Carrisa Moffat Miller, Ph.D., CEO of the Council of Chief State School Officers, shares her organization's key learnings from the COVID-19 pandemic, the remaining challenges ahead for state education leaders and the different ways exemplary leaders are innovating to overcome these challenges, with equity always at the forefront. Along the way, Miller shares insights into what she identifies as education’s top three post-pandemic concerns: school reopenings, learning gaps, and mental health guidance and support. She also unpacks how top leaders are building a new normal in education, and explains how the lessons learned from the pandemic may change how learning takes place moving forward. Finally, she shares her best advice for education leaders: Don’t be afraid to act even when there’s not a clear “right” answer, and get comfortable with admitting when you don’t know something.
Carrisa Moffat Miller, Ph.D., CEO of the Council of Chief State School Officers, shares her organization's key learnings from the COVID-19 pandemic, the remaining challenges ahead for state education leaders and the different ways exemplary leaders are innovating to overcome these challenges, with equity always at the forefront. Along the way, Miller shares insights into what she identifies as education’s top three post-pandemic concerns: school reopenings, learning gaps, and mental health guidance and support. She also unpacks how top leaders are building a new normal in education, and explains how the lessons learned from the pandemic may change how learning takes place moving forward. Finally, she shares her best advice for education leaders: Don’t be afraid to act even when there’s not a clear “right” answer, and get comfortable with admitting when you don’t know something.
Ed Influencers Season 4
Episode 1_ Dr. Carissa Moffat Miller
Carissa:
The key things that we're hearing from state chiefs right now are about reopening buildings safely. And that varies by where they're at, identifying and closing learning gaps and addressing student mental health.
Joseph:
Welcome to Ed Influencers, a podcast from ISTE, the International Society for Technology and Education. I'm Joseph South, ISTE Chief Learning Officer and I'm excited to bring you interviews with members of the EdTech community. We're not just innovating in education, but we're influencing nonprofits, education policy in business, and are shaping how students learn.
It's been one full year since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. How can we best take advantage of the lessons learned to rethink and redesign learning in ways that are more equitable, and prepare students for their futures? What can educators and leaders do to build that foundation right now? In this fourth season of Ed Influencers, we will talk to experts who are helping shape this vision for the post-pandemic era of education. Dr. Carrisa Moffat Miller is the CEO of the Council of Chief State School Officers, a national organization that convenes and supports state chiefs who lead their respective state education agencies.
In this episode, she shares her organization's key learnings from the past year, remaining challenges and different ways that exemplary state education leaders are innovating to overcome those barriers with equity at the forefront. I would like to welcome Dr. Carissa Moffat Miller, CEO of the Council of Chief State School Officers.
Carissa:
Thanks, Joseph. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be able to have a conversation with you.
Joseph:
So if you could just describe a little bit about your role and what the mission of CCSSO as we affectionately call it, does.
Carissa:
Absolutely. I'm so impressed that you got CCSSO. It's a mouthful for sure. As an organization, we're a nonprofit, nonpartisan membership organization that represents the 58 state and territory, K-12 education leaders. We have vast oversight and responsibility to serve members that have a variety of students across the country. They're called various different things across States. They could be the Secretary of Education. They could be a superintendent. They could be either elected or appointed. We use the term state chief as a universal term. It has been a long year. I think we're what? In week 49 of the pandemic or somewhere along that line. I was thinking about that this week. I just have seen tremendous leadership among this group of folks that have navigated incredibly tough circumstances over the past year. I'm honored to be able to talk to them almost on a daily basis to be able to hear their thoughts and be able to support them. We at CCSSO have found that to be a really important role for us, in listening to what they need and how we can support their work.
Joseph:
As you engage these state leaders across the country, what are your top three concerns that you're hearing from them as they prepare for the summer, as well as school year coming up? What's top of mind for them?
