Out of the Box: The Federal Role: Creating The Space And Capacity For Innovative Models To Emerge

Bethany Little:

[I’m] Bethany Little with Education Counsel, it’s a pleasure to be here with you this afternoon. I want to thank all of you for your time coming to be in this conversation with us. It’s really an exciting moment to be talking about the issues of innovation, research and development with everything that’s gone on recently in the past few years with the COVID pandemic, there’s never been a more important time for this conversation and the federal level of government knows that too. And I’m excited to be joined here today by three real experts in federal policy-making. We are going to have a rich conversation about the role of the federal government in research and development, and particularly [in] creating the space and capacity for innovative models to emerge. I am pleased to say that these are three, not only colleagues, but friends, Roberto Rodríguez, who’s currently the Assistant Secretary for Planning, Evaluation and Policy Development at the U.S. Department of Education, Peter Oppenheim, who is at Van Scoyoc Associates now, but is the former Assistant Secretary for Congressional Affairs at the U.S. Department of Education, and Peter Zamora, who’s the Director of Federal Relations at the Council of Chief State School Officers, so knows these things from both a state and a federal perspective because in addition to the titles I just gave you, all four of us at various times worked together on Capitol Hill for different senators and different parties at different points in the work.

So it’s terrific to be back together. And I’m going to dive into some questions for these guys so you can hear their expertise directly, which is really significant in this topic. Out of the Box, that paper we’re all here about today discusses two types of constraints on innovative model providing, supply and demand. On the supply side of innovative model providing, [it’s] that is there are too few innovative model providers that are out there.

I was struck by the amount of R&D that is being spent in education versus other sectors. And we talk about this a lot when we have all worked in our policy space. In defense, the federal government’s spending approximately $65 billion a year. In health, it’s $41 billion. In energy, it’s almost $20 billion, and in education it’s $350 million. We’re used to being the little guys in education, but that’s really a differential, for sure. Most of that even goes to research, isn’t in sort of the innovation and development space. So I’m going to start with you, Roberto, and then maybe Peter Oppenheim. Both of you have been in Capitol Hill and the Department of Education. Why is this true? You’ve been on the purse string side and on the proposed budget side, why do you think there’s so little investment in education R&D and education by comparison to these other fields and issue areas?

Roberto Rodríguez:

Yeah, well thanks, Bethany. This is such an important conversation and discussion for us to be having because so much of what we’re trying to do is rethink about re-imagining and moving to new models and to more innovative design around teaching and learning, [which] necessitates a stronger investment in R&D. As you point out, we are… Well first, just to add some context, the United States, we remain the global leader in investments in R&D. We have some of the strongest institutions of higher education in the world. Our federal government invests heavily in research and development across a multitude of sectors. And yet, as you point out, the healthcare sector invests 17 times as much on R&D as we do in education. So you think about some of the grand challenges that we have at the federal level in education, closing the achievement gap, closing some of our opportunity gaps, really reinventing our teaching and learning for an innovation economy, to match an innovation economy. We need much more of a focus there.

I think in part it has been because we both have treated our research budget less as a development budget in education, we haven’t had as much through lines to be able to really think about testing and developing and refining and revising. We haven’t thought about that classically in our research capacity here at the federal level. And so part of it is building out the D next to the R in education. Part of it is also that we don’t have a culture and a system that really values and supports R&D at every level. And if we’re going to get to where we need to go with respect to some of the conversations today around Out of the Box, we need to be building that capacity for R&D not just here at the federal level, but we need to have systems districts at the school level, room to test, develop, refine and learn from what works, and learn from some of the ideas that are coming from the bottom up in the field. So that’s more of a cultural and systemic shift that needs to come alongside a larger budget for R&D.

Bethany Little:

Great. Peter Oppenheim, you come from sort of a different perspective on this. Share what you think about why we are where we are with R&D investment in education.

