Rethinking High School for the 21st Century with Paolo DeMaria

In the season finale of Designing Education and our yearlong exploration of student success systems, we sit down with Paolo DeMaria, president and CEO of the National Association of State Boards of Education (NASBE), to explore how we can transform our nation’s high schools to meet the needs and opportunities of the 21st century and how student success systems can play a key role in this transformation. From building stronger relationships to using predictive indicators for progress monitoring, these systems offer a blueprint for schools to better support every student.

This conversation builds on our previous episode with Tim Knowles of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, diving deeper into how high schools can shift from credit based to learning based, from reactive to proactive student supports, co-creating new designs with educators, students and families. Tune in for a thought-provoking conversation on transforming high schools to better serve every student!

Transcript

Robert Balfanz (01:00.206)

Hello and welcome to season three of the Designing Education Podcast. Today we'll be talking to Paolo DeMaria, president of the National Association of State Boards of Education. We will be discussing how student success systems can play a key role in redesigning our high schools. We can't wait to start the conversation. But before we do, we want to take a moment to remind you to subscribe to the Designing Education Podcast wherever you listen to podcasts. Subscribe to the Designing Education Podcast and never miss an episode.

Robert Balfanz (01:33.378)

Welcome to the Designing Education podcast series. I'm Dr. Robert Balfanz, director of the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University. In this episode, we are talking with Paolo DeMaria from the National Association of the State Boards of Education, also known as NASBE. It is the eighth and final episode of our third season of conversations we are having with education leaders, thinkers, and practitioners from across the country. With them, we are talking about what it will take to create an education system that truly empowers all young people and sets them on a pathway to adult success.

This season, we've been doing a deep dive into student success systems. They are a means to better organize how our schools support the success of all their students by focusing on relationships, progress monitoring all students with holistic predictive indicators, and creating unified student support teams which focus on prevention, problem solving, and co-creating solutions with students and families.

Today with Paulo, we are going to explore how student success systems can help high schools redesign themselves to meet the challenges of the 21st century. Our conversation will build on the discussion we had in our prior episode with Tim Knowles of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. 

So, let's get to it. Paulo, it's so great to have you here today. And we start our podcast with the same question for all our guests. When you were in high school, what was a good day?

Paolo DeMaria (02:59.858)

Bob, let me say it's great to be with you. I very much enjoyed my high school experience. What's interesting to note is that I actually switched high schools after my sophomore year. So, I did the first two years when we were living in Scotch Plains, New Jersey, and then the second two years in Greenville, South Carolina. So, you can imagine what kind of disruption that caused. But to me, a good day consisted of a variety of things. 

First of all, the opportunity to interact with friends and just see, you know, my, my peers and talk about things that we had shared interests. I'm a big lover of learning even to this very day. And so, I was always excited by the classes that I was taking. I also was a member of the choir. So, I would always welcome, you know, that choir course. Maybe we were preparing for a concert or what have you? I did, you know, school plays and school musicals. So, there's always that after school, you know, are we doing a rehearsal or something like that? So, to me, that's what a good day was - all those things giving me great opportunities and frankly a lot of enjoyment.

Robert Balfanz (04:06.606)

That's really interesting because many of our guests often lean towards one side or the other of the equation. They talk about some very great academic or learning experiences they had or they tend to go towards the extracurriculars. And you sort of said that I liked it all, right?

Paolo DeMaria (04:22.396)

Yeah, that doesn't mean I didn't have my challenges, especially, you know, being a new kid in a high school, it's always, it's kind of awkward. But, but yeah, I did. I did.

Robert Balfanz (04:28.652)

Right. Yeah.

Robert Balfanz (04:38.038)

And I think that really sets us up for our conversation today, because like we're talking about how do we design high schools to be places where everyone wants to be every day. And it seems like you have some good lived experience with that, right?  Before we get into the heart of it, let's just orientate our audience a little bit. If you just share briefly, what do state boards of education do?

Paolo DeMaria (04:47.429)

Absolutely, absolutely.

