Dr. Pedro Noguera is Dean of the USC Rossier School of Education. Dr. Noguera recounts his ascent from the streets of Brooklyn to the pinnacle of educational thought leadership. Feel the pulse of our nation's schools through his eyes, as we uncover the deep-seated challenges and innovative solutions that define today’s educational landscape. With Dr. Noguera's astute insights, this episode promises a powerful exploration into the heart of what can make or break the future of young learners, especially those who are most vulnerable.
Read more about Dr. Noguera.
Dr. Pedro Noguera is Dean of the USC Rossier School of Education. Dr. Noguera recounts his ascent from the streets of Brooklyn to the pinnacle of educational thought leadership. Feel the pulse of our nation's schools through his eyes, as we uncover the deep-seated challenges and innovative solutions that define today’s educational landscape. With Dr. Noguera's astute insights, this episode promises a powerful exploration into the heart of what can make or break the future of young learners, especially those who are most vulnerable.
Read more about Dr. Noguera.
Welcome to the superintendent's Hangout, where we discuss topics in education, charter schools, life in general, and not necessarily in that order. I'm your host, dr Sharedda. Come on in and hang out. In this episode, I was privileged and honored to sit down for a conversation with Pedro Noguera. Dr Noguera is dean of the USC Rossier School of Education. He has served in that role since 2020.
Speaker 1:Originally trained as a sociologist, dr Noguera's research focuses on the ways in which schools are influenced by social and economic conditions, as well as by demographic trends in local, regional and global contexts. He's the author of 13 books and over 250 research articles in academic journals, as well as book chapters, edited volumes, research reports and editorials in major newspapers. Dr Noguera serves on the boards of numerous national and local organizations, including the Economic Policy Institute, the National Equity Project and the Nation. He's a regular commentator on educational issues on national media outlets, and his editorials on educational issues have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Dallas Morning News and the Los Angeles Times.
Speaker 1:Dr Noguera and I touch on a wide range of topics, including student discipline approaches, the role of student suspensions, the limits on that role, as well equity in education, understanding the need for a connection between schools and students, and much, much more. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did sitting down with Dr Noguera. Welcome, dr Noguera. Thank you so much for joining me today on the Superintendent's Hangout.
Speaker 2:Great to be here, David.
Speaker 1:I'd like to begin the conversation where I start, with all guests all guests, which is, with your origin story. That's a question that I stole from Terry Gross, but the best interviewer ever Tell me a little bit about yourself.
Speaker 2:Sure, sure, I'm a New Yorker originally from Brooklyn. I often say that I grew up in the part of Brooklyn that still hasn't gentrified. New Yorkers will know Brownsville, better known for producing boxers like Mike Tyson than professors like me. My family was an immigrant working class immigrants from the Caribbean but my parents really believed in education. Somehow all six of us went to top-rank colleges, which says a lot about their values, their beliefs in education. That's definitely something I took from them. I was a first-generation college student. I went to Brown University where I initially felt like an imposter, like many first-generation students do. I felt like I didn't belong. I'm surrounded by really wealthy people. One of my classmates who I got to know well was a guy named John F Kennedy Jr, who some of the listeners may have heard of. It was in knowing people like that that I got over this idea that I didn't belong, because I started to see them just as regular people with their own challenges, though different than mine. Mine were primarily financial and social. There were others. That experience left me questioning why so few people like me, that is, students of color from low income backgrounds, were in schools like that. That actually is what drove me and my interest in education.
Speaker 2:I started teaching while I was in Providence. That's where I first started teaching at Central High School, which was considered the worst high school in the city at the time. I wasn't committed yet to education. I went off to Berkeley where I pursued a PhD in sociology. While at Berkeley, I decided to teach in the Oakland Public Schools and so continued on my education pathway. The more I taught, the more I started to see this as a really important work. What drew me to education was how tangible it was that you could really affect the lives of people through teaching. It's that belief that led me into education. That keeps me inspired about the work I do today.
Speaker 1:Thank you for that. I detected the New York accent in you. I'm also a New Yorker, but from the other side of the Hudson River. What you think of is upstate.
Speaker 2:New York we call everything Yonkers.
Speaker 1:Beyond is all upstate, Upstate yeah, I grew up in Rockland County.
Speaker 2:That's definitely upstate. I love when you go there to ride New York.