Carissa:
I'm glad you narrowed it to three because the concerns are wide and varied. But universally, the key things that we're hearing from state chiefs right now are about reopening buildings safely. And that varies by where they're at, identifying and closing learning gaps and addressing student mental health. Let me just say a bit about each one of those things.
When we talk about building opening, we know this requires a multi-pronged approach. It's covering everything from masking, ventilation improvements and physical distancing and other adaptations and things that this group of superintendents and state chiefs probably didn't have to spend as much time thinking about leading up to this. But we know that our state leaders are working with governors and state health departments in navigating the health guidance and needs for kids. And so, that's a constant focus for our state chiefs right now and how they do that safely, I think is one of the key pieces here.
On the gaps and interrupted learning, in terms of that, States are trying to figure out where students are, what gaps there might be and how they help continue the progression of learning and potentially increasing our accelerating that learning for students. The third area which is about addressing student mental health and the social emotional needs of kids, if we just put this in the context of what all of us have dealt with over the past year with the pandemic, with the virus itself, economic downturn, national events like the reckoning around systemic racism, the invasion of the Capitol, it's all impacted the way we interact in our world. And it clearly impacts students in their schools and teachers.
And so, States have been focused on helping districts provide necessary mental health guidance and support when the students first arrived back in school building and helping ease that transition and routine. I would just say, these are the near term challenges. And then, they just continue to be long-term challenges as well. But we could easily think about how we transition to delivering education differently. So I think it's got to be a dual purpose of addressing the most urgent needs, but thinking about it long-term as well.
Joseph:
I want to unpack some of these a little bit. Going back to your first one, reopening. That's on the mind of every student, every parent and caregiver, every teacher, every principal, every counselor. Every state seems to be taking a slightly different approach. And even district by district, there can be quite a bit of variation. One thing that I hear from some educators is that their safety may not be being prioritized, that there's a rush to get back. Parents are exhausted. They're ready to have their kids back. The kids want to be back. And some of the educators were saying, "Well, what about us? Are people really prioritizing our safety?" I'm just curious. How do you see States thinking about that issue? How do they manage all the competing priorities and needs of special needs kids who we know are really struggling at home versus making sure the teachers are safe? I just can imagine that these are really difficult conversations and trade-offs.
Carissa:
There are trade offs all across the board here, right? I will just say that the thing that continues to come up in conversations with state chiefs about how they're approaching this is first and foremost, they know that there have to be proper safety protocols to put in place. And they spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about how do we first make this a safe place. Now, you're right. That's been defined a little differently in various areas. But universally, when I talked to state chiefs, they're talking about what they can do at the state level to provide the resources and the support to open schools safely.
If you think about it, most students do better into a face-to-face classroom and they need services like meals and healthcare that are better provided in place. But at the same time, we can't discount those concerns about safety and I don't hear chiefs doing that at all. We use the evidence that health experts have put out, the school opening across the country, using the bully pulpit for state chiefs who have asked for teachers to be on a higher priority for vaccinations. And they're also putting the CARES funding and the federal funding that we've been using towards more mitigation and safety protocols, PPE and ventilation and all of those kinds of things. And so, States have been directing anything they can do to address the safety protocols. Some of this is just going to be about concern. And I think it's about showing the ways in which we can mitigate as best as possible and make it safe for people to be back in the buildings.
Joseph:
Yeah. I have to say one of the bright spots in my social media feed has been starting to have educators announcing that they've received their first or second vaccination. It's nice to feel like we're starting to turn a quarter on that. I think there's also an issue of risk perception, right? Not only do individuals have different perceptions of risks, but the whole communities have different perceptions of risks. And so, I just can't imagine what it's like to try and negotiate all of that to find a solution that works for everybody.