Paolo DeMaria (04:59.9)

Yeah, this is a great question. Obviously, we get that a lot. You ask the average person, does your state have a state board of education? Do you know anybody on your state board of education? And it usually is not something that people are totally tuned into. Although that's true often about different governance. Many people may not know their own state legislator or other members of governance structures at the lower level. But state boards of education are a policymaking entity that sort of sits in the in the space between the legislature. Like we all know legislature is the other one that sort of passed the laws, the big contours that define, you know, what's going to happen in a state education setting. And then between the legislature and then the state education agency, the Department of Education, that actually does implementation, the state board usually sits between those, which means what they do is they'll take laws passed by the legislature and either amplify or deepen them with more nuance, right? 

The legislature might say you have to have standards for what students are going to be able to do. And the state board may be the one that actually has to design the lengthy documents that include all those standards. And then they then work with the state education agency in terms of implementation and the kinds of things that have to happen to actually make those the laws and the rules that are enacted come to fruition. So, they'll get more into detailed policy development that may be too complicated for a legislature to deal with. And that's exactly the kinds of things they do. Establish content standards and it kind of gives them a voice that they can use to promote priorities. They may not have a lot of formal authority, but they may be looking at data and listening to constituents and saying, you know what, we ought to pay attention more to this thing. And then they can drive the agenda for what that state might be doing in terms of its education system, reaching an improved and an excellent state.

Robert Balfanz (07:18.112)

So that's, you know, that's really sets us up because like, know, in a way you're saying they are quite an influential body and sort of multiple dimensions, right? Some formal and some sort of informal ways. 

Let's bring this a little bit towards high school redesign. I know that NASBE is working with state boards of education on sort of this idea of high school redesign. Just briefly, what does that mean?

Paolo DeMaria (07:28.038)

Yes, exactly. Exactly.

Paolo DeMaria (07:43.612)

So, as you can imagine, we're a membership organization, so we're very tuned into what our members are talking about. And we found that a lot of them were thinking and or doing things to, you know, contemplate a different way that the high school experience might look. 

So many times we have defined what we want students to be able to do and to know in terms of number of classes taken. You need four units of English, whatever that means. You need three units of science, whatever that means. And boards have increasingly seen that, is that really the best definition of what we want students to know and be able to do coming out of high school? So, they've brought together task forces and had town meetings and done a number of things to flesh out and build greater buy into a much richer array of skills and abilities that high school students should come away with. 

About a year and a half ago we published - our flagship publication is called The State Education Standard and we published an edition of that that was called High Schools That Matter and it really struck a chord with our members because it included a number of articles from researchers and experts and others that had actually done work in this space and it really sent a signal to say, hey, you know, now is a really good time to be rethinking this thing that was created and defined a long time ago that hasn't changed very much and is still operating in a very, you know, very much of kind of an industrialized model. And yet we can make it so much better. A lot of times they're inspired because they're already high schools that have taken on the redesign and the transformation work. And when you walk into them, you kind of get the sense of, this is what a different experience in high school might look like. How can we create the conditions for more people to pursue those kind of innovative approaches?

Robert Balfanz (09:43.342)

So, we sort of started this conversation in our last episode about high school redesign with Tim Knowles from Carnegie. And I pointed out that in many ways, the American high school is one of the greatest inventions of the 20th century. The rapid spread of this, so the U.S. became the first nation with universal and free high school education. That's often seen by economists as a driving force of the nation's economic growth, but it was also a powerful entity for social cohesion, right? Because in many, many, many places, there was just one high school in town or two at most. And that meant everyone from that locale went to the same high school, right? And it was a great sort of place to build social cohesion for the community. 

All those things are still necessary and important, but the world has also changed. And the American high school was also initially designed in a time when most students ended their formal education after high school. That was the big advance. You're getting high school instead of an elementary education. But today we know, right, to really get to that place where you could support your family and you have all the skills and knowledge to be at the forefront of the 21st century, you got to do something beyond high school. So now it's a steppingstone and not an endpoint. And that's a change of mission, right, which sort of requires a change of design.

And that gets us to this question we've been already getting into, is, what are some of the key aspects of high schools that we might need to redesign for a new century and a new purpose?

