As a species, humans are smart, adaptive, and resilient. We all have the capacity to think, create, and contribute to society at a high level. What stands between this shared capacity and everyone realizing its full potential is the opportunity to learn. This is where human shortcomings come in … including greed, power, fear, racism, and othering. They play a role in the development of schools and education systems that are not only far from equal in the provision of opportunity to learn, but are too often designed in ways that undermine the agency, belonging, and connection we all need to thrive, especially for those furthest from opportunity.
In today’s episode Bob Balfanz is joined by Michael Wotorson, director of the Schott Foundation for Public Education’s National Opportunity to Learn Network, who has been at the forefront of efforts to organize and support community-driven efforts to push schools towards opportunity to learn for all.
As a species, humans are smart, adaptive, and resilient. We all have the capacity to think, create, and contribute to society at a high level. What stands between this shared capacity and everyone realizing its full potential is the opportunity to learn. This is where human shortcomings come in … including greed, power, fear, racism, and othering. They play a role in the development of schools and education systems that are not only far from equal in the provision of opportunity to learn, but are too often designed in ways that undermine the agency, belonging, and connection we all need to thrive, especially for those furthest from opportunity.
In today’s episode Bob Balfanz is joined by Michael Wotorson, director of the Schott Foundation for Public Education’s National Opportunity to Learn Network, who has been at the forefront of efforts to organize and support community-driven efforts to push schools towards opportunity to learn for all.
Robert Balfanz:
Hello, and welcome to the Designing Education podcast and today’s episode. We’re talking to Michael Wotorson about Opportunity to Learn and how they can design schools that draw on community insight and knowledge to enable all students to thrive academically and social-emotionally, with wellbeing and hope. We can’t wait to jump into the conversation. But before we start, we want to take a moment to remind you to subscribe to the Designing Education podcast. Wherever you listen to podcasts, we’re available—on Spotify, Apple, or Google podcasts, just to name a few. Subscribe to the Designing Education podcast and never miss an episode.
Welcome to the Designing Education podcast series. I’m Dr. Robert Balfanz, director of the Pathways to Adult Success program and Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University. I’m delighted to have you join us today. This is the third episode of the second year in a series of conversations we’ll be having with education leaders, thinkers, and practitioners from across the country. We’ll talk about what will it take to create an education system that truly empowers all young people and set up on a pathway to long term success. In today’s episode, I’ll be joined by Michael Wotorson, director of the Schott Foundation’s National Opportunity to Learn Network.
Let’s set the stage for our conversation.
I’m going to start off with something controversial, and I’m sure folks will remind me of all the evidence of the contrary, which seems to grow every day. But here it is: as a species, humans are smart, adaptive, and resilient. We all have the capacity to think, create, and contribute to society. At a high level, what stands between the shared capacity and everyone realizing its full potential is opportunity to learn. And here is where the human shortcomings come in, including greed, power, fear racism, and othering. These play a role in the creation of schools and education systems that are not only far from equal in the provision of opportunity to learn, but are too often designed to undermine the very agency, belonging, and connection we all need to thrive. That is why I’m so excited to talk to our guest today, Michael Wotorson, who has been at the forefront of efforts to organize and support community-driven efforts to enable schools to achieve opportunity for all by ensuring that is true for the Black, Brown, and Native populations for whom it has not been the case. Welcome, Michael.
Michael Wotorson:
Thank you, Bob.
Robert Balfanz:
Before we dive into Designing Education, we like to start by asking all our guests: When you were in school, what was a good day?
Michael Wotorson:
Well, I went to school in West Africa, in Liberia, and a good day in school for me in the mid-1980s was a day when classes were not interrupted by groups of armed soldiers looking for rebels or other people who were anti the military government at the time. In that atmosphere where you did not have soldiers interrupting the flow, classes for me were characterized by being relatively smooth in terms of full and robust classroom discussion. I loved physics at the time, and so I loved being in an environment where there was nothing interrupting me or preventing me from having an opportunity to learn and dream about physics. So that was a good day. Unfortunately, that wasn’t always the case.
Robert Balfanz:
Yeah, that seems quite the experience. It seems like you were really grounded in struggles of interrupted learning well before the pandemic.
Michael Wotorson:
Absolutely.