Carissa:
I'll point to Utah as a really good example of this where they started using testing as a way to return and then found it to be incredibly effective and so have been using it on a regular basis as one of the safety protocols. Masking is clearly a critical part of that, social distancing, the ventilation systems, all of those kinds of things. And I think it's more about layering those on. I think we had a webinar with the CDC director early on in the pandemic and they described it like Swiss cheese, which I thought was really funny. The holes in the Swiss cheese are in various different places. And so each time you layer some kind of mitigation on top of each other, you start to close those holes, but one in and of itself is not going to completely close the issue for safety. And so, I think state leaders have taken that to heart and said, for the lack of a better term, "How many layers of Swiss cheese can we put together to mitigate the gaps in safety for teachers?"
Joseph:
So the second issue, learning loss, this of course, I think has been... I was [inaudible 00:10:03] very early on. I remember even in the first weeks of the pandemic, I was already hearing from education leaders saying, "Wow, we're going to have to address this issue of learning loss." And even at the time, they didn't know how long the pandemic was going to run but they knew it was going to be an issue. I'm really curious. Are there particularly strategies or approaches that you're seeing that appear promising or the recommendations that you're making?
Carissa:
Yeah. You know, when I thought about this question, I decided I was going to take it apart into three groups of students. I think there's probably more than that, but let me just put it this way. There are some students who are actually managing learning and doing better because there's less distractions and less trauma for them. I think that's probably a small group of students, but there is a group of students who virtual learning could potentially be a very positive thing for them. Then there's a group of students, which I think are a pretty large portion of our population who've struggled with not getting the most important in-person learning in a building. It's just not the same. And they've struggled with that.
And then I think there's a third group, which just didn't have reliable access, either because they didn't have a device or they didn't have internet access. Or in that second group, those students who just got frustrated and disengaged. And I think that, that third group is when we're talking about learning loss, that really is that third group. I think there's some accelerated learning that needs to happen for second and first group, but it's not one size fits all. So I want to start by saying that, that it's not monolithic in the way in which students have experienced this.
There's some promising things that we've seen from States. One of them is that States invested in using interim assessments so they could see where students stood at the start of the year and help and drive instruction. We saw a couple of places in South Carolina and Michigan who used interim assessments on a statewide basis to get information and we're continuing to see that happen today. There's also places where they're starting to open in small ways, which I think is promising where they prioritize students who need instruction the most. It's younger children to be in class, English language learners or students with disabilities. Those students have been brought in so that they can receive instruction sooner as they start to scaffold students back in. We think that's very helpful.
And then when we look at more learning time, a number of things that we're starting to see and this is coming through state legislature action, some people are using the second round of CARES funding to pay for extending the current school year, because they're coming back in now. Maybe extending this current school year, starting early next year, offering summer learning or afterschool programs and doing it in a different way than we've done in the past, I think, and making it a little more structured. Just recently, we're hearing States talking about investing in providing resources to do year round options for schools so that we could think about school in a different way.
And I'll give you an example. In Tennessee, the state legislature passed a bill that required districts to offer summer and after-school programs. They created a statewide Tutoring Corps to help students. In Ohio, we have leaders that have districts developing their own plan but they're asked to look at extended day or extended year, additional counseling, additional tutoring services. So they're allowing the districts to decide how they address maybe some of the various needs of students by asking for a plan. And then we have other States that have task forces that are studying this. So I think we'll see a variety of those things starting to become more prominent in the weeks to come.
Joseph:
That's really interesting. I had heard about most of those, but I hadn't heard about the year round option. So do you know, are they thinking of that sort of the way year round school has been constructed in the past where the breaks would actually happen at different points? Or is it like a more of a one-year kind of thing?
Carissa:
Yeah, I think everything is on the table and I think we're going to talk at some point about what are the opportunities here?
Joseph:
Right.
Carissa:
Like, what do we put back in the bottle? Because we've been able to see that it's an opportunity for us. I don't think people are walking into this with preconceived notions that it's going to be exactly the way we've done it. We certainly shouldn't think about what we've done before. We certainly shouldn't forego thinking about what happened in the past, but we can also build on that. And maybe some of those barriers that we've had in the past about, for example, CTIME has been one of the things that has been a key driver in the way that schools have been funded. Could we think about that differently because we now have seen it play out differently for a whole year?