Paolo DeMaria (12:06.61)

Yeah, so I mean, it's one of those things that I think, I think are open to our imagination. So, I mean, it starts with the very essence of the place and the time. We think of, OK, you've got to go to this place and be there for this time period in order to “learn” at a high school level. But we all know that we as adults, we learn in lots of different ways and lots of different places and lots of different times and durations. Why can't we bring that to the high school experience?

And students, if they're passionate about something, they're going to pursue that learning many times outside a high school setting.  You're a member of you know, of a club that's, you know, rock climbing or that's civil war reenacting or, you know, that's pursuing, you know, something else. You're learning information, but it's not done in the context of the formal education. And so, you know, we don't necessarily give you, you know, acknowledge that that learning is happening because it's not happening in the place and the time that we've defined as where that has to happen. 

I think the duration of learning is also an issue. I mean, right now we're seeing a lot of places where we're blurring the lines between what high school learning is and what college learning is. And so, people are taking college classes while they're in high school, and that's perfectly fine. And to the extent that students are capable of doing that, they can be doing it on their high school campus, but they can also be going to the college campus, or they can be doing it online. 

I think we see a lot of places working on work-based learning experiences. I think about all the things we as adults have learned through the jobs that we've held. Why aren't we doing more of that with kids? And when you visit a high school that has a robust internship program with relationships with business, and then you talk with some of those businesspeople invariably, you get them saying, oh my God, I never knew kids could do this kind of thing. They've come in, they've gotten a handle on what it is we do. They're making valuable contributions. And while the businessperson is excited, then you talk to the student, and they're telling you exactly all the different things that they've learned. And what's more, if they see the relevance, they see how what they're learning is connected to what's happening in the real world. And I think those are some of the attributes that when you talk to students that are in a more traditional high school, often they're the ones that are shrugging saying, I don't know why I'm learning this. I don't know what relevance it has. And that causes them to disconnect. 

So, I think another thing that is ripe for attention is this idea of integrating subject areas, right? When I do my job, I don't like do the English part in the morning, and then I do the math part in the middle of the day. Why are we in these sort of silos of disciplines when, math and science and even math and reading or literature and social studies are integrated and allowing students to have greater choice in how they acquire the different knowledge and skills that we want them to acquire and doing it in an integrated fashion, I think has a lot of promise for again, building that relevancy, that enjoyment, nurturing that passion that students might have. 

I'm also a big believer in like project-based learning. We tend to see a lot of project-based learning in that kind of career tech space where the students might be in an auto shop, or they might be in construction trades and they can see the results of the work that they're doing and the learning that accompanies it. Anytime I go to a high school, and I witness a project-based learning experience, the students have such a rich way of talking about that project and all the different skills that they developed and had to apply in the course of that project. And I think it really gives them things to talk about. I always envision when you're interviewing for a job, it's easy to say, well, I took these classes and that class. But when you have a project to actually describe and engage in the back and forth with the person interviewing you, you can tell so much of a richer story and convey what interests you, the kind of skills that you're good at in the context of their project, than you can otherwise. 

Robert Balfanz (16:37.902)

Yeah, and so I'm just going t, let's build on this and let's see how far we're willing to go. So the Grad Partnership, where NASBE is a key community partner, just put out its first annual report on the state of educational attainment in America called Humbly Educating America. And one statistic that really stood out to me was that in 21, 22, that first year back sort of from the pandemic, when we know chronic absenteeism rates spiked, but you know, high schools are often large places - in that year, there were close to 5,000 high schools that had 400 or more chronically absent students. 

And, you know, one way to think about that is to say, it's sort of like the students were voting with their feet and saying, like, they didn't really believe they needed to be in school every day to succeed anymore. So can you imagine a day when, routinely as we were sort of suggesting students spend three days a week in a more traditional setting and two days more out in the community learning or at home virtually.

