Out of the Box: The Intersection of Equity, Policy, and Innovation

Andy:

Hi, good afternoon. I’m Andy Rotherham with Bellwether. We’re a national nonprofit consulting organization. We work across the country on a range of issues, including with the organizations that are represented today in different capacities. And I’m really excited for our two panelists here and just a great discussion to bring this day in for a landing. Equity has been a theme all day in the various discussions, but in this panel we’re really going to get after it very explicitly and some of the tensions around innovation and equity and how to think about that. And we have two just fantastic panelists to help discuss that. I’m going to ask them to introduce themselves here in just a moment and get the conversation started.

So Chris, I’m going to start with you. Could you just give a brief bit of your background and then your work at Teach to One. You’re very much on the leading ragged edge of innovation in our sector, and so how do you think about this question of balancing equity and innovation?

Chris:

Yeah, thanks Andy. It’s a pleasure to do this. Thank you so much everybody for tuning in. I’m Chris Rush. I’ve recently returned to New Classrooms. I serve as Co-Founder and President of Teach to One, but before that I’ve been on a tour of duty with the administration and the federal government serving as Director of Educational Technology and Senior Advisor for Innovation and Improvement. So it’s been a wild ride trying to deal with a number of these issues. Before that, I spent some time at IBM, I spent some time teaching Earth Sciences, and spent some time at New York City Department of Ed and Amplify. So I have a varied background of for-profit, nonprofit, government-type experience that I bring to this question, this effort around innovation, this effort around R&D and how we drive equity within it.

And I think the question in some ways is that there’s lots of folks out there that are trying to help create a more equitable space and opportunities for students, but at the same time they’re trying to protect and safeguard what’s happening with students out there. And I think the big question that I’m excited to get into here is how do you balance those things? How do you protect students? How do you make sure people don’t take advantage of it, but also leave room to evolve? And I’m so excited to talk about that today.

Andy:

Terrific. Thanks, Chris. Denise, you’ve had a fantastic career in education policy and advocacy. You also spent a lot of time on the Hill. So in addition to introducing yourself, talk about where you come from as you think about both laws and regulations that are aimed at protecting kids who have been historically marginalized, issues around civil rights and so forth, how you think about balancing those issues with innovation?

Denise:

Thanks, Andy. It’s really great to be here with you and Chris this afternoon. I have a long and varied career, over 20 plus years working on these issues and making sure that children and family policy is centered on children and family. Spent over 20 years on Capitol Hill before I came to be Interim CEO at The Education Trust. Most recently I was the Staff Director for the House Committee on Education and Labor. But during my time on the Hill, it was always really about focusing on lifting up the voices of kids and families, particularly those who were most underserved by the systems, and I continue to do this today.

And I think when you think about the role of innovation and how it should be balanced, and in thinking about the role of equity and how it should be balanced, the real question is are we doing it with service, and for the service, of kids and families, or are we doing it for the service of the system? I hope always that The Education Trust, which is a research and advocacy organization, is always focused on making sure that any innovation is addressed with the needs of kids and families first and foremost. But let’s be clear, it can be done. It can be done, absolutely. There’s no reason to have the tension that I think that we’ve had more recently but also in the past, because the fact is if you do put kids in the center and if you put those underserved kids in the center, the innovations themselves will come forward.

Andy:

All right, terrific. And I said fantastic —

Chris:

Can I build on something there, Andy?

Andy:

Yeah, go ahead Chris.

Chris:

I love how you’re framing the idea of are we doing it for and with students or communities versus for the system. And I want to take that a step further, and one of the things I hear out there all the time is also there’s a feeling that it’s happening to people rather than for them or with them. And there’s another issue that’s wrapped up in there around the inclusivity that we bring to R&D and innovation and who knows better and whether or not people all want some of the same outcomes. And I think one of the challenges that has existed is how much it’s happening to people instead of with them and for them and agreeing on what we’re actually trying to solve for.

Andy:

So Denise, I’ll give you a chance to respond to that. And also, by way of setting up, let’s just quickly set the stage because I feel like sometimes you hear these conversations and it’s as if people are saying, “Well, innovation, it might upset this wonderful system we have.” But in fact, the system’s highly inequitable right now, starting with just the way people are assigned to schools based on where they live and property wealth, what happens to kids in school, obviously the outcomes we see. So, talk a little bit about, set the landscape: where are we in terms of this? And when we talk about closing achievement gaps at current rates of progress, we’re talking decades, in some cases centuries, to close those gaps if we don’t figure out how to do something new. So talk about how you see the present state and the challenge.

