Episode 35: Boulder school board member Alex Medler on limiting cell phones in schools, and where reformers, philanthropy got things wrong

Transcript

Alan Gottlieb: 0:08

Hi everybody. Welcome back to the Board Hawk podcast. We have today a guest that steps us outside of our usual DPS bubble, and that is Alex Medler, who's a member of the Boulder Valley School District Board of Education. He's also executive director of the National Network for District authorizing a nonprofit that helps. State level initiatives and school districts strengthen how they authorize and oversee charter schools. Alex has been involved in the charter space for quite a long time, so, he's got some interesting thoughts about that and districts now that he's on the school board. But we're gonna first start talking to Alex about a. Hawk published that he wrote earlier this week on Boulder Valley's year old or almost year old now. Bell to Bell, cell Phone Free Initiative and why other districts should muster the political courage to do the same. We asked Alice, um, to discuss this issue as well as. Again, his thoughts about now that he's a school board member, a differing perspective that he has that than he might have had before on just the whole, I don't know if you wanna call it the Reform Union Divide or the Reform Chartered, or, you know, who knows. But there's, there's lots of terms for it. But we're gonna get into that, uh, after we talk about the cell phone ban. But anyway, Alex, thank you for coming on and welcome to the podcast.

Alex Medler: 1:17

Oh, it's, it's my pleasure. Thanks for having me. I should say upfront that though I'm an elected school board in Boulder Valley, I don't speak for the Boulder board or the district. I'm just talking as Alex Midler, who

Alan Gottlieb: 1:26

is a board

Alex Medler: 1:27

member.

Alan Gottlieb: 1:28

Sounds good. We will keep that in mind. So let's start with the cell phone policy. You wrote in the piece that we published on Board Hawk this week that you said, adopting this away for the day policy was one of the most powerful and positive decisions our board has ever made for our children. Why do you think that's the case?

Alex Medler: 1:46

I think it's a function of the prob, the scale of the problem we're trying to solve. And in the modern day, the effect of cell phones on youth or on everybody is just so intense and unavoidable that addressing it seriously and at its core is the right thing to do for kids in education and not just for educational outcomes, but for everything about youth. I don't know who, I don't know anybody who's excited about how much they only use their phone themselves as adults and doesn't wish that they could keep it under control. I don't know anybody who you know, goes out to dinner with a friend and is annoyed when they pick up their cell phone. So just amplify that by 30 kids in a room doing whatever they want, trying to do something as complex as teach them. Then try to manage a school where you have all the emotions and hormones and everything else of modern youth and then add cell phones to the mix and say, wow, I guess it's there. We can't avoid it. And then try to get back to teaching. It just seems so obvious to me for anybody who actually observes humans with phones that this is just a bad mix if you're trying to get the most outta kids opportunity.

Alexis Menocal Harrigan: 2:52

Thanks Alex.

Alex Medler: 2:53

Great.

Alexis Menocal Harrigan: 2:53

So one of the things that I hear a lot is that parents are often a big obstacle to passing these types of policies. You know, you hear parents saying, well, I just wanna make sure I can get ahold of my kid if there's an emergency, if something's going on. How big of an obstacle were parents and passing this policy in Boulder Valley and, and what would you advise other districts that are getting pushback from parents?

Alex Medler: 3:16

Something you see a lot in, I don't know, other districts in mine. We have 25,000 kids between the staff and the adults and the parents, I, I estimate, would probably touch 60,000 humans. Our district, when somebody is proposing something that's really controversial, sometimes I hear from eight people about it. Yeah. Um, so like the people that are motivated to come forward are not always representative. Eventually in the long run, while I was campaigning people who talk to me when I said, I really wanna be to bell ban or policy on it, uh, we're probably nine type one in favor. But then they said, but we need to manage this issue about if there's an emergency. I'm from Boulder. I live, uh, like six blocks from the King Supers, uh, where the shooting and the murder of 10 people took place just a few years ago. So like, that's real. But at the same time, the parents are overwhelmingly in favor of this when you do it. And the grief I got, uh, was from students. And there's many things where we have to be the bad cop to students, and this is one of them. And then I'll say on the security front, our policy is that they are away for the day intentionally. That means that they can have'em in their pocket. They can have'em in their backpack. They can have'em in their locker. So if something goes wrong, yeah, they can bring'em out. Now, that complicates enforcement a little bit, but it also makes implementation a little easier. So that's a, a decision we made in implementation that sort of takes away the argument, well, what would I do to communicate with kids if there was an emergency? Now, lemme say also my answer is, during an emergency, the last thing we want is 2000 parents calling their kids at the school or flooding the dispatch at the Boulder Police in emergency response with calls. What we want is a, an ability for families and kids to communicate. Once the all clear is sounded. That is real trauma. That is real need for parental kid connection. You can make people feel better and reassure them pretty fast. We had a false alarm earlier this year and unfortunately the police put us on lockdown instead of secure. So for the kids in the building, there was no way of knowing it wasn't an active shooter. Once we were able to give the all clear, took the police even longer to figure out their protocol. Which is another story, but in the meantime, kids could communicate with their parents'cause they pulled their cell phones out and called them if they hadn't already done so. So the security thing can be addressed. And I will say that's a whole nother topic of whether or not parents and kids should be communicating every 45 minutes to ask if they're still safe. Uh, and whether that helps mental health. But we could deal with that security after it's passed. I hear from almost nobody with a qualm about it. What I hear are implementation issues that need to be addressed and subtleties and nuance of application.

