Podcasts about no child left behind

Public schools are essential for democracy—and they're under attack. But the very policies that are being championed as their salvation may have a catastrophic impact on American education for generations. Public education advocate and historian Diane Ravitch unpacks how school choice policies like vouchers and charter schools are dangerous for democracy. Diane Ravitch is a former assistant secretary in the United States Department of Education. She is the author of several books on the history and policy of American public schools. Her memoir, about her life as a leading public education reformer, will be published this fall. It's called An Education: How I Changed My Mind About Almost Everything. https://dianeravitch.net/

Read the full transcript here. How bad are things in US education? Why does it seem that educational progress has stagnated? What parts of the US education system should be reformed? Is it better to group students by skill level or by age? How useful are standardized tests? Why is there so commonly a disconnect between what cognitive science tells us about how people learn and the practices that are actually implemented in classrooms? How much do we know about what it's like in schools today? What did the No Child Left Behind act get wrong? What should educational incentive structures look like? Is individual student progress constrained more by interest or intelligence? In the grand scheme of things, how big of a problem is classroom management? What happened in the FAA hiring scandal? Did it increase the risks associated with flying? How could the FAA have better achieved its own ends?Jack Despain Zhou, also known online as Tracing Woodgrains, is the cofounder of the Center for Educational Progress, a nonprofit focused on reorienting education around a culture of excellence. Elsewhere, he is known for his coverage of institutional crises and online history, particularly the FAA's hiring scandal and Wikipedia abuse, and for cultural and political commentary from an ex-Mormon centrist perspective. He previously helped produce Blocked and Reported, a podcast about internet nonsense. He can be found on Substack as Tracing Woodgrains or on Twitter as @tracewoodgrains.Further readingProject Follow Through Sponsor ✨This episode is sponsored by Animal Charity Evaluators.StaffSpencer Greenberg — Host / DirectorJosh Castle — ProducerRyan Kessler — Audio EngineerUri Bram — FactotumWeAmplify — TranscriptionistsMusicBroke for FreeJosh WoodwardLee RosevereQuiet Music for Tiny Robotswowamusiczapsplat.comAffiliatesClearer ThinkingGuidedTrackMind EasePositlyUpLift[Read more]

In this episode, Brian Karem, Dean Obeidallah, and John T. Bennett discuss the ongoing battle between Donald Trump and the judiciary, the state of the Democratic Party, and the importance of voter engagement. They explore the challenges faced by Democrats in communicating their message and the need for a strong response to Trump's actions. The conversation also touches on upcoming elections and the implications for both parties. In this conversation, the speakers discuss the implications of recent education policy changes, particularly the effects of the No Child Left Behind Act, and how these policies have led to a decline in educational quality. They explore the contradiction between the push for manufacturing jobs and the lack of educational support for the workforce. The discussion also touches on consumer confidence in the economy, the critical role of local news in shaping political opinions, and the controversial actions of the Department of Education, referred to as 'Doge', which some argue represents a new form of the deep state. In this conversation, the speakers discuss the current political landscape in the United States, focusing on the influence of Donald Trump, the role of Congress, and the future of federal institutions. They explore the dynamics of power, the challenges faced by the Democratic Party, and the implications of Trump's spending strategies. The conversation highlights the need for critical thinking and the importance of understanding the forces that shape American politics today.

Learn kind and practical tips to support your ADHD child by downloading the First 3 Chapters of the book for FREE here: https://bit.ly/first_3_chapters -------------------------------------------------------------------- In this episode of The ADHD Kids Can Thrive, the host Kate Brownfield sits down with clinical psychologist Dr. Matthew Zakreski, an expert in neurodivergence, to discuss ADHD, autism, and how the education system impacts children with different learning needs. Dr. Zakreski, author of The Neurodiversity Playbook, Sheds light into the neuroscience of ADHD, the impact of reduced recess and unstructured time in schools, and strategies to help children thrive. He explains why traditional school environments can fail neurodiverse kids and how parents can advocate for better support. Whether you're raising a child with ADHD, autism, or other neurodivergent traits, this episode will give you practical strategies and a fresh perspective on how to support their growth.  

In this special episode, Paul Willis discusses All Saints Catholic School in Essex, which recently won the Secondary Provision of the Year award at the nasen awards. The school is recognised for its commitment to inclusive education and its "No Child Left Behind" philosophy, ensuring all students, including those with special educational needs, have access to learning. Paul outlines a staff action research project aimed at raising awareness of students facing barriers to learning, with over 50 staff members participating. The school employs various strategies to celebrate student achievements and has introduced new initiatives for sixth form students. Paul emphasises the importance of prioritising student support, highlighting the collaborative culture among staff, including teaching, support, and kitchen staff, all dedicated to student well-being. He discusses the school's inclusive practices, such as tailored interventions for social skills and academic support. The conversation also touches on the role of communication with parents, the significance of building rapport, and the need for a whole-school approach to inclusion. Paul advocates for continuous improvement and learning from other schools, ensuring that inclusive practices are embedded in the school's ethos and curriculum. Contact Paul pwillis@allsaintsschool.co.uk  www.allsaintsschool.co.uk x.com/allsaintscsch www.facebook.com/allsaintscsch/   Useful Links nasen website nasen events and CPD nasen live conference  nasen Awards 2025   B Squared Website – www.bsquared.co.uk  Meeting with Dale to find out about B Squared - https://calendly.com/b-squared-team/overview-of-b-squared-sendcast  Email Dale – dale@bsquared.co.uk  Subscribe to the SENDcast - https://www.thesendcast.com/subscribe   The SENDcast is powered by B Squared We have been involved with Special Educational Needs for over 25 years, helping show the small steps of progress pupils with SEND make. B Squared has worked with thousands of schools, we understand the challenges professionals working in SEND face. We wanted a way to support these hardworking professionals - which is why we launched The SENDcast! Click the button below to find out more about how B Squared can help improve assessment for pupils with SEND in your school.

Kelly Lamrock looked at 20 recommendations made in the No Child Left Behind report three years ago. Roxanne Sappier of Negotkuk chaired the Indigenous advisory committee that worked on the report. 

New Brunswick's child and youth advocate is raising the alarm to tackle youth mental health in Indigenous communities. Of the 20 recommendations made in a report three years ago, only eight have been implemented. Roxanne Sappier, the chair of the First Nations Advisory Council, speaks with host Steven Webb.

​Of the 20 recommendations made in the No Child Left Behind report on Indigenous youth mental health made three years ago​, child and youth advocate Kelly Lamrock says just eight have been implemented. ​C​olleen Kitts-Goguen spoke to Roxanne Sappier of Negotkuk First Nation about these findings​.https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/indigenous-mental-health-report-1.7398942

In this eye-opening episode, we're joined by Dr. Derrick Standifer, a powerhouse in youth motivation and mental health advocacy. Known for his impactful message Life is Like a Rubik's Cube, Dr. Standifer shares his journey from a college dropout to earning a Ph.D. and becoming a voice for resilience and accountability. As a single father navigating his challenges, he knows firsthand the importance of taking ownership of one's life for his own well-being and as an example to his children.