Speaker 1:That's right, Exactly, it's up there. How did you resist the siren song of perhaps going into professions that would be historically more, would be better paid, for example? You were clearly rubbing shoulders with if you rub shoulders with JFK Jr and his ilk that kind of class of society weren't educators, they didn't come from families. How did you resist that siren call of MBA, JD, whatever medical school, whatever those paths?
Speaker 2:are. It's funny because my father, who didn't have even a high school diploma, told me before I went off to school. He said you can get a free education with a library card. He did that. He was an avid reader. He said so now, since we have this opportunity to go to this elite school, I hope you won't study something that you could have studied for free in a library. When he found out I was studying sociology and history, he said you could have done that in the library. He wanted me to be an engineer or a doctor.
Speaker 2:Initially I was thinking about medicine as a career, but that was largely because I wanted to do something that would help people. My math and science wasn't my strongest. Those weren't my strongest subjects. I was drawn to history and sociology, but then, when I took a psychology course in education, I immediately eclicked. Immediately I was asked to work with a kindergarten teacher and to help her. Who was?
Speaker 2:She was struggling with some behavior challenges among some boys. I immediately saw that the only challenge was that these boys were restless and needed to be engaged. I knew that they were likely to be in trouble all the time because this teacher couldn't handle them and had already labeled them as problem students. It was in working with these young boys that I started to see both the problem and the potential. The problem, as I see it, is that schools are fixated on controlling kids, and the kids they can't control they label or they get rid of or they track into oblivion. The kids they can control are the ones who often are more successful. I realized that the real answer was in building relationships with kids, getting them engaged, getting them excited about learning. I wanted to make sure that that work was happening because I saw it as something very tangible could change lives.
Speaker 1:I was touched by an anecdote and I think it's both in one of your books as well as in an article. I think it's in the problem with Black boys and also an article on school discipline or the school-to-prison pipeline where you were visiting a campus and an assistant principal was telling you about a student who was misbehaving when you were doing a walkabout on the campus. This guy says to you hey, you know what? There's a cell in San Quentin waiting for this guy. You said what do you mean? He said well, his dad's in prison and his uncle's in prison, etc. Then you kind of shock us in your book and you go yeah, that was an African-American educator who was saying that. What obstacles have you faced in your work and your research? Or have you seen in your research around the preconceived notions that society has, regardless of what race we are in society of, when looking at Black boys, for example, black boys and men?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So to go back to that example I shared, this was a little boy who was only about seven or eight years old, who was acting out in class. A lot was difficult and disruptive, but he also and the assistant principal shared this with me he had a father in prison, a brother in prison and was being raised by a sick grandmother and the school was ready to suspend him. And the question I posed to the assistant principal was what is the school doing to keep him out of prison? And he didn't have an answer because he didn't think that was his job. See, and that's the problem. Right, we talk a lot about the school to prison pipeline.
Speaker 2:It's partially a metaphor, but it's not really a metaphor, because when you look at who's in our nation's prisons, what you see is that we are more likely to incarcerate people we failed to educate. We're more likely to incarcerate black males. The problems facing black males don't start in prison. They usually start in school. They start in schools where there are no, where the relationships are strained, where they're bored or not. Their learning needs aren't met or the other needs they bring don't get addressed, whether those needs are hunger or lack of housing or lack of support at home and in most schools we're most likely to punish the kids with the greatest needs, and those often are black boys.
Speaker 2:So part of what I try to do in a lot of my work is to draw attention to the ways in which certain kids are written off as uneducable and that has implications for the race and class of kids, and to really remind educators that that's not our mission. Our job is to help kids. Our mission is to use education to improve lives, and when you are more concerned about addressing the behavior but then addressing the cause of the behavior problem, you end up pushing kids right out of school, as this assistant principal is doing. So black boys are experiencing this kind of punitive approach to discipline in a lot of schools across the country. It's not simply white administrators doing it as I used an example, this was a black and man. It's about the way the system works and it's only when we are reflective about our role in that system and start to understand how we may be complicit in that school to prison pipeline that we can disrupt it.
Speaker 1:We've seen coming out of COVID, you know I don't know if this has been measured, but certainly kind of reading the tea leaves in the media there's been this kind of reverting back to calls for more punitive discipline in schools. And, as educators have said, oh, you know, kids were out of school for a year and a half, two years, and they didn't, you know, they don't know how to do school anymore. So now we need zero tolerance policies. Got that end of the spectrum. We've got restorative practices. Perhaps on the other end of the spectrum, where do you see practices such as suspension, if at all, in schools? Their usefulness, their utility?
