This week, Thomas Hatch shares pictures and reflections from a recent visit to the Shenzen Education Kindergarten, a public early childhood center in China. This post is the fourth in a series on early childhood education that includes an article describing what Hatch learned about the Sunshine Kindergartens in rural China as well as articles describing approaches to early childhood education in Norway and India.
Last month, in a public kindergarten in Shenzen China, I saw what learning looks like when 300 4-, 5-, and 6-year-olds work on their own and together in over 100 different activities in 20 indoor and outdoor play spaces spread over 3 floors in two buildings.
When I walked into the first classroom, a six foot tall tower of blocks greeted me at the door. Spread out beyond that tower, I could see a series of different construction centers the children could work in, each one equipped with metal, wood, Legos, cardboard, bricks, tiles, or another kind of building material.
The construction areas continued past an open wall where children in clear plastic slickers pumped water through a series of pipes in the rain.
That one vast room could have housed three or four of the kindergarten classrooms where I used to work, thirty years ago, in Somerville, Massachusetts. At the time, I was studying how the strengths and interests of four 6-year olds evolved over six months during free play. With Howard Gardner and my colleagues at Project Zero, we sought to equip classrooms with a number of different activities that would enable young children to develop a much wider range of abilities than they normally encountered in school.
But I never imagined anything like this.
Each room of the Shenzen Early Education Center was dedicated to a different pursuit: creativity, music, language, logic, nature, society, drama, and visual arts among others. Walking through each door revealed another treasure trove of paints, yarn, clay, pens, instruments, costumes, games, books, and all manner of materials, tools and resources.
Even the spaces between rooms and buildings overflowed with plants, seeds, microscopes, construction helmets, slides, pulleys, pendulums, giant TV screens, and anything else that might support the students’ explorations.
Clearly, it took significant investments to bring this vision to life. But what I saw relied primarily on two things – materials that are all around us and the time and care to think about how to use them to support young children’s development. Beyond the awe-inspiring facilities and resources, the educational infrastructure that underlay every room and learning center stood out. Although I could not be sure of everything that was said in a quick 2-hour visit, an interpreter and my Chinese friends and colleagues explained that after breakfast, children are given the choice of where to play, and after lunch and outdoor play, the children gather again to discuss and reflect on how they spend the day. I heard about the curriculum that guided the design that of every room and learning center, how it connected to the Chinese national early childhood curriculum, and what kind of scaffolding and support teachers could provide.
As Wang Xiang, head of the education center, explained to me in a letter following the visit:
“In order to let children give full play to their autonomy, imagination and creativity, before the activities, teachers will organize children to have group discussions, introduce the areas and appreciate the works in the areas, share children’s life experiences, and let children discuss and determine the content they want to do and make work plans. Let children collect relevant materials, including books, pictures or video materials. We will also get families involved. Reading, consulting and on-site visits will be carried out at home. The daily conversation activities will help children sort out their activity ideas, encourage them to boldly realize their creative ideas, making each work full of challenges and creativity. Work is a process of continuous in-depth processing. Children’s works always exceed our imagination, bring us a lot of surprises and also make them gain a sense of satisfaction and achievement.“
I heard that many teachers had studied the material, skills and concepts of the centers for which they took responsibility. I was told about the teacher education that all the teachers went through as well as the system of documentation the teachers used to record where the children played, how the children’s skills were developing, and where the children might want to spend more time.
And I heard about the app the school created with a technology firm that enabled the teachers to keep track of what the students were doing, document their development in different areas, and share it all with the parents.
I do not know, exactly how much independence the children have or how much the choices and beautiful products they made were guided by their teachers. I do not know what happens — or how parents respond — if the children are not spending time learning to read or count and are not developing in ways consistent with the traditional Chinese curriculum many of these children will encounter in first grade.
But the experience enabled me to imagine what could be going on anywhere, anytime, if the world once again becomes the place where students of all ages learn when education is no longer confined to school.
“the experience enabled me to imagine what could be going on anywhere, anytime, if the world once again becomes the place where students of all ages learn when education is no longer confined to school.“
It enabled me to see what learning looks like when children have access to so many of the materials and resources that are so often are left outside their classrooms.
What if education was like that for all? What if students have the opportunity, over the years, to gradually, safely, explore more and more of the world around them until school itself is no longer contained in a classroom in a building? Learning can spill out, with support and care, across the landscape, unconstrained.
In this month’s Lead the Change (LtC) interview, David Osworth draws from his experiences in a research practice partnership and his work with improvement science as he discusses how to support leaders and center equity and justicein research and practice. Osworth is an assistant professor in the department of Educational Leadership and Cultural Foundations at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. His research focuses on race, class, and equity in educational leadership and policy. The LtC series is produced by Elizabeth Zumpe and colleagues from the Educational Change Special Interest Group of the American Educational Research Association. A pdf of the fully formatted interview is available on the LtC website.
Lead the Change (LtC): The 2025 AERA theme is “Research, Remedy, and Repair: Toward Just Education Renewal.” This theme urges scholars to consider the role that research can play in remedying educational inequality, repairing harm to communities and institutions, and contributing to a more just future in education. What steps are you taking, or do you plan to take, to heed this call?
Source: UNC Greensboro Website
Dave Osworth (DO): I appreciate this year’s AERA theme. I think a common pitfall for the academy is to focus exclusively on the creation of new knowledge without thinking about how this knowledge is relevant to the everyday work of educators or can help to make schooling a more equitable space. I have at times been guilty of staying exclusively in the theoretical without thinking about the transition to the practical. AERA’s theme calls upon us to think about the ways in which our research can lead to action.
One way that I am trying to respond to this call is by examining the ways in which research practice partnerships (RPP) may help to drive leadership capacity within a school district. For example, I have been part of an RPP between an R1 university and a large school district focused on fostering leadership capacity. RPPs are intended to be long term collaborations between researchers and practitioners involving boundary spanning through high levels of communication and the development of strong trust. With this RPP, like others, the research process is entwined with practice. Additionally, we have made sure that this partnership is very responsive to the needs of the district. As such we have found that at times it is important to be flexible and willing to explore how we might help address the additional needs of the district beyond the initial problem of practice. This flexibility has helped to support the longevity of the partnership and has resulted in new areas of work that supports the needs of the district while providing ample opportunity for university faculty to engage in scholarship.
AERA’s theme also calls upon us to think about the historical contexts of education. It is easy to fall into a pattern of focusing on the present problem of practice without situating it historically. As a scholar, I identify with post-critical approaches (see Anders & Noblit, 2024). This means that, as I apply my scholarship to educational leadership and policy, I try to think about the specific context that has shaped a current problem of practice. In practice, this can involve infusing historiographic works into my literature reviews, using the history of education to inform the context of my current scholarship. For example, in one of my current studies, I am examining the discursive practices of state policy actors as they debate anti-LGBTQ policy in North Carolina. My co-author and I situate this within an historical framing to understand how these attacks against LGBTQ individuals aren’t necessarily “new” or “unprecedented” but are a form of retrenchment. Retrenchment refers to a process through which, after progress has been made with regards to “rights,” a countermovement brings in more oppressive policies that move that progress back (see Crenshaw, 1988). We argue that by situating work historically, we can identify patterns in which communities resisted these oppressive policies (Osworth & Edlin, in progress).
“Attacks against LGBTQ individuals aren’t necessarily ‘new’ or ‘unprecedented’ but are a form of retrenchment.”
LtC: Your work has explored the policy implications of methods of continuous improvement, such as improvement science, that have been spreading in recent years. What are some of the major lessons that practitioners and scholars of Educational Change can learn from your work?