In the milestone 200th episode of the Better Learning Podcast, special host Kevin Foote sits down with Dr. Andy Forless, superintendent of Mesa Public Schools, to dive into a conversation about innovation in education. As the leader of Arizona's largest school district, Dr. Forless shares her unique journey from classroom teacher to educational leadership and how her passion for teaching has shaped her vision for transforming student learning experiences. The centerpiece of their discussion revolves around Mesa Public Schools' groundbreaking team teaching model, an approach designed to leverage shared expertise among educators. This model fosters a sense of belonging among students, enhances student engagement, and has proven effective in improving teacher retention—a growing challenge in education today. Dr. Forless and Kevin also explore the role of collaborative learning spaces and partnerships, particularly with Arizona State University, in making these educational innovations possible.   Takeaways: Team teaching allows for shared expertise among educators. Collaborative learning spaces enhance the team teaching experience. Personalized learning is essential for student engagement. Partnerships with universities can drive educational innovation. Redesigning working conditions is crucial to retain teachers. The future of education relies on collaboration and flexibility.   Andi Fourlis is the superintendent at Mesa Public Schools. Her career began in 1992 as a teacher in the Washington Elementary School District in Phoenix. She joined the Scottsdale Unified School District in 1996, where she spent 19 years as a teacher, director, executive director and assistant superintendent. In 2015 she joined the Arizona Science Center as the chief learning officer. In 2017, she joined Mesa Public Schools as the assistant superintendent of teaching and learning and later served as deputy superintendent. Andi Fourlis has received numerous awards, including the Horace Mann Ruler of the Month Award in 2019, the Kathy Hunt-Ullock Award for Middle Level Advocacy in 2013, and Teacher of the Year Award at Royal Palm Middle School in 1994. She is a graduate of Valley Leadership Institute Class 38 (2017).   Sound Bites: "I never thought that I would ever leave my classroom." "Team teaching is when a group of adults share expertise."   Follow Dr. Andi Fourlis on Social Media: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andi-fourlis-713994122/   Learn More About Mesa Public Schools: Website: https://www.mpsaz.org/     Learn more about creating better learning environments at www.Kay-Twelve.com. Kevin Stoller is the host of the Better Learning Podcast and Co-Founder of Kay-Twelve, a national leader for educational furniture. Find out more about Kevin at https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevinstoller/. For more episodes of the Better Learning Podcast, visit https://www.betterlearningpodcast.com/     Episode 200 of the Better Learning Podcast Kevin Stoller is the host of the Better Learning Podcast and Co-Founder of Kay-Twelve, a national leader for educational furniture. Learn more about creating better learning environments at www.Kay-Twelve.com.   For more information on our partners: Association for Learning Environments (A4LE) - https://www.a4le.org/ Education Leaders' Organization - https://www.ed-leaders.org/ Second Class Foundation - https://secondclassfoundation.org/ EDmarket - https://www.edmarket.org/ Catapult @ Penn GSE - https://catapult.gse.upenn.edu/   Want to be a Guest Speaker? Request on our website     Transcript Kevin Stoller (00:01.288) Welcome back to the better learning podcast. My name is Kevin Stoller I'm the normal host of the show, but we have another Kevin Kevin foot who's gonna be stepping in and Leading the conversation with dr. Andy for lists She is the superintendent of Mesa Public Schools the largest district in Arizona and I'm bummed that I wasn't part of this conversation I was really looking forward to it. But as you listen to the episode they talk a lot about their team Teaching approach had they've been doing in conjunction with Arizona State University. So it's really fascinating. So listen in. I hope you learn a lot from this and here you get to hear Kevin Foote and Dr. Andy Forless.   Kevin Foote (00:46.85) Hello, how are you? Good, how are you? I'm a different Kevin.   Dr. Andi Fourlis That is just grand, no troubles at all. So I'm Andy Forlund, Superintendent in Mesa Public Schools. I am an Arizona native. I began my educational career in Mesa Public Schools at Lowell Elementary. I'm starting kindergarten at Lowell. And I became a teacher because I loved to play school ever since I was a little girl. I was trying to arrange and rearrange, whether it was stuffed animals, my brother, the neighborhood kids, I was always organizing them into some type of a classroom. And so I spent fond memories of being a toddler and then growing up always playing school. I got super excited about going to kindergarten and I planned for my first day of kindergarten for a very long time from what I was going to wear to what my lunchbox was going to look like, what my backpack would look like and so on. So my mom took me to kindergarten and off I went and she picked me up at the end of the day. So excited to hear about, my gosh, Andi, how was your first day of school? You've been waiting this for so long. Well, I started crying. I pitched a fit in the car. I said it was the worst day of my life. And I remember her face was just blank. Like, how could this be the worst day of your life? And mom, you did not tell me that I was not going to be the teacher today. So I went to school and I was four. I was turning five in December. I went to school to kindergarten as a fourth as a four year old. Yeah. I was going for one reason. That was to be the teacher. I have had this idea that I was going to be a teacher because I always wanted to arrange people and things so that they can learn. And so as long as I can remember, I was always going to be a teacher in the back of my mind. Then I went to school, so I'll answer another one of the questions. So school for me was, it was a great place. I learned quickly. I had lots of questions. I kept thinking about how it could be different, how it should be different. And as I went through school, I never raised my hand. And when people ask me, Andi, what do you want to be when you grow up? I never said a teacher. kept thinking, I don't want to do it like this. I want to do it differently. And it wasn't until I had the opportunity to take some college courses that like an introduction to education, I thought, OK, this is what I'm going to do with my life. I can't way that it currently is. I don't have to live in the status quo. So I've always had one goal and I've always been in the service industry. I was a waitress all through high school and college to pay my way through college. And I realized that serving other people was something that I was good at and that it contributed to a better life for me and others.   Kevin Foote I love it. I love it. Very, very similar backgrounds, you and I. I'm not going to get into mine, but very, very similar. I was one of those weird ones that always knew I wanted to be a teacher. So what got you into administration, whether it was principal or eventually now in superintendency, what was your guiding light for that?   Dr. Andi Fourlis Well, I will tell you that I never thought that I would ever leave my classroom. I taught third grade, sixth grade, seventh grade, and then eighth grade. And it was a sixth grade classroom that I had district leaders come into my classroom and ask me if I was interested in mentoring other teachers. And I said, sure, I've always mentored other teachers. They said, yeah, but this would be a full time job where you step out of your classroom and for maybe three years or so work in our new teacher induction model and bring in our new secondary teachers. And really get that complemented to strong instructional practices and so on. I said, interesting. Okay, I could do that for a little bit. And then I never went back. So that was in 2000. And so here we are, 24 years later, I've not gone back into a classroom. I still have samples of student work that I'm ready to use someday. But I've back. So it was a tap on the shoulder to move into teacher leadership. And my journey has been through teacher leadership. I've never been a building principal or assistant principal. My journey was being an instructional coach and then to a director of professional learning and a director of recruitment.   Kevin Foote That's great. That's an interesting path. That's very unique compared to general superintendents. They've usually gone the principal path. So that's a very interesting path like that. So I've done some research into it. I've actually...you know, we've designed some schools and stuff within the ASU model of the team teaching and everything. And I wanted you to talk some more about that. I was able to listen to another podcast you were on and I've just, I loved it. Loved it. I was like, guys, this is right. I love hearing about this.   Dr. Andi Fourlis Okay. Yeah. So, you know, I would say like, I'm sorry to be redundant, but I know you probably love talking about it. And this is a, you know, maybe a bigger, different audience. So, if this is, you know, maybe architects or designers or somebody maybe in my industry on that end could hear more about what the team teaching model is for, like, for me, I'm all about it I was in the classroom. Maybe somebody who's never really been in the classroom. What does that look like? So when we think about our experiences in schools and being a one-on-one school is that people usually identify by saying, well, this was my third grade teacher. Well, my fifth grade teacher had the most impact on me. My seventh grade English teacher had an impact on me. That is the typical experience that most students have in American public school system. When we think about team teaching is when you start students start to identify this is the team of teachers that I am working with and it is beyond the one teacher one classroom model. Then the majority of my career I had the great benefit of working on a team. I was not just one teacher trying to serve all of my children. I was always on a team. I started in third grade and that was a team taught class and I did my teaching and then taught there. And then I moved into, there was a couple of years at the very beginning that I was a one teacher in one classroom. And I was a middle school team. And then when I moved to the Scottsdale Unified School District, I was also in a three person team, sharing a roster of 150 students. And we were co-designing deeper and more personalized learning. Those are all fancy words I have now, but I would have never been able to use. 1896 is when I started this work. School teaching is when there are a group of adults, teachers sharing their expertise to co-design instruction for a common roster of children that they serve. So, the public schools, our definition of a team is at least two teachers sharing a roster of students designing learning outcomes for them.   Kevin Foote Awesome. Now, just piggybacking on that, are there...How rare is this in Arizona? Are there other districts that are doing this? Did you get the model from, I know ASU, Arizona State's kind of guiding it, but did you get to see any other districts in action that are doing this?   Dr. Andi Fourlis So yeah, there are other districts that are implementing team teaching. And like I said, my own career, I started in 1991 and thinking about what we knew about middle school, adolescent design. It was, middle schools were based on teams of teachers bringing their academic knowledge, working with other teachers to serve children. So this is not a model that's new at all. In fact, team teaching, we can go back into our history books and look at even our former superintendent, Dr. Jim Saharis talking about team teaching in the 1970s. So this is not a new concept. What's new about team teaching today, is that we are using it in an environment of high levels of accountability. Because I believe that we started moving to the one teacher one classroom under the era of No Child Left Behind. No Child Left Behind talked about things like the highly qualified teacher, the appropriately certified teacher. And when it started breaking down classrooms by certification of who was highly certified to teach these students, and we had such a focus on that that we really aligned one teacher to typically a class of 25 to 30 students. And so No Child Left Behind came in with high levels of accountability to the teacher. And so team teaching, any type of collaboration, I believe, started to fall to the wayside.   Kevin Foote Yeah. OK. And I love what you talked about there where it's taken it from that middle school model or the junior high model where that's essentially what you're doing. And why can't we do top down with that? I love that. It's so important to talk about when we talk about the next education workforce teaming model, it is more than just a team of teachers. When we're truly talking about teaming, we are opening up learning opportunities for students by bringing in community partners, by community educators, rethinking the role of an instructional assistant. Even in today's world, here we are in 2024, rethinking the role of technology on a team. What role does this piece of technology play in integrating into the learning needs of students?   Dr. Andi Fourlis So it's taking all of your resources and arranging for learning for students and it is beyond the scope of just the certified teachers in that classroom. It's wrapping adults around the needs of children.   Kevin Foote Yes. I love that. And you you could see creating a strong workforce that knows how to work with, let's say, different types of bosses and all the varying learning styles and teaching styles that go along with, you know, I'm sure somebody in their career at some point were like, there's a boss that I just didn't work well with or I really like working for him or her and things like that. So I think this is a good start to that to get them to understand it at a young age. How do you function within, how does this team teaching model function within like the learning environment, like the actual spaces? Can you explain how Mesa's done it or if you've seen another district, like how do they make it work with if you do have a space that's been designed and furnished for that and everything, and then a space that's not, how do they make that work? I'd love to hear both sides of it.   Dr. Andi Fourlis So collaborative learning spaces are very important for teaming. And I will tell you that we have intentionally designed spaces for collaboration for teaming in Mesa Public Schools. And we also have teaming that is alive and well their physical design is not super conducive, but they make it work. So I'll give you another example. At Westwood High School, all ninth and 10th graders are on teams, and those are bigger kids, and they need bigger spaces. And so we have some potentially designed space where walls have come down. They've got movable chalkboards, whiteboards throughout the room. So kids are working on different projects. They're in and out of this collaborative space. At Stevenson Elementary, every child is on a team and they are beginning in first grade as a multi-grade team. And so the doors between classrooms are able to be opened. They look just like they're very large doors with the glass in between them and they- Storefront, if you will. So students are moving from classroom to classroom within a pod. never walk outside. They are all inside the building between classes. We have others that students have to walk outside to the classroom next door. So there's lots of different ways. And but what is most important is not that we're just moving kids, but what is the purpose and the intent behind the movement? And that needs to be artfully designed. We are moving kids around to get what they need to improve their learning outcome. So sometimes they need additional English language arts time. Sometimes they need more mathematics time. Sometimes they're going into innovation space because they're working in a project. And so they, at Stevenson Elementary, all students set their own intentions and learning targets for the day and then monitor those and then build their schedule with the guidance of the adults around what their game will look like. And so they have to be able to move.   Kevin Foote Okay, I love that.   Dr. Andi Fourlis That's one very last thing, have to be able to move. I love getting them up and moving. I'd also like to add that it's really important for our teams to build a community of learners. And so when the majority of our teaming models, at the beginning of the day, the entire grade level or grade bands at three, four, for example, at Stevenson, they meet in the morning for what they call family time. They all come together. Other schools, it might just be the entire third grade. They come together in the morning and they check the health and wellness of the community. That's what they do, but then they move on. At Stevenson, we have larger groups of children. So another added feature is that we have audio enhancement. So all of the teachers use microphones and they're in the classroom. And that's been a modification so that all children can learn even in a large space.   Kevin Foote That's great. I love that. I love that. what successes have you seen? And again, this is kind of like a two-part. What successes have you seen academically as well as socially? Because there's so many I want to hear from you firsthand. What successes have you seen in both those aspects?   Dr. Andi Fourlis So we have what our strongest indicators are around students have a sense of belonging. So they know where they belong, have an identity and they have more than one adult that they can connect with every single day. So while you might be assigned to Mrs. Smith and in third grade and teacher one classroom model, you and Mrs. Smith may not see eye to eye on things. And so in our teaming model, students have a lot of opportunity to connect with the expertise of multiple adults, including their teachers. So there's higher level of sense of belonging and confidence amongst our students that are in teams. The other is that what we're paying attention to building their confidence and efficacy for how they can be self-directed learners, those early on indicators are that they're feeling more confident. And being self-directed, when we take a look at our teachers, their retention rates are higher and their job satisfaction is higher in the team. Because it's always nice to know that we're in this together, right? I don't just go in and say, 28 students and me, let's go do this. We're all in this together. And it's a lot of co-planning and it's using expertise. We have teachers that have a background and are really great in math instruction. They take the lead on planning and designing mathematics lessons and design. The same reading specialist on a team taking the lead for that particular team. So they're sharing their expertise. And we often see that if a teacher is going to be out, need the substitute for a doctor's appointment or something on a team, oftentimes they don't even get a substitute or the substance provides just, you know, like supervision and support so the kids don't miss a beat. So we're also seeing learning outcomes are increasing. They've been paying attention to reading. So they are outpacing their peers in literacy development. And in our high schools, we're paying attention to Algebra 1 for our ninth grade. And we're seeing that students on teams are outperforming our students who are not on teams in Algebra 1.   Kevin Foote (18:50.83) Love it. Awesome. Something that I heard you say in a previous quote you made was that you're looking to create more personalized learning. And that's like the one thing that jumped out at me because I remember when I was in the classroom, that was always my goal is for all, know, sometimes I had 32 third graders or whatever, know, but that was a big class, but, you 25 to 30 kids, try to know something about all of them, like what makes each of them tick and feel like having that team teaching models makes that so much easier. You started teaching a little before me, like differentiated learning was the buzzword at the time. And so when I heard you say personalized, I'm like, I think that goes a little further. I love to hear that. So I don't if you want to elaborate on that a little much. That's just something I wanted to say. I thought it was pretty awesome.   Dr. Andi Fourlis We know the research around differentiated instruction that we differentiate by process product, right? And for learning, but within our kids are so different and we have an incredibly diverse community. So we need to make sure that not only is it differentiated, that instruction is differentiated, but it is also personalized where we are building, students have agency that they are building the what's in it for them in their learning. That takes it a little bit deeper than differentiation, because usually you differentiate for groups of kids. You look at personalization... it's a sliver of the solid research on why we differentiate. But this is saying that kids are setting their own goals. They're mastering their own goals. Elementary is very foundational. And English language arts, mathematics, and science, and social science. When we get into high school, that also looks at what is their career and college path that is personalized to them. It's not just the typical subject areas. It's like, no, I am on a path. I know that I want to pursue a degree in engineering. So my path is going to be different and I need to be engaged in an agent of my own learning towards that pathway.   Kevin Foote I think it's a perfect piggyback on the next thing. what's something you think that, or a couple of things that Arizona State's helped with? How do you think we can help work with future teachers on this, specifically college of ed students at our major universities, things like that? Are there some tips you'd have for them? And then also how is Arizona State help with that?   Dr. Andi Fourlis Well, what has been so helpful for us in our partnership with Arizona State University is the way that I think about our relationship is that ASU is the innovative university, a research-run university, and we are the laboratory to try those ideas, collect information, talk about what's working with boots on the ground and how they're constantly working together to make adaptations based on research and then based on implementation. And so to me, that's perfect model. The other is that Arizona State University is keeping this conversation alive beyond Mesa Public Schools. We have a crisis across the nation and the crisis of the teacher shortage. That's one long as I mentioned that I left my classroom in 2000 to be a new teacher induction specialist to help induct new teachers and then go out and recruit new teachers. So we've been at this for 24 years that we've been trying to solve a teacher. I think it's time that we're done admiring this problem and really digging down into why are teachers not choosing teaching? And especially in 2024, it's because the teaching job is incredibly isolating and it's inflexible. So if we can build some collaboration and flexibility into the teaching profession, that is one step closer to solving the teacher shortage problem. A phrase that I say, oftentimes, if teachers are not leaving the profession, they're leaving their working conditions. And working conditions is something that we can control. And so let's control what we can control and let's redesign those working conditions. And my belief is that if we do that, the theory of action is that we will chip away at the teacher shortage.   Kevin Foote (23:38.798) Awesome. I think that I have one more question, but you just answered it was how can people who are gonna hear this podcast help? And what are recommendations on what others do? But I feel like you nailed it in the head before I even got there.   Dr. Andi Fourlis And I think the other thing is that what can ASU do with those that are choosing the teaching profession? Designing their instruction and the experiences that free service teachers have. If free service teachers are coming in and working and learning in isolation. That doesn't set them up for success when they come into our school district with teaming model. So what I really appreciate around our relationship is Dr. Basile and I are constantly calibrating. What are we doing in classrooms in Mesa Public Schools? And how does that trigger pre-service learning and vice versa?   Kevin Foote Nice. I love it. love it. Well, thank you for your time today. I don't want to keep you too much longer. I think we'll just go ahead and wrap up here and thank you again for all you do. And that's a big job with the biggest district in Arizona. So appreciate your time.   Dr. Andi Fourlis The joy every day. We have so much opportunity to preserve the teaching profession and to create great outcomes.   Kevin Foote Awesome. Thank you.   Kevin Stoller (25:09.986) The views and opinions expressed on the Better Learning Podcast are those of myself as an individual and my guests and do not necessarily represent the organizations that we work for, the Association for Learning Environments, K-12, Education Leaders Organization, or Second Class Foundation.

I'M TIRED BOSS! Every time a new rap song comes, especially when it's an artist that y'all don't like. Objection goes out the window. My big issue today is that we aren't being objective about music. Also, we tend to jump to conclusions about what the music is saying rather than listening. What Bush did with 'No Child Left Behind' is irreversible. All of you need to read a book... and watch the Arts Block Podcast as well. Links:https://www.instagram.com/ericcurryiii/ https://www.instagram.com/artsblockpodcast/ https://linktr.ee/ArtsBlock?utm_source=linktree_profile_share

President Biden and former President Trump will face off in the first 2024 presidential debate later this week. Ravi takes stock of where both candidates stand heading into the debate, from their status in the polls and different approaches to fundraising to why TikTok videos about Trump receive more positive engagement than videos that mention Biden. Then, Ravi welcomes Darrell Bradford, president of 50CAN, to discuss the future of education and what we can learn from the evolution of education reform. They explore how the country went from a bipartisan consensus around No Child Left Behind to a backlash against high standards and accountability, growing fissures within education reform, and what it really means for a school to engage in activism. Finally, Ravi and Derrell turn to the future and the growing movement around new school models, including hybrid schools, microschools, and homeschooling. They discuss how Education Savings Accounts (ESAs) might impact this growth, what's driving families to new school models, the reluctance of many Democrats to join the conversation, and why this is such a revolutionary moment in education. Leave us a voicemail with your thoughts on the show! 321-200-0570 Subscribe to our feed on Spotify: http://bitly.ws/zC9K Subscribe to our Substack: https://thelostdebate.substack.com/ Follow The Branch on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thebranchmedia/ Follow The Branch on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thebranchmedia Follow The Branch on Twitter: https://twitter.com/thebranchmedia The Branch website: http://thebranchmedia.org/ The Branch channel: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/channel/the-branch/id6483055204  Lost Debate is also available on the following platforms:  Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-lost-debate/id1591300785 Google: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vTERJNTc1ODE3Mzk3Nw  iHeart: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/269-the-lost-debate-88330217/ Amazon Music: https://music.amazon.co.uk/podcasts/752ca262-2801-466d-9654-2024de72bd1f/the-lost-debate

我一直以為 教育是因材施教 教育是 不能放掉 不能落下 任何一個孩子 “No Child Left Behind”

How did No Child Left Behind result in a millennial identity crisis? Just kidding, I'm not sure it's directly connected... But, I have my suspicions! In this episode, let's talk about why millennials are job hopping, unhappy at work, and feel like their job is sucking their soul out. Connect with Lydia/Affiliate Links: https://bio.site/lydiakyle --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/lydiakyle/support