Paolo DeMaria (17:41.212)

It's funny, because now I told you my story about my high school, let me tell you about my kids high school. They went to a high school here in Columbus, Ohio called the Graham School. And at the time, the Graham School's model had kids in internships two days a week. And it was so funny, I was really kind of naive back then, because I would ask the head of schools, I said, if kids are out of the classroom, two days a week, when does the learning take place? And he kind of smiled at me. And he said, You'll see, you'll see. And sure enough, I saw it. 

My kids had, you know, these exciting and again, it happened in an urban area. And I know rural areas can sometimes be challenged with a model that would have students in in sort of non-school based settings. But the learning was really, really rich. And not only were they learning skills, but they also began to understand like this is something I might like to do as a career. And this is something I might not like to do as a career. And I think that gave them a richer understanding of of of what's out there. 

So, I think you're absolutely right. I think you can envision different modalities and locations of learning as part of a broader approach to helping students master the skills and knowledge that they need to succeed in the future and that we should be open to that and not hesitate about that.  Sometimes people also throw up the barriers. Well, what about this? What about insurance? What about workers' comp? But people are doing this in different places. So, we should sort of figure out, you know, how they've worked through those things and then find ways to, you know, embrace them and leverage them. But again, not use it as a way to, you know, sort of, well, this is less rigorous, we're going to make it easier for students because when you talk to a student who's actually gone through a very rich internship kind of program, they don't, they don't, 

Robert Balfanz (19:27.566)

Well, they work much more. They work much more. Yeah.

Paolo DeMaria (19:35.026)

Absolutely, absolutely. And they, and they do it with a certain passion because they love that they're acquiring the knowledge that's gonna help them be part of this team doing this thing that the team is doing. And it really creates a very beautiful, beautiful experience. 

I also love those high schools that are embedded in businesses. Cleveland has a high school that's right there in one of the hospitals. And those kids are like working side by side with those practitioners. And those practitioners love the fact that there's a high school right there because they know that they're going to have employee needs over the long term. If the more they can do to build those students, not only their skill set, but their love for that field and that discipline, the better. And of course, those kinds of settings, very integrated because, know, as you know, nurses and healthcare practitioners, they're using mathematics, they're using, you know, communication skills, English language skills, science skills, in all the work that they do. And the kids really have a rich experience to see how it's all connected.

Robert Balfanz (20:31.32)

One of the things I find interesting is we, again, when people sometimes say like, yeah, but they're not learning if they're on the classroom is that, one of the reasons why we had the seat time and requirements from the Carnegie unit, things like that is that when you think about when high schools were just being built and being widely disseminated as a mass institution in the 40s, 50s, and all the way you could argue to the age of the internet is the only place you could...It was only in a high school you could have mass dissemination of sort of, you know, the next level of academic knowledge or a library. Those are the only two places you could go. 

And now we and our kids, right, have access to many, many sources beyond that classroom to get access to information, not even information, knowledge, right? We have more opportunities, so we need to take advantage of them, right? And not say like, we have to stick to it. 

But my question is, and this gets back a little bit to the, to the role of, of state boards of education or in general, is like, does this mean the Carnegie unit is dead? And is that going to go down without a fight?

Paolo DeMaria (21:37.48)

Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. I don't know that it's death or not is as relevant as like - so for instance, I used to be the state superintendent in Ohio, and one of the things we did was we - there was legislation that was passed that allowed districts to grant credit for work based learning, right? Or to grant credit for knowledge acquired through other methods beyond the high school. So, it actually appropriated this credit concept in a way that allowed other alternative learning modalities to be fit into it, right? Now, I would argue that's less than an ideal approach, but it's a start, right? It doesn't sort of throw aside the idea that you gotta have some English skills, you gotta have some math skills, you gotta have some science skills, and if we can determine that you've reached those things, we can grant you credit that's not necessarily seat time based, right? 

But if we're going to do that, we might as well move. That's why I love you know, things like the mastery transcript consortium, and some of the other programs that have emerged to sort of say, Look, here's what we want you to know and be able to do. And so, the minute you know, and be able to do those things, we're going to start checking them off. And if you can acquire, you know, and know all you need to know in this particular area, and you know, in three weeks, or in one year, you whatever it is, time is variable. Knowledge is what what's, either fixed or we set a minimum for what you want to know. And you always have the ability to go beyond that. Right. So, you, you pivot away from the seat time requirement, and you get more into, know, what do you really know and how do you document it? And this fits beautifully with what's happening. We see happening in the the employer community where it's really skills based hiring. Right. We don't don't tell me where you've been, tell me what skills you have. Right. And it's just so logical.