Joseph:
So, the third one, mental health. Obviously, it's an issue for everyone who's involved. Actually, anyone who's in the pandemic, right? I think its probably taken some sort of hit to their mental health. Are you seeing approaches that States are taking towards this, that are promising or just...? I'm just curious. How are they coping with this? It seems like a crisis on top of a learning crisis.
Carissa:
You know, I'll point to a resource that we put out. We did a big push around restart and recovery back in April, May, June. We put out a group of resources for States that could be used also for districts. It's called Conditions for Teaching and Learning. And inside that, was supports for social and emotional supports for students. And I think the most important thing is to think about social emotional supports wrapped into the academic world of a student that it's not we're going to check a box for bringing in a counselor, but that we think about the needs for students across the time in which they're learning. And so, it's built into the curriculum and the way in which it's being delivered in the classroom. And so I think I would point to that resource that's out on our website at ccsso.org as a way in which we've envisioned building those things together.
Joseph:
We'll be back in a moment, but I wanted to quickly tell you about a new opportunity from ISTE. ISTE Summer Learning Academy is a two week online PD Program that will help K-12 educators move from surviving to thriving with the intentional use of technology to meet the new realities of learning. Whether you're teaching in online, blended, or in-person settings, you'll advance the skills you've already built and return to the classroom this fall ready to hit the ground running. The Summer Learning Academy is just $35, and you can earn CEUs and graduate level credit. Register now at iste.org/sla21.
You'd mentioned funding a little bit, the CARES Act funding, and that some States have been prioritizing a lot of that funding, or at least a portion of that funding for safety protocols, which makes a lot of sense. If people aren't safe there, you certainly can't resume school face-to-face. I'm curious. How are you seeing that money allocated beyond those safety measures. What's being prioritized? Do you all have [inaudible 00:17:46] recommendations for what should be prioritized?
Carissa:
In some of the ways in which we see, and it vary from the first set of funding, which by the way, I want to say that how grateful we are to Congress for putting together those packages and pushing those out to the schools districts and to the state. It was so desperately needed, both of those packages. We're looking on the horizon for the third package. Early on it was PPE and ventilation, and now, we're seeing some additional staff being hired. Like, when you need to social distance, for example, young kids, you may need some additional support in the classroom. That's one way to do that. The food service, packaging up the food so that you're not serving it in the same way, those are additional costs that we didn't anticipate.
Health services. So bringing in mental health support, counselors that we talked about. And then there's these technology investments, which, appropriately for this podcast is about using learning management systems, professional development for teachers. It's deploying high quality instructional materials for people to have access to that. Without this funding, I don't know how schools who would not have planned for safety protocol costs would have been able to do that. And then, as we think about recovery, longer term, again, that's going to require a huge investment in order to double down on this. It's going to take years for the education system to recover from the pandemic. And so, investing in that and saying how important that is, was just a critical piece.
Joseph:
Earlier you made a reference to some opportunities that might come from this. You mentioned the issue of CTIME, and maybe this will be an opportunity for States to consider moving away from that, and I guess, enforced more competency-based, more mastery-based approaches of just conceptualizing teaching and learning. I'm curious what else are you seeing that might come out of this that isn't just a response to an emergency, but actually leads to sustainable changes that maybe we should have been thinking about already?
Carissa:
I just want to, again, applaud the state chiefs. I look at them on a weekly basis and the utter fatigue over time would be easy to just be focused on what's happening in that week or that moment, but they were always talking about, "What's the future and what can we take from this moment?" And just incredible leaders do that kind of thing. I want to say too that this idea that we're going to go back to "normal", whatever normal was, wasn't necessarily working for all of our students even in the past. And so, this is an opportunity to take a step back from that.