Speaker 2:So you know I'm a realist. I'm a former teacher, so I know a teacher cannot teach in a disorderly classroom. Schools have to be safe and orderly. No one can you know no one does is served by disorder, by chaos. At the same time, what I also know is that suspension should be used as the last resort, not the first resort. And if you just think about it for a moment, you know why.
Speaker 2:Would we think that kids who don't like school, that their behavior would change by denying them learning time, by sending them home to play video games? And this is in effect what schools do. And that's because I would argue that the goal is not to change the behavior. The goal is to get rid of the kids. If the goal would have changed the behavior, we'd have to get more creative. We'd have to think about the kids in school when we think about our own children at home.
Speaker 2:If my child, one of my kids, acts out just to be wrong, I don't say get out of the house. I say give me your cell phone. No, no internet access. I take away privileges and then I try to address what's behind the problem and really deal with that. Talk about that with one of my kids and I would say that's the same thing that we've got to do in school. We've got to figure out we have kids who are acting out. Are they acting out because of mental health issues that need a counselor to help them? Are they acting out because of neglected home? Are they acting out because they're bullied or threatened? And we need to know why, if we're going to thoughtfully come up with a way to address it, because the goal of discipline should be to change the behavior, and you can only do that if you know what the problem is and if you're not going to re-engage those kids in school and in learning and that's where I think a lot of schools struggle. They don't have to do that.
Speaker 1:And they revert to just a policy that says, if this happens, you could. Here's the flow chart for suspension, expulsion, et cetera. I have a colleague who works with restorative practices in San Diego County and she says that she always says that we all want restorative practices for our own kids, over for ourselves, over for ourselves. I mean, it doesn't make me real popular in my job, but I'll have personnel all day long who say you know, I've used up all my sick leave but I had to take these extra days. And you know, my grandmother lives in another state.
Speaker 1:And I'm thinking to myself you're the same person who, a week ago, is punishing a kid because they turned in their homework a day late and they told you that something happened and that's why they're delayed. But you have a zero tolerance for that. But then you expect me to be flexible with you and you're an adult and you choose to work here. It's an interesting. It's interesting I reflect a lot on that fact of if we would look at the students who are in our charge or in our care in our daily, in our professions, the same way as we look at our own biological children or the people we love and care about in our private lives. I think the system would be have different outcomes perhaps Absolutely, absolutely.
Speaker 2:And again, this doesn't mean we want schools to tolerate misbehavior. I think sometimes people hear it and say well then what are we going to do? Because, again, it's rooted in traditions, and the tradition is that you get rid of kids, we exclude them when they act out, and that, like, as you said, if we were thinking about our own children or ourselves. We wouldn't want to be treated that way, and so the alternative is you come up with you first, you figure out what's going on and if discipline is needed and I'm not against there being consequences, I think a lot of them they do need the punishments, need to max the offense. So a child who's not doing their work, how about Saturday school? How about you don't get to play recess, you stay in the office with me and get your work done Right, and then you get to do the less work right. Because I think we send the wrong message to kids if we say the punishment for acting up is go home and watch TV.
Speaker 1:I could go a whole bunch of different directions on this, one of the things that keeps popping in my head and it's not totally connected to that thought, but I was very moved in your description of your son. I think if I'm Joaquin, I think it's his name, if I get that right that you noticed a stage in his life, I think somewhere in his teen years, where his demeanor shifted and he became defensive and, I don't know, maybe for lack of a better term sullen, at least in his interactions with the world. Can you talk about how you unpack that and why you included that in your book? And also I think it's in the book the problem with Black Boys although I've been binging your book so they're overlapping for me why you included that and what instructive pieces that has for educators across the spectrum.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that paper is called Joaquin's Dilemma and Joaquin's my oldest son. He's actually a professor now of education at Loyola Marama University. So it's ironic that I wrote about him. But I wrote about him because I think what was happening with him is typical of what happens with a lot of boys, particularly Black and Latino boys.
