rights Movement of our time. It’s just that I don’t remember that the Civil Rights Movement was led by billionaires. Eric Gurna: Yeah. Jesse Hagopian: And I don’t remember that the Civil Rights Movement contributed to mass incarceration. Eric Gurna: Yeah. Jesse Hagopian: And if I remember right the Civil Rights Movement was started with a boycott, and I hope that our boycott also helps lead to mass grassroots activism in defense of our public schools. Eric Gurna: And I hope so too. Jesse Hagopian: Right on. Eric Gurna: And I want to really thank you, Jesse Hagopian, for taking the time to be on Please Speak Freely. It’s been a real pleasure. Eric Gurna: Right on. Thanks so much. [/expand]

If you love zombies, you’re going to love this episode! I talked with Aaron Regunberg, Executive Director of the Providence Student Union (PSU). PSU became well known nationally last year when they led a zombie marchthrough the downtown of Providence, RI to call attention to the “zombification” of students that results from high-stakes testing and the narrowing of the curriculum. We also talked about the PSU’s other creative actions, including the day they asked “objectively successful” adults to take standardized tests for themselves. We discussed the huge praise the PSU has received from Diane Ravitch, the complexities of being a young adult heading up a youth-led organization, and much more.

Just in time for this week’s 16th Annual Brave New Voices International Youth Poetry Festival (held in Chicago this year), I spoke with the founder of Louder Than a Bomb: the Chicago Youth Poetry Festival, Kevin Coval, Artistic Director of Young Chicago Authors, as well as Jamila Woods, a poet, singer, playwright and founding member of YCA’s teaching artist corps. We talked about the power of poetry to transform lives and communities, the importance of creating spaces for young people to write and perform, and the complex realities of growing the scale of this kind of work. We also talked about Kevin’s recent book, and I got the treat of recording both Kevin and Jamila performing some of their own work.

We are pleased to present this special episode of Please Speak Freely, sponsored by Project Liftoff and recorded live at the Midwest Afterschool Science Academy, on March 12-14, 2013 in Kansas City. This episode is hosted by my colleague Jennifer Brady, and features conversations with Jeff Buehler of Project Liftoff, Ron Ottinger of the Noyce Foundation,Tony Streit and Leslie Goodyear of Education Development Center, Maryann Stimmer of STEMEducators and more! Jennifer and our guests discuss the special role that out-of-school time programs can play in helping young people embrace and explore Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM), and the challenges and strengths faced by the field.

On May 10, 2013, I read an Op-Ed in the New York Times that really struck a chord. The article was titled, “Pay People to Cook at Home,” and in the piece my guest Kristin Wartman argues that the government should provide compensation to parents of young children to support parents in providing healthy home cooked meals. Kristin based her idea on the Wages for Housework campaign mounted by the activist, organizer and author Selma James. Kristin and discussed this radical idea, and her views on other related issues including nutrition experts funded and co-opted by corporations, the lack of veracity in the way food is promoted, and how people can avoid being tricked. Oh, and she also weighs in on why Americans are so crazy about food.

Almost fifty years go, the Institute for Educational Leadership was formed to bring together leaders from diverse sectors to focus on building partnerships for educational success. Around that same time, Marty Blank was a VISTA volunteer in the Missouri Bootheel, and began his lifelong mission for social justice and equity. I talked with Marty about his journey, the work of the two organizations he runs and the growing Community Schools movement.

First, let me apologize for the extra long delay between episodes of Please Speak Freely! While I have intentionally ignored the good advice I get to put the podcast on a set schedule in order to keep it from becoming a chore with an arbitrary deadline, I do intend to release a new episode at least every four to six weeks. The longer stretch that has passed since the last podcast is unusual. That said, I am pleased to present this latest episode, during which I spoke with Michelle Yanche, Assistant Executive Director for Government and External Relations for Good Shepherd Services and a passionate advocate for youth and families in New York City. Michelle talks about her vision for the future of youth and   family policy, how she stays sane fighting the same funding cuts year after year, and her own personal reasons for believing so strongly in youth development programs. This episode of Please Speak Freely is dedicated to the loving memory of my hero and friend, Richard Murphy, who passed away on February 14, 2013. Murphy was a lion in the field of youth work. He founded Rheedlen Centers for Children and Families, where he hired Geoffrey Canada, who later succeeded him and transformed the agency into the Harlem Children’s Zone. When he left Rheedlen, Murphy was appointed New York City Commissioner of Youth Services by Mayor David Dinkins. During his time there, he founded the Beacon Programs. He went on to pioneer work in community youth mapping and was the driving force behind many other innovations in the field, and many innovations in people’s lives, including my own. Rest in Peace, Murph.

I sat down with Tony Smith, Superintendent of the Oakland Unified School District at the School’s Out Washington Bridge Conference in Seattle, WA on October 9, 2012. Before we talked, Dr. Smith copresented a keynote for the conference with Jakada Imani, Executive Director of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights (and past Please Speak Freely guest). The two of them discussed the inequities in our public systems, the important role of youth as change-makers, and the need to engage in critical dialogue across systems. Dr. Smith had so many great things to say in that presentation that I used much of it for this episode. This allowed me to talk with him about his own path–how he came to approach the work as he does, and his own experience in public education. Many thanks to School’s Out Washington for sponsoring this episode!

Communities in Schools of Spokane County Site Coordinator Sheri Frantilla discusses how to put youth in the lead as youth participant Keni Beebe and Please Speak Freely Host Eric Gurna listen. This episode was recorded live at the School’s Out Washington Bridge Conference in Seattle, WA on October 9, 2012. It features a panel discussion I moderated on the challenges and complex realities of shifting from a teacher-student paradigm to a youth-adult partnership. I was so happy to share the stage with youth and youth practitioners representing programs that exemplify this approach at the elementary, middle and high school levels including Site Coordinator Sheri Frantilla and youth participant Keni Beebe of Communities in Schools of Spokane County (Cheney, WA), Program Coach Lorena Guzman of LA’s BEST After School Enrichment Program (Los Angeles, CA), and Program Director Sarah Meyer and recent program alum Michi Olivo of New Urban Arts (Providence, RI). Seventeen-year old author and speaker (and former Please Speak Freely guest) Nikhil Goyal provided an introduction, which set the tone for a lively discussion about the realities of embracing a youth-centered approach. Many thanks to School’s Out Washington for sponsoring this episode!

Children’s Troubadour Raffi is famous worldwide for his beautiful songs, including, “Baby Beluga,” “Bananaphone,” “Willoughby Wallaby Woo” and so many more. While I only really got to know his music when I became a father, millions of people who grew up with his music now have children of their own. They are known as Beluga Grads. From his lyrics, it’s clear that Raffi cares deeply about children, and about the environment. But only recently did I learn about his work with the organization he founded, the Centre for Child Honouring, that seeks to “advance Child Honouring as a universal ethic, an essential code of conduct for all to embrace.” The Centre’s vision is articulated in its Covenant for Honouring Children, and further expressed in an anthology edited by Raffi and Sharna Olfman, Child Honouring: How to Turn This World Around, includes essays by renowned child development author Penelope Leach, Nobel Prize nominee Lloyd Axworthy, celebrated cultural historian Riane Eisler, bestselling author Barbara Kingsolver, ecological economist Ron Colman among others, and a foreword by the Dalai Lama. On my recent trip to present at the School’s Out Washington Bridge Conference in Seattle, WA, I took a little side journey to Salt Spring Island, BC with my good friend Zach Wilson and I was so delighted to have the opportunity to speak with Raffi about his values and his work, and I hope you get as much out of the conversation as I did. Raffi recently perfomed a few concerts in Canada and the northwestern U.S. to benefit the Centre for Child Honouring., and he plans to tour more in 2013. Be on the lookout for the rare chance to see Raffi perform live! I know I will be taking my family the first chance we get.

You may know Lenore Skenazy as the woman who let her nine-year old son ride the subway alone, and was then the subject of much controversy, including this episode of the Today Show. She is now the host of the TV show, World’s Worst Mom and author of the book Free-Range Kids, where she advocates for letting kids be kids without so much pressure for every moment to be productive and enriched. Lenore and I had a lively conversation about why everyone’s so worried these days, opting out, and the benefits of truly free time. Lenore is also active on social media, and her blog and Twitter feed covers the ridiculous and scary ways in which our kids are being overprogrammed and overprotected.

Many years ago when I was Director of Staff Development at LA’s BEST After School Enrichment Program in Los Angeles, we were very excited to receive a visit from the office of the U.S. Secretary of Education. That visitor was to become known by many as the Godfather of Afterschool, Dr. Terry Peterson. Terry is currently the Director of the Afterschool and Community Learning Network, and the Chair of the Afterschool Alliance. I got to sit down and speak with Terry at this year’s Afterschool for All Challenge, where he talked to me about the role afterschool plays in the larger educational picture, and the importance of programs remaining well-resourced and vital.

One of my favorite youth programs in the country is New Urban Arts, based in Providence, RI. This community-based program is located in a storefront, and it is one of those rare places where the practice matches the rhetoric. For this episode I interviewed Jason Yoon, Executive Director and Sarah Meyer, Program Director, and we talked about how they design a creative learning space where young people truly direct their own experience. Sarah and NUA program alum Michi Olivo will be joining me as presenters at the Bridge Conference in Seattle, WA on October 8-9, where they will share more about their model in a breakout session, and participate in a live recording of Please Speak Freely focused on the challenges and complex realities of shifting from a teacher-student paradigm to a youth-adult partnership. I hope to see you there!

It was a pleasure to sit down with Holly Delany Cole, Co-Director of Community Resource Exchange, a New York nonprofit consulting firm that provides strategic advice and technical services every year to more than 300 community-based nonprofit organizations confronting social issues such as poverty and HIV/AIDS in low and moderate income neighborhoods. Holly has unique insight into the inner workings and leadership of the nonprofits that run youth and community-serving programs, and we had a great conversation about the pressures nonprofit leaders feel these days, and how the best of them are thriving. [raw] [/raw] [raw] [/raw]

“I grew up as one of those kids who came from an ‘at risk’ background. And what made a difference for me was that I had a youth program that wasn’t just about providing me services, but that was about investing in me as a leader.” – Jakada Imani I’m happy to announce that this is the twentieth episode of Please Speak Freely! This is a special episode to me personally because I interviewed my best friend since seventh grade, Jakada Imani. Jakada is the Executive Director of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights. Through organizing, leadership development and advocacy, the Ella Baker Center unlocks the power of low-income people, people of color, and their allies to transform California and inspire the world. We had a great talk about what it will take to move our culture from one that treats young people as problems or potential problems, to one that sees that they are potentially the solutions. Jay talked about his own experience growing up in Oakland, CA and the work he does now to empower the voices of people who are often ignored. I’m proud to say that I would definitely have interviewed Jay about his work even if he wasn’t my best friend. But he is, and I couldn’t be more proud of him. This episode is sponsored by the School’s Out Washington Bridge Conference, in Seattle, WA on October 8-9, 2012. Jakada Imani will be presenting the closing plenary session of the conference, alongside Tony Smith, the Superintendent of the Oakland Unified School District, who will be featured in a future podcast episode. There’s no guest blog for this episode, mostly because organizing the blog is a lot of work, so I’ve decided to put it on hiatus for now. If you’d like to write a blog piece for the podcast, let me know!

“A lot of times you come into a place and you’re going to have an influence on that school and on that institution and better the community, but your child may or may not see the fruits of that.”    – Will Power This episode features a free-ranging conversation with Will Power, award-winning performer, playwright and educator (soon to be in the newly-created position of Artist-in-Residence at Southern Methodist University!) Will and I discussed the challenges of making choices about our own children’s education, the balance between focusing on community work and art and performance, and his own work as a pioneer in Hip Hop Theater. The blog this time was written by Zach Wilson of School’s Out Washington, who describes how this episode connected with him personally, especially the idea of the internal conflicts Will and I discussed about how to make choices for our own children.

“We know from lots of research and from lots of experience that the work of helping young people get to productive adulthood is bigger than any one institution can take on.” – Jane Quinn This episode features Jane Quinn, Vice President and Director of National Center for Community Schools for Children’s Aid Society. Jane discusses her diverse career in youth work and education, and the community school movement, which envisions public schools as a hub of educational, social and family supports and resources. Jane has great stories and strong convictions about how local communities and society as a whole needs to prioritize the holistic health of young people. This episode of Please Speak Freely is dedicated to the memory of Joy Dryfoos, whose research, writing and advocacy invigorated the Community Schools movement.

11th Annual Afterschool for All Challenge – from left to right: Afterschool Champions Dr. Paul Sereno and Dr. Gabrielle Lyon, Texas Afterschool Youth Ambassador Yovanna Ortiz, Afterschool Alliance Executive Director Jodi Grant and Actor Kevin Sorbo at the “Breakfast of Champions”, May 9, 2012. This special episode was recorded live from the Afterschool Alliance’s Afterschool for All Challenge, held May 8-9, 2012 in Washington DC. This episode features an interview with Afterschool Alliance Executive Director Jodi Grant, along with highlights from the opening panel entitled “Afterschool Works: Understanding the Evidence and Transforming Research Into Action,” and the 11th annual Breakfast of Champions, which honored movers and shakers in the afterschool field and featured rousing speeches by elected officials who support afterschool. I also got to tag along with Julie Wild-Curry of Fairbanks, AK as she met with her senator and made the case for legislative support for afterschool programs. One of the highlights of the Challenge was a screening of the documentary film; Brooklyn Castle, which chronicles the afterschool chess powerhouse at New York City’s Middle School 318, home to the nation’s most winning chess team, and a series of deep budget cuts that threaten to undermine the afterschool program’s hard-won success. Brooklyn Castle recently won the Audience Award at the SxSW Film Festival. It’s getting all kinds of aclaim and is a great illustration of the power of afterschool. Learn more about the Alliance, the Challenge, or to get tools for advocating!