The technology and closing the digital divide is a huge area of focus for States. I'll just name Mississippi, Connecticut, and Nevada, all work to ensure that students had a device and high-speed internet access at home. And then States worked to set up the backend support for digital learning. I mentioned those learning management systems and professional development. And I don't wanted to say a moment about that, about how that increases equity.
So if we think about a small district that can't afford the resources like what we were talking about, like a math curriculum, now with a state being able to deliver that, that district can use their resources for other things and have access to a high quality materials that they may not have had before. And so, those learning management systems where States are pairing up with districts to provide, I think will be a huge and important piece for learning. We also think that the E-Rate that's in the federal third package that's currently under consideration in Congress is another way to invest in infrastructure and long-term change. The digital gap that we just we've been talking about forever and known about forever and didn't have to deal with front and center until now, is not going to be closed unless there's an investment increasing broadband access. It's just a reality that [crosstalk 00:22:14].
Joseph:
And that's broadband access at home, correct?
Carissa:
Yes. Right. So giving access for students in places of not having to sit outside the library or sit outside their school to get the access that they need to.
Joseph:
Right.
Carissa:
So widening that will be really important. And then on the assessment piece, just going back to that, I think there's a real opportunity for thinking about assessment as an umbrella. And so the state and districts and schools all have needs in that umbrella and how can they create a system that isn't just one test or multiple tests that perhaps don't connect to each other. The state can be able to address accountability needs, but the district and schools can have the information they need to provide to students, but they're connected. And I think that's one of those opportunities that I hear a lot of chiefs talking about that will sustain over time.
The last one which seems like it should have been happening before, but it just wasn't because we're busy is these health partnerships. The partnership with health secretaries, epidemiologists, and others in the health field, being connected to schools in a way that they haven't been connected before. I think that will help bridge the gap between mental health and education in the future. And I really look forward to seeing what we can achieve.
Joseph:
It's exciting for those of us who follow these things to think about a future where maybe that kind of interim testing which is useful immediately to educators could be connected to the state testing and somehow lower the overall testing burden.
Carissa:
But I do think too, that it's important to note that having information about students is a fundamental thing that our state chiefs believe in. Like, there's got to be a way to have a bright spotlight so that we don't go to a place where we're not addressing student needs. And it's one piece of data, but it's an important piece. And so, I don't think anyone's looking to lose access to that, but asking how could that potentially look different.
Joseph:
You, yourself are a national leader. You work with state leaders daily. I'm really interested in sort of your insights into leadership. What do you think are some of the important lessons learned from this crisis for leaders? What have you personally learned?
Carissa:
Yeah, it's interesting. I learned that all the things that I thought were incredibly important, maybe there's less things that are incredibly important. I'll talk a little bit about what I've seen of chiefs and then I'll just talk about personally, some of the things that I've learned over this past year. We brought in Dr. Ron Heifetz, he's the author of Leadership on the Line, and this is a book that's been around for quite some time. He talks about adaptive leadership. It's a metaphorical dance floor and on the balcony. And so it's making sure that you, as a leader, are getting up above the fray. And during this pandemic, that's been the most important thing, is to get up and look above and say, "Okay, where are we going? What's happening? How can I assess to be a better leader?"
I think you've got to move back and forth between this metaphorical dance floor and balcony to be an effective leader. But I think in a moment of crisis, it's easy to just stay down in the midst of it, in the dance floor, although, this didn't feel much like a dance. You've got to be able to pull yourself up. Having interesting key staff members to handle the day-to-day operations, various things, so that you can also be a leader and look towards the horizon. I also saw chiefs be incredible listeners. You mentioned about the variety of ways in which there's a heightened sense of frustration in the environment. We shouldn't ignore that, but you have to be a listener. You have to make people feel heard, and that's even if you come up with something that they're not entirely happy with. If they felt heard and they know that you've listened and you've tried to take into consideration and been a strategic thinker, I think that those are the kinds of leaders that we've seen be incredibly successful.