Peter Oppenheim:

Yeah, I agree in part with what Roberto’s saying, and particularly the need to invest more on the D side and not the R side. Because I think one of the challenges in attracting attention and congressional support for increased investment in education R&D has been, unlike a lot of other areas in education where the debate is very partisan or ideological in terms of the appropriate federal role. I think there’s general agreement or a lack of major opposition to R&D being an appropriate federal role even in education. I think the problem is, at least with a lot of the members that I dealt with, and I remember the ARPA-ED debates back in 2011, they couldn’t really grasp their minds around what the ROI was for education R&D.

In defense it’s better missiles, better bombs, better ships; in healthcare, it’s more innovative drugs, it’s more innovative devices; in education, it’s hard to sort of really grasp, understand what the return is on that investment. And with such a heavy investment in the past being on the research side, the product was an academic paper largely. And I remember constant meetings with practitioners, constituents in Tennessee and those around the country who would say that was not a tangible return for them because they didn’t know what to do that with that, that didn’t present them new models to then be able to just implement in their classrooms. So I think if there is a greater emphasis and talk about developing new innovations and how those innovations are going to improve student outcomes, improve teaching, I think you can get an increased investment.

Bethany Little:

That’s a great point. And it is a place where this model’s frame, that’s used in the Out of the Box paper, could bring great power to the conversation by feeling a little bit more concrete. I’m curious, you’ve framed, Peter Oppenheim, the idea that there isn’t much argument with the federal role here. But Peter Zamora, I want to bring you in from the state perspective and say, how do states want to think about the federal role, particularly in funding education R&D, what are you hearing from your members now?

Peter Zamora:

Thank you, Bethany, and thank you also to New Classrooms and to Transcend for writing this paper and fostering this conversation, which is very timely and important. And yeah, I would acknowledge that there’s investments in R&D that are happening at the state level that may not be captured by this particular data point. And we do hear a lot about partnerships with flagship universities or districts partnering with strong universities that are local. But that said, states are very supportive of a federal investment in innovation, in large part because that would reflect some openness to innovation and sort of innovative education policy at the federal level.

It feels a bit like we’ve been stuck in a holding pattern kind of in Washington DC largely kind of based upon the NCLB-style accountability systems that emerged from the states in the 1990s. And so, ESSA in 2015 did make some tweaks to that model, made some changes to that model. But the still overall structure of annual assessments, identifying a subset of schools for interventions and then focusing school improvement on that sort of limited subset of schools, that does seem like a system and a model that’s ripe for innovation and for new policy development. Because particularly as we look to emerge from the COVID pandemic and see the effects on student learning as well as student wellness coming out of that, it becomes pretty clear that the 2015 model or the old models shouldn’t necessarily be guiding our approaches here into this kind of new normal in the world in which we live today.

Bethany Little:

You’ve put some good red meat on the table, Peter, with some references to the policies and accountability systems, and we’ll get to that for sure in this conversation. But let me just ask more specifically in, as it relates to the investment piece itself. You make a good point, Peter Zamora, that we often say that the federal investment in education is only 10% of what’s spent in education. So when you look at defense, the federal investments about a hundred percent of what’s spent in defense. So you can see maybe there’s some reasoning there for the differential, but it’s still, we are all saying, way off and needs to be much more. And so I’m curious, do any of you who’ve all known and worked closely with and in Congress, see appetite in Congress for a real change in this investment? Could we see a really big new investment in education R&D from Congress?

Peter Oppenheim:

I think we’d have to see much greater campaign from colleges and universities in particular who are interested in this, as well as other nonprofit and advocacy organizations as well as teachers and school leaders, and then state chiefs as well. The challenge you have, not to state the obvious, but in the healthcare and defense industry, they spend tens of millions of dollars lobbying Congress to increase the research projects and NSF, and NIH, and FDA. So that’s what you’re all up against as well. So I think if there is that effort and if they consistently hear that from their constituents as well as consistent parties that they value, I think there could be an appetite for it.