Speaker 2:Joaquin had been on fine in school, but as he entered high school he started developing what I would kind of describe as an oppositional attitude and that showed up at home and showed up at school and his grades plummeted and he was getting in trouble and I didn't understand it. But instead of simply pushing him away, I tried to spend time with him to really understand what was happening with him, and one of the things I started to learn is that, although he came from a middle class family, by then I was a professor. His peer group, the group he identified with, were kids on our block, most of whom came from families that were struggling. And he was saying to me you know, you think I'm doing bad In comparison to my friends. I'm doing good because I'm not failing, and I was trying to understand.
Speaker 2:Well, why are you comparing yourselves to them? Why don't you just do your best, but that's the way adolescents are very much influenced by their peers, and the peer group you identify with has a lot of bearing on your attitudes towards school and towards lots of other things. He was lucky because by 11th grade he got a new girlfriend who was a great student and put him on a different path and ended up doing fine. But a lot of kids don't have parents who know how to talk to them, don't have an adult, a mentor around who can figure out how to get them engaged, and so I used my son's experience because, although things worked out for him, there are a lot of kids out there who get written off and who get lost because our schools aren't organized to provide the kind of support they need.
Speaker 1:I want to talk a little bit about role models and examples in society. You write that we've got many examples of athletes and entertainers who are black men. You turn on any sitcom. It seems like on TV you're going to see people of color, but you're not seeing examples of college deans or we could fill in any other prestigious positions, politicians or what have you. How can educators like myself and the folks in my organization and the listeners on this podcast work to shift that paradigm? You talk about Joaquin looking at his comparative field. You're seeing him struggling, but he's looking here and he's like I'm way above these guys. He had you as an example and obviously he's followed in your footsteps. How do we as educators work through that and help better support our boys especially?
Speaker 2:Mentorship is critical, especially when boys don't have a father president in the home than having an adult male, preferably somebody of their background, that they can connect with is really helpful, because what it does is it lets them know that the person they cared for, but also what's possible for them.
Speaker 2:I often say that some of the best mentors can be recent graduates of a high school who are now in college. The reason why is because, even though they're not that much older, they know what those kids are going through, and the experience of someone from your neighborhood, from your school, who is now in college and doing well, is very powerful for kids. It sets an example that other kids can aspire to. If you bring in somebody like me who's much older and a university professor, they'll say, well, that's too far out of reach. They can't even understand a lot of times what someone like me does. Getting somebody who they can relate to, both in terms of age and experience, I think can be very powerful. It can help to demystify why college is important and why they should consider that a goal worth aspiring to.
Speaker 1:I want to return to the theme of school safety and discipline. We know that well. I wish it was an ebb and a flow and another ebb, but it seems like the conversations around school safety and protection against school shootings have just kind of they go along but they never decrease, they seem to be increasing. You did an interesting, fascinating series of interviews with over 100 black students in LA Unified School District you and, I think, a co-author, where you interviewed them and took oral histories around, I think their perceptions of interactions with school resource officers I think kind of a euphemism for a school police officer. Talk to us about the findings of that study and what struck me was this term of the legitimacy policing continuum. I was struck by that and I'll just I'll let you explain that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we did a study on policing in LA public schools and we were because we'd seen the data. We knew not only were black students more likely to be suspended and expelled, they were also more likely to be arrested in school, and often for non-criminal offenses, because police get called in now for all kinds of things in schools, which is one of the reasons why there's been a push to get police removed from schools so that we have counselors responding rather than police officers. But what we found is that the ways in which police are utilized in schools follows a pattern very similar to where they get utilized in neighborhoods and communities, that is, that they are seen as the agents of control and that they use intimidation and fear as a way of relating to kids. We don't do see that in affluent, middle class communities, where the police are seen there as being there to protect the kids, not to control the kids. That's ironic, because most of the school shootings that have occurred in this country have occurred in white suburban and rural communities. Most of the perpetrators have been white males. But the zero tolerance, very punitive policies that have arisen because of the school shootings are very punitive when they come to urban areas and have resulted in this rise in arrest, and so what we're trying to do there is to call attention to the inequities and the injustice Again.
Speaker 2:Schools must be safe, but we don't want to turn schools into prisons. I try to remind people prisons are not safe places. Anybody's ever visited or knows anything about our prison system. They're some of the most violent institutions in the country, so why would we hold prisons up as a model that we want to replicate? Schools need to be safe, nurturing places. Kids need to feel like they belong because guess what? Belonging is correlated with higher achievement, better behavior. The things that make a difference for creating a safe school are also related to creating schools where kids do weather academically, and that's about the culture of the school and building a culture that engages kids and keeps them connected to each other and to adults.