“We are trying to teach the kids that there is a way that KIPPsters act. There is a curiosity that they bring to the classroom; there is a respect that they bring to their interactions with their peers and with their teachers. We are going to be pragmatic about that approach, and we’re going to do what we think works.” – Marc Mannella The KIPP network of charter schoolshas been at the forefront of the charter school movement. In this episode, Marc Mannella discusses the KIPP approach to working with young people, including their values, and the systems they use to control/manage student behavior. [expand title=”Transcript Available here.”] Marc Mannella and Eric Gurna on the Please Speak Freely Podcast (Transcription) Eric Gurna: Hi, I’m Eric Gurna Gurna, Executive Director of Development Without Limits and this is Please Speak Freely, the podcast where we have honest conversations about youth development and education. So I’m here in West Philadelphia with Marc Mannella Manella, who is the CEO of KIPP Philadelphia. Did I get that right? Marc Mannella: Yep, absolutely. Eric Gurna: Good. So, Marc Mannella, thank you for agreeing to be on Please Speak Freely. Marc Mannella: My pleasure. Eric Gurna: Uh, so I guess you know there’s so much to talk about when it comes to KIPP. And there’s so much conversation about KIPP, in the field in general, and even in the sort of more public discourse. And I guess I’d like to start out by asking you, what drew you to come to work at KIPP? I believe you were a classroom teacher with Teach for America, starting out? Marc Mannella: I was, yeah, that’s right. Eric Gurna: So what drew you to KIPP? Marc Mannella: I mean, I think it was how aligned what KIPP believes is to what I believed. I was a teacher, I taught for two years through Teach for America in West Baltimore, actually in Baltimore Maryland for two years, and then I moved to Philadelphia and was teaching at a small charter in North Philadelphia. And I had the opportunity to be on a panel with Mike Feinberg. Mike Feinberg is one of the founders of the original KIPP school in Houston back in the early ’90’s, and we were talking about Teach for America and sort of what you can do when you’re done with your Teach for America core experience. I said you could stay in the classroom, other people were talking about going into consulting, and Mike said you could actually start your own school. So we’re on this panel together and I approached Mike afterwards, because Mike was talking about the expansion of KIPP, which had just started, this was back in 2002. And I said “Mike, when you guys coming to Philly? Because everything that you’re talking about, what kids can do when they’re taught in a high quality way in a safe environment, that’s what I believe too. And so if you guys were to come to Philly, I would be the first person to apply to be your science teacher.” And he said, well I’ve just listened to you for the last 90 minutes, and you’re exactly the kind of guy that we would like to see open the first KIPP school in Philadelphia. And so, you know, from there it was a question of really digging deep inside myself, and figuring out what it was I was really willing to commit to and do towards what I believed. And at the end of the day I decided to apply for the Fisher Fellowship, which is a 1-year training that KIPP Foundation runs to help teachers learn how to set up and start their own KIPP-like schools. So I was fortunate enough to be selected to be a Fisher Fellow, and from there worked in the ’02-’03 school year designing a school. I had to apply for a charter, I had to recruit kids, I had to hire teachers, I had to get insurance, like, everything you have to do to start from the ground up. Eric Gurna: And this is sort of a mock exercise? Or, this is, you’re really going through the process right off the bat? Marc Mannella: This was it, this was how KIPP Philadelphia started. Eric Gurna: OK Marc Mannella: It was this ’02-’03 school year where I spent the entire year working to this. And in July of 2003 we opened KIPP Philadelphia Charter School. 90 fifth-grade students, 4 teachers, an office manager, in a somewhat abandoned community center in North Philadelphia. Eric Gurna: Mmm-hmm. Marc Mannella: And those were our sort of inauspicious beginnings. Eric Gurna: And so you basically just stuck with it and ended up as the CEO. When did you start as the CEO or did you just sort of grow into that role as the thing grew, that you stayed the leader of the whole thing? Marc Mannella: Yeah, it was the latter. And so, I was sort of always the CEO of KIPP Philadelphia because back then it was just one grade. Eric Gurna: Right. Marc Mannella: And as we grew and we experienced more and more success, and by the time that our first group of kids, those fifth graders, were in the eighth grade, which is the end of the KIPP middle school experience, 91% of our eighth graders were proficient or advanced on the state test at math and 91% in reading. And we knew we were being successful at that point, and so we decided to grow. And so we put together a plan, that was gonna have us grow to 10 schools in Philadelphia. We were going to expand K to 12, so we were going to start doing elementary schools and high schools, which is a pattern that is being followed across the country by KIPP schools. What started as originally middle schools has now expanded to a K to 12 movement. And we’ve calculated that if we could get to 10 schools in Philly we’d be serving about 4400 students in North and West Philadelphia, and that expansion would increase the number of students from Northwest Philadelphia who are going to college by about 40%. That was a pretty significant impact that we knew we could have. And so we set out on this plan. We’re currently today at 4 schools, we serve about a thousand students. We have an elementary school, we have two middle schools and we have a high school. And we are on our way to hitting 10 schools by 2016. Eric Gurna: OK. So, at the beginning of that you said that what really drew you to it was that KIPP believed what you believed. That you felt like there was sort of a, it was compatible, your values, your beliefs was compatible to what KIPP is already trying to do. So what is that set of values, what is that set of beliefs? Marc Mannella: Ultimately, it’s that if you work hard, and you are nice, that there is no limit to what you can accomplish. Our students come to us between 2 and 3 grade levels behind. That is our reality. Our students largely come to us from the neighborhood schools that have basically failed their neighborhood for generations. And so when we take in a new fifth-grade student who is so far behind, that does not mean that their destiny is set. It means that there needs to be an intervention of sorts, we can’t continue to do the same old things if we’re going to expect that our students are gonna be able to go to and through college and have a happy, independent life. But it doesn’t mean it’s impossible either. My student’s zip code does not have to define their destiny. And so what we have said is, if we roll up our sleeves, and we work harder, and we go to school from 7:30 until 5, we go every other Saturday, we go for a month during the summer, if we roll up our sleeves and we work harder, our students can and will achieve. That’s ultimately, fundamentally, what it is that I believed that when I met Mike that first night, when I heard him talk about KIPP back in 2002, sort of drew me to want to be a part of this movement. Eric Gurna: Mmm-hmm. So there’s a few things in what you were just saying that I want to kind of pull out and see if we can examine a little bit more. One of them I had actually noticed from the one-pager about your schools, and it says in, you know, slightly different words than what you just said, “zip code does not define destiny.” But then, what it has underneath that just sort of spelled that out, is a couple of charts that show the test scores, that show what the results can be of, I believe, it’s like kids from equivalent backgrounds and what they can score on the tests. Now, when I saw that, what came to mind for me was if it’s saying “zip code does not define destiny” and then it’s showing the test score results, does that mean that the test scores are equivalent to the destiny in that equation? Marc Mannella: I’m glad you asked that question. I mean, obviously not, but at the same time there needs to be some scoreboard to point to at the end of the day, to understand how we’re doing. For KIPP, the goal is not a seventh grade math score. That in itself isn’t a goal. The seventh grade math score lets us know how we’re doing against our goal. Our goal is for all of our students to have a happy, independent life. And the way that we sort of make that tangible for our students is talking about college. Because increasingly in this economy and in this world that we live in, a Bachelors degree or an advanced degree is going to be, sort of, one of the things that you need in order to have that happy, independent life. And so when we’re talking to our fifth graders, when we’re talking to our kindergarteners, when we’re talking to our ninth graders, we’re talking about college. And so test scores are, like I said, they’re like a benchmarking more than they are the goal. If test scores were the goal, then why would I have music class? Why would we put science education, when there’s no science test, into our curriculum? We have to be careful not to only think about the tests, because then that leads to four hours of math and four hours of reading every day. There’s more to a college preparatory education than just math and reading, but you have to have math and reading. It’s a false choice to say that we can’t have great scores and have a robust college preparatory education that includes all the things that I was fortunate enough to have with my suburban public school that I attended when I was a child. We want that for our kids here in KIPP Philadelphia as well. Eric Gurna: So the test scores are a benchmark to see if you’re making progress towards these larger goals, that’s what you’re saying, right? Marc Mannella: Yes. Eric Gurna: So, but what do you think about the tests themselves? Like, how good of a benchmark are they? How good of a measuring system are they? Marc Mannella: They’re just OK, right? I mean, ultimately it’s fun to have these types of conversations because we can talk about whether the test is appropriate or not. I would love to see more performance-based testing out here. I would love to see it structured differently. I would love to see a portfolio be able to sort of, be a substitute for a written, bubble-in, standardized test. But the reality is, my kids have to take the test that’s in front of them. And that they’ll be judged and our school will be judged based on how they do. And,  you know, we can talk all we want to about whether or not the tests are fair or whether or not they are an accurate indicator. At the end of the day, our kids have to perform on them. President Obama had to nail the LSAT or else he wasn’t getting into Harvard Law. Now there are things about President Obama that make him a great leader, and let’s not get political, like whether you think he’s a great leader or not. There are things about him that make him a pretty incredibly successful guy, right? Ultimately he had to nail the LSAT or else he doesn’t get into Harvard Law, and if he doesn’t get into Harvard Law, all those other doors aren’t open for him. He could have said, well, the LSAT is an unfair measure, and so I’m not going to take it, or I’m not going to prepare for it or whatever, but he didn’t do that, all right? And our kids can’t or shouldn’t do that either. Eric Gurna: OK, but in that analogy, I agree that the young Obama saying the LSAT’s an unfair measure, I’m not going to take it, is unreasonable to expect that. But your school in that analogy is Harvard, right? So, if Harvard said, and I don’t know anything about the LSAT… Marc Mannella: I don’t know anything either. Eric Gurna: …so you’re using that as an example. But I like the example because it’s at the, it’s clear and it’s at the highest level of education in terms of the hierarchy. So, if Harvard decided to say, we think the LSATs are an unfair measure. We don’t think they measure the intellectual capabilities of students. We don’t think they measure the aptitude towards being a good attorney. We’re no longer gonna care about the LSAT. You can take it, you can show us your scores, but we’re not gonna care about it. If KIPP did that, I mean, doesn’t KIPP as an entity, as an institution, have that kind of, I don’t want to say it has as much influence as Harvard does, because nothing has as much influence as Harvard does, um, except maybe Yale already so calm down. But, you know, I don’t think it’s really a fair analogy to say well, our kids shouldn’t be expected not to take the test but, um, why does KIPP have to care so much about the test? Marc Mannella: At the end of the day, our kids are going to be judged. Whether it’s when they apply to high schools, if they decide to leave our middle schools and try and get a scholarship to a private school or try to earn acceptance into a magnet. Or whether it’s at the end of high school when they’re gonna try to get into college. Our students will be judged. And so to that end, we aren’t doing our job if we’re not preparing them to be judged. And if we’re not setting them up for success on that. And so, you know, when a college is looking at whether or not we’re doing a good job preparing them, they’re going to look at test scores. Whether they’re looking at the individual student or whether they’re looking at the school. Eric Gurna: Right. But if you, as a leader in education, you yourself or KIPP as an institution, believes that there should be more, as you said, there should be more portfolio assessment, there should be more performance-based assessment, there should be more varied measures, that aren’t just multiple-choice tests? If you believe that, couldn’t you then value the multiple-choice tests less and implement more of the portfolio-based and multiple measures, and then lead the field in that happening? Marc Mannella: Yeah, I think we could. I think there is, if you’re focused on everything you don’t actually have a focus, right? And I think for us, as we’re looking at what it is that we’re trying to accomplish, and how much farther we have to go, you know, I mean we went and put together a study of how our alumni are doing in terms of college completion, we called it the KIPP College Completion Report. And what we realized was that, despite the fact that we are incredibly proud of every single one of our alumni, our aspirational goal of making sure that all of our students have the ability to not just get to college but get through college, we’re falling short of that goal. We have about 38% of our students who are currently graduating with either a 2- or a 4-year degree, and that’s of a subset of students, we’re saying like, the students that we’re measuring there are students who finished eighth grade with us, right? So the students who finished eighth grade with us, it’s something like, you know, 8 years later, 9 years, 10 years later, 38% of them have a 4-year degree. And so we’re trying to push on that, that’s our focus. Our focus is increasing the college completion. I don’t think our focus can be that, and also trying to overhaul the way that the nation assesses learning. I think that there are some schools that are going sort of above and beyond on that type of work right now, that’s not our sort of core focus. In some classrooms, in our schools you’ll see a totally different way of assessing, and that’s part of the power of KIPP and what we call power to lead. Where at every different level there are different decisions that folks get to make. Teachers get to decide, ultimately, a lot about the way they deliver curriculum, the way they assess students. And so in some individual classrooms you’ll see, in some science classrooms you’ll see a huge percentage of the child’s report card grade be based on labs and that type of work, and I think that’s super appropriate. At the end of the day though, I don’t think you’re gonna see KIPP stepping up to be a leader in reforming the way students are assessed, because all of our energy is really being focused on helping our kids get to and through college, and I don’t think we necessarily, and I’ll speak for myself actually, and say that I don’t necessarily see that as my fight. Eric Gurna: Right. I mean, I see that it seems like KIPP is a leader in focusing more on high-stakes testing by emphasizing the success based on that measure. So it’s hard for me to sort of accept that you can say you value the performance-based assessment and all of that at the same time as it seems that the pressure has been put on so much more by, I don’t mean just by KIPP, but by what’s often referred to as the KIPP model. Because it’s really not just KIPP, it’s a whole coalition of charter schools and others. Certainly, you know, Michelle Rhee and Arnie Duncan and Joe Klein, you know, are not directly representing charter schools per se, but are sort of part of that same approach to measurement of success. But I understand what you’re talking about, about the focus thing. I, you know, my concern is that there’s not, and I’ve talked about this before, there’s not a shining example for the alternative to standardized tests. There are pockets, as you referred to, but they’re not well known. Marc Mannella: Right. No, I think that’s right. It’s really interesting, like you said, I think that as practitioners on the ground, and because KIPP is a decentralized model, right? And because we run very, sort of, lean and mean, and so at the KIPP Foundation level there are some folks who get to spend a lot of time thinking about these greater issues, but on the ground here in Philly, like, we are so lean, and that’s because ideologically we believe that the revenue that we’re bringing in should be directly impacting students as much as possible. So I don’t have a research team, I don’t have, you know, a whole sort of office full of cubicles of people working so solve x, y, and z, right? Eric Gurna: Right, you’re not a think tank. Marc Mannella: Yeah, exactly. And so, no, I totally understand where you’re coming from, and it’s really interesting. It is, you know, one of the criticisms I have of what’s happening in education right now is that folks who don’t believe the same things don’t talk to each other enough, right? I think that we tend to surround ourselves with people who think like we do. And so then you have folks who are sort of in this one camp that don’t want to see testing, that don’t want to see, you know, we were just talking about Alfie Kohn before the taping we were talking about Alfie Kohn, punished by rewards. Folks that are sort of in THIS camp, and then there’s sort of the, I think they’re called sometimes the no-excuses charter crowd, right? We talk to each other, and never shall the two meet, it seems like. That’s a detriment. I don’t think that we need to agree on everything but I do think that 95% of what we want is completely in line. I really do firmly believe that. Our conflict or what we don’t agree on is the tactics. So what is the way to get the results that we’re looking for? Like, we want to be able to have an educated work force. We want to be able to have a democracy where people understand, a well-educated democracy so that we can make good choices and we can run our country in a way that is going to be living up to the democratic ideals of our founding fathers, except maybe a little more inclusively than maybe our founding fathers envisioned it, right? We all want that. So how are we going to get there, is the question that we’re grappling with. And I think the movement would benefit from people actually talking to folks who don’t necessarily agree with them. And that’s not gonna happen, I think. Eric Gurna: Well, I’m taking a step in that direction. At least, you know… Marc Mannella: I know. Eric Gurna: …we’re not actually getting it on the same episode, you know, we’re trying to talk to people who have different approaches. I would say that I agree with you except for one part of what you just said, which is I don’t think it’s just tactics, I think that it’s values, too. I think that there are, and by values I mean some people value certain things more than they value other things. I don’t mean that people have, um, I don’t mean morals. So, you know, I agree with you on the side of, I think the vast majority of people who are just in the field of youth development education in general, have the same sort of morals. They want to work towards a more idealistic, better world. But I think what we value is different. And maybe we could get into what I mean about that a little bit. Marc Mannella: Great. Eric Gurna: Because it definitely connects to where I wanted to go. So, a couple of things you were saying that before we even got started, you were talking about how there can be a challenge of how, sort of, open and candid that you can be at times, because there’s, and you didn’t say, this is me editorializing, there’s your institution, and there’s your own personal views. But at the same time, from the things that I’ve read before I came down here, KIPP is making an effort in general, and KIPP Philadelphia in particular, at being more transparent, being more accountable. Marc Mannella: Yes. Eric Gurna: I read an article about the KIPP open book transparency and accountability in schools in the Philadelphia Social Innovations Journal, and it seems like there’s a real genuine dedication to addressing some of the criticisms that have been sort of thrown at KIPP through being more transparent. But I want to connect that to what you just said, which is that your work is really focusing on point of contact with young people. Your work here is not really about, necessarily, the national policy debate, although you obviously are informed on that and you connect to that. But it’s really about what’s happening in the classroom. And, so I want to sort of ask if we can take that open book concept and apply it to what’s happening in the classroom a little bit. Marc Mannella: Mmm-hmm. Eric Gurna: And just to ask you just first of all, what’s your own, what’s your pedagogic approach, what’s your philosophy about how young people learn, what kinds of learning environments are best, that sort of thing? Marc Mannella: Sure. And I will say that I agree with everything you’re saying and I will say that actually the open book concept came not from any slings and arrows that may have come the way of KIPP, but it was a specific response to what was happening in Philadelphia. Eric Gurna: Oh, OK. Marc Mannella: And for folks who are familiar with what’s going on here, I mean, there’s something like 17 charter schools that either have officials under indictment or are under federal investigation for things ranging from nepotism to corruption to, you know, to just outright theft and everything else. And so I think you know we’re trying to lead through KIPP open book, which is a KIPP Philadelphia initiative. We’re trying to lead our community, locally more so than nationally. I think KIPP has always been pretty good with transparency as we think about the report card that is published every year, and the fact that all of our schools are an open book, and people can come in and visit anytime that they want. We have open houses, we have an open door policy for parents, et cetera. And so really, as we think about what’s happening here in Philadelphia, there is, you know, this notion of charter schools as an entity where there’s going to be greater accountability in exchange for greater freedoms, right? And so there’s some of the bureaucratic stuff doesn’t exist and we don’t have to follow some of the same rules, but in exchange there’s greater accountability. And that’s sort of, it’s a missed opportunity here in Philly, it’s not happening that way. And because charter schools can’t be held accountable or aren’t being held accountable, then the sector suffers and then just, but really what I care about is that kids suffer. And there are schools that should be open or should be pressured to improve and it’s not happening. And so, you know, it is really open book and transparency as we think about KIPP, is really focused on that. And now I’ll segue back, because I want to answer that question… Eric Gurna: You know, I appreciate that, thank you. Marc Mannella: And again I think that the conflict between sort of being able to operate in a totally transparent way with having to talk in sound bites and not feel like you can be totally candid, I think for me has nothing to do with the difference between what I believe and the organization. Because KIPP is so aligned to what I believe, and because as the head of KIPP Philadelphia schools, if we’re ever drifting in a direction that I don’t like, I pull it back. And that’s one of the benefits of being the boss. And so, really as we think about what it is that forces us or makes it really difficult to be candid, I think, is sort of how brightly glaring the spotlight is. Open book is not necessarily, like, a PR play. There’s stuff in there that doesn’t look the way I want it to. There’s stuff in there that’s frustrating, there’s places where we have failed, or at the very least where we have disappointed. And we’re committed to owning that and to getting better. Around here we embrace the Stockdale Paradox that Jim Collins talks about, this notion that we have to be real with ourselves about our brutal facts, but at the same time never give up faith that in the end we’re going to succeed. And so for us, that guides everything that we do. We can’t sugar-coat the fact that, you know, sixth grade math has been a trouble spot for us historically for years, for whatever reason our kids do great in fifth grade math, and then we don’t see the same thing happening in sixth grade math. And, you know, so we have to own that and we have to do better, we can’t give up and say it’s hopeless, our kids will never do well on the sixth grade PSSA, they’ll never make the types of gains in sixth grade as they do in fifth and seventh. But at the same time, we can’t kid ourselves and say sixth grade math isn’t really a problem for us. Naah, you have to do well. So when I think about sort of pedagogically what I believe and what we believe, we believe a lot that students have to be able to access material, and so that means sort of like when we think about teaching as an art and a science, so as we think about the science of art, we have to think about the Vygotsky‘s zone approximate development, and I won’t get too sort of jargony with you, but this notion that if you’re teaching kids something they already know, they’re not learning anything. But if you’re teaching kids something that they can’t access because they don’t have the background knowledge or because they don’t have the three prerequisite skills in order to do the new skill, then they’re not going to learn anything either. So trying to hit our kids where they are is a key critical piece of what we’re doing. So what does that look like? Well, in our reading classrooms that looks like a lot of differentiation, a lot of readers workshop-style lessons, where maybe we’re doing an author study on Roald Dahl, and our lowest readers are reading one of Roald Dahl’s simpler books, like The Twits perhaps, and our more advanced readers are reading James and the Giant Peach or the Big Friendly Giant, The BFG, one of those types of books, so that there’s leveling inherent. So that they’re going to receive the same basic lesson, but then we’re going to be able to access that lesson through a novel that is on the level that they can read. In the math classroom, it largely looks like the science of it is going to be a little bit less evident, other than the fact that you’ll notice it in the fifth grade classroom, we are not starting with fifth grade standards, because our kids mostly have not mastered third and fourth grade standards, so at the beginning of the year in fifth grade we’re doing times tables, we’re doing place value, we’re doing third and fourth grade standard. Really, in math is where you’ll see the art of teaching, and where you’ll see students accessing material through more engaging lesson structures. You’ll see the chance that KIPP has become famous for, thanks to Oprah Winfrey, and some of the publicity that we’ve gotten around just that one methodology that we use. But you’ll see storytelling, you know, Deci and the Chocolate Factory as one of the ways that we teach decimals, with bits, bytes and bars, and just like sort of telling a story and using analogies to help our kids to access what is a traditionally a more intimidating subject like math. So you’ll see the art and science at play in all of our classrooms, our teachers don’t have autonomy over what they are teaching, so we define the scope and sequence for them that is aligned to Pennsylvania standards and the high schools aligned to the college ready standards, but you will see a lot of innovation around the how it is being taught, around sort of that art. Eric Gurna: So the sort of rap on KIPP pedagogically is that the teachers are not allowed much control over how they teach, and that there’s a heavy emphasis on control and on conformity. And I say that’s the rap on it because I don’t, you know, I don’t want to put that on it when I haven’t experienced it, but I’ve read a lot about it and you know you see things and you hear things and one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you is because, you know I’m less of a policy person and more of a pedagogic child development person, and what I care about is how kids are treated and the whole realm of the kind of learning environment that we create, and just the cultural environment that we create within our schools and programs. And so, I’m wondering, is that rap, you know, does that come from somewhere, you know, just to get you to sort of think and talk about that aspect of it, the conformity, the culture of control, criticism that’s been put on KIPP? Marc Mannella: Yeah, I think that, back to you said something earlier about how there’s KIPP, there’s, and sometimes KIPP is thought of as like a leader in this movement, but this movement involves a whole bunch of people, a whole bunch of different organizations, it’s a much more sort of larger patchwork sort of movement, right? I think that you’ll find, and let me just speak for KIPP Philadelphia, I think you’ll actually find that to be pretty false. And let me say that more sort of definitively. That’s false here in KIPP Philadelphia. It’s not true. The distinction between how and what, is how a lesson is taught and what a lesson is taught is clear and distinct. So our teachers have a ton of autonomy over how it is taught, but we are defining teachers what they will be teaching, and we think that is sort of the right level of intervention and the right level of, let’s call it support for a teacher when they’re gonna be coming in and they’re gonna be expected to be expert. I think that one of the advantages that we have here at KIPP Philadelphia, you know, we require two years of urban classroom teaching of all of our teacher candidates, of all of our applicants. And so we really are able to work with some teachers who are already quite, quite good, and are already establishing that they know how to manage a classroom, that they know how to drive results. That they know how to build relationships, and they know how to, and frankly instead of saying know, they believe what we believe about teaching and learning. And so for us, we don’t have to exert that type of command and control because we’re hiring rock stars. Eric Gurna: Rock stars, in the sense of they have a high level of skill. Marc Mannella: Yeah, among other things. And what I don’t want to sell short because we think it’s actually the most important thing is they believe what we believe. And when I say that, it really comes down to sort of one critical belief. On our website you’ll find 10 regional beliefs that KIPP Philadelphia holds. Eric Gurna: OK. Marc Mannella: But the one that really sort of jumps out and the one that really guides our work in the classrooms the most directly is that we believe that all children will learn when taught in a high quality way and a safe and orderly environment. Like, that is a belief that we hold. And we are testing our teacher candidates when they’re coming in, they’re applying for a job at KIPP, we’re testing that belief. We want to know if folks believe that, because sometimes in our history we have found that that teacher who got 90% of her kids to pass some state test, wasn’t even worried about the other 10%, or said that 10%, those aren’t kids I’m, I can’t do anything for those kids. And that’s just not at all what we believe. We’re here to serve every single child that’s gonna walk in our doors. And we have to make sure that they teachers that we hire believe that as well, or else we have misalignment between what I’m saying right now into this microphone and what’s actually happening on the ground, and that misalignment is gonna be a killer. That’s the type of thing that brings organizations to their knees. Eric Gurna: So let’s talk about those 10% a little bit, or whatever the percentage might be much higher, right, of young people who are coming in and who are not necessarily performing on the tests at the level that you want them to be, maybe they’re not, they don’t have the sort of attitude to engage with the class as much as you want, maybe they’re not behaving according to the rules and standards of the school. How are those things handled and dealt with? What’s the sort of philosophy on how to manage a large group of kids? Marc Mannella: Oh, I thought you were going to ask me a different question, so sorry. Our approach to those students is, first of all, it’s guided completely by the Stockdale Paradox. We’re going to be real with ourselves and what is going on, we’re never going to give up faith that our kids are gonna be able to go to and through college and have a happy and independent life. OK? And so we have to be able to come up with, then, the systems and the supports to make that real, because we have our behavior system that we believe, sort of, works for anywhere between 85-95% of our students, but then what about the other 5-15%? We have to exhaust every single thing that we can think of. We have to go outside the box, we have to go outside the room that the box was kept in, we have to go outside the building that had the room that had the box. OK? Like, we never give up. We’re going to try hundreds of different interventions to make it so that that child can succeed. Eric Gurna: So, before we even get to what’s outside the box, and the room, and out in the car, and the parking lot, um, what’s the box? What’s the behavior system that works for 85% of the kids? Marc Mannella: Sure, and I can speak most specifically about it at the middle school level, because I think that’s where, you know, that was when I was principal of the school and I think that’s the most developed and most standardized across all of KIPP. So, we have a very simple token economy system for our fifth and sixth graders for the kids in what we call the lower school of the middle school. And so basically, in a nutshell, you make good choices, you earn dollars. If you act in accordance to our values and our beliefs, you earn dollars. When you make bad choices, you lose dollars. These aren’t real dollars, these are KIPP dollars, like I said it’s a token economy. And all of that is captured in what we call the paycheck. Then as the week goes on, they’re earning and losing dollars, and at the end of the week each student is given their paycheck. So maybe at the end of the week, a child has earned $22. You can see that they actually earned $29, but then they lost $7 for this, that, and the other thing. The types of things that you earn dollars for, like I said if you’re exemplifying any of our values, so you’re showing resilience, you’re showing respect, you’re showing any of the values that we have. Love, grit. You earn dollars for that, a teacher can assign a dollar for that. You earn dollars for completing your homework, you earn dollars for showing up to school on time, basically meeting our expectations. And then you lose those dollars for things like chewing gum in class, for being disrespectful, for just making the types of mistakes that middle schoolers, you know, make. 10- to 14-year-olds make mistakes. We all make mistakes, but from 10 to 13, that middle school age, like, we know what the mistakes are, so our systems are built around, sort of, making sure that there is an appropriate consequence for that. At the end of the week you get basically what is equivalent to a behavior report card that the child brings home to their parent, guardian, whomever, and someone at home signs it. When they bring it back on Monday, that money is deposited into their KIPP bank account. They then can take that money from their KIPP bank account to the KIPP school store, where they can buy school supplies, they can buy fun stuff, they can buy basketballs, they can buy whatever. That is, in our school store. I think for the younger kids, having something that concrete, it gives a structure and it gives a sense of, it’s you know, we want to do the right thing because it’s the right thing to do, but also because we don’t want to receive the consequence that happens when I don’t do the right thing. It is a simple sort of consequence and reward system. As our kids get older, we have to wean them off this system, because if you’re only doing the right thing because you’re afraid of a punishment or because you want a reward, then what are we actually teaching? Well, then we’re only actually teaching obedience, and that is not the point. The point isn’t to teach obedience, the point is to teach kids that their actions have consequences. The point is to teach kids that there is a right way and a wrong way to interact with their peers, to interact with their teachers. And so, as the kids get older, we start to wean them off of this system, and so by the time you’re in eighth grade, you’re not getting a paycheck anymore because you don’t need a paycheck anymore, because you already understand what’s right and what’s wrong in a school environment, and you’re already choosing what’s right. And I think that what some of the notions that are sort of heaped upon KIPP from folks who don’t know or who aren’t in our buildings, is like they hear this paycheck thing and they’re like oh, my god – like, that is, you know, again our friend Alfie Kohn, like punished by rewards, right? Like come on, all they’re doing is teaching them how to sit and stay like they’re some kind of animal, would the most inflammatory thing that someone might say about us, right? Yeah, it’s just not true. I think people want to see a black and white picture of the world, but in reality it is much more nuanced and thoughtful, and it is a specific response to what we’ve seen, which is our fifth graders come to us from a school environment that was not orderly, where no one bothered teach them, or no one was successful in teaching them how to act in a school setting, and so we’re gonna establish that this is not your old school, and this is how we’re gonna expect you to behave, and you’re gonna meet that expectation. Eric Gurna: But, one of the things you said was that the point of it is not to teach obedience, but it’s to teach that actions have consequences. But do you think that if you didn’t have the punishment and reward system, or just the reward system, that they wouldn’t learn that their actions have consequences? Marc Mannella: Maybe they would. I think we look at first of all I think that this is working for us, and I think that we’re finding that our kids are able to have sort of these successful, happy lives. Independent lives, that we want them to have now that we’re a little bit older as an organization, we can see, you know, as we’re hiring KIPP alums to come back and be KIPP teachers, and as we’re seeing our alumni be incredibly successful in their fields, I think we’re seeing that it’s sort of an effective strategy. But at the end of the day, we believe that we’re here to teach more than reading, writing, and arithmetic, right? Like, character is as important to academic skills, in terms of a student’s success in having that happy, independent life. And so we want to make sure that character has as thoughtful of an approach, and the way that we’re helping our students to develop that character is as thoughtfully developed as our academic curriculum would be. Eric Gurna: Right, and certainly, this is where I think it’s different values rather than different tactics. Marc Mannella: OK. Eric Gurna: And, so how do I wanna…isn’t the system where you’re paying kids to behave a certain way, isn’t that different from helping them to learn what it means to truly develop their own character? If they’re acting certain ways in order to get certain rewards, aren’t there messages that you’re giving them about the way the world works that are outside of the specific action and the specific reward? Marc Mannella: I think that our approach is really rooted in sort of Kohlberg’s stages of moral development, right? So as we think about that work that Kohlberg did, we look at that sort of baseline stage of moral development as I do the right thing to avoid a punishment. And then it goes to I do the right thing because I want a reward. And then eventually you get to I do the right thing because it’s the right thing to do. These are stages of moral development that, you know, the theory is that every person sort of goes through, and you never sort of attain the top. The only person who consistently lived at the top level was like Gandhi or something, right? And so all of us sort of act in different moments and in different times, we’re acting on different levels. So, for example, the only reason I don’t go 90 miles an hour on the New Jersey turnpike when I’m driving up to New York, is cause I don’t want a ticket. Is it because I don’t think it’s – I’m a good driver, I can go 90 miles an hour, right? But ultimately, I don’t want that punishment. I don’t want to get a ticket. I don’t want to deal with it, I don’t want it to go to traffic court in some town in central Jersey, like, I don’t want to deal with that. And so, I don’t speed. I think that the notion of KIPP dollars and, remember, you say we pay our kids and we’re not paying them, like, cash. Eric Gurna: I understand, it’s a token economy. Marc Mannella: And the notion that we have set up something for 10 year olds to understand the concreteness of that, we think that it is then a way to have the conversation around, so you know, when you repeatedly speak out and yell out the answer in math class, the result of that is that the other kids who were trying to solve that problem in their head, now they just stop trying and so they learn less. So while I’m proud of you that you know the answer to four times three was twelve, you need to raise your hand like everybody else so that other kids have the time to think. I would love it if our teachers in the moment, you know, could have that conversation like right then and there in that moment. The reality is that the way public schools are funded in this country, I’ve got to have between 25 and 30 students in all our classrooms, and even the very best teachers aren’t going to live in a world where they can have that conversation in the moment. We want them to have that conversation though, and so in essence when that child lost $2 for calling out in class, then that’s the opportunity to circle back and when the system’s working right, then you have the conversation about when you blurt out the answer to the math question in class, the result of that, or the impact of that is that the other kids aren’t learning as much because they’re stopping to solve that problem in their head, they stop thinking. And so we have to change that behavior. There’s sort of a pragmatism to it. Eric Gurna: Right, I think it’s highly pragmatic. I guess what I’m saying is that it seems to me that what you’re valuing in that is the efficiency of the process over taking the time to help them see in an organic way how their actions actually affect others through actually experiencing dialog with others. So if you, to me the notion that you can take away a KIPP dollar and then tell me that the reason is, is that I was sort of being an obstacle towards learning to the other students by blurting out the answer, I’m thinking less about your reasoning and more about the transaction. If I was in a situation where I could hear from my peers about how my blurting out might impact them, I think a 10-year-old has the capacity to just understand that without the need to have the transactional sort of system, and what I’m saying is that I think, I mean I do think that it’s a really deep philosophical difference that you’re describing between your approach and the one best exemplified or described by Alfie Kohn, that the system itself that’s in place is one that is geared towards helping people see that they need to make sure that they understand their place in the system and that they shouldn’t go outside the lines of their place in the system. If they do the things they’re supposed to do, they’ll get stuff, and if they don’t do the things they’re supposed to do, they’ll get stuff taken away, but there’s also a sort of public image issue there that you’re the kid with less points than everyone else. And so what I’m trying to get at is, like, it feels like that type of token reward system, token economy system, is there primarily to keep control and then justified by things like Kohlberg’s stages of moral development. The explanation for it, the foundational philosophy for it, is backed into as a way to sort of wrap something around it that makes it valid. Marc Mannella: Interesting. So I would say first of all, I think it’s a bit of a false choice. I think that this is about and not or, to once again rip something off from Jim Collins. And I would say that what you’re talking about is the system when it’s broken. So if it’s not being implemented correctly, if it’s being implemented incorrectly, then it is about sort of power dynamics, I’m the teacher how dare you, and it’s about control. Whereas, we could also talk about the other piece of it, which also is the only way that you’re going to implement sort of any sort of character development, and if it is done incorrectly, doesn’t work either, right? So what I would challenge sort of listeners to think about is this notion of, any system implemented incorrectly with, I think now back to this notion of values, with sort of the wrong ends in mind. If your end is to teach obedience, if your end is to assert the power of a teacher, right? Then yes, that is an abuse of that system, that is the failure of that system. On the other side of it, you know, through having thoughtful conversations and making sure that children understand the impact and the consequences of their actions, without some sort of structure to it, if that isn’t going correctly then I think you have the opportunity, then sadly what it can slip into is how many traditional school classrooms look in America’s inner cities, which is disorganized, not an environment conducive to learning because there is no system, because maybe the conversations are happening 1/8th of the amount of time that they need to because there are so many misbehaviors now at this point that the teacher couldn’t possibly have them all and possibly try drive any kind of results and drive any kind of learning. So I think the one when what we’re doing is working the way it’s supposed to, it doesn’t lead to that conclusion. Eric Gurna: It’s interesting. Because in my mind, it’s not just about how the classroom is flowing, but it’s the, creating a culture conducive to learning is also about each individual’s attitudes towards the teacher, towards each other, and towards the material. And so, the level of engagement that each young person has might not be evident by looking at a classroom and seeing, you mentioned earlier before we got started recording, it’s very quiet today cause there’s a class trip, a field trip, today. And usually it may be much more rambunctious because I think you said learning isn’t always silent, right? Marc Mannella: Oh yeah. Eric Gurna: Right. But just by looking at a classroom you can see a very orderly system, or you can walk into a classroom and see kids working together in groups. You don’t necessarily know how conducive to learning the situation is until you have a chance to really find out what’s in kids’ heads. So part of my reluctance to accept this sort of token economy system as a means of, as the centerpiece of a culture, of a centerpiece, of one cornerstone I really should say to be fair, of a culture, is that I was the kid who when you tried to pay me to do something, I immediately hated it. You know, so it’s like, you know, oh, you’re going to give me a gold star? I mean, from pretty early on, it was like, I always felt like, are you kidding me? You think I’m going to do all this work for a gold star? You know, surely if someone had said, well how about $10? Then that would have changed my mentality, but probably only until $10 became more normal, and then I’d, you know, I’m going to do all this for $10? And I do think that’s all just scale, you know, what the prize is, is all just scale and can have diminishing returns over time. But do you see that? Is there at least a subset of kids who seem to sort of disengage with the whole thing because they feel like they’re being condescended to? Marc Mannella: We don’t, I don’t think see that terribly often. I can’t say that with the 1000 children that we serve that at some point, someone’s not thinking that. I think that the, you alluded to a little bit, but, I think that the thing that we must make sure that we talk about is the relationship between the teacher and the student, because ultimately this, any of this only works if you have that strong relationship. First of all, if a teacher knows that Eric Gurna in the back of class is not into gold stars, then it would be our expectation that the teacher doesn’t give Eric Gurna gold stars. And not that it means that he’s got to get $10, but that it means that there’s clearly something else that motivates Eric Gurna. Whether it is seeing his name on the list of kids who got 100 on the test, or whether it is a positive formal call home to mom, or whether it is frankly remaining a little bit in the back and not having that spotlight. Whatever it is, like, our teachers have to know that. And when we talk about the art and the science of teaching, there’s an art and a science to any kind of school-wide discipline system as well. And so yes, chewing gum we want that to be minus five in every single classroom because we want students to not pit teachers against each other. How come in Mr. Gurner’s classroom that was only minus two? You’re unfair, you don’t like me. Like, so we try and have those consistent rules so as not to blow the mind of an 11-year-old, and to make it very predictable. But at the same time, you have to know as the teacher sort of what the vibe is of your room. Each individual student as a person, as a child, as somebody who is putting an unbelievable amount of trust in your hands that you’re going to keep them safe that you’re going to make the learning environment safe, a safe one to take risks. And at the end of the day, those relationships are the biggest reason why our schools are experience the success that they are. More so than a token economy system. More so than the fact that we wean them off it. More so than sort of the way it’s rooted in Maslow. Eric Gurna: In Maslow? Marc Mannella: Sorry, not Maslow, Kohlberg. I forget my psychologists. Eric Gurna: No, I would love to hear about how it’s rooted in Maslow. Marc Mannella: Well, I can tell you, right? I was a psych major once upon a time. I mean, the bottom line is safety is at the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. And to your point about what’s conducive for a learning environment, if a child doesn’t feel like it’s safe to take risks, I need to know that every single one of my kids is willing to raise their hand if they think they know the right answer, not when they know they know they have right answer. Because that’s when those learning moments happen. If I say four times three is seven, then my teacher needs to be able to help me understand what I just screwed up. And that needs to happen in a room where other kids aren’t laughing. Because if other kids are laughing, next time I’m just not raising my frigging hand, and I do not learn as much. Eric Gurna: So I don’t want to be unfair by jumping on that example, but the reaction that I have on my mind is, wouldn’t the level of risk for, you know, the kind of situation we want to create where our kids can actually take a risk, to me is more about when there’s conversations where there is no right answer, and they feel that they’re free to raise their hand and create an idea, or add to an existing idea, and that it doesn’t seem to me like those are the examples that are at your fingertips because it seems to me like the right answer/wrong answer, do I get a point, do I not get a point, do I get a KIPP buck, do I not get a KIPP buck, is much more prevalent. Am I wrong, is that unfair? Marc Mannella: I think it’s a little unfair, I’m just trying to use the most concrete examples that I can. I think that it is going to be really hard for me to say something right now, sitting in my office, that can convince you or anybody else that we are working really hard to make sure that we have the higher order of thinking in our classrooms, to make sure that this isn’t about, you know, the old criticisms of KIPP, about drill and kill, and the only thing we care about is computation and math, and things like that. Although I totally see how the example that I picked would potentially reinforce that sort of bias, I would invite you or anybody else listening to come and see a KIPP fifth grade math class, a KIPP tenth grade biology class, a KIPP second grade classroom, and sort of make that decision for yourself, about the way we’re approaching that. Eric Gurna: Yeah, and that’s why I ask it like, is this unfair? Marc Mannella: No, I’m glad you called it out because I didn’t even realize, but I was trying to make simply a more concrete example, that’s all. Eric Gurna: Yeah, no, and it’s not just that one example. It obviously ties in to everything else that we’re talking about. As we get towards wrapping up, there’s one, you know I mentioned to you, you know, the rap on KIPP is this, and the rap on KIPP is that. And a big part of my wanting to talk to you is, you know, I was starting to feel as I refer to the KIPP model in a rather cavalier way that I’m being unfair, that I need to learn more and not just read the criticism but go and talk to KIPP, and learn more about it, understand more about it. And certainly when you sit across the table from someone and talk to someone who clearly, like yourself, who clearly has the passion and dedication for helping young people succeed, it helps to, like, sort of make the whole thing more human. But, so I want to ask you about some of the, one or two more of these things that are sort of in my mind, like oh KIPP does that. Marc Mannella: OK Eric Gurna: Silent lunches. I keep hearing that over and over again. When kids don’t behave, they’re not allowed to talk at lunch. Is this a thing, or is this a myth? Marc Mannella: Is it a thing, so we don’t have silent lunches but we do have, there are consequences when kids screw up. You know, the thing about a consequence as you pointed out with a reward, if it’s not something that kids care about then it’s not a consequence. And so, have I told a lunchroom that they’re going to be silent for the next 5 minutes forward? Heck yeah I have, cause that felt like the appropriate consequence based on whatever the heck I saw on that moment. Are KIPP kids allowed to talk in lunch? 99% of the time, at least KIPP Philadelphia students, the cafeteria looks like any orderly, like, respectful, but certainly it’s loud, middle school/high school/elementary school cafeterias anywhere else. Eric Gurna: The other one was, and I’m not going to remember it exactly right, something about when kids misbehave, they have to walk around with their shirt untucked so everyone knows it, or some signifier like that? Am I, um? Marc Mannella: So, there, every school is going to have a different discipline system, and that may be – I haven’t heard of the shirt untucked one before, I have heard about the shirt inside out before. Eric Gurna: It may have been that. Marc Mannella: And in various stages of our evolution we’ve done that and not done that at different points in time. The bottom line is that we’re very focused on a pragmatic approach, and this is something that we have found to be effective in certain situations. The notion that, for us it was always that everything at KIPP is earned, including the right to wear a shirt that says KIPP on it. And so if a student does something that is such an egregious violation of what it is that we believe and what it is that we stand for, so this is a type of consequence that would happen in a more sort of, a more serious situation. Sadly, it’s still middle school, and 11- and 12-year-olds sometimes make really bad choices, and so a student who makes like a devastatingly bad choice, we might say to them, you know, you’re not going to wear the KIPP name on your chest anymore until you’ve earned that back. And so in that moment we would tell them to go in the bathroom and turn their shirt inside out so the KIPP on their chests or on their back wasn’t visible anymore. Eric Gurna: And, but there’s uniform policy, so everyone’s wearing a KIPP shirt? Marc Mannella: Yes, yes that’s right Eric Gurna: So everyone’s wearing… it’s mandatory that kids wear a shirt with KIPP on it? Marc Mannella: Yep, we have a uniform policy. Eric Gurna: Right, but it’s – but they have to earn their right to wear the shirt. Marc Mannella: That’s right. When a new student starts with us they wear a blank shirt. Like, we’d tell their parents and we start our relation with every family with a home visit, where after they’re selected through our lottery, then we go and we explain the expectations of the school to the child and the mom and let them ask any questions they have about their new school. And one of the things we tell them is that for the first few weeks in summer, excuse me, they have to wear a blank t-shirt, it should be a blank white t-shirt, until they earn their very first KIPP shirt, and we have a big ceremony for when they’ve earned their right to be a… Eric Gurna: Is it at the same time every time, or is it like, is it actually each kid, like you have to decide have you earned it yet? Marc Mannella: There is a t-shirt ceremony where about 90-95% of the kids have earned it, but then there’s going to be a couple of kids who’ve made bad choices early on in the school year, who then have to earn that anew. Eric Gurna: And, do you feel that that creates a pressure on, that they create a pressure for themselves to adhere to the behavior policies, because they don’t have the, they haven’t earned the right to the shirt? Marc Mannella: I mean, yeah, it does. I think that ultimately one of the things that we’re trying to establish is that we’re a team and a family, and that there is a way that we’re going to act. There’s a way that we’re going to carry ourselves both academically, as well as in terms of the choices that we make in the cafeteria, and the hallways, and the bus stop, etc. And so, yeah, part of this is like a positive peer pressure where, look, that’s not what we do here. Like, why are you being mean? Like, we don’t do that here. And we’re trying to establish that sort of positive peer pressure in that way. Eric Gurna: But isn’t the tactic to get there public humiliation? Marc Mannella: I would not call it public humiliation. I mean, it is not the type of thing where we’re, like, putting on blast and just, you know – you, stand up, everybody else let’s throw rotten vegetables at this kid. That’s not at all what’s happening. There is a positive peer pressure that comes from wanting to be sort of on the team, and yeah. I mean, that’s ultimately what we’re trying to tap into there. Eric Gurna: So, I mean, I know you’re not throwing rotten vegetables at the kid, but I mean it’s a… Marc Mannella: Or verbal rotten vegetables Eric Gurna: But the point of the shirt thing, it’s not like you really think that the shirt matters that much, the shirt itself. What matters is that everyone sees that they have, they don’t have KIPP on their shirt, that their shirt’s inside out, that they’re wearing the white t-shirt after everyone else got their t-shirt. The point is that they’re, they stand out from everyone else as being, sort of like, they have an X on them, or whatever you want to call it, right? I mean, that’s the tactic. Marc Mannella: I mean, for there, one of our schools has a sticker, like a name sticker, my name is, and says I’m turning it around. At our elementary school, it is just like probably, you know, I can’t say the percentage, at hundreds and thousands of other schools across the country there’s your clothespin system where your clothespin is either here or it’s there or it’s there, and it’s on green, yellow, red, or whatever else it is. Eric Gurna: On a board or something, not on you Marc Mannella: Yeah. But I could argue that if it’s on the board and I’m in that classroom, I can see who’s green, yellow, red. Eric Gurna: Right, sure. Sure. Marc Mannella: I mean, it’s the same idea. It is trying to teach a kid that there is a way that KIPPsters act. There is a curiosity that they bring to the classroom, there is a respect that they bring to their interaction through their peers and their teachers, and we’re going to be pragmatic about that approach and we’re going to do what we think works. Eric Gurna: Right, no I get that, but if you wouldn’t call it public humiliation, what’s the tactic? I get the point of it is, and why you’re doing it, but… Marc Mannella: It’s positive peer pressure, is the answer. Eric Gurna: It’s positive peer pressure. Marc Mannella: That’s right. I want to, I want that privilege. I want to be able to talk in the cafeteria, so I’m going to, you know, next time the teacher says you’re getting too loud, or next time someone decides to whip a green bean across the room or whatever the heck it was that prompted this, I’m going to choose not to do that, or I’m going to help sort of maintain this culture that we have, this strong culture, on a peer level. Student to student. Eric Gurna: But it’s, the reason I’m gonna choose that is because I feel humiliated for not being able to have my shirt on right side out. Marc Mannella: Yeah, I don’t think we’re gonna agree on that at all. OK? Eric Gurna: So what’s your reason? As a kid, why do I want to earn my shirt back, or what’s my motivation for, how do I feel? And let me ask like that, as a kid, how do I feel when I’m not allowed to wear the KIPP shirt? Marc Mannella: Hard to speculate, I don’t know. But what I do know is what I want them to feel, which is pride and belonging on the team. I want them to feel pride that they’re a KIPPster, they’re taking control of their own future, they’re going to and through college and have a happy, independent life. That’s what I want them to feel. In the absence of that… Eric Gurna: But is it certain what they actually feel? Marc Mannella: In the absence of that there’s going to be all the, sort of, the counterpoints. At the end of the day though, I just don’t think this is about, it’s not about public shaming. And I think that we’re locked into a dichotomous debate when it doesn’t need to be. Like, at the end of the day, what we’re looking for, is we’re looking for students to understand that there’s a set of choices, there’s gonna be many forks in the road, and that we believe in you and you’re going to make it, to have this happy, independent life, and we’re going to teach you. Eric Gurna: But, when I ask how does that kid feel, and you say I can’t speculate on that, I just know how I want them to feel, isn’t that at the crux of a lot of this, like, doesn’t it actually matter what that kid actually is feeling? And isn’t it our job as educators to try as hard as we can to learn what’s going on inside of them? Marc Mannella: Don’t I want a child to feel a negative emotion after they just chucked green beans across the cafeteria? Eric Gurna: I don’t know, do people do better when they feel worse? Marc Mannella: I think that you remember the choice that you made that made you feel that way, and then you choose a different path next time. I think that’s learning. Eric Gurna: OK. Marc Mannella: And so whether it’s a red X next to number 3 on the higher order thinking question, their math test, or whether it is a consequence that’s delivered in the form of a negative on a paycheck, or it is in the form of being told that you’re not on the team anymore, and you’re gonna have to turn your shirt inside out or you’re gonna get your clothespin moved to yellow, I’m learning now. This is learning. Eric Gurna: OK. I’ve thrown a lot of things at you to respond to, I’m wondering is there anything else that you feel like is, you know, a criticism that’s out there or just sort of how KIPP’s referred to or anything that you’d want to clear up. Or is there just anything else that you’d want people to know about your work? Marc Mannella: I think that what we’ve spent a lot of time thinking about and working on, and this is an incredible point of pride for me and for us, is this notion of college completion for our kids. We are a lottery system, in terms of how children come to KIPP, and so that means that we are, you know, we’re actually in our open enrollment period for right now. And so, you are as a parent, you have the choice of entering our lottery. And we work really hard to make sure that every single parent in our neighborhoods that we serve know about our lottery. And we walk around with clipboards signing people up. On the weekends, in the evenings, we go to parks, we go to churches, we go to community centers, we go to supermarkets, just making sure that everybody has the opportunity to sign up. And after that lottery happens, with the students who come in there’s an incredibly wide range of ability. There’s an incredibly wide range of previous knowledge and educational attainment that our children come to us with. You know, of our KIPP Philadelphia, when you put all three of our schools together, 17.8 or something percent of them have a special education need of some kind, have an IP, so there is that one criticism out there that we don’t serve special ed. kids, it’s just patently false here in Philly. And then, you look at the, for the students who are with us at the end of eighth grade, how many of them are graduating with a 2- or a 4-year degree from college? The notion that 38% is, first of all, more than four times the average for kids who grow up in poverty in this country, that number is 8%. So 38% is almost five times that number. But yet we’re still not satisfied, because for the top quartile by income in this country, that number is between 75 and 80%. We see that as the real achievement gap in this country. That is the thing that has caused the institutionalized poverty. That is the thing that is holding our country back from realizing what it could become. The fact that there are 8% of children who are going to have that opportunity, have that happy, independent life because they’ve got that college degree, compared to 75 to 80% for the top quartile. KIPP and others like us are trying to totally reverse that. And we’re not going to be satisfied until we have closed that gap, not the seventh grade reading gap, you know, as measured on some state test, not even the ACT or the SAT, what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to close that gap in terms of college completion. And, you know, we have come an incredibly long way, and we have an incredibly long way to go. It’s going to be incredibly hard for us, and those who are working alongside us, to close that gap, but we are not going to stop until we’re there. I mean, there is nothing that we see as more important than that, and so we’re going after it. Eric Gurna: Well, thanks Marc Mannella. I really want to thank you for being on Please Speak Freely and for having this conversation with me. I know that there was a lot of things that I was raising that were, you know, trying to sort of, I certainly wasn’t trying to poke holes in your argument but really trying to have an authentic conversation about different viewpoints, and I really appreciate you engaging in it with me, and, you know, I learned a lot, and I hope to learn more, thank you. Marc Mannella: My pleasure. Thanks for having me, and yeah, I hope you get a chance to come back and see the classes in session, we can see some good higher order thinking, and we can see what that paycheck system looks like in practice when it’s done correctly. Eric Gurna: I’d love to, thanks. Marc Mannella: Great, thanks Eric Gurna. [/expand]