Roberto Rodríguez:

I sure hope there is, Bethany. And I agree completely with Peter here. This should not be anything that is a partisan debate here. This should be about how do we think about developing and testing and supporting innovation and new ideas in our system to not have to go back to how we’ve done things in March of 2020 pre-pandemic, but how do we use this moment to really redesign and rethink everything from our pedagogy, our teaching and learning, to how we assess and measure progress to how we support structures and learning and engagement for students and student agency and more student-centered and personalized models.

I feel like there’s a lot of appetite for that. We’ve certainly been encouraged by seeing some early signs of interest in R&D from the House Preparations Committee. We were excited about seeing more of that from Chair DeLauro. And I think there are others in the Senate that are actively considering legislation and policy to support R&D here in our administration. We’ve been having a really robust conversation and discussion with IES and leadership here at the department about how to create space for more R&D within our existing research infrastructure. So, we hope we can lead and model that leadership here. And we want to also make sure that we’re supporting states and districts as they think about this too.

Peter Zamora:

And I’ll just note that there’s kind of a realtime practice underway right now. Congress approved substantial amounts of COVID relief funding, and so we’re doing a lot of work at CCSSO to track the uses of those funds. And then we and states are also kind of standing up real-time evaluation systems. And so, I think our goal here is to emerge from the pandemic with a sort of stronger research base around… Not that every intervention in every single district can then be extrapolated out to the world, but that we will kind of be using this crisis partly to learn more and to refine our systems and one hopes to develop innovative practices that we can then scale up more broadly.

Bethany Little:

That seems so spot on that this is a unique moment to really make this push. And in this case, we’ve talked a little bit about the opportunity and the need for this investment from the federal government in education R&D. Let’s talk a minute about the potential risk. So, one of the policy recommendations in the Out of the Box paper is for an investment from the federal government in the early stages of development, innovative learning models that don’t yet exist. Roberto, you ran a teacher-focused organization earlier, and it seems to me the teachers experiment and tweak every day. But at the system level, it feels like that’s really discouraged a lot of times.

And in other industries, there are real hits and misses coming out of R&D and that’s okay, and it’s even encouraged by other federal agencies knowing that some of those hits and misses, some of those misses are going to lead to the next big thing you need to know. Should we encourage an environment to move outside the box, even if that might mean there are more hits and misses in education and what would need to change to make that happen? Particularly is there a federal role in that, and particularly does missing in education entail more risk when it’s federally funded? We all know how people feel about missing when it comes to children as opposed to when it comes to missiles. So curious how you all think about that. Roberto, you want to start us off?

Roberto Rodríguez:

Yeah, it’s such a great… You’re cutting to the heart of the question here, Bethany, as we get into this, which is how do we continue to create room and create new room for innovation that inherently is about some hits and misses, but do so in a way that, I think for, the way I think about that is how do we continue to maintain the integrity of the system and we do need to have measures and benchmarks in our system that continue to aim for what we know students should be able to do and know as they’re graduating, as they’re preparing for their future. I think the question… And we also need to make sure that one of the hallmarks of standards-based reform over the last 30 years has been a focus as that’s evolved over time on every child, and on really ensuring that we are meeting an accountability and an equity imperative through that.

I would hope that we could get to a place where we’re setting the table for new ideas and for some experimentation and learning and evolution, but doing so in a way that really does attend to every child and that where we don’t lose that integrity and we don’t lose that focus. I think that’s really very important. But I think there’s a lot of opportunities to do that, bridges to get there, interim measures, to be able to know how students are doing. If we know where we’re going and where we need to go, and we can still hold our system accountable for that. There’s a lot of room underneath that to think about in terms of how we get there. I’ll also just mention briefly, as you mentioned my time at Plus, which was such a wonderful experience for me and opportunity to learn from some of our best and brightest and most accomplished teachers in the country across my network.