And can we configure the high school experience to kind of match that? It's like, okay, what do you know? Because then that's so much a much richer way to communicate. Think about, what is my high school diploma actually communicated if I were to plop it down right now? Or even my transcript, maybe I got a C in algebra one. What does that even say? Does that tell you which parts of algebra one I mastered and which ones I didn't? And so could we have a tool that allows us to more effectively and in a more nuanced way communicate what it is that we actually know and are able to do. And we kind of do that all the time in our resumes, right? If we're diligent about how we write them. And it's like, great, why can't we envision a concept like that for high school students?

Robert Balfanz (24:07.192)

Yeah, and again, like the point of that, that will seem, that will engage students much more showing like I was, had different modalities of how I could learn these important skills and how I can document, can do them rather than I'm just like punching my time clock essentially, right? By showing up and like, you know, not getting in trouble and going home at the end of the day and doing some of my homework, right? 

Just one more question on the contours of high school redesign and challenges and possibilities is so we've done some of this work as well. I've always noted that the more a school team involves students in this sort of design, the more ambitious designs they would end up with just because the kids are the front line and the front line. And also, they're not constrained by what once was, right? But I can also see a situation where if we just give maximum flexibility for local design, that maybe some important attributes of a high school that they're not aware of would get lost. 

And I'll give you one example from a conversation I had with some kids, and they were trying to figure out how they would design their high school and this group of kids, and each group of kids is different, right? But they were sort of like, not being too excited that they had to take four years of math with no options, right? That was a requirement. And I said, I can understand that. But how many of you know, do you know that like, if you want to go to engineering in college, you really have to take calculus in high school not to be behind the curve. And they weren't really aware of that, right? And when I gave that information, then, you know, some of them changed their votes, right? So, I'm just wondering about this thing about how we have some, you know, guidance and guardrails and are there any non-negotiables that, you know, all our high schools still need to have?

Paolo DeMaria (25:57.5)

Right, right. Yeah, I mean, I think the answer to that is yes. But I also think that the answer to that is can we make it more interesting, right? Because I I mean, I'm I'm cut from the cloth that every student is a math student. Everybody can be good at math, including calculus, right? And that and that it's really only the ways in which students have been, you know, instructed or taught where at some point somebody has given up on them or not really understood how they grasp the subject in order for them to master it.

Paolo DeMaria (26:27.07)

I remember my AP calculus teacher; she did such an amazing job. And there was a certain elegance and relevance to it, right? She’d draw these, these curves and then say, okay, let's say we want to define the area under this curve, we could draw a rectangle, then we can draw two rectangles, and then we can draw three rectangles. I mean, the whole notion of limits, derivatives and so forth, and so on began to emerge in a way that made a lot of sense. 

And frankly, I think you could find work-based settings that help emphasize the need for those higher levels of mathematics and not necessarily compromise on the skills and abilities of algebra two and calculus, while also showing their relevance in real world problems. I think this is one of the things when you talk to people who are in the midst of doing, like, how do we transform math to be more powerful? You can make it more powerful by showing those real-world applications. 

And I think we can also have rigorous mathematical competency building that isn't necessarily always in the calculus strand, right? Look at all the people that are using statistics every single day from journalists to nurses to people who are working in manufacturing monitoring process, process quality, and things like that. So, statistics strands, discrete mathematics, quantitative reasoning strands that are very highly rigorous. It doesn't always necessarily have to be on that calculus track. And we're seeing a lot of high schools and states, frankly, redesigning the high school math pathways in the spirit of providing greater variety that actually bring greater relevance to certain career disciplines.

Robert Balfanz (28:08.952)

Yeah, no, I think that's really the way to look at it, right? There's some core things we have to do, but it doesn't mean we have to do them as they've always been done. 

