Season2, Ep6: Designing an Education System That Works for All Students

Celebrating its one-year anniversary, the National Partnership for Student Success (NPSS), a partnership between the U.S. Department of Education, AmeriCorps, and the Johns Hopkins Everyone Graduates Center, was launched following a call to action from the Biden-Harris Administration for more Americans to serve as tutors, mentors, college/career advisors, student success coaches, and integrated student support coordinators to provide young people with supportive learning environments and experiences that will support them to recover from the impacts of the pandemic and thrive.

In Season Two’s sixth episode, Cindy Marten, the U.S. Deputy Secretary of Education, joins Robert Balfanz for a conversation about how local innovation, K-12 and higher education collaboration, NPSS, and federal education policy all have key roles to play in enabling design of an education system that works for all students.

Transcript

Bob:
OK. Hello and welcome to the Designing Education podcast. In today's episode, we're talking to Cindy Marten, the US Deputy Secretary of Education. 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, and 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. Bob, director of the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University. In this episode, we're going to engage in a conversation with Cindy Marten, the US Deputy Secretary of Education. It’s the latest in a series of conversations we're having with education leaders, thinkers, and practitioners from across the country about what it will take to create an education system that truly empowers all young people and sets them on a pathway to long-term success. Today we'll be exploring how local innovation, K-12 and higher education collaboration, and federal education policy all have key roles to play in enabling design of an education system that works for all students. Welcome, Deputy Secretary Marten. We're excited to have you here today.

Cindy:
Hello, thank you so much.

Bob:
Yeah, it's going to be an exciting conversation. We start all our podcasts by asking our guests the same question. When you were in high school, what was a good day?

Cindy:
I love that question. I have lots of memories, I'm sure like everybody else does, about a great day in high school. And for me, of course people will say it's about friends and being able to connect with my friends. But it was also, I have lots of great memories about writing and my English class and having some form of poetry every day, having some form of outdoors activity every day. I went to high school in San Diego so it was easy to be outside all the time. And we had a campus, we got to leave campus for lunch. Leaving campus and making it back by the bell, but also just being able to connect with friends and having class time to be able to work together. I had great math teachers, great literacy or language arts teachers, science classes. So all of it was really connected learning and it was about relationships, relationships with the educators, relationships with my peers and my friends and having an opportunity for outdoor activity, physical exercise. I was on the cross country team. And I think a great day was about a really balanced day in terms of the academics, the friends, the sense of belonging, and the sense of connecting my learning to things that mattered in my life.

Bob:
Wow, that sounds like a really, really nice day. And it really is that combination of elements that make it a rich experience. The one note I have to make of a connection is that I also went to a school that was described as the California campus, except they built it in Connecticut. So we froze in the winter having to go between classes. But they did let us go out to lunch also, which I did greatly enjoy.

Cindy:
As long as you made it back in time.

Bob:
Yes, yes, yes.

Cindy:
Which didn't always happen, and not get a speeding ticket on the way back.

Bob:
Yes, indeed, indeed. That was part of the challenge. All right, let's dig into it. Prior to being Deputy Secretary, you've worked for many years in the San Diego Unified School District, and you were a student there as well, and ultimately a superintendent. And I've heard you say that this experience is one reason why you're a champion of local innovation, and the importance of students and teachers and families and community members all working together to create the best solutions for their community. What brought you to this idea? Because in a way, this is quite different from the standard idea of, we have an evidence-based policy, let's all do it.