Jennifer Davis, Co-Founder and President of the National Center on Time and Learning, leads a campaign to get educators and others to re-think how time is used in schools. In this episode, she describes the Expanded Learning Time (ELT) movement and responds to some of the concerns raised by people in the after school/youth development field. “Why should there be a limit with regard to the number of students that can be served? Why can’t it be that the schedule itself could be changed in order that all students have those opportunities versus just a subset of students as a part of an afterschool or summer program?” – Jennifer Davis, regarding reforms to the 21st Century Community Learning Center program [expand title=”Transcript Available here.”] Jennifer Davis and Eric Gurna on the Please Speak Freely Podcast (Transcription) Eric Gurna: Hi, I’m Eric Gurna of Development Without Limits and this is Please Speak Freely, the podcast where we have honest conversations about youth development and education. So I’m here in New York, New York at the Development Without Limits office with Jennifer Davis, the co-founder and president of the National Center on Time and Learning. Welcome. Jennifer Davis: Thank you, nice to be here. Eric Gurna: So you know, what the National Center on Time and Learning is most known for, and I believe what you’re most known for in the field is sort of spearheading expanded learning time. Um, and I feel like that has become a catchphrase that’s thrown around in lots of different contexts, so I’d love to hear from you what you see – if you feel like defining expanded learning time that’s fine, but even beyond that, sort of, what is your work?  What is your personal mission in all this? Why are you the cofounder and president of the National Center on Time and Learning? Jennifer Davis: Sure. In 1998 I was working in Boston for then-mayor Menino, current mayor Menino, to launch a major initiative to expand afterschool and summer programming across the city. We had a very ambitious goal to serve every child in every neighborhood over time.  And about two years into it one of the things that our research showed was that many of the children that needed the programs we were helping to launch the most weren’t in those programs. And we were concerned about that and began – I launched my own non-profit organization when I left the mayor’s office, to research, you know, what might other models be to provide the kind of enriched learning and the variety of programming that many of the afterschool programs were offering, but in a way that more students and those particularly most in need were benefitting. And we started to research the movement around the charter schools sector and started to notice that, you know, they were starting their schools with significantly more time. So they just had a very different definition of what their school day was and what their offerings were going to be. And so over time we began to develop an initiative in Massachusetts, really in 2004, 2005 – to see if we could help create a more integrated school model where community partners became a part of a redesigned school day, but that all students in the school were staying roughly for a seven to eight-hour day, and they were all benefitting from the kind of enriched programming that only a few were getting in many of the schools in the programs that we were serving and supporting prior to.  That initiative came to be known in Massachusetts as the Expanded Learning Time Initiative and that’s really kind of a little bit of the history behind the name and the initiative. And basically what we were trying to do was to expand and really broaden learning opportunities for students but through a different mechanism. The-afterschool -in-school partnership work which I invested a lot of time and energy in had taken us what we felt was just so far, and this we felt was the next iteration of that work, which was a much more integrated model. Eric Gurna: And were you aiming all of this work at a particular demographic of young people, a particular demographic of community? Jennifer Davis: All of our work is focused on high poverty students and children in urban districts for the most part. There are a few communities in Massachusetts that are less high poverty than the Bostons or the Woosters or the Fall Rivers, but the majority of the students are well over seventy percent poverty. Eric Gurna: Mm-hmm. So that brings to mind a question for me, and I want to ask it without seeming like I’m being combative. So just know that I’m genuinely asking this question, not trying to make a point in the form of a question. Does – does that mean that you believe that kids from economically poorer neighborhoods need to be in school longer hours than kids who are from middle class or upper-middle class or wealthier neighborhoods? Jennifer Davis: So wealthier and upper-middle class communities invest in learning opportunities and they pay for it. They have the resources to do so. Many of the children that again we were most concerned about didn’t have those kinds of resources and there weren’t enough programs and they weren’t engaging them enough. And so what the reality is, is that many of the students that we’re concerned about the most start school behind and they never catch up. So without additional learning opportunities, without extra supports, they’re just not going to be on a path to success in high school, college and beyond. And so yes, the majority of our efforts are targeting students that don’t have typically the kind of enriched learning opportunities beyond school, to make sure that they get those kinds of opportunities in an integrated, newly designed school model. Eric Gurna: But in that comparison between the neighborhoods, communities with more resources and poorer neighborhoods, the equivalent, so the economically – you know, the wealthier the middleclass neighborhoods, hey have enrichment activities and other kinds of experiences that they pay for, right? Things like music, art, sports – all of that stuff. But not everyone does those things, right, only the ones who choose to sign up for it and pay for it do those things. And some kids don’t do any of it, and some kids might do a little bit, or some kids might do a lot. So wouldn’t the equivalent of that in a poorer neighborhood be the kinds of afterschool programs that you were working with in Boston originally where it’s a choice that families or young people are making to do those things or to do other things to have free time or to do whatever they do. Jennifer Davis: The majority of the schools in the districts across the country we work with, it is a choice for families. Families choose to send whether to send their children to a school with an expanded schedule or not. I mean, the reality in most large urban districts now you can make choices as families as to where your children go to school, and also the reality is that the waiting lists are very high. The parents want their children to be in these kinds of schools. And remember, what I’m taking about in the schools we’re working to help redesign is arts and music and physical education, more recess time, longer lunches are very much a part of those new designs. So students are getting a very diverse set of offerings and that’s the goal, and that’s the mission of our work. And again we- I think it’s fabulous that parents can choose, and in most of the communities if not all the communities we’re working in there are waiting lists to get into these schools. Eric Gurna: Mm-hmm. It’s interesting, something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is how much energy goes into just different initiatives and movements and stuff within education. And something that I read recently online when I was looking at this issue of Expanded Learning Time, was the notion – the issue isn’t necessarily you want to have more time in the day, because there’s twenty-four hours in a day, right? It’s what we do with the time when we’re engaged with school that the movement -that ELT is concerned about. And within the regular school day that’s not been extended or expanded in any way, there’s a lot of time spent typically on things that maybe aren’t that productive. And one comment that was made that sort of crystallized it for me was, if we took out the high stakes testing pressures that teachers and principals and superintendents and most of all the kids and parents feel, and if we took out the huge amounts of homework that go along with that, the test prep practice that goes along with it, even just the days of testing themselves, if we took all those days out of it, we’d have all this time to do more music, art, recess and all the things that you’re talking about.  So it’s a choice expand – to have more hours in the day to accommodate all of those things and the other things you wanna have in there. Um, how do you- have you thought about that balance and that sort of investment of energy into putting more hours in the day versus possibly investing in changing the larger picture of what schools face? Jennifer Davis: Well, so my early work in education reform was for President Clinton and Secretary Dick Riley in the launching of the Standards Movement in America. I believe in the need to have more clarity about what students should know and be able to do, in having accountability around that, and driving resources based on the accountability to support kids most in need. So, um, is there a question that’s being debated right now about the magnitude and focus on high stakes testing and assessments, yes.  Is that a worthy conversation, is that an important issue for debate and discussion, I do agree. But I don’t think that’s so much of the real challenge. I think that ideally we want all of our children to excel in the core academic subjects and have access to this broader set of educational opportunities. And it is my belief even if you were to narrow out some of the testing, that the majority of students that live and grow up and are experiencing poverty are gonna need more time for learning. And one of the things we do when we first start working with schools is, we help them understand,  “How are you using your current time? Are you wasting some of your time?” And inevitably decisions are made about how to strengthen the six hours before they add the two extra hours.  We also know from our important report entitled Time Well Spent where we analyze thirty high performing high poverty expanded time schools across America, that those schools that excel at such high rates for kids use every minute strategically and well. But they’re eight-hour school days typically and longer school years as well. And so I understand the point you’re trying to make, I just don’t believe that that is, you know, the most important issue.  I think the most important issue is that we need to support kids with extra time extra learning, extra enrichment throughout the pipeline from early childhood to and through college. I mean that’s just the reality for kids that again are in circumstances where they don’t have the kinds of networks and supports readily available to them. Eric Gurna: So I hadn’t actually heard about that, what you described around – in your work with schools before you help them to see how to use like, say, two additional hours or however much more time the school day is gonna have, that you work with them on making better use of the time that they currently have. What does that consist of, how do you help them improve the way they use their, I mean it’s funny framing it in the context of how they use their time. It’s a little bit of a false construct ’cause really it’s not such much just looking at what they do with their time, it’s looking at how they engage young people, what’s their practice, how do they improve their practice. Jennifer Davis: We’ve developed some tools that we’re refining, um, one is called the Quality Time Audit, that helps teams from schools analyze how much time they’re dedicating to each subject, how much time they’re dedicating to, for example, passing time in the hallways, how much time they’re dedicating to things like recess and lunch and so forth. And some schools have made very simple changes that have had dramatic impacts on time, and those simple changes might be anything from reorganizing the structure of the school so that classes are closer together, um, it might mean that they think differently about, um, you know, when lunch takes place and a whole series of other issues. It might mean that they really hadn’t realized how much they had cut a certain subject because they had never looked at it holistically. It’s a whole range of things and what we try to do is help encourage teams from schools to themselves uncover the strengths and weaknesses. Now we also are developing and refining a tool that looks more at classroom time, what’s happening in the classroom, you know, how are students being engaged or not.  Um, you know, those are more complex analyses that schools are doing and you know that’s complicated ’cause that’s the guts of teaching and learning, you know, what’s happening in the classroom. But I guess what I’m just saying is, you know, we don’t believe just adding time is the answer. It’s not. It’s being thoughtful about it, it’s how your current time is being used. We don’t encourage schools that are dysfunctional to add more time, they have other things they need to address before they can add  time and do right by children. Um, so, it needs to be done thoughtfully, it needs to be done carefully. We encourage, as schools think about moving in this direction, a year-long planning process to really help think through all of the opportunities that more time allows and to step back and say let’s throw out the schedule, let’s throw out how we’ve been doing things, let’s think about how can we staff our school differently, that might mean bringing community partners onto the team it might means just thinking very different about class sizes, about individualizing supports for students, small group instruction, you know, many many things are considered during that planning phase. But we encourage that kind of creativity and that’s really important because educators very often do not  have time or the luxury, frankly, to really step back and say, you know, “How can we do a better job supporting our children and our students?” And so this is not a simple reform, it’s very complicated, it’s very hard, there are schools that have not succeeded at it. Um, and there are schools that are excelling at tremendous rates and kids are thriving, and you know,  obviously we’re working to make more of those kinds of schools possible Eric Gurna: And you just sort of mentioned the big, I think, criticism that is generally thrown around and maybe oversimplified around ELT and your work, which is, well, “More of the same isn’t gonna do it,” right? That’s what you hear again and again when people talk about this. “Well, if they’re not, you know, engaging young people in a rich way with the time that they have, why is more time gonna -why is that gonna do anything more? Or better?” And I think that that can be an oversimplified critique but I think there’s a much deeper more complex critique sort of embedded in that um because it seems to me like if were working within the same construct of objectives things like the high stakes testing, things like grade level reading even just keeping kids in grades first second third fourth grade and assessing using test scores and grades as the primary means of assessing, if we’re keeping within that construct then our options for how we change the pedagogy are really limited. and so the question around what are kids doing in the classroom or what are teachers doing in the classroom or what’s going on in the classroom and how they’re using their time, um, that I guess I wanna say, the example that’s often held up are KIPP and other charter schools that say, “We’re having success with improving achievement as measured by tests, and we do it in part by putting more time in,” but there’s a whole lot of people in the field that critique the whole thing and say that’s not even  a good measurement stick. Even if you can say that, and even if it’s true according to your data, that’s not a good measuring stick. So are we really improving engagement? And engagement being what really leads to actual genuine learning. as opposed to the kind of learning where you put it on the test and then you forget it.  Are those conversations happening in that year of planning, are they happening in your conversations with your team at the Center on Time and Learning  or with your partner organizations? I just cant tell how much this work is with that constr -that sort of paradox and how much you all who are working on this are willing to look at other frameworks. Jennifer Davis: Well a couple things. First of all, I think that it’s not true if people believe that students in the KIPP schools I’ve visited aren’t getting a broader set of educational experiences. Whether they’re in the orchestra, the school that I’m very involved with in Massachusetts students travel to Utah and all kinds of really interesting opportunities to really broaden their educational experiences and beliefs and understandings, to the very nurturing environment, there’s athletic teams that have been created. So I do think that some of the high performing charters in KIPP are signaled out often, are not understood comprehensively. And of course not every KIPP or not every high performing charter is the same, so there are some high performing charters you walk into and it is very regimented and there isn’t a lot of, maybe creativity, right. And maybe others you walk into and there’s a true focus on the joy factor. So I think it’s a little unfair to kind of pigeonhole charters in one bucket, so I just wanted to start with that. But I wanna go back to the’ more of the same’ situation or question. Um, two schools that we’ve worked with the longest, really since 2005, that both were chronically underperforming, the Cuss Middle School and the Edwards Middle School, one in Fall River and one in Boston, um, where the teams from those schools and their partners truly did step back and say, “We can’t do more of the same. We have to think differently. We have to design a school schedule that is going to more individualize how we approach each child, that they get the kind of support from the right kind of adult at the right time during the course of the day and the year.” That there are engaged learning whatever in be in science or whatever subject it might be that really keeps middle schoolers in school and engaged in wanting to continue to learn and grow. And so there are examples in the traditional urban district school construct that we’ve experienced and documented and seen. One school that we’ve been working with, Orchard Gardens, a group of first graders were just at the White House with President Obama this week because of just some of the really interesting work they were doing in the area of poetry, and they recited a poem, it was the cutest thing. But part of you know, what these schools that we’ve worked closely with have done is, they really are working and creating a school outside of the box. Now we don’t have enough of those, right. We don’t have enough schools that have taken that year to be thoughtful about thinking differently, engaging the faculty, parents and community partners in that process and then coming out on the other side with a bold, creative, innovative, engaging education opportunity for kids. Um, it’s hard work and we gotta create more educators excited and engaged in doing that work. And you know, there’s a lot that needs to be done to move more schools in that direction, but I know its possible because I’ve walked into those schools and I’ve seen them. Eric Gurna: And a lot of this, you know, the issue of scale always comes up around, you know, we have these shining examples of what’s possible in certain places, and then how do we grow that? If it’s something that we, you know, really value, how do we grow it? And that’s related to another sort of I guess category of questions or ideas that I had in mind when talking to you. And I wanna sort of, so it’s a little bit of switching gears but it’s really quite closely connected. I wanna frame this that a lot of my preparation for this already done for me on the Washington Post blog The Answer Sheet. They had a whole thing around you know, the issue of time and school and afterschool, and you and Jodi Grant from Afterschool Alliance had a whole sort of back and forth.  It was really compelling to me because you know, as you know from the work we did together a couple of years ago with the Schools at Washington Conference in Washington State, I am interested in bringing different perspectives to light. So that conference was, you came out and Hillary Salmons from Providence, Rhode Island came out to co-present on extended learning time. And to present some things you had in common and some views that you had different and it wasn’t exactly a debate but it was different perspectives, and at that same conference we had a debate around measuring outcomes and the importance of measuring outcomes from two people with very different viewpoints. And I think that there’s lots of people with very different viewpoint in our fields and in the larger field of education, um and, but we don’t often get to really hear how those things can bounce off each other and can inform each other and can also just compete for people’s, you know, attention and energy. So I thought that was a great forum that you all had. Um, so I say some of my work was done for me because you know, I was able to go through that and cull some things and say, “Oh that’s an interesting thing, I wonder what you know, Jennifer Davis, how she would respond to that.” There’s a few things that came up on there that I wanna roll by you and see what you think, but with this issue of scale, can you explain to me a little bit, before we get into the issue of scale, the context of this is, new potential wavers to No Child Left Behind or education, what is it called, elementary secondary education act, because were not supposed to call it No Child Left Behind anymore, what wavers proposed by secretary of education, the president were given – states were given the opportunity request wavers to sort of get out of certain aspects of No Child Left Behind policies and one of them led to the state’s ability, or leads to the states ability to use Twenty -First Century Learning Center funds for things other than afterschool or before school or summer programs,  including some services that may go directly to schools or school districts for expanding their school day or expanding the school year. Do I have that right? Jennifer Davis: Yes. Eric Gurna: Is there any, is there part of that that you would wanna sort of make clearer? Because I’m not – policy is not necessarily my specialty. Jennifer Davis: Sure, let me back up just for a minute. The Twenty-First Century Program was really launched and grew significantly when I worked for Secretary Riley and President Clinton in Washington. And the purpose of that program of course was to expand learning opportunities and broaden opportunities for students during the hours when schools were not in session. That was during a period of time where the standard American school schedule was not being questioned, it was just the way it always has been and presumably the way it always will be. There were no other models to look to. And what was important is that we had safe, engaging learning environments for more children, particularly in, you know, the large urban districts in America. A lot’s changed since then, a lot’s changed since that since that program was first launched. A very critical evaluation came out that Mathematica conducted that basically showed that the program, even though it was an education program, wasn’t having the educational impact. And that concerned the Bush administration, it concerned, you know, the Clinton administration and it certainly has concerned those who came in under President Obama and the Duncan administration. And so over the years it’s been an emphasis to try to strengthen the Twenty-First Century Program and that’s been very important and it’s been very exciting actually to see because I was there at the very beginning and then to see the strengthening of the program overtime with these intermediaries, one of which I ran in Boston being formed to strengthen and support a program to provide training, to help build partnerships between schools and community organizations, the integration of those. There’s been a vast improvement with regard to the integration of afterschool and in-school really over the last ten years. But really what’s happened since then, a couple of things. One a concern that students need more educational support in order to succeed in this very competitive, internationally connected economic condition and climate. Two, that we now have models of high performing high poverty schools that we didn’t have fifteen years ago and so how can we really create more of those kinds of schools so that more and more kids are prepared for success beyond high school in higher education. And so the Obama administration made a decision that they wanted resources to be dedicated initially through a proposed bill called the Time Act to support the creation in standard district schools of expanded time. And as the policy agenda unfolded the Obama administration made a decision that they wanted to also provide flexibility in the Twenty-First Century program that did not allow, even though in many cases these programs were operating in schools, the money could not be used to change the school schedule. It could only be used for nonschool time. That didn’t seem to make a lot of sense to the Obama administration and frankly to me. Why should there be a limit with regard to the number of students that can be served? And why can’t it be that the schedule itself could be changed in order that all students have those opportunities versus just a subset of students as a part of an afterschool or summer program? So the policy barrier didn’t make sense to this administration and they made a decision they were gonna make changes to it through a variety of policy vehicles. And the one that’s actually now being implemented is the waver option. And states can choose as to how they want to use those resources and of course what’s going to happen over time is that many communities will continue their afterschool programming and invest in summer programming. But there’ll likely be a subset of schools where they’re gonna wanna invest in changing and redesigning the school schedule for all students. Eric Gurna: So, I mean, it comes down in part to how much funding is available overall, right, ’cause if the funding – if the pot remains the same as it was and they, here’s the possibility of doing more things with it, um, think you know, many in the Twenty-first Century Learning Center World see that as a net cut to afterschool programs. Jennifer Davis: It’s not a net cut to children being served. That’s where I get concerned abut the points that they’re making. We’re talking about students being served, just through a different vehicle and setting. Eric Gurna: I think that’s what I hear the most is, if it’s the schools who are deciding what to do with it for the regular school-day rather than community-based organizations being a primary partner and providing the program as a separate but supplemental program to the regular school-day, that those shining examples that we see that are held up as the role model programs or schools won’t be what we see everywhere. That it will be “Here’s a little more for my budget. I can make the school-day a little longer, I can use it for this, I can us it for that,” but that it’s not gonna be a replication of the same – Jennifer Davis: So do you think that local communities should be able to make those decisions for themselves? Eric Gurna: Do I think the – Which decisions, how to use the money, you mean? Jennifer Davis: Because that’s basically what the Obama Administration is saying. Eric Gurna: Well, they’re saying that states first get to decide whether or not their local communities will be able to make those decisions, is that right? Jennifer Davis: States and then, but, you know, states could choose not to move in that direction and then local communities could choose not to apply, it’s going to be a, still a very flexible set of resources. Eric Gurna: The devil’s in the details with that though. Because if a state goes ahead and says they want to be able to use Twenty-First Century money for a regular school-day, um, and then- Jennifer Davis: It’s not for a regular school-day, it’s for an expanded school-day. Eric Gurna: For an expanded school-day. If they decide that, it’s sort of in how they do the procurement. That sort of determines whether local communities decide to apply for that or not, because if schools, if the RFP is written in such a way that it encourages schools to do that, then they will. It’s just like in Twenty-First Century competitions. You get more points if you have certain things on there, so if you’re gonna have a high school you get some more points, or if you’re, things like that -There’s a huge increase in the number of high school programs who apply because it’s schools and districts who make that decision, they can decide which schools to include, they wanna increase their chances of getting funded. And so sometimes I think the fact that there is technically an option doesn’t mean that it’s really a choice if the RFP is written in such a way as to strongly encourage those schools and communities to make that choice. Jennifer Davis: I just think, I guess what I’m saying is there are going to be very few states, I believe, that will narrow the option to just expanded learning time. I think that there is going to be a variety of options available for districts and schools to apply for. Expanded learning time will be one. Eric Gurna: Um, so, a couple of aspects of this that I wanna try to dig into a little bit, one actually comes directly from Carla Sanger of LA’s Best and the reason I can quote her is that she put it in the comments to the Washington Post blog. So I’m just gonna quote her from that. She said a bunch of things, but I wanna just jump right to it. She talks about the cost per student of implementing the longer school-day versus the cost of afterschool programs. Um, and she says , where am I –  “Based on costs associated with the Massachusetts Extended Learning Time Initiative, for each school that eliminates its afterschool program and instead uses Twenty-First Century Community Learning Funding to extend the school day to three-thirty or four o’ clock, six other communities with afterschool and summer learning programs supported by Twenty-First Century will lose funding and be left with no expanded learning opportunities for kids. We can run six afterschool sites for the price of extending the school day on one campus.” Is that a fair argument? Jennifer Davis: No. Eric Gurna: Why not? Jennifer Davis: Because it’s a very cost effective model if you’re expanding the school day depending on how you do it. Um, it’s all, you know, many of the schools are being incredibly creative about the integration of community partners, the use of technology, staggering teacher’s schedules, a variety of things. And so she is kind of making up numbers that I don’t believe are accurate or really based on truth, to be honest with you. I mean the Wallace Foundation not long ago came out with a study on the cost of afterschool programs, and it was significantly higher than thirteen-hundred per child.  In Massachusetts it was between two-thousand and something like almost five-thousand dollars based on the type of program we’re talking about. So, um, you know, I just feel like some of the numbers that have been thrown around are just not at all based in reality. Eric Gurna: It’s hard for me to defend or speak to that too much because I’m not, I don’t have a good coherent expertise of any of that, the costs of things. But where my interest really is, and my fear and concern with this, is that for me the reason – what drew me to afterschool, it seems like it’s the place in public education where you can focus on individualized learning, where you can focus on project-based learning where you can focus on putting young people in the driver’s seat in their own learning. That the afterschool sort of pedagogy generally, not entirely, but generally,  is really focused on putting young people at the center and finding out what those young people are really interested in, what drives them, what they care about and building your program around that. I have not seen a public school that’s doing that. I have seen a couple of schools that give some rhetoric to it but I haven’t actually  seen it in practice. There’s many more schools out there that I haven’t seen than that I’ve seen, but I’ve got to visit a lot of schools around the country. So that’s where my impression is formed from.  So my concern with it is, does this drive the community organizations who are leaders in the field of afterschool learning, does it drive them away from that kind of philosophy and approach and towards figuring out how they can fit into a school district’s plan to extend the school day rather than focus on the values that they come from? Jennifer Davis: Well again, I just need to say several things. First of all, no one is arguing that afterschool programs aren’t really important in communities, ok. Afterschool programs and summer programs are very important to the fabric of all communities across this country and they need to continue and hopefully thrive and strengthen and so forth. My point here is that states have a constitutional responsibility to provide a child a quality education and that is not happening in too many places in this county. And so some of us who are committed to that goal, that civil rights agenda, believe strongly that we have to do whatever we can to improve those educational opportunities. Many people who I talk to from the afterschool sector seem to have given up on public schools, and we cannot give up  on public schools. We have to create, strengthen and expand the good schools that are serving students in this country. That’s where I really differ, I understand why many funders are so committed to afterschool programs ’cause they’re so frustrated with the urban schools that they don’t see that they’re improving or making a difference. And that’s all well and good and that’s really important to continue to invest outside of the school context. But what my organization is dedicated to is trying to bring some of that wonderful engaged learning into schools. To try to make them a better learning environment , a broader learning environment for children. And that’s what we’re committed to, that’s what we feel is necessary.  This administration believes that to be the case as well. Eric Gurna:  And but – If you’re dedicated to bringing that kind of engaged learning into public schools, I mean, do you really not think that the toxic pressures from high stakes testing and the teaching to the test that that creates is like a massive obstacle towards creating that kind of engaged learning in schools ? Jennifer Davis: It’s a massive obstacle in a traditional school schedule, because that’s what’s happened in this country since No Child Left Behind passed, is the narrowing of the curriculum to ELA and math primarily. Cuts to other core subjects and certainly to the arts and music and drama and all the things that engaged me when I was a kid in school.  So it’s not going to be realistic in the short term to say we’re gonna get rid of high stakes testing.  And now that the common core is being implemented there’s gonna be more of an emphasis I think on ensuring that more kids reach those high standards, and only with more time are students gonna get that broader set of educational opportunities that they deserve. And we believe strengthened, redesigned expanded schools is an important model, but certainly afterschool and summer programs are bringing that kind of creativity to kids too. But, by the way, you’ve talked to me a lot today about the poor quality of schools. There are a lot of poor quality afterschool programs out there. Eric Gurna: Yes indeed. Yeah, for sure. Jennifer Davis: The reason I always come back to states have a constitutional responsibility to ensure that kids gets a quality education, you know, we have got to put all the pressure on that we can to make sure that they’re delivering. And to just pile on all the focus and support into programs that aren’t school it seems to me is skirting one of the most fundamental challenges we have in this society. Eric Gurna: Sure, but no one is arguing that everyone, we should take all the money that’s going to schools and give them to afterschool programs. It’s the opposite that’s being argued. That the money that’s going to afterschool programs, some of it should be going to schools in stead. Jennifer Davis: A different kind of expanded school. Eric Gurna: Yeah, I mean, I will say that when I read through the Washington Post blog comments, what I was left with was, while I agreed with a lot of the comments that were on there that were sort of defending afterschool, I also was left with sort of a bad taste, because it feels like we’re defending an industry rather than advocating for good practice. And I completely agree that the quality of afterschool is hugely diverse and there’s a lot of poor quality afterschool going on. It’s just the thing that I am so stuck on is, if we don’t change the framework of how we define success, then I don’t see how more time will do it. Because the toxic pressures that high stakes testing brings on, I don’t think that it’s possible- because what I see in the kids that I know and the teachers that I know even more, is that it’s so demoralizing and so disengaging that the engagement level for other things is – the potential to do good even if you have more time is so diminished. I don’t mean it’s impossible, that you can’t do other good things, but it’s so diminished by this huge centerpiece of the school, which is, you know, preparing kids to succeed on tests. And so I just, I think that if energy was put into shifting that, that it would have a huge impact on exactly the goals that your center has. Jennifer Davis: Right, but I mean, one of the whole purposes behind the Common Core and certainly in states that have been very thoughtful about their reforms, it’s not just about the tests because the tests are aligned to knowledge that students need to succeed, good writing and good computation skills and reading skills. I mean, so you’re making an assumption and you keep using the word toxic, you’re making the assumption that all testing is bad because students actually aren’t gaining skills by preparing for those tests. The whole purpose of the standards movement was not for rote learning, it was to help put in place a quality approach to defining what students needed to know and be able to do in the core subjects. And so certainly in states like Massachusetts you are not wasting your time preparing for the MCASS, because the MCASS provides a fundamental baseline in reading and writing and calculation skills. So I just think you’re going a little overboard. Now, should we over time be able to cut back maybe on how often students are tested? Probably, yes. Or the emphasis? Probably, yes.  Now we’re gonna be broadening the subject and the content areas, there’s a new focus on science, of course, coming up. But you know, so I’m not saying there isn’t a challenge around that and certainly if you look at high performing countries like Finland, standardized tests are really nowhere on the agenda , right. And they are very high performing and students particularly across the economic board. So certainly there’s a point, and I hear your point. But you know, over time, and there certainly has been a lot of movement I think in the right direction to make sure that what’s tested is actually, are valuable skills. Eric Gurna: I may be going overboard. I think we have to agree to disagree that we’ve been going in the right direction with, in terms of that the tests are becoming better at testing the actual skills. Um, but you know, I’m the first one to admit that I could be going overboard. I’m certainly stuck on that as what I see as not an insurmountable obstacle but something that absolutely has to shift in order for any of these other things to shift. But that being said, um, I know that you have a plane to catch and I want to give – I’ve thrown a lot at you and I really appreciate your willingness to engage in the conversation. And I do in closing want to give you the opportunity,  is there anything, either is there anything that we missed that you wanted to say Are any of the arguments that I’m making, are any of the arguments that I’m making or questions that I’ve given you unfair? Or is there things that you’d like to have the chance to talk about if we had more time? I just wanna give you to the open forum to have that mic if you choose to. Jennifer Davis: I think the challenge is that people seem to come to this discussion from one side or another. And I’ve been on both sides. I ran a large 2-6 afterschool initiate for Mayor Menino and worked hard and we doubled the number of kids in programs. I learned a lot and it was a fabulous experience and um, I remember walking out of those schools and programs with the question of why are only forty, fifty kids in a five-hundred -child school getting the benefit of these opportunities? And you know, although not every school that we’ve worked with of course has done as excellent a job of ensuring these broader engaged learning opportunities, it is been a component of every initiative in every school that we’ve worked with. It’s not just about ELA and math, it’s about broadening enriched opportunities for kids. It’s been a part of our model from the very beginning, it continues to be in all of our national work. We believe strongly that you need to provide students a broad educational experience for them to be engaged and to be prepared for the future. And, you know, the other goal of our work is to also give teachers additional time to plan and meet and strengthen their teaching approaches. And so I just feel like not enough people in the youth development world have been exposed to schools that are doing this work really well. And I find that’s, you know, unfortunate, because they’ll continue to have a fairly I feel limited perspective on what’s possible. Many of the nonprofit groups that we’ve worked with who then went from afterschool programming to deeply partnering with schools have had fundamental shifts in their own thinking, in their business models, and have found real success in that work.  And again, not enough have seen that and understand how to do it and that it’s possible. And I think until those kinds of things change, we’re gonna continue to have these kinds of debates and discussions. But I think what’s most important here is that it isn’t about who is delivering the services, it isn’t about the industry, as you mentioned, it shouldn’t be. This should be about, how do we prepare children for success in their life. And they do need both the academic skills and the broader skills that help them navigate this really complicated world we’re living in. And that can come from more than one place, but great schools thoughtfully designed can certainly and are doing, providing those kinds of services for kids and that’s what we wanna see more. Eric Gurna: Yeah and you know, the amazing thing to me about working in this field is that even if you sit down with someone and you don’t agree about a lot of things, there’s something fundamental that I think almost a hundred percent of the people I’ve met working with in this field do agree on and that’s what you just described. That in the end that we are all going, shooting for the same goals, and that we are all dedicating our lives to improving the quality of life for young people and all the things that you just described. I really, I do appreciate that and even if we don’t agree on everything I can definitely see the, you know, the genuine dedication to that and I appreciate it. And thanks for being on Please Speak Freely. Jennifer Davis: Thanks for having me. [/expand]