Speaker 1:Yeah, one of the things that struck me from reading that paper about that study was that a student talked about or several students talked about this dynamic of a school resource officer counseling them and being friendly with them and hey, you know, I want to help you. And then it moved along the path and one student at least, was like, yeah, next thing I knew I was on the ground getting handcuffed or something along those lines. Maybe I'm oversimplifying, but it was really that relationship that seemed to be very different from a relationship between a student and a teacher. You're never expecting your teacher to arrest you or detain you.
Speaker 1:School resource officer, there's a friendship element, or at least a feigned friendship. Maybe some of them are authentic, but then it can quickly move towards the law enforcement end. Do you see any role for school resource officers? In my work I'm pushed all the time to hire them and implement them, and security teams and security squads. I've pushed back on all of that because I don't believe that it makes the environment safer. I think the safety doesn't come from within as human beings, it's not coming from anywhere. But what's your opinion on that?
Speaker 2:Again, I'm a realist. If a school is in an unsafe neighborhood, yeah, they probably need school safety officers to make sure that the kids are safe and that no one can just walk into a building. The truth is, because we have so many guns in this country, I'd say if the school shootings were committed by Al Qaeda or some terrorist organization, the politicians respond differently. But because they're committed by ordinary kids or adults who have guns, it seems acceptable. We just had a school shooting tool already this year. The year has just started, one recently in Iowa, and no response from policymakers none.
Speaker 2:So we have to both challenge the way in which violence is normalized in American society, but then we also have to commit ourselves to ensuring that the adults we bring in to keep schools safe do have strong, positive relationships with kids, have moral authority. I'll give you an example of what I mean by moral authority. Moral authority is not just your title, just the fact you have a uniform or a weapon. That is about the relationship, about how you're seen by the young people. So a school I worked with in Oakland many years ago, they hired a grandmother at their security guard, their school resource officer, and although she was in her 60s. She could handle anybody who was out of line because she had moral authority. She wasn't there to intimidate, she was there to handle disruptions, whether it be from adults or kids, and it worked.
Speaker 2:So I think we have this image that the school resource officer needs to be a large man who is armed. And in fact, I would say what you really need as adults who know how to build strong relationships with kids, because here's the truth. The truth is kids if kids trust you, they will let you know if there's going to be a fight or if another student has a weapon on them, because they trust you, because kids have an interest in safety too. They want to see safety. But if they don't trust you, the taboo gets snitching is even stronger and they won't let you know what's going on.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think I would even extend that to the actual perpetrators oftentimes will drop many hints in advance. Just depends on whether we're paying attention or not in the right ways. I want to pivot a little bit to your work in higher education. You know you've taught at very prestigious institutions Harvard and USC and others. How do you maintain your contact, your connection to equity and urban public education, to grassroots level, and also operate at I guess for lack of a better term a rarefied intellectual level? How do you bring those two together?
Speaker 2:So you know, my work has always been focused on what I would describe as kind of pressing social problems. So from the very beginning, when I was a new professor at Berkeley, I was concerned about issues of violence, because violence was a current community, particularly as related to the drug trade, the crack cocaine. Then I got concerned about problems facing black masses. I was seeing those issues playing out in schools. That was in the early 90s and so right now my focus on social problems keeps me connected to schools here in Los Angeles where I live, and keeps me thinking about how do I now, as a dean of a school of education, ensure that our school is a resource for schools in the area. It should be that when schools are faced with problems and challenges, that they see the university as an ally that can help them figure out how to address those problems.
Speaker 2:The metaphor I use a lot is the ed school should be like the med school. Right, great medical schools are attached to universities where they're doing research on health care and that's why you want to go. If you're faced with a serious health issue, you want to go to a university hospital. Should be that universities with schools of education are also addressing compelling and important educational issues, and the help for schools through research and through practice is available at the university. So that's what I aspire to and that's the reason why I decided I would become a dean at USC.
Speaker 1:It seems that everywhere we look in society and education in general, we love acronyms. We love, I mean, I think the California Department of Education has an index of acronyms that's like seems like it's 500 pages long. It's just abbreviations and acronyms. We live by that CRT DEI, et cetera, et cetera. How can educational institutions think about concepts like diversity, equity and inclusion in an authentic way that's meaningful and not just, oh, we're quote unquote, doing this, or quote unquote, we're doing critical race theory? How can we, as educators, make this work real, tangible and meaningful?