Robert Balfanz:
All right, let’s get going. Let’s begin by hearing just a little bit about the Schott Foundation and the Opportunity to Learn Network. In brief, what do you do?
Michael Wotorson:
Sure, so the Schott Foundation is a BIPOC-led public fund. We are a philanthropy essentially, and we operate as an intermediary. What that means is that we pull philanthropic funds and we use those pooled resources to support racial and education justice movements across the country with a particular focus and emphasis on grassroots, community-based, and more often than not BIPOC-led organizations. The really important piece I want to point out about this is that Schott is very intentional around the notion that those who are closest to the problems are probably closest to the solution. So we try very hard to center the experience of community and the perspectives of local parents, students, people of color, and so forth.
Robert Balfanz:
And then how does the Opportunity to Learn Network fit into that?
Michael Wotorson:
Sure, so the Opportunity to Learn Network is essentially a national community of practice. If you will, these are granted partners that the Schott Foundation supports across the country, organized into our three target regions, the Northeast, the South, and the West. But most importantly, these organizations, as I alluded to earlier, are very community-based grassroots organizations, very close to the issues that confront far too many students, particularly in the opportunity to learn space. Also, in the Opportunity to Learn Network are four national partners. These are large national coalitions within themselves, which also comprise a wide variety of community-based organizations. So for example, some of our national partners are the Journey for Justice Alliance, the Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools, the Alliance for Education Justice, and the Dignity in Schools Campaign. In short, there are a little over forty or so organizations across the country that are part of the Opportunity to Learn Network. And then, as I said earlier, there are our four national partners.
Robert Balfanz:
Wow, that’s wonderful. So, from that vantage point, what comes top of mind to you when you think about what the community organizations in the Opportunity to Learn Network? [What do you] see as some of the most crucial reforms or even new designs of schools and education systems that are needed to secure the opportunity to learn for their children and all children?
Michael Wotorson:
Sure. I would say, probably one that is most important to a lot of the organizations that we work with and that we support is the issue of equity around school resource applications. As you know, the way public school is organized and funded in this country, to be somewhat simplistic about it, is that it’s largely based on property taxes. So, If you live in a particular zip code where the property tax revenue isn’t as strong as in another zip code, that has a direct effect on your public schools. It has an effect on the quality of instructional materials, a whole wide range of things, but ultimately it has an impact on the opportunity to learn afforded to students who live in that zip code. So resource application and equity is a huge issue of concern for a number of the organizations that we work with and support. But beyond that, there are a number of other issues that these organizations are really concerned about. One being, for example, the over-reliance, on law enforcement in schools. This is an interesting one, because on the one hand, there are a number of people in society who increasingly believe it is absolutely necessary, given a lot of what we’ve seen in the news recently, to have a law enforcement presence in schools. On the other hand, however, there is this question of whether or not schools should be utilizing law enforcement essentially as an arm of discipline. All too often, we see situations in schools where that is the case where more often than not, the law enforcement response to a student infraction of some kind, very often ends up being a bit over the top. So there are a number of organizations that we work with that are really concerned about the presence of police in schools.
Robert Balfanz:
Yeah, and those two things are connected, right? Because you know when you underfund a school they can’t afford enough staff to really address the full range of students’ academic and social-emotional needs. And then sometimes, for things like school police or school resource officers, there’s a different funding source above and beyond normal application, so schools almost take those folks because they’re paid for, because they’re short-staffed. So if someone is going to give me a staff person that costs me less, I’ll take it. But then, as you pointed out, things that would have sent the student to the office before, or maybe made them stay after school for detention, small indiscretions that all students do as they’re learning how to be mature, become criminalized and that takes it in a whole different, much more severe direction.
Michael Wotorson:
Absolutely. I was going to say schools make a trick, but we all make a choice about what we value and what we deem to be most important in terms of providing our young people an opportunity to learn. So, with regard to this particular conversation, we can decide whether it is more important to us to ensure that students have an opportunity to grow and learn socially and emotionally, and therefore we make a decision to provide ample availability, say, of school counselors, or we make the decision that we’re going to err on the side of law enforcement and make a decision to spend our resources on school resource officers versus counselors. Hence one of our organizations actually runs a campaign right now aptly titled Counselors, Not Cops.