Hanaa Arafat spearheaded an appeal effort that had a big statewide impact in New York, by gently but rigorously insisting that the State maintain standards of fairness in how they dole out grants for afterschool programs “The self-reporting mechanism to document poverty [is] discriminatory, because teenagers do not want to self-report on this.” – Hanaa Arafat [expand title=”Transcript Available here”] Hanaa Arafat and Eric Gurna on the Please Speak Freely Podcast (Transcription) Download PDF Eric Gurna: Hi, I’m Eric Gurna, executive director of Development Without Limits, and this is Please Speak Freely, the podcast where we have honest conversations about youth development and education. So I’m here with Hanaa Arafat, senior director of high school and adult programs for the YWCA for the City of New York, here doing the first ever Please Speak Freely interview in our own Development Without Limits Office, so welcome Hanaa. Hanaa Arafat: Thank you very much, I’m pleased to be here. Eric: Yeah, I’m pleased that you’re here. You and I have known each other for a number of years and worked together in a couple different capacities, I think, over the years. But we’ve never had a chance to sit down and talk about, or at least talk publicly about some really interesting experiences that you’ve had as a program director and a leader in the field. And, you know, I was saying before we actually formally got started that this interview is a little bit different from some of the please speak freely episodes ’cause I’m so eager to talk to you about this  one particular thing that happened. But as eager as I am to talk about that I also know that the day-to-day work that you’re engaged with is really interesting and important and I’d love to hear a little bit about what you do. Hanaa:  Okay, so I’m a program director at Murry Bergtraum High School for business careers, which is a large high school in New York City. It’s actually the last large high school in Manhattan, discounting maybe Stuyvesant, which is probably just as large or larger. And I also oversee program directors at two other high school sites, one at Independence High School which is an alternative school, and one at Rachel Carson High School, which is a smaller school in Coney Island.  And they’re different programs that I oversee, but you know, usually they’re youth development programs; after-schools, we also have an in-school , kind of attendance improvement drop-out prevention at Rachel Carson. As the program director I’m kind of involved in direct service, but then overseeing two other program directors, site coordinators, I also kind of do a lot of that administration, operations, kind of planning for the future, funding, grant-writing, all of that kind of stuff. Eric: Sure. Hanaa: So I kind of wear a couple of hats. Eric: And you know, for the benefit of the national listeners, can you say a little bit about what you mean that it’s, Murry Bergtraum is one of the, or is the last you know, large high school in New York City? ‘Cause obviously we still have the old school buildings we’ve always had, but – Hanaa: Right, I mean, you know, in the past, I would say I guess ten years, there’s been this process of education reform which entailed closing down, you know, failing high schools according to the benchmarks that the Department of Education has, and also  -the New York City Department of Education – and also the New York State Education Department. They also may close down schools depending on their No Child Left Behind Act status.  So what happens is, when these schools close down – often they’re large high schools – they’re replaced by smaller schools, oftentimes many large  –  small schools within that large building that had once housed one school.  And so Murry Bergtraum is one of the last large high schools that’s still, you know, considered one school and not, you know, many smaller schools within a campus. Eric: Right, so a lot of these buildings that we work in will have like four or five principals in one school building. Hanaa: Exactly.  Each school occupying a different floor or, you know, just designated, demarcated space within the building. But this building houses just one school, the student body, you know, twenty-two-hundred. Yeah. Eric: And Murry Bergtraum has a storied history too, I just, I don’t know if you saw the Tribe Called Quest documentary? Hanaa: No, I haven’t seen it, although Q-tip is coming to visit the students – Eric: Is he? Hanaa: – in a couple of weeks for career day. Eric: Oh, that’s cool. Hanaa: Which is great and I’m gonna show that documentary to the students before he gets here. Eric: Oh that’s good, because some of them may not understand how important he is. But they, you know, they talk about it ’cause that’s where a couple of them met. I think, like, him and Ali Shaheed Muhammad met at Murry Bergtraum. Hanaa:  And they’re graduates of Murry Bertraum. And Murry Burgtraum has that history of being one of the best high schools in New York City. This is, you know, I would say maybe ten years ago, it was considered a really competitive school to get into because it was one of the high schools that had a selection process for the student body, so students had to apply and be selected by the school. Right now the selection process has kind of changed, but because of that selection process the school had you know, a reputation that you were gonna get a really, you know, top rate, top-notch education at Murry Bergtraum. And actually I think about, I don’t know, I think maybe twelve to fifteen years ago there was a US News and World Report article about how it was one of the top ten high schools in the nation. Eric: Really, wow, I didn’t realize that. I just thought it was cool ’cause Q-tip went there. If you don’t know who Q-tip is you can just, you know, look up Tribe Called Quest, you know – Hanaa: Yeah, we’re excited. He’s actually gonna come to our afterschool program as well. Eric: Oh, that’s so cool. Hanaa: We have a hip hop appreciation class where the students produce their own music and their own rhymes, and he’s gonna be coming and talking to them. Eric: That’s really cool. Hanaa: It’s gonna be really fun. Eric: Yeah. So, I’d love to, I sort of built it up a little bit, what it is that I wanted to talk to you about. And maybe, you know, I could describe just in general what it was, and then we could walk though it a little bit. Coming on three years ago now, New York State had a – was it three? Yeah, coming on three years ago, ’cause the new cycle is almost up. New York State had a funding competition for Twentieth Century Fund learning centers. It was a a request for proposals, RFC out from New York State.  TFC is federal funds, it gets granted to the states and then gets re-granted out to schools, school districts, community organizations and even some private companies that get contracts to run afterschool programs, out of school time programs that serve young people in economically poorer neighborhoods. And so there was a funding competition and a lot of different organizations obviously put together proposals, including your own. And this particular RFP, the New York State for whatever reason changed some of their procurement methods, right.  So they changed some of the processes for how they read, reviewed, scored those proposals. And you received notification that your proposal had not been funded. Hanaa: Right. Eric: Is that correct? Hanaa: Yeah. Eric:  And then, what did you do then? Hanaa: Well, I mean, what happened was then, you know, when we found out that we weren’t funded, I you know, we found out – I called the New York State – we found out that we had been tied with I think ten other proposals at a score of ninety-five out of a hundred. Eric: So you got an A. Hanaa: So yeah, I mean, we got a high score. So then we requested the feedback from the reviewers. And also we asked what was the measure that they used to break the tie, since you have ten programs that were tied at the score and I believe they could only fund five of them. So we wanted to know, like, “How did you rank them?” and they said, “We rank them based on poverty.” The schools that have the highest poverty were ranked higher in this tie-breaking situation than this – so that’s how they ranked it. So then I went back and I kind of thought about it, and I thought well, so the eligibility to even submit a proposal was that you had to have at least forty percent of the students in the school qualified for the federal free lunch program. Eric: Right, free and reduced. Hanaa: Free and reduced lunch. And the way they calculate that is they have people, they have students’ parents submit forms that show their income, and the school collects that. And based on that there’s the percentage. So when I thought about it, I’d known that Murry Bertram had struggled to get all of these lunch forms in, and there were lots of reasons why they struggled. There’s a poor parent involvement rate, it was very difficult for parents to be involved, or to get the parents involved in the school. And there were multiple factors for that, you know, the school drew its student body from all five boroughs. It wasn’t a zone school, so some students had to commute as much as two hours to get to the school building. So to bring parents into the school building was no easy task.  And then at the same time, I knew that the students didn’t want to bring in the forms because number one they didn’t like school lunches, so why would I bother to bring the form?  And number two, they didn’t want to be in the free lunch line, they didn’t want to be stigmatized in that way. So I’d known all that and I thought Murray Bergtraum, because it was such a large school, it was at, it was at a disadvantage, there was no way that we would have been able to compete with say, an elementary school that was based in a community. Because everyone knows that elementary schools generally have higher parent participation rates. And if it’s based in the community, you know, it’s much easier for parents to come into the school building and be involved. And thirdly, you know, it’s a large school, it’s one of the last large schools in New York City, and so there was, you know, much more they needed to collect in order to get a high poverty percentage rate, you know, in terms of that kind of reporting mechanism. Eric: Right, right. Hanaa: So I felt that there was no way that Murry Bergtraum could have competed using that critera, and so we did a little bit more research. We found that, you know, what we had already known, there was lots of research showing that, you know, high school students in general underreport their income status and the school lunch forms. And that also resulted, you know, around the city, you know, statewide, nationwide – in high school programs, high schools in particular receiving a much less, a disproportionately less amount of money in Title One funds which uses this criteria. Eric: Right. Hanaa: So we decided to write the protest kind of to highlight this. That there was no way that Murry Bergtraum could have been awarded those funds based on that criteria. Eric: Right, and if I could just interject, that- I also looked at some of that research. And I had been helping the town where I live, Beacon, New York, I’d been helping Beacon to put together a Twenty-First Century proposal at that same time, just ’cause I was involved with a community organization there. And we had found the same thing, it was actually for the middle school. Just, you know, high school is underreported, middle school is also underreported, the socioeconomic status is less reported than at the elementary school level. I mean it makes sense, just the indignity of having to prove how poor you are becomes more felt the more kids are aware of what other people think.  And parent involvement, like you said, goes down as the grades go up, and it’s documented to the point that there’s an alternative analysis that the state will allow, called a feeder analysis.  Which was easy in Beacon because Beacon has four elementary schools, a middle school and a high school. So Beacon is borderline, it’s like, it has the problems of you know, a community that has significant poverty but not enough to get the grants. It’s forty percent, I believe is the cutoff. We were just, the middle school was showing, was reporting just under forty percent, but if you looked at the feeder schools when you averaged it all out , it was over forty percent. And so we learned that the state would accept a feeder analysis as proving that forty percent, which is really easy and straightforward to do when you’re one town with four elementary schools, a middle school and a high school.  I mean if anything, elementary school to middle school, that transition, the kids who are taken out of the system at that point are going to private schools. So if anything the rate of free and reduced lunch in the middle school should be higher than the average rate of all four schools. But then when I, when you told me about the situation at Murray Bergtraum and I realized that not being a community-based school, being a school that draws from all five boroughs, doing a feeder analysis would be impossible. I mean, you’d have to bring in McKinsey or Bane or some, you know, one of these consulting firms and pay them a million dollars to get them to figure out what is the actual socioeconomic status based on free and reduced lunch eligibility at a high school that draws kids from, I would guess, you know, thirty neighborhoods  or something around the city. Hanaa: I mean, Murry Bergtraum has always been like that, but I think that it exemplifies this other process that had been happening in New York Ci -I can only speak about New York City which is, you know, Joel Klein’s initiative, I don’t know what it’s called. The Student School Choice Initiative where basically there was much more of an emphasis placed on parents being able to choose the school that they wanted their children to be a part of.  So what that meant is that, you know, there, it was very difficult to parse out community schools because so many students were traveling long distances to go to school. Eric: Sure. Hanaa: And so there was just no way to backtrack and figure out the feeder schools and what their poverty rate was. Eric: Right. So you went back, you went to the state and you put together a letter – Hanaa: Right. Eric: – trying to document the difficulties of that, and was the message essentially that it was unfair, an unfair – Hanaa: That it was discriminatory toward high school programs. Eric: So that the state, by using socioeconomic status as a determinant to break the tie,it was unfair to high schools because it was so difficult for high schools to be able to show that, so they couldn’t compete. Hanaa: Right, we’re using this school lunch form as a measure, like this self-reporting mechanism to document poverty, was what made it discriminatory. Because teenagers do not want to self report on this. I mean there’s this, all this kind of evidence that says, “No, I don’t want to turn in my form.” And also just nationwide, they don’t turn in their form. Eric: Yeah. And so the issue wasn’t, it wasn’t taking issue with or protesting  using levels of poverty as the way to break the way the tie, it was the methods discriminatory towards high schools. Hanaa: Yes, yes. That basically that there wasn’t a recognition that high schools had these added challenges that other, that elementary and middle schools don’t have. Or have much less of, let’s put it that way. In that it’s really, the onus is on the student instead of let’s say the parent, to bring in the form.  And so the student has much less of an interest to turn in the form. They also understand much less about that what that form, what the implications of that form is, in terms of their own education and their funding. Parents are more likely to understand that. But because high school students are older and parents tend to, you know, allow students to make more choices regarding their education, you know, that’s – Eric: Whether they’re allowing them to or not, they’re going to be making them. Hanaa: They’re going to be making them, exactly. Eric: So then what happened? Hanaah: So we got a response from the New York State basically sayings that they’re request for proposals really made this clear that there was going to be poverty – poverty was going to be used as a tie-breaking criteria. And then we responded basically by saying that we know that poverty is going to be, because that’s part of the federal legislation. You know, this wasn’t the New York State Education Department requirement, the legislation requires that the funding be tied to the percentage of the poverty rates of the schools. But we didn’t realize – our response was basically,  “We demonstrated our eligibility based on poverty, it’s unfair to then break the tie based on poverty, you’re using the same measure to break a tie, I mean at this point you should use a different measure based on either the results of the program in the past or maybe you know using a different rubric to evaluate the proposal, or other ways to break the tie. And actually we presented another, you know, model where in a prior round for request for proposals in New York State Education Department Twenty-First Century, they had said in the event of a tie middle and high school programs will be ranked higher, and then they will be ranked based on academic achievement rates. Basically the schools that have, that are struggling the most with their academic achievement rates and poverty rates. So there was more of a variety of factors that went into the final decision. Eric: Right. Hanaa: And so we kind of said, we should probably revisit, you know, this idea of having only one measure deciding the, you know, quality of the proposal, the eligibility or the reason why a school is more deserving of these funds than another school. Eric: And at this time, this was, you had sort of spearheaded this, you had got your, the leadership of the YWCA to back you – Hanaa: Mm-hm, they were very supportive. Eric: And were you in touch with other organizations that were in a similar position at the time? Hanaa: Yes, we were, we were in touch with two other, three or four organizations. They also submitted letters, but they submitted letters  based on the peer review process. So I mean, we had spoken about two or three different things in our letter. We spoke about the poverty, the criteria that they used to demonstrated poverty in the school, especially n the tie-breaking situation. Then we also talked about how they had changed their peer review process so that instead of peer reviewers working together as a group that they were often separated by distance. People were sent proposals and then they reviewed them and sent their reviews back to the state, as opposed to being able to speak to each other.  So some organizations kind of spoke about the inter-rater reliability of being able to have people bounce ideas off of each other so they can come to a consensus. And that was important because not all reviewers, most of them were in the field and were very knowledgeable in the field, but not necessarily as involved with Twenty-First Century programs. And also Twenty-First Century programs differ from state to state. So even though it’s a federal program, the federal legislation is fairly broad and they give  a lot of room to states to kind of interpret that legislation or, you know, emphasize certain points rather than others. And so when you had reviewers from other states maybe they didn’t understand some of the nuances of New York City or of New York State. And often even people in upstate New York would not know some of the differences between Upstate New York programs, or rural and suburban programs and inner city programs. So oftentimes when they evaluated the programs they would pick up on details that you know, for instance, one proposal was – one reviewer penalized that proposal because they talked a lot about school violence but  the proposal didn’t mention anything about having surveillance cameras. Well, in New York City an afterschool program is not in any way capable of installing surveillance cameras in a New York City Department of Education building, so they were knocked down a lot of points for that. But if you were able to talk to other peer reviewers within those teams, you know, that would have come out. That could have come out. But there was no space for that. Eric: Right. And it is an issue that I – that that the people organizing these procurement processes really face as a challenge. Because the people who have the best knowledge of it are usually involved with proposals themselves and have to,  you know, can’t be a reviewer or they have to recuse themselves from anyone that they’re familiar with. ‘Cause I know there are certainly people who do grant writing, provide grant writing consulting services, who also serve as reviewers. But they’re supposed to remove themselves if they have any knowledge of or affiliation with the proposal, the proposer. But it does get complicated so I know that sometimes like New Jersey and New York, people go back and forth a little bit because the state of New Jersey can get reviewers from New York and vice versa. But it used to be that everyone was sort of around the table. And they, this process, as you said they did it, they had distance -it was a matter of efficiency and cost effectiveness I think, because they did it all online. You started out, you had one specific issue, I feel like, which was the method of breaking the tie was discriminatory to high school programs. But the ball got rolling a little bit and once you were writing the letter and once you reached out to other organizations people said, “Well, you know, what about this aspect of the process? It seems like it was changed from how it was before and it’s maybe less fair, or maybe less comprehensive.” And so those various critiques of the procurement process all sort of got piled in together to some extent. Is that right? Hanaa: Yeah, yeah, I mean, yes.  You know, I think that the New York State education department did have to cut some costs in terms of figuring out how to, this procurement process. Because in the past ,you know, it was a lot, there were a lot more resources that were devoted to  the peer review process. Training, selecting the reviewers, having the reviewers be all in the same space. You know, it was much larger and they had to cut costs. And then at the same time there’s much less funds available for these types of programs, so the stakes were much higher for community-based organizations who were submitting proposals. So I think that created a lot, you know, that’s kind of some of the tension that was happening at that time. Eric: And was there a formal appeal process for you to follow? Was there something in the notification that said, “If you have an appeal, you know, here’s what you do”? Hanaa: No. Eric: So how did you figure out how to- Hanaa: There is one now I think. Eric: Well we’ll get to the impact of this, ’cause that’s, you know, it seems probably like we’re really kind of geeking out on the details of this. And I certainly am, ’cause I find it so fascinating, but the reason that it’s so fascinating is because of what it led to, I feel like. But what – to stick with the process for a second, if there wasn’t anything that said, “If you want to make an appeal, do this,” how did you figure out how to even file this appeal? Hanaa: What happened is that we had been working with a grant writer who had been working, you know, she also writes lots of grants for for-profit organizations, and so she knew that there was a pretty detailed process for for-profit organizations to protest a bid with the comptroller’s office, the New York State comptroller’s office. Eric: Is that how you say that word? ‘Cause I’ve never understood how to say that word. I feel like some people say comptroller and some people say comptroller. Hanaa: You know, I think its comptroller. Eric: Comptroller, let’s say comptroller. Okay, so, sorry – Hanaa: So then we started to the research at the comptrollers’s office to see if there was a process for nonprofit organizations to file a protest, and there was. And so that’s how we settled on that process. Eric: And these other organizations also signed on? Hanaa: What ended up happening is that when we first – so what happened is that we wrote the initial letter and the part of the comptroller’s process is if you write this letter you have to send a copy of it to everyone who had submitted a proposal to the same bid. Eric: Right, I remember that. Hanaa: So when the other organizations saw our letter they reached out to us and said, you know, there were some other things that have come up in this process as well. And the other, the second part of the process is that the New York State Education Department has, you know, can respond, and then we are given a chance to respond to their response. And so we included letters from other organizations in our response, and what we found out later was that the comptroller’s office deemed them as each letter as a separate protest. So that’s how that came about. Eric: Yeah, so in the end, after all was said and done with the back and forth, what did the comptroller’s office, how did they actually formally respond, what did they put into place? Hanaa: I mean, what they said was that they were going to work with the New York State Education Department in basically reforming their procurement process for for future proposals. They had decided that there was going to be,  that everyone, that all of the organizations who had been awarded a contract award, instead of the contract term being five years it would be three years. And then the New York State Education Department would have to release another request for proposals for the remaining two years on the contract, thus giving those organizations that may have been, may not have been funded based on this criteria another opportunity to receive funding in the future after this process was reformed. Eric: And so that may seem like a small thing ’cause it’s, you know, it wasn’t that they came out and said, “Okay, these appeals have merit. We’re going to take – we’re not going to give all these grants out as they’re awarded, we’re gonna start over and you know, conduct the process again.” Or they didn’t say the education department has to figure out a way to award these programs. But that changing the contract from the grant from five years to three years is a huge decision for them to make. I mean, I know for our organization alone – and this is all public information that’s out there, so it’s, you know, it’s nothing terribly mysterious- but we have, we were awarded one of those contracts. And we got a Twenty-First Century contract in the amount of four-hundred fifty-thousand dollars a year for five years, was the initial memo or email or whatever it was. And then when this appeal happened and they came out and changed it from five years to three years, some looked at that like a nine-hundred-thousand dollar loss for our organization. Now that’s theoretical to me. It’s not -you’re not actually losing nine-hundred thousand dollars. You’re just, you know, getting a three-year contract instead of a five-year. But it’s, if you multiply that by the dozens of organizations who are awarded grants under that round,  it’s a huge fiscal decision that they made, or  financial impact that they made. And also to underline that, the federal legislation says that the grants have to be for at least three years. So they – one way to look at it is they knocked it down by two years. Another way to look at it is they forced the state education department to make it the minimal level of commitment that they could possibly make under federal law. And then they would have to reform their procurement process at the next competition. Hanaa: Yeah, and we what we found out was actually that we were the first nonprofit organization to submit a protest to the New York State comptroller’s office and since then there have been numerous protests that they’ve received. And so I think it’s important for community-based organizations to know that there are outlets for them to respond if there’s an issue with a procurement process. I mean the thing that really meant the most to me in this whole process was I guess being able to highlight how high school programs are different in particular with respect to funding requirements because oftentimes afterschool programs have these, these requests for proposals and elementary, middle and high school programs are kind of lumped together under the same parameters. And it was, you know, it was important to me to say,  “Wait a second, high school programs can’t meet the same conditions that elementary school programs can or maybe middle school programs can.”  You know that high schools are different, they’re judged differently. They often have, you know high school have  much more kind of external pressures or different external pressures, I don’t want to say much more. And so that needs to be acknowledged in the funding request for proposals that come  out of the city, the state, or nationally. Eric: Yeah, it’s interesting because I completely agree with that and we, you know our Twenty-First Century contract is high school programs. And you know, we’ve done a lot of work with high school programs. And that isn’t the most significant thing that came out of this for me. The most significant thing that came out of this for me was the example of what one person can do.  Because you know, it was amazing to me. I mean, we were sort of occasionally talking sort of on the side throughout this process and after the process, just sort of reflecting on it and you know, brainstorming how you might go about things and stuff like that. And you know, it was amazing to me that you as the program director of one program or one organization could spearhead this effort that would result in this enormous statewide policy shift and a reform of the actual process. Hanaa: Right I mean, it was actually a really collaborative effort. I should say that, you know, within the YWCA key people in the organization that was you know, shaping this protest. But I think that the YWCA of the City of New York, while it’s, there’s a lot of rich historical roots at the organization compared to maybe some other organizations that are much, much larger, I mean it’s not such a large organization and so for an organization that doesn’t necessary have the same, you know, numbers or reach throughout the state to be able to kind of be able to address something on a state level yeah, it was, it was very empowering. Eric: Yeah, I mean it was empowering, it was inspiring I feel like to the field to be able to have an example of you know, ’cause advocacy efforts and policy efforts and they’re important. But look how much impact you can have by just taking your own personal authority, collaborating with others as you said and making it known and putting together a really coherent and smart argument. That there was- I don’t believe, I don’t know but I don’t believe there was ever any perception that this was anything personal or this was selfish or this was just the YWCA trying to get theirs. This was, you know, I mean I read the letter and the materials, it was really clear that there was a core principal at stake. There was evidence to support the argument, you had legal counsel to be able to, you know, put it out there into like really coherent, those kind of crisp legal terms that it’s important to be able to speak that language. So it was the quality of the effort in addition to the effort, but I think underneath it all what I found so inspiring was that it was incredibly brave because the state is who’s giving you the money. And so it’s like, okay, people say don’t bite the hand that feeds you, and that sort of thing. And it’s like, to be able to step and say, “Wait a minute. This, you know, this isn’t fair, and then also it’s complicated. We’re not just appealing about this one thing. There’s all these other factors at play.” And it was only after you initiated it you, you with your, the support of your leadership – I put a lot of this on you because I know that it wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t spearheaded it, but I appreciate that your leadership and your colleagues at the YWCA created a team effort. Hanaa: And other organizations too. I mean, we got a lot of support. Eric: Once you spearheaded it they got on board. But if you hadn’t of spearheaded it, if that initial letter hadn’t gone around and others hadn’t sort of climbed on board with it, it could have just been another case of everybody sort of grumbling to each other about how unfair it is but nothing actually coming out of it. Hanaa: But I also wanna say that it was important to us that other organizations also you know, had their input in it. Because otherwise it would’ve been just, you know, the YWCA just didn’t get theirs, and so they just want their money. And then it became actually more of a critique of the field. You know, that this is something that we need to correct in the field, the RFP process. Eric: I think we’re both maybe pointedly not saying the names of the other organizations ’cause we’re not sure if they wanna be sort of publicly associated with this, but that also leads me to something else I find fascinating about this. Because when it happened, what I was saying to you was,  people need to know about this. Because people kind of learned, that the – you know obviously people who got the grant learned that they had been cut from 5 years to 3 years,  a lot of people were unhappy about that. And, you know, people who looked into it learned about why, and people that received the letter. But the general public and the field in general never really learned about it. So you and I put together a proposal to the National Afterschool Association Convention to present a workshop telling this story. And for whatever reason for their own procurement process that workshop was rejected even though, you know, on behalf of Development Without Limits me and my colleagues have presented at that convention, you know, several years,  and other workshops were accepted, that one was not accepted. It’s, you know it’s, I can only guess as to why, maybe we didn’t write the proposal in a compelling enough way. Or maybe there was reasons why people don’t wanna tell this story. I also got in touch with, if you recall I got in touch with Youth Today, the publication. And there was some interest on their part, at least at first, in writing a story about it, but there was never follow-up, and I did follow up with them a couple times. Again, I don’t wanna, you know, I’m one of those people, I’ve never met a conspiracy theory I didn’t like. So you know, it’s easy for me to attribute why. I just know that it seemed to be somewhat consistent that people didn’t really want to hear the story, and it’s a long tedious complicated story. So for those of you who are still listening, I appreciate you sticking with it because the details of it might not seem all that interesting, you know whether it was forty percent free reduced lunch, more or less.  But the fact of one person within one organization being able to have this statewide impact on policy, to me that’s inspiring and that story should be told. Hanaa: I think it also highlights the fact that there is actually very little space for these funding organizations to receive feedback from the fields in a really systematic, consistent way. And that there is a big need for us to create spaces where we can actually have more of a back-and-forth about what it is that these funding streams or funding organizations or, you know, what kinds of outcomes they’re looking for and then from us in the field what it is that we need in order to make that happen or conversely what other things we’re seeing that are things that need to be addressed. We don’t have that space to do it, and I really hope that in the future, you know, in terms of the advocacy piece, that more of that advocacy is shifted in terms of research. You know and really, you know, hard concrete steps that need to happen within the field in order for us to move forward as a field, but in a way that would also reach the funders. Because I think that the funding requirements that came down were, I guess what I want to say is that the funding requirements – I think that they were faulty because they didn’t have enough of an understanding of the field, at least for high school programs. And so I wish there was more of that kind of back-and-forth where we would have the request for proposals and they usually have the questions and then they’ll send out addendums based on the questions. But there’s not a space to give feedback, basically to say, to say, “Wait a second, you know, this doesn’t seem fair.” And to get a response or to get a modification, or even to be able to have it. Eric: To be fair there is I think some of that process sort of modeled in New York City. The Department of Youth and Community Development does really make an effort to have that sort of dialogue in that before they issue an RFP they issue a concept paper and then request feedback from the field. And they allow some time for people to get together, have conversations. I know this last time for the Out of School Time Funding, PASE, the Partnership for Afterschool Education, sort of hosted a conversation.  And so people could be able to have their input without necessarily writing something themselves because people are afraid to have their critique attributed to themselves or people don’t necessarily have the time to make the effort, so PASE was sort of facilitating that. And then DYCD theoretically they issued the RFP that has taken into consideration some of the feedback. Now I think the critique is how the process is actually managed in real time, I think that the –  theoretically though they’re making the effort. More specifically, I think the critique is they don’t necessary take enough of the feedback into consideration when they build out the RFP itself.  To be fair, they’re dealing with  a lot of external pressures from the funding they get that they’re then re-granting, and they’re juggling a lot of influences. Not to let them off the hook, but it’s always complicated. Do you think that that process is sort of structurally what you’re suggesting? Hanaa: Yeah, yes. But more, but much more intentional. You know and I think there needs to be a lot more reflection based on it. I mean the thing is that actually that the New York State Education Department, you know, they have for the Twenty-First Century, they have year after year after year multiple workshops and conferences. ANd I will say that   they are very, you know,  responsive in that sense, of like, what are some of the professional development needs that you have, they will try and solicit for that . but i feel like there isnt a really formalized space to be able to do it. There needs to be more formalized spaces for people in the afterschool kind of youth development field to be able to get together and compare best practices and then have those best practices inform, you know, our work in the field but then also inform policy. And the –  but in a much more cohesive way. And these request for proposals – because the request for proposals – oftentimes I think people look at a request for a proposal, well let’s just get the funding and then we’ll worry about it later, like how we’re gonna make this work. But I think that we should stop and say wait a second, you know, why can’t we give feedback with, like, wait a second, as a field and a consensus, this is what, I think if we make this tweak or this whatever,  this will make it so much easier or so much better. Because I think that there’s a lot, for instance there’s a lot of emphasis in request for proposals on, and you know I’m talking about school based programs right now, Twenty-First Century programs really emphasize, you know, collaboration with the school day. But you know the grants, the grant money that they’re giving out is really to provide direct – there’s not a lot of money unless you really think about it before you develop your proposal to really do the coordination with the school day in a way that will you know, help us meet our ends as opposed to us just going and talking to the principal and saying “What do you need?” There’s lots of things that we should have this loop of communication that’s difficult with the staffing that’s available. And so, you know, just like a little tweak hear or there just adding, you know, saying , you know, you can have dedicated staff to kind of figuring this out. Would make would make a huge impact in terms of, this is an example, in terms of the program, the end product. Eric: But the way that the RFP is structured really is what allows for those sorts of things to be suggested in the proposal. Hanaa: Yes, it’s very open process. You could suggest a lot of different things in the proposal, but at the same time there’s a lot of requirements in the request for proposals. Eric: Right, right, that’s what I mean, that it limits your ability to do that within the budget. Hanaa: It limits, exactly. I mean, you know, they do – I will say that Twenty-First Century is, really does allow for people to be creative in the proposal process, you really can create a program proposal that is responsive to the specific needs of the specific community or schools that you’re working with. But because there is, because there are so many different requirements in that proposal it is very difficult for someone proposing that to kind of divvy up the resources properly, especially if you don’t know – I guess there isn’t enough research to show, “These are the ways in which other programs have successfully met these requirements.” Eric:  Right, right. And the proposal – I think a lot of people don’t realize, the proposal you write becomes your contract. I mean, you’re saying, “If you give me this money, this is what I’m going to do”. There’s some flexibility, but not a whole lot. I mean you really have to – Hanaa: I mean and I will contend that there’s a more flexibility in Twenty-First Century than in other funding streams that I’ve seen. And so to be fair  I think that Twenty-First – at least the New York State Education Department request for proposals, it does allow you to kind of like imagine a program model. But at the same time, if you have, I don’t know off the top of my head but let’s say just a random number. If you have twenty objectives and under each objective there’s three sub-objectives, I mean that’s a lot to manage. Eric: Yeah, sure. And you know it’s interesting, ’cause – the timing of this conversation, ’cause we’re talking about the RF as thought its something that exists but all we can talk about is what’s in the past. Hanaa: What’s in the past. They reshape their RFP year after year after year. Or eachround. Eric: Each round, yes. And we’ll get into that in one second, but I do wanna say, the epilogue to all of this is that, I think it was a year after the initial grants came out they realized, the state realized that they had enough money to fund some more programs but not enough to do a full funding round. And so they looked at the highest scoring proposals that were not funded under that first round and awarded several new grants. And your program was one of those programs that was awarded, so in the end you got the grant. But the appeal process and the changing from the five years to three years and the comptroller telling the Education Department to change the procurement process, that has nothing to do with that. It just worked out that you got the grant. Hanaa: And the New York State Education Department just recently announced that they’re going to be taking some extra time to develop the request for proposal process for next round. Eric: Right. And that’s that what I wanted to get to next. Because  I don’t know how much that has to do with the procurement process changes.  I think it’s more to do with the fact that they’re waiting to find out what the state is going to do around the waivers to No Child Left Behind and or, you know, we’re suppose to call it ESEA , Elementary and Secondary Education Act. But because that, you know, legislation has not been completely thrown out, they’re just trying to sort of modify it and hobble along, ’cause congress doesn’t seem to be able to do anything at all, you know, the president has said there can be waivers. And one of the waivers is that states may use Twenty-First Century money for things other than just afterschool programs. For in-school work, what we, some people are calling extended day, expanded learning. But there’s a lot of room and give in there. If you’re, you know if people wanna get more details on that, Afterschool Alliance recently put out sort of an FAQ, and a lot more information about what the waivers mean and which states have gone after them. I don’t, New York hasn’t officially been requested and granted a waiver at this time, but I believe that that’s in process. I don’t know what’s going to happen with that. And I think that State Ed. has to sort of wait to issue the RFP until they know what the deal is with that. So this next RFP that comes out in, quote, the ‘spring’, which we don’t know when that is, but – may be very different than Twenty-First Century RFPs in the past. Hanaa: Yes. I wonder, are they gonna be called Twenty-First Century programs then? Eric: Yeah, it’s, the legislation is still what funds it, Twenty-First Century Community Learning Centers is still what funds it, but the idea is you can use the money to do some other things besides just what – so people are very worried about this being a watering down of afterschool, and being a, essentially – it’s essentially a net cut to afterschool programs, potentially. And others would say that it’s allowing more flexible use of the funds. Which particularly for high school programs could be advantageous, ’cause you could do out of school-time work during regular school hours. So it’s, I think it’s a complicated issue. I’m going to be speaking soon to Jennifer Davis who’s the CEO or executive director of the National Center on Time and Learning, who has really spearheaded nationally this whole expanded learning effort, to you know, talk to her about all these different complicated issues and you know, we’ll see what comes out of that. I do want to say that to me what you did, and this might sound a little hokey, but to me the energy that you put into it and what came out of it and what you did was really heroic. It was really, like, one person taking the initiative to really, like, step up and say, you know, “No offense but this isn’t fair.”  And the grace with which it was done, there was no, you know, calling around with angry phone calls and trying to get people riled up. It was just very clear and straightforward, assuming good intent on all sides but not backing down. And saying, you know, we’re gonna stick with this until we, you know, we get a real response. And so to me that was heroic and it’s a story that needs to be told. And I, as much effort as I made with the NAA conference and Youth Today, it took me making a podcast to be able to actually just the story out there. So I really appreciate the work that you did and I appreciate you coming to talk with me about it. Hanaa: Thank you, I really appreciate being able to speak with you about it. Eric: Yeah, great. Well, you know, I look forward to talking you once the new RFP comes out. We can share notes about what we think about the changes that they might have made. Hanaa: Yeah, absolutely. Eric: And maybe we can both become reviewers and experience the process ourselves. Hanaa: I’d love that. It’s a great process being the reviewer. Eric: Yeah, I’ve never done it. Well, Hanaa, thanks a lot for taking the time to talk to me. Hanaa: Thank you. Eric: – and being on Please Speak Freely. [/expand]