Alexis Menocal Harrigan: 6:00

That makes sense. Yep. Interesting. And when you say bell to bell, just so I, I just wanna make this really clear to our listeners, as you mentioned, they still have their phones with them. They might be in the backpack, they may be in their pocket, they may be in the locker. So it just, it doesn't mean that. Phones are not allowed on school grounds. It just means they cannot be seen or heard from the start starting bell that opens the school day to the closing bell that ends the school day, correct?

Alex Medler: 6:24

Yes. And to be clear, that was actually the case in all our K eight schools before we did that in 2019.

Alexis Menocal Harrigan: 6:31

Great.

Alex Medler: 6:31

And in high schools, kids who are not allowed to have them during class and could only have them out during lunch period, free period, and during passing periods. The only change we made, which again was an argument for me, the only thing we had left was lunchtime and passing periods. Yeah. Um, but it's because we had lunch and passing periods free, that it was much harder to implement the them out of the classroom. And kids we're just using them.

Alexis Menocal Harrigan: 6:55

Right. And in a lot of ways, I actually think for like the social emotional aspect, it's equally important to have them put away and not be seen during lunchtime and during. Bell, um, or, uh, transition times because that's when you have the social interactions with high school students. That's where, you know, you're, you're having time with your friends and if you are as a young person starting to develop social connections and you're looking at your screen instead of looking at the person that you're walking down the hall with and having a conversation with I actually think it's, it's. Equally important for the social interactions amongst students as it is the classroom distraction and classroom management. What are your thoughts?

Alex Medler: 7:36

I totally agree and I will add that it's not just that they learn how to do positive stuff, it's that they stop doing negative stuff. We deal with lots of bullying. We deal with lots of kid on kid harassment stuff. And like one of the classic things did a film, a kid at lunch eating. Who might be overweight and then post that online. Like that's a thing. 15 year olds in America seem to do for some tragic reason. So get the phone out of the cafeteria. Or just picking a fight in order to have, film it on TikTok, you know, the worst sort of abuse and harassment stuff we do, uh, tends to happen in the lunchtime and passing periods. And, uh, it's just a, an attractive nuisance to someone who might have been, interested in. Not bad, good behavior that you're trying to crack down in the first place, and then on top of it, the thing I mentioned in the article, I feel, is that if that's going on in the hallway, it's just all the harder to stop it from happening in the classroom.

Alexis Menocal Harrigan: 8:29

Absolutely.

Alex Medler: 8:29

The other thing is the adults are not enforcing something school wide, so it becomes purely on the back of the teacher to enforce something that is undermined once they get out of their classroom. That means, and if you know about how schools work, having all the adults on the same page in a building is super powerful. Having 200 adults in a comprehensive high school, different things means you can't control anything. So like by having it be basically zero tolerance for having them out means that adults can hold each other accountable eventually for doing it. We can talk about implementation. Like it's not turn the switch and suddenly everybody's doing it, but it's a lot easier if everybody is doing it.

Alan Gottlieb: 9:11

Yeah. I did wanna ask you about that because I, I, I would imagine the implementation would be a little tricky if it, if the kids still have possession of their phones, even if there's a zero tolerance for pulling them out, because especially at like lunchtime and stuff, how it must be really hard to enforce that kids scatter around, I would imagine. Unless they're all in the cafeteria to eat lunch. How do you enforce that? How has that worked? I think it's a

Alex Medler: 9:32

work in progress and I hear it's different from school to school, so some schools jumped on it and they made it part of this sort of adult approach. Like everyone's on the same page, like, this will be better if we all do it, we're all gonna do it right. And they all do it. Uh, and another high school that has a stronger history of independent classroom sort of difference that's harder. But that is actually the case of any policy. So I don't think of that as something unique to cell phone policy. It's just. The classics of how do you get the adults on the same page with any practice in a, in a high school? Yeah, it's we do have requests in to add a person who does it. We have our in-house security folks who are there. We do have administrators. Uh, one of the challenges is making sure, again, all the adults that are there. Know what to do and that the interventions are fairly clear and that they are scaled in over time and they're, they're starting out with warnings in the first few weeks and then, you know, stepping up to more involved consequences. How involved do those consequences get? Uh, the main one is taking the phone away. We, it's really important to us. We have a history of disparities and disciplinary actions between different subgroups and different populations, so that was really important to the board and important to the district that we track that and we have our system to track our disciplinary actions. Uh, we don't have, I don't have any data on that yet, but it's, um, it was on front of everyone's list when we started to make sure we were. Aware of how that's playing out. Interestingly, I, I will say when we were talking about this during the campaigns, that we really got a better sense of how much more, actually cell phones are more deeply penetrated, like in middle and elementary school, in working class and low income families than they are in middle class families. So more affluent people are withholding phones from their kids. Working class. Families have to work out the logistics after school for their fifth grader. So there are racial and class implications of how you manage cell phones, but lemme tell you, this one we were expecting, we need to say, Hey, everybody should just call the princip, call the front office if you need to get a message to your kid. When our middle schools, which had this policy before went from loose implementation to full implementation, they, they're expecting a lot of calls just from parents managing logistics. And I'd ask the principal like, how many calls do you get a day? They're like two or three. So like some of the talking points that come up are just, they're just so low frequency that they are manageable.