Robert Balfanz:
Here you go, and building on that (and that that may be great example right there), can you share a success story your community organizations have had, in working with their districts to increase the opportunity to learn?
Michael Wotorson:
Sure. One really big one that comes to mind is the Campaign for Physical Equity, which has been a longstanding campaign in the state of New York, led and guided and directed by a number of committed advocates. One of those advocates that comes to mind for me that is a part of the Schott Network is the Alliance for a Quality Education. Schott has been providing support to AQE for close to twenty years, if not more, but very recently I think your listeners will be interested to know that in the final resolution of the Campaign for Physical Equity lawsuit in New York, the work of those advocates resulted quite literally in a redesigned new state public education funding formula amounting to an additional four billion dollars going into public education. What’s important and instructive about that is that the voice of people at the local level actually does matter.
Robert Balfanz:
Right.
Michael Wotorson:
And if we can find ways to sustain, elevate, promote, and support those voices, we can actually see progressive and positive changes unfolding for the benefit of all of our young people. The Campaign for Physical Equity is a wonderful example of that.
Robert Balfanz:
I think it’s so crucial what the Opportunity to Learn Network advocates for, as we think about designing education of this now: really including the voices of the students and of the parents of the community. And you know one reason for that is that sometimes the conditions of these schools are almost beyond the imagination of the distant policy maker or the distant state legislature. The example I’ll give you that I’m sure you’ve come across too many times is the physical condition of the buildings: the fact that the boiler doesn’t work in the winter, or there’s no air conditioning in the summer. And kids are actually missing many days of school because the buildings are not even habitable. For many people that don’t live in those environments, it’s hard to imagine that that exists. And if we don’t have the voice of the people that are impacted saying it, it’s easy to believe it doesn’t exist.
Michael Wotorson:
Exactly.
Robert Balfanz:
So I’m going to bring the pandemic in. Now, I know we’re trying to move beyond it, but its impacts are going to be quite long-lasting and I’m just wondering if you, the network or yourself, if you know how is the pandemic impacting the opportunity to learn.
Michael Wotorson:
You know, I saw a quote the other day, and unfortunately, I don’t remember the exact quote, but it was a quote by a well-known activist scholar by the name of Arundhati Roy. The long and short of what Arundhati was saying is that this pandemic, and pandemics in general, have the unique quality of allowing us to so step back and recalibrate our decisions around the kind of lives or the kind of society we want to have, And I think that’s important because what the pandemic did was it really laid bare for all of us to see: the results of, for example, these resource application inequities. The country got to see firsthand how deep the divide was in terms of availability to the broadband, for example. Even being in this quasi post-pandemic reality, the country is seeing how the lack of an opportunity to learn for any number of reasons has, in a really hyper way, impacted communities of color where kids, in some cases, are now even further behind than they appeared to be pre-pandemic. So we’ve certainly seen that reality. We’ve seen it exacerbating over the last couple of years or so. And that’s why a number of the organizations that Schott has been in partnership with over the years have really been trying to raise their voices for quite some time about the need for systems to be redesigned in a way that they are more purposeful, around insuring that young people and the communities from which they come have full and unfettered access to opportunities to learn, so that everything that we do from a systems standpoint that either inadvertently or purposefully serves as a barrier, needs to be removed, reconstructed so that all kids have the same opportunity. Last piece. The last point I make around this, and this is what I think is probably most important, is that this conversation is absolutely critical for the building and the sustaining of a vibrant democracy. Quite simply put, if we don’t have an educated citizenry, we don’t have people who are fully prepared to shoulder the mantle of leadership, and we don’t have a society. That’s what this boils down to.
Robert Balfanz:
That’s right. And that’s my opening point, that we all have this human capacity and if we don’t allow people to actualize it, we just hurt all of society, and put everything at risk. One other point I want to explore on the pandemic is this. We see all this literature about learning loss, and I always find it interesting: if you talk to kids, they don’t recognize learning loss there. [They say] “I was trying, I was learning as hard as I could during that time. I don’t know what you’re talking about, ‘loss.’ But that’s how adults talk about it.” And you know, I think there’s some risk they are right, [and] that could push us to some of these very old school ideas of mediation and holding kids back. And, you know, “If you missed this, how can you move forward until we give it to you?” And I’m just wondering [if] the alternative [is] some of these liberatory learning ideas that the OTL Network advocates for. If you have thoughts on that?