Brad Lupien, Co-Founder and Co-President of ARC (formerly Champions) has a million ideas for how to improve education and the lives of young people, and in this episode we got to discuss a few. “You’ve got to try lots and lots of different things and think about lots of crazy ideas and you have to be comfortable that most of them will fail. But if one of them is a great idea and it sticks, you’re successful.”        – Brad Lupien [expand title=”Transcript Available here”] Brad Lupien and Eric Gurna on the Please Speak Freely Podcast (Transcription) A pdf version of this trasncript is available here Eric Gurna: Hi, I’m Eric Gurna of Development Without Limits and this is Please Speak Freely, the podcast where we have honest conversations about youth development and education. So I’m here with Brad Lupien, who is co-founder and co-president of Champions. Um, the full name is Champions Afterschool Adventure – what is it? Brad Lupien: Champions Adventure Afterschool and Sports Programs, it’s a bit of a mouthful. It’s been shortened by our students down to Champions. Eric Gurna: Champions, right. I think it’s been shortened by most people down to Champions. Brad Lupien: Absolutely. Eric Gurna:  So, ah, Brad co -founded and is co-president with Gary Lipsky, of Champions. We’re here in beautiful San Diego, we’re sitting on the balcony of my hotel room overlooking a bay with sailboats and a old steamwheel ship and it’s just gorgeous here. Um we both, we both happen to be here at the Up Your Game Step Up High School Conference Amp Up Middle School Conference. Which is happening all week, they went from sort of the high school conference called Step Up to the middle school conference at the end of the week called Amp Up. We both happen to be in town and I’ve been wanting to talk to Brad on Please Speak Freely so I’m glad to have the opportunity to do it. So thanks for talking to me. Brad Lupien: Yeah, thanks for having me. I’m excited. Eric Gurna: Your programs focus not entirely on high school and middle school but mostly, is that right? Brad Lupien: Predominantly. We have a handful of programs across southern California, twenty-one of our programs are specific comprehensive high school afterschool programs. Eric Gurna: And that was how I got to know you, you did a presentation with Sam Piha a couple years ago at –  I think it was a National Afterschool Association Conference, and it was on high school programs. And you know, I think back to that conversation, and you and I have got to know each other a little bit and work together a little bit since then, but I remember very distinctly in your presentation that what really jumped out at me is that it seemed like you all had figured out how to do what a lot of other people had been talking about, and that is to make young people actual leaders in the program. To not just do youth leadership training and to not just create certain projects or, you know, activities where young people can be leaders, but they’re leaders throughout the program including designing the program and sort of running the program with you. Is that right? Brad Lupien: It is right. I mean, I guess just spinning on that and riffing on that for a little bit, it’s embarrassing to say but now I’m happy to make it public – I didn’t – I heard this term youth development and I feel like I’ve been in the field since I was in undergraduate programs up in Vermont. And I heard youth development and I was like, mm, okay. And I feel like we’re still in this stage where people talk about youth development and everybody likes to throw in the term. Eric Gurna: Yeah. Brad Lupien: But seeing it in actual practice is – I haven’t seen it a lot in actual practice now that I’ve actually learned the formal definitions of what it is. Eric Gurna: Mmhm. So what do you mean. like, the formal definition of what it is, or like, what is it in practice for you? Brad Lupien: I come from – this is a little bit of the back-story here, but I think it begins to define it for me – I come from a family of teachers, and my dad was a PE and health teacher at a middle school in Whitman, Massachusetts for thirty-seven years before retiring a couple years back. And he taught me what youth development was through his work well before I started Champions and well before I started hearing the term.  And it was the idea, for me, I see youth development as being the idea when we are taking young people and we’re giving them some concrete life lessons and then we’re asking them questions about how they interpret that information and then we’re weaving in other programming and other opportunities for them based on their responses to those questions. Asking a group of kids, “Hey, what do you want to do in your afterschool program?”, that’s not youth engagement, that’s not youth development for me. I think presenting ideas, challenging them, asking questions and then helping guide them on a path that relates to what they, how they respond to that question, is youth development. And that’s really what we’ve tried to do with our programs. And I, it’s not Champions, I think there’s lots of programs out there doing it but those are the programs that I think are most desirable and they’re the programs I want to try to be like. Eric Gurna: It’s interesting, ’cause it’s come up in a couple of these conversations, that it seems to me that the process you just described, it’s, there’s a set of values that it’s based on and the values are different than the values that a different process would be based on. So what I mean by that is like, it seems to me that when you talk about not just asking a group of young people or like, making a suggestion box so they can suggest activities or something, but actually engaging with them in a critical conversation that takes places over time and that grows and develops and then the program that you create together, it really it gives weight to not just to the suggestions that they have but the interests that they have, regardless of whether they’re interests that you started out with or not. So there’s, its like there’s a level of dignity and respect that you’re approaching the young people in your program with that I think is lacking when we approach young people like we know where we need them to need to get and we’re just gonna ask them, you know, for some guidance about how they might best like to get there. Brad Lupien: Right. Eric Gurna: You understand what I’m saying? Brad Lupien: I do. Interestingly, when Champions first started back in two-thousand-and-one, we called ourselves coaches. And I think a lot of people do that now. Because I come from a sports background I learned a lot of the life lessons that I hold near and dear to me, I learned a lot of my values on a soccer field or on the basketball court. So we always, we built Champions as being a sports-based youth development, youth-based organization.  Now I’ve shifted that, and my team gets frustrated because I always change things up. I’m like, “Ah, I think we were doing it wrong for eight years, let’s start using a different term.” Now I actually refer to the older youth site coordinators and assistant coordinators and stuff, I’d say, “”Listen, you’re a guidance counselor, you’re a social worker in the school. ” Our young people don’t, in the big urban settings in particular, they don’t get enough opportunities in my opinion to have somebody just sit and actively listen to what they have to say, to check in with them on the relationship between home and school, on the relationship between school and what they wanna do in the future. So I say to my staff now, “Listen, you’re a guidance counselor.” Unfortunately I think there’s a confidence issue with young educators, myself, I mean with lots of educators or I guess regardless of age, but inexperienced –  I’ll use the word experienced – inexperienced educators  lack the confidence to be able to sit there and really listen. They wanna try and educate, they wanna try and teach –  “Let me give you -let me pour out information for you to soak in.”  I think the really high quality educators are the ones that are able to sit there and say, “Let me hear everything you have to tell me about what you wanna be/do/think and then I’ll interject advice/suggestions/ideas/things that you might wanna further explore, as you talk to me.” Eric Gurna: It’s interesting, it reminds me – um, Alfie Kohn talks about, we should say less and ask more, you know. And it’s a nice rule of thumb to think of in your mind as you’re in that situation when you don’t know what to do, when you don’t know how to respond. It’s like, oh if just, if I have an inclination to say more, but if I say less and ask more maybe that will get me somewhere different. I never thought about it as a confidence thing, that it takes a lot of confidence to just listen in that way, and I’m wondering –  I mean for me, the way I heard what you just said is, that the confidence that you need is that when you do speak it’s gonna have to be something that’s somewhat spontaneous and responsive to what the young person is bringing up, rather than something that you prepped in advance. Is that sort of the confidence that you’re talking about, that there’s the unknown? It’s like you’re gonna have to respond to something and it’s totally unknown. You can prep your sort of your capacities and skills but you can’t prep your script. Brad Lupien: Yeah, I, yes, I mean I think that that’s what social workers do, I think that that’s what therapists do. You have some questions that you wanna ask and you have some leading questions that maybe are rote and you use with everybody, but then from there, there can be no scripts in educating young people. It has to be, start the conversation and then really listen to what they say, and the response to their questions should be – that should define the path you’re gonna take with their education. In particular in the afterschool field. I mean it wasn’t, when I was in the classroom it wasn’t the same because of standards. In many ways I had to say,  “Okay, you guys wanna talk about Mayans right now, but were supposed to be talking about the Inca empire.” So you know, maybe a bad example, but you get the idea. Eric Gurna: Yeah, yeah. And I think that’s why a lot of us end up in afterschool and other sorts of alternative situations rather than the classroom. But I think some people would start to get uncomfortable with how you’re talking about it and referring to them as social workers and guidance counselors and even therapists, like you said. Because those are, especially social work and therapists, those are highly, at this stage they’re highly credentialed positions. There’s a lot of regulations, you know, you’re a clinical social worker, you have, you know, this license and you have this training and, you know, some people are critical of putting young, you know, often inexperienced educators in college, straight out of college, whatever –  into situations where they’re not necessarily formally trained to be a social worker or therapist and they’re being asked to play a similar role. Brad Lupien: I would – I agree with you. The three critical training pieces and professional development pieces for these less experienced educators without the credentials and without the, you know, graduate level education in therapy or in clinical psychology or whatever it might be is, one, let’s teach our educators how to actively listen. Two, let’s teach them what strengths perspective thinking is and really embrace strengths perspective and active listening. And then most importantly train them when to bow out of the conversation. I mean I don’t want my inexperienced staff to start asking questions and when the young person says, “I’m contemplating suicide,” to keep going in that conversation. So we really spend a lot of time training on alright, go as far as you can go in that conversation, but you need to also have the confidence and be realistic enough to know when you say to a young person, “I thank you so much for sharing that with me. I wanna help you, I’ll always be here for you. I think that there are some amazing things we can do together, but I really want you to talk to somebody else, and I’m gonna tell somebody about what you just said.” Or, “I want you to know that I want more help for you, so I want you to reach out to somebody else.  I’m not comfortable going any further with this conversation, I think its something that we should bring in somebody else. ” Eric Gurna: Yeah, so they’re playing the role of like, connector and sort of like playing a support role for that young person and helping them to connect to the resources that they need. Brad Lupien: Absolutely. I mean, listen, look at – in our existing large urban high schools, what’s the caseload for a school social worker or a school guidance counselor?  Hundreds, if not more than hundreds. I don’t think that that’s the way it was intended when we put school social workers in place. So in many ways I think the afterschool staff can function as support staff to the existing school social workers, the LSWs. Eric Gurna: A colleague of mine, Rebecca Fabiano, she talks about this notion she has of, every young person should have,  I think she calls it their team. I gotta ask her, she has a catch word for it. But the idea is like, celebrities have stylist, and they have a lawyer and they have a this and they have a that. They have a whole crew of people that are there to support their success, and that young people need a crew of people to support their success. And that everybody can’t play, you know, every role. You don’t want your stylist drawing up legal documents or your lawyer doing your hair, but that they can play a key role and they can connect you to other resources. Brad Lupien: Absolutely. So I’m not suggesting that the Individualized Education Plan, the IEP plan for special education students is as efficient as it could be. I was a, you know, I taught in a special education school in Boston for young people with behavioral and emotional disabilities. Kids that were trying to basically to move from lock-up situations back into the public schools. But I started thinking, like, well why doesn’t every young person have an IEP meeting at least a couple times a year, where were bring together all the different people in this person’s life either with the – we should have the young person at the table but saying hey, here’s your football coach, here’s your art teacher, here’s, you know, somebody from – mom or dad or aunt or uncle or legal guardian from home here’s – if you’re having a hard time, here’s your social worker. Let’s sit down together and create an end plan for you.  What percent, I don’t know what percent, I’m not a statistician, but what percent of students right now get IEP’s written for them? Well, wouldn’t it be amazing, and I know I’m idealistic here, but what if we had Individualized Education Plans for every young person? And I think the openness right now and the lack of definition for what older youth afterschool programming is allows us to do that. I mean we sit down with a team of people, we coach the young person, we’re like, “Hey, you should get involved in this, oh you’ve got an interest in art , do you know that this exists, let me connect you, let’s bring that person in to the table to talk to you.” Eric Gurna: I think the trouble is that when you formalize it and you turn it into a bureaucratic process with forms, that it almost becomes something completely different than it started out as. So the IEP is something that just has to get done for the kid as opposed to a human kind of experience that you’re talking about where it’s not just people, it’s not the social worker, the this, the that, who are sitting down – it’s individuals who know that young person, who that young person has a connection to and trusts. That’s a really different experience. Brad Lupien: I’m not sure how to explain this, but I get scared of stopping- when we stop working toward the ideal because it seems impossible.  So everybody says, the immediate response when I say every young person should have an Individualized Education Plan and we should have three, four meetings if not more,  plus sub-meetings, everyone says, “Well, that’s impossible.” But – why? We won’t get there and I understand that but why not try to move towards that as opposed to saying, “That’s impossible and let’s stop.”  I get frustrated with that in a lot of areas, but I get frustrated when we say, “Let’s stop working towards the ideal, let’s stop working towards the utopia ’cause it’s too hard.” Okay, so let’s be realistic.  We’re not gonna meet it, but heck if we can do that for half a dozen students in a school that would be amazing as a start. Eric Gurna: Also, I mean, I don’t even think it’s necessary to say we’re not gonna meet it,.  Like, I mean, there’s been all kinds of huge changes in the world and some of them have happened really fast. I mean, if you look at, you know, your experience living right now compared to what it would’ve been twenty years ago – if we were the same age we are now twenty years ago – we have completely different resources at our fingertips, literally.  So I don’t know that it’s – I wouldn’t even, I don’t even think you have to apologize by saying, “I know we’re not gonna meet it.” I think it’s worth saying that every young person is entitled to this, you know. And I think we live in a culture right now where saying – entitlement has become like a dirty word.  You know, because Republicans talk about entitlements as, you know , handouts and all that stuff, as though it’s not right to say someone’s entitled to something. I think humans are – should be entitled to certain things. Brad Lupien: Absolutely. It’s interesting actually that you bring that up, and it’s a little bit of a transition here but something that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is, in terms of this relationship to what the existing rules are and the speed at which society is changing. Eric Gurna: Yeah. Brad Lupien: We keep running into that. And I think we’re able to innovate in an afterschool setting in some really cool ways, but we often run into,  “Oh, social media, you can’t use social media because risk management is never gonna let that happen,” or “How do we ensure the safety -” and those are important questions to engage with, but we keep running into- or I keep running into, and I think a lot of us are running into, that is, well – “We can’t do that in schools because there’s rules against that.” I think the starting point is to ask the question “Why? Explain to me that rule.”  We’ve got a changing world. Our young people see the world and experience the world in very different ways today in 2011 than they did even five years ago, definitely ten, twenty years ago. But throwing up our hands and saying “There’s a rule, the bureaucracy has told us we can’t do that so therefore let’s not explore it any further,” is foolish. We have to explore it further and it starts with asking questions.  “Why? Tell me why you’re saying no to that, I wanna understand what the rule is.” And I’ll see if I can find a way to work within the theory of the rule and still get it done for our young people. Eric Gurna: That’s funny, ’cause I was sitting for breakfast earlier with one of your colleagues, Angelo, and I said, “I’m gonna be interviewing Brad later for my podcast. What should I, you know, what should I talk to him about? What sort of, what lights him up?” You know, I wanted to get Angelo’s perspective.  And he said well, anything about the status quo and just like, the idea that we should be doing something just because it’s the way that it’s done. You know is something that – Brad Lupien: Drives me nuts. Eric Gurna: Drives you nuts. And that is a good transition because I think that your organization is somewhat unique in just the structure of it, how it start- maybe not how it started but the structure of it, how it exists in relation to this nonprofit organization that you founded, so I hope you don’t mind talking about this. Brad Lupien: Not at all. Eric Gurna: Champions is a private corporation, or a – Brad Lupien: It’s an S-corp.  It’s a for-profit S-corp. Eric Gurna: Right. I like to say Development Without Limits it’s  – it’s not against profit. Brad Lupien: I like, I’m a big fan of the new movement, not so new but past few years of B-corporations, for-benefit corporations. Eric Gurna: Right, not just for profit. Brad Lupien: It’s not just for profit, it’s a tax status. Eric Gurna: Right. But also not just for profit, we’re for a lot of other things. The problem is that the tax status of ‘for profit’, it makes it sound like all you’re for is profit. And to me the big distinction is between publicly held organizations and privately held ones, ’cause publicly held organizations, when you work there your sort of duty is to make money for the stockholders. If you’re the owner or co -owner of a company you can decide what your job is and what you value, how much you value profit, how much you value something else. So Champions is a private company that provides after school programs in public schools and public charter schools as well. Right? Brad Lupien: Yes. Eric Gurna: And so mostly it’s public moneys being utilized through grant programs in the state of California, twenty-first century money, that sort of thing, right? Brad Lupien: The predominant business model is that we’re a subcontractor for a school district that gets federal money. Eric Gurna: Right. Which is the same model that many nonprofit organizations are.  They’re subcontractors for the school districts, so in that way it’s no different. But you also formed a nonprofit organization that sort of works in concert. Brad Lupien: Yes. Eric Gurna: Can you talk about that a little bit? Brad Lupien: Yeah. Core Educational Services is a 501(c)3 here in Southern California and the primary role is to bridge the gap between the private sector and the public sector. So we use Core to bring additional funding into afterschool programs. And I’m very specific in saying into afterschool programs, not Champions afterschool programs, because, yes, Core raises money and brings in additional resources for schools where Champions is an afterschool provider, but that’s only a portion of where the funding and resources go. We bring in foundation dollars and private sector dollars and implement programs where Champions has no presence. Eric Gurna: Okay, and why did you decide to form a nonprofit? Champions is doing very well, you seem to have your hands full with that work . Brad Lupien: Um, one, because  – there’s a couple answers to that – one answer is because of the requirements within the grants and the contracts of getting a match and we found it, I mean very realistically we found it pretty challenging with people’s existing understanding of what a private versus a public organization corporation does, in walking up to, you know, another private entity, a  grocery store, and saying “Hey, would you make a donation to Champions?”, and they’re like, “Yeah, fantastic, do I get my 501(c)3 tax letter ?” Well no, so that was part of the reason. I also believe  in- I’ve referred to in the past and I’m not sure what people think about this and frankly I guess I don’t care any more – I believe in the Robin Hood method. I believe in – it makes me a screaming liberal, I guess  – but I believe in this Robin Hood method.  I believe that Champions can go into some of our more elite schools where the income, the household income for the families is really high, and we can charge a premium for a fee-based afterschool program and the quote unquote profit from that program gets funneled into a school that is in a socioeconomically lower threshold and is only maybe getting the federal dollars, which I just don’t think is enough.  I don’t want to misquote here, but it believe it was the Mott Foundation who put that report out a while, a couple years back, on what it cost to run a high-quality older youth program and I believe the number was up in the thirties, the high twenties and thirties. And the state of California, we get about ten dollars per student per day to run the program. And I said,  “How do we cover the gap?” Well, I use Core to try and cover the gap. Eric Gurna: Right. Which is no different really from what other nonprofit organizations do, you just have two entities to do it. Brad Lupien: Right, our business model is the same as a 501(c)3. At the end of the year themoney that comes in is going back out the programming. You know, that’s – Eric Gurna: Well, right, except for the money that goes to pay people. I mean programming- Brad Lupien: Which is the same as any corporation. Eric Gurna: The cost of programming is primarily paying people to run the programs. Brad Lupien: Absolutely. Eric Gurna: As the owner, owners of the company as opposed to just being the executive director who works for the company, you’re getting paid, Gary’s getting paid, but so do executive directors of nonprofit organizations. Brad Lupien: We’re W-2-ed employees of our corporation. Eric Gurna: Right, so what you’re saying though is – part of this might not even end up on the podcast because now I’m getting into the weed, but I’m curious for myself – you’re employees of the corporation, but there’s also a profit. At the end of the day there’s also a profit. Brad Lupien: We strive for that, but no. In ten years we’ve never posted a profit. We’ve reinvested the money into personnel or other resources to further develop the organization. That’s not to say that we’re not aiming for that, I mean, I think we are. But I would challenge any executive director of a 501(c)3 that at the end of the year doesn’t say, “Yeah, were trying to raise more money.” Eric Gurna: Sure. Brad Lupien: “We’re trying to grow.” Eric Gurna: Sure, I mean, most want to have a cash reserve if they can. Brad Lupien: Absolutely. Eric Gurna: That’s really interesting. That’s not – that’s based on a set of values.  You could cut corners, do less and make more money. Brad Lupien: Yes. Eric Gurna: In the structure – with a private company, that can be the motivation – is that if you do it cheaper you keep what’s left.  As opposed to if you’re an employee getting a flat salary, doing it cheaper doesn’t increase your salary. Brad Lupien: It’s not – this is not just words. It’s a concept, a theory of value, a moral of the organization.  The bottom line for me is and will always be young people. And regardless of an organization’s tax status, I don’t think everybody, and I would question even the majority of people have that as their true bottom line. Eric Gurna: So what do you think is the true bottom line of – Brad Lupien: I’m a board member for a number of different nonprofits. As a board member the number one thing that I’m asked to do is fundraise. I’m asked to bring in money. The dollar’s the bottom line. Eric Gurna: But the money ostensibly is for the programs and services that that nonprofit provides, right? Brad Lupien: Yes. Eric Gurna: So what I’m asking you is, for those leaders of organizations where you don’t believe that young people really are the bottom line, what is the bottom line that they’re working on? What is the set of values they’re basing their work on? Brad Lupien: I think for many it’s expansion, growth, power. Eric Gurna: So, sort of like building an empire. Brad Lupien: Building an empire. It scares the heck out of me. Eric Gurna: Why? Brad Lupien: Because I think that our country is based on not having monopolies and not having – and I think competition is really good in a capitalist society. I think that if we want the best product for young people we need to compete. And I think if, regardless of one’s tax status, or private versus public corporations status, if their goal is to control everything then we eliminate competition. Eric Gurna: You and I – you referred earlier to – when we were talking before we started recording, to a session that you and I co-facilitated, co-designed and co-facilitated at a conference a couple years ago about how to take business practices and apply them to afterschool. And you know, that’s sort of similar to what you’re talking about right now. But I also, you know, my thinking on some of that has I think changed since we did that. Because while I think there are certainly things that we can learn from business practices I also think there can be a danger in approaching everything as a competitive situation or everything as a business. You know? Brad Lupien: We started this conversation about – in talking about how the most important thing we can do for young people is ask questions and then listen to them.  And I think that’s the same thing here. No one’s saying that it’s a black and white situation, it’s a one or the other situation. But I think we have become scared in the education non-profit world of looking at the business model and saying “There’s some amazing things we can learn.” And that’s what excited me about that conference and that presentation we did in the past is, let’s look at the positive things we can learn and let’s engage with that model to say “What do we wanna pull out and what do we wanna stay the heck away from?” But listening to that model, understanding it, engaging with it is important, that’s education. And we need to do that as opposed to just throwing up our hands and saying we’re not gonna look at it. Eric Gurna: So what are some of the ideas you think that can be especially helpful from looking outside the afterschool sort of nonprofit government public education construct? Brad Lupien: I think that there’s a lot that can be learned in the education field about how marketing firms and advertising works. I think we have to advertise, we have to change perceptions of schools because we need to be advertisers and marketers. We have to shift young people’s perceptions of what school is. Instead of being that thing that they dread going to, if we shift school to become the center of the community, the place where you hang out, play sports, be with friends, that hosts celebrations for you – I think that that type of marketing and advertising is really valuable. I think that there are some concrete concepts there like loss leaders that we’ve talked about in the past where you know, at the beginning of programming you have to put some things out there that are gonna cost you a fortune. And I don’t want the budget people, the CFOs, to say “Ah, that’s too expensive.” Say,  “Let’s look at return on investment.” If we have to drop a boatload of money in the first couple weeks to get young people excited about what school is gonna be like that year, good, spend the money. You’ll get it back tenfold with the number of times that young person comes to a program or how they perceive school as a whole. Eric Gurna: It’s funny because I just interviewed Michael Edwards who wrote a book calledSmall Change: Why Business Won’t Save the World. And the book is essentially a criticism of the philanthro-capitalism sort of model, like the Gates Foundation , who else, the Broad Foundation, others who look at investing in certain social policy, public policy that they’ve deemed important, putting their money into organizations who are going to tackle those problems the way that they’ve suggested that they tackle them, allocating money towards companies who are going to take a businesslike approach  and looking at return on investment and all of that. And I think the way you described it, it just makes sense. In another context it can mean that the hardest problems get ignored because the easier problems are gonna be the ones where you can show success. So we keep going after the easy ones and we ignore the harder problems.  And the harder problems are often more expensive to fix, more expensive to even begin to address. And so I think that my thinking on it may have – I’m still a little muddled with it, but my thinking on it has become more critical of both sides, that what you’re – agreeing with you that  for people who are just totally in the bubble of school and non-profit who won’t look at the business world, that that’s like, holding us back.  But it’s also wrong-headed to think that we should take a totally business-like approach to the business of working with people, to the business of social programs and education. Brad Lupien: Yeah. It’s not – I like to play in the gray area. It makes me nervous even to be – this conversation here that people are listening to, for them think oh, Champions and Brad are looking at it from a business model. I mean, I am a social worker and a teacher, that’s what my education was and that’s what I continue to be. But I think that there is a gray area between those two and I want to play and live in the gray area between the business world and the education world. I think that there’s a really rich and valuable middle that we need to explore. And you know, I think one of the things that I – I want to continue to have people ask me the hard questions  and I want to continue to ask other people the hard questions. I wanna wrestle with the challenging ed. reform ideas. And in some ways the big money from the charities, from the foundations out there, pushes us to do that. I don’t, we don’t always get a grant  – we don’t often get the grant, but the process of writing fifteen pages about how I want to think about technology in the classroom pushes me to be better even if I don’t become a grant recipient. And I’m sure we’ve turned in a lot of things that are way off mark, but they end up being – you know, my ten-page rant gets turned in as a grant application. I’m sure it gets laughed off the table, but it helped us become a better organization. Eric Gurna: That’s interesting, so it’s like proposal writing as a means of, sort of, your idea development more than just as a means of getting money. Brad Lupien: It makes my team not focus on daily operations when I say, “Okay, we’re gonna be going after x number of dollars, let’s get the team together in my office.” And we’re gonna throw up the whiteboards and we’re gonna start thinking and really engaging and start talking about how we wanna go after this money. For that day ,for that week, for that month, whatever it takes. That’s time that I’m not just thinking about daily operations and it’s too easy in our field to get sucked into day-to-day operations and what we have to do about getting kids signed into the program, feeding them a snack and getting them to do their homework. And we don’t take enough time to push and challenge. Eric Gurna: That’s really interesting to me ’cause I’ve just recently been involved with several different proposal development processes where we’re a subcontractor or a partner on someone else’s proposal, and I’ve been noticing that different organizations take different approaches to that. And to me, its -I’m sure there’s more than two, but the two approaches that have become apparent to me are the organizations who look to, look at the request for proposals or whatever it is and try to almost approach it like it’s a take-home homework assignment, like a take-home quiz. Like, “I’m gonna write this to answer these questions as well as I can and to write what’s gonna score the best.” You know, the proposal that will score the best. And others approach it like, “Here’s an opportunity, what’s gonna be our concept? What’s gonna be our idea that we can fit into this opportunity?” And like you said, throwing up the white boards and having those kinds of brainstorming and really looking at it like concept identity. And figuring out what that is and there’s an exchange of ideas in that process and it can be a little messy and but – Brad Lupien: Messy is good. Eric Gurna: Messy is good when it comes to thinking. And I’ve been very frustrated with the other approach and, you know, it might just be my short-term limited experience with it, it also seems to be the approach that doesn’t work as well. Because you know, it just so happens that these few instances that I’m referring to, they didn’t get, you know, they didn’t get the funding. And the ones we’ve got that have been the most significant have been ones where we’ve had a significant role in sort of thinking it through and sort of feeling our way through the process and it’s grown our ideas, as you said, sort of putting that proposal together. So it’s just interesting to think about, and it applies directly to my own recent experience.  And I just, you know, I wonder if there’s some way – I don’t know what I wonder. It’s just, it’s really frustrating to work with people who just look at it like, you know, all you gotta do is fill in the bubbles. Brad Lupien: There’s so many overused expressions that actually are so meaningful if you stop and really think about it and work within the – one of them for me is being outside the box. This is what you’re talking about, like, even if we don’t – if the money’s inside the box  and we’re all trying to get there, you don’t have to be inside the box to get the money, I don’t think. I think you can work way outside of it and – yeah. Well, I appreciate that you’re doing these types of things, because I think a lot of us out there are really trying to wrestle and think about the hard questions and have the hard conversations and the good conversations that push us forward and those conversations that are outside the box and they happen too infrequently . And everybody’s scared of saying something that’s gonna annoy everybody or be confrontational, but I want people to challenge me and have those harder conversations. Eric Gurna: And so how do we do that, how do we change the field? I mean you and I are about the same age, I guess we found out the other day I’m a few years older than you. But so you know, we’re sort at this point where we’re at a lot of conferences and we’re, you know, out there in the field and part of the reason for doing Please Speak Freely and for doing other things that we’ve been doing, debates and things like that, is I realized that I was complaining about something and I was part of the problem.  So I’m complaining about how boring the conferences are but I’m a presenter at all these conferences. So I’m, you know, complicit in the boredom, the boringness of them, so I need to do my part.  So how, what can we do to change the field ? ‘Cause I totally agree with you – to change the field so that it’s not just the same conversations being had over and over again, and the same sort of institutional statements, you know, about whatever is the current topic. Right now it’s extended learning time, or however you want to say it – expanded learning time, extended day, more time.  All the sudden this is the thing everyone is talking about, and there’s like, certain party lines on it and it’s assumed that we all agree, and there’s not so much of a really critical conversation where we say “Well, wait a minute, let’s, like, look at different perspectives here.” So you know, I go to conferences, I go to things like that, and it seems like it’s almost a publicity platform for a particular policy, set of policies, rather than an opportunity for, you know, different people in a field to be able to, you know, I call it geeking out. You know, to be able to, like, talk about all the intricacies and disagree about – we can agree about, sure, everyone has good intentions for young people. I’m gonna take that as a given, if you’re in this field you have good intentions for young people. But that doesn’t mean that I’m gonna, that I think you’re valuing the right things in your work or in the direction that the policy and the funding is going. I don’t. But I don’t find a lot of – you know, I had to create this podcast because I needed a way in which to have these conversations more publicly, because I don’t feel like I have one. Well, what do we – what’s our part? Brad Lupien: I think the question in there, or the piece of the question in there that resonated for me is how to change it. And I- bear with me on a little aside here. My wife and I spend a lot of time sitting down over a glass of wine and talking about everything from politics to religion to the future of the world to education to technology and we’ll – I love those conversations. It’s one of my favorite things in the world, is sitting, having those discussions. And then when friends come over we would have that as well. And I started saying well, we had this idea, we said – what if we just assigned one person to tell us all about what they’re passionate about for, like, forty minutes and then after that everybody can kind of ask questions and that would frame the conversation instead the party breaking, you know, the social gathering breaking up into six different conversations about, “Hey, how the Red Sox playing? Hey, you know, how’s work these days?” So this kind of information salon that they used to have back in the, you know, back in the day in the early nineteen hundreds, let’s start, let’s implement salons. I think we need to do that with the conferences as well, like why not at an education conference have the CEO of a, or a franchise owner of Dunkin’ Donuts or McDonalds come out and talk to us about what they do? And people would say, “Well, how the heck is that relevant at all?”  But I got a funny feeling that a lot of people sitting there in the audience might start thinking about, “Oh man, how’s that relate to my classroom? How’s that relate to my club? That would be cool!” Or let’s bring out academics, you know, the academic conferences they read papers. Our conferences people get up and talk and run with a Powerpoint. Wonderful, I think they’re both great, but what if the afterschool conferences and these get-togethers we have, like, here in San Diego, what if we had some professors come out and talk about what’s happening at, you know, the university level, in the engineering department or in the law schools. I just think it might challenge us to think differently about the questions. Eric Gurna: Yeah, hm. Well, we’ll get to work on that. Brad Lupien: Yeah, again, one of those, like, “Huh, yeah, sounds great Brad, but that ain’t gonna happen.” Eric Gurna: Well, I don’t know, I, you know, it’s – that’s kind of what I’m saying though, that it’s not “That ain’t gonna happen.” It’s, “Are you gonna make that happen?” or, “Am I gonna make that happen?”  It’s that, for me, part of doing this podcast and part of, I mean, everything we do at Development Without Limits is- maybe not everything, some things are just – we have contracts and so we do the work – but a lot of things we do are things that we just decided to take on and now we gotta figure out a way to make it happen in the world. Like, it’s not enough to sit around talking about the concept of it, we gotta operationalize it. We gotta actually make it happen in the world. But the thing is, things like that – you could make that happen. Like, you know, Champions could throw that conference. You know, you could actually just host, like, do it yourself, you know? And that’s what, kind of what I’m saying is that I think that those of us who, in the field, regardless of age and all that but those of in the field who are frustrated with the somewhat one-dimensional nature of a lot of the professional learning experiences that we’re having need to make some things happen ourselves. You know, I just was at the Bridge Conference a couple weeks ago where-you met Zach Wilson who… Brad Lupien: Yes. Eric Gurna: …who runs the Bridge Conference. And you know, it’s a standard two-day conference, but within that format, there – I think that they were able to do some innovative things, really bring some things to life. And as I talked about with Zach on the podcast that we did live from the Bridge Conference, to do it in a way where people feel that they’re being treated in a humane way. That they’re being respected, that they’re having a pleasant experience, and above all it’s modeling the kinds of experiences that we wanna be creating for young people. You know, so I guess I wanna say, I think you’re already doing a lot of that in your program. From what I’ve learned and know about your programs, that you’re already sort of walking that talk and I’m just glad to know that you’re already, you’re always a few steps down the road. Like, “It’s not good enough, it’s not good enough. We’ve gotta get closer to what we mean, we’ve gotta get closer to this ideal that we have in our minds and our hearts,” you know. Brad Lupien: I think these, what they say about entrepreneurs in particularly, in particular entrepreneurs in the technology field, that’s – if you haven’t failed twenty times, twenty-five times with your new idea, with your new concept, you’re not really going the right direction. It wasn’t like these people who come up with this brilliant concept, it’s the first thing they ever thought about doing. You’ve gotta try lots and lots of different things and think about lots of crazy ideas and most of them will be, you have to be comfortable that most of them will fail. But if one of them is a great idea and it sticks, you’re successful. Eric Gurna: Yeah, yeah. And maybe it changes the world. Brad Lupien: Maybe. Eric Gurna: Well, you know, it’s funny, ’cause I think I prepared less for this conversation than I have for any of the other ones that I’ve had. And I think the reason for that was that I knew that once you and I sat down that conversation was gonna take on a life of its own anyway.  And when I look back at my notes now I covered everything in my notes. I think we’ve done a pretty good job here, do you think we did it? Brad Lupien: Yeah, I think it’s fantastic. I love the conversations and the idea of the – I wanna hear other people’s conversations. I wanna hear more people and what’s happening in these types of discussions, because it pushes it forward.  I think we did it. Eric Gurna: I think we did it. Thanks, thanks a lot for doing this. Brad Lupien: Yeah, thanks a lot for having me. Eric Gurna: Alright. Okay, but you know, just when you thought it was over, it’s not over. We weren’t done, we didn’t do it. ‘Cause as Brad and I are sitting here, sort of talking about the conversation we just had, we realized that there’s an important announcement that Brad has and that by the time this podcast goes up online that announcement will already be public. So we thought we’d use this as an opportunity to make that announcement even more public. So Brad, do you wanna talk about the name? Brad Lupien: Yeah, Champions has always kinda been one of those, when people say, “What is your business model?” we say, “Say yes and then figure out how to do it.  Figure out a creative way how to do it.” So in some ways we didn’t write down a huge business plan and didn’t go through all of the legal things we probably should have back in two-thousand-and-one. So because of that the name ‘Champions Adventure Afterschool and Sports Programs’ has been, we’ve been told by another corporation that had that name in the vaults for a while, that they’re now making it public. I’ll just say it – it was coincidental, maybe, that that happened right after there was some words about a national best practices resource book coming out and then all of a sudden the name Champions was no longer ours. So we will be launching a new name. It is Arc, and the Arc Experience, and then we will have a supplemental program where students in all of our older youth afterschool clubs will have an opportunity to have a online presence that is related to the clubs that they’re involved with that will be called MyArc. Eric Gurna: Wow. Brad Lupien: So our new name is Arc, A – R – C.  It is not an acronym for anything, but it could be. Eric Gurna: Alright. Brad Lupien: I like to think that young people will interpret that as they see fit. It’s about academics, it’s about recreation, it’s about community, it’s about creativity, it’s about college. It’s about all these things that are A, R and C words, but it is not an acronym. Eric Gurna: That’s cool. Brad Lupien: The Arc symbol is essentially a C, seventy-five percent of a circle. And I’m tired of hearing about an achievement gap, I think we need to close the opportunity gap and Arc’s job is to close the gap in opportunities that we offer our young people. Arc, it will be – a young person will go through their Arc Experience, and they will have their Arc or MyArc, MyArc will be the online supplement to all the clubs that we do. Eric Gurna: Great. And you know, we’ll post a link to Champions on the website, so it will now be a link to Arc. Brad Lupien: Every kid is still a champion by all means, but you know, it’s how the game goes. Eric Gurna: Great, well, I’m glad we have a chance to let Please Speak Freely listeners know about this and it’s definitely a unique way of naming it. It’s like, sort of an acronym, sort of not an acronym, which is pretty cool. Brad Lupien: I hope it makes people think. Eric Gurna: Yeah, great. Alright, so now I think we really did it. Brad Lupien: Alright, we did it. Thank you. Eric Gurna: Thank you. [/expand]

