Building a Quality Learning Organization

I’m always looking for ways to offer equitable learning opportunities to kids.

It’s plain to see that our traditional K-12 system hasn’t offered that opportunity to so many of our young learners, especially those who are black, brown, and poor.

That’s why I read with interest recently an article posted on Getting Smart online titled “Tips and Tools for Equitable and Sustainable School Design,” written by Erin Whalen, the Executive Director at Da Vinci RISE High School. Whalen writes,

“As school builders, how do we best minimize blindspots, respond to inequities, and create universally designed spaces that account for the diverse array of lived experiences within our schools?”

“By building from the margins, or redesigning in deep consideration of the most underserved, we have the opportunity to create empowering schools that use the experiences of the most at-promised youth to enhance the overall school.”

“The design process must be centered around the user experience. Youth must be at the table to share insights, illuminate blindspots, and critique current practices to design and revise the overall school model. Cogenerative dialogue is a useful tool for eliciting the voices of youth to drive and direct change.”

Secondly, design processes must be focused and scaffolded. What is the capacity of your school for change? Does this change align with your current priorities and mission? All must be in alignment for meaningful growth to occur.”

Whalen goes on to lay out an example design process:

“Assess the assumed need or challenge (do so without making general assumptions, but rather devise questions to ask your youth to inform your problem statement. Avoid getting attached to claims about the problem and allow the true issue to be surfaced through empathy interviews and discussions with the community.)”

“Survey your youth/community”

“Revise your need or challenge”

“Assess your school’s capacity for change”

“Plan backward from the desired outcome with frequent check-ins with students on the impact these changes have on their experience in schools (focus on slow meaningful change rather than rushed changes.)”

“While this design process is a great way to lay a foundation for starting, there are numerous pitfalls of school and system transformation. Below are a few of the most common and some guidance on how to anticipate and overcome them.”

“Identify the locus of control – A common trap of the school redesign process can be overemphasizing all of the factors that we do not control within schools. Ultimately, a huge portion of our students’ personal lives directly impacts their performance in school and overall ability to learn.  Though schools and school personnel cannot control it all, it is important for us to adequately assess how we can operate as community hubs to address the most challenging issues out youth face which may lead to inequitable learning experiences. To address these factors, it is important to consider two things: advocacy and fundraising.”

“Spot inequities – When building from the margins, it is common to expose inequities that are not considered by the status quo. Once this is identified it can be important to expose the inequity to local, state, and federal leaders to be considered for future policies. This can also direct funding and resources to ensure these changes have long-term sustainability.”

“Fundraise and staff accordingly – When designing schools that provide extraordinary resources (i.e. housing support, food beyond school hours, extended counseling services, etc.) or services, it is imperative to devise long-term sustainability models in tandem with designing the system. Innovative ideas are often attractive for grant funding when paired with concrete action plans, deadlines, and impact assumptions. Having someone on the team document the impact and process to later be used for grant writing can save time and effort. Codify and memorialize as you build!”

“Don’t recreate the wheel – Transcend Education’s Innovative Model Exchange is an amazing toolkit for accessing innovative and successful school models and resources. I would advise that anyone seeking to make meaningful changes to their model use this toolkit only after they have engaged with their community to unearth the root of the problem and the most meaningful level of change.”

“Looking to other school models prior can lead to misidentification of the needed change and ultimately adopting a system or model not tailored to your particular community. Building form the margins is all about recentering the most disenfranchised as a way of building a more encompassing model capable of equitable serving all.”

“Building from the margins” sounds like a type of incrementalism here. And if there’s one theme from my 45 years in and around public education reform it would be incrementalism. Traditional schools love it when “reformers” talk about “building from the margins,” because it allows K-12 leaders to change at their pace instead of the pace required to improve learning for all kids, especially black, brown, and poor children. I used to tell my teachers and staff that adults who work in a school building believe they have years upon years to make things better for the kids they teach. But the reality is that adult learning leaders have very little time to improve the conditions whereby young learners can become smarter and stronger.

Over 10 years ago now, Stacey Childress, then part of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, wrote this about “building from the margins,” “incrementalism,” and “the adult public educator’s timeline:”

“Even in those places that have gone the furthest, progress has been nowhere near fast enough. New York City is a sobering example. The administration and unions there negotiated a contract that ended seniority preferences and gave principals broader hiring power. Years of investment in building a stronger applicant pool have paid off in some six applicants for every open teaching position. The city has invested tens of millions of dollars in better data systems, calculates the value each teacher contributes to student performance, and grades each school relative to other schools and its own past performance. These and other reforms have resulted in NAEP scores that rose 3% annually in math and reading between 2003 and 2011, even as national rates remained flat. But at that pace it will take more than 40 years for 80% of New York City students to reach math and reading proficiency, let alone the level of excellence that Chinese students are already achieving. For the U.S. to remain competitive, its students must go further faster.”

And that, in a nutshell, is what is wrong with “building from the margins.” Our young learners, especially those who are black, brown, and poor, just don’t have time to wait for the current traditional K-12 system to correct itself, if indeed that ever happens.

It’s time for a breakthrough.

It’s time for a new way of learning.

Til tomorrow. SVB