Education News Headline RoundupOver the past few weeks, there have been significant developments at the State Teachers Retirement System of Ohio (STRS Ohio). On May 15, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost initiated an investigation into the allegations of a hostile takeover attempt of the $90 billion pension fund, which serves thousands of educators, by QED Systematic Solutions.Academic publishing is facing a crisis of credibility as journals close and thousands of retractions are issued in the wake of a glut of fake research papers. A study by Nature found that in 2013 there were just over 1,000 retractions compared to 2022 with 4,000 and then jumping to more than 10k in 2023. More than 8k of the retractions came from an Egyptian company called Hindawi, which is a subsidiary of Wiley; the Hindawi brand will be sunsetted and its properties absorbed into Wiley. Wiley has announced they will close 19 journals because of the rise of fake papers.A report by Spectrum News from May 14th alleges that millions of dollars in Texas taxpayer funds intended for a charter school in Odessa were diverted to support struggling Third Future charter schools network in Colorado, of which Houston Independent School District superintendent Mike Miles is founder and with whom he has recently maintained a consulting relationship.Examining the Effects of High-Stakes Standardized Tests on Learning OutcomesThis episode explores the history and impact of high-stakes standardized testing in the U.S., starting with a brief review of the No Child Left Behind Act and its legacy. Discussions include the educational goals of high-stakes tests (such as accountability and standardization), and the reasons why these tests often fall short of bettering educational outcomes for students, including curriculum narrowing and stress on students and teachers. We also delve into recent research, including a 2024 study by Maroun and Tienken, which highlights the significant influence of socioeconomic factors on test performance.Discussion QuestionsWhat are the consequences of "teaching to the test"?Why does the high-stakes testing system persist despite its criticisms?Can we design a system with standardized tests but without high-stakes consequences? What might this look like?What would it take to move school administrators and policy makers toward the idea that standardized tests should inform academic strategies instead of penalties or other punitive measures?How do we develop a system to hold educators accountable for serving students well that recognizes that a student's academic or standardized test performance is not always the best indicator of that student's learning? Would peer/student reviews play a part in this system?Sources & Resources:Ohio AG investigating alleged 'hostile takeover' inside teacher's pension fundMarch Board News | STRS OhioApril Board News | STRS OhioFebruary Board News | STRS Ohio EmployerAnswering viewer questions about Ohio's retired teachers' pension fund chaosHouston teachers union calls for Mike Miles' resignation after explosive reportHISD students plan walkout as investigation launches into state-appointed superintendent Mike MilesHISD's Mike Miles responds to 'spurious' investigation into charter school networkHISD superintendent Mike Miles accused of mishandling state education funds | CW39 HoustonHouston ISD Superintendent Mike Miles responds to allegations he diverted Texas school funds to his Colorado schoolsReport about charter schools founded by Houston ISD superintendent Mike Miles prompts calls for investigationHISD Superintendent Mike Miles responds to report he funneled TX taxpayer money to Colorado | TEA commissioner, Third Future Schools also respondDisappearing Dollars: Texas public schools missing millionsFlood of Fake Science Forces Multiple Journal Closures - WSJWiley shuts 19 scholarly journals amid AI paper mill problem • The RegisterWiley to shutter 19 journalsEvolving our portfolio in response to integrity challenges | Hindawi‘The situation has become appalling': fake scientific papers push research credibility to crisis pointSurge In Academic Retractions Should Put U.S. Scholars On NoticeScience's fake-paper problem: high-profile effort will tackle paper millsThe Pernicious Predictability of State-Mandated Tests of Academic Achievement in the United StatesStandardized Testing is Still Failing Students | NEAResearch Shows What State Standardized Tests Actually MeasureHistory of Standardized Tests - ProCon.org18 years ago, Mike Pence voted against No Child Left Behind. So did Bernie Sanders. Their reasons weren't the same. - The Washington PostEpisode 51 - Left Behind - 16:1 - An Education PodcastObama Calls for Major Change in Education Law - The New York TimesHistory of Standardized Testing in the United States | NEAPearson, ETS, Houghton Mifflin, and McGraw-Hill Lobby Big and Profit Bigger from School Tests | PR WatchHistory of Memorial Day | National Memorial Day Concert | PBS

On this episode, Nate is joined by philosopher and educator Zak Stein to discuss the current state of education and development for children during a time of converging crises and societal transformation. As the pace of life continues to accelerate - including world-shaking technological developments - our schools struggle to keep pace with changes in cultural expectations. What qualities are we encouraging in a system centered on competition and with no emphasis on creating agency or community participation? How is unfettered technology and artificial intelligence influencing youth - and what should parents, adults, and teachers be doing in response? What could the future of education look like if guided by true teacherly authority with the aim to create well-rounded, stable young humans with a sense of belonging and purpose in their communities?  About Zak Stein:  Dr. Zak Stein is a philosopher of education, as well as a Co-founder of the Center for World Philosophy and Religion. He is also the Co-founder of Civilization Research Institute, the Consilience Project, and Lectica, Inc. He is the author of dozens of published papers and two books, including Education in a Time Between Worlds.  PDF Transcript Show Notes 00:00 - Zak Stein works + Info, Civilization Research Institute, Education in a Time Between Worlds, Center for World Philosophy and Religion, First Principles and First Values  03:24 - No Child Left Behind 03:56 - Joseph Tainter + TGS episode 03:53 - Iatrogenic  05:30 - Daniel Schmachtenberger (TGS Episodes), Ken Wilbur, Marc Gafney 16:01 - Effects of screens and social media on teen mental health 16:54 - Marshall McLuhan 17:20 - The importance of adult boundary and limit setting for children 18:17 - How social media affects the brain 19:06 - The rise of ADHD in the 90s and effects on education - a timeline 19:58 - Hypercompetitive primary education systems 20:20 - High level of stress and cheating in primary education 22:28 - Scandinavian school systems 26:27 - Cold war effects on the education system 26:35 - Sputnik 27:25 - Tech elites don't give their kids tech 28:35 - Elite overproduction, Peter Turchin 34:10 - Your Unique Self  37:28 - Iain McGilchrist + TGS Episode 38:02 - Moral Relativism 43:27 - Foundations of advertising  47:07 - Negatives of standardized testing 47:22 - Donald T. Cambell - Campbell's law 48:57 - Nature vs Nurture Debate 49:20 - Cooperation and competition 52:10 - Effects of a competitive school environment 55:02 - The effects of an above-and-beyond teacher 55:42 - Legitimate teacherly authority 59:55 - Importance of the environment in the first 5 years of life 1:02:20 - John Dewey 1:10:31 - The best way to learn is to teach 1:11:40 - David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs 1:15:25 - How standardized testing increased high education access 1:16:08 - Civilian Conservation Corp, Lawrence A. Cremin 1:17:02 - New Deal 1:22:07 - Risks around artificial intelligence 1:24:58 - Rise of relationships with AI 1:28:41 - First Chatbot ELIZA 1:30:01 - Electricity use of AI 1:37:30 - The Future of Human Nature 1:41:19 - Peak Oil 1:42:29 - Mental Health Crisis 1:46:35 - Correlation of COVID with IQ loss Watch this video episode on YouTube

Ravi welcomes Amy Davidson Sorkin from The New Yorker to the show to explore the legal challenges of the various cases against Donald Trump, including the immunity case before the Supreme Court, and the potential consequences of a conviction before the election. They then turn to Joseph Fischer v. United States and discuss how the Supreme Court might rule on whether prosecutors can use federal obstruction laws to charge individuals involved in the January 6 Capitol attack. Tim Daly, founder of The Education Daly and CEO of EdNavigator, then joins Ravi to explain why experts considered Finland the exemplar of quality education for many years and what we can learn from its steep decline. Ravi and Tim talk about how Finland's education system impacted advocacy around No Child Left Behind and why it's important to develop a deeper understanding of what drives educational success. Leave us a voicemail with your thoughts on the show! 321-200-0570 Subscribe to our feed on Spotify: http://bitly.ws/zC9K Subscribe to our Substack: https://thelostdebate.substack.com/ Follow The Branch on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thebranchmedia/ Follow The Branch on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thebranchmedia Follow The Branch on Twitter: https://twitter.com/thebranchmedia The Branch website: http://thebranchmedia.org/ Lost Debate is also available on the following platforms:  Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-lost-debate/id1591300785 Google: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vTERJNTc1ODE3Mzk3Nw  iHeart: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/269-the-lost-debate-88330217/ Amazon Music: https://music.amazon.co.uk/podcasts/752ca262-2801-466d-9654-2024de72bd1f/the-lost-debate

The largest school district in Texas lost its elected leaders in the summer of 2023. In their place – a state-appointed board along with a leader unafraid of creating upheaval and massive changes.It's unusual for school districts to lose local control, especially on a scale this large. Suddenly, the Houston Independent School District with its nearly 200,000 students and 11,000 teachers didn't know what would happen next. But the reforms came quickly.What led to the takeover and what's the impact of this whole-scale, test-based reform? We go back decades to understand how a history of high-stakes testing got us here. That pressure to perform trickles down to campus leaders and teachers, to students and their parents. The stakes mount as the takeover plays out and no school is left untouched.The Takeover is a seasonal podcast about power and public education. The first season captures 18 months of on-the-ground, neighborhood-level reporting, enterprising investigative work, and deep context about education policy and history from a range of expert researchers.

Surviving Diddy, Part 7: From the Diddy Raid to Grace O Marcaigh v. Christian Combs. And what her lawyer Tyrone Blackburn, Esq. is facing from not only judges but other legal representation in the hemisphere of these lawsuits due to perceived malfeasance. What is a Rule 11 Violation at the center of the lawyer beef and what role does this play in the end game? Also, we follow-up on our Friday 4/4/24 youtube video (watch that for context) with the response / outcry to Aoki Simmons (21 years old) dating a 65 year old Serafina restauranter - specifically the response from her mom Kimmora Lee Simmons (ex-wife of Russell Simmons, who can no longer hide in Bali from process servers). Get into our other podcasts and our youtube channel: https://linktr.ee/irefusepodcast --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/jason-clark-fox/support

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus speaks with Rick Hess and Mike McShane about their new book, Getting Education Right: A Conservative Vision for Improving Early Childhood, K–12, and College. Nat, Rick, and Mike discuss what principles a conservative vision for education should be grounded in, whether No Child Left Behind was […]

“My philosophy is to leave people better, coach them to a new level.” Coach Carlos Johnson https://carlosjohnson.org/ "True educating will not start, can not start, until you've created an environment for healthy relationships to foster.” Hailing from Detroit, Michigan, with over two decades of experience, Coach Carlos Johnson adeptly bridges the worlds of business and education, advocating for having all voices at the table with a sense of empathy and action. From curriculum design to facilitating professional development, Coach Carlos empowers administrators and leaders to understand the data that impacts their student culture, consider the brain based science when examining student behavior, and always remember the three R's: Recruit. Retain. Respond. “It's war time.”Coach Carlos is a business man that understands education, and an educator that understands business. When reflecting on the state of education, he discusses the longitudinal data and the impact of Title IX. His journey into education was shaped by the era of No Child Left Behind and the rise of charter schools, which encouraged districts to adopt innovative approaches. Recognizing the impact of his own African American female teachers (and the lack of Black male educators), he stresses the importance of diverse representation in classrooms. Coach Carlos's advice to first-year educators is to build healthy performance-based relationships and he challenges educators to adopt a coaching mindset.

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus speaks with Rick Hess and Mike McShane about their new book, Getting Education Right: A Conservative Vision for Improving Early Childhood, K–12, and College. Nat, Rick, and Mike discuss what principles a conservative vision for education should be grounded in, whether No Child Left Behind was conservative, why family policy should be part of a conservative vision for education, why now is an opportune time for conservatives to take the lead on education, the pandemic's effects on the politics of schooling, the culture wars, where conservatives have come up short on education in the past, the value of bipartisanship in education, where civics education has gone wrong, the state of education research, parental rights and parental responsibilities, and more.Frederick M. Hess is a senior fellow and the director of education policy studies at AEI.Michael McShane is the Director of National Research at EdChoice. Show Notes:Getting Education Right: A Conservative Vision for Improving Early Childhood, K–12, and CollegeParents' Rights, Yes. But Parent Responsibilities, TooThe Party of Education in 2024Four States That Are Leading the Charge for Conservative Education