Alan Gottlieb: 11:59

On the other side of that coin. I was, I wanted to ask you this question anyway. Well, I've heard just generally when reading about, about cell phone limitations in schools and bell to bell policies and things like that, that before these things go into effect that often, it's not just that parents are. Anxious about, an emergency in the school, you know, an active shooter or something like that, where they would obviously wanna be able to reach their children if possible. But also that parents, whether you call'em helicopter parents or snowplow parents or whatever you wanna call'em, that there's just a great frequency of parents texting their kids during class, like multiple times a day. How did you do on that quiz? Or like, you know, do you still have your headache or whatever the hell, I mean, is that something that was experienced in Boulder Valley and like, how has that. Taking the phones away during the day or having them put away, change that I don't have a

Alex Medler: 12:46

lot of, you know, I'm hearing more anecdotal for people that contact me and tracking it, but that's an example of the kind of thing that people are glad to not have and not have that distraction going on. And again, I'm not getting a a hundred calls a week from people that say, Hey, I wasn't able to check in on my kids' test score every 45 minutes. Um, so I, I agree that. The helicopter parenting or the over involvement. What others consider over involvement can be distracting, can be unhealthy, uh, is fueled by the cell phone. Like I'll tell you, one of the things I'm interested in doing in the long range, and so are some of my colleagues on the board, is revisiting how we use Infinite campus. And so maybe Infinite Campus should only be updated on Sunday nights once a week. Well, let's, let's just say

Alan Gottlieb: 13:30

what that is, Alex. Oh, sorry.

Alex Medler: 13:32

That's a technology system by which, like a teacher would post grades or explain an assignment and that can be done in real time. And people and parents can be tracking a test score on yesterday's quiz and get the results. And then they'll get a notice that homework is late you know, minutes after the assignment was due. Now that's the thing that makes kids' phones ring like this. If they're totally using it and the parents can be having it happen too. So you've got a lot of hyper-focused attention on that. Now, maybe that's good to have some kids without executive function get more done, but we have climates of mental health issues. We have a mental health crisis in our schools. We have particular high schools where the focus to perform at the highest levels are super intense on kids, and I don't think it's healthy or actually productive. So that kind of. Intensity. Constant interaction with parents and the teacher and the kid, I don't believe is what we want or need. And the cell phones are an enabler of that for sure. But so is a lot of other tech number. So is a lot of other tech.

Alexis Menocal Harrigan: 14:31

Yes, I completely agree. Yeah. As a parent with a two kids in two different schools, one in elementary, one in middle school, the level of constant communication from. Blooms or Infinite Campus or whatever, the individual teacher software that they wanna use to communicate to the newsletters, like Google, like, it is so intense. And I've just created an agreement with my husband. I refuse. I'm not reading the emails like, that's on you. That's his responsibility. I refuse to read the school emails. It's just too much. So Well, and

Alex Medler: 15:06

then. But there are needs to communicate about some kids. So like when a kid, of

Alexis Menocal Harrigan: 15:10

course,

Alex Medler: 15:10

I wanna know when a kid has put his head down for three weeks straight and is deep depression, right? So communication between schools and parents and families is really important. I just don't believe the constant, like CNN version of it on your TV all day is the right way to do that.

Alexis Menocal Harrigan: 15:26

Yeah, well, on top of that, if you're in the PTO, it's like all of the Facebook pto, like, oh, don't get me started. So I, I do have, yeah. No, it

Alex Medler: 15:33

should be easy. Parents are stressed about modern parenting as well as kids. Yep. Right. Yeah. And that's like Jonathan, he's book, which I do recommend. It's got a lot of other good stuff besides just dealing with the cell phones. I mean, I, I think we just need, we really need to do. Make kids lives more fun, make them be more independent actors in their lives sooner. And we need to relax a bit as

Alan Gottlieb: 15:53

parents. I mean, I'm book, that book is called the. That book is called The Anxious Generation. And yes, highly, highly recommended read for everybody and very readable, and everybody

Alex Medler: 16:03

focuses on the, the phone part, but he also makes a big case about playgrounds, right? So I'm glad we in Boulder Valley passed a new policy I'm proud of to clarify that the principal's responsibility vis-a-vis facilities is to encourage the community use of them, not like the previous policy was primarily about protecting the asset from damage. We still have signs around our elementary school saying, stay out of these playgrounds until after five 30 when every adult is gone. It's like kids are getting outta school at 2 45. We got three hours of daylight where everybody should be playing on the playground that wants to, and our policy was opposed to that. You know, like that's Wow. Similarly not constructive for, uh, kids being kids and, you know, figuring out how we make life fun. You know, I think

Alexis Menocal Harrigan: 16:45

it goes back to the social interaction. I mean, you know, with my youngest, he's in third grade. Some of the best experience he had with his peers is after school, several kids just play in the soccer field or play on the playground. Their new thing is for any of the parents that are listening. That was, were with me yesterday, throwing pine cones at each other. Like, it's great. Let the kids be kids. Um, oh, totally. I do have two, just two more follow up questions on this. The first is you, you know, we're, we're saying cell phones. You know, my, my kid, my sixth grader, we don't have a cell phone. And I, I hear about it every day when I pick him up. Mom, I'm the only kid that doesn't have a cell phone. You know, I call bullshit. I don't think that's true. Raise

Alex Medler: 17:22

the yellow flag. Raise the yellow flag. Every

Alexis Menocal Harrigan: 17:24

kid says I'm the only one that doesn't have one. But you know, it, it is hard when he walks outta school and all the, like, all the kids, many kids pull out their phones from their backpacks and he doesn't have that. Right? So, um, my husband and I are trying to hold strong, but we're losing, losing our will a little bit. So what he does have, he has a watch that he just keeps in his backpack. We have the watch primarily, you know, when he's riding his bike around the neighborhood or, you know, we let him go down to the store, things like that on the weekends. But the watch is just a way for us to track is he where he needs to be. Does this count for the watches too?