DO: Policymakers often think about improvement in terms of identifying what works in general, based upon randomized control trials (RCT), often seen as a gold standard in certain fields. This prototypical approach to research, however, may not always be possible and/or ethical in educational settings. Improvement science offers a different approach as a type of continuous improvement that aims to systematically solve complex problems of practice. The promise of improvement science lay in how it involves looking at the context of problems of practice and utilizing iterative approaches to address problems involving a feedback loop that allows interventions to be tested and adjusted (Bryk et al., 2015; Hinnant-Crawford, 2020). While traditional thoughts about improvement may assume that a “proven” intervention will be applied and if improvement does not occur it is because the intervention wasn’t done with fidelity. By contrast, improvement science recognizes the particularities of a problem within that specific context that must be considered to know how to solve it.
I have studied improvement science primarily in relation to its connection with the federal policy, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). ESSA, passed during the second Obama administration to replace No Child Left Behind, provides guidance to state education agencies about criteria are required to be included in their state accountability policies to be eligible for certain federal funding packages. In Cunningham and Osworth (2023), we classified 52 state accountability plans—this includes 50 states, Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico— based on their presence of improvement science language. We found that many state ESSA plans included language about “continuous improvement,” but this appeared more like a buzzword. Only a few highlighted specific improvement science approaches (e.g., Hawaii or Washington), and hence the true commitment to improvement science approaches within state education agencies was unclear (Cunningham & Osworth, 2023, 2024a).
We argue that district leaders can leverage improvement science while aligning with many states’ expectations of continuous improvement. Improvement science recognizes the need for a context-specific approach to improvement (Cunningham & Osworth, 2024b). Because not all districts within a state are the same, district leaders can use improvement science to identify and address context-specific problems while meeting the requirements of state-level ESSA plans (Cunningham & Osworth, 2024a).
LtC: Your research has examined leadership preparation in the context of research-practice partnerships. What might practitioners and scholars take from thiswork to foster better school systems for all students?
DO: Future school leaders need strong foundational preparation to develop confidence to be change agents to make schooling better for all children. In the RPP mentioned above, researchers at an R1 university collaborated with a large school district to intentionally design a leadership preparation program for a district-specific M.Ed. cohort at the university. As part of that RPP, in Osworth et al. (2023), I studied this leadership preparation effort using a powerful learning experiences (PLE) framework (see Cunningham et al., 2019; VanGronigen et al., 2019; Young et al., 2021). The PLE framework provides 10 characteristics that help to drive adult learning in leadership preparation programs. In this interview-based study, we found that the partnership specifically brought to the forefront certain PLEs—including providing authentic learning, building confidence, engaging in critical reflection, and sense making (Osworth et al., 2023). These results suggest that long-term and trusting partnerships like this may provide intentional access to practical experiences and supportive spaces that help to develop strong aspiring leaders.
“Future school leaders need strong foundational preparation to make schooling better for all children.”
I think that one of the most salient takeaways is that a collaborative partnership like this can strengthen graduate programs’ relevance and fit to the specific needs of districts. Through our partnership, the M.Ed. program underwent a redesign in response to district feedback, involving revamped coursework that included changes to required readings and key assessments (Osworth et al., under review). While leadership curriculum stayed relevant to national standards, the cohort could make real-time connections to their district context collectively, drawing on similar frames of reference and allowing for greater confidence in how the course content related to the practice of school leadership. Furthermore, because the partnership is characterized by a high level of communication, faculty could incorporate district-specific examples using district data (Osworth et al., under review).
Leadership matters in the context of student success and wellbeing (Grissom et al., 2021), and such partnerships provide opportunities for leaders to be prepared in a way that meets the needs of students. However, it is important to note that, to be effective, partnerships like this are time-intensive and require resources to be committed by both partnered organizations. For instance, attention to the needs of both organizations requires attention to multiple voices, which often involves a high level of planning and a time commitment by liaisons from both organizations (Osworth et al., under review).
LtC: Educational Change expects those engaged in and with schools, schooling, and school systems to spearhead deep and often difficult transformation. How might those in the field of Educational Change best support these individuals and groups through these processes?
DO: The current policy landscape is quite hostile towards educators engaging in meaningful change, especially regarding work surrounding diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). In the current times, many educators are understandably worried about anti-DEI policies and their repercussions. These policies are often under the guise of attacking the teaching of critical race theory, that ultimately make it difficult to engage in DEI work. The law school at the University of California, Los Angeles has a center that is tracking these current policies (CRT Forward, 2025). While many of these policies are challenging for states to enforce, they often include threats to funding as recourse (Martínez et al., 2023). Whether real or imagined, such policies create a sense of surveillance, which can control individuals’ behavior and becomes coercive in nature (Foucault, 1995).
To support educators committed to educational change, I think that scholars in the field of Educational Change need to be strategic in how we engage in work that centers equity. We need to continue to leverage tools from “controversial” theories (e.g., critical race theory, culturally responsive pedagogy, historical materialism, or humanizing pedagogies), but rethink about how we package them. We can help educators continue to center equity and justice without using the buzzwords so that they can navigate the current political landscape which has attacked allegedly controversial topics in school (CRT Forward, 2025).
By avoiding triggering buzz words, however, the goal is not to give into, but guard against, the chilling effect that can come from such policies. There are individuals who would like to opt out of the work of meaningful educational change, who will find it easy to cite these policies as the reason to do so. We should ensure that educators continue to engage with data that shows the persistence of racial disparity in our public schools to be at the crux of the change that is needed in education.
LtC: Where do you perceive the field of Educational Change is going? What excites you about Educational Change now and in the future?
DO: I think the field of Educational Change, now more than ever, needs to double down on efforts to center equity at the heart of our work. Equity poses what social scientists have called “wicked problems,” describing societal problems that tend to be both complex and heavily contested (Rittel & Webber, 1973). Rittel and Webber (1973) argue that traditional science tends to be insufficient to figure out how to solve wicked problems. Such problems, rather, require a commitment from the field to engage with and shape the debates around them.
I am excited about the potential for collaborative and community-engaged work to tackle “wicked” problems in education. The backlash against DEI has become a key wicked problem that requires sustained engagement. The backlash targets all non-dominant identity groups; this includes ability, class, gender, language, race, and sexuality (to name a few). This period of retrenchment, as described above, can make it challenging to support all students in creating a more socially just schooling environment. I see a major purpose of my work, and the work of the field, to be to serve as resistance this retrenchment and continue to advance a justice-oriented agenda that serves our children and fulfills the democratic promise of our schools.
I’m also excited for the opportunities in Educational Change to engage in theoretically rich work that is also relevant to practice. An often-expressed concern is that theory and practice don’t align or that theory-heavy research cannot be applied practically. In contrast, I think many critical theories offer valuable analytic insights for navigating the current moment. Indeed, educational change is entering an exciting moment to engage in praxis— to reflect upon action to connect theory to practice. What excites me most is the opportunity to engage in praxis through conducting research that is theoretically deep and involves critical reflection on how we engage in action related to that theory.
References
Anders, A. D. & Noblit, G.W. (2024). Postcritical ethnography. In A.D. Anders & G.W. Noblit (Eds.) Evolutions in critical and postcritical ethnography: Crafting approaches (pp. 1-20). Springer.
Bryk, A.S. (2020). Improvement in action: Advancing quality in America’s schools. Harvard Education Press.
Bryk, A.S., Gomez, L., Grunow, A., & LeMahieu, P.G. (2015). Learning to improve: How America’s schools get better at getting better. Harvard Education Press.