“I’m very worried that the move towards the business is best approach, right throughout society, is eroding older traditions of solidarity and working together, and cooperation and community in the public spirit, which are the things we are going to need to get us out of the mess that we’re in.” – Michael Edwards I can’t remember how I first came across Michael Edwards’ book, Small Change, Why Business Won’t Save the World, but it was a rarely engrossing experience for me. I love to read, but I often skim the non-fiction stuff, and I was surprised to find myself highlighting passages, dog-earing pages and reading lines aloud to whoever happened to be nearby. I even bought a stack of them and started giving them away – to me the book is somewhat of a manifesto, and I wanted others to share my fascination. Small Change is a thin paperback that packs a punch – it’s a critique of the current culture and system of philanthropy, and more than that it’s a sharp analysis of where we are as a culture in general.  I had a great conversation with Mr. Edwards at his home in Swan Lake, NY. We talked about how the current definition of education reform – a package of policies that all amount to a move towards privatization and a reliance on “market forces” – is part of a larger agenda that puts more value on efficiencies than values, and makes false assumptions about the power of business-like practices. I hope you enjoy the talk, along with a guest blog by Jakada Imani, Executive Director of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights (and also my best friend since seventh grade). [expand title=”Transcription Available“] Michael Edwards and Eric Gurna on the Please Speak Freely Podcast (Transcription)  download pdf Eric Gurna: So I’m here in Swan Lake, in upstate New York, Sullivan county, with Michael Edwards, who is a writer and activist affiliated with the think tank Demos in New York and he’s also formerly Director of the Ford Foundation’s Governance and Civil Society Program, he’s worked for World Bank, Oxfam, Save the Children, and lots of other esteemed organizations. So, thank you for doing this, and welcome to Please Speak Freely. Michael Edwards: My pleasure, thanks a lot. Eric: So, what drew me to you is this book that I hold in my hand right now, “Small Change: Why Business Won’t Save The World”, I want to talk a little bit about what the book’s about, but maybe you could summarize a little bit about what your work is about, and in particular why you wrote this book. Michael: Well I’ve spent, what, now 35 years, really the whole of my career, trying to find ways to support people who are doing work in communities and schools and non-profits in different parts of the world, to do their work as well as they can, to do it in a way which really empowers people, and doesn’t make them dependent, and which is as democratic as it can be.  Because I think all good work tries to be democratic and liberating and empowering, in that way, and what I’ve found is how difficult it is for a funding agency, particularly a large funding agency, whether it’s a foundation or a bank or a corporate or a government, to be really useful who are doing their work, and so often we get in their way, we do the wrong thing, we tie them up in knots, we put all sorts of restrictions, we have strings attached to the money that we give.  And, not surprisingly, it doesn’t work very well, and so all my life I’ve been trying to find ways to do that very simple job, if you’d like, more effectively.  If you have money, what’s the best way of putting it at the service of the people doing the work on the ground, so that they can do what they need to do as effectively as they can.  Sounds mind numbingly simple but it’s actually really difficult, and the reason I wrote the book was because I thought my world of donor agencies and funders and so on was going in the wrong direction.  Rather then reforming itself, so that it could be more effective, it was becoming more and more distant from communities, more and more technical and technocratic, it was becoming less and less, I think, something that was genuinely supportive of people on the ground, and more and more a sort of control system where people in bureaucracies hundreds of miles away, were making decisions which were not informed by realities on the ground, and yet were very important in determining what people could do.  So, the point of the book is to try to challenge the direction of philanthropy and say “this isn’t working, we need to do better.” Eric: And the subtitle is “Why Business Won’t Save The World”, but the book is mostly about philanthropy.  Can you talk a little bit about why that’s the message there, why business won’t save the world, as opposed to “Why Funders Who Sit Up In Their Ivory Tower Won’t Save The World.” Michael: Well the reason is pretty simple, it’s because over the last few years philanthropy has effectively been, I would say, taken over by business.  It used to be very separate, they used to be almost totally opposite actually.  You remember the original meaning of philanthropy was simply “love of humankind”, and nothing to do with money, it was about working together to achieve something.  But, over the years it became largely about giving money, and increasingly about giving very large amounts of money, from very rich, very wealthy individuals or from large corporations.  And, more then that there’s been the tendency to try and make philanthropy work like business, if you like, to make sure it earns a return on its investment, if you see it in those terms, to surround it with very detailed metrics and data requirements, which are supposed to prove that something is happening, and push resources to the organizations that are performing most effectively, in that narrow sense.  And, I think, more and more, philanthropy is becoming the playground of the business world, which is sort of an odd conclusion but that’s where we are.  And, so it’s very important, I think, to have a conversation about what’s happening as a result, is this a good thing, is a bad thing, is it somewhere in between, and what should we do about it.  I think the book tries to paint a sort of canvas of those strengths and weaknesses so that people who may not be aware of what’s happening in this field know that something important is going on that may affect them in a real sense, further down the line. Eric: And, that was a fairly objective way to describe the perspectives that you describe in the book, but I feel like reading it you get a pretty good sense of where you end up when you take that examination yourself.  So, I guess I’ll sort of prod a little more and ask, most people I feel like take the idea that government and non-profit can benefit from a  businesslike perspective, and that if non-profits and government and philanthropy were more like business that they would be more efficient, they would be more innovative, and they would have better success, and you’re not so sure. Michael: Exactly, and it’s partly because people mean very different things when they say “behave like a business” or “work like a business” or be “businesslike.”  If its only being organized, if its being professional, dedicated about what we do, doing the best we can, and so on, then no-ones going to argue against that, and I’m not arguing against that.  I think any institution, it doesn’t matter whether it’s a business, a government,  a ???, a public agency, a non-profit, has to be serious and disciplined about what its doing, otherwise it won’t do anything.  That to me is not being “businesslike” and that probably because many business, lets face it, don’t have any of those characteristics, they’re irresponsible, inefficient, incompetent, costly, wasteful, and damaging, and you could say that right across the board, the principles that underlie good practice are pretty much the same.  You have to have a clear idea of what you’re doing, you have to have very good accountability relationships with the people you’re working with, you have to build a team, and work collectively, and collegially, and so on.  You have to be sensitive to the environment which surrounds you, and we can reel off that list.  None of those things are the possessions of one set of institutions in society, it’s not being “like a business”.  What “business like” really means, and I think this is why this movement is so important, is something much more narrow, might tighter, much more formal, if you like, and that means that we should see philanthropy as a form of investment, in other words no longer giving grants that people don’t have to pay back, but that we should really seek to make both a financial and a measurable social return on the money that we give.  And, inevitably, that means your going to have to have much more, much fiercer data requirements to measure whether that’s happening or not.  You’re going to have to spend a lot more time gathering that information and analyzing and processing and so on, and you’re going to see, if you like, social change as an exercise in supply chain management, about inputs and outputs, about the most cost efficient use of resources, and that’s going to drive you , I think, away from your mission for social changes, towards doing things that  are more easy, that are less costly, that are less controversial, that don’t take so much time. And, inevitably non-profits are going to move down the slippery slope as they follow that path. And, so the paradox is that the more businesslike you become in that sense, the less effective you may become in the social sense, the social and political sense, and that’s why I’m concerned. Eric: And have you thought at all about how that trend in philanthropy, and it even goes outside of philanthropy, because even government funding agencies have really taken a similar approach, with the contracting they do with non-profit agencies, and even schools.  Have you given much thoughts to how that plays out in the world of public education, or non-profit agencies that work with schools? Michael: Sure, well I’m not an expert in education, but I do try to follow the debate, and the debate is really heating up, and I understand it, and is becoming, I would say, almost a textbook example of the debate that we’re talking about, the difficulties we’re talking about. Because you do have a very powerful, well resourced school reform movement which is very business oriented, very businesslike, and which sees schools as business units almost, and wants to maximize their cost-efficiency and their productivity, which you can only do as I said by reducing education to something easily measurable, which means standardized tests.  It means that you start to introduce market principles into the educational system, which usually increases inequality, and so on.  So, this is a great example of what actually happens when very well-meaning philanthropists and other decide to introduce these principles into their work, and I think one of the things that’s interesting is that it’s the education field where this conversation is the most heated, and I think that’s because everyone cares about education, everyone cares about their kids.  So, you’re having a full blow public conversation about the pros and cons of this movement and people are beginning to speak up I think, and to give voice to their anxieties about what’s happening, and not just the teachers unions, who some people say will be biased anyway, but independent intellectuals and policy makers and thinkers, people who have decades of experience in education, I think, are worried that by following a market reform process in education, we might achieve some small cost-efficiencies in the system somewhere, but we’ll never generate the kind of education our children need, in the broadest and deepest sense of that word, so we may be sacrificing some very important long term goals in order to satisfy the demands of business oriented philanthropy. Eric: You said that introducing market forces often increases inequality, could you say a little more about that? Michael: Well, markets don’t work on the principles of fairness, or human rights, or equality, they work on supply and demand, and so therefore they naturally privilege people who have more resources, who can purchase more in the marketplace, who have more influence with producers, who are more powerful consumers, if you like, and therefore markets will simply push resources to the places where demand is greatest, not where need is greatest. They will  reward those with the most resources, not those with the most deserving cause.  They don’t particularly care about eh quality of what’s done or the cost involved, the job of markets is simply to get things done in the most cost efficient way.  So markets are great at doing some things, but not in any human endeavor, where most things are intangible, and where we really care about who’s benefiting and who’s left out of the process, about the quality of what’s happening and not just the quantity, about the hidden costs that are involved, and not just the superficial provision of a good or a services, which is what you would find in the market, so although people in the business world would say that markets can work in education, markets can work in healthcare, markets can even work in governments, in the media, as you said this is a very general process. What you find when you analyze the actual results of introducing the market into those areas of life, is rising inequalities, lots of people left out of the process, who can’t afford to take part as effectively, and you may find very effective services delivered to a small number of people at the top of the tree, and everyone else losing out.  That tends to be what happens when you apply the market to human issues of health and education. Eric: To try and play devils advocate, to try and sort of imagine what some others might say in response, what comes to mind for me is and example like Harlem Children’s Zone, are you familiar with Geoff Canada and Harlem Children’s Zone and that movement? Michael: Yes Eric: Geoff Canada, the president and CEO of Harlem Children’s Zone has been able to bring together a huge amount of financial and other resources to concentrate on providing schools and other services for young people and families in a particular geographic zone of high economic need, and all of that, in upper Manhattan, in Harlem.  So, I think that some might say “doesn’t it depend on what you set as the outcomes you’re reaching for?” and “who benefits from the resources that are brought together?”  So, in a certain sense what is happening in Harlem Children’s Zone is, as you said, costing a lot of money, and in a certain sense it’s very businesslike in terms of looking to be as effective as possible and reaching their goals.  But, if their goals are helping every young person in within the geographic zone graduate from high school and graduate from college, and achieve a successful career, and if they are successful in reaching those goals, or making great progress towards those goals, wouldn’t it be good to be as efficient and effective as possible, and use the resources that are coming in from private philanthropy, from government sources, and others for the benefit of those most in need? Michael: Well, Harlem Children’s Zone is an interesting model but far from proven, and extremely costly, as you say, at a level which is virtually impossible to replicate on a large scale.  So, you could approach it in a number of ways, you could say well, if that’s the case, why are we doing it in the first place, because it will simply be an island of success, in an ocean of poverty.  And, if there really is no possibility of replicating something because it is so expensive, then maybe we should rethink why it’s so expensive and do something differently.  The second set of issues are that you could approach the goals of the Harlem Children’s Zone in a different way, in a way that’s been done many times before, (unknown) rather then starting very expensive, very good integrated programs, why don’t we build the capacity of local institutions and local communities and people to do things for themselves, so that they can solve their problems over the longer term.  It’s actually much cheaper that way, it’s more sustainable, but of course it doesn’t generate the short-term results that you’re talking about, as very high-profile, which are valued by the donors of something like the Harlem Children’s Zone.  There are lots of ways you can slice the cake in terms of how you achieve the same goals that you might want to achieve, and Jeffery Canada is doing it one way, and has a very high profile, they’re doing that and deservedly so.  But, it doesn’t mean that he’s right, it doesn’t mean that is the best way in the long term, and it certainly doesn’t mean that everyone else has to copy him.  I think if this conversation was more open and more genuinely a way of everyone sharing in different ways of approaching the problems that we face, and less about convincing that you have to do it this way, we would actually get somewhere much more quickly because you can’t replicate what’s happening in Harlem in Mississippi, or California, even if you could afford it, because the politics are different and the culture is different and the history is different and the needs are different.  So, what we need to be doing, if we are serious about attacking the problems of education, for example, is building everyone’s capacity to get together and solve the problems in their own ways which are appropriate to their context.  If we did that, then we would get results, but they may not be the results you want, or I want, in years 2, 3 or 4.  But we have to accept that, that’s not what we’re going to do.  Hat’s off to Geoffrey Canada, but I don’t consider the Harlem Children’s Zone as a great or sustainable model for reform in the rest of the country. Eric: And what you just talked about makes me think about other issues that we’re looking at in education reform, because there’s a lot of talk about creating and finding models that work, and then the phrase is always, and I think this is outside of education as well, “taking it to scale,” how do we take it to scale.  We’ve addressed this issue a little bit in other conversations on Please Speak Freely, some would say that the notion of taking a model to scale is not the right way to think about it.  But, it’s a very attractive, if you can find a school that’s had some success, however you’re defining success, and certainly that’s a whole conversation in and of itself, but if you find a school that’s achieved success, you want to find out what they’re doing, and then, lets even say adapt it to the local context, because no-one says “we should replicate this, do this exactly the same way” somewhere else.  Usually that’s someone criticizing the notion who says that someone else is saying that, but I believe that the people who are advocating for replication or growth of a particular set of charter schools or other sort of school or program, is saying, “we need to take the practices they have in place and adapt them to other local settings, but we can find efficiencies by utilizing the same model elsewhere.”  But that seems to be to me a particular world view.  Is that reflective of the larger culture that you’re addressing? Michael: Very much, in my world it will be replication and scaling up will be the most common currency, and it really partly depends on what you’re trying to do.  If you wanted to try and make the banking system accessible to low income families, right across America, actually you probably would use the market and you would find out which model works, because that’s a problem that’s very, I think, susceptible to those sorts of models.  People need access to credit, it has to be provided by an institution, the institution has certain rules and regulations and assessment requirements, so I think there’s something that will be relatively easy to scale up, and of course we have large scale micro-credit and micro-finance programs to point to now, which seem to work pretty well.  But, that’s a very distinctive kind of problem.  If, on the other hand, you’re doing something which is much more complicated and involved very different views even of what the goal should be, what is a good education, never mind how should it be provided, never mind provided most cost-effectively, and it’s much more difficult to take that route because you’re not dealing with what you might call a standard product, which can be doled out in millions and millions, you’re dealing with something which has to be tailored and even if you, as you say, are very aware of the context and are very sensitive and so on, it may be that you simply have to sit down with people and agree the most basic characteristics of the kind of schooling they want for their children before you start looking at any models.  And then, I guess, my advice is always to people, find as you can that’s useful to you, learn as much as you possibly can form wherever you can find it, bring in and enrich information bases as much as your can.  But, at the end of the day, you have to make a set of decisions about what’s relevant and appropriate for you, in a context where people may not agree with each other about eh answers to any of those questions.  Therefore, the idea of replicating or scaling something in that context makes no sense, unless you simply impose something, which is going to steamroll all of those differences and debates and conversations, which is a little bit what’s happening in the education reform debate, I think.  So, it’s “horses for courses”, as we would say in England.  It simply means you use the right tool for the right task.  No one would ever have a toolkit which only contained hammers or screwdrivers, you would have  a whole range of things.  So, if you goal is to dole out millions of low cost grants or mortgages and so on, you might well find one model of standardized delivery, but when we’re dealing with any human endeavor, which is intensely political and embedded in the locale and the culture and where people disagree with each other, you simply can’t go that way, and that’s very frustrating because it means that you’re going to have get your feet dirty and spend quite a lot of time simply fostering a conversation about what needs to happen. Eric: I think the other expression it brings to mind is if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail, right? Michael: Yep. Eric: You mentioned something about, essentially what I think of as a factory model, or the business model works when you are looking to actually produce the same thing wherever you go.  The other side of that to me, is that it also sort of assumes that you have the same input wherever you go, so whether it’s students, or something else in some other context, that students are students, essentially, and what I’ve found is that there is a distinction made in the education reform movement that’s unsaid, which is that poorer students are poorer students and they need something in particular, they need specific strategies and approaches, and we don’t really need to think that much about wealthier students and families in the same way, we need too think about them, but not in the same way.  It seems to me that much of your arguments are about what are effective and sound practices for accomplishing goals, but there’s another sort of underlying thread in all of this, which is more a moral argument, it seems to me, and I’m not sure if moral is the right word, but that not only does it not make sense because all students are different, but that there’s also unseemly and inhuman about treating all students as if though they were the same. Michael: I think there are multiple levels of moral and ethics arguments because all these things eventually devolve down to values, what do we value most in our own lives, what do we value for other people, and that drives what we do in the real word, whether it’s in terms of funding or decision making or policy making, or even research, and I think what we have to do is find a way putting the values back into a central place in the conversation, rather then hiding them away and pretending they don’t matter, because I think a lot of this debate is presented as though it were neutral, value-free, who could possibly disagree, but of course it’s just skating  over the surface because we disagree wildly actually on the answers to even the most basic questions of life.  And the secret of all democracy and therefore progress is to be honest about that a put them on the table and work your way through them in a way which doesn’t marginalize anyone and doesn’t privilege anyone, and I think one of the big ethical dilemmas we face now, shown very well in the education movement, is who decides, who decides the answers to these questions, who has the right to intervene, does money talk, should it talk, what do we do about people who have billions and billions of dollars and very strong opinions about how they should be spent.  We don’t want to say no to those resources, but we don’t want to simply follow orders, from someone sitting in San Francisco or Silicon Valley, or New York, who may not have any direct experience and certainly has no right, just because they are wealthy, to do what they like in the education system of a country.  So there are huge dilemmas of democracy and accountability and decision making, one the one hand, in addition to the dilemmas you raised about the values we want our education to be based on, do we want really, education, schools, to produce people qualified for certain jobs?  Is that it?  Because that’s basically the way it’s going I think.  Or, do we see it as a process of creating whole and rounded citizens who can be responsible and active in the world, who think about their role, who have much more creativity, and who become people who can change the world, in radical ways, if that’s what we want.  That’s a very different kind of education, and they have very different consequences for the kind of education that’s provided and even how it’s financed.  So, we’re rather afraid of having conversations about values because we’ll get stuck maybe, we’ll never agree, it’s divisive, it’s political, I hear that a lot, but unless you’re prepared to put them on the table and work through them, then they’ll simply come back and bite you in the end.  And that means the programs you create will be erected on very flimsy foundations, and will eventually fall apart, because you haven’t done the most important, basic work of being honest with each other about what you’re trying to do here. Eric: I recently saw a televised debate between Geoff Canada and Diane Ravitch and I don’t know if you caught that or not? Michael:  No, but I know both of them are two interesting personalities. Eric: Yea, sure, and you can see it online, if you’re interested, it was part of Education Nation, I think it was NBC that did that, and Diane Ravitch, I know I’ve mentioned her in previous episodes, and many people involved in the conversation know who Diane Ravitch is, she worked in the Department of Education under Bush I, and was one of the architects of the current movement of high-stakes, accountability, standardized testing, and all of that, and really pushed that for a long time, and in more recent years has taken a fresh look at that and seen sort of how it actually played out, and wrote a book called “The Death and Life of the Great American School System” that essentially says “I was wrong” and “we were wrong” and we were misguided and we went down a path we shouldn’t have gone down, and here’s why.  It was an incredibly brave book and inspiring to me to be able to take that and have that public of a conversation about being reflective about our own perspectives and just the idea that we can grow that much, is inspiring to me.  But, getting to the story and the debate, you just mentioned, it’s important to look at who decides these things, and it’s amazing to me how subtle the assumptions, how subtlety the assumptions are made, and how hard it is to question them, and she is incredibly adroit at doing that, and the debate with Canada, I can’t remember who the moderator was, but he Dianne Ravich was talking about how much financial resources have been invested in Harlem Children’s Zone and how that’s a huge investment that, as you were saying, may be hard to repeat somewhere else, and that the moderator said “so you’re saying that what we need is a huge investment of private money into the entire education system,” and she caught it and said “no, I’m saying we need a huge investment of public money into the education system,” and I didn’t even catch that he had sort of slanted the question that way, all I heard was “do we need a lot of money into the system,” but that one word, private or public, that’s a huge difference in figuring out who decides, because when it’s private money, who decides is essentially, you can count them on one hand.  And, when it’s public money, there’s obviously a whole democratic process in place, at least theoretically. Michael: Yeah, well yeah, you say at least theoretically, which of course is an important point, one can’t be too, sort of, romantic about the ability of democracy or the public to respond to everyone’s needs effectively, because we know that doesn’t happen, but it’s much better then the alternative, which is no access, as you say, people deciding in closed rooms miles and miles away, which no-one ever has access to.  I think the public is very important because it means something that belongs to all of us, something which we have some say, we have some root to make demands and to hold people accountable, and to try and make systems representative of a broader sense of where we want to go, and all successful societies have a strong sense of that, they have some sense of direction, and people feel, I think, that they have a stake and a share in success, that they can, however imperfectly, play some role, that they’re not just robots or puppets or pieces to be moved around in the jigsaw puzzle, that they have views of their own which have to be listened to, they have ideas which are important, and they may not be right, and other people may not agree with them, and so and so forth, but they have a role to play and it’s their right, and their duty, their responsibility, to step up to the plate and do that, that’s how you build communities and how you get effective institutions and have societies as a whole prosper, per our history.  So, it’s very worrying that those things are being eroded by the trends we’re talking about, and people I think feel more and more distant from most institutions in society, whether they’re public or private, they feel more and more disempowered, they feel more and more that things are happening around them they have no control over, and once you, I think, fall into that trap, something very fundamental has changed in society because it means that no longer can the public direct society and push it in the direction that they want, they become much more passive I think, and therefore you lose a lot of the drive and potential that societies have to be creative, and to move forwards, in some sense togetherness and solidarity, and we haven’t talked about this but I think a very important part of the reason I keep writing and speaking about this is because I’m very worried that the move towards the “business is best” approach, if we put it that way, right throughout society, is eroding older traditions of solidarity and working together and cooperation and community and the public spirit, which are things we’re going to need to get us out of the mess that we’re in, and once we lose those characteristics, then we have even less potential to solve problems in the future. Eric: Two things come to mind, the first one, and I’m repeating something that I said on the last episode but, I was at a conference recently where one of the speakers said that there’s going, there’s soon going to be 7 billion people on the planet, and we need to prepare our children to complete with every one of them. Michael: Right, while good luck, if that’s the message, total warfare, sort of somewhere down the road. Eric: But, on a more hopefully not, I definitely identify with what you’re saying as a general trend, the recent Occupy Wall Street movement and all around the world, I think, maybe is the pendulum swinging the other way a little bit around people coming together, hearing different voices, and that kind of solidarity.  I’ve been travelling a lot lately and I’ve been able to visit a few of them, which has been kind of cool, because everywhere you go you can check out the local Occupy, there’s one nearby in Poughkeepsie, I visited the Seattle one, I was in Boston just earlier in the week, and visited Occupy Boston, and it’s both the messages and the fact that they’re coming together and protesting and staying there, but it’s also the spirit in which they’re doing it, I think, that is sort of pushing back on what you’re saying, as the, not only the business approach of do things effectively and efficiently, but the hierarchical, top-down, find a strong leader and follow what they say, and this movement, so far at least, has been very strict about remaining democratic within their own processes, even if it takes meeting twice a day, even if it takes long long drawn out conversations, and that it’s not even about the old sort of approach of finding consensus as a group and then standing behind what the group says, it’s about that we all are going to be working on different things at the same time and that there’s room for that. Michael: Yeah, I think that’s true, and as I understand it yesterday they were trying to work out whether they want to move to sort of formal representative system or process, at least in the New York Occupy, and also should movements do that, they start in a very formless and they try over time to preserve their power, but also to become a little more organized, because that’s usually what you have to do to remain effective.  I think the real test though, obviously, lies ahead, and it’s whether it can broaden it’s appeal, much more out into ordinary communities, if that’s not a silly way of saying it, across the country, because there’s always a vanguard of people who are very highly motivated about something and get out into the streets and so on.  But, they’re only the tip of the iceberg, and the iceberg has to grow behind them, which is hundreds of thousands of people who may not be so confident about coming out on the streets, but are very worried about the direction of American society, and they have to get motivated, they have to get involved, and I think what one can hope there that the problem is always in times of great economic insecurity, the kind of times we’re living through now, where most people are really struggling to make ends meet, they tend to be more risk-averse, and they tend to want to sort of circle the wagons around them and protect what they have, and they may be less, actually, surprisingly, maybe given the problems that confront them, less interested in taking part in that sort of broad based mobilization.  So, you always have a problem, when you really need people to get out on the streets in large numbers, it’s actually more difficult to persuade them, and when things are slightly easier, often they feel more confident and secure about doing that, so we’re trying to organize at a time of great stress I think for most families, which is not ideal in terms of building a social movement. Eric: Right.  I want to switch gears a little bit because there’s something that’s in the book “Small Change” that I want to draw out, and ask you to talk about a little bit.  Unfortunately, the copy that I actually read and highlighted and dog-eared the pages, I couldn’t find it, so I had another copy, so I have that and so flipping through it I couldn’t quite find the exact part that I was looking for, but there’s this notion that when we focus on data driven decision making, trying to be as efficient and effective as possible, in tackling social problems in particular, that the hardest problems get ignored, aren’t tackled, because there is no cost effective way to do it, and even within the problems that we do tackle, we essentially, it becomes most efficient to not address the harder areas.  To put it in the context of school and youth development, I work with a lot of afterschool programs who work with communities that are economically poorer, these are communities that are in need of services, certainly in need of child care, in need of supports for young people, enrichment, recreation, etc.  And so, most of the programs, they go around and they say “well, we work with at risk kids” or “we work with the kids that are most in need,” and in a general sense,  that may be true, but within each of those communities the kids who are truly most as-risk of making bad choices or falling into bad dangerous behavior or dangerous situations are not generally coming to the programs, because they don’t have enough stability in their life to have a parent or other authority figure that’s bringing them, or they don’t choose to go because of the setting they’re in, and I feel like there’s a real parallel to that for other problems, I was going to say larger problems, but they’re not larger they’re just more macro, in other fields, and I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit. Michael:  Well it’s certainly a general problem, there are lots of examples in the book from workforce development, social services, international development programs, community organizing, and so on.  Traditionally non-profits, I think, had a philosophy that said “we’ll do whatever it takes to support people in this community or this process, to do what needs to be done, and then we will find ways to do it, and find ways to pay for it, if we need to pay for it; but, we’re not going to be making our decisions on the basis of selecting what we can afford to do or what someone tells us is more cost effective to do, because then we know we’re only address one part of the pictures.”  And so, non-profits traditionally have worked on the basis of universals, human rights, or values, that everyone should be served equally, regardless of how much it costs, and I think that’s a very important difference.  As soon you enter the market model, as soon as you apply business principles, whatever field you’re in, you’re bound to start to select because you know you can’t do everything, or you know you shouldn’t do everything because there are some things that are not going to make a return on the investment that you demand, or are not going to satisfy the demands that you have for short-term measurable indicators of success or something like that.  So, you’re bound to start excluding, so this is a very important ethical question, on what basis do we establish our national education system, or our national health system, is it the basis of universal rights and access, every child, wherever they are should have the same quality of education as anyone else, and the health system in the countries I come from, in the UK for example, we’re lucky enough to have a national health system, which is free at the point of entry, so everyone gets the same health care, regardless of who you are.  That’s a totally different philosophical and practical set of principles to applying the logic of the market, and therefore this is partly about what should drive institution in society, what should drive politics and political decisions in the future, is it a market view, which is inevitable going to be selective, or is it a view based around certain sets of universal values and rights and principles which says “this is what we’re going to do, then we’ll find a way of doing it, and if we have to pay more we’ll raise more, and if we have to find more we’ll find more, and if it doesn’t prove to be the most cost-efficient, that’s OK, we’re still going to do it because we think this is what’s important.”  So it’s a very sort of philosophical and ultimately a very personal question of what we want, what motivates us, and how we see these huge questions of health and education and social services and poverty and so on.  Do we see it through the market, or do we see it through human rights? Eric: Really interesting, it’s so complicated, because I’m thinking about, this all plays out in the details of how funding works, a lot of times, so, the way the RFP, the request for proposals is written, and I’ve been around tables where people are talking about, that it’s often on a cost per child for the services, but how much it costs to provide the services might be the same, but how much it costs to do the outreach required to get the kids who you really want to reach there might be vastly different, depending on the “populations” you’re working with, just who the people are who you’re trying to support, and within that market system, one response to that could be, well, create a separate funding stream for those kids who are “harder to reach,” and you would have high cost per child to account for the outreach, but the problem with that is that then you’re separating people into these categories of foster kids, or homeless youth, or formerly homeless, or whatever it is, and so even the response, because I think there is a market response to the problem, but the market response has these other outcomes that are, seem to me to be really detrimental to the way that people think about other people. Michael: Yeah, I think that’s probably true, I think there are some cases where under no circumstances could you apply a market approach because there is no money, people can’t pay anything, there is no revenue in the system, so you just have to accept that I think; it drives me crazy when people try and pretend that everyone everywhere and every problem can be subject to the same approach, when we know that isn’t true, it’s never been true, but you’re right, the ways in which you can manipulate markets and pricing and everything else, but of course it becomes very complicated, and that introduces it’s own costs and bureaucracies and so on, you have to develop a huge infrastructure basically to generate all the data that you need to make these decisions and so you generate a huge bureaucracy when in fact you could simply say “we’re not going to go down that route, everything needs to be accessible to everyone in the same way, we’ll fund it publically through public money,” which is Diane Ravirch’s argument, so we don’t need any of this other stuff, and if, as the market would tell you, that means you’re going to experience some costs and inefficiencies somewhere in your system, the response is to say “yeah we know that, but we think it’s worth it because we think we’ll get a better system in the end and that’s what’s important to us.”  So, you can you develop a sophisticated segmented market approach, as you like, but it’s not going to be an effective substitute for what we should be doing, which is declaring, if you like, certain parts of society as a market-free zone.  The way in which we educate our children, the way in which we care for each other, the way in which everyone has access to basic healthcare and social security, have a job above the minimum wage, these are things that should be guaranteed by us and our government, because that’s part of the social contract that we have with each other, and if we can use markets and so on in certain points in this, that’s fine, we’ll do that, that’s a pragmatic argument, but the argument of principle is that these are and should remain public systems accessible to everyone. Eric: You mentioned earlier that the conversation about values is an important one to have, but a difficult one to have, that people often resist having, I think you said it was because you’re afraid you’re going to get sort of stuck and you’re not going to be able to agree.  I feel like there’s something even more intangible than that in our culture which is that it’s difficult to talk about matters that are deemed too moral or two spiritual, to even use the word spiritual, I think raises a lot of eyebrows, when you’re having conversations around public policy and services, social services and educational.  But, reading your book and listening to you talk, it really strikes me that there is something just underlying the whole conversation, which is that we should be able to  talk about what’s right and what’s wrong, and the right way to treat people.  It’s interesting because it’s very gratifying to me, because I’m often finding myself not quite sure where to pin it down why something makes me feel so bad.  Recently I was reading an article and it was talking about the, it was advocating for youth services in a particular city, and saying there was a particular program that helps kids stay with their family rather then get taken away from their family and put in foster care, so it’s probably counseling services, and other sorts of services that are provided to the family to help young people stay with their families rather then get put in foster care, and that that, eventually, will save the city hundreds of thousands or million of dollars because foster care is so expensive, and statistically kids who are in foster care are more likely to commit crimes, and more likely to end up needing other social services, at a cost to the state, and that was the argument.  Of course, I support the program, and I support the public funding of the program to help families stay together, but the fact that we have to make the argument on a cost balance, a cost benefit ratio, instead of saying this program is important, not at all costs, but if at all possible, people should be able to stay with their family and get the services and support that they need for that family to be a loving, stable place to be.  But, that’s an unseemly argument to make, in our culture. Michael: It’s true, and in a sense it shows how far we’ve gone down his path towards marketization, in a sense it’s colonized even our imagination, so we can no longer think outside the box of costs and benefits, and of course once that happens you inevitable are directly more and more to only certain programs and only certain kinds of activities which qualify under that sort of cost-benefit analysis.  So, you will actually do some things and not others and select some populations and no with others, that’s inevitable, so there has to be some process of liberating ourselves, consciously, intellectually, spiritually, from the box we’ve placed ourselves in, because only then do other alternatives become possible, in the real sense.  There was a time in the 1960’s, I’ve been reading a lot about the  civil rights movement, when people talked about these issues all the time, it was the centerpiece of public debate, was all about building a world of love and compassion and community, and getting rid of discrimination and realizing people for what they were, human beings of full and equal potential, when no one was embarrassed about talking about love and compassion, in the public sphere.  And yet, now you’d be considered a mental case if you started talking about love, but I actually do it a lot, because I do want people to start thinking much more about the kind of society they’re trying to build, and ultimately it has to be built on those inequalities of love and compassion and solidarity, if it isn’t it’s not going anywhere.  And Martin Luther King had wonderful phrase to describe this when he said that “life’s mission, as human beings, is to translate love into justice structures,” by which he meant to take those inequalities of love and compassion which define who we really are and see them as a sort of positive virus that goes into schools, corporations, public agencies, non-profits, foundations, hospitals, prisons, and so on, so that they become transformed, if you like, in that same spirit, and they become nurturing, think of this, as a really revolutionary, nurturing of compassion in themselves.  Could you have a loving corporation, a loving government department, so you can, yes you can, but you would look and work very differently to what we have at the moment, but that remains the challenge, we’ve buried that away beneath layers and layers of bureaucracy and markets and influence and so now, it seems a crazy conversation to have, but I wish we could get back to doing that because it makes lots of things possible, lots of different things possible, and you can start to think about the task of building new institutions which essentially what we’re all doing, we’re trying to build institutions that work, in a way which is much more empowering and liberating and transformative than tinkering around the edges of the school, in terms of the salary structure, or trying to make hospitals slightly more cost-effective, in terms of their patients, these are not un-important things, but they’re such the tip of the iceberg that they’re never going to get us very far in producing the kind of society we can be proud of.  So, bringing these morals, these ethics, this talk of love and compassion back into the center of public debate is vital and I think you simply have to move through it.  You’re going to get criticized, people will raise their eyebrows at you, they’re you’re crazy, but my advice is persevere, because that’s the secret of something really important. Eric: Thank you, thank you for that, and I think that’s a great note for us to wrap up on.  So, Michael Edwards, thank you very much for being on Please Speak Freely and thank you for the work that you do. Michael: Absolutely, thanks a lot. [/expand]

The 2012 PASEsetter Award Winners (from right to left): Sadie Mahoney, Fabyiene Miranda,Deena Hellman, Mi Jung You, and Patrick Pinchinat.

This episode of Please Speak Freely is all about food. I sat down with Crystal FitzSimons of the Food Research Action Center at the Bridge Conference in Seattle last October, and learned a lot about how school lunches, snacks and suppers are funded and provided, and the efforts being made to ensure high-quality nutrition. Because I am recording the podcasts faster than I can edit and post them, some time passed before I got a chance to listen to the conversation, and I happen to read a gripping article in the NY Times called, “How the Food Industry Eats Your Kid’s Lunch,” and immediately reached out to the author of the piece, Lucy Komisar, who was kind enough to sit down with me as well. The two conversations provide interesting perspectives on an important issue. Having worked on the Healthy Children, Healthy Futures program for many years, and because I love to cook (and of course, love to eat), the issue of what we feed kids matters to me very much, and I hope you enjoy the conversation. Coming soon…my conversation with one of my professional heroes, Alfie Kohn.