Cindy:
Well, there should always be an evidence base to what you're doing, so I'm not against evidence-based practices and using science and understanding, reading big papers and knowing what's back there, but at the heart of it is, it's a people-driven business. And you spoke at the opening of the podcast about an education that truly empowers people. And an empowering education that has local innovation at the heart, creating the best solutions, I've always believed that the best answers come from within—to the point where I even have a slippers collection from the Wizard of Oz, because the message is, “there's no place like home,” and everything you're looking for already exists within your community somehow, some way, in some form that's up to you to help unpack and discover. You have to be knowledgeable about the research, the evidence-based practices that are out there, but start with the local community. And I always say if you want to know what works, ask the people doing the work. They know. Talk to students, teachers, families, community members, school leaders, and any solution that's actually going to be sustainable, durable, systemic, systematic, replicable, scalable, that's going to actually work and have staying power, is one that comes grassroots, from the ground up, that has from-the-top-down supports, but it's a ground-up innovation. Because what I have found through lived experience, 10 years in an inner-city school, where so many solutions were dropped down upon that school, where people from the outside came in and said, “Here's what you need to do to the poor kids at this hundred percent title one [school].” None of that ever worked—and it could be a great idea, could be an evidence-based idea that works someplace else. But as soon as you do something to a community, no matter how good it is, or for a community, no matter how research-based it is, it will not completely take hold. When you do it with the community, [from the] ground up, it's a kind of thing that lasts forever and it's grassroots, not Astroturf. And I think that people can learn hard lessons that way in understanding that when you do it together, you're going to have some durability to it.

Bob:
I love that, grassroots not Astroturf, and really the idea of evidence and form but locally owned and developed. We were talking about the power of local innovation and this idea of being evidence-informed but locally developed and owned. Can you share with us a local innovation you experienced that worked even better than expected?

Cindy:
Yeah, because I totally believe in this idea of ground-up and create the solutions locally. That's the best way to have durability and sustainability. And I've experienced so much of that. I'll give an example from when I was a principal in San Diego at an inner city school. It was a thousand students, pre-kindergarten through fifth grade, 100% Title I, 85% English learners. San Diego was a border town, so we had lots of kids that were commuting across the border from Tijuana or newly moving to our country. Pretty much every risk factor known to education lived on that campus. And all of the solutions are out there somewhere in the world, and people wanted to just keep telling us what to do to make the school better. And because I believed in the ground-up approach, we did it differently. So one of the innovations that we did had to do with… I think it was my fifth or sixth year there; I was there, like I said, for 10 years. Seven teachers in one year got pregnant and were about to have their first child.

Bob:
Oh wow. What are the odds?

Cindy:
We had spent about five, six years at that point and millions of dollars in professional development. It's when we had a lot of money in California and we invested in our teachers in professional development, I thought all of that investment's about to go out the door because guess what? A great teacher also happens to want to be a great mommy. And they all wanted to stay home with their babies, and I didn't want to get in the way of that. Of course, they should be home with their babies. But I thought it shouldn't be that all these great teachers now have to leave their students to go be home; how can we have both? So, I worked with local groups and we ended up building an employee daycare with the dual purpose of retaining high quality teachers in the inner city. When I started at that school, the teacher turnover rate was outrageously high. Every year at every staff meeting, there were 17 to 23 new teachers being introduced because it just kept turning over. And we had stabilized that. We didn't have the revolving door anymore, but yet a whole bunch were going to have to go. And we wanted to figure out how to do it. I came up with this plan. We put an employee daycare in place. And what it did is, it allowed them to be the great moms they wanted to be. They could see their babies during their lunch breaks and they could go and nurse during their recess breaks and they could be there with their children and be the great mom to their own children and still be the fabulous teacher that we had invested so much in. That was something that ended up turning into an employee daycare for infants up to two- and three-year-olds, and then we turned it into an employee preschool. It still exists today and it became a replicable model. So that was one great innovation. We also built a garden because it was a school that had been pretty much a concrete jungle, did not have a lot of growth or trees or shade and it was very hot sometimes. And we wanted to build a garden, an organic garden, so we built that. We were able to build a garden that we grew a salad on. We grew salad makings for the salad bar so kids, got to see that they can grow their own food and work with the food services to get all the requirements to make it something that we are allowed to serve, a salad on the salad bar for the school lunch program that the kids had grown. We also built an arts education program because there was no arts education there. It was pretty much reading, math, and science—reading and math, get the reading and math scores up. That was the goal of the district. They weren't paying attention to gardens and arts education, they just wanted to have the reading and math scores go up. I believe that if you invest in an integrated arts program that delivers math and science standards through arts education, you can create a great program. So we used Title I funding to grow our own arts education program, and at the time I got in trouble, because Title I money was supposed to be for improved reading and math scores. So I showed the map of how the reading and writing and math were aligned to the standards, and we were able to improve both. That ended up turning into a program that we did district-wide when I became superintendent: we leveraged Title I funding to invest in arts education tied to literacy and math standards. So you can raise literacy and math scores through arts education. And arts education weas really important. So those are three things that I've seen work. They had sustainability and scalability baked in and they were things that were innovations that came from what I saw on the ground as a leader in a school.