Crenshaw, K. (1988). Race, reform, and retrenchment: Transformation and legitimation in antidiscrimination law. Harvard Law Review, 101(7), 1331-1387.
Cunningham, K.M.W., VanGonigen, B.A., Tucker, P.D. & Young, M.D. (2019). Using powerful learning experiences to prepared school leaders. Journal of Research on Leadership Education, 14(1), 74-97. https://doi.org/10.1177/1942775118819672
Cunningham, K.M.W. & Osworth, D. (2023). A proposed typology of states’ improvement science focus in their state ESSA plans. Educational Policy Analysis Archives, 31(37), 1-21. https://doi.org/10.14507/epaa.31.7262
Cunningham, K.M.W. & Osworth, D. (2024a). Improvement science and the Every Student Succeeds Act: An analysis of the consolidated state plans. Leadership and Policy in Schools, 23(4), 955-972. https://doi.org/10.1080/15700763.2023.2264924
Cunningham, K.M.W. & Osworth, D. (2024b). Policy considerations for continuous improvement. In Anderson, E., Cunningham, K. M. W. & Eddy-Spicer, D. H. Leading continuous improvement in schools: Enacting leadership standards to advance educational quality and equity. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003389279-13
Foucault, M. (1995). Discipline and Punish: The birth of the prison. Vintage Books.
Grissom, J.A., Egalite, A.J. & Lindsay, C.A. (2021). How principals affect students and schools: A systematic synthesis of two decades of research. [White Paper] The Wallace Foundation, New York.
Hinnant-Crawford, B. (2020). Improvement science in education: A Primer. Myers Education Press.
Martínez, D.G., Osworth, D., Knight, D. & Vasquez Heilig, J. (2023). Southern hospitality: Democracy and school finance policy praxis in racist America. Peabody Journal of Education, 98(5), 482-499.
Osworth, D. & Cunningham, K.M.W. (2022). Improvement science and the Every Student Succeeds Act: An analysis of state guidance documents. Planning and Changing, 51(1/2), 3-19.
Osworth, D., Cunningham, K.M.W, Hardie, S., Moyi, P., Osborne Smith, N. & Gaskins, M. (2023). Leadership preparation in progress: Evidence from a district-university partnership. Journal of Educational Administration, 61(6), 682-697. https://doi.org/10.1108/JEA-01-2023-0009
Osworth, D., Cunningham, K.M.W., Hardie, S., Moyi, P., Osborne Smith, N. & Gaskins, M. (Under Review). Boundary spanning, partnerships, and educational leadership: How a district-university partnership fostered organizational learning.
Osworth, D.& Edlin, M. (In Progress). The political construction of “don’t say gay”: A critical discourse analysis of North Carolina state legislators.
Rittel, H.W.J. & Webber, M.M. (1973). Dilemmas in a general theory of planning. Policy Sciences, 4(2), 155-169.
VanGronigen, B.A., Cunningham, K.M.W., & Young, M.D. (2019). How exemplary educational leadership preparation programs hone the interpersonal-intrapersonal (i2) skills of future leaders. Journal of Transformative Leadership and Policy Studies, 7(2), 1-11. https://doi.org/10.36851/jtlps.v7i2.503
Young, M.D., Cunningham, K.M.W., VanGronigen, B.A., & O’Doherty, A. (2021). Transformational leadership preparation in a post-COVID world: U.S. perspectives. eJournal of Educational Policy, 21(1), 1-15.
IEN celebrates the life of Lee Shulman, renowned scholar and mentor, who passed away on December 30th, 2024. Shulman was a Professor of Education at Michigan State University and Stanford University, before becoming the 8th President of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in 1996. He also served terms as President of the National Academy of Education and the American Education Research Association where he helped establish the division of Teaching and Teacher Education. Shulman received numerous awards over the course of his career, including the American Psychological Association’s E.L. Thorndike Award for Career Achievement in Educational Psychology in 1995 and the Grawemeyer Award in Education in 2006. Thomas Hatch, who worked with Shulman at the Carnegie Foundation, shares some of his reflections.
Lee Shulman was an exuberant friend and scholar. Always positive and supportive, whether in his professional advice or as a host as he and his wife Judy welcomed me, my wife (and his graduate student) Karen Hammerness and our young children into his home. Lee’s work and impact cannot be summed up in any one idea or publication, but Those who understand: Knowledge growth in teaching, his 1986 AERA Presidential Address, made clear that teaching involves substantial knowledge and expertise. In the process, he demonstrated that teaching is not just a difficult job, but a demanding profession, worthy of the same kinds of recognition and reward as any other. That work helped to launch a whole new era of research on teaching. Far more than an academic exercise, that work and Lee’s insights were central to the establishment of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, as well as to the advancement of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning and to the creation of a host of centers and institutions dedicated to studying and improving the quality of teaching in K-12 as well as higher education.
Lee worked out his ideas over time in conversations, at meals as well as in seminars, and his ideas often launched new initiatives and new lines of work. In her remembrance, Jill Perry, Executive Director of the Carnegie Project on the Doctorate – one of several projects spawned while Lee was President of the Carnegie Foundation – explained this as “classic Lee:”
“offering a casually delivered suggestion that was, in reality, a deeply considered and insightful idea. He was known for these moments, where his offhanded guidance would leave young scholars or practitioners inspired yet responsible for sorting out the details on their own.”
I had that experience, sitting in Lee’s office in 1996, in the heart of Silicon Valley with the internet developing all around us. He declared that he wanted to bring the power of the three great resources of the university – the laboratory, the library, and the museum – and put them online to support faculty in K-12 and higher education who were creating the scholarship of teaching and learning. And then he asked me to do it. Inspired, I returned to my office to stare for hours at the cursor blinking on my computer screen. But, eventually, we established the Carnegie Knowledge Media Lab to support the Carnegie Academy of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (CASTL K-12 and CASTL Higher Education) and began a long line of work that included two books, Into the Classroom and Going Public with Our Teaching, and the development of a whole series of multimedia websites and images of practice that documented the work of exceptional teachers.
Beyond his ability to tell a story and make a powerful point, Lee’s brilliance was in his humanity. Lee was as likely to draw on his experience working at the counter at his parents’ deli on the south side of Chicago as he was to quote Benjamin Bloom or Joseph Schwab, two of his mentors at the University of Chicago. That deli experience, in particular, was evident in a segment he did for NPR’s This I Believeseries. What did Lee believe in? He believed in pastrami:
“I believe that pastrami is a metaphor for a well-lived life, for a well-designed institution and even for healthy relationships. Pastrami is marbled rather than layered. Its parts, the lean and the fat, are mixed together rather than neatly separated.… Separate layers are much easier to build, to schedule and to design. But I believe that marbling demands that we work with the messy world of people, relationships and obligations in their full, rich complexity. The diet mavens inform us that marbling can be dangerous for our health, but as an educator I’m willing — even obligated — to take the risk. I want to marble habits of mind, habits of practice and habits of the heart with my students — just like pastrami.”
His writings and his talks drew from all his experiences, and, somehow, after a well-known tendency to wait until the last minute, they would burst forth, fully-formed. On one occasion, I remember flying from San Francisco to Washington D.C. for the annual conference of the American Association of Higher Education, where Lee was scheduled to give the keynote address the following day. I happened to be seated in front of him, and as we settled into our seats, I asked him what he would be talking about. He held up a pack of index cards and told me he was going to work on it on the plane. Some six hours later, after the plane pulled into the gate, when we unbuckled our seat belts and stood up, Lee spilled all the cards onto the floor. As I stooped to help him collect his notes, I realized every single card was blank.