Denise:

Yeah, no better time than now, when we just got the NAEP scores recently, which showed just a precarious drop both in Math and English, and when we’re looking at students of color, those drops were even further. And the fact that we have set ourselves back, the pandemic helped, let’s not underestimate that. But at the same time, historically we have been underserving kids of color and kids from low income communities. So what does that mean? I mean, at this day and time, you’re right. If we just keep going at the rate that we’re going, we are never going to reduce opportunity gaps. We are never going to see those disparities really eliminated. And so that’s, I think, where innovation really has a role to play.

And one of the things that we’ve been thinking about a lot at Education Trust is it’s not just getting back to normal. We need to accelerate forward. We have to have accelerated growth at this date and time. And with the amount of money coming in through the American Rescue Plan and with ESSA dollars, there is no moment like right now to get started. There are some excellent examples going on right now that look at innovation as more than just, I think, some of your traditional innovations, but really getting under the skin of how we should be thinking about both teacher training, like teacher apprenticeships that are going on in Tennessee, or big acceleration around high dosage tutoring. That’s something that’s been around forever, and afterschool and summer learning. But if we do it and if we do it the right way, thinking about the infrastructure that needs to be put in there, hopefully we can see real accelerated growth. So we’re not getting back to normal, but we’re getting beyond that.

Andy:

You talked about a lot of stuff and you mentioned specifically tutoring, stuff we’ve known for a while works as evidence-based. What about the new stuff that we don’t know? All the things that are around the corner that we’re not necessarily seeing, some of the things that this paper points out in terms of models and creating a marketplace for models. How do you think about not just implementing what we know and is more or less thwarted by the political process, but actually figuring out what we don’t know?

Denise:

Yeah, great. That’s a super great question. I mean, look, we can also not just toss away the power of R&D, but I do think something that Chris said earlier was we should be thinking about how you even do R&D better. What is R&D maybe plus “I”, Research, Development, and Inclusivity? Can that be turning what is the traditional R&D on its head, turning what’s the traditional innovation? I don’t know if there’s traditional innovation. But can we be turning that on its head as well to be really thinking about how we push things forward at this time and place? Yeah, I think we can.

But again, we need to make sure that we are including the voices of students and families in how we do that, which I think is entirely possible. And mostly by bringing those innovations closer to home, giving them a timeframe in which to test. I don’t necessarily like the thought of experimenting, but I do appreciate the opportunity to test when we know what we’re testing for. And I think “test” in the broad sense of test, not our assessments and all that stuff. But let me stop there because I’m sure Chris has a lot of things to…

Andy:

Yeah. So Chris, same basic question to you. First of all, innovation. Innovation’s one of these words now in education, like “adequacy” or “adequate” or “equity” that means a thousand things to a thousand people. So when you talk about innovation, talk very specifically about how you’re defining and using that term, and then how should we think about against this backdrop that we’ve laid out of problems before the pandemic, exacerbated greatly by the way policymakers responded to the pandemic? How should we be thinking about innovation in terms of solving both the near-term problem and the long-term problem we have that even our best schools weren’t necessarily doing what we needed them to do from a standpoint of getting kids where they need to be in life?

Chris:

Yeah. Well I think, to me, first off, you’re right, “innovation” means a lot of different things to different folks. Some people think of it as just technology. Innovation means somehow putting some new gadget in the classroom or some new computer program. But I love some of the examples you were giving, Denise, around staffing models, apprenticeships, training. I think innovation to me means any way of trying to get where you’re going that might be different than how we were doing it before. And I think embedded in it is trying to do it in a way that is better, that improves. I think one of the challenges we have is different people, different communities have different definitions of what is “better.”

I think from a policy level we tend to look at these state test scores and NAEP scores, and those matter, but I think the time horizons which those come up are often off from a community. There’s a number of folks in a community, and as a parent myself, if you tell me that my son or daughter is further behind, I know that and I don’t necessarily expect that they’re going to catch up all the way in one year. And I know that there might be some things that need to be done first. There might be some mental health things that we need to focus on. There might be some SEL activities, some executive function activities that I want to achieve on, and success on some of those other factors needs to count. And I think that leads to some of the disagreement that’s happening in this space. And what we see is that people recognize this need in different communities and in different schools and in different households, students themselves, and what happens is there’s not necessarily the space to do it.