Alex Medler: 17:56

It does, yeah. We track all the technology that does that and our policy covers watches, it covers personal laptops as well, and all the other technology that might come along. That's seems to be work. You know, the, the elementary and middle school principals are like, do you really want an$1,100 piece of jewelry slash tech on your fifth grader's wrist? Anyway one of my, I mean, I use an Apple watch, but I use it in hopes that I'll keep my cell phone away from me longer in the day.

Alexis Menocal Harrigan: 18:25

Yep. And then, yeah, how's that work out? I have one too. The notification. Make sure you turn all notifications off. That's the dangerous part is with the watch if you are constantly getting the notifications. My last question on this is a really popular device that I've seen out there is called the yonder pouch. And those are the pouches that kids can put their cell phones into and they lock. And I don't exactly know how it works, if it like, unlocks by the magnet and only like a teacher can do it or. Have any schools sort of using the pouches?

Alex Medler: 18:53

Not yet. And so far, that's part of why we settled on, uh, just the away for the day policy. Yeah. Different schools certainly all over the country. Use either pouches or lockers. It creates its own advantages and disadvantages for sure. Mm-hmm. Um, from a security point, the ander pouch is interest.'cause you can have teach every teacher in every classroom have one of the magnets to open it. Right. So if you need it, if you could get'em out, like the away for the day policy. Yeah. Uh, I think one of the issues is the logistics of ensuring that they're there or not. Right. So you're sort of affirming that someone has done something. Rather than having a policy to intervene when they do something. So you're having everybody go through a process.

Alexis Menocal Harrigan: 19:33

Yeah. It's a kind of a silly thing to spend money on too, I think. Like, it's not cheap doing it. Like at scale. The thing that I found the most simple, and I, I think brilliant and to, and please push back, is, um, the little like those plastic shoe holders. Like you put your shoes on them, you can put like on the back of your door or something. And they just put the phones in there so when kid walks into the class, they just dump their phone in this little, like, plastic sleeve that is meant for shoes, but it's like all the kid, and then when you leave the classroom, you can just grab it. So you know, if you're going to the bathroom or doing the bathroom break, you're not taking your phone with you.

Alex Medler: 20:10

Yeah, but that, but that just reinforces the idea that the classroom is the place where you don't have it and every place is where you have it. Mm-hmm. Um, and that's what the places had when we had our current, previous policy in place, which. Again, puts it on sort of the teacher to look up and make sure that everybody's got their phone up there and then intervene. Yeah. So like the whole advantage of sort of the away for the day is there's just no ambiguity about it. Yeah, there's no, like in my classroom I don't care if you use the phone as long as you do your work. Like, that's the kinda stuff we'd hear from the teachers who are opposed. And they'd say, well, I, if the students can do their work, that's great. And if they don't wanna avail themselves of my excellent instruction, well then that's on them. Now for me, those are people who probably shouldn't be in public schools at all. Right. But but even if there's a subtler version of that then like that's just harder for principal or an AP to try to get people on board. I had one person comment to me when I'm like, when we heard about a high school that was having slow implementation, and I was like, I want the district to talk to that principal and make it a priority.'cause this was a huge priority for our board. And they're like, well, that's really not the teacher's job to do this. I'm like, so it's the teacher's job not to comply with district policies. I'm sorry. So make it doable. Make it clear that it is a district policy, that it's a priority. And then once you have the, it's okay in the class and not in the classroom, but everywhere else, maybe. Then you just, uh, it's just harder for the other adults to keep everybody on board. Lemme say, I do wanna speak to any school board member or CAM candidate who might be running. This is a no-brainer. This is a win-win win. You will get some noise. Be courageous, be brave, do the right thing for kids. Don't let a small population of people who have legitimate concerns stop you from doing the right thing. Address the concern. Have a nuanced policy about kids with disabilities using it for assistive devices. Have a strategy to communicate to families in the event that you finally have the all clear half to an emergency. Like address the issues. Don't say, oh, we should talk about this for two years.'cause there's issues. Like this is just such an obvious thing to do. Be courageous. Do it as soon as you can. It's the thing to do for kids. By the way, dps. Do it for teachers because it makes teaching easier once this is in place. Like maybe it's a little work per month to reir the culture. Once the culture's there, the teaching feedback I get is some of the best sort of feedback of, oh my God, this is making this better in the classroom.

Alan Gottlieb: 22:33

Just one or two really quick questions'cause I want to pivot to the other topic, but, um, DPS is just announced this week that they're forming a community committee to like study this issue. Um, which means it's gonna take forever to. Get to any kind of a decision? Did you all do anything like that? Or did, was this just a board decision based on obvious, you know, obvious priorities and research?