Did Dr. Deming forbid setting goals? Dive into this discussion about healthy goal setting, learn why your process matters, and the four things you need to understand before you start on goals. This episode is the first in a 4-part series about goal setting. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.2 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today I'm continuing my discussion with John Dues, who is part of the new generation of educators striving to apply Dr. Deming's principles to unleash student joy in learning. This is episode 21 and we're talking about goal setting through a Deming lens. John, take it away.   0:00:26.9 John Dues: Yeah, it's good to be back, Andrew. Yeah, 'tis the season for resolutions, I suppose, so I thought we could talk about organizational goal setting and sort of doing that through a Deming lens. And I was thinking about, at a recent district leadership team meeting, I put the following quote up on a slide. I said, "Goal setting is often an act of desperation." You got to watch people's faces when they see that. And to give some context, we're sort of updating our strategic plan at United Schools Network and my point in putting that on the slide as a part of strategic planning was to start a discussion on sort of what I think is healthy goal setting and how that's not typical to what I've seen across my career in schools, education organizations.   0:01:22.4 JD: And I wanted to provide a framework for the team so that anyone that's setting a goal as a part of the strategic planning process sort of had this sort of mindset as we're going through the goal setting process. I think that the typical reaction to that quote, at least in my experience, has been something like, "But I thought that goal setting was something that highly effective people or highly effective organizations do." And my basic argument is that I think that that's the intention, but it's rarely the case, whether that's individuals or organizations. And there's these, what I've come to sort of frame as four conditions that have to be met during the goal setting process. And without those, you kind of get fluff for a goal setting, probably more likely just completely disconnected from reality. I think... Yeah, go ahead.   0:02:22.5 AS: I just wanted to talk to everybody out there that's listening and viewing. I mean, I'm sure you're going through goal setting all the time and as we talk about, it's the beginning of the year right now, this is actually, we're recording this in mid-January of 2024. So it's like I've been working on what's our vision? What's our mission? What's our values? Where are we going? What is our goal? What is our long term goal? What is our short term goal? And I don't know about you guys, but for me, it gets a little confusing and round in circles sometimes and overwhelming, and then this whole idea about, that goal setting is often an act of desperation. It's like I've been working on this stuff for recently over the last week or so and then I just heard you say that and I was like, "Oh, I'm really interested to learn more." So let's go through those four conditions.   0:03:18.5 JD: Yeah, I'll get to those in a second. But I... So I'm not saying don't set goals necessarily. And people have that same reaction typically to that statement, but it's goal setting is often an act of desperation. So it's not the goal in and of themselves, but generally it's the process that you go about and the lack of sort of logic behind the goals that I'm talking about. And I know on these podcasts, many of my examples have sort of I've been banging on like State Department accountability systems and stuff like that. I'm going to continue to do that today but I think the same sort of errors happen at the school system level, at the individual school building level, at the individual teacher or principal level, it's just the stakes are higher when you're talking about states and countries, systems of education.   0:04:11.8 JD: But what I've seen is over the last two decades, certainly post-No Child Left Behind, what it seems like is that there's often these goals set and they're sort of, the targets are sort of chosen out of thin air. And then there's this whole accountability system built around those goals and then in the case of states, we then rate and rank school systems or schools based on how they perform in relation to those goals. And again, the same type of thing is happening at the school system level, at the school level but probably the state accountability systems is what most educators are familiar with when I'm talking about goals. And in Ohio, like a lot of states, we give state tests, we give them third through eighth grade.   0:04:58.5 JD: They take reading and math every year, third through eighth grade in Ohio and you have to hit this 80% benchmark in terms of the percent of kids that are proficient in your school to meet the state standard. So the first question is, why not 60%? Why not 95%? Why not 85%? Why not 82.5%? Just random, you know? And my hunch is, the first problem is that that benchmark for passage rates, if you asked 100 people at the State Department or 100 people working in public school systems in Ohio, I'm not sure if anybody could give you that answer, why 80%? So the first problem is that that target itself is chosen arbitrarily and without sort of a deep consideration. And so that's sort of where the fork initially comes...   0:05:58.3 AS: And I would say that if I look at that 80%, it's like below that and you would seem like you're really underachieving, and above that, it's like, let's be realistic here of what the system can produce.   0:06:11.6 JD: Well, it's a B, it's a B minus. You know, that's familiar, a C, you're not allowed to bring home a C, but a B is okay. So, I mean, my guess is, I don't know where that particular target came from, but my guess is it's something maybe not too far off from, "well, it's sort of a B minus" in the typical grading scale in the United States.   0:06:32.4 AS: Probably came just the way we just discussed it.   0:06:35.1 JD: I would not be entirely surprised. So a lot of the problem with goal setting and when I'm saying act of desperation, it has to do with that arbitrary nature of the goal in and of itself. And so what I've sort of told the team here is that let's put forth some conditions that came up, I mentioned four, that we should understand prior to ever setting a goal. So the first thing we want to understand is what I call the "capability of the system" under study. So in this case, we've talked about third grade reading because that's such an important time period in a student's life.   0:07:13.4 JD: The states, lots of states put a lot of emphasis on it. In Ohio, there's a third grade reading guarantee that exists in other states as well. So we'll kind of look at data in that realm. So the first one, what's the capability of that third grade reading system? The second condition is we have to understand the variation that that system produces. So what are the ups and downs in the data? What are the patterns in the data? So capability, variation is the second condition. The third condition is, is the system that we're studying, is the data stable? When we look at the patterns of the data over time, is there predictability to it?   0:08:01.8 JD: Is there stability to that data or is it all over the place? And then the third thing or sorry, the fourth thing we want is a logical answer to the question, "by what method?" So let's take sort of a deeper look at each of those four conditions, kind of unpack those a little bit. We'll use third grade reading state testing data. I have some data on a chart, but I'll share my screen in a second for those that are viewing the data. And then for those that are only listening, I'll sort of narrate what we're looking at so you'll still get some value out of the description. So you see my screen now?   0:08:42.5 AS: Yep.   0:08:43.3 JD: Okay, cool. So we've looked at these charts before in previous episodes. It's been a while. So this is what some people call a control chart. I call it a process behavior chart because it's literally a description, a visual description of a process unfolding over time.   0:09:01.7 AS: And maybe I'll just describe it. At the title it says, Ohio Third Grade Reading State Testing Proficiency Levels. On the y-axis is the percent proficiency ranging from, of course, zero to 100. And on the x-axis, we have seven school years going from the 2015 to 2016 school year all the way to 2022 to 2023 school year. And then most importantly, we have points, that's a blue line here, but the points that are showing the movement of third grade reading state proficiency levels year by year or school year by school year. Continue.   0:09:51.1 JD: Yep, that's right. That's a good description. So those blue dots are the percent of third graders that are proficient each testing year. And to give you some context, in Ohio about 125,000 third graders take that state reading test each year. One thing you'll notice is that there is no data for 2019-'20. That's because we give the test in the spring of a school year. So in the spring of 2020, schools were shut down due to the pandemic so there was no state test. So we missed one year of testing, but that's really not, that's not really pertinent to this discussion. So the other thing you'll see on here is the green line is the average of the data running through there.   0:10:38.4 JD: And those red lines that are on either side of the data are, some people call them control limits, I call them the lower and upper natural process limit. And they're based on a statistical calculation. They're not where I want the lines to be, they're where they are based on the data. And for those watching, the data points are 54.9% proficient in '15 -'16. The next year in '16 -'17, 63.8% of the third graders were proficient. In '17 -'18, 61.2% were proficient. In '18 -'19, 66.7% were proficient. In 2021, er, 2020 -'21, kind of dipped down to 51.9%. Then in '21 -'22, 59.8% of the third graders were proficient. And then in our most recent year, 62.3% of kids were proficient.   0:11:35.3 AS: So out of all those points, let's just say a high of about roughly 70% and a low of a little bit higher than 50%.   0:11:45.5 JD: Yeah. Yep. Yep. So the low was like, I think 59%. I can look back. Low was 54.9%, the high was 66.7%.   0:11:57.5 AS: Okay.   0:12:00.3 JD: And that works out to about an average of 60% across that seven-year time period.   0:12:08.3 AS: And when we talked about the 80%, is that 80% related to these test results?   0:12:13.7 JD: Sure. Yep.   0:12:13.8 AS: This is what the state is saying it should be?   0:12:18.1 JD: So the state says that in any individual school building, in any individual school system, and so as a result, in the state as a whole, 80% of third graders should meet the proficiency benchmark, basically. So in the state, on average, across the state, when you look at all the third graders, 80% of the kids are not at proficiency. It's lower than that year in and year out across the last seven years. And I should say I picked the starting point as 2015-'16, that was the first year of a brand new test. So it's really a new testing system as of that year. And then it stayed pretty consistent in terms of what the kids are being asked to do. Prior to that, the test was a different format. So it was sort of like a different system.   0:13:04.6 AS: And this is from all schools, so it's Ohio, it's not your school?   0:13:09.6 JD: Right. So this is all Ohio public schools.   0:13:12.9 AS: Okay.   0:13:13.9 JD: Yep. Which are required to give the state test once a year. So, like I said, beginning with this spring 2016 testing season, Ohio began administering this new state test, which is why I started with 2015- '16. And that's where the data starts. So again, schools need to have at least 80% of their students score proficient or higher in each tested area, including reading. So what we're doing here is sort of looking at that first condition. We're trying to figure out what's the capability of this third grade reading testing system. And when I say system, I'm literally talking about everything that could impact third grade reading test scores.   0:14:00.4 JD: Now, I mean, you could almost make an infinite list, but I'm talking about the actual students in Ohio public schools, the third graders themselves, their teachers, the various reading curricula that's being used in schools, technology related to reading programming, supplemental materials, the schools themselves, how the schools themselves are organized. And you can go on and on about any number of in-school and out-of-school variables that might impact a third graders performance on a state test.   0:14:37.2 AS: And I think about resources like between schools and parents and teachers and administrators, everybody's putting forward... Putting forth resources to try to get to this.   0:14:46.9 JD: Yep. The reading standards themselves, the reading test, that's all a part of the third grade reading system. And basically, for those that are viewing the video or heard the description, the capability is outlined in the process behavior chart. I mean, that's literally what the process behavior chart doing. It's, it's, it's visualizing the capability of that third grade reading system. So one thing that's pretty clear when you look at this seven years worth of data is that it's very unlikely that the state of Ohio is incapable of hitting that 80% mark. Now, seven years of data is not 20 years of data, but we, in none of the seven years that have occurred have we gotten anywhere close to that 80% mark. So that's one thing we can see.   0:15:39.9 AS: Sorry, what was the conclusion that you just said?   0:15:42.8 JD: Well, we're, we can see from the data here, even though it's only seven data points, which is something to work with, but it's not 20 data points, it's not 25 data points but it's pretty likely that the third grade reading system, that we're incapable as a state of hitting 80%...   0:16:00.9 AS: Okay, so the capability of the system, the goal of the, of the state representatives that set the 80% seems to be slightly outside of the capability of the system.   0:16:14.4 JD: I'd say more than slightly.   0:16:15.8 AS: More than slightly. 0kay.   0:16:16.9 JD: Yeah, I'd say it likely... I would go as far to say, I try to talk scientifically so it's, we are likely incapable of hitting that 80% mark as a state.   0:16:26.5 AS: Okay. Got it.   0:16:27.7 JD: Not impossible.   0:16:29.0 AS: That's point number one.   0:16:30.5 JD: Yeah, well, and these red natural process limits actually tell us what we could expect from this particular system based on what we've seen so far. So those process limits, kind of way to think about them is as you get more data points, especially as you get 20, 24 data points, they sort of start to solidify. So an individual data point has less of an impact on the limits. So I would call them a little bit soft right now, an individual data point kind of could have an outsized impact because we don't have tons of data but what these red lines are telling us is that our reading system, this third grade reading system is capable of hitting rates somewhere between 41%, where that lower line is, and 79%, where that upper line is.   0:17:19.8 JD: That's why I say that the 80% is unlikely, rather than impossible. It's technically within the capabilities of this system as illustrated by this process behavior chart. But based on the way the limits are constructed, the limits come from the data itself, how the data, not only the magnitude of the individual data points, but it's also taking into account the point to point variation. So time is an important factor in that formula that's used to calculate the limits. And so based on how the limit is constructed, there's about a 3 in 1000 chance that we would hit that 80% mark. So that's why I say...   0:18:03.4 AS: So you're saying there's a chance?   [laughter]   0:18:06.5 JD: Very unlikely, very unlikely, right? So that's capability, that, this, that's sort of looking at the chart and talking about how capable is our system. The next thing we want to look at... Well, the last thing you could say is that that 60% average across those seven years is a pretty good descriptor, especially as you look at where the dots fall, some above, some below, that's a pretty good descriptor of the overall capability of the system, that's 60% proficiency.   0:18:37.6 AS: Right.   0:18:39.3 JD: So the second thing we'll take a look at is using the chart to understand the variation in our system. So again, we have seven data points. We just mentioned that they're bouncing around this average of 60%. And actually with seven data points, you have three that are below the line and four that are above. So about as even as you could be between how many points are below the line, how many points are above the line. So if you describe the year to year test results starting back in '15-'16, they increase and then decrease and then increase and then decrease and then increase and then increase again, a little bit in that last of the seven years.   0:19:27.8 JD: So when you look at the data, there's no sort of signals in those patterns that indicate that the increases or decreases are of significance. So in the Deming language, probably most people aren't familiar with the "common cause" language, but basically it's just saying that the thousands of variables that impact these test results are part of a common cause system. Just like, they're bouncing around, but the bouncing around is not meaningful. But what actually happens is, you know, inevitably when people describe these results, they'll pick two years. Let's say they look at, well, let's even say they look at the last three years and people will say, "Oh, we've increased the third grade reading test scores 'cause they went up a little bit from 2021 to 2022 to 2023."   0:20:19.5 JD: But again, the increases are meaningless when you're viewing this through the sort of understanding variation, knowledge about variation Deming lens. So, but again, even though seven data points isn't a lot of data, it's pretty clear from what we see so far that that, setting that 80% goal, holding schools and school systems accountable from a state perspective, it's not having any impact on the outcome of this third grade reading system. So that's what I mean to connect back to this goal setting is often an act of desperation. It's a hope and a dream that 80% of kids in this system are gonna meet this proficiency standard. It's just not happening by setting a goal.   0:21:10.2 AS: Right.   0:21:15.4 JD: The third thing is looking at stability. So we want to know if the results are predictable in this particular system. So the thing to think about here is if the system is in fact predictable, it means that the results are sort of performing as consistently as the system is capable of making it. And this Ohio third grade reading system is in fact a stable system. So based on these results so far, we can reasonably expect that future results will continue to bounce around this current average. That's just what's gonna happen. So the results might be a little bit below the average, maybe they'll remain a little bit above the average, but in all likelihood, unless something else of significance changes, this is what we can expect from this system. Now...   0:22:13.1 AS: And for some people that may not totally understand the Deming lens, point number two and point number three may be a bit confusing because you're thinking, what's the variation of the system? Well, doesn't the variation of the system also tell you if the data is stable? How would you describe the difference in those two points?   0:22:39.9 JD: Well, it's stable because there's no patterns in the data that signify instability. So there are different sets of patterns that different organizations like Western Electric had a set of patterns that they sort of established because that's sort of where these charts were invented. The Institute for Healthcare Improvement has a set of rules that they use. They are big in training and using control charts. I sort of, my basic approach is to try to keep things as simple as possible. So I default to Donald Wheeler who wrote a book literally called Understanding Variation among many others on using these charts and interpreting these charts. But he basically says, and I sort of have adopted this idea of just three simple rules that I look for.   0:23:29.0 JD: So I look for a single point outside of the red lines, either above or below that's so unexpected, that's a significant pattern, just one data point. I'll also look for three out of four that are closer to one of the red lines than they are to that average green line. And the other big thing I look for is eight successive data points that are on either side of that average line. So if a single point is outside either the upper or the lower limit, that's a pretty high magnitude chance that there is something very different going on now in your system. The eight points in a row is sort of like a moderate but sustained indication that something has changed in either direction. But in this case, we have a stable system. There's no patterns in the data that suggest instability.   0:24:33.0 JD: So it's good in the sense that the system is predictable. And so, let's say I sort of would then try something new, an intervention of some kind, and then look to see what happens. I know at the outset of the experiment that it was a stable system and I can be relatively assured that it's the thing that I introduced that brought about the change. But stability should not be an indication of good, necessarily. You can have a stable but unsatisfactory system, which is how I would describe this particular system. It's stable, meaning it's predictable based on what we see so far, but it's also unacceptable that 40%, two out of five kids are not proficient on the third grade reading test.   0:25:30.1 AS: The good news is your cancer is stable, the bad news is you have cancer.   0:25:33.4 JD: Your cancer is stable, right. It's the cancer is stable, but maybe not growing. How about that analogy?   0:25:39.5 AS: Yeah.   0:25:41.2 JD: Yeah. So we have a stable system but producing less than desirable outcomes. So at that point, the only thing that I can do is work on the design of the system itself. Something about the inputs, something about the throughputs. Maybe I... One big push here in Ohio is to sort of adopt the principles called the science of reading. So teaching reading in a scientific way, like a research-backed way. And so perhaps that's an intervention that could be attempted and Ohio's sort of attempting it. But that sort of everybody getting behind an approach that's been shown to work, that's very different than just setting a goal and then holding educators accountable to the goal.   0:26:26.3 JD: And that's typically what's happening. And when you do that, then you cause frustration. Because if people knew what to do to make things better, then they'd probably do it. So they're being held accountable for something that they maybe don't know how to improve, or maybe they don't have the resources to improve. And so that's why Deming would say "substitute leadership." And that's what he was talking about, leadership towards improvement. And that's a good segue to the last condition, we've mentioned this idea that the 80% goal is beyond the capability of system, so we have to think about methods. By what method then can we improve because this setting a target isn't gonna work. Nothing's changing just because we have this target.   0:27:21.3 JD: And so instead, what happens, and I've seen this my entire career, is that some schools in Ohio regularly surpass this benchmark. Many other schools are nowhere near it. But my sort of a priori hunch, so my pre-testing hunch would be sort of like the overall system, the individual school's third grade reading test results are fairly stable. So what I mean is that low scoring schools stay low scoring, and the high scoring schools stay high scoring. And we sort of admonish the low scoring ones and celebrate the high scoring ones but there are people doing great things in all of those different types of schools.   0:28:14.3 JD: But the fact is, if you took the staff at one high scoring school and put them into a low scoring school, I think you'd be hard pressed to get the same results because so many of the other things that are in place at that high scoring school would not travel just because the staff travels. You know? And so that's, again, where frustration comes in. Then this 80% target really just becomes this sorting mechanism. It's not a roadmap towards improvement and it's literally sorting the schools, the ones that don't hit this benchmark and the ones that do but then you have these other things that happen. What teacher wants to consistently work at a low scoring school when they don't feel like they can do anything else? They can't affect change, what do they...   [chuckle]   0:29:05.3 AS: Have you seen the chart of that school?   0:29:08.4 JD: What did you say?   0:29:09.4 AS: Have you seen the chart of that school you're gonna go work at?   0:29:11.5 JD: Have you seen the chart, and so I'm gonna go work somewhere else that gets all the awards. And so you have this, if anybody studies systems, you have this sort of self-fulfilling thing that the rich get richer, sort of, right? The resources tend to pile up. And so instead what we need to do is think about this last sort of condition, by what method, by what method. Okay, if you're gonna say we're gonna set this 80% goal, by what method can we work together and achieve that? So I brought up one possibility is to sort of implement the science of reading. Now, doing anything as an initiative statewide is very challenging for any number of reasons because the obstacles are gonna be different in different locations that are low scoring.   0:30:02.1 JD: So I don't want to paint the picture that you can just sort of, when people say use evidence-based stuff, well, the evidence-based stuff often doesn't take into account many, many different contextual factors that are important. So I don't want to say there's some silver bullet because there's not. But what I do know is that I think you could argue that having these targets set like this that just sort are not good for anybody. And so maybe they're doing more harm than they are good. And I just want to at least take that into account, because this could work, not only for people working in schools, but also policymakers to think about these things, to at least understand. So if you told me, I've looked at the data for 15 years, I understand the capability of whatever system that is being studied.   0:31:05.8 JD: I understand how the results have shifted up and down over those 15 years, I understand the stability level of those results and I'm still moving forward with the target, I mean, I could accept that a little bit more than just completely arbitrary, but it still sort of begs the question, by what method? Who can do this? So I just think that's... That's really what I'm talking about when I'm saying goal setting is often an act of desperation, that the targets are arbitrary and that this thinking that should underlie this substitution of leadership for just picking targets is really the sort of the approach that we should be looking as, especially systems leaders, school systems or state education system leaders, that type of thing.   0:31:56.4 AS: And for the technical listeners or viewers who want to understand how you calculated the upper and lower natural process limits, maybe you can describe using standard deviation or tell us how you're doing that.   0:32:12.0 JD: Yeah, well, so it's, in this particular type of chart, you can see up here it says X chart, which there's, typically with an X chart, there's another chart below that charts the moving ranges between each successive point. So usually it's two charts together and it's called an XMR chart. Just to simplify things, I just included the X chart, but the XMR chart is sort of like the Swiss army knife of charts, meaning that it basically works with any type of data. It doesn't need to be normalized, as long as it's data that occurs over time. Now, people have strong opinions that that's not the case, but again, I sort of follow the teachings of Donald Wheeler and that's sort of his take on things and I you know, I've subscribed to that.   0:33:00.2 JD: But basically what the chart is doing is it's looking at each data point and it's using the moving range along with some scaling factors that were sort of invented by Walter Shewhart 100 years ago and then refined over time by statisticians like Deming to develop the formula. So it's not standard deviation. Your standard deviation doesn't take into account time. Standard deviation is the distance from the mean, but it's a sort of a static measurement. Whereas this is taking into account not only the variability, but also the time that variability occurred. So that's the key...   0:33:46.6 AS: In other words, if you had a process where you had 20 years and you've made a significant shift in the way you're doing things, if you were calculating a standard deviation based upon the whole data set, you would be using a data set that's really not reflecting the behavior of the system now...   0:34:08.5 JD: That's right.   0:34:10.5 AS: As opposed to sort of a rolling style or using the most recent periods as what you should be using to set the control limits.   0:34:20.1 JD: Yeah, that's right. So I think, yeah, so the big factor is the process behavior chart, the XMR chart, takes into account the point-to-point differences and standard deviation doesn't take time and how the changes occurred over time into account in terms of that calculation.   0:34:40.3 AS: Okay, so let's just wrap up.   0:34:41.4 JD: And I should say someone smarter than me on these should definitely fact check me on that, but I think I have the basics right.   0:34:49.5 AS: I have to admit that you got me thinking about one of the goals I've been setting for admissions into my Valuation Masterclass bootcamp and is what I'm pushing for something beyond what the system's capable of? And so while you were speaking, I was gathering my data and playing around and thinking about it in relation to what you're thinking because I definitely understand point number four, by what method, that we have to think about new methods or else we're gonna get the same result. But I also can say that I didn't understand the number one capability of the system 'cause I didn't have a control chart on it. Now I do as a result of this conversation. And so I challenge anybody out there that's listening or viewing, it's time to make your control chart.   0:35:38.6 AS: The second thing is I had an intuitive feel for what was the variation of the system but when I look at the chart now, it's much bigger than what I had thought. So I can see, in fact, yeah. And then number three is, is the data stable? And I just kept it simple, for my data points I just used standard deviation. And what I found from my upper and lower control limits is that I have one data point that broke through the upper 1 standard deviation line and also the upper 2 standard deviation line. And there was something very unique that I did at that time that we stopped doing for good or bad, but at least I can attribute that to a specific action.   0:36:31.5 AS: And then the fourth point that you've made, so capability of system number one, number two, what is the variation of the system? Number three, is the data stable? And number four, by what method? Of course, that to me is the whole key, once we've got, I think most people don't understand points one, two, and three about their system that they're trying to get a goal out of. But then by what method is really hard. I mean, we've been doing it this way, now... And it's not producing the result that we want, so what's the method to get us to the goal that we want? And I think to me, that's a huge challenge.   0:37:08.5 JD: Yeah. And a key to that last point, and maybe a good point to wrap up on, from a Deming lens and thinking about the system of profound knowledge and let's say the understanding of psychology is that in the state accountability system, the by what method goes like this, "By what method are you going to improve?" Right? But in the Deming methodology, it's, "All right guys, by what method are we going to improve these third grade state reading results?" Right?   0:37:37.5 JD: And in that first case, the finger wagging, what do people do? They try to protect their corner. "No, it's not that bad. We improved a little bit." "No, no, no, it's not us, it's them." So all the energy gets put towards trying to sort of write fiction about our results, which we talked about before, versus actually trying to improve things. And that's part of that, why you need all parts of the System of Profound Knowledge, including psychology, to actually bring about improvement with a group of people.   0:38:10.4 AS: So a great place to wrap up, as you're thinking about improving things, instead of saying "by what method" as a command, why not say "by what method" as a question? John, on behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute, I wanna thank you again for the discussion. And for listeners, remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey. And you can find John's book, Win-Win: W. Edwards Deming, the System of Profound Knowledge and the Science of Improving Schools on Amazon.com. This is your host, Andrew Stotz, and I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming, people are entitled to joy in work.