I’m going to pull on another word that you said, Denise, which was experiment, and experiment has sort of become a bad word in relation to students, but I think there are other industries that have figured out ways to balance that and spaces to balance this. Right? In the pharmaceutical space, there’s this idea of stage one control trials that we all see so that a drug gets tested in a responsible way, people know that it’s being tested on them or with them, and they opt into that because they don’t think what the standard options that are available to them are going to get the job done. So they see this, taking this chance, as a real opportunity.

In education, we don’t really allow for that. When there are people and communities that feel like the school system isn’t working for them, not because the school system is necessarily broken, but it might be that the situation or circumstances that particular student is in, the school system is not set up for them to be successful at this particular moment in time. And therefore, having another space that they can go and try something new would create a population where you can try some of those new things, figure out what works and doesn’t, where you’re doing it with folks. And when you do that, the rules are a little bit different.

But right now, if we have policies and systems out there that are trying to ensure equity, they’re very well meaning, they’re trying to make sure that people aren’t left behind in this, it doesn’t leave room or space to try to do those other things. So people do it in secret. They do it a little bit here, a little bit there. They don’t put into it what needs to happen in order to make that successful. They don’t have the time horizon to make that successful. And I think that’s a challenge.

I have some young children myself, and I was thinking about this as I was watching my son learn to walk and my daughter learn to ride a bike. And if the first time that she tried to get on the bike and fell off the bike, I was like, “Well, this doesn’t work,” then she would never learn to ride a bike. And the first time my son tried to stand up and fell over trying to walk and fell over and I said, “Oh, this doesn’t work. I guess he’s not going to be a walker. I guess we’re not going to do it this way,” then there would be no progress. And I think the same thing is happening in R&D and innovation in schools. We try something out. The first time we try, it might not go perfectly, and then we don’t fund it, we don’t allow it to continue, and therefore it never gets off the ground, never learns to walk or run.

Andy:

So in two of the things you said there, Chris, both [that] parents have different preferences and things they want to see, and then this idea of informed choice around innovation and new approaches, it seems inescapable that choice is a common thread through that. And so my question for you, can we really have education innovation in an environment of low choice, or do we have to create more space for choice if we’re going to have the kinds of innovation that you want to see?

Chris:

Well, I do think there need to be some opportunities for choice, but I think it’s responsible choice. Because if it’s not responsible choice, then you can get that student in a lot of trouble, and you also have to look at who is making those choices and how informed they are. So if we identify criteria by which choices open up under certain circumstances, that’s informed by evidence, it’s informed by experts, so that we can then give reasonable choices to parents, to students, to schools, to teachers, to districts about what paths to go down. I think we can do a lot of that. But when we lock it in, again, very well meaning, and I think equity is a tough balance in this, in trying to ensure that everyone gets some bare minimum, some standard in a very responsible way, it leads to a challenge for when people can deviate and whether or not you need to.

I use another analogy to describe this. For those people who are on the east coast or anywhere, you might be traveling up by 95. You’re going from let’s say Atlanta up to New York City and you hit traffic, you get in a traffic jam, right? The current system, in an attempt to make sure that everyone’s treated equitably and fairly, says you have to stay on this highway because that is the way you get from Atlanta to New York. But if you have some agency in this, you can actually get off the highway, take a detour, find a way around that traffic, and still get to the destination you need to get to. And right now, I described the current system as making it very taboo in many ways to get off that highway for any meaningful period of time. And I think where there are responsible choices and exits to get off the highway to take those detours and then get back on course, we need to figure out how to open those up. Otherwise, you’re just sitting there in traffic and you’re never going to get there.

Denise:

I love that analogy.

Andy:

Denise, I want to hear your response to that please.

Denise:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I love that analogy, until you think about those who are on the bus and have no agency and what roads they get to take, or that same person who’s broken down on the side of the road because they’ve broken down and maybe the AAA truck is the only way that they’re going to get home. So it’s a very interesting, I think, analogy. But here again, I’m concerned that we’re trying to pose two things against each other, innovation versus equity, which is what I thought I heard. And I don’t think we need to do that. I think you can do innovation with equity, and actually it’s going to be a better product.

Let’s take for example, this teacher shortage problem that we have right now, or the alleged teacher shortage problem that we have. My team at Ed Trust, Eric Duncan did an amazing piece on this issue. And one way to think about teacher shortage or to help solve the teacher shortage is actually to think about how you can be growing your pipeline, and to be thinking about what types of new teachers you actually want in the classroom. And that’s through [an] amazing teacher diversity initiative or with a real focus on teacher diversity. That is innovation, and that is innovation that is steeped and centered in equity. So you don’t have to choose one or over the other.