Bob:
Yeah. I think what really unites those is that they're all human centered-ideas and solutions. Like, humans have got to be good. And if humans are good, then the work of teaching and learning will even be better. Right. And one of the things I have to just add as a connection point is how times have changed in some ways for the better. In my family, my mom was a teacher and she got pregnant with me and she got let go from her job, right? So now we're building daycare to keep our skilled teachers together and in the school. So that's really a good, good progress. Given the role you now have, how can federal educational policy learn from and spread all these great innovations that occur in our schools and districts every year?

Cindy:
Yeah, it's a little bit of a problem, because I'm saying it should come from the ground up, and by definition, I am big time top down now, at the federal level. So, your question's really important. How, at the federal level, which is about as top-down as you can get, as far away from the day-to-day of a school, how can we actually do that? Well, it's because of my firm belief that we actually know what works in education and that we, as in we at the federal level, know what works and we're going to go tell people what to do. But we know how to lift up bright spots, we know how to find examples of where it's going well—and by the way, wherever it's going well, it's going well because it was developed locally as number one. No matter what it is they're doing, the best programs that we want to lift up and highlight as bright spots started with a local community that discovered what it cared about, found the researched, evidence-based practice that matched what they cared about, and then put it into place. So I think what we can do is figure out how to keep lifting up what we know works, and the fact that we have it some days in some schools and some communities for some kids sometimes means that we can switch that and we can have it be all over the country by lifting up what's working. Because it's not true yet for all students in all communities. So when we give the public models of what is working, those that need to see it to believe it… I happen to be somebody who can believe something into, I can believe it before I see it. Not everyone is like me, I get that. Some people need to see it and be inspired and informed about how to make the kinds of changes that are sustainable and durable with their own community. And I think it's what the public's been asking for. They've been asking for the department to help us find those models. That's why Secretary Cardona and I are both very much driven by these local solutions. Our whole initiative is called Raise the Bar, Lead the World. And it's a way that we highlight bright spots, ways in which local communities are raising academic excellence and learning conditions and global competitiveness. And we're looking for the replicable, scalable, sustainable innovations that are developed by local schools and communities, because they demonstrate what's actually possible and we can amplify those.

Bob:
Yeah. And as you said, I think it's so important. Schools are hungry to see examples and ideas from other schools that are working, because then they have confidence that they'll likely work in their school. And when it's this more diffuse, “here's an idea from somewhere, I'm not quite sure where,” it seems reasonable. But has anybody ever actually tried this in a real school? They're much more suspect. I think that idea of lifting up these powerful local innovations is a way to scale ideas that people haven't fully focused on enough. And they're much more [effective than] trying to focus on some deep, broad synthesis that they think can be spread easily, but it's not—because people don't believe it's doable, so they don't really pick it up.