Alex Medler: 22:54

Keep in mind, I come from the Boulder Valley School district and Boulder, so we have it as a deep part of our community culture and expectation of deep community engagement in everything we do. And there's a lot of things where that's really important that I support wholeheartedly. Four of us that ran that campaign were firm believers that we wanted to have a belt phone policy. There was nothing that was gonna change my vote. I was con and our traditional culture from the district was, well, we should form a task force and we should have every group comment on this for 18 months and then we can bring it back to the board. And I said, no, no, no. Uh, I'm not gonna do a. Pretend public engagement thing where I, it's not gonna change my policy. The issues they will raise are pretty clear. The issues are implementation issues. If we're gonna do it, we'll have to address them. Let's address the implementation issues as things we figure out. And, uh, the basic policy, like seriously, we were talking about changing lunch period and passing periods in our high schools. Like not a huge deal really. So do we need 18 months to delay it when it's the right thing? And no member on the board's gonna change their vote like I just do it. That's got, the biggest I got was for that rapidity with which we did it. And people are like, wow, how did you make us implement it so soon? Okay, we're six months later. If we had waited to start until today, how would the last six months been? Better. And how would your implementation implementation today have been better? I don't see it. It's the right thing to do. Just do it. Be courageous.

Alexis Menocal Harrigan: 24:22

Yep.

Alan Gottlieb: 24:23

Great. And my last question is on this topic is what have you heard from students or any of your colleagues or what if principals, anybody heard counselors from students about this policy since it has been implemented since you said there was pushback from students initially.

Alex Medler: 24:38

Yeah, the, the predominant feedback from the students before was negative, but not universally negative. The feedback you get afterwards from the students is much more mixed, uh, with good and bad stories. The things you observe and the principals and the teachers talk about are really are, changing, like fundamental changes in student behavior and what's going on. Mm-hmm. So people do like the coverage. You'll see lots of it where they're interviewing the students, figuring it out, the ping pongs being played, the gyms are being used, kids are talking to each other, kids are hanging out. They are doing kid things. It's better. We still get some kids who are, who are frustrated about a technology application and they still feel patronized. Lemme just close on the patronizing thing. People are often like, well, this is something kids need to learn to do after they get outta school, so why should we be coddling them during high school? And this is a personal self-control thing. I'm like, yeah, that's why we have vaping rooms in our high schools and why we have rooms for drinking and gambling and everything else you can imagine that kids would've to deal with as adults. That's sarcastic. We don't have those things. It's obviously a thing that doesn't need to happen during the school day, just like cell phones don't need to happen during the school day, even if a 19-year-old on their own out of school can do it. There's lots of things 19 year olds can do outside of school that they can't do in school, and we as adults say, sorry, you don't get to do that here. So the idea that cell phones are an exception to that. Just doesn't pass muster

Alan Gottlieb: 26:03

with me. Great, Alex. Thanks. That's just a, a really nice way to sum it up at the end. Now, I wanted to pivot because, um, again, you and I had a, just a conversation last week when you were, uh, preparing or had written the piece that we published and you started talking. I mean, I just thought it was so interesting. I wanted you to. To talk about this a little bit publicly now, you've been for many, many years and you still are deeply enmeshed in that sort of charter school authorizing world in the charter school world, and you've just come to view the whole, I guess it's the different divides that exist in all sorts of ways in education, policy and education, debates and union, you know, union reformers, blah, blah, blah. You've just come to see things very differently as a school board member now for, for a couple years. And I'd just like you to, to talk about what you've seen that. That's caused you to think differently and how you're thinking differently now than maybe you were a couple years ago?