The next morning, seemingly without reference to a script or a single card, Lee delivered a talk, Taking Learning Seriously, that ended in a standing ovation. In that talk, Lee addressed the first question “What does it mean to take anything seriously?” by declaring that “when we take something seriously, we often talk about professing it:”
“The deepest, oldest meaning of the word “profess” is to take religious orders in a public and visible way. When one professes faith, it means taking on a set of obligations that will serve as the first principles for controlling one’s life, no questions asked. Professing one’s faith, behaviorally and emotionally, is an impressive example of taking something seriously.
Another sense of the word is that we profess our love–for our spouses and partners, our parents, our children, our dearest friends. We profess a kind of commitment that has within it a willingness to sacrifice on behalf of the other. Also in a public manner, we declare our devotion to another. Here is yet another example of taking something quite seriously.
A more contemporary meaning of the word, a meaning more closely associated with the work of those who read this magazine, is to profess one’s understanding, one’s expertise: to be professional, or to be a “professor.” Members of professions take on the burden of their understanding by making public commitments to serve their fellow beings in a skilled and responsible manner. “Professors” take on a special set of roles and obligations. They profess their understanding in the interests of nurturing the knowledge, understanding, and development of others. They take learning so seriously that they profess it.“
Throughout the talk, and especially in the conclusion, Lee’s remarks deftly weaved together the insights of a scholar of science and a man of faith:
“To be deeply educated, I believe, is to understand both when skepticism and evidence are appropriate, and when faith and suspension of disbelief are appropriate. There are no rules or principles for knowing this distinction. Only through studying the examples in both scientific and humanistic sources -through wrestling with that inherent contradiction between faith and reason–can we and our students come to terms with the essential uncertainties that define our roles as professionals and as human beings.
As professors, we are asked to be rational and empirical, to demand evidence. On the other hand, as teaching professionals, we expect ourselves to believe what much empirical evidence says we shouldn’t: that all our students can learn. We express our faith in our students’ potential and in our ability to teach them. As professors, we do not choose between the skepticism of reason and the hope grounded in faith. Our students demand both. And we must learn, as professional educators, to do both.”
In this month’s Lead the Change (LtC) interviews James C. Bridgeforth on the 2025 AERA theme: “Research, Remedy, and Repair: Toward Just Education Renewal.” Dr. Bridgeforth is an assistant professor of educational leadership in the School of Education at the University of Delaware. His research and teaching broadly examine the politics of educational leadership and governance, specifically attending to issues of racism, antiblackness, and community voice in educational decision-making. His most recent research focuses on the challenges facing K-12 school boards and the possibilities for more inclusive and equitable forms of educational governance.
Lead the Change (LtC):The 2025 AERA theme is “Research, Remedy, and Repair: Toward Just Education Renewal.” This theme urges scholars to consider the role that research can play in remedying educational inequality, repairing harm to communities and institutions, and contributing to a more just future in education. What steps are you taking, or do you plan to take, to heed this call?
James C. Bridgeforth(JB): This year’s AERA theme could not be timelier and more necessary given the current state of U.S. education. Conservative politicians and policymakers across the nation have continued their assault on academic freedom and anything that they consider “divisive” or “controversial.” Through censorship policies that limit teaching about racism in K-12 schools (Bridgeforth & O’Neal, 2024) and anti-DEI policies that have decimated multicultural centers and programming on college campuses (Lange & Lee, 2024), it is not hyperbole to say that our education systems are under attack. With former President Donald Trump returning to the White House with a unified Republican Congress and a ready-made playbook in Project 2025 (Dans & Groves, 2023), I fear that this heightened state of legislative and political warfare against equity-focused and justice-oriented approaches to education will continue and may become even more aggressive.
I believe that this moment calls upon us to do more with our research to contribute to a more just future in education. People committed to the lives, hopes, and dreams of marginalized communities have always had to fight for a more just and equitable world. As Dr. Ruha Benjamin reminded us in her 2024 Spelman Founders’ Day address,
Black faces in high places are not going to save us . . . That is, our Blackness and womanness are not in themselves trustworthy if we allow ourselves to be conscripted into positions of power that maintain the oppressive status quo.
While I believe that peer-reviewed journal articles and publications matter, and research conferences can be an incredible space to connect with scholars and engage in rigorous debate, I also recognize the limitations of these spaces in enacting community-oriented change. Far too often, these venues primarily offer opportunities for self-promotion and career advancement with limited attention to how to make the lessons from our research actionable and accessible to communities that can use them. If we continue this cycle, I am deeply concerned that we will fail to meet the challenges of this critical moment in history. I am in full agreement with Dillard (2000) that research is a responsibility “answerable and obligated to the very persons and communities being engaged in the inquiry” (p. 663).
Research can be a powerful tool to reshape the structures and systems that govern our lives, and I am committed to democratizing the ways that we engage in this work. One way that I have tried to have a more direct impact through my research has been working directly with school and district leaders to build and strengthen the community schools strategy. For the last two years, I have been proud to work within the community schools movement in California to support school and district leaders to transform how we do school. Much of this work has involved working with leaders to build their capacities in data-driven decision-making and developing a shared vision for their community schools.
To guard against the potential for this work to reproduce educational injustices and inequities, I have also coached leaders to reimagine the ways that we understand the data that we have available, what data we value, and how more participatory forms of research can lead to more inclusive, equity-driven educational spaces. For example, leaders’ conceptions of data sources that can be used for school improvement are often limited to traditional surveys or feedback forms. As I work with leaders, I regularly introduce more community-driven, participatory methods, like photovoice, that offer leaders new opportunities to collect and analyze data about experiences within their school communities. Similarly, I have been proud to collaborate with the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution to pilot one example of a more participatory form of education research, The Conversation Starter Tools: A Participatory Research Guide to Building Stronger Family, School, and Community Partnerships (Morris, et al., 2024). What has been most exciting about this collaboration is that it explicitly honors the inherent wisdom and expertise of families and communities, positioning them as co-researchers rather than subjects to be studied. For example, the Conversation Starter Tools engage families, students, and educators in critical dialogues based on community-adapted survey items to collectively examining challenges and collaboratively develop solutions to foster family, school, and community engagement.
LtC: As a scholar, educator, and policy advocate, a major focus of your work has been to elevate community voice in educational governance. What are some of the major lessons that practitioners and scholars of Educational Change can learn from your work?
JB: The main lesson that I want practitioners and scholars to learn from my work is that we cannot remain beholden to what is, and we need to focus on whatcouldbe. We must believe that more is possible.
Much of my work is based on the premise that those who are closest to a problem should be meaningfully engaged developing potential solutions. In far too many spaces where education policies and decisions are being made, those who will be directly impacted by those decisions are missing from the room. In particular, the hopes, dreams, and visions of persistently marginalized communities have often been ignored or opposed in favor of those who hold power.
My most recent research has been focused on K-12 school boards. Nominally, school board meetings seem to be one of the most accessible spaces for community voice in educational governance. Meetings are legally required to be open to the public and board policies generally require opportunities for the public to address the board on any given number of issues. Yet as I have sat through many hours of school board meetings and interviewed school board members across urban, suburban, and rural contexts, I have confronted a troubling reality: many opportunities for community voice in governance have limited impact on the decisions that boards make (Bridgeforth, 2024).