Paolo DeMaria (28:15.518)

Right, right, right. Anymore, everybody needs to know math. No question. You need to have a comfort level and a capacity because even, you will learn more math if you're comfortable with it and willing to sort of be a student as you grow in your understanding. You can't let somebody say, I'm not a math person. It's never been sort of acceptable. We've kind of let it as a society.

Robert Balfanz (28:40.492)

Right, yep, yep. So, take a consumer math class and be done with it, right?

Paolo DeMaria (28:45.032)

That's right. You've got to be, we've got to say, no, no, we're going to help you figure it out and in a way that you can understand.

Robert Balfanz (28:54.542)

So, I want to take us now to talk about the transition from high school to what comes next. And it strikes me that, you know, in our age, current age of diverse thought, that there's still some broad agreement out there on what's needed to build these stronger pathways from high school to some sort of post-secondary schooling or training and to the workplace. Because, you know, a big challenge high school students face is like, where do I go next? Is it a four-year college, a two-year college? Am I looking for a certification, an apprenticeship? Am I going to do national service? 

And the other thing that we've observed, and many people have is that the pace of change in our economy and the types of jobs that are available are now changing almost like two times a generation. So, there's jobs out there that, for my children, that I'm not aware of, right? And from time immemorial, kids got their advice from their parents and their family and their extended family and their neighbors on what comes next. In some cases, they're just not aware of what's out there, right? Because of the pace of change. 

So, my sense is the closer we get to the ground at the state and local level, there's maybe more agreement on this than maybe at the other levels. But I'm just wondering, am I being too optimistic or what has your experience been working with state boards of education about this idea of a broader sense of agreement on how we build pathways from high school to what comes next?

Paolo DeMaria (30:17.246)

You know, I love your optimism and I'm optimistic too. Because again, if you look back and see the transitions that have taken place, you know that ultimately people will adapt and accommodate as will the systems that are in place. I mean, which all the more reason speaks to some of the skillsets, especially this idea of learning to learn, right? Not being afraid when something new happens and being, you know, willing to dive in and understand that new thing so that you're capable enough of using it. 

You know, I mean, you know, I'm old enough to remember when there weren't personal computers, right? I remember my first experience with a personal computer. And then I think today of how much that and the mobile phone and other technologies have changed things. But it's also prompted me to look to, to have to learn new things. And yet my disposition that hopefully you got from my first sentence of like, I'd love to learn. Like, I'm not afraid to dive into something that seems complicated and try to sort through it. 

You know, sometimes there are things that do discourage me, and I don't feel like I'm capable of learning. But I'm, you know, by and large, I'm willing to try and experience that. And I think the more we can do to develop, that's why, you know, everything from, you know, language skills to scientific and scientific method kinds of things to, to mathematical capability that is, you know, fluid enough so that you can master new things to, you know, understanding, you know, systems approaches and you know, critical thinking and the way to work in teams. But we all have opportunities to sort of master that skill set. And then 10 years from now, we'll be having another conversation saying, yeah, I remember before we had artificial intelligence, I would do this, without the help of AI. And now AI is doing it all for me, right?

Robert Balfanz (32:17.703)

Right. I remember what, yeah. Right. Remember, they'll say, I remember when AI first came around...

Paolo DeMaria (32:26.654)

That's right. So, I think it's within our capability. I don't think that we need to be so precise. And sometimes I think the enlightened employers who are actually in high school say, I want kids working in my shop, sometimes there are ones that are really focused on, I just need them to do X. I don't need them to learn anything. I don't need them to understand why they're doing X. I just need them to do X. And I think that's so unfortunate because I think, I think the employer community itself benefits when they're actually cultivating the skill sets, because they know their business is going to change. So why not cultivate a set of skills that is in, that things will change mindset rather than I just need you to do A, B, and C.  And when A, B, and C are no longer necessary because they're being done by, you know, a robot or something else, then you're no longer necessary. It's like, no, I want you to learn and grow into other responsibilities and duties and practices, because that's how you're going to sustain your career and frankly help my business succeed.