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, this is a big one because this becomes such a controversial topic. And you've got states now banning DEI, banning critical race theory. You know what? They can't ban the truth and you can't hide from the truth of American history, and America has a history that's fraught with injustice. That includes not just slavery but genocide against Native Americans, and every state in the country is required by law, by the standards, to teach American history. You have the state of Oklahoma under their ban, trying to stop teaching about the race massacre of 1923 in Tulsa, and even the courts said no, you can't deny kids the right to learn that. So some people may be troubled by American history, but the real issue is how do we ensure that teachers are equipped to teach that history in ways that help kids to understand it?
Speaker 2:Diversity is our future. This country is not going to become less diverse. The irony is that if you look at the census, what you see is the white population of this country is aging and shrinking. So what that means is that increasingly older white people will be dependent on a younger, more diverse workforce to support them and their old age. So older white people should be the biggest advocates of educating young people of color, because if those young people of color don't have a good education, social security is in trouble, medicaid is in trouble, all our support systems for that aging population, those baby boomers, is in trouble. So what we don't see is that we're interconnected, we're interdependent and education is key to our future.
Speaker 2:So what I try to do as I speak to around the country, to policymakers or to educators, is say look, if people are put off by buzzwords like equity, then use something else. We prepare a lot of superintendents at USC. One of our alumni is superintendent of Newport Beach, a wealthy community here in Southern California, and his board told him we don't like the word equity. He says, ok, then from now on we'll just talk about making sure we're educating all kids. I say, ok, we like that.
Speaker 2:Well, equity is about educating all kids, regardless of their race and background, and so let's not allow the rhetoric to get in the way of the substance of the work. The substance of the work is we need schools that serve all kinds of kids well, and we only know if that's the case if we see predictable patterns of achievement are disrupted, gaps in achievement are closing. We should see poor kids like myself who are excelling, because, guess what? I'm not the only kid who came from a working class background who has the ability to excel in school if provided the opportunity. And that's what the work should be focused on is making sure that educators know how to do that work.
Speaker 1:I was watching a YouTube video of a speech you gave. I'm not sure what the setting was, but it seemed to be a group of teachers. I know you do a lot of these around the country and you brought up the term and it made the audience laugh. But you talked about evidence-based versus faith-based teachers and everyone started laughing. I think there were some nervous laughter in the room. Can you explain what that means?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I would say when I talked about faith-based, you know, the biggest problem in a lot of particularly middle and high school is teachers focus on covering the material, covering the curriculum, rather than teaching the kids Right. There's a difference. When you teach with a focus on evidence, you teach differently. You are constantly checking for understanding. You're looking at student work to make sure that the students are getting it. If they're not getting it, you're re-teaching and teaching differently. You're differentiating support. You're doing all the things we know to ensure that kids are learning Right. Because that's what? Because I always say teaching and talking are not the same.
Speaker 2:Covering the material is about talking. Teaching is about the evidence of learning. So when I talk about faith-based teaching, it's you know, like you cover the material and then you hope they got it, you hope that the test scores will go up. That to me is pretty weak. We want evidence that they're learning every step, every day. There should be some evidence of learning and you only know that evidence is if you look at the work the kids produce. You know, and so evidence-based teachers are holding themselves accountable for student learning and I often say that good teaching is like good cooking.
Speaker 2:Right, how do you know a person is good cook? Well, all the people who eat the food will tell you that was good. How do you know a person is a good teacher? The students will tell you. And right now you can go to any school in this country and you ask the kids who are the best teachers. They will tell you who are the teachers who are actually helping them to learn Right, and that's what we need to look at more closely. Who are those teachers? How do they work? Who are the teachers who can get kids to overcome fear of a subject right? Who can get them to feel a sense of confidence and competence about what they're learning? We need to learn from those teachers. We need to demystify what that looks like, because too often those teachers are isolated by themselves in the classroom and no one's learning from them. And right next door there's a teacher who's struggling.