And I do think when we get down to the question of do you have to have choice? For sure, I think half of innovation is responding to choice. It’s responding to needs for different situations in different disciplines and different audiences. But again, informed choice is really important. And I would argue, if you are really going to do it within [an] equity orientation, then it needs to be more centered on community choice as opposed to individual choice in order to give communities the opportunity to have a voice in what that choice is going to be and how that choice is going to be designed. More often than not, that’s the case, and I think we’ve swerved too far onto the side, in so many conversations, [of] “I want my own thing.” It’s very difficult to have your own thing in a world where we really do try to make sure the underserved are treated equitably as those who have the ability or their own agency to go after what they want.

Andy:

So Denise, how do we manifest that though for people who don’t want? Because I feel like in every community there’s going to be different kinds of dissenters. And so how do you create, if the community decides they don’t want innovation, but a certain number of parents are interested in what Chris is talking about, how do we decide. And what rights should there be for the people who don’t want to go along with that consensus, they want something different?

Denise:

Well, we need a lot more voices in the room, Andy, if we’re going to be able to solve that problem. I know this is something that you’ve worked on for a really long, long time and I’m always interested in being a part of those conversations with you. But look, bottom line for us at The Education Trust is, we really want to make sure that students of color, students from low income communities are able to achieve at the highest level, that the expectations that you might have for other students are given to those same students, and that all the opportunities that are given to their more affluent peers or their white peers are able to be accessed by students of color and students from low income communities.

That means that they should have the same wealth of opportunity, the same choices that any other student might have. I think what’s really difficult, and you really sort of put a nail in it here, is how do you ensure that everybody… I’m sort of blanking right now what you said, but my hope is that we can start to try to resolve that tension and we can do that with really thinking about innovation, starting from a place of equity, as opposed to innovation and then throwing some equity in to make everybody feel better.

Chris:

I’d love to double click on equity. You asked before, what’s the definition of innovation? I think we also get a little muddied in what the definition is of equity. I think some people think it’s much more like equity of resources and what you have available to you, as opposed to equity of outcomes. And I think that’s where there’s a confusion, because if you are striving for equity of outcomes, of everyone achieving at a certain level, it’s not going to be the same formula that is going to achieve that equity. And that so gets confused with being the equitable equity of the resources or that formula that is being put into in this situation.

And I think we really need to tease that out for folks, for what we’re really trying to strive for, because as soon as that happens, no one thinks… Again, I’ll go back to a healthcare analogy. No one thinks that I need all the same things that my wife needs, that my friends down the street need. We come, we have different genes, we have different circumstances, we have different needs, we have different ailments, we have different advantages and disadvantages. We end up with different treatment plans so that we all get to this equity of health. We want our cholesterol to be at this level. We want to measure our blood pressure certain ways. We want to get to the equity of these outcomes. And I think that becomes really important, and these things get so muddled together, and that’s a real challenge.

I think the other part of what you were asking about, you’re in a community, you’re in a school district, and some people want to try something new and some people don’t. And there is a challenge that it feels like everyone has to be on the same bus together. It is a binary choice about whether or not you’re going to try that new program or not. And I think we need to figure out mechanisms within schools that make it okay that there may be multiple different programs that people are doing. And we do that in other subject areas, just not the major ones. So from a music standpoint or from a physical fitness standpoint or sports, we recognize that there can be differentiation in the treatment plans that happen. And I think we need to explore, can there be differentiation without tracking in Mathematics, in English Language Arts, in Science for what’s there? And the right structures could help that.

Andy:

So as we think about this paper and the ideas, talk a little bit, Denise, what do you think people who are opposed to greater innovation experimentation… Chris said earlier, reasonable choice, and I think we’d be here all day trying to define that, because people have very different views on what reasonable choice is. But people are generally opposed to these things and there’s a large constituency out there in the education sector that’s opposed to these. What don’t they get about the promise of what we’re talking about here in this Out of the Box paper, and what we’re talking here more generally about? What do you think those people are missing?