We’re a country right now that doesn’t embrace the teacher’s role and the educator’s role in research and innovation, and that stands in such high contrast to some of the rest of the world. If you look at Singapore, there are opportunities to drive innovation dollars down to every building for principals and teacher teams to start to innovate around problems of practice. Our Nordic countries regard research as an inherent part of the teacher pathway. So our teachers are all prepared in those countries to be able to do research as they’re also preparing to enter the classroom as practitioners. You can’t progress in China as a teacher without engaging in a depth of research.

So here we still have these silos, and this gets to kind of how we reorganized the teaching profession alongside embracing some of this pivot to R&D and innovation. But we had such great research teacher leaders at Teach Plus that understood there’s a role for the educator in generating evidence and in generating knowledge, in addition to consuming the knowledge base. But that is so different than what our norm is in our country where still the academy produces the knowledge base over here from a research perspective, and then policymakers and practitioners over here consume those learnings and that knowledge. And I think part of the evolution we need to see is we need to kind of flip that on its head. It’s probably easier said than done.

Peter Oppenheim:

Yeah, I agree with Roberto. I think there also needs to be maybe a big culture shift, an attitude shift at the federal government level, and that’s both in Congress and at the department in terms of giving breathing room to state school districts, schools and teachers to take risk. And we put such a high premium on evidence, which is important, very important. But we have to recognize there are some areas where we don’t have a lot of evidence, but we have a lot of need and there needs to be an opportunity and an environment where practitioners can take those risks and try things out in their schools, even with the help of federal dollars. But again, that takes a culture shift. In Congress, they’re ready to pounce on any perceived misuse or waste of federal dollars if it doesn’t work, that may be just as good of a thing if it had worked because you learn just as much, but that’s going to be a tougher hill to climb.

Peter Zamora:

Well, and then I’ll just quickly agree with both of my colleagues here and kind of add that I think of a sense among states as not that we need Congress to lead on innovation, or more specifically we don’t need top-down innovation, and that in fact isn’t innovation, but it is creating the opportunities for good ideas to bubble up and to be granted some space to work. Clearly, and I think your question gets to this, Bethany, is there are some challenges. You certainly can’t be experimenting on children here. You can’t deny a control group good literacy curriculum that you think is going to be good. But again, there are very encouraging practices, some of which are under development right now, and I think it’s incumbent upon us at the state level to create processes for local school districts to bubble that up to the state, but then also for the state to have a avenue into the department.

And I think in terms of the investments and the implementation of innovation, there’s very little incentive for a state to develop a whole new assessment structure accountability or fill in the blank that’s innovative if they have a sense that they’re going to bring it to the department and it will not receive an appropriate hearing. So, just very glad and very encouraged that Roberto and your prior role with your ear to the ground and talking to very effective local champions that… I’ve always been aware, and I started as a classroom of the huge gap between our conference tables in Washington DC and sort of practice in the classroom. And so, I think it’s really incumbent upon all of us to try to balance that out a little bit.

Bethany Little:

Finding my mute button, or my unmute button. That really resonates. Let’s get into this in this question of the accountability system and the rules that the federal government has in place and how they play out as it relates to innovation, because that’s really a central piece of policy point that the paper makes. So, the paper argues that among the most constraining policies that keeps innovation and new learning models from taking hold are those embedded within the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, currently called ESSA, which requires states to institute accountability systems centered on grade level assessment. They argue that schools looking to embraces a student-centered paradigm as opposed to a grade level-centered paradigm will need regulatory permission to operate under an alternate accountability structure that maintains the overall objective of college and career readiness, but allows for more personalized academic pathways that may be off-grade level and might provide a more precise way of measuring and more rewarding learning growth towards proficiency that’s sort of embedded in that paper.