Alfie Kohn is a busy man, and I had to be pretty pushy to get him to agree to be a guest on Please Speak Freely. As the author of bestselling books Punished By Rewards, The Schools Our Children Deserve, Beyond Discipline and more, Mr. Kohn pretty much embodies the title of the podcast, and his work has been incredibly important to me – he’s shaped my perspective on youth work more than any other writer. Our conversation ranged widely – we talked about charter schools, expanded learning time,Race to the Top, and the dark side of using extrinsic rewards to motivate both young people and adults.  He doesn’t pull any punches, but his views are always grounded in solid research and compassion for young people and families. It wasn’t until we wrapped up the interview and I took his picture that I noticed the giant frog balloon gazing admiringly at him the entire time. [expand title=”Transcription Available“] Alfie Kohn and Eric Gurna on the Please Speak Freely Podcast (Transcription) download pdf Eric Gurna: Welcome again to Please Speak Freely, this is Eric Gurna of Development Without Limits.  Before we get into this episode’s conversation I just wanted to say a couple words about the podcast. The strange thing about this podcast medium is that it’s all output without much input, and given that I’m used to doing a lot of in personal professional development and seeing the looks on people’s faces, and feeling the vibe in the room, it’s very strange for me to sit in my office or wherever I am recording and not get any feedback from you, the listeners.  So, drop me a line at [email protected], or go onto the blog and join the conversation, I’d love to hear from you and love to know if you have any suggestions for the podcast, any suggestions for people you think I should talk to, or things you think we should talk about, love to hear from you. I’d also like to take this time to give a shout out to all of my colleagues out there in the field who have supported the podcasts through letting other people know about it, the Schools Out Washington Bridge Conference was the first sponsor of the podcast, and they have agreed to sponsor the podcast again for the Bridge Conference in October 2012, in Seattle, Washington, so thanks Zach Wilson and the Schools Out Washington for that.  The Partnership for Afterschool education has recently agreed to sponsor the podcast for their Pacesetter Awards, so I’ll be interviewing each of the Pacesetter Award winners, who are practitioners who have really shown excellence in the field, I’ll be interviewing them for an episode of Please Speak Freely, and we’ll also be recording live from the Pacesetting Awards event on March 1st in New York City, so if you’ll be in the New York area and  want to check out a great event in the field where they’ll be honoring youth who are youth workers and afterschool programs, go to Partnership for Afterschool Education and you can get tickets to the Pacesetter Awards, and the other organizations such as the Afterschool Alliance, Park Action, Harvard’s Pear Center, who have all be kind and generous in featuring the podcasts on their websites, tweeting about it, those kinds of social media, I really appreciate that, and appreciate those of you who have taken the time to figure out what a podcast is, if you needed to, and also to just listen to the conversations and to encourage us to keep doing this. This episode is, to me, a very special episode of Please Speak Freely, one of my professional heroes is the author and speaker Alfie Kohn, and he was gracious enough, after me being somewhat persistent and pushy, to go on Please Speak Freely, and we had a great conversation, he has a lot of really grounded views and perspectives and opinions, and when I say grounded I mean he has a lot of research to back up his thoughts.  So, take a listen and reach out and let me know what you think. Eric Gurna: So I’m here in Belmont, Massachusetts with Alfie Kohn, author and lecturer.  I want to welcome you to Please Speak Freely. Alfie Kohn: Thank you. Eric Gurna: Thank you.  You can find out more information about Alfie’s work at AlfieKohn.org.  I was saying before we formally got started that I’ve been a huge admirer of your work, and more then that your work has really influenced my thinking and help me grow my perspective.  Now, I’m seeing a whole new aspect of that, I have a young daughter, a 4 year old daughter, so your work has helped me shape my perspective in terms of my professional work with youth programs and with educators, and now I’m seeing, I’m feeling a totally different version of that as a parent.  Especially the books “Beyond Discipline” and “Punished by Rewards”, but for our listeners, Mr. Kohn is also the author of books like “Schools Our Children Deserve”, and I believe the most recent book was “Feel Bad Education”? Alfie Kohn: Yes, that’s a collection of essays. Eric Gurna: Yes, that’s also great title.  I’m often referencing your working my own work, and I’ve recently re-read “Beyond Disciple” and it’s inspired me to revamp the work we do around discipline.  Maybe we’ll have a chance to talk about that.  But, before we get into anything, I was starting to say to you earlier, I don’t set this up like an interview, so I don’t have a list of questions, I do have some notes to work from.  I wonder if you could say a little about what it is that you do, what is essentially your work. Alfie Kohn: Well, I write and speak on a number of different issues having to do with education, parenting and human behavior, I have a special interest in pulling together research that ends up supporting positions that may seem surprising to people, on one level what I do is say to people “you say you want this” as a teacher or parent, so how come you’re doing “that”, when it turns out that logic and good values, and sometimes common sense, point in a very different sense from what have become common practice in schools and in families. Eric Gurna: You said, about education, and also human behavior, that’s a pretty broad idea. Alfie Kohn:  It is, well I’m interested in more then just, I started writing about all kinds of, I guess you could call them psychological issues, but often those with social implications.  My first book looked at the destructive effects of competition in all areas of human live, at work, at school, at play, at home, and the whole notion of what it meant to have to engage in activities in which I can succeed only if you fail, and I drew from a number of different academic disciplines to uncover a lot of research showing that competition is inherently counter productive.  Then I wrote a book about altruism and empathy, and the nature of human nature, and if you’re familiar with “Punished by Reward”, you know that my challenge to behaviorism, or succinctly the idea of “do this and you’ll get that”, is again not just about education or parenting, but about motivation and behavior and broader concepts. Eric Gurna: And it seems to me that the perspective that you are coming from is not the perspective that many are coming from these days who are in positions of leadership in education. Alfie Kohn: I feel that that is fair to say. Eric Gurna: Do you think it’s gone further in that direction in the last couple decades? Alfie Kohn: Well, yes, I mean there’s not just a single direction, there’s a lot going on at any given time in education, and of course are we talking about elementary or secondary, public or private, are we talking about assessment, instruction, curriculum, there’s a lot of different things going on.  When you step back and look back at public policy issues relating to education, what you mostly see is a concerted push by public officials and corporate executives who usually don’t know very much about how children learn to implement a corporate style, top down, heavy-handed, test driven approach to changing schools, which on some levels seems to be designed to undermine the whole institution of democratic public educations, and beyond that, to turn back the clock to a model where the emphasis is on control, control by policy maker of educators, and of educators of children, to get them to memorize facts and practice skills, so that they can become adequately skilled, docile future employees.  The purpose of this whole approach to “school reform”, being not create a vibrant democracy, or do what’s in the best interest of children, but to ultimately pump up the economy.  So, there are a number of individual strands that can be teased apart.  I think anyone who’s knowledgeable about learning, anyone who’s committed to doing what’s in the best interest of kids, has to be very concerned about what’s been going on for, at least, 20 years, and is getting worse.  A lot of us thought we had hit bottom at the end of the 90’s, because so many states had adopted very specific, prescriptive standards for what had to be taught, along with really bad tests to enforce those mandates.  And then along came what should’ve been called the “Many Children Left Behind Act”, which ramped it up on a national level, forcing schools to test every kid, every year, from third grade to eighth and again in high school, with punishments for the schools that needed the most help, which did, and is continuing to do unimaginable damage to kids and to schools, particularly low-income kids.  And we thought it couldn’t get much worse, and Obama has, with the help of the Gates Foundation and Arnie Duncan, has taken the Bush administration’s attack on public schooling to levels that we the Bush administration never dreamed could happen.  They have taken that corporate approach to new levels, and it’s really an assault on public education.  They’ve turned a number of schools all over the country into glorified test-prep centers. Eric Gurna: And what’s happened with the Obama and Duncan administration with Race to the Top and all of that, I’m so eager to talk to you about so many things, and I feel like there’s a real connection between what you’re talking about now and the issues around discipline in the classroom and in programs, it reminded me, The Race to the Top model, of holding out new funding for states and schools and school systems that would apply for it, but in order to apply for it, in order to qualify to apply for it, you have to put a set of policies in place.  So, it’s essentially a means of controlling the states and school districts of putting those policies into place more then it is a funding source.  It reminded me of the movement from, a lot of people know that they want to move away from traditional approaches to discipline, and a lot of people, when we talk about that a lot of traditional approaches to disciple are essentially, when you look at them in their most essential way, it’s about getting kids to “shut-up and stand in line”, or “sit down and shut-up”, and that one of the things that really struck me about beyond disciple is that it’s not enough to simply phrase things in a nicer way, and speak with a nicer tone of voice, and turn “shut-up and sit down” to “refrain from talking and please take a seat”, or something, and the idea of moving from the stick to the carrot, or phrasing things in  nicer way, putting things in a nicer package but not fundamentally changing the thing itself, I saw sort of parallels with Race to the Top, did you have that response when Obama… Alfie Kohn: Well, I think there are several connections between what’s done in the name of disciple or classroom management, on the one hand, and public policy efforts to change educations on the other.  I’m not sure if Race to the Top was ever presented as a kinder, gentler version of what had preceded it, in fact it became… Eric Gurna:  More of a carrot, I mean it was presented in terms of a carrot and a stick… Alfie Kohn: I see your point.  I’ve been doing this for so long that I see rewards and punishments as two sides of the same coin, they’re both ways of doing things to people, as opposed to working with people, but in another respect Race to the Top made what had come before even more vulgar and ugly because it turned it into a competition, which event he Bush administration hadn’t thought to do, which is to set states against each other, saying that one can succeed only by triumphing over another, instead of trying to figure out a fair way to give all the states and their children the resources that they need.  Second, it was more blatantly about top down control, you don’t get those funds, or have a chance of winning this contest, where we’ve created an artificial scarcity, and turned every state into a rival for other states.  You don’t even have a chance of winning unless you obey us. Then the third level of problem is what they were asking the states to do, the particular policy requirements, which is the ultra right-wing corporate agenda of a free market model of privatizing services when possible, of moving money away from democratic public schools, into quasi-private charter schools, making test scores count for even more, and compromising teacher’s job protections, threatening to close down schools that need help, merit pay for teachers, you jump through these hoops and raise test scores if you want to earn more money, and so on.  So, there are interesting connections between that and different models of discipline with individual kids. One is that schools are cracking down on more on individual kids and their conduct, precisely because of the pressure to raise test scores.  So, what we’re seeing, especially in the inner city, is an increasing criminalization of adolescent misbehavior, and expelling or suspending kids in part because it seems these kids may be low scorers.  So there’s that pressure to get rid of “bad kids” or the kids who aren’t going to bring glory to adults who run the schools.  And then there’s the respect in which, and I don’t think many people have commented on this, that if someone has a gun to your head and is saying raise test scores, or else, what kind of classroom do you create?  Well, you don’t create a classroom that’s about discovery and exploration, you don’t create a place where kids of different ages and abilities can figure stuff out together, and create a democratic learning community.  You don’t create a place that’s intellectually vibrant, you create a place that’s all about worksheets, where you have to memorize these facts and get better at the narrow skill of taking tests, which a lot of kids are good at who aren’t very imaginative, and conversely a lot of kids aren’t good at who have terrific brains. But, when you’re creating a test prep environment, you need a place where kids comply, because understandable, most people who have a mind, resist taking time away from real learning to get better at scoring well on tests.  And, that in turn leads to pressure to create more top-down disciple for kids to make them sit down and shut up with a variety of bribes and threats.  So are all kinds of links, I’ve diverged somewhat from your original question which is about the idea of ostensibly kinder way of doing something, which has its analogue in the classroom and at the state and federal level.  But, it’s bad news on many levels Eric Gurna:  And so, lets get a little more into that, around the two sides of the same coin, the carrot and the stick, I’m working a lot in New York City where the mayor has initiated a program for paying kids for grades, I think maybe for test scores as well, I’m not sure, Jeff Canada, who is head of the Harlem Children’s Zone, and a big advocate for a certain model of charter school, and education reform right now has also very enthusiastically advocated for paying kids for grades.  So this is something that we’ve been talking about a bit, and I had an interesting conversation with Karen Pittman of the Forum for Youth Investment where I raised this with her, and she said something that I’d like to quote to you, just wondering what you think about this, because she put it in a way that I hadn’t really heard before.  She said that “the market approach says that if you want people to change their behavior, pay them to change their behavior, the social psychology says that if you want them to sustain that behavior after you finish paying them, that you really have to use the limited time in which you’re paying them for the behavior to really bring them into a space in which you reflect on their behavior, change their priorities, change their skills, and get rid of the barriers, so that when they come out the other end, they’re going to stay on that path.” Alfie Kohn: Well, I think she has the first part right, in characterizing the economic or free market view, and I think she is unfortunately looking at a thin and outdated view of social psychology, if that’s as far from that first view as she gets, in that field.  Social psychology and educational psychology have actually grown beyond a focus on behavior per se, all good educators are not just interested in getting kids to act in a particular way.  What she’s offering as a choice sounds to me like a false choice, it’s sort of like a stupid version of behavior control and a slightly savvier version of behavior control.  Fortunately we’re not limited to either of them, we’re interested not just in the behaviors that can be seen and measured, short-term or long-term, but in the values and reasons and motives and the kids who have them.  And that stuff is not just a matter of getting better at rewards or skill-building to sustain behaviors in a longer term, but engaging in a respectful and constructive way, with the kids themselves, and thinking about what learning is, and why kids behave that way or the other.  What are their attitudes and goals, what does there perspective look like.  And that requires us not merely to get better at the way we implement a policy like that, but to stop doing what research shows is counter-productive, among those tactics would be any kind of “doggie biscuit” that’s offered to kids.  Now in the case of paying kids for grades, you’re talking about a reward for a reward.  The best teachers don’t give grades, much less do they give them a “doggie biscuit” for getting a good grades, which doubles the damage.  I have an article coming out in the November issue of Educational Leadership which sort of updates some of the research and experience of why grades get in the way.  So, when you hear people say, for example, “I don’t believe in paying kids for good grades, they should just take pleasure in the grade itself,” NO!  The grade is part of the problem!  An “A”, just like a dollar, or a pat on the head and a patronizing “good job”, or a sticker, all of these are extrinsic inducements that research shows undermine the intrinsic desire to learn.  Now, parallel to the “paying kids for grades” stuff, the kind of mindless behaviorist way of manipulating kids which is disproportionately visited on kids of color in the inner city.  That’s not to say that affluent white kids aren’t given stickers and behavior charts too, but the full strength concentrate of this kind of tendency to treat kids like pets is mostly visited upon kids with the least resources, which is why you don’t really find the sort of “pay kids for test scores.”  Now, paying kids for test scores raises a question not only about means, but about the end.  This is a bad way to accomplish a bad goal.  So, on the one hand, there may be better ways to achieve that goal that don’t involve the carrot and stick, but if the goal itself is to raise test scores, that’s not the same thing as helping kids to learn more deeply, and to love it.  And conversely, I suppose you could try to use the bad means for a better goal like “paying kids to think more deeply”.  But, I think there’s different versions, but we have to look at both separately. Eric Gurna: You mentioned competition, and it’s funny to talk to you in the middle of this particular day, because I’m attending a conference today here in Boston sponsored by the Nation Center for Time and Learning, and Harvard School of Education, and it’s all about what they’re calling “expanding learning time”, “expanded learning time”, “expanding learning opportunities”, “extended days”.  The conference this morning, which was about six keynote addresses and three panels between 8:30am – 12:30pm, in one room, was mostly focusing on the idea that we need to have more time in the school day.  I don’t want to be unfair, there was a fair amount of talk about “it’s not just about more time, it’s about what we do with that time,” but there was a lot of talk about “time”, and there’s a few notes that I took that I was eager to come to you and see what your response might be to some of these things.  One of them had to do with what you mentioned about competition, in the course of saying something else one of the speakers mentioned that there’s soon going to be over seven billion people in the world, that the world population is about to go up to seven billion, and that we need to prepare our kids to compete with all of them. Alfie Kohn: Sure, after all what are other people for if not to defeat.  What kind of way is that to raise and teach children, to look on everyone else as the potential rival whose face you have to step on to get ahead?  I don’t want my kids to compete in the twenty-first century, I want them to collaborate in the twenty-first century.  Every time you see another ranking of international test scores where people wring their hands over the US being number twelve, instead of number one, put aside for a moment that this is about test scores, not about learning, but lets pretend that that’s a useful indicator of learning, what we’re saying is that we want kids who live in other countries to do poorly, and I find that intellectually and morally bankrupt.  I want children in every country to succeed.  But, the larger question, and I believe it’s probably not a coincidence that the same people whose idea of school reform is to make kids do the same crap longer also are more interested in “winning” than in, say, “learning”, or “caring.”  It’s not say there’s a perfect correspondence, there may be people who share my views about wanting to cooperate, or at least not wanting to have to defeat other people, who still believe the more time you force kids to spend on a task or at school the better they’re going to do.  Well, that’s an empirical question, now we’re not talking about value judgments, and the research very clearly shows that more time on task is not strongly correlated to better proficiency, unless the task is mindlessly simple.  The simpler the task, the stronger the correlation between time and outcome. When you start talking about understanding mathematical principles from the inside out, instead of merely memorizing algorithms, or when you’re talking about reading for understanding instead of pronouncing words correctly, then there’s almost no relationship.  I mean obviously you need a certain amount of time to do a task, but beyond that threshold, it doesn’t really mean much.  Now, look at it from the bigger picture, we’re supposedly having all kinds of problems with our schools, why would you think that more time, more days in the year or more hours in the day would lead to any substantive improvement at all, especially since school is so profoundly alienating and un-engaging for so many kids, because of the continued traditional emphasis on worksheets and textbooks and lectures and quizzes and grades and homework.  Why would you think that strapping them to a chair and saying “you’ve got stay till 5pm” or “you’ve got to through the summer” would do anything to address the fundamental problems we have with that, it’s that “more of the same” or “intensification” stuff.  I looked at this from another direction when I wrote a book about homework, it turns out that homework, certainly below the high school level, has absolutely no academic benefit, regardless of how much of it is assigned or how good it is, and even in high school, it’s a dubious connection, making kids work a “second shift” when they get home from spending all day in school.  It’s not only off-putting to kids and causes them to lose interest in learning on many occasions, it has no apparent benefit, but it comes from that same corporate style simplistic sensibility that leads people to hold whole conferences, not about how to make school more engaging and meaningful and worthwhile, but how to make it last longer. Eric Gurna: So what a lot these speakers would say, I think, is something like “in order to do more project based learning, in order to get deeper into things, in order to give language learners more time to practice, that you need more time, you need more time to do all of those things.”  The other argument that was being made that I thought was really confusing was that, it was said several times that we had to cut things like gym and music and art because there wasn’t time, so if we add more time to the school day and school year, we can add those things back in.  But, at some time there was time for those things, so where did we suddenly… Alfie Kohn: No, we cut that stuff, A, because there wasn’t enough money, or B, because of the pressure to raise test scores, and that stuff doesn’t lead to higher test scores, or at least prove it does.  But, this is a bargain with the devil.  Most of the people who are pushing for longer school days, longer schools and so on, are the same people who talk about competitiveness, who talk about accountability or “raising the bar” more rigorous schooling, more corporate focus.  These aren’t the people who have been saying for years “if only we had another hour we could do rich, project based learning, interdisciplinary teaching.”  The Venn diagram has very little overlap between those two, and if the school year is lengthened, like they were pushing to do in Chicago, that’s going to lead to more “drill-n-kill”, there’s no going to be better stuff.  Apart from that, I just want to ask these people: how much is enough?  If you were really serious about improving the quality of teaching and learning, and I mean in a meaningful way, I don’t mean shoveling more facts to raise test scores and make the adults look better, I mean to really help kids be excited and proficient thinkers.  How much time is enough?  I got a bigger desk a couple of years ago, within two weeks the stuff had expanded to fill that “time” and I wanted a bigger desk.  And, when teachers say “I have to give homework; I have to shove the burden over to the kids to make them do the stuff I can’t figure out how to make them do during the time allotted to me,” how much time would you need to have such that you would finally say “yea, that’s enough”? Eric Gurna: Well, one of the founders, of KIPP Charter Schools was at this particular conference, and he was describing his school system and he said that his students go to school nine and a half to ten hours per day, then go home with some homework, and then come to school on Saturdays and over the summer too. Alfie Kohn:  He should be ashamed of what that does to children’s lives.  This superficial criticism of KIPP schools is “that’s not scalable; you’re not going to be able to do that to enough kids and enough schools to make a difference from a public policy perspective,” so any gains they get are atypical and un-replicable.  I wouldn’t send a dog to a KIPP school, the way they treat children. First of all, ask the basic questions about what makes for a great school, the kind you’d want to send your kid to.  First, how much say do the kids have about what they’re learning?  To what extent are they brought in on the decision-making?  “How do we want our class to be?”  If we need guidelines at a school level, kids learn how to make good decisions, by making decisions. Let’s look at KIPP.  Even the teachers have limited discretion about what they do.  Number two, do they get the kind of great, again, interdisciplinary, team taught, student directed, project based learning, where the point is to understand ideas from the inside out, or is it all about showing better scores on bad tests?  Third, when there’s a problem, do you work with kids to try to solve the problem, or do you bribe or threaten them to into mindless obedience?  It’s about “work hard, be nice”, and “nice” you get the sense contextually doesn’t mean a compassionate, generous human being, it means “you do what you’re told, you obey authority without questions, or else we publicly humiliate you,” and conversely have a token economy program of the sort that was developed in mental institutions some years ago.  The program itself at its core, is anti-child.  The fact that they also believe that kids should be subject to it for morehours in the day and the week is unsurprising and more depressing.  Are they able to pump up the test scores?  I’m willing to stipulate that they can, a lot of people have challenged that, because they also cherry-pick the students and throw out the ones who aren’t going to make them look good.  They say they don’t.  I’ve read people who have example after example where they do, but let’s assume they don’t.  Let’s assume you can turn a school into a factory, which is what this is, where you reward or punish students into doing exactly what they’re told, not questioning authority and becoming thinkers, and you make them stay there long into the night, sacrificing social, moral, emotional, artistic, physical development, all in the service of being socialized to comply with authority and get better at taking test.  I am willing to grant that they can raise test scores.  If they figured out a way to do this in the usual six hour a day, five day a week thing, I’d still find it horrifying, but the face that they are sucking up a lot of these kid’s childhoods by demanding extra time adds insult to injury. Eric Gurna: I had a conversations recently with someone who was not as familiar with education but had resources and wanted to support, and was curious to know different perspectives on KIPP and other charter schools, and when I described some of the critique I had, his response was “OK, I can kind of see that,” he said “my kid goes to a private school where they call the teachers where they call the teachers by the first names and they’ve got these really intellectually engaging and rigorous projects, and they don’t walk in a single file line down the hallway,” he said “I can see that, but isn’t it better than a lot of the schools in economically poorer neighborhoods that already exist, the sort of traditional school?  Isn’t it better to see the kids walking in a single file down the hall and chanting their math times tables and chanting the ‘work hard be nice’ slogans and all of that, then the alternative?” Alfie Kohn:  There are two alternatives for black kids  in the inner city, the standard, traditional kind of schools, which has often neglected them and worksheets offered by a revolving core of burnt out teachers, versus “boot camp”, where you get more worksheets by younger people who are more committed to the mission.  To pose the question as those two alternatives is not only outrageous but it’s racist.  How come the kind of education that his kid gets doesn’t become the model for kids of color?  Since, as one person put it, progressive education is nice for affluent kids, whereas for poor kids it’s essential, but we don’t look at it that way.  We say “compared to what they get.”  I’m not sure, I would hate to have someone to force me to choose, frankly.  I am in no way romanticizing pre-NCLB schools in the inner city, or non-charter schools, which are appalling.  It’s no coincidence, just to cite one name you may be familiar with, a guy like Jonathon Kozol, who has been documenting the horrors of inner-city education, and the savage inequality of American schooling for so many years, joins me and so many others in being more horrified by KIPP and so many other of the charter school models that are imposed on kids of color in the inner city as sort of ratcheting up the damage.  It’s now a more systematic way of making sure that black kids and urban kids in general get a worse education then white kids, and the suburbs. Eric Gurna: It seems to me that there’s more of a debate about a fundamental world view then there is about all the tactics and the different reform strategies and this “kind of school versus that kind of school,” it seems to me that a thread that runs throughout your work and what I hear in this conversation too, is that you said it’s bad for kids.  It’s treating young people as pet-like pets, or treat young people like they’re people you need to get to do things, or do things to, is essentially wrong.  It’s not just ineffective, but it’s also wrong on some deeper level.  It’s hard to have that conversation in most of the arenas in which I work.  When you start talking about the difference in world view, or a difference in the way that what we think is the right way to really approach this work, I don’t get a lot of response, I don’t feel like a lot of people want to talk about that there are fundamentally different views one can take. Alfie Kohn: Well, there’s no such thing as a value free education or parenting.  There’s only a conversation in which the values are invisible, and whenever they’re invisible you tend to, by default adopt the values of the status quo.  So, when you don’t talk about this stuff, it’s implicitly conservative, and perpetuates the things that we are already doing.  So, there’s always values present, there’s always a goal, “what are you trying to do here?”  I try to make that explicit whenever I speak to teachers or parents, usually the first thing I do in a lecture or workshop is to ask “What are your long term goals for your kids?  How do you hope they will turn out?  What do you hope they’ll be like after they’ve left your class, your school, your household?”  It’s interesting, I’ve done this in urban, suburban and rural environments all over North America.  I’ve done it with teachers and administrators, elementary and secondary, and parents, public and private schools, and there’s a remarkable degree of census.  I’ve done this literally hundreds of times with tens of thousands of people, and I can tell you, you might be able to guess the list looks remarkably the same.  People say “I want kids to be problem-solvers, good communicators, life-long learners, who are curious, creative, critical-thinkers.  I want them to be happy, ethical, caring, independent, responsible.”  The same sorts of things show up all over.  It’s interesting that most of the items that show up, even with educators, have to do with the kind of people kids become, not just the kind of learners.  So there’s more “happy” and “ethical” and “responsible,” but even when they look at intellectual issues, they tend to be “life-long learner” or “problem-solver” rather then “my long-term goal is for my kids to be able to convert a decimal into a fraction,” nobody says that.  So then I say to them, “is it possible that our practices are inconsistent with our goals?  But, lets keep the goals in mind, because you say you want your kids to be ‘this’ ‘this’ and ‘this’, so why are you doing stuff that is likely to undermine those very goals?  Here’s the research showing that when you reward kids or praise them for being nice, they become a little more selfish, a little more focuses on ‘what do I get’, even if it’s just a pat on the head, and a little less concerned about people needs.  If you’re using grades, if you’re assigning them homework, if you’re excluding kids from decisions about what we’re going to read next, here’s the research that says they’re less likely to become life-long learners.”  So values are very much present, so it’s our job to bring them into the conversation.  That doesn’t mean we ignore the empirical stuff, it so happens that on the issues I like to talk about, it’s like a double whammy for the people who want to perpetuate the status quo.  The research shows that it isn’t particularly effective in getting even their own goals, and in many cases some of the goals, or at least the values implicit in the practices, I think are deeply problematic. Eric Gurna: In the workshops we do at Development Without Limits, we do the exact same exercise, so I’ve also had that conversation many many times.  I was just in Burlington, Vermont on last Friday, doing a workshop, that we do call “Positive Disciple” but we started calling our workshops that before we knew that there was a whole series of books and official trainings called “Positive Discipline,” they’re actually called “Positive Discipline: How to work with kids and not be mean.”  But, in our “Positive Discipline” workshops that’s one of the things that we do is have that conversation, what we say to wrap it up is, no one ever says “I want my kid to be obedient” or “compliant.”  People say “good citizen” and people say “engaged” and “cooperative” and all those, “reflective,” and things that aren’t just about being a radical change-maker.  But, they never say “obedient” or “stand in line, walk in line.”  I started working in the field of afterschool, sixteen years ago, or something like that, and at the time I was working in an afterschool program that was really focused on providing an environment where young people could choose what they wanted to participate in, to choose what they wanted to learn, but also to be a part of sports and arts and community services, and all kinds of things.  A very youth centered program, it’s still like that, that’s LA’s best, it’s in Los Angeles, it’s still a program that really focused in that way.  But I started to see, with twenty-first century community learning centers, at the federal level, and different parts of the way the afterschool movement was coming together, I had this sort of nightmare vision.  I started to write an article about it, and never did anything to publish it, but it was this almost post-apocalyptic story where a young person gets up seven in the morning and doesn’t get out until eight at night, and then has to do more work.  So we’re starting to see a lot of those things actually happening now, and at this conference I was just mentioning today, I heard another level of it that I hadn’t really heard before, and I wanted to run this by you too.  They were talking about this particular school, I believe it was the principal or some leader at this school or school districts, they were talking about the need to start very young, practicing the sorts of academic skills that kids are going to need when they get older.  So, I’m a little familiar with this because my daughter is in Pre-K and she gets homework.  She’s in Pre-K at the public school… Alfie Kohn: It’s outrageous in 5th grade, let alone Pre-K… Eric Gurna: It’s supposedly optional, but I’m pretty sure I know what the teacher’s response is if they don’t do it, it’s coloring, and the teacher says “they love it, especially the ones with older brothers and sisters, they love it.” Alfie Kohn: “They love it now, we’ll take care of that in short order…” Eric Gurna:  So, I’ve been seeing that a little bit.  At a workshop I was at recently someone was saying, we screened “The Race to Nowhere” out in Seattle, Washington last week, and someone was saying that she picks up her seven year old daughter at gymnastics and takes her home, and that her daughter had texted her a list of vocabulary words and asked her to drill her seven year old daughter in the car between gymnastics and home because she had a spelling test the next day.  But this, what I heard today, took it to a new level.  She was saying that what they do at every level of the school is they have a system for teaching, I forget what she called it, not just reading, but engaged reading, and it was about reading the text closely, interpreting the text, being able to make a claim and cite evidence, and she said they do this at all level from Pre-K on up.  So they’re having conversations with four year olds about reading the text closely, interpreting the text, making their claim, and offering evidence.  My daughter loves books, loves to read, just loves it.  I can’t imagine how quickly I could get her to stop loving books and stop loving to read. Alfie Kohn: Oh yeah, that’s a great way to do it.  Well, there’s several great ways.  In fact I’ve written about this, I have an article called “How to create non-readers.”  It offers seven ways to destroy children’s interest in learning.  One of them is to reward kids, give them some prize for reading a book.  A pizza, a t-shirt from the public library during the summer, etc.  Another way is to give kids no choice about what they’re reading.  Third, is to turn it into work, where they’ve got little stickies and be thinking about meta-cognitive stuff going on, and write reports, answer questions, and so on that turns it into a chore.  It would be enough to destroy anyone’s interest in reading.  So, the first question you ask is if your long-term goal is not just about skill development, and I think any educator will say, even if we disagree about some of the strategies, “I don’t only want kids to read with a sophisticated set of decoding strategies or comprehension strategies, but I want kids to like reading, I want them to be life-long readers.”  Well, that is completely inconsistent with this, particularly at a young age. The greatest predictor to kids who read not only with enthusiasm, but with skill, is to set them loose on books, so they pick books they want, and read as long as they want on their own time, without turning it into some sort of graduate seminar before the kids are barely out of diapers.  This, what you’re describing, is almost a textbook example of what would be called developmentally inappropriate practice.  I don’t like it even for older students, but here it’s developmentally especially inappropriate.  And it gets close to something the “BGUTI” which is a stupid acronym for “Better Get Used To It,” which is how they justify a lot of stuff with little kids where there’s absolutely no intrinsic benefit, and it’s developmentally inappropriate. Homework, grades, standardized tests, competition.  We say to them basically “this may be lousy, but people are going to do these lousy things to you later, so we have to prepare you for that by doing lousy things to you now.”  When you lay bare what’s going on, it’s almost laughable.  It’s like the Monty Python sketch of getting “hit on the head lessons”, which is excellent preparation for getting hit on the head later.  But people, with a straight face, actually do this crap to kids. Eric Gurna:  There’s so many more things we could talk about, but there’s something sort of a little more personal for me I want to ask you.  When I read your work, I have two responses that I keep having again and again.  One is this sort of relief like “I knew it!”  Like the “punish or rewards” book, I’ve always been uncomfortable with the stickers and the pizza parties and all of that stuff, and then you read that.  I’ve never been able to articulate why I’ve felt wrong about that stuff, and then I have to keep re-reading it, because I can forget it, sort of instantly read it and then forget it.  The other is the feeling like, the feeling like you’re seeing something that’s missing, rather than just critiquing what’s there, so, so much of what I have in the field and conferences and other articles is just talking about the current policies, the current practices, and talking about “could we do it a little better” and “is this better than this, is this a little better then that,” and what you’re often talking about, it’s like you said earlier, it’s not a choice between those two options, another world is possible.  I’m just wondering, how do you practice thinking like that, how do you do that kind of work, where you’re able to uncover those things and show that there is something else other then the available options that are being presented to you. Alfie Kohn:  Well, you cheat, by learning what other options other people have figured out.  The broader your exposure to different kinds of schools and societies and families, the more, if you’re open to what you’re seeing and hearing, the more you can let that fertilize your own thinking.  So, you don’t have to come up with everything by yourself.  So, if you, for example, just assume, that kids have to be segregated by age, they’re all in second grade, then they’re all in third grade, then they’re all in fourth grade, then you never stop to think about it.  But, then the more schools you visit, you say “wait a minute, they’ve got seven, eight and nine-year olds together, what the hell?  Why wouldn’t we?”  How many forty-two year olds only spend most of their time with other forty-two year olds?  It doesn’t have to be like this.  The same is true for many other things that we just assumed you have to do, from grades and homework, to the notion that if a kid does something bad something bad has to be done to him.  Why?  Then you start to reason by analogy.  You see enough examples of this where you see there are other opportunities, other things that we are not doing that we could be doing that most people haven’t thought of, and you say “well, if that’s true here, then by extension, how can I think about this situation in front of me in a different way, and transcend the limited options that I’ve been presented with?  What else could it be like?”  And, you don’t have to do that alone either, because you could do that in conversation with others. Eric Gurna:  Well, thank you so much for taking the time to do this, it’s been a pleasure, and I really appreciate you being on Please Speak Freely, and more then that I appreciate the work you are doing in the world. Alfie Kohn:  I appreciate you saying that, good to talk with you. [/expand]

By Rhys Powell, Founder & President, RedRabbit When I listen to these types of interviews, I cannot help but think how this is mostly a community issue and that we all need to work together to create a systemic change. I believe we can have an impact on the issues facing our society in this area if we focus on both ends of the spectrum—the bottom-up local grass roots level and the top down regulatory and government level. I would like to talk about that theme first, using the conversation with Crystal Fitzsimmons &Lucy Komisar, as a starting point. Then I’d like to expand on some of the key points that they brought up with more specificity. From the top: We live in a country where USDA nutrition standards consider(using only a few examples here) pizza and french fries as vegetables—which means they can be served to our school-aged children every day of the week. If that is the standard that we set; if the bar is set at that low a level, then kids are far from safe. No one can re-invent the system overnight, but parents and educators need to step up and say, “this is not helping our children and it must change.” Here is another awful oversight in our current system:refined foods. None of the school nutrition standards in place today address those at all. Until Congress changes the guidelines, large companies will not change what they serve. We all know pesticides, chemicals and preservatives are horrifically bad for us—as kids and adults. Yet, we treat all fruits and vegetables the same. Do you think peaches that were grown on a farm 50 miles away and picked yesterday have the same nutritional value as those that were picked 6 months ago, shipped half way around the world,dumped into a sugary syrup (most likely high fructose corn syrup) and canned?Take a look at the typical school lunch fare and you will find more of the latter than the former. Though I think the Let’s Move Campaign is a terrific first attempt at setting a good example, we need to go further and deeper into the system to make wellness, fitness and healthy food options something all kids—of all socioeconomic backgrounds—have access to. From the bottom: Companies like Red Rabbit go above and beyond to provide top notch meal programs using local, sustainable food sources—typically at the same price as the current poor quality options found in most schools. Parents and educators are reaching out to smaller companies for all of the above—and something else—education and support of local suppliers. Through partnerships with local and regional suppliers, we are able to contribute to the health of our local economy and also provide operational efficiencies that translate into savings which we then pass onto our parents and schools through competitive pricing. Other similar organization like City Fresh Foods in Boston,and DC Central Kitchen in Washington DC have made the health and wellness of children and the local community a greater priority than making a profit. Additionally, by combining healthy meal programs with nutrition and cooking education, we can extend the benefits of healthy eating beyond the classroom and into the home. Local NY based non-profits like the Children’s Aid Society, The Palette Fund and Food Fight (to name a few), are all making a concerted effort to embed nutrition education as a basic component of our education system. In response to the INTERVIEW with CRYSTAL: I agree with Crystal that there is a huge need for more summer and after-school programs, but the food quality in the majority of those programs is also questionable. Small companies like ours want to do something about food insecurity but we are often discouraged by all the regulations. We are willing and able to provide healthy food in a safe manner, but someone has to step in and help us navigate the “endless administration and red tape” that surrounds the system. In terms of packaging and waste, we encourage schools to use a family style approach in place of individual packaging. As adults we have all dined family style or buffet style at events ranging from fancy banquets, to small neighborhood pot lucks, so why can’t our kids in school?This approach typically requires a greater initial effort from the school, so Red Rabbit provides the training and support to help them through it. Teachers don’t think they have options for both healthier food and more sustainable practices, but they do—just look away from large conglomerates that put convenience and profit ahead of our kids’ health,towards local community based organizations. I strongly counter the assumption made that healthy always means more expensive because we have proven since our inception that it doesn’t have to. Through a careful selection of local and regional vendors, and our commitment to sustainability and streamlined operations, we are able to take the waste out of our business—literally. This enables us to offer far healthier choices to our schools and kids—at, or even below, the federal reimbursement program level. It has been a challenge, but one that we’re proud of. In response to the INTERVIEW with LUCY KOMISAR: The relationship between food service management companies and food manufacturing companies is a great topic. If the question is “can a school can provide healthy meals to kids at an affordable rate if there is no rebate offer?”, then the answer is most definitely yes. Do you think districts/schools are aware that they risk reimbursements based on these rebates? Schools and districts should feel empowered to look for options that make their net costs the same—and are far better for their students and kids health. If small providers like us are able to achieve better quality, and healthier options with a commitment to the local economy—let’s not make the conversation about these rebates at all. I would like to steer the conversation away from the ills of the current system and onto the cure: a dose of good and simple corporate responsibility. Red Rabbit is proud to be an early supporter of the new B-corp/Benefit Corporation. For those of you who don’t know what that is, it’s a new breed of company that ties social benefit directly into their business model. We like to call it “doing well by doing good.” Bottom line, I recommend a follow-up special segment to discuss solutions not just the issues. We all know that traditional school lunches are bad, that the poor typically get the short end of the stick, and that there is a huge obesity issue in this country. Without effort at the top, and at the grass roots level, like I spoke to above—we are just talking in circles. It is important that people hear about real world solutions and examples, and about who is succeeding in our current environment. It’s a mission that companies like Red Rabbit have had since 2005, well before it was a national trend.