Cindy:
That's exactly right, and that's why I just recently finished the first part of our Raise the Bar, Lead the World Tour where we were looking for that. We're looking for examples where it's already happening, but we didn't go to places that something's happening around teacher pipelines or mental health supports or academic excellence or career-connected learning or multilingualism, which are key policy pillars of our administration. We could go and find an example of that, but where we went is not just where it's already happening, but where it's been replicated. Because we want to show that our schools and our cities and our states are doing better, not in spite of the federal government, but because of what we're doing. So when I'm on this tour, I encourage all the local leaders, “Apply for federal funding opportunities that help further your mission. You have a mission at your local level but the federal priorities can align to your mission.” That's where we put out all of our grant information, on the [website]. [We want to] learn from people within their networks and tie it back to the federal funding, so they can create these really strong, durable, wide networks and get this through-line from the federal space to the local space and make things happen. That's why being out in the communities and visiting the promising practices we think helps create a long-term sustainable replicable model.

Bob:
Yeah, that's a powerful model. I'm going to pivot us a little bit now from innovation and spreading innovation to talk to you about how we might achieve some of our big goals. And the focus of this podcast is, how do we design education systems that put all students on pathways to adult success? This is also a goal that Department of Education shares. But it's easier said than done, right? What do you see as one of the biggest challenges standing in the way of our education system’s putting all students on a pathway to adult success?

Cindy:
Well, I don't have to tell educators this because they know it more than anybody, but education often ends up being the thing that's at the intersection of every problem that society has. So, what do we do with that? I think what we can do is identify all of the complex problems that exist and then figure out how to produce these multi-pronged solutions. I have heard way too often that what we're really good at in education, at the local level and the federal level, is what I call admiring the problem. talking about the problem and saying what's wrong…

Bob:
Conducting autopsies.

Cindy:
Yeah, and I'm not into the autopsy. I'd rather figure out how to do something before that happens. So we can read the statistics. We know that our public education system doesn't yet deliver on the hope and the promise of public education for all students. And I think that the way we move towards this pathway to adult success, and some of the strongest levers that we have, looking inside our Raise the Bar initiative, it's a whole-government approach where we've collaborated across agencies. [It’s not] one siloed department, the Department of Education, working on it. It's all of the Department of Education but it's also collaborating with all of the other agencies. We're working with the Department of Commerce, Department of Labor, Department of Transportation, with public-private partnerships that allow us to collaborate across agencies, because that's how we get to that long-term vision of delivering on the hope and promise. And we think it's super important that we're promoting intentional strategic collaborations with all the kinds of organizations that are connected to the education ecosystem. There's no silver bullet, there's no shortcut solution here that's going to get us to the ultimate hope and promise. It's going to take… sometimes people talk about a group project, when you're in school and you do a group project. It might take more time, maybe a little more stress to work with other people than to just do it yourself. But when it's done well, it’s going to be the thing that produces better results than when one individual contributor does it on their own. And we think to get better, to be better, to deliver on the hope and promise and raise the bar for all of our students, we've got to work together across agencies, across government and in public-private partnership.

Bob:
I wholeheartedly agree. And I think for too long, and I’m sure it was even a plan, we tended to reduce education to a bunch of soloists. This is your work, you do this, you do that, you do this, you just close your door and do it or see these kids and not those kids; not recognizing that we have to embrace the complexity and create the team that can deal with it. As opposed to making these little discrete chunks that don't that don't add up to a solution.

Cindy:
Yep, the time of the lone wolf is over. A soloist is not going to work. We're going to do it together and be synergistic in the outcomes because of it.

Bob:
And speaking of working together, one project or public private partnership that you and I are working together on is the National Partnership for Student Success, which is really bringing together the Department of Education, AmeriCorps. our Everyone Graduates Center, but also 150 nonprofits and many school districts and now a whole higher ed coalition of hopefully hundreds of universities with the aim to help realize the president's call to action: to have more adults serve in schools and in afterschool settings as mentors and tutors and success coaches and post-secondary advisors to help students not just recover from the pandemic, but really to thrive, which is the goal. And as we've been talking, partnership always sounds good and it is the answer, but it can be difficult to achieve. So why in this case is it worth the effort? Why is it important for schools and community partners to work more closely together to enable all students to get the supports they need when they need them?