I’m curious what you all think are the opportunities and risks to embracing a shift in policy, like the paper recommends from the federal level. How do you resolve this tension between building models that might not follow a grade level trajectory within a system that assumes grade level proficiency is an important parameter, and are there other federal policies that set parameters that are creating innovations? Let’s start with the one related to this grade level question. Curious how you all are thinking about this these days? I’m looking for who’s coming off mute and wants to have first crack at it? And I know you all three think about this a lot since this has been something we’ve all wrestled with together for many years. That question of the need for some parameters, the need for some guidance, the need for a focus that keeps equity and kids moving forward, but some flexibility within it. Peter Oppenheim, I think I saw you come off. You ready?

Peter Oppenheim:

The nuts and bolts of accountability systems really aren’t my expertise, but I think there’s tons of flexibility built into the Every Student Succeeds Act and ESSA. That authority is there for the Secretary, and it’s intended not to just be a tool, I’m not going to use the evil W word, but it’s not just a tool when there’s a national crisis or a global crisis like the pandemic, but it’s a tool that can be used to foster innovation. And if there are states and particularly individual school districts or schools that want to experiment, that authority is there for the secretary to provide some flexibility on those accountability and assessment measures.

Roberto Rodríguez:

I’ll just also add to that too, Bethany, you’ll get no argument from me that we need to evolve accountability and evolve our policy as a country. I think the question is how, and in what direction? I think Peter’s point is really well taken in that the framers of ESSA as we were all sitting around and working on this collectively together, many of us here on this call. The framers of ESSA envisioned innovation in the context of assessment. That’s part of the spirit behind the Innovative Assessment Demonstration Authority. We’ve heard a lot of feedback and Peter hears even more feedback from his state members about how that authority has been used or hasn’t been used in the past. So we’re certainly looking at that and thinking about what can we do to support and meet some of the states where they are relative to their interests in supporting next generation assessment systems.

But I think it’s also important, and the framers of ESSA also will testify to the importance of equity and accountability for all kids. And so I think there’s some room there to think about new ideas, new approaches. I am excited about the conversations around this paper and the series of discussions we’re having today where we’re starting, not necessarily from assessment, but from what do we want teaching and learning and instruction and advancement to look like? What do we want student engagement to look like in our schools? How do we design a system and some models around that as an objective? And then think about where might we need to adjust assessment? My presumption there is that the assessment question, which we always jump to when we’re having this conversation around innovation, is not the primary stumbling block here.

In fact, there are opportunities to think about how we utilize formative assessment and diagnostic assessment and other tools alongside some of these measures or alongside some of these other more innovative models. But I do think our policy needs to evolve at the federal level as a country. We should not be static in our approach to how we think about teaching, learning, school design and assessment, because the field’s not static. In fact, we’ve grown… We know now much more than we did before about the science of learning, about what we can do to support real-time assessment and feedback back to teachers in ways where they can adjust instruction. So, we got to embrace some of those innovations. We need to have both a policy, legislative and regulatory framework that embraces that.

Peter Zamora:

That’s right. And building off of, well, really what both of my colleagues have said here, I think what Roberto is getting at in part is that the current statewide summative annual assessment is carrying a lot of weight. So obviously it’s an important spotlight on student achievement. And I think all of us who’ve been working in this space clearly see into your question, Bethany, part of the risk and the concern is that we lose that sort of spotlight on inequity. And there’s obviously some potential concern around that. But, I think Roberto was getting to, is it giving enough real-time data to inform instruction, and particularly now given how much change is happening in the sector. And then I think the Innovative Assessment Demonstration Authority under ESSA, I think did show at least a goal of innovative assessment.

But also there’s so many kinds of restrictions and limitations both upon the U.S. Department and on states that sort of functionally, I think, there’s still some more work that could be done in that space to be helpful. But there’s a few other ways that I might highlight in which we all at the federal level could be more supportive of innovation that are not the things that make the newspapers and not assessment and accountability. One is which… And the paper does a really good job of describing the silos that are put in place, and really that’s partly structural and that Congress considers different legislation for different purposes at different times, and then breaks down different student groups by different titles under ESSA.