As a youth development organization, Rich Berlin and his team did an audacious thing – they started their own school. What began as a notion to revive baseball in the inner city grew, until Harlem RBI was a major resource to the East Harlem community, and then they founded DREAM Charter School. I had a frank and interesting conversation with Rich, Harlem RBI’s executive director and the chair of the charter school. Rich was more than happy to speak freely! Plus we get to hear from Earl Martin Phalen ofSummer Advantage (and founder of BELL) again, as he responds to Rich’s challenge that out of school time organizations who want to make a real impact on academic success should start schools. DWL Senior Consultant Rebecca Fabiano wrote the PSF Blog for this episode, and she draws an interesting parallel between what Harlem RBI is doing and the Expanded Learning Time movement. Please join the conversation! [expand title=”Transcription Available“] Rich Berlin and Eric Gurna on the Please Speak Freely Podcast (Transcription) download pdf Eric Gurna:  So I’m here in East Harlem, New York with Rich Berlin, executive director of Harlem RBI. And chairman of… Rich Berlin:  Dream Charter School. Eric:  Chairman of Dream Charter School. And so first of all I just want to start off by saying thank you for agreeing to do this. I appreciate. Rich Berlin:  An honor and a pleasure. Eric:  So I was mentioning before we actually got started recording that there was something quite specific that led me to invite you to ask you to be on Please Speak Freely. And really it’s funny, it’s that I had the opportunity to be in a meeting with you recently as I got a tour of Harlem RBI’s summer programs with some other people. And you and I have known each other a little bit over the years. But it was the first time for a while I got a chance to sort of sit around the table with you. And I felt like you were more inclined to actually speak freely than a lot of executive directors of youth organizations that I know. And you said one thing that made me want to hear more. And it wasn’t quite the context to ask more about it in the meeting there. But I thought this might be a chance to do that. And that was we were talking about different programmatic efforts and curriculum that you’ve used in your programs. And that you all have designed or brought in from the outside. And someone was asking about what behavior changes result from those programs being implemented. And in my experience people usually have a pretty pat set of answers to that. They have, well, we expect to see this and we expect to see that as a result of implementing this curriculum. And your answer was to question the idea of measuring behavior changes that result from a particular program or curriculum. This may not be a direct quote. But you said something like, I do this because I believe in it. And I know that if everyone did this, the world would be better. Now, I might have paraphrased that in my notes, but you said something like that. Can you talk about how you think about that sort of thing? Rich Berlin:  Yeah. I think that there’s a lot of thinking and head scratching and writing and talking about the best way to do things. I think there’s probably pretty broad agreement about the best way to do things. And then there’s a lot of talking and head scratching and writing and thinking and talking about how to measure the best way to do things to prove you’re doing it. And I think people, at least when it comes to youth work, can usually walk into a room and in about 36 seconds you can tell whether someone’s doing things well or badly or somewhere in between. And so in places where budgets are limited and staff is already constrained or stretched. And kids are there to have fun and know that there’s some good in it for them. The amount of energy devoted to rounding the wheel, I think the delta on that is pretty slight generally. And so in our case, I think we do spend a lot of time being reflective about practice. We spend a lot of time being intentional about the type of work we do. But mostly we try to create environments where kids feel safe and respected, are doing something that engages them. And you can usually measure engagement by the number of kids in the room. And where they’re perhaps building some skills and working together. Just take the high scope test or whatever it is and kind of line it up. And you do that stuff, and that’s good for kids, it’s good for people. People do it with their own children. People do it on soccer teams in the suburbs. And do a lot of that. And that sort of moves the dial. I think this work is incredibly important. I don’t think it’s incredibly complex. And I think we make it a little more complex than it needs to be. Eric:  You can often measure engagement by the number of kids in the room. So I assume you’re referring to after school programs or summer programs where kids have some kind of choice when it comes to that. Right? Rich Berlin:  Yeah, particularly amongst adolescence or early to late adolescence. Anywhere where kids choose to be, there’s no such thing as a youth program of choice that is a poor quality that is well attended. You will never find a crappy youth program that is well attended if kids have a choice. Unless actually it’s so bad that it can be like a place where they can really safely do anything. Eric:  Yeah, there’s been some studies on some of those programs actually. Where there was actually an increase in negative behaviors. Rich Berlin:  Right. But I wouldn’t actually call that a youth program. I would call that some sort of organized gang or something. Eric:  It’s a building. Rich Berlin:  Right. It’s a safe place to be all the bad things that a teenager can be. Eric:  Right. It’s a safe place to be violent or a safe place to smoke. Rich Berlin:  But that’s not a program. Eric:  Right. So that’s interesting because if you hold yourself up to the test, particularly with older youth, you have more of a choice. And you hold yourself up to the test of they say they vote with their feet, so if you’re doing something engaging and interesting and they come, then you’ve passed the test to some extent. But then you all went and opened a school of your own where young people have less of a choice about whether to be there or not. Rich Berlin:  So the rationale behind our school was this. It’s that our programs, if we are immodest and maybe even if we’re modest in some regards, we think have anomalous impacts on kids. That young people who start in our program at a very early age and finish in it or go through it over five, six, seven, 10 years. Universally graduate high school, almost universally go to college, almost universally don’t get pregnant. And we think universally build a whole set of life and work skills which will serve them very well beyond East Harlem or beyond their days at Harlem RBI. So that’s exciting, it’s powerful. I think it helps give kids a chance to raise their families out of poverty. Poverty that they typically grow up in if they’re here in our program. And that’s a pretty big deal. It’s pretty exciting stuff. Kids love being here. We have this incredible community. And maybe I should even say like not kids who go through our programs. Kids who sort of reside in and help shape the culture we create here. So it’s very powerful. Our mission statement at Harlem RBI, the tag line on our mission statement reads that we help kids recognize their potential and realize their dreams. I think in fact that the programs that we run, the work that we do is off the charts on the recognize their potential part. We really open kids eyes to what they can be in the world. What they should be in the world. On the realize their dreams part, on the we put kids on an even playing field or above any other kid in the world and they can go do anything they want. If they want to be a baseball player. If they want to be a stock broker. If they want to be a teacher. If they want to be president of the United States, they can do that. Well, I actually don’t. We felt pretty strongly that our programs didn’t do that. And the reason they didn’t do that is because they didn’t give kids a set of hard skills required to be able to do that. We help make our kids incredibly resilient. We think skilled in navigating the world in lots of different ways, skilled at avoiding many of the potholes that any kid, let alone kids in East Harlem can fall into. But if you go to a failing school from 8:30 am until 3:00 pm every day for 12 years, your chances of realizing your dreams are pretty diminished regardless of how fantastic the after school out of school program you go to every day for those 12 years is. Because we don’t do reading and writing and maths here. I mean, we do, but we don’t do it the way school does it. We’re not going to try. First of all, that’s not why kids come here. Second of all, it’s not what we’re great at doing. And third of all, even if we were great at doing it, we wouldn’t have enough time to do it in the appropriate way. So that’s why Harlem RBI is an after school out of school summer program. Whatever you want to call it. But if you have relationships with children for a decade and you’re proud of yourself for being a key driver or lever in helping them get to college, which no one in this community does virtually. Or one in 20 kids do in this community. We were not real comfortable with the idea that they could go do that with an eight grade or sixth grade or fifth grade education. Which in many cases was what was happening. And not wanting to turn our after school programs into something else, we decided that we had both an opportunity and therefore responsibility to do something about that. And that’s what school is. And then we thought that we don’t just want school to be a place where you do English, language arts, and math and science. We want it to be a place where all these other things happen. And we’ve already got an after school program and social services and family programs that we could wrap around the school. And suddenly it started looking pretty appetizing. And that’s where that came from. Eric:  When did the school start? Rich Berlin:  It opened in 2008. Eric:  It opened in 2008. And what are the grade levels at the school? Rich Berlin:  It’s now K to four. K to eight charter, I’d be very surprised if it didn’t turn into a K to 12 charter. Eric:  So you add a class ever year. And how many kids are in this school? Rich Berlin:  250. 250 kids per grade. 25 per section. Eric:  OK. So you set out to start this school for the reasons you just described. And then what’s been your experience for the past few years running this school? Before you answer, it’s an interesting process from the point of view of after school programs. Because we work with a lot of programs who feel very frustrated because they’re so committed to supporting the young people in their program. And they want to really support their success in school, but they don’t want to spend all their time doing remedial supports. And even if they do spend a lot of their time doing remedial supports, they feel like if the kids are in like you said a failing school or are not engaged in their school experience, then they’re really just working around the edges. And they’re trying to take a strong youth development approach, which the school might not be taking. And, they’re trying to take a strong youth development approach which the school might not be taking. And, they’re trying to support the academic progress of the kids, which feels like they need to do more of the same that the school is doing that they don’t really agree with the way it’s being done. So, they feel like they are in this very frustrated position and feeling increasingly like the weight of the world is on their shoulders because the pressure is on them to do it all. And, I’ve heard some of the leaders of those organizations discuss the idea of, “Well, why don’t we just start our own school?” And, you all went ahead and did it and have been successful in it for the past few years. So, I am curious about what your experience has been and what guidance or advice you might suggest to other afterschool programs who are in that difficult position. Rich Berlin:  So, first to note on like after school remediation or even afterschool academic programs that exist to fix what doesn’t happen in school. Eric:  Yeah. Rich Berlin:  Afterschool programs don’t have the time, the resources, or the expertise to do that. And, I think it’s a massive waste of time and money to try. That is not to say that kids don’t need it, right? Like, kids do need to know how to learn to read and write, and all those things. But, I really don’t believe that you can be very effective at it, if that’s like what you are like trying to do in afterschool. I think there are lots of ways to enhance learning out of the school day and in the school day. But from a straight like ‑ You know, our mission is to fix what didn’t happen in school. Well, if it’s not getting done in those seven hours with four times as much money, I can assure you it’s not getting done in the hour and a half to three hours that you have. And, I can also assure you that many kids get out of fifth grade and no one’s coming to your program either. So, there’s my two cents on that business. And truthfully, I don’t think there are too many people in the afterschool world who would disagree with that. Eric:  Well… Rich Berlin:  I think people get forced into doing that kind of work and for all sorts of stupid reasons, mostly having to do with bad policy. But anyway, that’s what… Eric:  Well it’s interesting though, because I recently had a chance to talk with Earl Martin Phalen… Rich Berlin:  Yeah. Eric:  …who founded Bell and Summer Advantage, and now runs an organization called Reach Out and Read. And, we had an interesting conversation about the issue of afterschool academics. And, he has very strong views on the necessity to hire credentialed teachers in the afterschool program and in summer programs, and to do really focused academic enrichment work. I think it’s funny. The word remediation is a funny one because it’s pretty much only used in a negative way ‑ like people sort of cast dispersions on remediation. No one defends the remediation. People defend academic practice, and academic enrichment, and academic support which often times takes the form of… [crosstalk] Rich Berlin:  Yeah. Eric:  …what we… Rich Berlin:  It’s a pretty… Eric:  …call remediation. Rich Berlin:  … fine line there. Yeah. Eric:  Yeah, I think it’s semantics. But, it’s semantics based on a set of values, right? So, the language that you use is sort of based on what you value and what you want to defend. But, it would be interesting to have that conversation with Earl or with others from Bell who do take… Rich Berlin:  Yeah. Eric:  …a pretty strong stance on that. They sort of stake out that territory that as afterschool programs we can make a difference in the academic success of young people ‑ academics success as defined by how the regular school day defines academic success. And, they have all their evaluation data and all that which they use to back up those claims. And, I tend to agree with your perspective that you just described. And, I do think that in some ways, it’s the broader perspective. But, it’s not the one you hear publicly defended as much. Rich Berlin:  Yeah. Well, first of all, here’s what I say about Bell and Earl is they’re, you know, incredible leaders in this field and this work. And I don’t think at heart they’re academicians. I think at heart they’re youth developers. I think there’s some significant differences between the way they program and we do. But, there’s some good reasons for what they do, and why they do it, and how they do it. And, I think they’re probably better at that version of it than anybody else. Eric:  Right. Rich Berlin:  All that said, I think Bell should open schools. If they want to build educated leaders for life, they should build it all day long. Eric:  Right. Rich Berlin:  That’s my very highfalutin and unfair advice which certainly Tiffany and Earl don’t need from me… [crosstalk] Eric:  Well, why is it unfair? Rich Berlin:  …successful. Because like, I’m sitting a million miles away at my own desk, you know… Eric:  OK. Rich Berlin:  …and have chose our own path. And like, they’re enormously successful, and credible, and smart, and passionate people. Eric:  Sure. Rich Berlin:  And, they can do whatever they want. For us, what I should say… Eric:  Yeah. Rich Berlin:  …is, for us… Eric:  Yeah. Rich Berlin:  …you know, we felt, in order to credibly, effectively build educated leaders for life, we needed more time. And, the only place to get that time was during the school day. And, in particular, the only place to get that time and still do all the other quote/unquote “soft stuff” that we deeply, deeply, deeply believe in, like we really needed the whole day ‑ like eight am until 8pm, or later, and weekends, and summers, and,etc, etc. Eric:  Hey, podcast listeners, I am actually doing an unusual thing in interrupting the conversation here, because I was so intrigued by what Rich said about that Bell should start a school. And, what I was so eager to find out what Earl Martin Phalen, the Founder and CEO of Bell and Founder and current CEO of Summer Advantage and Reach Out and Read, would have to stay about that, that I went ahead and gave Earl a call after this conversation with Rich and played for him the clip you just heard of Rich saying essentially, with all due respect, if they want to really fulfill their mission, they need to start a school. And, Earl had pretty surprising response. Remember when you listen to this that Earl founded Bell and he also founded Summer Advantage. He currently runs Summer Advantage as well as Reach Out and Read, not Bell. So, his response really comes more from a Summer Advantage perspective. But philosophically, it’s still just as relevant. So, what we’re going to do is listen a bit to a brief conversation, a phone conversation, I had with Earl, and then jump back into the conversation with Rich. So, what did you think about what Rich said? Earl Martin Phalen:  Well, I think his advice ‑ it’s great advice. And, I guess, the good news is we’re actually in the process, right now, at Summer Advantage of launching a network of charter schools in Minneapolis and Indiana. Eric:  Oh, really? I didn’t know that. So, this is a good opportunity to [laughter] announce that. That’s interesting timing. Earl:  Yeah. So, I love his advice. And, he should know that we’re taking it. Eric:  And just to be clear, he was talking about Bell because that was the example that came up. Earl:  Right, right, right. Eric:  And, you’re talking about charter schools that Summer Advantage is going to launch. Earl:  Yep, Summer Advantage is going to launch a network a charter schools. And, we’re going to start right in our back yard in Indiana. Eric:  Well ‑ And, what led you to that decision? Was it similar thinking to what Rich just described or were there other factors at play as well? Earl:  Yeah, I think it’s twofold. I think we feel that we bring excellence to education and if we can take what we do in five or six weeks of the summer and make that the year‑round experience for children, and for families, and for educators, we believe that our children will do extraordinarily well. Eric:  Do you see this as a potential evolution of the field of after‑school and out‑of‑school time or even a trend in after‑school and out‑of‑school time to move towards ‑ for youth organizations that started out as, you know, organizations that work with young people outside of the regular school day or the regular classroom environment starting their own schools and sort of becoming the institution that they used to serve as a supplement to? Earl:  I am not sure if it’s a movement. I think that the economic times, realities of most non‑profits in the out‑of‑school times space right now, has been, really, holding on for dear life and trying to just continue to provide the services that they provide to children and families. And so, it’s hard to be incredibly strategic when you’re fighting for survival. That said, I think there’s a small group of non‑profits that continue to not only survive but actually thrive in this economic environment. And so, when you have the blessing to be strategic and you’re concerned that our policy makers seem to be in an unethical, uncaring fight for power as opposed to service to the nation and to those who are most down and out, I think that forces one to at least look strategically and say, what else can we do? And, some people are choosing to run for office. And, some people are choosing to start low‑profit companies. And, others are saying ‑ You know, what we came up with at Summer Advantage is we can leverage our experience working with children and families to make this a year‑round experience for our children and families. But, not everybody is in that. And, quite frankly, the vast majority of non‑profits, I don’t think, are in that place. Eric:  Is there anyone in particular we should know about from our field who’s chosen to run for office? Earl:  Well, Alan Khazei, founder of City Year, founder of Be The Change, is running for senator here in Massachusetts. Eric:  Oh, really? That’s interesting. I didn’t know about that. Earl:  Yeah. Eric:  Yeah. Well. All right. Well, he might be an interesting future guest for Please Speak Freely then. That’ll be a first. Earl:  Yeah. No, he’ll be a great ‑ And, he’s one of the most talented leaders that I have come across in my 20 years in the sector. So, he would be a great guest. Eric:  Great. Well I really appreciate you taking the time to respond to what Rich had to say. I didn’t know what to expect. But, I definitely didn’t expect you to tell me that you actually are starting schools. Earl:  [laughs] Well, it’s a good reminder actually because I have been beginning to ‑ We’ve had a half‑dozen conversations with some of the nation’s top school leaders. And, this is a great reminder because it will get me down to see Rich and get his advice next time I am in New York. Eric:  Good. All right. Well, Earl, thanks a lot. Well, there you have it. Summer Advantage is starting their own chain of charter schools. Who knew? Anyway, we’ll jump right back into the conversation with Rich. Rich:  So now that I’ve opined on everybody else’s wrong way of doing things. What I would say is it’s incredibly hard and humbling work. I would say that we’re just now entering our fourth year. It’s just starting to feel like we know what we’re doing. And it’s ultimately for us not only just another way to put our kids in a position to recognize their potential and realize their dreams. It’s also a way to make our community stronger. It’s also a way to engage with families in a more deep and meaningful way. It’s also a way to expand the concept of learning. Like when people talk about Harlem RBI as an after school program. I just think Harlem RBI is a learning environment. And I think Dream is a learning environment. And I think our real kid summer program is a learning environment. Kids learn in all sorts of different places in all kinds of different ways. And most of them are kind of important and crucial to growing up this whole healthy person. And we’re not interested in growing. Had no interest in supporting the growth of the next generation of consumers. We would like to help grow the next generation of citizens and leaders. And that’s not just being good at taking a test. It’s just a lot more than that. Now, all that said, they better be able to blow that test away. That’s a really important skill. Those tests actually do measure whether you can read and write and do math. People might not like them, but they really do measure fairly accurately, particularly as they get harder and they get better skilled. Whether you know your Rs. But what does that have to do with being a full human being? That’s a piece of being a full human being. And there are plenty of brilliant people in the world from all sorts of backgrounds, whether it’s corrupt politicians or corrupt businessmen or other sorts of horrible criminals who are smart. Really, really smart. The Enron guys were the smartest guys in the room. Right? But they had no moral code. Right? They had no ethos. They didn’t care about other people. That’s really important. Eric:  And within the school, how do you deal with the testing piece? You say it’s important for them to do all that and also blow the test away. How do you prepare them to do that? Do you focus on it? Rich:  We don’t ignore it. So in order to help third graders be ready for a national norm test, you do have to practice that test. Not all day, not all weekend, not all that. But you have to take time out to do that. So kids know how to take that test. But it’s sort of not the focus of our school. I think the way we prepare kids to do that is we have balanced literacy curriculum. We have some phonics early and then it turns into balanced literacy. And we have nine different ways of teaching reading, which I’ll try and figure out different ways to teach reading. And if we do that right and we give kids the skill of this is what it’s like to sit at a table and fill out a form. Not perhaps the best way to do it, but a way that we’re required to do it, that they’ll do OK. What we won’t do is spend four hours a day shooting flash cards at them getting ready to do that. Eric:  You don’t torture them at your school? Rich:  No, we don’t torture them. I don’t think there are that many schools out there that will. I don’t think there are that many great schools out there that do torture them. Eric:  They wait till middle or high school to. Rich:  Actually, I don’t think there are any great schools that do torture them. Eric:  OK, so you said great schools. Rich:  Yeah. Eric:  I thought you said grade schools. Rich:  No. I think there are plenty of schools that do good on tests and do bad on tests that torture their kids. And I think there are lots of ways to do this well and lots of ways to do this poorly. I think our vote is for the holistic approach to working with children and families as possible. To the degree possible, we really believe in having kids for long periods of time, working with them in lots of different contexts. Providing them with lots of different opportunities, skills, and supports. And building on that year after year. There are other more technical ways to do that like providing academic support after school and doing it in partnership with the school. That can really move the dial for kids. Eric:  It’s interesting to me that in all of your description of the after school programs and the school, you didn’t really talk about baseball. And Harlem RBI’s sort of heritage is reviving baseball in the inner city. RBI is a national initiative, right? It’s not exactly a national program. Right? But there are other RBIs around the country. Hundreds of RBIs, really? Rich:  Yes. Eric:  I didn’t even realize that. We’re doing a little work through a program called Good Game with Athletes for Hope with a Cincinnati RBI program out of the Cincinnati Reds. I’ve known for some time that Harlem RBI is maybe a little different than the other RBIs that exist out there. But it seems to me sort of telling that in all of this description of this, you haven’t mentioned baseball. Can you talk about that? Rich:  Yeah. What do I think about that? I think probably because we just take for granted how central it is to what we do. Teams and in our case baseball and softball teams are the organizing principle of our programs here. And in that regard, fun is kind of the organizing principle of our programs here. That playing is fun and playing is work for kids. That where they learn. I don’t know what more I would say about it like that except there are ways in which school is just a huge departure from that. And I think there are ways when we see our work happening at the school or elsewhere off the field. Let’s just say that. There are other ways in which when we see our work being done off the field the best it can be doing, all the values and lessons of 20 years of baseball practices and games are infused deeply into that culture. So that means a team environment where individuals have to often succeed and fail on their own. A game where if you fail seven out of 10 times, you’re successful and you need to be enormously resilient. And a place where kids build skills very slowly over long periods of time. And it takes a long time to get good at, but once you develop the muscle memory of being good at it, it actually is something that you can sort of accelerate in a certain way. A place where kids get to lead. A place where kids get to follow. A place where the set of peers, the team is a really, really powerful peer influence. And a place where the adults, the coaches are also really central to the experience of how and why that team works. When we see our programs, our school, our classes, whatever it is working well, I think we see all the values that are infused from that playing themselves out in there. And baseball is integral to who we are and what we do. But there also is the dirty secret of we could probably do it other ways too. This is just the way we do it. Eric:  Well, it’s funny. I was just thinking, you could do it other ways. Could you do it with other sports? Could other sports serve as the center piece of a program and of a school in the same way as baseball could? Or is baseball special as a vehicle in that way? Rich:  No. Baseball is special for us because it’s evolved that way. But why would there be anything special about baseball? Just like there’s something special about chess for chess in the schools. And there’s something special about soccer for America Scores and there’s something special about squash for City Squash or Squash Busters. And it’s special because they’ve made it special. And then there’s sort of this meta. And then there’s the reality of doing it. And that’s to me like the concept of it. To me, there’s nothing special conceptually about it. There is something special about doing it and having done it and building upon it. And sort of the conceptual thing becoming real and then truly having a life of its own. My friends at MLB would like me to say there’s something special about it. [laughs] But of course there’s nothing special. There’s only special about things that people make special. Eric:  Well, and there’s something special about it maybe to you or to others who are here. And that that passion and that belief in something. Rich:  But I think it’s very specific. Very people specific, very context specific. In our case, very neighborhood specific. And as we grow our program, it will be interesting to see. How important are all those specificities? Because I think you can also ask that question about East Harlem. There are other ways. Eric:  Yeah. I mean, what’s funny as a tangent. It’s hard for me to imagine football talked about in the same way you talked about baseball. Just because of the conflict and the violence of football. But that’s probably another conversation. There’s probably people who are passionate about football and could see it as a vehicle. Rich:  Absolutely. And I’ve started Netflixing Friday Night Lights. Eric:  Oh yeah. Where are you? Just the first season? Rich:  No, I’m in the third season. Eric:  You’ve still got some good shows ahead of you. Rich:  Well, it’s amazing to me how many football games come down to the last play. [laughs] But there are lots of things not to like about Texas high school football and all that, but there’s so many things to love about this coach. And the way he’s trying, what he is to these kids, and what he makes the team to turn into. For these kids and for this town. There’s all this horrible, ridiculous stuff about it. And there’s all this amazing stuff about it. So you can do anything with enormous integrity and power and purpose. And you might talk about it differently, but I bet you could have the exact same impact. Eric:  But it’s interesting because if someone tried to replicate that. There’s a lot of talk about replication. If someone tried to replicate that and implement the coach Taylor of Friday Night Lights program, you might see a very different version of that. And it reminds me of something that I’ve often thought about because you hear about a lot of pilot programs all over the place and the success that they have. This was piloted and it was very successful. They did an evaluation. They showed that this intervention was very successful at preventing these behaviors. Or whatever whatever. And I have come to think that it’s not any of the individual processes or content or curriculum that are the ingredient that makes it special. What makes it special is it being a pilot program. That what’s effective is piloting something because the people who come and run that are passionate and they’re focused and they’re evaluating, they’re reflective. They’re asking people to really buy in and try something. There’s a focus of energy there that whatever it is that they’re piloting is almost secondary to the energy and the focus that they’re bringing to it. Rich:  Right. So the big problem with human services is that the humans who provide those services are not replicable. Right? Humans are people, they’re individuals. And you can arm them, you can do a lot of things. But if you do not have an amazing, an extraordinary, almost heroic committed person who believes so deeply in our case in the youth they work with every day. And if you don’t have someone similar managing them, and if you don’t have someone similar managing and on up, you’re going to have a very hard time scaling your work. Right? There’s are no efficiencies, no real efficiencies to be had in our work. Our work is about, right, a kid with a kid, an adult with a kid. That’s what our work is. It’s people connecting and supporting and sharing with each other. And yes, if Harlem RBI could figure out a way to do what it does for 10,000 people I’m sure we can find all sorts of ways to thin out some of our overhead cost. And as we grow we get more quote, unquote efficient. But we’re not talking about the types of efficiencies that ‑ you know, can do is turn a $1,500 summer program into $150 summer program and have the same impact. And in many ways if I want my $1,500 summer program to serve 1,000 kids instead of 100, I might even have to invest more. I bet I do. I know I do. Eric:  Even putting the efficiencies and the money aside. There’s a real question about whether just the idea of replicating is even possible. Or not possible, it’s certainly possible. Rich:  Well, it’s really happening. Eric:  That actually leads me to another question that I had for you. Before we started recording we were talking about some other organizations in the field, and I won’t name the names now as we’re recording. But we were talking about the notion that programs don’t always live up to their hype. And that there are people who are very strong voices for their own programs or their own organizations who have excelled at describing their program. But when you go and visit the program, you find out that it’s not how they described it to be. But most people don’t go visit the program. And particularly most people who are audiences at fundraisers and business people. And that kind of audience who might be willing to give some money and resources to help continue the organization, to support the organization aren’t necessarily going to visit the program. And if they do, they’re often led on a site visit that is going to be a constructed version, or a constructed vision of the program. Not just the ever day, what the program looks like. We were joking around a little bit. But do you think that that’s an issue or a problem for us in the field? Rich:  It’s a disease. [laughs] It’s a total cancer. And ultimately it’s not a problem for the field. It’s the problem for the people the field serves. Philanthropy is totally dysfunctional and irrational. Even the most rational versions of it are pretty dysfunctional and irrational and wasteful. And policies maybe even more. Policy making might even be worse in many ways. And the people to blame for that are us. We accept that. Right? I see funders every day. There are very few, like how many of us are willing to speak truth to power in that way? Probably not at the risk of our funding. And by the way, speaking of that, speaking of like, oh, this guy is all hype and all this. Well, you know what? Obviously I believe deeply in what I do. I think we run model work in many instances. I think there are plenty of places we can improve, etc., etc. Like all of us should be a little bit careful about casting stones. How much time do I spend visiting other people’s programs? Not a ton. But yeah, there should be a better way. We all should be more honest with each other, with our funders, with our electives, with our policy makers. But the structure of nonprofits is a pretty dismal thing generally. When nonprofit boards work, they make incredible sense. I think they’re incredibly powerful. And Harlem RBI happens to have what I think is like a world class board. People who really govern, focus on policy strategy, resource development. Trust the staff to be good at what they do, but ask the staff to prove it to them in meaningful ways. I think they’re awesome. Most boards aren’t like that. Most boards are really detached. Or the other side, they’re really connected and therefore are too much like the clients. Right? And then don’t have the resources and connections to help an organization move the dial. So you’ve got a really bad societal structural problem. I think private philanthropy is in many instances, in its worst instances, kind of a really ugly form of social control. I don’t understand why foundations get to give away five percent of their assets a year in existing perpetuity. Eric:  What should they do? Rich:  They should give away everything. Like I’m only going to give you enough to survive on? Like, what? What sort of weird, bizarre. On the other hand, say you have a billion dollar foundation. It’s really hard to give away a billion dollars. But then all I’m really going to get into is my thoughts on the distribution of wealth in this country and other things like that, which would really make me unpopular with some of our funders. But first and foremost, providers and leaders like myself are to blame for how things are. Eric:  How could we do it differently? How could leaders ‑ and I don’t say we, putting myself in the same category. Not just leaders of organizations, but there are leaders of organizations who choose to play a more public role. And there are some that stay inside more. How could those who play that more public role be more honest or represent things more authentically? Rich:  Well, I think we could be more honest in representing. I mean, we could be more honest. Right? We could say that your $25,000 grant sucks. Not only is it not enough money to do anything real with, but it’s totally inefficient in many ways. Right? Oh, and if I do well with this 25, I’ll get 30 next year. Or the other way, which is like, we raise money here at Harlem RBI both ways. And there are people who come to our gallery who write that $25,000 check because someone wrote a note on the invite saying, I hope you can join and support me. I believe in this. And we were just serving for proxies. And like OK, I owe him a favor. He’s a proxy. Whatever it is. That spectrum of giving is crazy. And it forces people to do crazy things. But it is the way our business is. And it is the way that wealth redistributes itself. It is the structure of wealth redistribution in this country. Whether it’s a public grant for too little money or a private grant for too little money, or a private gift for too much money. All those things. But I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about it. Maybe that in itself is part of the problem. Eric:  There’s an incredible book that I read recently called Small Change: Why Business Won’t Save the World. And it’s this little thin paperback, but it talks about the toxic model of philanthropy and how it’s gotten even more toxic as it’s gotten more market driven. Rich:  Yeah. Well, let’s be very clear. Business exists to be in business. And strategically it is intelligent to make philanthropy part of your business model. For your business. How many private companies even maintain philanthropic giving when profits go down? Right? Like, no, because that’s not core. That’s not core. Or a few maybe it is core. But when you’re making thin margins or negative margins, you’re probably not going to be giving a whole lot of money away. And to create a system where relying on the health of a company to ‑ you know, like relying on the health of Pfizer to fund health programs. And it makes a lot of sense for Vizor. It’s good business. And there’s no question that there are lot of people at Vizor who care deeply about these issues and world health and all those things. But the way a corporate entity acts is not necessarily how individuals would act. It’s driven by its own rationale. And its own rationale is it exists to make money. And public companies exist to make money for public shareholders. They don’t exist to see the vision of a compassionate founder. And that’s scary and dangerous. Eric:  Well, I know that my being a little bit late today has made you late. And I wanted to apologize for that. And thank you very much for doing this. And for everything you do for kids. You’re actually the first person I’ve had on Please Speak Freely who is currently running a direct service organization, so I was really excited to talk to you for that. Because it’s kind of important. Thanks a lot for doing this. [/expand]  

I’ve known Dr. Paul Heckman, Associate Dean at the University of California School of Education for a long time – thirteen years ago, when I was Director of Staff Development for LA’s BEST Afterschool Enrichment Program, Paul was a consultant for LA’s BEST, and a mentor for me. I’ve learned so much from him over the years, and I was so happy to talk with him for this episode. We didn’t even get close to covering everything I wanted to talk about, but we did have a great talk about the current culture of education, and how to create a new path. I’m also happy to introduce a new feature of Please Speak Freely – a blog! Sam Quiah, Director of Professional Development for Development Without Limits, kicks off our blog with a lively commentary on the issues and ideas raised in my conversation with Paul. We plan to have different members of the DWL team and guest writers featured in the blog each time we release a new podcast, and we encourage you to join the conversation as well by making comments. Enjoy!

This is a special episode of Please Speak Freely, recorded live at the Bridge from School to Afterschool and Back Conference in Seattle, WA! While I have recently recorded a few more interviews that still need to be edited and put online, I wanted to get this episode up while the conference is still fresh in the minds of everyone involved. In this episode, I tried to capture some of the ideas and conversations from the conference, and I included excerpts from the keynote speeches of Karen Pittman, President and CEO of the Forum for Youth Investment and recent PSK guest, and Dr. Shawn Ginwright of San Francisco State University, who I will be interviewing soon. I also spoke briefly with several conference participants, and had a more in depth conversation with my friend and colleague Zach Wilson, Director of Educational Services for School’s Out Washington, and the “maestro” of the Bridge Conference. The editing might be a little shaky, because I’m no radio producer, but I think you’ll enjoy what you hear. Thanks to School’s Out Washington for sponsoring the first few episodes of the podcast!

I got to sit down with Karen Pittman, President and CEO of the Forum for Youth Investment and a national leader and advocate for positive youth development. Ms. Pittman has received many awards and has advised the top levels of government, foundations and nonprofits on how to create programs and policies that promote the values of youth development and address the holistic needs of young people and communities. We had a great conversation about the importance of “low-stakes accountability” strategies for encouraging rigorous practice while still letting creativity and risk-taking thrive, as well as the range of challenges facing the field today.  Karen Pittman was refreshingly reflective about how the youth development field could frame the issues in a way that connects with people, and insightful about the language that she now prefers. She also talks about how the OST field can educate and support the regular classroom, and vice versa. Ms. Pittman will be the keynote speaker at the Bridge Conference in Seattle, WA next week, where I will also be presenting a session that screens the documentary, Race to Nowhere. Hope to see you there! This episode is dedicated in loving memory to Mr. James C. Welbourne, who passed away on August 22, 2011.  I got to know Mr. Welbourne, the City Librarian for New Haven, CT when he engaged Development Without Limits to help in his efforts to support afterschool programs by having the library serve as a community hub. He was a visionary in his field, a mentor to me, and a gem of a man. This episode of Please Speak Freely is sponsored by the School’s Out Washington Bridge to Afterschool and Back Conference, happening on October 17-18 in Seattle Washington. Come to the Bridge Conference to connect, act and transform!

I was pleased to speak with Dr. Pedro Noguera of New York University, who has been a leader and advocate for holistic and equitable education. Pedro Noguera has been a consistent and strong advocate for the role of community organizations and the importance of afterschool and summer learning opportunities. Pedro Noguera and I had a good conversation about the complexity of the movement towards “expanded learning time,” the value of social and emotional learning supports, and the role of afterschool programs in the larger context of education reform. We got to talk about the advice he gave to the chancellor of the New York school system, and how that advice was interpreted. Enjoy!

In this episode, I had a chance to talk with Earl Martin Phalen, who founded BELL andSummer Advantage and is the President and CEO of Reach Out and Read. BELL, which Earl founded when he was a law student, has grown to become one of the leading afterschool providers in the country, and Summer Advantage has received a lot of attention recently because of their results with helping to keep young people engaged over the summer months. Earl and I talked about some of the thornier issues in the field today – how organizations represent their work as opposed to the realities, who gets to call themselves an educator and the value of investing in measuring results. We also had a few laughs. This episode of Please Speak Freely is sponsored by the School’s Out WashingtonBridge to Afterschool and Back Conference, happening on October 17-18 in Seattle Washington. Come to the Bridge Conference to connect, act and transform!

In our premier episode, I had a very interesting conversation with Alexis Menten, Assistant Director for Education of Asia Society. Asia Society has been leading the way in the out-of-school time field in the area of global learning and global competence. Alexis and I discussed what those terms mean, what the ideas mean for afterschool, and what it looks like to really prepare young people for the 21st century. We also talked about the notion that not all programs really live up to their own hype, and the difficulty of assessing our work in meaningful ways. Please take a listen and join the conversation! This episode of Please Speak Freely is sponsored by the School’s Out Washington Bridge to Afterschool and Back Conference, happening on October 17-18 in Seattle Washington. Come to the Bridge Conference to connect, act and transform!