I guess my advice to leaders is don't be afraid to act. There was not going to be a right answer in a lot of these situations. And so, it's listen, assess, anticipate, and then decide. And you just have to go into it and you have to go into it having been a compassionate listener. Move forward and be ready to make a different decision as you get into it. This goes back to our opening of schools. We make the best decisions we can with the information at hand at this moment, continuing to assess and listen, but you have to be decisive.
I think too, one of the key things about a leader is to be able to say when you don't know. People can see right through it when you say something and you don't know. At the end of the day, leaders are humans too. They may have their own kids in school and they may have their own worries and their own things that they're dealing with their families. And I think being authentic about those kinds of challenges and being real about it really goes a long way.
Joseph:
I have some folks in my extended family who are public education teachers. One of the things that they talked about is the issue of literacy. They've been really concerned because kids in 1st grade are supposed to learn to read. If they get to 2nd grade and they haven't learned to read, 2nd grade teachers aren't necessarily fully equipped to help them learn to read. And with the learning loss, they're wondering what kind of issues they're going to be facing. I know CCSSO recently published a report around steps that state leaders can take to improve student literacy, but I'm curious what are some of the foundational steps that States at least could take to improve and address student literacy that will pay dividends for later on, as we sort of navigate through the impact of the pandemic?
Carissa:
Last January, we convened a group of state chiefs and experts around the growing concern about the NAEP results. In 2019, when we saw the reading results from NAEP come out and had seen stagnation for almost two decades, we just took it together and said, "We've got to do something about this." And so we convened in January of 2020, and we listened. It was a whole day event, listened to experts, listened to how we could go about as state leaders making an impact in this. And I say it's an ecosystem, right? We are players in this ecosystem and we can't do this without our partners. But because we're an organization that supports state chiefs, we focused in on what the state role could be.
The four things that, that report that we just released talks about for state leaders were setting a vision. So being clear about what you're going to do about reading in your state and what your expectations are. Deploying SCA resources to help districts. I'll give you some examples of places that have done that in a minute. Providing local policy guidance, setting those up. And then engaging higher education partners. So, teachers coming out of prep programs and having the right skills in order to be able to teach reading is one of the ways we think States can play an important role.
Here's four examples of some of the work we're seeing. In Arkansas, they have a law that phased in new requirements that elementary teachers and special educators be proficient in the science of reading. They're supporting their teachers in utilizing the scientific basis for reading. In Mississippi, they have four now, I want to say four or five years, SCA provided statewide professional development for their K-3 teachers and they created a new diagnostic tool to screen for students who have difficulty reading. They've also reached out to their pre-K partners even in the private sector and the headstart programs and offered those resources at no cost so that they can ensure that kids are reading as they come into the K-12 system.
In Louisiana, they work to ensure that all their districts had high quality reading curriculum to make sure again, back to that equity issue of making sure that they have the materials. And finally, Texas passed a law, I want to say now two years ago, that required newly trained pre-K and elementary teachers to pass an exam, showing that they know how to teach the science of reading. And then they are going back for currently licensed teachers and principals who have to attend this professional development that the state will provide.
And so, those are some examples of ways in which States have started to take those kinds of things on. And you can find the report on our website at ccsso.org/literacysummit. You know, and I think one of the ways that CCSSO going forward we'll work with States on these four things, but also we've had a long standing. I think we're in year three or year four of a project on high quality instructional materials. And we have 13 States that have been deploying these high quality instructional materials that are grounded in the science space. And so, making sure that the materials are provided the professional development that's provided, all are grounded in that, are one of the ways in which we think we can as States help move this forward.
Joseph:
Earlier, when you talked a little bit about technology's role in all of this, you'd mentioned the LMS that have been deployed at the state level. It's a really interesting example of how technology that's being deployed during a pandemic can not only benefit someone during the pandemic, but afterwards. Are there other ideas or thoughts you might have around how we can build upon the fact that everybody had to use technology, whether they liked it or not, to build upon that in a positive way to provide new capabilities or new approaches that we'll want to keep using even when we are back face-to-face?