Speaker 1:And I think we, to extend that thinking we have many school site-based cultures that actually discourage people from focusing on effective teachers, right? So they don't. We kind of have this idea that we're in a staff room, even, that we're not going to even draw more attention to one teacher over another in terms of their success. We want to kind of keep it oh, everybody's a good teacher, everybody's doing their thing. And though, as you say, you ask the kids and they'll tell you right away it's like asking the kids who's the best dressed teacher They'll tell you right away, right. But more importantly, they know which teachers they learn from, which ones they're challenged by.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and you know it is important to create an atmosphere in a school where teachers can collaborate, where they can work together and plan together. So you don't want to pit teachers against each other, but you do want. You know. I would say, if you bring the work into the room and you get teachers analyzing student work together, then the evidence is clear. Some teachers are producing better work out of their kids than others, and that's an opportunity for a conversation.
Speaker 2:You know what are you doing to get your kids to do such advanced work, to engage complex texts, when my kids are struggling? When teachers have conversations and share, what can happen is that it can help all teachers to improve, because too often you know we are asking teachers to do something really hard without enough guidance. You know you think about what does it mean to be a good teacher? It means you have a strong command over the subject you're teaching. It means you have, you know how to teach it, you have pedagogical skills, you can teach it a variety of ways and, most importantly, it means you're not a build relationships with kids that are rooted in respect and trust. So kids feel safe with you, they feel challenged by you and they want to work for you.
Speaker 1:Although I've worked my entire career in charter schools, I kind of consider myself to be a bipartisan, observer and participant in the educational landscape, so this podcast is certainly not focused exclusively on charter school. We haven't even mentioned it until now. You wrote a fascinating book, collaborated with Mr Hess. I think that was written in email form, which was really interesting. It was your dialogue around a range of topics around related to charter schools and I again had that on an audio book and I would listen to it on my commute. Where do you see both the promise and also the challenge of charter schools? In all these topics we've talked about right Innovations, teacher effectiveness, building strong relationships with our students, et cetera. Where's the promise, and also perhaps the peril, of charters?
Speaker 2:So the book you mentioned, the search for common ground we was chartered as one of the controversies we addressed. Rick is a well-known conservative writer. He invited me to engage in this dialogue with him about a number of controversies because, part of it, we wanted to demonstrate that we could actually engage in a civil debate, discussion over these topics, because even before the current politicized and polarized moment we're in, there was a lot of polarization in education and there was the charter camp and the anti-charter camp. So on that issue, I have always taken a more nuanced view on it. On the one hand, I support schools that are good, whether they be charter, private, public especially if they're good at serving kids who historically haven't had access to good schools. At the same time, I am concerned that some charter schools screen out kids who have greater needs, whether those behavior needs, or the kids whose parents don't even know that there's a lottery, don't know that they should get the kids signed up. It's easier to serve the kids who need less help and what we know is if charter schools can do that, then the public schools, the regular public schools, are going to have more kids who need more help and that creates greater challenges.
Speaker 2:So my concern with the way charters often play out is that it exacerbates inequity in schools. Now I also know of many charter schools that specialize in serving I need kids. So you can't generalize about charter schools, and I think some of the anti-charter folks do that often. So I think we have to understand what role charter schools play. I think we should be focused a lot more on giving educators a chance to visit all kinds of schools, to learn from schools, because there's some great charter schools that public school educators could learn from if there weren't so much antagonism. And so part of the reason why Rick and I did the book is to encourage educators to see the complexity of the issues rather than painting them in such dichotomous ways, to open up a discussion, rather than continuing this stagnant way of thinking about these issues, which I think is not helpful as a whole.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I really appreciated that particular portion of the book and I think, regretfully, I think we're headed towards even more polarization in certain states. Certainly I can speak locally in San Diego and Southern California You're seeing declining student populations across the state. That means more competition for scarcer resources. There's going to be pressure, budget pressure. All those things I think lead to pointing more fingers rather than reaching out to kind of find common ground. But I very much appreciated those conversations that you had via email.
Speaker 1:One thing popped up in my head, returning to the topic just for a minute. I knew I wanted to ask you this. I was thinking about it last night and I forgot to ask you when we were talking about the suspensions topic have you done research, or do you know research that exists, about the degree to which schools do what I would call kind of the soft suspension, soft expulsion? So we know as school officials we have massive authority. I could come in in my suit and tie and say, ma'am, you know what Just this school is not for your kid and you don't have an enfranchised parent, they might not be speaking English, et cetera, et cetera. Add all those layers on and before we know it, johnny's going to a different school. Has there been research done on that and does that enter into your thinking about exclusionary practice in schools?