Cindy:
Yeah. The way we define equity is, each and every student gets what they need, when they need it, in the way that they need it, and where they need it. And through this program that we have around our National Partnership for Student Success, it's, like you said, answering the President's call. We need more caring adults in schools, not less. We need more partnerships like this that will actually give us the fighting chance that we know our kids deserve. I really think that the strength of every one of our schools is reflected in the strength in our communities. What can we do to help? But if you don't have an organized, concerted effort to help people find the bridge into supporting their schools, you could end up just throwing a lot of spaghetti at the wall and hoping it sticks. This is a strategic approach that allows education to transcend the classroom and the school building. When we see community partners that work together to support the local schools, everyone wins. And school principals, I can speak for myself, and I know many principals I've talked to, [don’t] have the time to coordinate a robust program that brings in quality tutors and mentors and coaches. That is evidence-based, research-based, but still locally designed. Because there's just the principal, who has enough to do to manage the school. So when we create this partnership, the National Partnership for Student Success, it’s a call to action to everybody to help our kids [and] focus on developing their strengths, gifts, talents, and abilities. As I tour around the country, I keep seeing examples of how schools are re-imagining using the federal relief dollars, putting in these programs that help with the national partnership for students. This has all kinds of people finding their way back into the school in a meaningful way to support. And it gives a sense of purpose and belonging for the students, but also for the people in the community that want to come and help, ways that they're able to help, and I think this is a really clear example about how communities can wrap their arms around our public schools and ensure that every single student has the exquisite learning conditions that they deserve to thrive and to succeed.

Bob:
Yeah. I think that's part of this larger vision of creating these larger teams of adults working together with and for students and their families, and recognize that we need to increase the number of adults in the school building to meet all the many things schools are asked and need to do. So I started you off in high school, and now I'm going to move you up to college and say, imagine you were back in college, and the university was asking, “We’re asking more of our students to be mentors or tutors in our local schools.” Do you see yourself as being more of a mentor, a tutor, a post-secondary transition coach, or a success coach, which combines mentoring and tutoring? Which one would you sign up for?

Cindy:
Those are all the roles that we're featuring in the National Partnership for Student Success. I think it's important that we think about, what would I have done if I had that role? Ironically, I guess, it’s fun to mention that when I was in college, I had been a Girl Scout my whole life all the way through high school. I earned the Gold Award, which is equivalent to the Eagle Scout that people seem to know more about. So when I got to college, I wasn't done with my scouting. I went to the local Girl Scout headquarters in La Crosse, Wisconsin. I went to University of Wisconsin. And they gave me a troop. They're like, Wait, you're a college student and you want a troop? You're not… usually it's a mom that has a Brownie Scout. So I had a group of girls that I started with when they were in kindergarten and took them all the way through until the time I graduated, they were in fourth grade or third grade when I graduated. And so that role was one that was really familiar to me. I think it's more of a mentor that I connect to. That's kind of what a Girl Scout role was. Although when I was in school, I was studying to be a teacher, so I might have wanted to do tutoring, because tutoring would have been a chance to practice my teaching skills that I was learning in my college classes. But mostly I see myself as a probably a mentor. I think I like that one the best and that matches my skillset and my interests.

Bob:
Yeah, and it's one that is multifaceted. That can include some elements of tutoring and some elements of post-secondary, and even this idea of a success coach which is a powerful idea. So my next [question] building on this is this. As part of this National Partnership for Student Success, an element that was recently rolled out through a dear colleague letter, from the Department of Education in a White House briefing, was this call to action to higher education universities to increase the number of work-study students that are serving as mentors and tutors in local schools and afterschool programs. And that's one example of schools and universities working together. And one thing that our audience may or may not know is that the US Department of Education covers K-12 and higher education. So I'm just curious: in your travels, have you seen other examples of how colleges and universities could work more closely with their K-12 schools to put more kids on pathways to adult success?