Some of my collaborative work that was recently published (with Eupha Jeanne Daramola, Taylor Enoch-Stevens, and Akua Nkansah-Amankra) explains how board meeting policies, norms, and routines can often work to limit dialogue and debate, rather than offer opportunities to influence decision-making. For example, during a contentious series of board meetings focused on proposed school closures, board leadership regularly relied on shifting interpretations of board meeting policies to maintain a sense of order decorum, which in turn, stifled opportunities for members of a majority-Black community to share their concerns and opposition to the closures. After hours of emotional testimony, the board ultimately voted to move forward with the closures. Importantly, the board at the center of this study was also majority-Black, raising important questions about the limitations of demographic representation in promoting more inclusive forms of community engagement.
School boards remain key sites of educational policy and decision-making. I believe that more scholars and practitioners need to engage in such critical, creative examinations of existing policies and procedures that can be changed or reimagined to enable a more just, equitable, and participatory policymaking process. This requires us to interrogate how existing board-level policies and routines were developed and whose interests they have generally served. Rather than take for granted existing understandings of good governance, I believe we must go further by asking, good governance for whom? Moreover, we must ask, do our systems serve the needs of a more diverse and inclusive society, or are they relics of a more exclusionary past?
“Much of my work is based on the premise that those who are closest to a problem should be meaningfully engaged in developing potential solutions.”
LtC:Your research has explored manifestations of antiblackness in educational policymaking and in the practices of educational leaders. What might practitioners and scholars take from this work to foster better school systems for all students?
JB: I believe that if we are going to truly foster better school systems for all students, we must reject policymakers’ rhetoric that racism is a relic of our past. We must begin with the truth that racism is endemic to our society and that we must continue to work to mitigate its harms. Several years ago, I published an article in the Journal of School Leadership entitled “This Isn’t Who We Are”: A Critical Discourse Analysis of School and District Leaders’ Responses to Racial Violence in Schools (Bridgeforth, 2021). This study examined close to 150 letters, press releases, emails, and social media posts from school and district leaders in the wake of racist incidents within their school communities. While conducting the analysis for this project, I was repeatedly struck by the ways that leaders often maintained that “racism had no place in their communities”, even as they were responding to harmful acts of racial violence often committed by members of their school communities—including teachers, students, and administrators.
As I build on my research agenda and work towards disrupting racism and antiblackness in educational spaces, I often return to histories of resistance in our society. Learning about Black fugitivity (Givens, 2021) and the histories of Black educational resistance (Walker, 2018) can remind us that the issues that we face today are not so different from those faced throughout our history. These and other historical insights deeply informed a recent comparative critical policy analysis (Bridgeforth & O’Neal, 2024) which documented how Texas and North Dakota developed their anti-Critical Race Theory legislation, which we characterize as acts of educational censorship. The historical record explains that similar reactive policy actions have occurred throughout our history when any semblance of racial progress has been made (e.g., state legislatures passing Black Codes in response to Black political power during Reconstruction).
Part of our goal in conducting this research was aligned with traditions of bearing witness to these actions and ensuring that the race-evasive, dominant narratives embedded in these policies do not go unchallenged. Particularly in times of rampant disinformation, it is important that scholars use our training to ensure that counternarratives exist so that we do not inadvertently cede the fight for truth and justice to those who are committed to maintaining the status quo by limiting or undoing the racial progress that has been made.
“I have confronted a troubling reality: many opportunities for community voice in governance has limited impact on the decisions that boards make.”
LtC:Educational Change expects those engaged in and with schools, schooling, and school systems to spearhead deep and often difficult transformation. How might those in the field of Educational Change best support these individuals and groups through these processes?
JM: To support individuals and groups going through challenging transformation processes, I return to some of the lessons I learned through my participatory research partnership with the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution that I mentioned previously. Due to the success of this research spanning 16 countries across six continents, I was recently invited to be a panelist for the closing keynote of the inaugural National Assembly for Family Engagement in Education. Our panel focused on the six global lessons (Morris & Nóra, 2024) that were uncovered through this collaborative research project. While the research primarily focuses on family, school, and community engagement, I believe that several of the lessons can provide useful insights that can support individuals who are leading many kinds of transformation efforts within their school communities. Two lessons that are most relevant to supporting the work of educational transformation are: 1) Begin with beliefs; and 2) Build at the speed of trust.
The first lesson of beginning with beliefs addresses the understanding that many school communities are undergoing significant demographic changes (Turner, 2020) and in turn, often have diverse beliefs and understandings about the purpose of school. Before attempting to engage in school transformation efforts, this lesson suggests that we should take stock of what the various groups within our school community believe and how those beliefs can inform a shared vision for what our schools should be. This does not mean that we will all eventually agree or that there will not be conflicts or vigorous debates. In fact, I can almost guarantee that things may get contentious as people share their beliefs. However, by sharing our beliefs and openly discussing how we came to those understandings, we can begin the process of building relational trust, which can facilitate greater cohesion and in turn, foster meaningful transformation.
The second lesson, build at the speed of trust, acknowledges that educational leaders are often working under a sense of urgency, or in some cases, a state of emergency. Whether due to calls to quickly address concerns about post-pandemic student achievement levels or navigating issues due to looming budget shortfalls, leaders are regularly expected to make decisions swiftly, often leaving little time and fewer opportunities for building trusting relationships that can inform those decisions. While it is important to recognize the pressures that many leaders are facing, rushing through transformation without taking the time to build deeper levels of trust among community members is one of the swiftest ways to limit the impacts of the change that you’re seeking to make. Leaders, and those who support them, should prioritize strategies and practices to build trusting partnerships across the school community (e.g., home visits with families, restorative practices with students and educators) before any transformation process begins. Importantly, these practices should continue throughout the process to deepen and strengthen those relationships over time.
LtC: Where do you perceive the field of Educational Change is going? What excites you about Educational Change now and in the future?
JB: I’m excited to see an increase in critical scholarship calling for meaningful transformation, rather than tinkering around the edges of educational reform. Although this kind of scholarship has traditionally been relegated to smaller, more specialized academic journals and outlets, I have recently seen more critical scholarship showcased in the flagship journals of the field. One such example was the June 2024 special issue of Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis focusing on critical approaches to educational research. This special issue offered several incisive calls to action to transform education systems and included a diverse group of scholars, particularly junior scholars in the field. Additionally, I noticed several recent articles published in Educational Researcher addressing critical issues and methods that have similarly been a welcome addition to the field of educational change. For example, I have appreciated recent work in this journal by Lewis and Muñiz (2024) about navigating hostile, anti-DEI environments, Murray and Hailey (2024) about racialized network analyses, and Tanner (2024) about the influences of neoliberalism and whiteness in education.
We are at a moment in time where we cannot afford to be silent or even reserved about the challenges that we face in our society and the need for bold, meaningful change. While we do not know whether the new Trump administration’s proposed policies will come to fruition, I believe that researchers must use every tool within our power to push back against and mitigate the harms that may come to marginalized communities. In the aftermath of the murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd in 2020, I remember observing so many marches, calls to action, and events that gave me hope that we might see meaningful changes. While many of those changes proved to be temporary due to the intense backlash from conservative policymakers and those who support them (Samuels & Olorunnipa, 2024), I do remain hopeful that we can eventually realize a more just and equitable future and I believe that the field of Educational Change can and will be a significant part of that future.
References
Bridgeforth, J. C. (2021). “This isn’t who we are”: A critical discourse analysis of school and district leaders’ responses to racial violence. Journal of School Leadership, 31(1-2), 85-106.
Bridgeforth, J. C., & O’Neal, D. (2024). (Re) Setting the racial narrative: Antiblackness and educational censorship. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 32(9), n9.
Bridgeforth, J.C. (2024) Beyond board etiquette: Responding to racism in K-12 school boardrooms. In. Johnson, R.M. and Harper, S.R. (Eds.). The Big Lie About Race in America’s Schools. Harvard Education Press.