So really, the silos kind of start in Congress and then flow all the way down. I think we could do more to support more sort of comprehensive supports and to support particularly states and districts in blending and braiding funds to create sort of coherent supports for kids, but otherwise they’re sort of left with a bunch of really small, fragmentary kind of programs that fail to wrap up into a hole. So, there’s a lot of stuff that that that’s sort of under the surface, the way in which teachers document their time and effort for personnel expenditures and just really the way that the gears grind at every levels of our education system. I think that might be worth reexamining as we think about ways in which we may be unintentionally and purely based in good intention harming innovation.

Bethany Little:

I love that point, Peter, because when I was reading through and thinking about this, it’s clear that accountability assessment is something that the paper identifies as a big federal policy barrier to innovation. But I kept thinking, there must be innovations that are not reliant on out of grade level assessment, that there are other things people are trying to innovate on in the world. And I was curious, and I’m curious if any of you, Peter’s given us some good examples, but either of you have other examples of places where you think the federal government policies are potentially a barrier to the kind of innovation that we need in this country right now.

Roberto Rodríguez:

Well I think, Bethany, I hear a lot about a common narrative here as we talk about innovation, which is if the government will just get out of the way, we will innovate our way to better outcomes for all of our kids. And I think there is a little bit of a tension there because it is not… Yes, the government has a framework in place at the federal level and 50 different frameworks across our states and 15,000 different systems across our districts. But I actually think the government can be a tool, both from a funding perspective and from incentivizing and inviting our districts and our state leaders, and other intermediaries who are building the knowledge base, performing that evaluative function in real time.

They’re kind of like the R&D engine alongside a number of our district leaders who are helping them learn from being tried and tested and build that into the system. I think there’s a real role for the government to play in that vein. And I think we’re seeing those innovations. We’re at such an interesting time in our system. We’ve never seen this level of disruption that COVID brought. I often call it the great disruptor in American education. But what it’s done… And again, I think so many of our leaders at the local level, whether it’s our principals or our teachers or our superintendents would say, we’ve learned from this pandemic. We’ve learned how to use technology in new ways. We’ve learned how to deliver and accelerate instruction and core content in new ways.

We’ve learned how to build relationships around students virtually as well as reinforce those in real time as students have come back to school in new ways. We’ve learned how to use out-of-school time and non-instructional time in ways that still build knowledge and growth for students. So, let’s bring some of that innovation into our system. Let’s think about, is there a permanence for that? Particularly as we know so many of our young people are far behind. We have a lot of work to do around accelerating learning and growth, and we’re reminded of that every day. But, I think we need some more systems, partners… And we all have a role to play here, our states, our district leaders, our school leaders. And at the federal level, how can we all work together to try to bring more of that into the system in real time?

Bethany Little:

Yeah, absolutely. I think there is such a unique moment of a recognition of the importance of R&D and innovation. What it did for us in health is put us all back into the world, and yet education’s really had a mixed ability to innovate, learn, and improve. And you mentioned some of the cultural barriers and the structural barriers, but I want to close on this. We have probably time for each of you to maybe answer this last question. We’ve mentioned the word equity multiple times here, and I know from working with you all personally for years that equity is a priority for all of us and an explicit federal role, the access to equal opportunity and guaranteeing that is part of the federal role.

I’m curious about how you think about the ways in which equity is advanced by innovation or ways that it could be put at risk by innovation. And do we need to think about equity guardrails if the feds are going to get more deeply into innovation? And so we’d love to hear from each of you. Peter Oppenheim, I’m going to start with you since I see you off mute, on innovation.