Cindy:
Yeah, this ties back to the Raise the Bar Tour that I've just completed the first part of. It launched in January, right after Secretary Cardona gave his speech around the Raise the Bar, Lead the World Initiative. That's when I kicked off the national tour of places and people and programs that were demonstrating what we were looking for. The first stop that I did on the Raise the Bar Tour was Mesa, Arizona. It was Mesa Public School District. The reason I went there is to learn more about their partnership with Arizona State University. What they were implementing was a next-generation workforce initiative. I got to feature that on the first stop of the tour because it showed how institutions of higher education can work with the local public school system. In that innovative, exquisite partnership between Mesa Public Schools and ASU, they were collaboratively rethinking, along with their students and families in the community, what it looks like to have sustainable, high-impact school staffing solutions will effectively prepare all of their students and maybe bring them into the teaching workforce and create pathways for that. I think we were able to show this Next Generation Workforce Initiative as a way to invigorate and reinvent how educators can deliver instruction, can support students academically, socially, emotionally, and it develops a more resilient workforce. It was a great thing to feature and another great aspect of this Next Generation that we saw in Mesa is that they've strengthened their career and technical education pathway program for high school students to explore careers in education. It was [also] a sustainability model for teachers in Mesa public schools about how they want to stay in the profession and not leave. The superintendent in Mesa, Arizona, Andy Ferlus, said people aren't leaving the teaching profession, they're leaving the working conditions, when a teacher doesn't feel a sense of efficacy in the workplace. They featured a team collaboration model where teachers got to work together to support one another. When teachers have that planning time, they feel a greater sense of efficacy; and they will never leave the profession if they feel like they're making a difference. This both kept people in the profession and simultaneously created a pathway so high school students could be trained by ASU and the school district to become reading tutors and then go serve in the schools. By the time the high school student graduated from the program in education, they were trained reading instructors with practical experience working with students. The district hoped that would create a stronger pathway for young people to return to the school district and ultimately be hired and stay in the profession. That's what it looks like when a community comes together and you work with the local college to create a solution that is highly scalable and replicable. I guarantee you it's evidence-based too.

Bob:
Yeah, that’s such a rich example because it has the elements of collective efficacy. We do more as a team than alone, but also, students themselves could do more than we think. They can be trained when they're in high school to be a very effective reading tutor, reading instructor, and get that real taste of what being an educator is, which then excites them more to take that up as a profession.

Cindy:
Exactly.

Bob:
So it brings so many nice elements together. Let's bring this home by focusing on the nation's students. They've been through a lot in the past few years. One thing I think we have learned from the pandemic is that we did not fully appreciate how important students’ feeling connected to school was until we lost it. As you know, many of our schools and communities are still struggling with high rates of students being disconnected and being chronically absent and facing mental health challenges. So how might we better design school so all students feel agency, belonging, and connectedness?