Dans, P., & Groves, S. (2023). Mandate for Leadership: The conservative promise. The Heritage Foundation.
Daramola, E. J., Enoch-Stevens, T., Bridgeforth, J. C., & Nkansah-Amankra, A. (2024). “On a risky slope of democracy”: Racialized logics embedded in community–school board interactions. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 46(3), 506-533.
Dillard, C. B. (2000). The substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen: Examining an endarkened feminist epistemology in educational research and leadership. International journal of qualitative studies in education, 13(6), 661-681.
Givens, J. R. (2021). Fugitive pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the art of Black teaching. Harvard University Press.
Lange, A. C., & Lee, J. A. (2024). Centering our humanity: Responding to anti-DEI efforts across higher education. Journal of College Student Development, 65(1), 113-116.
Lewis, M. M., & Muñiz, R. (2024). A call for research on the role of legal counsel in promoting (in)equitable educational policies in a hostile, anti-DEI sociopolitical climate. Educational Researcher, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X241289402
Morris, E.M. & Nóra, L. (2024). Six global lessons on how family, school, and community engagement can transform education. Brookings Institution.
Morris, E.M., Nora, L. & Winthrop, R. (2024). Conversation starter tools: A participatory research guide to building stronger family, school, and community partnerships. Brookings Institution
Murray, B., & Hailey, C. A. (2024). Missing the forest for the trees: Toward a networked racial analysis of White parents in education policy and research. Educational Researcher, 53(8), 472-477. https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X241290791
Tanner, S. J. (2024). There’s no way for this to end well: Lesson planning, neoliberalism, and Whiteness. Educational Researcher, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X241289932
Turner, E. O. (2020). Suddenly diverse: How school districts manage race and inequality. University of Chicago Press.
Walker, V. S. (2018). The lost education of Horace Tate: Uncovering the hidden heroes who fought for justice in schools. The New Press.
AI, cellphones, and security – those are a few of the issues highlighted in this IEN’s scan of the predictions about education in 2025. To see the predictions for previous years, review the scans of the “looking ahead” headlines from2024, 2023,2022, 2021 part 1, 2021 part 2, and 2020. To discuss the trends and possibilities for education in the new year join Getting Smart’s annual town hall What’s Next in Learning 2025.
The education sources we follow in the US often provide predictions for schools, students, and teachers in the new year, but it’s been harder to find articles looking ahead from other parts of the world. The Ministry of Education in New Zealand, however, did offer a summary of What’s new for 2025 and the Education Review Office produced a series of best practice guides “to help educators effectively implement incoming changes for 2025.” In the US, to put developments in the new year in context, back in 2017, the National Center for Education Statistics shared Projections of Education Statistics 2025 which can be compared to their Report on the Condition of Education 2024.
Education predication from the US and around the world
“As we look forward to 2025, we hope that public schools will be a lot more conducive for learning. This means cleaner and properly ventilated classrooms, better classroom materials, and improved facilities for both teachers and students.“
“After disappointing results in maths and French tests at the 2024 rentrée, the Education Ministry announced there would be a “complete overhaul” of the curriculums for these subjects in 2025, ranging from maternelle to troisième (infant school to the fourth year of secondary).”
A girl watches during an immigrant rights workshop at Academia Avance charter school in Los Angeles in 2017.
“Education leaders should focus on integrating AI literacy, civic education, and work-based learning to equip students for future challenges and opportunities. Building social capital and personalized learning environments will be crucial for student success in a world increasingly influenced by AI and decentralized power structures.”
“K-12 schools are likely to face several challenges in 2025, including strained budgets due to the expiration of federal aid, cybersecurity threats and staffing shortages, particularly in special education. Additionally, the influx of AI in classrooms and the rise of book bans and curriculum restrictions are key trends to watch for in the upcoming year.”
“Chartwells K12 has identified 10 emerging food trends for school cafeterias in 2025, highlighting a shift toward diverse and nutritious options that align with the preferences of younger generations. Customizable bowls, inclusivity in the form of allergen-friendly and plant-based options and crunchy items are a few of the listed trends.”
“New California state laws will protect the privacy of LGBTQ+ students, ensure that the history of Native Americans is accurately taught and make it more difficult to discriminate against people of color based on their hairstyles.”
IEN’s annual roundup of the end-of-the-year education headlines features stories about efforts to ban books and cellphones in the US, while some of the international stories emphasize the conflicts and crises affecting children around the world. To see how education in 2024 compared to previous years, take a look at IEN’s scans from the end of the year of 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019 part 1, and 2019 part 2.
Although relatively few of the international education media IEN follows reviewed the biggest stories from 2024, organizations focusing on children highlighted the crises affecting many young people, particularly those caught up in conflicts. In the US, many journalists and educators noted the impact of AI and other technologies and Education Week highlighted the efforts to limit technology use by declaring that “cellphone ban” was the word/phrase of the year (The education word of 2024 is…) Given the number of articles that discussed efforts to ban books and regulate curriculum and other aspects of schooling, just “ban” may have been a more appropriate choice. To get a sense of the extent of book banning, the American Library Associationtracked books banned in 2024 and The Guardian reported on a survey rom PEN America showing that more than 10,000 books were banned in US public schools from 2023 to 2024. That same survey suggested that bans of books nearly tripled in the US from 3,362 the previous year (US public schools banned 10,000 books in most recent academic year). But bans were not limited to books or cellphones. The California legislature also passed a number of laws in 2024 banning or restricting a variety of practices including limiting libraries abilities to ban “books based on subject matter focused on race, gender identity, sexual orientation or other characteristics.” The California legislature also banned legacy admissions in private universities in California, and school districts can no longer institute policies requiring teachers or staff to disclose a child’s gender identity to the child’s parent or guardians (Ten things California is banning in 2025).
“More than 52 million children in countries affected by conflict are estimated to be out of school. Children in the Gaza Strip, and a significant portion of children in Sudan, have missed out on more than a year of school, while in countries such as Ukraine, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Syria, schools have been damaged, destroyed or repurposed, leaving millions of children without access to learning.”
Isiolo Secondary school teachers during a strike earlier this year.
“The 2024 academic year in Kenya faced significant disruptions, stemming from funding delays, natural disasters, industrial action, and social unrest, severely affecting learning activities across the country.”
“Learning losses to the students of all levels [in Bangladesh] were caused by not only the mass uprising, which began with the student movement against government job quotas, but also natural calamities of cold wave, heatwave and flood that caused the closure of educational institutions several times in 2024.“
“Warm demanders are teachers who insist on the highest standards but remain sensitive to a student’s need to belong—and to succeed. By bracketing the most frustrating lessons with work that elicits a child’s feelings of competence, teachers can “bolster students’ math motivation and engagement” in a way that does not “involve reducing the rigor of the material that students learn.'”
IEN will be taking a break over the holidays and New Year and returning in January with our annual posts surveying the headlines reviewing the education news in 2024 and predicting education trends in 2025. In the meantime, please revisit some of our most viewed stories of the year. We hope you have a restful, peaceful, and healthy New Year!
Hirokazu Yokota on aggressive education reforms to change the “grammar of schooling” in Toda City part 1 & part 2
That is the power of the collective that can be known as “power with.” There’s close coordination between authorities at grassroots levels and schools, with monthly meetings between the village or what we call the commune authorities and school leadership and educators.
Looking toward the future and the implementation of a new competency-based curriculum in Vietnam: A Conversation about the Evolution of the Vietnamese School System with Phương Lương Minh and Lân Đỗ Đức, part 1 & part 2
78% of parents polled want their children to have cellphone access during the school day in case there’s an emergency. Some 58% said cellphone access is needed so parents can get in touch with their children and find out where they are, and 48% said contact is needed to coordinate transportation.