Alex Medler: 26:54

Uh, I'll back up. Uh, the school board thing has reinforced it and given me new insights, but even in my day job for the last eight years, my focus been on helping school districts act as charter school authorizers and centering on the district's needs and interests and. As a way to have good charter school oversight that leads to taking care of the problems in charter schools. Um, so I'm a big believer in supporting quality charter schools and trying to address or get rid of bad ones. And so it's a nuanced take that I've been doing for a long time. So I work with districts in my day job. Mm-hmm. In and in the school board role. You see it all the more I'll add I have a spouse who works at the Colorado Department of Ed and their accountability work and works with districts and schools all the time. So I'm deeply engaged in both what I will call the reform side of things and the district run side of public education. And for me, one of the biggest problems I see at this point. Is the separation of those two sides? I believe that. Let me define those for you. They're, they're both broad and it's, you know, it's a mixed, it's a gray thing, but we have district run schools. They may be innovative, super cool challenging specialized schools, but to sort of run by the district. And then we have our charter schools, but in Denver you have your innovation schools. We call'em focus schools in Boulder and all sorts of things that are cool that the district runs. But generally there's your local public school that you would attend'cause you live nearby. All right, so. One of the things I diagnose is that the effort to make things better, and in generally it's to make kids' outcomes better and to make their life better when they're done with our school system. Right. So that's the goal of both sides. And even just acknowledging that the goals are the same. Both sides is hard, but they use different tools. On different approaches sometimes, but then 90% of what they do is the same. Like the enterprise of running an elementary, middle, high school, whatever you got, there's a lot of the same stuff needs to happen. A lot of stuff we do, not because it's required, but it's just the way schools efficiently run to do the exercise. Meanwhile, people have had such fierce political fights about this and the litmus test stuff that goes on with the partisan divide has made it, has made education like. Gun control and abortion have been for 20 years. Education has gotten to that point where if you're gonna be a Democrat, you have to make sure you're as opposed to reform as you are to guns and restrictions on women's right to choose. And that litmus test orientation is just exacerbated what was already there. And that happens from philanthropy on the reform side, uh, unions on the district side, all sorts of people are doing it wrong. So like it's just hard to learn from each other. And say, Hey, how's that working? What are you doing now? Lemme give you a prime example of that. I think the reformers do not understand the last 25 years of work by districts and traditional public schools on school improvement. We have strategies to identify a school that's low performing have the school. Deal with its data, do data-driven inquiry, give them support on a quality curriculum have instructional coaches. You can work with a process like the University of Virginia's assistant process that has a really high track record of making a school get better than it was. And the reformers, if you ask'em to say, Hey, how do public schools do with poor schools? Like, and they will tell you to a person, every single one of them. Well, you know, the district schools, uh, they are just always bad and they'll never do anything better on their own. And we just have to go outside the system'cause it's so broke. As if the charter and reform side didn't have a batting average of success as well. So I've spent most of my career trying to close at least 10% of the charter school sector because it's not serving kids very well, and we go back and forth for how aggressive we are when we're really only closing two to 5% of the worst charter schools. There's another 10 to 20% where you are that really aren't doing a very good job, just as there are 30 to 40% that are knocking it outta the park. Meanwhile, you look at the district side, there's 5% that should probably be closed tomorrow'cause they're just not doing the job. But there's 25, 40% that are knocking it out of the park. They each have their spectrum of success. They each have their batting averages for how they make it better or their strategies, but we don't share about how those strategies work. In the charter world, if a charter school is failing, they wanna hire a new CMO and then they want a new lead of the CMO. They have this like leader. Obsession with the institution of the broader thing outside the charter and the reform and the district side. Yes, you change principles, that happens a lot, but you also have this toolbox of school improvement that is non-existent in the charter space. So if we wanted to, if we can't close all the bad charters, what's our strategy to improve them? I don't see one, if you go to the district side and you're like, okay, well how do we have to deal with school consolidation? School closure. Can we inject Denver's old idea that school performance should be part of that discussion? Apparently not. That's not a lesson we could take from the reform side. Anyway, I'll stop for what, where you want to go. But the first point is we're not, we can't talk to each other. We think each other sucks. We talk about them badly, we alienate them. We don't even people are so good on both sides, so many good people trying to do what's right for kids in a complex environment. And we treat'em as if they have mal intent. And that they're have an ulterior motive that is not to make things better for kids. And I didn't see that when I worked with districts as a professional consultant with them, and I sure don't see it now that I'm on a school board.

Alan Gottlieb: 32:11

Another thing you said that I thought was so interesting, and I don't wanna get you in trouble, so if this isn't something you wanna talk about, it's fine, but I think you will. And that is, you, you were critical of philanthropy in some ways for its, you know, kind of obsessive focus on a dozen big urban school districts where you said there are plenty of kids with the same demographic profile in places like Boulder and, and other places where there is actually some stuff that maybe the bigger districts could learn from, but that philanthropy tends to ignore these places. So I just, I'd just love to hear you elaborate on that a little bit.