Could the very freedoms we hold dear be slipping through our fingers? Dale Hutchison, a retired drug and alcohol counselor and now host of "Coffee Time Again," joins us for a stirring exploration into the intersection of American history and constitutional rights. With a past life as a restaurant owner, Dale's voice now resonates in the podcasting realm, where he champions a deeper grasp of our country's core principles. Our conversation unearths the concerns surrounding the diminishing understanding and respect for the Constitution, pointing to pivotal moments and presidential decisions that have shaped today's political landscape.As we navigate the labyrinth of government bureaucracy, we confront the literal and metaphorical draining of Washington D.C., assessing the origins and repercussions of federal agencies that have burgeoned well beyond their original intent. From educational oversight to environmental regulations, we question the federal government's encroachment into areas once controlled by state and local authorities. The episode probes the impact of legislation like "No Child Left Behind" and the establishment of institutions such as the Department of Education and the Environmental Protection Agency. Through these discussions, Dale and I seek pathways to reinvigorate the constitutional foundations that seem to be eroding before our eyes.Join us as we step into the classroom ourselves, dissecting the contentions within the educational sphere and the politicization that has seeped into its core. Reflecting on my own experiences as an educator, we tackle the shift from local to federal control and its effect on the narratives taught to our nation's youth. We also contemplate the media's influence on public perception and historical discourse. As we bid Dale adieu, we not only express our appreciation for his insights but look forward with eagerness to further dialogues over coffee that will continue to challenge and enlighten our listeners.mosaic: Exploring Jewish Issuesmosaic is Jewish Federation of Palm Beach County's news magazine show, exploring Jewish...Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify Support the show

The current debate over corporate Governance depicts a conflict between shareholders and stakeholders. But what if their interests were aligned?Alex Edmans is a professor at the London School of Business and an expert on the impact of ESG factors on firm performance. His latest book is called Grow the Pie: How Great Companies Deliver Both Purpose and Profit. Alex and Greg discuss the pervading discourse on ESG factors and fiduciary duty. Alex compares the benefits and challenges of long-term versus short-term activism. Join us as we debunk the stereotypes of activist investing, asserting its potential to spark long-term value through a lens that values genuine insight over raw data. Greg and Alex also navigate beyond the surface of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion metrics, drawing a parallel with the flawed educational policy of No Child Left Behind. Alex also gives his personal reflections on the importance of research in real-world business applications and leveraging purpose statements for strategic decision-making both in business and life.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Why is it difficult to craft a statement of purpose for companies?36:03: So why is it difficult to come up with a mission statement, either for a company or for a person? To mean anything, it has to be selective. You can't be all things to all people, and that's why it's difficult to come up with such a statement because there's certain things that you miss out. So when I say to use rigorous research to influence the practice of business, that rules out just doing research for purely intellectual purposes, only to be published in top academic journals and be applauded by fellow academics. Instead, it's something where I'm doing this because I want to influence the way people think and act.Is shareholder capitalism bad for companies?11:42: Shareholder capitalism is actually not a bad thing as long as we correctly recognize that shareholder value is long-term shareholder value.Reforming companies by improving it for the long-term16:34:  Some of the most valuable companies today, such as the tech companies in the US, are worth far more than their quarterly earnings. Because investors are valuing the future, indeed, the most successful activist investors are the ones that will try to improve a company's productivity and innovation, and indeed there was some nice academic research which looks at the source of the value creation from activist shareholders, and it's not value extraction, value capture, it's indeed things such as improving productivity and improving innovation.Pursuing action, not profit08:46: So, one of the messages of the book [Grow The Pie] is actually the best way to pursue a goal. Let's say it's profits. It's not actually direct. If you go in with the mindset, and you're right to highlight the mindset, can I make money from this? There are many good things that do make money in the long term, but because that monetization is unexpected and difficult to predict, if you have the mindset of, I'm only going to do something if it makes me money, then I might not actually take that action.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Pareto principleM-PesaMichael PorterMilton FriedmanESG - Environmental, social, and corporate governanceDEI - Diversity, equity, and inclusionSASB - Sustainability Accounting Standards BoardNo Child Left Behind ActMcKinsey & CompanyBlackRockCSR - Corporate social responsibilityProject Last MileDoctors Without BordersBob IgerGuest Profile:AlexEdmans.comGrowThePie.netFaculty Profile from the London Business SchoolProfile on LinkedInSocial Profile on XWikipedia PageHis Work:Amazon Author PageGrow the Pie: How Great Companies Deliver Both Purpose and ProfitMay Contain Lies: How Stories, Statistics, and Studies Exploit Our Biases―And What We Can Do About ItGoogle Scholar Page

Air Date 2/17/2024 The debate over education has been derailed from the legitimate concerns of the past focused on the downfalls of No Child Left Behind and Common Core policies into a cul-de-sac of ignorance over opposition to diversity, equity and inclusion programs and the teaching of critical race theory. Not to mention the new McCarthyism that has sprung up to squash any criticism of Israel's genocidal war in Gaza. Be part of the show! Leave us a message or text at 202-999-3991 or email Jay@BestOfTheLeft.com Transcript BestOfTheLeft.com/Support (Members Get Bonus Clips and Shows + No Ads!) Join our Discord community! SHOW NOTES Ch. 1: How to Dismantle the Anti-DEI Machine - At Liberty Podcast - Air Date 2-9-24 Free speech on campus, book bans, education gag orders, the overturn of affirmative action, the resignation of former Harvard president Claudine Gay. All of these issues center on one hot-button topic: DEI. Ch. 2: Fighting Back Against The GOP's War On College w. Bradford Vivian Part 1 - The Majority Report - Air Date 2-8-24 Author Bradford Vivian joins Emma to discuss his book Campus Misinformation: The Real Threat to Free Speech in American Higher Education. Ch. 3: Wadie Said on the New McCarthyism - CounterSpin - Air Date 12-22-23 Powerful institutions, including the media, combine a selective understanding of free expression with a vehement desire to enforce it. Ch. 4: The Education Myth - How America Changed Its Relationship With School w. Jon Shelton - The Majority Report - Air Date 8-20-23 Sam and Emma host Jon Shelton, professor at the University of Wisconsin at Green Bay, to discuss his recent book The Education Myth: How Human Capital Trumped Social Democracy.   SEE FULL SHOW NOTES MEMBERS-ONLY BONUS CLIP(S) Ch. 9: Resistance to Change in Higher Ed Part 2 - with Dr. Brian Rosenberg - The EdUp Experience Podcast - Air Date 11-7-23 FINAL COMMENTS Ch. 12: Final comments on the tradeoffs we make when we allow culture wars to dominate the education debate Articles: The Loss of Things I Took for Granted - Slate In the Fight Over How to Teach Reading, This Guru Makes a Major Retreat - NYTimes SHOW IMAGE: Description: Photo of the gothic facade of a university with dark clouds overhead. Credit: "Ball State University, Muncie, Indiana", Pixabay | License