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's been certainly done research on in-school suspension, which some schools use as an alternative to putting kids out. Then they just set up a room where they put the kids in school. If it's done creatively and that's a place where kids get counseled and get help and get sent back to classroom, that's fine. But if it just becomes a holding tank for kids, that's a real problem. But we're also seeing what you've described. Now I haven't seen research on this but many of us have a hunch because you can see it in the numbers. And there was an expose on a well-known charter network in New York City Success for All, where they actually that's a principle with a got a goal list and these were kids that they wanted to counsel out of school because they were frequently in trouble and they were doing it. It was a teacher who exposed it and it was very embarrassing for the network because they had taken great pride on their results. But oh, yeah, it was.
Speaker 2:Look at their data. The number of kids entering the high school ninth grade each year was shrinking so that by the time 12th grade they had a very small number. They could say, oh yeah, we got 100% of these kids into college. They say, yeah, but you lost over half the class between ninth grade and 12th grade. So where did those kids go? And I'm sure not all of them have counseled out. Some of them just chose to leave. But there's got to be accountability on schools like that that they don't just disregard and get rid of kids who are more challenging to serve.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I was actually recently speaking with a young man who had graduated from our schools and then went on to college and started working at that network that you referenced, and so we were exchanging YouTube videos of different stories about the network and it's interesting. You know, certainly not the only place in America where there have been organized kind of conspiracies about kind of gaming the systems around. You know how our student populations are organized and who's in and who's out. I think when we I think it was Charlie Munger, the the, who recently passed away he said that I guess he's Warren Buffett's number two guy or whatever he said you show me the incentives, I'll show you what the results are going to be.
Speaker 1:You know, whenever I see a board say we're going to reduce suspensions and expulsions, whatever we have a goal to do it, I think there's a right way and a wrong way to do that. There's a hard way and an easy way to do that, fast way and a slow way. So it's interesting, you've been incredibly gracious with your time and I really want to honor that. I have one more question for you, but before we get there, is there anything that we haven't touched on on the topics of equity and urban education and these topics, perhaps some recent work that you're doing that you'd like to to highlight before I get to the last question.
Speaker 2:The one thing I would add is the importance of leadership. You know, I've never been to a good school or a good district. They didn't have a good leader. And good leader usually means they're willing to take on tough challenges, they're willing to generate a sense of shared responsibility for outcomes. They could they get buy in amongst staff, they can communicate what they're doing to their staff and why, and to the community.
Speaker 2:And I just wrote a piece on implementing an equity agenda with my son, Joaquin the same Joaquin we talked about earlier, and we talk a lot about leaders who are able to implement an equity agenda that serves all kids well, and so I would just since this is your program's aimed at superintendents I would just say that leaders who are able to speak with clarity about their goals are going to be the kind of leaders who are able to withstand the attacks that will come from those who oppose equity, as well as the attacks that come from parents who are tired of seeing their kids not get served. Because they're going to be those leaders are going to be able to produce results and be able to explain what they're doing and why, and I know some of those leaders, so I know they're out there.
Speaker 1:And thank you for that and the challenge of seeing, even just during COVID and the aftermath of COVID, the number of superintendents taking early retirement. I'm sure not all of them were effective, but some of them were effective right or leaving the profession just too much pressure. It'd be interesting to see what the next generation of school leadership looks like into the future. That plus the challenges of how AI changes our landscape and is already changing it. There's a lot on the horizon the school leadership end. So my last question to you is a hypothetical. You're given the opportunity to design a billboard for the side of the freeway. I don't know. You said you're in LA, so I'm going to call it the 405, but we know LA probably has more freeways than anywhere. So one of the freeways in LA people are driving by. They're either going 70 or they're going seven, depending on what time of day it is. What does your billboard say to the world in terms of what you'd like to convey about the work you do and the beliefs you have?
Speaker 2:It would say, the future of this country won't be determined by what happens in Washington. They'll be determined by what happens in our schools, because our schools are producing the next generation of parents and voters doctors, lawyers, teachers. It's that important. So if you care about the future, you better care about education.
Speaker 1:Thank you for listening to the Superintendent's Hangout. You can follow me on Twitter at DVS1970. Please be sure to share this show with friends and family on social media and in the real world. Thank you to Brad Bacchial for editing and production assistance and to Tina Royster for scheduling and logistics. Thanks for hanging out and have a great day.