Michael Wotorson:
I think absolutely, and again, a lot of this is what we hear from advocates and local communities all around the country… I think fundamentally, if you listen to most parents critically, and most communities, what they are saying is ,there is a real need to, in an equitable and justice-driven fashion, emphasize the basics around fairness education. So what do I mean by that? Making sure that students regardless of zip code have access to the same kind of high-quality instruction, making sure that students regardless of zip code have access to the same kind of high-quality teachers. Making sure that disproportionalities that exist around suspension and expulsion, for example, no longer exist. Making sure that systemic structures that schools have around providing students and their families indications that a student is in some way not on track for graduation, and is facing all of these sort of obstacles and deficits, but doing so in a way that less emphasizes the output, the idea that there’s something wrong or deficient with the students, as opposed to doing so in a way that emphasizes a need for us at a system level to challenge ourselves and figure out what it is that we need to do differently to insure that students in fact, have that infinite opportunity to learn. So all of those kinds of very basic and fundamental things need to be reemphasized. And that’s what we hear more often than not from parents at the local level.
Robert Balfanz:
Yeah, and speaking of that, as you said so eloquently, you know that how do you design the work based on the insight of the people closest to it? How can we help schools to more deeply engage student and community voice?
Michael Wotorson:
Yeah, it’s a wonderful question. you know. I think there is something about our culture: we’ve accepted this idea that systems have to guard access to their internal decision making. That somehow, by providing access to community, by democratizing access, somehow the quality of decisions suffers. If you really think about that, if you stretch out to its logical conclusion, what we’re actually saying is that we really don’t believe in the democratic process. What we believe is that it’s best that a small group of individuals make decisions and think through all of the sort of permutations and the like for the rest of us. So, having said that, I think what needs to be visited within schools, from a systems standpoint, is figuring out how we can better listen to parents and communities, and how we can better pull them into the decisional processes that we make that we purport to be doing for the benefit of young people. Now I’ll give one quick example. The idea that banning In books is helpful or in some way protective of kids is a decision, a series of thought processes, that I believe, and most of our organizations believe, is really being sort of led by a small number of people. But if you survey the vast majority of parents and community organizations across the country, they get it. They understand that by denying young people access to a range of instructional materials, by denying them access to an honest education, you are actually placing them at a severe disadvantage, and you’re placing the country at a severe disadvantage. So I would say, just fundamentally, schools as institutions need to get much more comfortable with opening their doors, so to speak, and allowing the community to be a part of reasoned decision making.
Robert Balfanz:
Yeah, I think that’s so important. And that’s one thing I hope we can continue from the pandemic, but I sometimes doubt, but we have to find a way to do it, which was [this]: During the height of the pandemic, everyone recognized that there were no experts, and some of those hierarchies broke down because they had to, and people had to work together to figure out solutions because no one had a solution. And you know, we just have to be honest sometimes; we’re trying to find a way to educate all students. That’s a huge challenge. That’s a huge call to action and we need everyone thinking on it. And to think it should be a few people that can figure it out is just folly, and we just have to get past that.
Michael Wotorson:
Absolutely, absolutely.
Robert Balfanz:
So recently the Schott Foundation and Everyone Graduates Center and seven other nonprofits joined forces to create the GRAD Partnership. This was done to help spread student success systems, where we’re trying to combine the focus on strong relationships that we’ve talked about with progress monitoring of key indicators of the postsecondary success [and] with multitiered improvement systems around a shared set of students. That’s a lot for the audience to take in [but] that in a nutshell is what we’re working together on. And what I wanted to ask you is, how can student success systems help get us closer to achieving the opportunity to learn for all?
Michael Wotorson:
So, I think it’s at the core. This discussion of success systems is really about equity and justice in education, because the discussion allows us, in a very important, open way, to confront and interrogate the structures that we have set up and that we have been comfortable with, for thirty or forty years, around how we interact with and make decisions on behalf of students; and query ourselves about whether or not that actually works and whether or not we are looking at the right things. I think far too often, as I tried to allude to earlier, from a systems standpoint, we have [tended] to focus solely on an output question. What’s happening with young people in terms of their academic performance? Are they performing well on standardized exams and the like or not? And all of those things have a role. It’s important to keep all of that in mind. But what we haven’t done enough of, is to interrogate our own systems, to figure out how well our systems are in fact aligned with student aspirations, community goals and aspirations. How democratic are our systems, and how much do our systems in fact support an opportunity to learn for students. I think figuring out that question and doing so together—meaning between schools and community—I think that is probably one of the reasons why I am just so excited about this project, because this body of work is encouraging that kind of communication, that kind of conversation. And I think to very large degree we haven’t done that very well over the previous years.