Today's episode is about Alaska's Charter Schools which were recently ranked #1 in the country. The lead author of the study is Dr. Paul Peterson of Harvard University. Paul E. Peterson is the Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Government and Director of the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University, a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and Senior Editor of Education Next, a journal of opinion and research.He received his Ph. D. in political science from the University of Chicago. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Education, he has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the German Marshall Foundation, and the Center for Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He is an author or editor of over 30 books, four of which have been identified as the best work in its field by the American Political Science Association.Peterson was a member of the independent review panel advising the Department of Education's evaluation of the No Child Left Behind law and a member of the Hoover Institution's Koret Task Force of K-12 Education at Stanford University. The Editorial Projects in Education Research Center reported that Peterson's studies on school choice and vouchers have been among the country's most influential studies of education policy.LINK TO STUDY: "The Nation's Charter Report Card: First-ever state ranking of charter student performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress"

Dr. Gee is joined again by his friend Kaleem Caire to look at the atmosphere around Justified Anger in the early years and how the initiative has created change over the last 10 years. They reflect on having breakfast together on the day that the original Justified Anger article was released and talked about how the truth of the article would be recieved in the community. The two thought leaders in the Madison community consider what it is like to speak boldly and be visionaries for racial justice. Kaleem is a champion of educational change that needs to happen to address disparities. Kaleem Caire is the founder and CEO of One City Schools, the operator of One City Preschool and One City Elementary School. Both schools are focused on getting young children ready for school success. Prior to One City, Kaleem was the President and CEO of the Urban League of Greater Madison in Madison, WI and chair of the National Urban League's Education Committee.  In 2001, Kaleem commissioned the nation's first comprehensive study of high school graduation rates in the United States, which resulted in graduation rates being embedded in the nation's No Child Left Behind law and forever becoming a measurement of the productivity of American education. In 2002, he was appointed by the U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige to serve on the Independent Rules Panel that advises the U.S. Congress on the evaluation and implementation of Title I (then referred to as No Child Left Behind). From 2002-2004, he led a coalition of education, business, philanthropy and community leaders in Washington, DC to secure the passage of landmark legislation that created the nation's first federally funded school voucher program and has since provided more then $900 million net new federal funding for school reform efforts encompassing DC's traditional public, public charter and private schools. In 2009, he was appointed by the administration of President Barack Obama to serve as an expert reviewer for his signature ""Race to the Top"" national education reform initiative. Photo of Black Leaders at Justified Anger Event Read Justified Anger's Our Madison Plan alexgee.com Support the Show: patreon.com/blacklikeme

Another week of Flavva an some Niggin Is a teachers strike coming ? Sports make more black men millionaires than anything else Kids are getting burnt out His real name is clarence Nobody cares about your paternity pics socials youtube-EverythingWoo Twitter-Deshawn_903 email any questions - Truthhitdifferent@gmail.com Outro - Woo - Fatherless

In this episode, host Katie Martin talks with Melissa Agudelo, the co-principal of Lincoln High School in San Diego, about her experiences and insights as an educator and leader aimed at putting students at the center of learning. Melissa shares how she got into education through Teach for America in the 1990s and the impact of seeing disaggregated student data under No Child Left Behind, which made her question traditional approaches to teaching focused heavily on curriculum coverage versus relationships and relevance. She discusses her transformative experience teaching at High Tech High with project-based learning, but also her realization that those approaches weren't reaching all students, prompting her move to lead schools focused explicitly on serving learners who are furthest from opportunity. Key topics covered include: - Implementing restorative practices rather than zero-tolerance discipline - The importance of advisory structures to build relationships - Collaborative teacher development of projects and portfolio assessments - Iteratively developing a learner-centered culture and portrait of a graduate focused on broader competencies rather than content mastery - Melissa's vision for an education system that privileges authentic learning over grades and curriculum Whether you're an educator looking for insights on learner-centered strategies or simply interested in progressive approaches to transforming secondary schools, this discussion provides valuable perspectives.