Alex Medler: 32:36

Yeah. So just by the background. First part of my career in education was helping with the Education Commission of the States focusing on state policy and the charter laws diffused from state to state, not from city to city. Along the way, the philanthropists who fund the reform stuff. Gave up on state policy and they started focusing on cities and they saw things that happened in a place like Denver or New Orleans or DC and they said, well, we should focus on these cities. And once we have an shining example of a great city, then everybody else will fall into a place and really be able to diffuse this all over and help everybody. And then they also looked at all the cities and they said, well, where's the place that's most promising or the best ecosystem to support creating the beautiful crystal that will crystallize and spread? And so they, they basically picked 12 to 15 different cities in America and most of the big foundations, that's where they put their money. They stopped funding efforts to change state policy. It took'em 10 years to sort of cycle back to maybe caring about the ecosystem, and that was the sexy thing. Now, there are shining examples in those cities, but I think they proved my point. Denver made a huge turnaround. I'm a believer that the improvement that happened under Bennett and Bosberg is significant and amazing. Just as I, uh, was at nsa, the National Association of Charter School, authorizers when they helped in New Orleans after Katrina. The turnaround in New Orleans is amazing. The informance improvement in Washington DC Amazing. But did those crystallized anywhere else? The answer is no. Things don't diffuse in America, city to city. They diffuse state to state. And by the way, what happens with a city like New Orleans, DC and Denver the people who are opposed to it for philosophical or other interest-based reasons. The strategy in America when you're not excited about something is to run candidates and, fire the superintendent and change direction and lead to chaos. Um, and that's what's certainly what's happened in Denver. And then the philanthropists doubled down like, well, we have to protect it by investing in school board races. What happens when you invest in school board races is that other people may invest more. If there's a lot of interests about this, there will be churn. You will eventually lose. And if your money has been spent, uh, supporting school board candidates who lose the ones who win, don't really wanna take your call. Few things they've done wrong. Number one, focusing on these 12 cities with the illusion that they're going to change them all into like what Denver was 10 years ago. Number two is once they get one or two of them to change, the rest of America will suddenly do stuff right. Number three is that if they're threatened, we should invest in school board races is the way to make this work, rather than just dealing with the issues that arise and addressing the concerns and the stuff that's tricky. So instead we're like, we just need to make sure to win every race forever. You will never shoot the moon indefinitely. In American politics and urban settings, it's a pipe dream. So like philanthropy and America for education reform has like three running pipe dreams that have just been so dysfunctional and not worked, which has also contributed to this divide. So you're done with the school board races. So now anybody who wants to talk about charters in Denver, how good are they gonna be when they try to talk to a new school board member about what they wanna do for a kid? I'm sorry, you just spent a hundred thousand dollars trying to defeat them. And saying bad things about each other. Like now we haven't exacerbated the divide. Like, can we just get real? Oh, and then finally, I have a Boulder Valley school district. 40% of our kids live in Boulder. 60% do not. We have about 22, 20 3% free and reduced price lunch. We have schools that are majority minority, majority English language learner. No one would know that. They would assume we're just all affluent, and it's just the land of high performing tech kids. That's not what it is. There are kids at risk everywhere, and in fact, in American demographics, they are not in our inner city cores anymore. A lot of them have gentrified. You gotta go to Aurora, you gotta go to Broomfield. And then you'll see the populations that the philanthropists thought were in our inner cities 20 years ago. Sorry, this is a long rant. I know, but this is part of where we've lost sight. Of how cities work, how policy diffuses, how electoral politics interplay with ed reform. I'll even, here's another point. Denver's gone back and forth for so long about its investment in the school board races as if that was the big deal. Those of us outside Denver are like, wow, you know, we got some challenging settings too. You might, and ask us how it's going and what we're doing. I've never heard someone from Denver's reform community or Phil community say, Hey, what should we do in Denver that you did in the suburbs? That will never happen. No. Um, instead I'm like, you don't understand how hard Denver is. Like, can we just learn from each other? Meanwhile, Denver's sorry, I'll stop.

Alexis Menocal Harrigan: 37:06

Well, I, no, I you're, I really appreciate this take and it's one that I don't think we've heard as clearly said, um, particularly when it comes to the money that's going into the school board races. So I appreciate that. The, the point you made about suburban, urban, rural it reminds me, there's, um, a sociologist that I love to follow her writing I follow any podcast she's ever on. Her name is Tressie McMillan Cotton. Cotton. She's a New York Times, uh, opinion columnist, and she often speaks about this and, and occasionally on education, but more broadly on, on politics and culture in America. That you have Democrats and progressives often concentrated in cities, and it's easy to be a Democrat. It's easy to be a progressive in a city. It's harder to be a true blue progressive in the rural south. And that's where she's from, is she's, she's a black woman from the rural south. And so what I often see, you know, as I think about her writings, I think about what you're saying and, and I think about Denver in particular. I see so many progressive democrats, holding this imaginary, like, here's what perfect education looks like in Denver. But they're ignoring the reality of not necessarily the South, but like what working class and low-income families of color are struggling with every day. And oftentimes those progressive Democrats don't actually reflect students that are in our schools. And I think that's, that's what I have such a hard time with. On both sides of of this debate is the people who are fighting and the people with power, money, influence, are often not reflective of the students and the families in the school system. And a lot of those people don't even have kids in the schools themselves, which drives me insane. That's,

Alex Medler: 38:56

well, lemme just add one more thing to that

Alexis Menocal Harrigan: 38:58

please.

Alex Medler: 38:59

So Boulder is an amazing school district and they were really good before. And now that we've implemented the normal district strategies for school improvement, we are rocking it. Boulder is the place to be and we have a lot of 2,400 families center kids into our district.'cause we have really good schools even in that and being basically the highest performing district, certainly on the front range and maybe in Colorado, at least at our scale. We have schools where the top kids are doing fantastic, where we are directing targeted resources at the kids with the most challenges. Mm-hmm. But we are boring the crap out of a lot of kids in the middle, and we're not, you know, engaging them. So for even from the progressive thing they care about the kids that need, that are most impacted by poverty and by the challenges. Immigration, you name it, like L-G-B-T-Q, all the things that, that set up an obstacle to you. We have 52 million kids or whatever the number is in public ed, whom we need to serve better. For the kids who are asking the most of, they're super stressed out. We gotta figure out how to make'em not, hate life so much, but for that next tier, like in Boulder Valley, there's a ton of kids who we hadn't challenged, we hadn't. We're like, oh, uh, they'll probably go to a four year school if they want to. Community college is always there. We don't wanna pressure'em too much, so we're not gonna expect too much of'em. We, that's also a huge population of kids whose life we could make better if they mattered to the philanthropists or reformers, but they don't. Mm-hmm. And then they don't live in inner city, so they don't even matter less. I'm like, how do you discount all these kids whose life could be better if we could get our act together as adults? So it's rural, it's urban. Of course it's suburban, it is high performing kids stressed outta their gord, trying to get into colleges they can't get into. The other kids who parents assume will get in to see you just fine, but get there. All the kids. Need to be loved and helped have a great life, have fun at school and be prepared for success. And the reformers are like, oh, well we really need, we don't have enough money so we gotta focus on the kids most at risk. Uh, but only in these settings'cause we have this other theory of change. I'm like, you know, the district people on the non-REM side, they've been dealing with all the kids for a long time. Um, as do the people who actually open a charter school, they gotta deal with all the kids that show up. And then the reformers and the philanthropists and the advocates, they have this vision of what the schools are and should be. That is just not, it's not inclusive. So even when we try to be inclusive, we're excluding the third of the kids that don't meet the factors of the things that we care the most about.