Robert Balfanz (33:31.342)

Yep, so we can, we'll both be optimistic together on that one. 

So, I want to really end our conversation by bringing it back to student success systems and the role they could play in both high school redesign and the transition from high school to post-secondary schooling or training. And just to remind our listeners, you know, at their heart, you know, student success systems are a means to progress monitor important outcomes and indicators and then organize sort of proactive, preventative, as well as targeted and customized responses as needed by combining sort of both evidence-based strategies with the wisdom of the school staff, the teachers, the students, and their families. 

And so, I just wanted to, we'll put our heads together here and think that, you know, these systems initially were built for, you know, to keep kids on track to graduation and, you know, progress monitor their attendance and their course performance. And that's still incredibly valuable and important thing to do, but there's a, you know, I believe there's a utility beyond that, right? And we started thinking about some of these redesign efforts and what things we're talking about, things like know, mastery learning, right? How are you going to keep track of what the students have mastered and, you know, make you be able to get there early when kids have it, right? As opposed to later. 

And this whole idea of giving kids a range of exposures, experiences, and applications to the world of work and, you know, other things out there in the wider world. How do we make sure that all kids are actually getting that right? And not just some. And it also strikes me that our schools aren't really set up, you know, from working with them to really this idea to progress all students on these and then have this system of prevention, problem solving and mitigation to make sure they get it. 

So, you know, just wonder what your thoughts are about how we might be able to expand this idea of student success systems to this, you know, another level of utility about keeping track of these new elements that redesign will be important, both from any way from mastery learning or, you know, are we equally giving all our kids the same chance to be exposed to the world of work, right?

Paolo DeMaria (35:20.829)

Right, right.

Paolo DeMaria (35:28.156)

Right, right. Yeah, and it's funny because I think it speaks to the evolution of how we view students, right? Back in the industrial age, we actually wanted to treat everybody the same. And it was up to you whether you did well or not. Because we really didn't have the tools to be very individualized. 

And now, I mean, and I think this is another area where AI can help us because the goal would be if we're collecting, if we have a lot more data points about Paulo de Maria and what he knows. Not just that, like right now a counselor might look at my transcript and say, well, you haven't taken this math class yet, or you haven't taken the science class yet, right? In the future, will be you have acquired these competencies, but not these other competencies. And so, we need to work on helping you acquire those competencies, whatever format or modality it might take. And a student might actually own that process a little bit more themselves, because if we create the structures that allow us to say, to Paulo, you know these things, but you don't know these things. And here are the ways that maybe you could learn those things. I think we can get much more nuanced and personalized and then, and then, mine the data about Paulo that helps us better understand what are the kinds of supports he needs? What might his career interests be so that we can target him to internships that speak to that so that rather than dealing with every student the same way, we're trying to deal with every student in very individualized and customized ways.

Now, guidance counselors will freak out at this concept because they're saying, well, we're already overloaded. But I think what happens is if you enable it with technology and actually allow a broader set of actors in the education system to own the work, including the student, that you could actually create a much more powerful, where the student support systems that you talk about aren't really run by a person as much as are infused across the enterprise. And everybody sort of shares ownership in what does Paulo need to succeed and how do we help him get there? And I may in fact help to define what that is and how it happens.

Robert Balfanz (37:32.472)

Right, we're trying to really distribute that guidance function on a wider range of both technologies and people. Because even if we doubled our ratio of counselors, they would still have too big a load, right? Right, yeah.

Paolo DeMaria (37:42.492)

That's right. That's right. The numbers are so far out of whack that it's, there are other ways to try to get at that reality.

Robert Balfanz (37:51.022)

Right. Yeah. So, this has been a great conversation, Paolo. We could have gone on all day. Is there anything else you'd like to share or tell the audience? Or is there a website that they could go to to visit or find resources?

Paolo DeMaria (38:04.062)

Well, you can always go to nasbe.org to see the kinds of things that NASBE is working on. 

I do want to say one thing because I think, you when I think about the barriers to high school transformation, you know, to me, the biggest one is our own, you know, adults own perceptions of what high school was for them and should look like. Right? 