Peter Oppenheim:

Sure. I think it’s a very important question. I was going to add maybe to your particular question, equity might be a barrier in some respects to innovation. If you look at the federal law, we have so many fiscal constraints built in there to ensure equitable allocation of federal resources and state and local resources. And that’s a great thing, I’m not questioning those. But I am sure, and this is totally anecdotally because I remember hearing these stories, but I don’t have any tangible evidence of this, that it was a forced, discouraged states and districts to innovate because if they spent more money on a new innovative approach in school A that upended their supplement not to plan or comparability requirements. And that can be a problem, but I think it could also be a great solution. A lot of these innovations, by trying and then taking risk, you can learn how to better allocate resource and better direct, not just financial resources, but teachers and student supports to those student populations in areas that need it the most and aren’t really equitably benefiting from our public school system.

Peter Zamora:

And in my view also, I think equity or sort of equal opportunity for education is really at the foundation of the federal role in education. We hear No Child Left Behind followed by Every Student Succeeds Act. It’s not Some Students Succeeds Act by design. But yeah, I do think that and heroic work is happening in the field under our current structures. And a lot of thinking went into bringing us to where we are now on the federal structures, and all of that generally kind of well-intentioned and thoughtful. I would say that obviously we can’t say that we’ve done, certainly there’s a lot of utility in state summative assessments. School improvement does have… I’m certainly not intending here to denigrate our entire federal structures, but we need to continue to push forward the notion that we’ve kind of reached a state of perfection, I think not a lot of folks would agree with that.

And so I think this continual desire to move forward again with sort of equity at the core. And yeah, I was also really wanted to associate myself with Roberto’s remarks about the great things that are underway in the field right now. And all of those really sort of focused on providing equal opportunities for kids. And CCSSO is now doing a lot to try to help states to evaluate the effects of those activities. And then also knowing that there’s going to be a fiscal cliff of ESSA funds in a couple of years, how do you sustain the equitable or positive things that have been happening using ESSA funds once those funds go away? So bubbling up good activities, looking for funding mechanisms to sustain those. I think that is a real sort of opportunity in this moment in education policy. And I look forward to working with the administration, to working with Congress, to sorting out the effective practices and looking to create space for them to flourish as we move forward. So, thanks very much.

Bethany Little:

Roberto, bring us home on equity.

Roberto Rodríguez:

Well listen, you know me, Bethany. I’m enjoying the panel because you are all wonderful colleagues and friends, we’ve had the chance to work together for many years. And so equity and opportunity are just hallmarks for me, values that I hold dear and will always look to underscore and reflect in our federal policy making. I think it’s important. And the reason I do, I think of, that is because I remember a time when our federal policy didn’t emphasize that as much as it could, we did not have a focus on every child. We were losing kids in that process. And I don’t think that that was by, as a function of, mal intent on the part of any educators or system leader. But if we are not vigilant and explicit about equity, it is not just going to come about on its own, right?

So we have to think about… When I think about that, I think about, well, we need to make sure we continue to have a system that is held accountable for the progress of every child. How can we think about innovation and this agenda as a way to better tailor instruction, supports, opportunity for every child And if we can have a system that follows every child and that continues to close and galvanize accountability around closing gaps, closing our opportunity and achievement gaps in our gaps around resources for our students, then I think that can coexist with a design, a more systemic, an intentional design around innovation in our system. Our policy doesn’t have to stay static in order to accomplish those other goals. I think we can get there.

Bethany Little:

Absolutely. I’d love to end on that note of optimism. I think innovation can be an important tool, a necessary tool for driving more equity. And it’s good for us all to keep our eyes on the risk. That really is often the federal role, is to make sure we’re looking out for what might happen to those who are most disadvantaged by our systems. So I just want to thank all of you who are listening to us today, and I particularly want to thank my friends, Peter, and Peter, and Roberto for joining for this conversation. It’s been terrific fun, and I’m grateful to all of you. I hope you all enjoy the rest of the conversations today. Take care, and bye-bye.

Roberto Rodríguez:

Thank you.

Peter Oppenheim:

Bye, now.