Alexis Menocal Harrigan: 41:23

And I think we often lose sight of those other aspects that are taking place, contributing to why students may not be doing well and that are outside of the school. Building. Right. So you briefly touched on immigration. You know, a lot of these philanthropists are spending so much money on ed reform in very urban settings, but we're not actually talking about the students who are facing immigration challenges or whose parents are undocumented, and what that in turn, how that manifests in, in, in the classroom. And so it, it's just, I feel like we're. So myopic and, and our approach to solving student outcomes, that the philanthropy could be spent so much better actually looking at system-wide challenges. And so I was, I was really disheartened,'cause I I've seen the same thing. We've moved away from statewide policy and advocacy to hyper-local, um, school board races. And, and I think that's really problematic. And then the last thing I'll say, that's a little bit of a tangent, but, um. I think just speaks to the complexities here is, I consider myself like very much an ed reformer. I believe in accountability and equity and choice. I think charter schools are a means to get to high quality choice and, you know, not, not the ends necessarily. And so that is true. And I also consider myself a progressive Democrat and people are like, you can't be a progressive Democrat if you're an ed reformer. At the same time my best friend in the whole world, my sister from another mister, just announced her candidacy for the US Senate, and that's Julie Gonzalez, and people consider her one of the most progressive Democrats in Colorado. So, you know, I was going, I was not surprised, or I was, I should say, I was expecting not to see very many ed reformers step up and support Julie Gonzalez because she's considered a progressive, and Ed reformers don't support progressive people. What was shocking is the number of people who I wasn't expecting show up on social media supporting her. And I think the reason why, and I would love to have a whole nother episode on this, Alan, is the number of people in education organizing that are like true ed reform organizers, right? Like I'm not talking about the CEOs or the executive directors of these organizations, but are like middle, you know, directors, managers of a lot of these ed reform organizations. A lot of them came up from organizing through immigration, so they be, they were immigration organizers and then eventually became education reform organizers. And to me, there's a lot of similarities in why, from a values perspective, you're going in and doing that type of work. You're trying to solve a systemic problem that is impacting some of the most vulnerable populations. And so it, it was like, oh, well you have all these people who are ed reformers now, but the reason they're so supportive of. Senator Gonzalez is because she trained a lot of them as immigration organizers and I just think there, there's something there, especially in Denver, and I could rattle off probably like 15 people right now who have been organizers in both spaces and would also probably consider themselves progressive. But because they work for Denver families or have worked for Rut or a charter school, they work for DSST. Oh, well you're, you're a sellout to your people. Even though that person is probably black or brown themselves. So anyway, that was a long-winded tangent, but there's something there and I, I don't know, I probably need to write a column about it or something.

Alex Medler: 44:44

Well, you, you totally should I, one of my observations for a long time, like my last 10 years, 12 years of my job, have been a lot about helping authorizers manage the charter space. But in the earlier 15 years of my career, I spent a lot of time going from state to state helping either. Manage charter school laws or up to ventilator for more accountability and, and include access. But earlier our coalitions were so much more diverse, so much more. Mm-hmm. Um, people able to talk to each other. And you would have rural, uh, republicans who were protecting local control, who disagreed with the Republicans who weren't tied into local district boards who were in favor of choice. And you had new Democrats who were trying to avoid vouchers. And due choice. And you had Democrats who were progressive urban activists trying to make schools better for their kids. And you had union sympathies. I mean, it was all there, it was all managed through communication and talking, that has all just gone by the wayside and the partisanship has become dominant. And then the ideology within the partisanship has become more constrictive. So like you can't be. In favor of just doing what's right for kids and then making decisions on, based on lots of values. I've always told people who click to jump to say, I'm not pro charter. I'm like, tell me what the part you're not pro about. What is? And then they, they again, they assume everybody on the other side has mal intent that they are represented by their worst outlier who's done something terrible, who they disagree with the most. And you're like, do you realize the. First charter school was really for at-risk kids in Minneapolis. And the second ones the school that taught so that deaf kids in in Minnesota wouldn't have to leave home to learn a SL. And you're thinking these people are all opposed to surveying all kids and they don't wanna do it. It's like, no, we're all trying. So many people are trying not to do it. Some people aren't like, it's true. I'm not naive to that. But so many people on all sides are trying to do the right thing with kids in the context where they have the most influence and. We can't get there. It's just symptom of America. But reform is an absolute crystallization of it in the last 15 years. Yep.

Alan Gottlieb: 46:53

I think that's a great place to wrap up this conversation. I could go on on this forever'cause it's, it's really interesting and I knew that, uh, I knew you'd have an interesting take based on our conversation last week, so I'm glad you were able to articulate it so eloquently here as well. Alex, thanks so much for coming on and, we will be posting this worth with and, uh, I'm sure we'd love to have you on again sometime. Well, thank you very much for having me and, uh, and giving me a chance to rant anytime, Alex. Anytime.