Denise:

Yeah, I do think there’s a bit of rigidity in terms of these definitions of innovation or equity. I think there’s a lot of old thinking maybe about what it looks like or what it should look like. But the fact is, innovation is here. It’s here to stay. As I said earlier, if you start from a place of equity, then innovation is better for everybody. And it’s centering students, it’s centering their families, which is really what you want. I think, the same thing that Chris just said about thinking about outcomes, how do we drive for innovation in outcomes? How do we drive for equity in outcomes? Those are some of the same questions that we should be trying to answer.

And then, the last thing is it’s already happening and it’s happening in a way that does center equity. So we shouldn’t be afraid of that. It’s happening. Again, when I talked about teacher apprenticeship models or doing the high-dosage tutoring or thinking about teacher diversity or even innovation in how you’re setting up a healthy school climate, these things are happening. They’re not widespread of course, but we need to be thinking about where we could be pushing innovation in a couple of those settings so that more people have access to them.

And then, I guess the last thing that I would offer is innovation can be really healthy when we think about it as innovation for all as opposed to innovation for just some. And perhaps that’s where we get entrenched in some of the old way of thinking about these innovations, these new things, these better things, these newer outcomes are only going to be for some people. And I think if you do them with a sense of equity at the center, that’s not going to be the case.

Andy:

Terrific. Thank you. Chris, I got the inverse question for you. There’s some people out there in the innovation world and the choice world, who have yet to meet an innovation or a choice plan they don’t like. And so, there’s folks who are working at this at different levels… I don’t know what the right word is, of enthusiasm or whatever. What do some of the real boosters who think that all this talk about equity is a distraction or just people trying to hold this back, what don’t they get about the potential risks here? What are those people missing about the complexity here?

Chris:

Yeah, I don’t know whether or not they’re missing anything in particular, versus valuing some things differently. Look, the reality is that when you deviate from the current tried and true plan, you can have higher highs and you can have lower lows, right? And you’re probably going to have some of those on the way. And I think that group thinks that that’s worth that journey. That is the price you pay and that in the long term you will be better off. I think the thing that gets underappreciated sometimes by that group is the fact that there are some folks who will take advantage and not try to create positive innovations, but instead use the term innovation as cover for exacerbating inequities for further underserving certain populations because of other biases that may exist in certain communities and that we already see happening. And I find most of the folks thinking from an innovation standpoint aren’t fully appreciating the degree to which that may happen or the risks that they may happen or the consequences to specific communities if that happens and their historic experience with it.

I also think some of what factors into this though is what I was talking about earlier with this idea that innovation is happening to folks rather than for and with them. And therefore, those communities don’t necessarily see the innovation as a positive. They see it as the next thing that’s serving somebody else’s agenda. And if we don’t find responsible ways to do it, if we don’t find some good policies, some good rules of the road that allow it to happen in safer, more effective ways, I think there are people who are just pushing back on that space in general and they’re not willing to take that risk. They’re not confident in that risk, so they think it’s just the latest way that they’ll be taken advantage of. And I don’t think that’s always understood.

Andy:

Yeah, I think that’s a terrific way to bring this in for a landing. Just a great conversation, I think, points out a lot of the themes that have been present throughout the day with this. And I heard three big themes. One is create space to do this and for the ideas that are in the Out of the Box paper, and I would really commend that paper to everyone to create space. But second, we’ve got to involve communities and parents in different ways, and I heard you both say in different ways, so that they’re heard, this isn’t done to people and so forth. And then third, that there are real tensions here, and you were very explicit about that Chris and Denise, you talked about it in a couple of different ways, that in a theoretical world we could have complete innovation and that would create just a high degree of, as Chris said, of highs and lows, and where you could have no innovation and we’d have a common degree of mediocrity.

In practice, we live between those spaces. People disagree about where to put the line, but that’s the argument that we’re having, and the Out of the Box paper makes a compelling argument for pushing that line. And that’s the conversation we need to have. We need to acknowledge that there are some tensions. There’s not always in tension, as you said Denise, but there are some tensions here. So those are the three themes I heard.

I would urge viewers to do a couple of things. First of all, learn more about the work of the Ed Trust and Denise’s work. They’re online at the Ed Trust website. About Chris’ work at Teach To One, also online. And you can find both organizations on social media as well. And then to really read the paper and think about the ideas that it points up. But most importantly, just right now, Chris, Denise, thank you for just a really insightful conversation about a really complicated set of issues, tensions, and trade-offs. And appreciate you all joining us.

Denise:

Thanks Andy. This has been great.

Chris:

Thanks Andy. We really appreciate it.

Andy:

Great. See you all soon.

Denise:

Bye-bye.