Nearing the end of 2024, it’s an opportune time for Looking Back to Look Forward. In this case, that means looking back on the standards-based education reforms of the 1990’s through a reflection and report from Mike Kirst. As Dick Jung describes in his book and blog series about Kirst’s career and impact, Kirst is an “uncommon academic;” at the same time that Kirst has been a professor of education at Stanford University he has also been an influential public servant. Kirst has been a trusted advisor to California’s former Governor Jerry Brown, and Kirst served four terms as President of the California State Board of Education. This week, IEN highlights Kirst’s continuing influence by sharing a quote from a blog post Kirst wrote for Policy Analysis for California Education along with excerpts from the latest installment of the “Uncommon academic” blog series. Both the blog post and the 21st installment discuss the Kirst’s latest report for the Learning Policy Institute on some the standards based reforms in which he has been intimately involved. (For a previous post on Mike Kirst’s career see Making public policy work for education: Reflections on the career of Mike Kirst)
“After ending my fourth term as president of the California State Board of Education in 2019, I have begun to reflect, in my sixth decade of education policy, about what I did right and what I should have done differently. In my time on the board, we organized many policies around and integrated them with the state standards in English Language Arts, Mathematics, and Science. California made significant progress toward creating coherent and aligned state policies aimed at helping local districts implement the Common Core State Standards. We coupled these policies with a new, more equitable funding system—the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF)—and a multiple measures accountability system.
Looking back, it was naïve to believe that these policy reforms alone would be enough to achieve the desired impact. We successfully corrected for some of the failures of prior attempts to generate educational improvement by over-focusing on accountability (embodied by policies like No Child Left Behind). I failed, however, to realize the extent to which accountability-focused approaches of the past had underinvested in building the system capacity necessary to support educators in developing the knowledge and skills that would enable them to teach successfully in the new ways that the new standards demanded. Our policies did not do enough to overcome this deficit.”
A Clarion Call for Reform from an ‘Uncommon Academic’Excerpts from the 21st installment of the Mike Kirst Biography Project produced by Richard Jung
This installment of the Mike Kirst Biography Project features Mike himself, speaking of his rationale and intentions as he toiled, in his eighties, over the lessons from decades of research and policymaking. This installment allows you to see and hear, through video and audio clips, Mike’s sense of what is most important for policymakers to know and do toward lifting local education practices to meet high standards (standards-based reform).
He elaborates—in his own words, often with captivating metaphors—the answers to three questions:
Why has he spent the first five years in his eighties researching and writing this Report?
Why have many K-12 education reform efforts, including his own, fallen short?
What should be done differently going forward?
So, let’s take a more personalized plunge into the education policy approach of standards-based K-12 education reform, enhanced by recent interviews with Mike.
Mike’s “More-Focused Heart” Years
In the report’s first sentence, Mike writes that its genesis was when he turned 80. His longtime Stanford colleague, walking partner, and hand-selected successor as California’s State Board of President, Linda Darling-Hammond, then President of Learning Policy Institute (LPI), and he had “discussions.” He agreed with her and others that “[a]after almost 60 years of working full-time in education and doing research, I thought it was a good time for me to reflect on” that previous work in federal and state education reform efforts “and to synthesize the research focusing on the impact of standards-based reforms.”3
As Mike turned 80, he reviewed the current research literature. He saw that there was a much deeper understanding of how difficult it is to change classroom instruction and that California had no master plan or strategy based on that research, particularly for math instruction.
Mike persisted for the next three years, through his early 80s, to gather and reflect on this research at a time when, as he writes in this “Preface,” “the COVID-19 pandemic was the overwhelming focus of education policy.” A series of LPI editors worked with him to refine and polish the Report. And now, some five years after those initial discussions with Linda Darling-Hammond, Mike believes “public attention” might be “more receptive to classroom instruction issues and the core subject matter curricula of k-12 schools.”4
Professionally, Mike’s septuagenarian years had hardly been “serene,” unlike those of suffragist Scott-Maxwell noted above. During his stint leading the state board of education and working hand-in-hand with then-Governor Jerry Brown from 2011 through 2019, Mike had led the charge with others to pass and then start to implement one of the country’s most successful school finance and governance reforms, the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) which enhanced both quality and equity in the state’s distribution of funds and accountability for their use.5
With others, he began working quietly—perhaps less quietly recently—behind the scenes to stir up enthusiasm about the standards-based reform ideas embedded in the LCFF, e.g., that standards-based reform involves setting standards and aligning curriculum, instruction, and assessment practices to those standards to ensure that all students have the opportunity to meet high expectations, thereby enhancing both quality and equity.
By the time he was almost 82, in July 2021, like writer and activist Scott-Maxwell, Mike was becoming “more intense” as he aged. He began publicly to “let the cat out of the bag” about his sense of the critical next steps toward fully implementing standards-based reforms when he delivered his acceptance remarks as he received the prestigious James Bryant Conant Award from the Education Commission of the States.
In his acceptance speech (this clip below), he begins, as is his wont, with a sports analogy—of “being in the fourth inning of a nine-inning ballgame when we got rained out by Covid”—to summarize California’s complex education policy situation as implementation of the reforms in the LCFF were to roll out. He had already highlighted that “local capacity building” is the place to start and emphasized that again. There’s a lot to unpack from this two-minute clip. Let’s first listen in:
Even amid the COVID-19 shut-down of schools across California and most of the country in 2021, Mike looked into the future and beyond when K-12 schools would be fully operational. He drew upon his decades of education policy research and policymaker experience to note, “States… can’t mandate—we can’t even incentivize very well what teachers and principals and school people do together.” Further, “when the teacher closes the classroom door, she or he has the impact, in effect, of a pocket veto, over whether state policies are implemented or not.”
As a politics of education expert, the pocket-veto power of teachers once the teacher closes the classroom door is a metaphor that Mike has often used to depict that state, federal, or even local policymakers cannot merely “mandate” or require classroom practices to improve instruction.
As you can hear in this clip, Mike had been looking in the U.S. and other countries for ways to build the “massive infrastructure” needed to effect reforms in California. He cites Ontario, Canada, Singapore, Australia, Finland, and some states in America, several of which were sites for his early policy work.6 He offers this tease: “I can’t describe all of this to you now, but you’ll be hearing more from me about …”big thinking, big infrastructure, big capacity building, and state-wide scale-up… in the next months and years.”
Now, three years later, Mike has found a more apt metaphor for the complexity of improving classroom instruction; it’s an analogy he picked up from Harvard University’s Richard Elmore.7 Mike now observes that “education policy, particularly at the federal and state level, is like a shell of a turtle. The shell’s important for the turtle, but moving and important, complex parts are underneath. Mike believes that “at this time in my career, my focus is on the operating parts of the turtle rather than on the ‘shell’ of finance and governance.”8
To illustrate this portrayal of education policy by drawing on the Elmore turtle analogy, he borrows an image from his research colleague Jane David, who calls it “the puzzle of educational change.” Mike explains in the Report, “David’s diagram is daunting in its complexity and helps illustrate why it has taken years of effort even to begin to align the supports for standards-based reform, long after support for the concept itself took hold.” In other words it’s one thing to create strong standards. It’s quite another for “those standards” to make “their way into instruction” inside the classroom.9
Massive Infrastructure Needed for Scale-Up
The publication of Looking Back to Look Forward is evidence of Mike’s focus since his Conant Award acceptance speech three years ago. He had been deliberating on the nature of and the necessity for a “massive” post-COVID standards-based reform of California’s K-12 education system. The word “massive” appears in the Report nine times.