Carissa:
I think about it as a modernizing data technology. I want to be really clear that we aren't talking about technology replacing teaching. It's a support. It's a tool. It's a mechanism that I think will increase the way in which we're able to deliver. So a couple of things come to mind just even on the classroom basis, using it to increase small group assistance where you're having some students working on a material and being able to work with small groups of students. What is this going to do for students who happen to be ill for an extended period of time? Are they going to be... They aren't just out of school, but will there be a way in which they can access some kind of virtual instruction? The way people learn is different and so using technology as addressing those different modalities. And this was all going on even before the pandemic, but I think what we've learned from the pandemic will increase and best practices will be able to be proliferated in a way that we hadn't seen before.
And then I thought about this and it's right here center in my own home, is outside of school, the parents and family access to technology. I have a college aged daughter who was, when she was... I was saying about when she was in middle school, and I really had little visibility into whether she got behind until the semester was over. I didn't have that kind of access. I happened to have a 7th grader also in my house now. This is my second daughter and she is a 7th grader. I get a daily report of her missing and upcoming work, which I wish we didn't have as much missing work, but missing and upcoming work.
I don't see not having that kind of access once she's back in person and being able to have visibility, what happens with her. And I think there will be other parents who have become a part of the system and a part of the support network for students. I think it could really connect the support system for students when we think about afterschool programs, tutors who could have access to these kinds of things that you wouldn't have to pass a piece of paper, or you'd have information about a student that you could pick up to move along. So I think there's some real questions about all the other people in the ecosystem and the kinds of things that technology has provided for them.
Joseph:
Yeah, it's interesting. Now, I've heard a lot of teachers say that a bright spot of all of this is how much better they know and how much more often they communicate with parents. When teacher told me that they had, I think, 100% participation in the parent-teacher conference, they were surprised because of course they'd never had that before. Then it changed their own perception of a parent's desire to engage and they realize that they weren't coming to parent-teacher's conference not because they didn't care, but because they had to be at a particular place on a particular day at a particular time and their life just didn't allow them to do that. But now that it's virtual, they see that, "Oh, those people would have showed up if they could have. They are happy to show up and they want to participate." And so, it's interesting to think how technology could continue to facilitate that kind of collaborative role.
Carissa:
Yeah. I mean, I just got done participating in a series of 15 minute parent-teacher conferences. They were across, I want to say seven or eight different days. And I thought to myself, "Boy, I sure hope they keep doing that because I'm able to wedge a 15 minute meeting in somewhere without completely disrupting an entire day of work." And I'm pretty fortunate I can do that. There are parents who taking a day off of work means a day of lost salary and so making those choices are pretty difficult. And so, technology could enable us, enable parents to have better access and not have to make those difficult decisions.
Joseph:
And so, just in closing, there's lots of reasons for people to feel pessimistic about the future. I'm curious. What makes you feel optimistic about the future?
Carissa:
Yeah. You know, thanks for ending on that. I appreciate that. First of all, I think it's the leaders that I work with and the resilience that they've shown. Just every day, seeing how thoughtful they are about what needs to get done and trying to come up with new ways to do it, gives me a lot of hope. I also look across this entire education ecosystem and I look at how hard teachers are working, how hard principals, superintendents, the support staff at our schools. It's a community that has risen to this challenge in a really difficult time with really not a clear definition of when this will change. And people have sustained that. Human nature is about the good for all. And that for me, sustains when I think about how important it is for what we do.
Joseph:
Well, thank you so much for spending this time with us. We really, really appreciate it. The Ed Influencers Podcast is brought to you by ISTE, the International Society for Technology and Education. Special thanks to [Leslie Huff 00:38:03], Linda [Apanio 00:38:04] and Jesus Sang for supporting the podcast development and production.