Slogans and exhortations don't work to motivate people. Targets usually encourage manipulation or cheating. John Dues and Andrew Stotz discuss how these three strategies can hinder improvement, frustrate teachers and students, and even cause nationwide scandals. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.4 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz. I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W Edwards Deming. Today I'm continuing my discussion with John Dues, who is part of the new generation of educators striving to apply Dr. Deming's principles to unleash student joy in learning. This is episode 16, and we're continuing our discussion about the shift from management myths to principles for the transformation of school systems. And today we're gonna be talking about principle 10 "eliminates slogans, exhortations, and targets." John, take it away.   0:00:37.1 John Dues: Good to be back, Andrew. Yeah, we've been talking about these 14 principles for educational systems transformation for a number of episodes now. I think one, one important thing to point out, and I think we've mentioned this multiple times now, but really the aim in terms of what we're hoping the listeners get out of hearing about all these principles is really about how they all work together, as a system themselves. So, we started with create constancy of purpose. We've talked about a number of other things, like work continually on the system, adopt and institute leadership, drive out fear. Last time we talked about break down barriers. We're gonna talk about eliminating slogans and targets this time, which is principle 10. But really, as you start to listen to 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and now 10, what should start to become clear is how all of these things work together.   0:01:34.5 JD: If you are operating as a leader, for example, within sort of the Deming philosophy, one of the things you are gonna do is eliminate these slogans. So all these principles shouldn't be studied in isolation. We study them together, see how they all work together. But let me just start by just reading principle 10 so you have the full picture. So principle 10 is "eliminate slogans, exhortations and targets for educators and students that ask for perfect performance and new levels of productivity. Such exhortations only create adversarial relationships as the bulk of the causes of low quality and low productivity belong to the system, and thus lie beyond the power of teachers and students." So really what we're talking about is, what's wrong with slogans, exhortations and targets for educators and students, because these things are, pervasive, I think.   0:02:29.5 JD: We've seen them, we've seen the posters on the walls with the various slogans. And, of course targets are everywhere in our educational systems. In my mind the main problem is that they're directed at the wrong people. The basic premise is that teachers and students could sort of simply put in more effort, and in doing so, they could improve quality productivity, anything else that's desirable in our education systems. But the main thing is that, that doesn't take into account that most of the trouble we see within our schools are actually coming from the system. And I think we've talked about this quote is probably one of Deming's most well-known quotes, but he said, "Most troubles and most possibilities for improvement add up to proportion, something like this, 94% belong to the system, which is the responsibility of management, 6% is special." And that's more like, can be sort of tagged or pinned to individual students or individual educators working within the system. So I think that's a really important thing to revisit 'cause it sort of is at the heart of all of these, all of these principles.   0:03:47.7 AS: It's interesting, like, maybe you could give some examples of what type of, slogans or targets or exhortations that you've seen, in your career and what's going on in education these days.   0:04:06.5 JD: Yeah, I mean, I'm gonna give an example here, kind of walk through an example in a second. But there, they're really everywhere, I mean, to varying degrees probably in different places. But, one, that one that sticks out in terms of, a target is when I first started my career in 2001, I was a teacher in Atlanta Public Schools. And No Child Left Behind had just come out. And, basically as they, as the leadership at the school sort of presented what was in this legislation, you know, they would always put up a just chart that basically said, a certain percentage of students are expected to be proficient across the country on state tests. And that, that percentage would increase over time starting in 2001 when the legislation was rolled out. And by the 2013, '14 school year, the way the tables were laid out is that 100% of students would be proficient in reading and math across the country in third through eighth grade. And of course, that didn't come to fruition. There's no chance that that ever would be the case. And it was also the case that there was really no methods attached to that target. So that's a really good example of a target that was sort of pulled out of the sky. And, basically, over the course of a dozen years, it was supposed to sort of, so somehow magically come to be.   0:05:38.2 AS: That's great. The idea of 100%. I mean, like what fool would say that, you would have 100% of anything. I mean, you just can't get anything to that point. But one question I have about that, I suspect that in those types of cases, it just gets swept under the rug and nobody's looking at that number the way that they looked at it back then, but maybe, maybe they do look at it. But my question would be that No Child Left Behind if we were able to objectively measure the improvement that was caused by that, or a devolution, like did, if it was, what was the starting point, for No Child Left Behind?   0:06:26.0 JD: Well, so, it, that would vary by district. If I remember right, I think the, the target early in the 20000s was something like in the 50 or 60%, something like that, right? And then it would...   0:06:40.3 AS: Right, so let's say 50 to 60%. And I wonder at the end of that period of 2013, if we could objectively compare and calculate that number, what would be your estimate of where it would be if it was 50 to 60 originally, where do you think it was at the end of 2013?   0:07:00.0 JD: 50% to 60%.   0:07:02.4 AS: So no improvement?   0:07:02.5 JD: No. I mean...   0:07:02.5 AS: Incredible.   0:07:04.2 JD: That could vary a little bit by time and place, but it's a little bit even hard to pin down because, the way that the test was constructed in 2001 in Georgia, for example, would be different than the way the test was constructed by 2013-14. So even, even the test itself had changed, the standards had changed, a number of things had changed over time. Also, for folks that know much, about what was going on in Atlanta by, by 2013-14, the superintendent, who would've been the superintendent from about 2001 until, I don't know, 2010 or something, she was actually charged under the RICO statute for sort of, yeah, I don't know if that was warranted or not. I think it was unprecedented, that's for sure. But there was a cheating scandal that was systematic from superintendent to principals down to even teachers. That was pretty pervasive because there was a lot of, in Atlanta at least, there was a lot of monetary incentives tied to the test score improvements. And so I know that it did result in a number of people being charged with various crimes, including the superintendent and number of principals.   0:08:18.3 AS: That's incredible.   0:08:20.6 JD: Incredible. Yeah. Yeah.   0:08:22.8 AS: Yeah. And there was a trial, there was a trial, I'm looking here on the internet. The trial began on September, in September of 2014 in Fulton County Superior Court.   0:08:32.3 JD: Yeah. Right around that time.   0:08:33.7 AS: Incredible.   0:08:33.8 JD: And so I was gone from Atlanta by that time. So I don't know all the details, but I have read a little bit about it, and I think, again, because there's these targets, that's certainly not an excuse for systematically cheating on these tests for sure. But, a byproduct of some of these testing regimens and some of the monetary incentive systems that were put in place was, cheating did happen in, in a number of places in the United States. Especially at the height of when the scrutiny was highest on these test results. So again, it's not, that shouldn't be the expectation even in a system where there's a lot of focus, certainly, but it was a byproduct. So you, you would wanna ask the question, why did that, why did that happen?   0:09:20.5 AS: Yeah.   0:09:21.9 JD: I mean, I think, yeah, go ahead.   0:09:25.2 AS: I was just gonna say that I also wanted to talk about, we were talking before we went on about the word "exhortation," which is kind of an, an old word, kind of a, and so I was looking it up on the dictionary. It says, "an address or communication emphatically urging someone to do something," and they use an example of "no amount of exhortation had any effect." And then I thought about, one of the questions I always ask students when I start my class, is "who's responsible?" And I want the listeners and the viewers to think about this answer to this question. Who's responsible for students being on time to class, the student or the teacher? And of course, the majority of students are gonna say the student. And if I ask the teachers, of course they're gonna say, student, it's personal responsibility. And most of the listeners and viewers would probably say the same. And then I want to explain a situation that I do every time I start my class. My class starts at 01:00 PM in this particular semester. And as soon as the door, as soon as 01:00 PM came, I just locked the door and I started teaching.   0:10:39.8 JD: And this is university setting?   0:10:40.7 AS: This is at university.   0:10:44.0 JD: Yeah.   0:10:44.6 AS: And when I did that, the university students, some of them had the, they were outside and kind of knocking on the door or no, wondering if they can come in. And I didn't let them in until after five or 10 minutes of teaching. And then I let, I went out and talked to them a little bit about, being on time and, please, be on time to my class or else I'm gonna lock the door and you're not gonna be able to come back in. And so I did that a couple times until all the students, I have 80 students in that class, and they all were in. And the next time that I, had my class, 100% of the students were on time. They were in there and ready to go. In fact, I had a funny case, John, I was, I was visiting a client of mine, which is north of the city of Bangkok. And I told my client, I gotta get outta here now because if I'm late to my class, my students are gonna lock me out.   0:11:32.7 JD: They're gonna lock you out. Yeah.   [laughter]   0:11:33.0 AS: But the point of the story is for the listeners and the viewers out there, if you said that the students are responsible for being on time, but I've just presented a case where the teacher changed something about the way that the, the class was done. That changed the outcome of the students. Can you still say that it is the students, and in fact, if you were to, to listen, if you went, we went to a, a high school or university and we sat down with all the teachers that would they be saying no amount of exhortation had any effect on the students being on time. These guys are just irresponsible.   0:12:17.4 JD: Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting 'cause I think, David Langford, on one of the episodes he did, talked about the problem of kids being, or students being late to class. And in that particular scenario as a high school, and, when you ask the kids, why were you late? They said, "well, the teacher doesn't start until five or seven minutes into the period anyway, so why, why do I need to come on time?" So, there is some truth to thinking about who, who is creating the system, what is that system? What types of behaviors does that system encourage? That's certainly a good way to sort of analyze each, each situation.   0:12:53.7 AS: Yeah. I mean, it makes you think, and I think what David highlights too is like, what's the priority here? And, where do we want, is it so important that someone's gonna be there at exactly this moment or does it matter if it's five minutes before, five minutes after? And I think that there's, there's an interesting discussion on that.   0:13:13.1 JD: Yeah.   0:13:13.8 AS: And for the listeners and the viewers out there, you're gonna make up your own mind. But I think that the key thing is that what you're saying when you talk about 94% of, the output or the result of something is the result of the system. And that helps us to focus beyond just, putting the pressure on students or administrators or educators or employees.   0:13:36.1 JD: Yeah. Yeah. And I think, one of the tools that I've talked about repeatedly and I'm a very big fan of is, is the process behavior chart or what some people call a control chart. And the reason for that is because when you use that chart, you can then tell what problems are coming from the system itself, and that's the responsibility of management and what problems are coming from other causes and may take some other types of sort of approaches. I think just knowing that is a really important sort of upfront step when you're considering that 94%, 6% problem. You can actually tell what's coming from the system, and then there's one approach and what's coming from special, special causes. And then there's another approach to, to improvement. And I suspect that, you know, when you chart data in this way over time, the vast majority of systems are stable, but unsatisfactory.   0:14:38.5 JD: And I think that's probably where things like, targets, exhortations, these slogans when you have a stable but defective system, that's the point where, these exhortations, et cetera are particularly pernicious, you know? I think, goal setting seems like a good idea, but it's really useless in that type of situation. It's really often an active desperation actually, when you set a goal in a stable but defective system. So I was gonna sort of talk you through a, through an example of how this, perhaps, could show up.   0:15:23.6 AS: Yep.   0:15:26.2 JD: We... This is going back a couple years, but as the pandemic rolled out, and I think we've talked about this data before, but we were really closely charting and paying attention to: are kids engaged in remote learning? And again, this example's from the pandemic, but this can come from any data that that's important to you. And almost all of this data unfolds over time. But we were looking at, how, how engaged are kids in remote learning? And it was really important for us to first define engagement. And so for us, this question always comes up, what do you mean by engagement? For us, this meant, kids did a remote lesson with the teacher and then they had a practice set in math. So what percent of the kids completed that full practice set?   0:16:17.6 JD: And basically when we, when we charted this, what we see, we did this for, about five weeks. We charted the data. So we had about 24 days worth of data. This was eighth grade math. And the first day 62% of the kids were engaged the second day, 67, the third day, 75%, fourth day, 84%, and then down to 77%. And then the next day, 71%, the next day, 58%, the next day 74%. So you can kind of get the picture here that this data was sort of bouncing around. And when we took that out to 24 days, that first day was 67%, the 24 day was 68%. And then sort of, we looked at the average over those 24 days, it was about 67%, a high of, 84%, a low of 49%. But when you put this on a process behavior chart, what you see is it's a stable system.   0:17:17.3 JD: Meaning there are these ups and downs, some are above that 67% average, some are below it. When we look at sort of the natural process limits. So those are sort of the boundaries of the system based on the magnitude of the variability over time, it was sort of suggesting with this system, we could expect a low of 42% engagement, a high of 91% engagement, but mostly it's bouncing around this average. Now if imagine, that you're this eighth grade math teacher and the principal comes and says, this engagement data is not high enough, we're gonna create these posters across the school, we're gonna start this campaign. You can almost picture this in different places, right? And it says these posters say 100%...   0:18:06.3 AS: Graphic design.   0:18:07.0 JD: Yeah, that design, you have this poster and it says "100% engaged. We can achieve it if you believe it." Right? And you can almost imagine these posters going up in a school, and it's just this sort of proclamation. But when you look at the data, it's just a stable system. And what we can expect is this, these data points bouncing around the 67% average. School, the school leadership wants higher engagement rates. They want fewer days with the low rates. But the problem with a poster or a target or exportation is that you're, you're basically asking the teacher to do what they're unable to do. And we do this in all types of settings, all types of, work settings, not just, not just in education. If you look at this particular system, the upper limit's at 91%. So basically the...   0:19:10.0 JD: The system's not capable of achieving 100% remote learning engagement, and so basically the effect is then fear and mistrust towards leadership, and I think, you know, when you look at this remote learning engagement data, that's probably what happened to a lot of people, but if we go back to that No Child Left Behind example, the Federal Government, 'cause that's who is setting the proficiency targets, for No Child Left Behind, its federal legislation, teachers knew, principles knew that in many places, the system that was in place for education was not capable of hitting those targets, it just...   0:19:50.1 JD: It wasn't in the capability of the system, and then so if you are an individual operating within that system, you're trying to navigate that, you're gonna try to hit that target no matter what, and then in some places, they chose to do things that went as far as cheating, because they were trying to hit that target. Now, I'm not absolving those individual educators of responsibility, but it was that system that they were operating in that sort of caused that behavior to then happen. You know the worst case scenario is people did, the adults did cheat. And I'm sure there were other things that were happening in other places that didn't rise to the level of cheating, but I think we've talked about it before, there's really only three options in response to data that's not satisfactory. You can improve the system. That's the ideal. That's what we're talking about here. That's what we're going for here. You can sort of... What do you wanna call it? It's not as far as cheating, but you can sort of...   0:21:02.6 AS: Manipulate or...   0:21:04.4 JD: Manipulate the data in some way, or you can manipulate the system in some way, and that's I think what we were seeing. So the worst case scenario in Atlanta, they manipulated the data. But I think in many places, this idea of manipulating the system is less clear, but what happened in many places, and I think we've actually talked about this, that there was this over-emphasis on reading and math at the expense of other types of academics, and that's a manipulation of the system. That's not cheating necessarily, but it is sort of in my mind, sort of cheating kids out of a well-rounded education, and that was a product of so much emphasis on just reading and math test scores, and again, a lot of this was well-intentioned because people were...   0:21:53.5 AS: It's all well-intentioned. What are you talking about a lot of it?   0:21:56.9 JD: It's all well-intentioned but what actually happens as a result of putting these systems and these testing systems in place, and especially the sanctions or even the incentives on the positive side, the money. What actually happened...   [overlapping conversation]   0:22:10.6 AS: Holding back funding or providing additional funding, if you can hit these targets or that type of thing.   0:22:15.4 JD: Right, right, yep. And so you get all these unintended consequences that are produced as a result of the system, and we talk about these things as side effects, just like with drugs, there's these side-effects, but they're not really side effects, they're things that commonly happen, they're things that you would expect to happen as a result of doing these things, but we sort of put them in this... We've given this language as if they're these small things that happen over here, but really they're the sort of the typical unintended consequences that you could expect when you design a system in that way, whether the side effects of a drug or the side effects of cheating in a very strict, sort of, and regimented testing system, an accountability system in a school district.   0:23:03.6 AS: I couldn't help but laugh 'cause I thought about Robin Williams, and he had this skit he used to do when he was alive, and he talked about the drugs, drugs that people that the companies are marketing. And he said I was going through the side effects and I was like reading these horrific things that they had a list and he's like, I'd call that an effect.   0:23:21.4 JD: [chuckle] Right, right, yeah. Yeah.   0:23:24.0 AS: Let me ask you about this slogan, "We can achieve it if you believe it." Now, some students may respond to that, John, what do you say about the fact that... You know, because every time that you talk about getting rid of targets and getting rid of slogans and stuff, that people say, sometimes it works and it works for some people, and some people are driven that way, and when they hear that, they respond to it. What do you say to that?   0:23:57.5 JD: Well, I would say prove it, I wanna see if you're telling me that was actually successful, sometimes people will sort of dress up an anecdote. So, one, I'd wanna see the evidence that that did have the intended...   0:24:13.2 AS: Okay great answer and that's a lesson for everybody listening and viewing is always go back and say, prove it, 'cause I'm making an assertion.   0:24:21.3 JD: Yep. Yeah.   0:24:22.1 AS: And my assertion is that it helps certain people, actually, the burden of proof, of course, is on me as I make that assertion and you're asking me to prove that, which is a very, very logical and sensible thing to do. What else would you say?   0:24:38.0 JD: Well, well, I would say that, you know, Dr. Deming often talked about this idea, I think he got it from Taiichi Ohno, this idea of the loss function, which is basically like...   0:24:51.9 AS: Taguchi.   0:24:52.0 JD: Taguchi loss function, sorry.   0:24:54.4 AS: Yeah.   0:24:54.9 JD: And basically, think of an inverted parabola inverted U basically... And here is an optimum.   0:25:03.3 AS: Or think of a U. Think of a U.   0:25:03.4 JD: Now either side of it... An inverted U, yep, and the optimum is at the bottom of the U, but there's loss as soon as you start to move away from the U, but that loss comes on both sides. So, you know, the people that are anti-testing versus the people that wanna put strict sanctions and rewards in place, probably the answer is somewhere in between there, because we have to know how our students are doing, so we do need some data, so I would be probably a proponent of kids being given some type of standardized tests and can we sort of know the scores at the aggregate level, perhaps at the school level, by subject and grade level, but there's not sanctions and rewards tied to that in any way, it's just information. So that's one thing that'd be a big difference between, you know, between what we could be doing with this data and what's actually being done.   0:26:06.1 JD: So like taking the eighth grade math engagement data, for example. In terms of what would you do? I mean, I think if I was gonna put a poster up with sort of an explanation of how we're gonna approach the remote learning, maybe the first poster that I'd want staff to see is a list of what we're gonna be doing month by month to sort of deal with the reality of remote learning, maybe that first month, it's just making sure... The strategy is to make sure every kid has a device and access to reliable internet connectivity, right? That's very different than this proclamation, that 100% of kids is gonna be engaged, because as soon as I see that, as a teacher, I know that's not gonna happen. Especially if there's no other sort of methods tied to that. Maybe in month two, after I get all the kids devices and connectivity, that's reliable, we can do some training on, well, how do you even teach? What are the methods that a teacher can employ in a remote learning environment, and maybe all along, I am tracking the data, there's nothing wrong with tracking the data, but I'm putting it on that chart, I'm tracking it over time, and as we implement these various approaches to remote learning, I can see how that's impacting, but I'm doing that with students and teachers, and I'm not just plotting the data and then not giving a set of methods that sort of accompany the sort of march towards continual improvement.   0:27:47.2 JD: And the same thing, the same approach could be used with that test data from Atlanta, you know if the idea was, I'm gonna sort of start charting this data and seeing how we're doing over time, and I'm working with teachers and students to come up with ideas to how to improve this, to march closer to that 100% proficiency goal, I mean that's a noble goal, assuming that the test is well-constructed and that we want obviously more and more kids to be marching towards proficiency for sure, but we don't want all these other side games going on that come about when you sort of just simply have targets without methods, and I think that's the point. And if you take that approach, I think then teachers sort of understand that the leaders, the school leaders or the district leaders, they're taking some of that responsibility for a lack of engagement or low test scores or whatever it is, and they're trying to remove those obstacles systematically, that's a very different, different approach, 'cause I'm not suggesting that people shouldn't have goals. That's not what I'm suggesting. I set goals for myself all the time, I think they're actually helpful and necessary tools for individuals, but I think when you set numerical goals for other people without a set of methods to accomplish those goals, then you get the opposite effect of what was intended and you know, that's what I see happen over and over and over again in the education sector.   0:29:28.2 AS: And what I like to say is that two things about that, which is one is that if, if you're setting a goal, just don't tie compensation or other benefits to the goal or other punishment. Set the goal and then use it as a tool and track the information and discuss it. It's the same thing with compensation, once you start to tie compensation to specific goals, then you start to mess around with the incentive structure. And that's the first thing I also think the other thing I'd like to say is that if the object that you are measuring through your goal or target or whatever knows that it is being measured, look out. Now, I have a ruler right here, and if I measure the height of this glass, the glass doesn't know I'm measuring it, and so there's no change in anything in the glass, but when a human being knows that they're being measured, it causes a change. Just the knowing of that.   0:30:46.9 JD: Okay.   0:30:49.6 AS: So. Okay. So that helps us to understand about slogans, and what you're talking about is the idea of maybe replacing slogans with "How are we improving the system?" And, you know, I've started doing that in my Valuation Masterclass Boot Camp, where I was at the end of each session... At the end of each six week period, I have a survey that I give to students and I asked them for feedback, and how can we improve this? And then what I do is I take all those and I give them to my team and then we have a discussion and we kind of rank them, and then we go back on the final day and we say, by the way, these are the improvements we're making. And these are the improvements we did the last, this current time that you guys didn't realize, and then that way, the students also are kind of involved and interested in what we're doing, that we're asking for their feedback on how to improve the system, and we're telling them.   0:31:44.9 AS: I don't generally announce it beforehand, like put up something about, "Here's all the changes that we're making in this boot camp," 'cause I just want them to have a natural experience, I don't necessarily need them to be thinking like, "Okay, so this is new", and also some of the things that we're trying, we're testing and we're observing how they work and if they work, and so we may abandon that thing, so it may not make sense to just necessarily advertise it, but when we have some big things like this time, we got some excellent feedback in our last one, and now, I decided that when we do the boot camp, we're gonna have, let's say, 30 or 40 people, and we're gonna cover it one industry, we're gonna value companies in one industry, so we're gonna do the automotive industry, and then that allows everybody to work together in the first week, say, "Let's analyze this industry before I tell you which companies each of you are valuing." And so that's a new innovation that we're trying to do this time, and so there's a lot of work on our side to get that prepared.   0:32:46.7 JD: Yeah. And it sounds like there's methods, there's methods attached to the goal of improvement. That's the most important thing, I think.   0:32:58.1 AS: Yeah, I mean I feel like... One of the things I feel like, and I think maybe some of the listeners or viewers may feel like this, sometimes I don't measure it the way I maybe should. What I do is I get feedback from the customer, from the student in this case. And then I bring that feedback to my team and I ask my team to kind of rank what they think about those, and then we identify, let's say three of those recommendations that we think, Okay, this is good. Let's implement it. And then we test it. We don't have an exact measurement that say, "Okay, well, you wanna say, "Did that work at the end of a six-week period?" We just kind of know whether it worked or not, how much trouble it was, how much benefit we thought it got, and then we get some feedback at the end, and maybe the feedback from students at the end is part of the data. But I'm just curious, what are your thoughts about people who are doing things necessarily, they may be doing the right things, but they may not necessarily be measuring it in the way that they could or should, including myself. What are your thoughts on that?   0:34:08.7 JD: Yeah. I mean... Well, I mean, I think there's quantitative data and qualitative data, and it sounds like what you're doing is relying more on qualitative data, including this experience of the students. I mean, I think generally, probably some things lend themselves to more quantitative data, some things lend themselves to more qualitative data. I mean, I think the key here is to set up a system for improvement, identify what's most important to you in terms of... 'Cause you can't focus on everything at once, what are you gonna focus on? Get, you know, get other people involved. So it's not just coming from you, and it sounds like there's a team here working together, you're also doing it repeatedly over time. I don't think there's necessarily a right or wrong answer on this. I think the most important thing is to, for me, I think about looking at this stuff, putting the data on a chart over time, again, that can be quantitative or qualitative data, determine what the sort of capability of the system is, get some baseline data. I think that's really, really important. And then understand, is what you're seeing sort of typical, is it bouncing around an average within some limits, or do you see special causes in your data? I think those are the most important things.   0:35:57.2 JD: And then the other thing, I think if we're talking about a school and if we really wanna make breakthrough improvements, then I do think at the end of the day, that continual improvement sort of approach has to involve students and teachers, I think it has to. And so I think there's different ways to go about doing that, but I think if you do those things, then you're well on your way to improved outcomes.   0:36:25.1 AS: I do have one question I ask them at the end, and that is, I give them a range of value, and I say, now that you've experienced the Valuation Masterclass Boot Camp, how, what would you say is the value that you received? And definitely in the beginning that kept going up because we kept improving and they could feel that value, and I didn't give them any guidance, the rating did never change, but it was moving up. Now it's kind of flattened off, and so I think we've, we've got a challenge if we wanna bring that to another level, but that's one of them. Well, John, without, without any exhortations to the listeners, I would love it if you could just wrap up the main takeaways that you want us to get from this discussion.   0:37:15.7 JD: Yeah, I think you know, maybe putting a fine point on those things, I think what I've come to appreciate is continual improvement is really the combination of plotting data over time and combining it with that Plan Do Study Act cycle, which we've talked about multiple times. So the first recommendation is whatever metrics are most important to you, plot them on a chart in time order, and then... It can be intimidating at first. But the calculations on the process behavior chart, to add in the upper and natural process limits or control limits is really, really valuable, because then you can start to understand the capability of the system And then you start to understand what would it really take, what would we really have to do to actually shift those limits and indicate a pattern of the data that actually indicates that we've brought about improvement. The other reason those limits are really important is because it does help you understand, do you just have this common cause system where there's lots of different cause and effect relationships, but there's not really a single one you can hone in on, and so then you know you're not trying to improve one component, but the entire system systematically. So I think for those reasons, it gets a little technical with the process behavior chart, or the control chart but they are...   0:38:46.7 JD: I think it's the most powerful tool that we have in the continual improvement tool box. So I would highly suggest at least a couple of people on, on your school district team have that sort of skill set, because then you don't waste your time on improvement efforts, and you can also tell when something you tried has actually resulted in improved outcomes for kids or for teachers or for schools.   0:39:13.1 AS: John, on behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute and the listeners and viewers, I wanna thank you again for this discussion. For listeners remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey. You can find John's book, "Win-Win: Dr. W. Edwards Deming, the System of Profound Knowledge, and the Science of Improving Schools" on amazon.com. This is your host Andrew Stotz, and I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming, "People are entitled to joy in work."