Robert Balfanz:
Yeah, when you think about it, the traditional responses to the students [who were] in different ways, waving their hands and saying, “I could use a little help here,” were so reactive and counterproductive. So you know, the standard response if a student is not coming to school on a regular basis [was] pretty much, do nothing until they trigger a truancy law, and then you’re referring them to somebody else to deal with it.
Robert Balfanz:
Or if a student is not engaged in class or maybe talking to their friends a little too loudly, and rather trying to figure out what causes that, we just say, Well, you violated this rule. We’re going to ask you to leave the school. It’s sort of…
Michael Wotorson:
And that’s why I think some of the innovations that we’re seeing in community schools across the country hold so much promise. Because there are any number of reasons why a student may be chronically absent over time, and there are any number of strategic and innovative responses that might be employed, other than shipping the student to an alternative school, where more often than not the facilities, the quality of instruction, [and] the notion of supports are often far worse. So what you’ve essentially just done is put a student in a worse situation than to begin with.
Robert Balfanz:
Yeah, it’s just magnified because now we put only kids that need more support together [but those supports] are not given to them, and then we’re shocked when it doesn’t work right. It must be their fault, [even though] obviously we created a system that was designed to fail, right?
Michael Wotorson:
We could do better. We could do much better.
Robert Balfanz:
Absolutely. And opportunity to learn does not stop after high school graduation. We know the strong majority of young adults need some schooling or training beyond high school to find work with a family supporting wage, which really should be the goal of our public education system. It should position you to become a successful adult and raise a family, and help them succeed. So what is the Opportunity to Learn Network learning about how to support students in their community, through both the postsecondary selection process, and the actual transition to postsecondary?
Michael Wotorson:
So that’s a wonderful question. One of the things that I’m particularly excited about, about the OTL work is its intersectionality. Not all of the grant partners of the Schott Foundation that are part of the Opportunity to Learn Network, are directly working solely on education. There are community groups that are working on housing or transportation, or any number of other quality of life issues. But when you think about what all of these areas of focus have in common, [it’s that] ultimately they contribute to an environment that ensures a young person has an opportunity to learn. So to your question, I think the intersectionality of the work is extremely important. Bearing that in mind, I’ve always been pleased with a lot of what I’ve seen in different parts of the country around early college transition supports, or even early career transition supports. There are organizations within the Schott Foundation network [for which] part of what they do focuses on those early career transition pathways. And the degree to which communities and schools and school systems working together can make sure that more students, more families, are aware of and have access to these pathways, ultimately is much better. But this takes me back to one of the earlier points I made around resource inequities. Not every CTE program—career and technical education—is necessarily the same. There may be situations in different parts of the country where once again based on zip code, those career or college transition pathways or programs might differ wildly. I remember, I used to live and work in Hartford, Connecticut, and there was a high school called Prince Technical High School, and it was a real success story in terms of the quality of early career transition options and pathways that young people were offered. And so for me, a program like that is what we ought to aspire to, as opposed to situations where young people have offerings, that are only, say, basic cosmetology, or things of that nature. So I would say we are very supportive of ensuring that there are opportunities for school systems and community to work together in terms of developing and deepening those kinds of pathways. You’re absolutely right. This doesn’t start and end only at the high school level.
Robert Balfanz:
Yeah, and it really strikes me too that this is again the question of the schools. In funny ways, the design schools and systems open the doors to this sort of cross-consultation. Because to build those pathways, we have to both be listening to the students and the parents, but also the folks in the business and employment community.
Robert Balfanz:
Because we really want to expose our kids to what the jobs of the future are. Not just what our vocational labs were funded to do twenty years ago, so we just keep doing it.
