Trust

This article is about trust.

I used to be a big fan of The Education Trust, a Washington D.C.-think tank led for many years by Kati Haycock. According to their mission, The Education Trust’s is “committed to advancing policies and practices to dismantle the racial and economic barriers embedded in the American education system.” I always admired Haycock and Ed Trust for their continuous commitment to achieving equity inside our public school system.

Recently, Ed Trust regionalized their operation and opened an office in Texas. The Ed Trust State Director is Jonathan Feinstein. Recently, Feinstein sent this note out via email:

“Lawmakers are back at the Texas Capitol for a special legislative session. There is already continued debate around school vouchers, funding for public education, and other education related proposals; we are ready.”

“Meanwhile, school systems are staring down a ‘fiscal cliff’ with federal pandemic recovery funds set to expire at the end of this school year and many have already adopted deficit budgets.”

“For our part, we will work closely with lawmakers and other advocates to center the needs of the 5.5 million Texas public school students and the educators and families that support them. Some of our priorities from the regular session that were left pending could come back for consideration.”

“These include making investments in our school finance system that will provide more resources to the students who need them most, improving early literacy intervention, and passing the recommendations proposed by the Teacher Vacancy Task Force. Among these are expanded support for teacher residency partnerships, a proven strategy to address teacher retention by preparing more qualified and diverse educators. Our new video series highlights district leaders from every corner of the state sharing the value of these residency programs.”

As I wrote above, I used to be a fan of The Education Trust. No longer. And I’ll tell you why.

The Education Trust is like so many “school reform” organizations I’ve written about in the past. They believe the current public school system can and will change. They believe student outcomes will improve, especially when it comes to black, brown, and poor kids. They believe the current school system can become “equitable.”

The Education Trust and other organizations like it are wrong on all counts.

The Education Trust would be wise to change their mission, along with several other groups who believe that the present school system can and will change. Why should Ed Trust change their mission (stated above)? The Education Trust should change their mission because they can’t achieve their mission in its current form. There is no way to “dismantle the racial and economic barriers embedded in the American education system.”

If we are to trust a group like The Education Trust, then they need to begin advocating for building a new learning system, a system that will provide “equity” to black, brown, and poor kids and their families that the current system just can’t do.

This change needs to happen in Texas and across our country, or Ed Trust might think about changing their name.

I recently read with an interest and article published by the Big Questions Institute – on trust. The article begins:

“In the past year, as our work with Boards and leaders has grown, we’ve had to engage in some deep learning on ‘trust’ – to better understand the conditions that erode or build trust, its presence (or absence) as a larger societal phenomenon, and techniques that can rebuild trust even as it has broken down. In fact, in most cases, the assignment or engagement might have been around ‘equity leadership,’ strategic planning, governance development, or leadership goal setting, but the initial focus needed to pivot to take time for building trust.”

…

“Work in schools reflects wider trends of society. Where there is a decline in trust nationally, we see that within school communities trust also seems fragile: individuals might be reluctant to collaborate, be more prone to gossip, and show cynicism toward new ideas. In these settings, the school leadership team seems especially exhausted. Trust in institutions and individuals is generally declining, and in some areas, it’s a dramatic drop.”

…

“We’ve worked in places like Colombia where trust numbers are at an abysmal 4% of the society. Going into this climate, where do we begin to do work that relies on collaboration, fearless inquiry, and therefore trust? Two principles have been important to get started:

Make trust visible – this means we go meta. We try to surface a shared understanding around the question ‘What do you need for trust to exist?’ By taking time to share around this question, we discover that for example, various demographic and identify factors might influence the way different individuals think about trust and what their expectations are. For example, in younger professionals, the quality of ‘transparency’ is often very important for trust to exist, while among their more seasoned colleagues, ‘discretion’ might be valued. Surfacing the difference between what transparency versus discretion looks like the practice has created deeper empathy around a-ha moments where misunderstandings began and might have been avoided if these expectations were clarified.”

“Small steps make a difference. In Daring Greatly, Brene Brown describes, ‘Trust is built one marble at a time.’ In other words, trust is built on very small moments – gestures or actions of goodwill that may seem insignificant on their own but gradually fill up the ‘marble jar’ of social capital to form trust. It might take one inadvertent action, like venting one’s frustration about another individual at the end of a long day, and the word getting back to them, to dismantle a fragile trust. So patience, deliberate action, and very importantly, the humility and honesty to admit one’s wrongs (and this might not feel so small and insignificant) are necessary to fill the marble jar back up.”

Or maybe, just maybe, our institutions are making it difficult for trust to build. Is our current school system someplace where trust cannot be established? Because of this lack of trust, relationships can’t be built? And because of the lack of relationships, young learners and adult learning leaders feel a void when it comes to mental health?

Maybe making trust visible and taking small steps won’t work. Maybe it’s going to take a new learning system to build trust and build relationships.

Til tomorrow. SVB