In his “long paper,” he states that all states, “even those…in the midst of piecemeal improvements to instructional capacity-building…would benefit from broader thinking and planning. The objective should be to create a lasting education infrastructure similar to the federal interstate highway system of the 1950s.”10 Mike’s point with this analogy to the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act is that it took 15 years to pour all the concrete to complete our country’s interstate highway system. With COVID hitting only a few years after the standards reform legislation in California was enacted, much of the “concrete” in terms of essential “capacity-building” for improving instruction had only begun to be “poured” or put in place.
“The key word is ‘capacity-building’ of local educators.”
Recall that in the Conant acceptance speech, he told the audience that “the keyword is ‘capacity building” at the local level, that “this capacity building has many aspects,” and that education reformers in other countries had told him, “we build this capacity building into the districts” and “we build it into every day” and “into the professional work of teachers through expanded professional development.” Mike details this local capacity effort in other countries and states, including Massachusetts and Louisiana, on pages 69 through 76 of Looking Back to Look Forward.
Mike Notes Two Caveats about the LPI Monograph
Mike’s thinking evolved in several significant ways as the publication of this paper “percolated.” Most notably, he, with other colleagues, now more fully admits “how hard it is to scale up PD [professional development]…to statewide implementation.”11 He also recently reflected on two caveats about the paper, especially its conclusions. Click on the link below to hear more from Mike about the first of these:
Mike is delighted that the monograph is now out but laments that it “essentially ends with a plea for a detailed plan with very little detail.” He continues, “I’ve learned now more than I had in the paper about how hard it is.”12 after recently working with several groups–including the California Collaboration on District Reform and the California Math Roundtable, which he refers to jointly as the “collaborative” in this interview excerpt. Voicing some frustration, Mike concludes, “There is no detailed strategic plan in this paper because nobody has ever done one.”
He asks rhetorically specifically for math, “So what’s your strategic plan for teachers to teach the math curriculum in California when the students are all over the map in math? You have so much diversity, particularly in that subject, even within middle-class and upper-class classrooms. And so that’s why it’s not there.”13
The second limitation Mike now sees in his Report is that he failed to more forcefully note that educational policy has been imbalanced too frequently, failing to emphasize capacity-building as much as accountability. Click on the link below to listen to how he explains this limitation in his own words:
Referring to Harvard’s famed education policy researcher, Richard Elmore—what Mike calls “Elmore’s Law—Kirst notes that for too many years, policymakers have put too much emphasis on accountability up front rather than understanding that successful implementation requires more initial investments in capacity building.14 Using a scale of justice metaphor, he notes that even a recent California education funding initiative had still made this mistake when it had “ratcheted up accountability but with no real systematic capacity” and that it’s “a common mistake” among policymakers to “lead with accountability and never get around to capacity building.”
Still Living His Mantra
Before LPI published Mike’s “long paper,” Kirst was cautious in what he said publicly about his behind-the-scenes efforts to advance his standards-based reform project, which is close to his heart. That didn’t stop others from wanting to hear more about Mike’s education reform ideas. Earlier this year, for example, Dr. Lisa Andrew, President and CEO of Silicon Valley Education Foundation, hosted for Forbes Books a two-part series offering what she summarized as “a unique bird’s eye perspective on education’s challenges and opportunities,” with the impatient foot-tapping title of “They are Waiting For Us”, perhaps unwittingly reflecting Mike’s wanting for the past several years to get out the ideas now appearing in this LPI paper.
Mike begins this Report with more than a hint of that impatience, noting that the COVID-19 pandemic became “the overwhelming focus of education policy for three years.” So, he and LPI leadership decided to “wait until public attention was more receptive to classroom instruction issues and the core subject matter curriculum of K-12 schools ” to release the monograph.15 With the publication of this Report early in the 2024-25 school year, Mike boldly exhorts, “Now is not the time to give up on state standards.” Instead, he insists, “There is no better time than now to proceed.”16
We note, however, that Mike’s “now” is tempered in his “long paper’s” closing observation that “providing sufficient capacity-building for teachers in making major instructional shifts is more realistically implemented over a decade or more rather than in… a few years”—cautioning policymakers once again to adhere to his time-proven policy reform mantra of: “patience, persistence, humility, and continuous improvement.” reiterated in the Report’s concluding sentence.”17
Do adults have the skills they need to thrive in a changing world? That’s the question OECD asks in its report on the results from the 2023 Survey of Adult Skills. In many places, the answer seems to be maybe not. 160,000 16 – 65 year olds in 31 participating education systems took the test and only test-takers in Finland and Denmark improved their scores in literacy, with scores in the other participating systems remaining stable or declining since the data collection began in 2011. 8 of the 31 systems improved in math, but in both literacy and math the lowest-performing adults have shown the biggest decline in scores. Along with the latest scan of the headlines in the education sources we follow, this week’s post provides a brief summary of some of the key take-aways reported. Produced by OECD’s Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), this estimate of adult skills comes only a few weeks after the latest release of the results of the Trends in Mathematics and Science Survey (TIMSS), which assesses the skills of 15 year-olds (Around the World in Math and Science: Scanning the headlines on the results of TIMSS 2023).
Key Takeaways from the 2023 Survey of Adult Skills
Finland, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden excel in the three tested areas of literacy, numeracy, and problem solving, with significant percentages of adults showing “advanced” abilities.
Finnish high school graduates outperform those with college/tertiary education degrees in several countries, including Chile, Israel and Lithuania.
Adults who show high levels of skill in numeracy are 11 percentage points more likely to report very good or excellent health compared to those with low numeracy skills
On average, across participating systems, 18% of adults lack even the most basic levels of proficiency in any of the domains, but the performance of the top 10% has improved, leading to widening skills inequalities within countries
Adults with highly educated parents outscored those with “low-educated” parents by 50 percentage points in literacy
Singapore and the United States displayed the largest skills inequalities in literacy and numeracy
Disparities in educational attainment are largest in Israel, Switzerland, and Hungary (34 percentage points) and smallest in Spain (7 points)
A flurry of articles in the US press since the presidential election in November explored the effect that a new Trump administration might have on schools, on students, and on a number of education issues. In this week’s post, IEN shares some of the headlines as well as those discussing the results of governor’s races and local propositions with particular relevance for education.
Is the federal role in education slated for elimination or expansion?…There’s no way to be sure today. But there’s ample reason to be unsure, and that’s because the Trump world has long sent exceedingly mixed messages when it comes to K-12 education and the federal role therein.
Pete Hegseth has pushed for years to steep American education in patriotic principles and Christian theology — and he could implement that vision for thousands of military families if he’s confirmed to lead the Defense Department.
Many California children and their families, including immigrants, transgender students and Black and Latino students, are feeling fear and uncertainty.
“More than a dozen states had ballot measures related to protecting or codifying access to abortion rights, the majority of which passed. But for Gen Z, being pro-reproductive rights did not equate to voting Democratic. In Florida, over half (52%) of young voters favored ending the state’s six-week abortion ban while supporting Trump by a 10-point margin.”
Eleven newly elected governors have big plans for education in their states, with a focus on key issues including school funding, teacher retention, early literacy, math proficiency, career readiness, and school choice.
Voters in Kentucky and Nebraska said no to private school choice Tuesday, dashing the hopes of advocates who wanted to further advance the movement for vouchers and education savings accounts.
Voters in the Virginia suburbs shifted toward Trump. Some said they were still frustrated by pandemic closures and fights over gender, race and testing in schools.
International Education News 