Michael Wotorson:
You know, Bob, you and I have attended a number of education practice and policy conferences, and one of things that people often talk about is a recognition that we are a different society. Today we are no longer primarily an agrarian society, we are a technology society. We are part of an interconnected world. And so, while people recognize that and talk about it Intellectually, we need to take the next step. And the next step is reorganizing our systems so that our systems catch up with what we all intellectually recognize and talk about.
Michael Wotorson:
I think that’s an ongoing challenge for us, but that’s also a space where systems can learn from, by listening to, the community.
Robert Balfanz:
Yeah, absolutely. So let’s close by being real and discussing the challenges historically underserved students and communities face, from what I call both institutional indifference, which is—we gave some examples with the school saying in essence, not my problem; it’s on you to come to school, to focus in class. Get your work done regardless of your challenges or the resources we provide for you—[and] to what I would call even further institutional betrayal, where a school might actively work against the well-being and success of its students. It’s charged with educating. My question is, whether [it’s] indifference or betrayal, is this something we can address through school design with community participation; or is this really more a question of the ballot box by electing different school boards or working through the courts; or is it really a both/and situation?
Michael Wotorson:
Yeah, I definitely think it’s both. And you know, Bob, I like to refer to myself as a social reconstructionist. I believe very strongly in the way a lot of early education scholars wrote and thought and talked about public education and its purpose for building a society, the sustaining of a democratic society. I think when you think about the original purpose or idea behind public education, it really was to sustain and support democracy.
Michael Wotorson:
And if we believe that, and if we recognize how much our nation and our world are changing, then we really ought to think about the fundamental purposes of public education in this new reality. So with that as a backdrop, for me, I really believe it is a both/and situation. We cannot afford to throw up our hands, but we have to recognize that in some instances, policy adjustments, practice changes and their like, will require courts. In some instances, it will require a lot more activity and guidance and direction on the part of school boards and leadership at the community level. In some instances, it is going to require school systems deciding on their own that they’re going to make an affirmative decision to turn right and go straight. It’s all of the above.
Michael Wotorson:
I think shrinking from this in any way, puts our nation at peril, and that is something that I think we cannot afford, we ought not afford, and we should not afford
Robert Balfanz:
Yeah, so well said. So thank you, Michael. this has been a great discussion and as we close out, are there any last words you like to share with the audience or let them know where they can learn more about what we discussed today,
Michael Wotorson:
Two quick things. I would just remind your audience that, regardless of the way things may appear or sound, particularly if you listen to talk radio, the reality is that public education in the United States is still very strong. We certainly have a long way to go, but on the whole it’s still very strong and there’s no reason why we can’t exponentially improve it. So just keep in mind, I would say to your listeners, that we are doing the right thing. We are winning, and we can do even better. If you’d like to learn more about the Schott Foundation for Public Education and our work in the Opportunity to Learn Network, you can visit us on the web at Schott Foundation.org. Schott is SCHOTT foundation dot ORG.
Robert Balfanz:
Thank you. I really want to thank you for ending us with that positive note and reminder that we have the capacity to educate our children well. We’ve made some progress along those lines, and we have a ways to go, and both those things are true. To bring our discussion to a close, I’d like to thank Michael again for sharing his insights and learnings about the role community organizations can play in helping their local schools provide all these students with the supports and the experiences they need to actualize their potential through a robust opportunity to learn. As I [said in] my opening, opportunity to learn is what connects our shared capacities as humans with our ability to realize them. Most state constitutions, in fact, guarantee a free and effective education for all students. Yet almost any educational outcome will show you that we have not achieved this. In part, this is the result of existing school and school district designs, as we talked about today, effectively cutting off the very people [they are meant to serve]: students, parents, and community members. We have some of the most informed insights on what would enable the opportunity to learn [that are] able to influence the day-to-day workings of schools. We look forward to continuing to learn from the Schott Foundation and the Opportunity to Learn Network on how we can do this better Before we let you go, we want to ask you to please subscribe to Designing Education to stay up to date on all the revolutionary work happening in education. If you’re enjoying the show, leave us a five-star review, and also please share the show with a friend or colleague on social media. This has been Robert Balfanz from the Everyone Graduates Center and the Pathways to Adult Success project, thanking everyone for listening and inviting you to listen to the other episodes in our Designing Education series wherever you listen to your podcasts. Onward, and be well.