Cindy:
That kind of hit home when you said, until we lost it, did we really appreciate the value of in-person, brick-and-mortar teaching and learning? Did we ever imagine that it could actually disappear for a time? I don't think anyone imagined that at the scale that it happened. I do say that, although many of our schools had to close for brick and mortar, schools were closed, I saw firsthand and taught myself online classes or hybrid learning, and hearts and minds were open. Kids and teachers were able to create a sense of belonging, a sense of connectedness. We used to say in the classroom, brick and mortar, if you can't reach him, you can't teach him. Well, we quite literally meant it during the pandemic. If we couldn't reach him, we couldn't teach him. We needed to find connectivity, both like Wi-Fi and hardware connectivity, but we also had to connect hearts and minds so that learning could continue. And so what did we learn from this? I say, once you see it, you see it. Once you learn it, you can't unlearn it. We have seen and learned things. We had a level of intimacy in terms of understanding the conditions that our students are coming from. We understood our students and their families way more than we ever have before, and families saw teaching and learning up close and personal way more than they ever did before. So, what should we do from that? We can learn, like you said, to better design schools so that there's a sense of agency, and with this very unique circumstance, that was so wide-scale. And I think that the first thing we have to do is we have to acknowledge that we can design schools. It is completely possible to design a school so that all students feel a sense of belonging. We know how to do it. And it's not just we know how to do it in a “we hope it works” kind of way, there's science about this. We can follow the science on how to do this and how to create the conditions for all students to develop and thrive. It's called the science of learning and development. It is proven, it is evidence-based, we've seen it in action. I used to say during the pandemic, science was going to get us out of the pandemic, but the arts were going to get us through the pandemic. Well, the science of learning and development is what's going to inform us what our students need so that we can truly deliver it in a scaled way. What do we know the science of learning and development says what students need? It's pretty simple. They need environments filled with safety and belonging. They need positive developmental relationships with adults and peers. They need rich learning experiences. They need an opportunity to develop skills and healthy habits and they need integrated support systems that meet their needs. So that's why I really love what we're doing with our partnering with NPSS. We can elevate the kinds of supports and invest in students’ mental health and well-being so that academic excellence can occur. There are plenty of models to show how it works. It's not just a theoretical framework, although it is a very powerful theoretical framework. It translates into practical day-to-day design of schools and follows the research and adjusts accordingly. We can find the like-minded visionaries around our country that are already doing it and implementing the programming all day every day. And then we can show what it looks like to have a sense of belonging and connectedness so it can be replicable everywhere. And then we share what we're doing. share it across the country so that people can see it, believe it, and do it themselves.

Bob:
Yeah, what I think is so powerful about the science of learning and development, is that so much of what it calls for is based on relationships, which are sort of like water or air. It's there, we have to activate it and use it, but it's not some super expensive thing we have to invest in. I think there's a lot of power there that's really actionable and is about, how we organize human connection, right? So, as we bring this to a close, is there anything else we should talk about or you'd like to bring up about designing education to meet the needs of our students and communities in the 21st century?

Cindy:
Well, I think the theme that you've so beautifully woven throughout this whole conversation is the idea of humanness. And all of the answers live within the communities and the hearts and minds of people doing the work and creating the opportunities for people to work together to deliver on what they're hoping best to do. And don't look outside for the answer. There's a historic amount of funding. There's a historic need right now. So, what do we do with this exact moment? We’ll look back and say, what did we do with this time? The kind of money that's being invested, we're not going to buy our way out of the pandemic or into the future. I'll be the first one to say, we always need more funding in education, we have had less than adequate funding, but it's not the money, it's how we use the money. If the money is not invested in the people that are going to be able to do the work and have the supports that they need to do it, we're not buying things. Teachers need more time together. Students need more time with each other. It's that investing in the people that is the long-term sustainable, durable thing that we do so that we can say 30 years from now, what happened because of this pandemic are things that actually gave us the entry into what education can truly look like. And I think once and for all, we can deliver on the hope and the promise of public education in our country because of what we've learned and because of the way we chose to recover by putting human beings at the center of it.

Bob:
That's a beautiful way to end, right? Investing in the people and take a human-centered approach. This has been a great conversation. Thank you, Deputy Secretary Marten.

Cindy:
Thank you very much.

Bob:
In closing, what our conversation today has illuminated is that local innovation will be at the heart of designing education systems that work for all students and puts them on a pathway to adult success. But this does not mean we're asking schools to do this alone. They should work in partnership with their communities, community groups, higher education, and workforce partners, and this joint effort can be fueled, networked, and magnified through supportive federal education policies. As we close, we want to ask you to please subscribe to Designing Education to stay up to date on all the revolutionary work happening in our schools. If you're enjoying the show, leave us a five-star review. Also, please share the show with a friend or colleague on social media. This has been Bob for the Everyone Graduates Center and the Pathways to Adult Success project. Thank you, everyone, for listening and we invite you to listen to the other episodes in our Designing Education series wherever you listen to podcasts. Onward and be well.