And I use myself as an example, when my kids were enrolling in a high school that had a very different approach to learning, my initial thinking was, well, wait a minute, my high school didn't look like that and I turned out fine or it was fine for me or fine for lots of other people. 

I think we have to be willing to set that aside and listen to not only the student voice, but also those who are the adults and administrators that are designing those new approaches and frankly feed into it with our own experiences beyond high school and be willing to embrace the new ideas in terms of differences in place, in time, in duration, in, you know, in mastery and what have you, you because the minute a parent still wants, did you get an A or a B in a class, you kind of have lost this idea of, you know, like, like, no, what we're really working on is the mastery of these concepts. It's really not, you know, reducing it to a letter grade, you know, because when you said, well, my student passes with a C, you're actually agreeing that they only acquired a certain type of knowledge and not all the knowledge that that probably was best in that class. We need to sort of stop thinking in those terms. 

Because a lot of times when, you know, the other point I want to make is there are a lot of places doing great work in high school transformation. So, I would encourage anybody listening, find those places, visit those places, you will have an amazing experience. But a lot of times they're like startups, because it's easier to start up a high school that has these attributes than it necessarily is to take a high school that's already operating and begin to infuse like really different approaches. But, but it, that too can be done. 

Robert Balfanz (40:02.935)

But I've seen those, those are out there too though. They're out there too.

Paolo DeMaria 

That's right. You can't, yes, that's right. And so, you know, be on the lookout for those too, and, and, and use those to inspire other people to say, Well, look, if they can do it, then we can do it too. And it may, you have to sequence it so that your seniors are still kind of ending under the old regime and the, the new students are coming in under the new regime. But, you know, you'll, you'll, you'll see the power of what the change can yield.

Robert Balfanz (40:28.078)

Yeah, and you know, I think the other advice too is, know, when schools have those parents with those questions, invite them into the process. Say, join us and help us. Let's look at our portrait of a graduate or like look at our goals and figure out like, are we really organized to get there for all our kids? Right.

Paolo DeMaria (40:45.032)

Co-design with students, co-design with families, co-design with community members. And that way you have the investment in the success of the new model and people will help make sure it's impact.

Robert Balfanz (40:48.238)

Yeah.

Robert Balfanz (40:58.368)

Because the good news is people really care about their high schools. They often see them as having transformative effects on their lives. And so, they're serious about it. So, let's invite them in, right? 

So, this has been wonderful. Thank you so much. This is a great conversation. And I'll just close this out by saying that traditionally the federal government, state departments of education, local and state school boards have focused on outcomes and asked schools to show them what they've accomplished.

You know, typically they provide some guardrails and guidance, but largely they leave it up to schools and maybe with some district support to figure out how to achieve those outcomes. This is often what we call local control, right? And there's a lot of people who greatly value that. 

But as we discussed today, the American high school needs to be redesigned or re-transformed to enable our students to be prepared and ready for the opportunities and challenges of our time, right? This century, not last century. To do that, we may need to replace some of the traditional guardrails of quality control in high schools like the Carnegie unit, right, which equated learning with the hours of instruction in formal classrooms. But in giving up guardrails and embracing the freedom to design better high schools, we need to make sure there are still means to know if all our students are receiving the educational opportunities, experiences, and supports they need to be on a pathway to adult success.

This is where student success systems could play a role. If we progress monitor all students on key predictive indicators of school success, but also the exposures, experiences, learning opportunities, and applications they are participating in outside the classroom, we will know sooner rather than later who needs additional supports or opportunities, and also where our high school redesign or transformation efforts are succeeding, and where they might need a little more refinement or improvement. 

This brings our third season of Designing Education and our deep dive into student success systems to a close. As we close, we want to ask you to please subscribe to the Designing Education podcast series 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. Also, please share the show with a friend or colleague or on social media.

Robert Balfanz (43:13.08)

This has been Robert Balfanz from the Everyone Graduates Center thanking everyone for listening today. I invite you to listen to the other episodes in our Designing Education series wherever you listen to your podcasts. Onward and be well.