There’s a New Sheriff in Town

I’ve always been interested in what the folks at Bellwether are working on. Bellwether is a national nonprofit that exists to transform education to ensure systemically marginalized young people achieve outcomes that lead to fulfilling lives and flourishing communities. Now that’s a mouthful and, admittedly, a tall order!

I remember when Andy Smarick, at the time a Bellwether leader, wrote sometime back that urban schools were broken and couldn’t be fixed. I happened to be working in a large urban school district when Smarick wrote that, and it caused me to start looking at how possible his statement might be.

Now Bellwether has launched a new initiative to tackle education’s big problems. It’s called Beta by Bellwether, with a tag line that states “It’s Not Enough Just to Reimagine the Education Sector. It’s Time To Rebuild It,” and Andrew Rotherham wrote about it in a recent article for The 74.

“It’s not news that the education sector is stuck. After several years of often disastrous COVID-19 policies, students and families need American education’s best and most urgent effort. But for all the rhetoric around “reimagining” and “reinventing” schooling, there’s precious little to show for it. Instead, experts operate in silos to find solutions, reform and pandemic fatigue abound and dysfunctional reactionary politics define various debates.”

“Beta by Bellwether is a new initiative bringing viewpoint- and background-diverse experts together to tackle big problems and develop blueprints, strategies and tools that can help communities address structural educational problems. We’re building on our 12 years of work at Bellwether bridging policy and practice with a perspective that should be mundane but in this climate seems radical: the belief that the best ideas often lie between different perspectives and are strengthened through serious debate. No faction owns solutions, good ideas or virtue.”

“We’re starting with an initiative called “Assembly,” examining how America can ensure that families and students have equitable access to an array of flexible learning options like tutoring and pods and extracurricular activities like sports.”

Bellwether recently released three briefs explaining what “Assembly” is, its potential benefits and pitfalls, how public schools came to serve so many student needs, and describing the existing landscape and emerging trends.

Rotherham goes on to write:

“Among our findings:

• As the school year gets underway and results from spring testing are finally being made available, it is clear that both parents and educators want better opportunities for learning
• Parents now spend more than $200 billion annually on supplemental educational opportunities for their children – an enormous sum even in the context of the more than $750 billion dedicated to public education by local communities, states and the federal government. Though assembling an array of services isn’t new, the amount families are spending has skyrocketed. Much of that $200 billion is the affluent wrapping support around their kids, not help for middle- and lower-income families trying to make sure their children have what they need.
• There’s enormous promise in assembling a more customized approach to schooling, but also real risks to ensure quality and equitable access to services and support. One area of particular interest is Arizona, where landmark finance reforms [in that state] may have tremendous ramifications for a more assembled education.

Rotherham ends the article by writing:

“Why is Bellwether taking this on? For more than 12 years, our team, now 90 full-time professionals, has bridged policy and practice. But perhaps even more importantly, we’ve bridged the factions that have come to dominate the nation’s education debate. We have progressives, liberals and conservatives on our team. We have members who see great power in school choice and others who are skeptical that choice can deliver more equitable outcomes. On many complicated and contested questions, you’d get 90 slightly or substantially different answers from our team. That’s because we believe in both viewpoint diversity and an empirical, evidence-based approach to education questions. In other words, we appreciate the essential role of openness to debate, error and learning, and thoughtful dissent in driving progress. We’ve held to that approach even as it has come under pressure and fallen out of fashion. It makes our work better and is the only path to durable solutions that avoid the latest policy and political fads.”

It’s good news to have a group like Bellwether join the cause of finding a better path to learning. I don’t know if they need my advice moving forward, but just in case they do, here are a few “coaching points” for Rotherham and Co.:

1. Beware of traditional school districts! They have a tendency to want to “pull the wool over our eyes” to convince us that they, too, are committed to a better path to learning. But there path is old and worn, and arguably leads to nowhere.
2. Work to get money out of the traditional system so black, brown, and poor families can access that money to get their kids out of “sucky schools.” The traditional system is inequitable and for one, I don’t think it can be made “equitable” moving forward. Rich parents are already practicing the art of using money to put their children in better learning conditions than most traditional schools can provide. It’s time to offer the same opportunity to our poor families.
3. Work on developing a new type of “learning leader.” We called them “learning coaches” when we ran our pilot personalized learning lab school. Call them what you want, but smarter and stronger learning depends on developing a pipeline for adults interested in helping young learners define, plan, execute, and evaluate their own learning. Traditional teacher training doesn’t train anyone this way, and, quite frankly, very few colleges and universities are interested in taking this type of training on.
4. Work on developing a parent and community education program where black, brown, and poor parents begin to understand that taking their kids out of “sucky schools” is something that they should morally and ethically commit to moving forward. Now, once they gain the confidence to do exactly that, it’s up to us to provide them with a learning center, filled with learning coaches, able to help build learning plans for their children. Parents got a hint how bad their public schools really are over the past two to three years, and they are interested in looking at options. But don’t talk options without having those options in place and operating well.

There’s probably more to work on, like a matching system to pair learning coaches with young learners, so that we can give up on the way we start relationships in the traditional school system – computer-generated class lists and schedules that assign kids to teachers. Blah!

But, for now, let’s see if we can move the ball on the four above. If that starts to happen, then we can assess if better learning opportunities are happening for our most fragile child.

Til tomorrow. SVB