On this week's Education Gadfly Show podcast, Chad Aldeman, the founder of Read Not Guess and a columnist for The 74, joins Mike to discuss how the end of COVID relief funds could cause a wave of teacher layoffs. Then, on the Research Minute, Amber reports on a new study investigating whether schools gamed their academic gains during No Child Left Behind.Recommended content:“Schools could lose 136,000 teaching jobs when federal COVID funds run out” —Chad Aldeman, The 74“Fiscal cliff could force layoffs of the best teachers” —Michael Petrilli, Education NextJohn Gregg and Stéphane Lavertu, “Test-based accountability and educational equity: Breaking through local district politics?” Economics of Education Review (December 2023).Feedback Welcome: Have ideas for improving our podcast? Send them to Daniel Buck at dbuck@fordhaminstitute.org.

In this episode, James tackles a wide range of topics, from football plays gone wrong to cautionary tales for children. Here are 5 key takeaways that you won't want to miss from this informative and entertaining discussion: 1. The Sideline Box: Did you know that the sideline box extends from the 20-yard line to the other 20-yard line? Learn why this knowledge is important for players and how it can affect the outcome of a game. 2. The Fascinating Tale of Pinocchio: Explore the origin of this beloved, but often misunderstood, fairy tale character and discover the hidden life lessons within the story. James offers his insights on the importance of cautioning children about potential dangers. 3. Testosterone Replacement Therapy: Get the lowdown on TRT and hormone therapy from James's perspective. Gain a better understanding of the role testosterone plays and why it's not the be-all and end-all when it comes to these treatments. 4. The Unbeaten Teams and Surprising Losses: Keep up with the latest college football updates as James shares the highlights and surprises from various conferences. Find out which teams are maintaining their winning streaks and which ones have stumbled along the way. 5. The Perils of Delusions in Sports: Delve into the psyche of sports fandom as James reflects on the media's influence and the lengths some fans go to defend their teams. He shares his frustrations, observations, and questions society's perception of honest criticism. Fun Fact: Did you know that it takes a staggering one million dollars for an artist to have a platinum single on Top 40 radio stations? James dives into the music industry's secrets and his thoughts on explicit lyrics in popular songs that might surprise you. As always, James brings his signature charm and wit to this episode. You won't want to miss his breakdown of football plays, cultural critiques, and thought-provoking insights!

This week, hardcore fishing dads Tyler Winter and Matt Farrell discuss allowing 5-year-olds to watch Jaws, we fill a kiddie pool with suckers and sand sharks, watch our precious tackle get brutalized by the gentle hands of children, and explain how your yard isn't the woods so you can't poop there. 

Join Lil' Lo and Big Shot Shae as they discuss gambling, No Child Left Behind, tending to your kids, and more! Email for advice / to be featured: LetMeStayFocused@gmail.com Follow Our Hosts: @lilloworldwide @bigshotshae **DISCLAIMER: THIS IS A COMEDIC PODCAST** Scenarios and responses from this show should be taken with a grain of salt. In other words, this is all a joke. Unless otherwise noted, any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is purely coincidental. The views and opinions expressed by guests / classmates are those of the guest / classmate and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Let Me Stay Focused: The Podcast. Any content provided by our guests / classmates are of their opinion and are not intended to malign any religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company, individual or anyone or anything.

In this episode we experiment with a different format. Co-host Dr. Maria Piantanida offers a review of The Tyranny of Metrics by Jerry Muller a professor of history at the Catholic University of America. Dr. Piantanida highlights key ideas in the book and recommends it as useful reading for anyone concerned about the inappropriate and oppressive use of narrow performance measures. It can serve as a starting point for conversations among educators, the public, and policy makers as they strive to create realistic and meaningful systems to evaluate the quality of educational endeavors. 

Tim and Johnny are here to discuss the new era of No Child Left Behind, a relic of an older time in education that some Republicans are trying to resurrect for their own benefit.

A recent report from the Center on Reinventing Public Education has pointed out that chronic absenteeism and mental health problems are overwhelming American students. Another report from the National Assessment of Educational Progress shows math performance has dropped to what it was thirty years ago. Likewise, ACT scores are at a thirty year low. The National Center for Education Statistics also released data last year showing almost 75% of schools have seen an increase in chronic absenteeism. A Gallup Poll found that a fifth of students were mostly just concerned with mental health support at school and this is indicative of a bigger problem: making ideology and elusive concepts for uneducated people with no context seem as if they are the most important factors in an education. What is happening?Although there was an overall learning decrees prior to 2020, the proceeding three years made it far worse. The CDC shows that there was a 17% spike in dyslexia and speech disorders, and that this was a result of masks. Another study from the Laboratory of Cognitive Psychology, Lorraine Research Laboratory, and the University of Geneva, showed that students 5-7 were harmed by masks because they couldn't read facial expressions or lips, which lead to literacy rate declines too. This means that decades of progress was erased due to school closure alone and remote learning, coupled with already saboteur programs such as the No Child Left Behind and Common Core strategies. America's education system is so poor that even countries most Americans have never heard of, or were made famous by Borat, have higher literacy rates than the U.S. In fact, only 79% of U.S. adults can read and write, leaving 21% who hopefully aren't operating machinery or voting. Joking aside, there are plenty of illiterate people who are smart and plenty of literates who are pridefully, by choice, ignorant - literacy isn't the only marker of education but it is a main pillar. Other countries seem to have it figured out though, including Ukraine and Japan which both have literacy rates at close to 99+%, which shows their programs are working and it's not just their smaller populations. A great example of this problem is what a Virginia School District is aiming to do: give kids 50% grades for not even doing an assignment. Some give 25% for writing you name, meaning you could feasibly get a C for turning in your name on a blank sheet of paper. Under the Bush administration and others too it was lowering test standards, curve grading, open book tests, and despite this, kids still failed; and as George Carlin said, the IQ slipped another few points. But it made the teachers, schools, and government look good - for a while. Other schools are letting kids use CHAT GPT. And although some countries are better off than the U.S., global illiteracy is on their rise, despite centuries of positive progress. It's all been an experiment - Educate Back Better - and as all slave masters know, you don't want your slaves or peasants or servants to read or write.This show is part of the Spreaker Prime Network, if you are interested in advertising on this podcast, contact us at https://www.spreaker.com/show/5328407/advertisement

Ever since No Child Left Behind was signed into law in 2002, assessments have been a fixture of the education landscape—a very divisive one. But assessments have changed a lot over the last twenty years and are still changing to better meet the needs of students, teachers, schools, districts, and states. But what do these […]

Ever since No Child Left Behind was signed into law in 2002, assessments have been a fixture of the education landscape—a very divisive one. But assessments have changed a lot over the last twenty years and are still changing to better meet the needs of students, teachers, schools, districts, and states. But what do these new assessments look like? What are they capable of that the old ones weren't? And what can we look forward to next on the assessment front? On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus discusses these questions and more with Arthur VanderVeen. Arthur VanderVeen is the CEO and founder of New Meridian, an assessment design and development company that serves over 2,500 school districts. Arthur was previously the executive director of college readiness at the College Board, and the executive director of assessment and chief of innovation for the New York City Department of Education.Show Notes:New MeridianA Right Turn on Assessments: State-Directed Assessments Using an Interstate Test-Item Bank CooperativeCan State Tests Be Useful for Instruction and Accountability?

 Lois Letchford sharesher experience with the No Child Left Behind program and the importance ofengagement in education. She discusses her son's journey with dyslexia and howshe helped him overcome his struggles with reading through creative learningmethods. The interview also addresses the need for individualized teachingapproaches and the lack of awareness and understanding of dyslexia amongteachers. We emphasize the importance of engaging students in early literacyand learning and the negative impact of quick judgments about students'abilities. The interview concludes with a call to action to buy and reviewLois's book, which provides teaching ideas and shares stories of strugglingstudents.     Action items   Buy and review Lois's book on teaching ideas and stories of struggling students.  Increase awareness and understanding of dyslexia among teachers.  Implement individualized teaching approaches to cater to students' needs.  Emphasize the importance of engaging students in early literacy and learning.  Avoid making quick judgments about students' abilities.      About The BookWhen Lois Letchford learns her son has beendiagnosed with a low IQ at the end of grade one, she refuses to give up on his future. Testingshows Nicholas is labeled “learning disabled.” The world of education is quick to casthim aside, so Lois begins working with him one-on-one. What happens next is ajourney—spanning three continents, unique teaching experiments, never-ending battles withthe school system, a mother's discovery of her own learning blocks, and a bond fueled by thedesire to rid Nicholas of the “disabled” label. Reversed is a memoir of profounddetermination that follows the highs and lows of overcoming impossible odds, turning one woman intoa passionate teacher for children who have been left behind.  About The AuthorLois Letchford specializes in teaching childrenwho have struggled to learn to read. Her creative teaching methods vary depending on thereading ability of the student, employing age-appropriate, rather than reading-age-appropriate,material. She holds a Master's in Literacy and Reading from the State University of New Yorkat Albany and has presented her work at several literacy conferences. Reversed: A Memoiris her first book.        Links  (60) LoisLetchford - YouTube  Lois Letchford(@LetchfordLois) / Twitter  Facebook  LinkedIn  LoisLetchford (@loisletchford) • Instagram photos and videos  Lois Letchford  LoisLetchford_OneSheet.pdf(squarespace.com)     Biography  My book,"Reversed: A Memoir," chronicles an extraordinary journey ofovercoming daunting odds, offering inspiration and hope to parents andeducators navigating desperate situations. At the age of 39, while teaching mysecond son how to read, I stumbled upon my own "learning difference,"an unexpected revelation that ignited an unwavering pursuit for answers. Withsheer determination and unyielding resilience, I confronted challenges andbattled self-doubt head-on, proving that no obstacle is insurmountable. Throughrelentless effort, I witnessed the transformative power of perseverance,achieving significant milestones and experiencing profound personal growth.I discovered the immense value of trusting my instincts. This experience leadto my appreciating literacy learning as being more than a “set of skills toacquire.” Embracing foundational knowledge of “how children and adultslearn,” and adopting a growth mindset, I unlocked true potential,shattering self-limiting beliefs.Guided by the philosophy of living in the present moment, I learned toappreciate the inherent beauty of the journey itself. As the founder of LoisLetchford, Language, Literacy, and Learning tutoring, I am dedicated toassisting others facing similar challenges. My memoir serves as a beacon ofhope, sharing the mission and vision of empowering individuals with dyslexia."Reversed: A Memoir" stands as a testament to triumph over adversity,offering not only inspiration and motivation but also a profound sense of hopefor all who read it.     

How do we motivate employees? Traditionally, we offer merit pay, focus on accountability, and use other extrinsic motivators tied to performance. The ideas sound good on the surface, but John and Andrew discuss the many pitfalls and unintended consequences - and what to do instead. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.4 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with John Dues, who is part of the new generation of educators striving to apply Dr. Deming's principles to unleash student joy in learning. The topic for today is...well, in fact, we are continuing our discussions about management myths that keep fooling us. And today, we're talking about merit pay, accountability, and extrinsic motivators. John, take it away. 0:00:37.7 John Dues: Yeah, thanks for having me back, Andrew. We've sort of been on this sort of mini-series talking about some of these myths that Dr. Deming talked about. So two episodes ago we sort of introduced the idea that Deming said we're living in this sort of age of mythology. We talked about two myths: the myth of best practices, and the myth of the hero educator. And then last time we talked about the myth of performance appraisal, and really talked about sort of this failure to consider the role of the system on individual performance. And really what we're gonna do is kind of wrap up those myths with the three you mentioned today. I think when I think of the myth, I'm thinking about sort of management dos and don'ts, and the myths are the don'ts. And then sort of the idea would be after we cover the myths, we can turn to some guiding principles, and those would be sort of the dos, the things that management leaders should do, that sort of Dr. Deming talked about. 0:01:38.7 JD: So we can dive into the first one, which is sort of a continuation of last time, this idea of rating and ranking. Last time we talked about performance appraisal, and now it's sort of the merit pay side of rating and ranking. And it something...merit pay is a practice that has been sort of tried over time in education. What I can tell, it goes...the idea in education goes back at least to the Reagan administration. So at least to the '80s. So since that time, this sort of merit pay idea for teachers or other educators in the system has been taken up by various governors and presidents in the United States. I think most recently during President Obama's administration, there was the Race to the Top program. And sort of as a part of that program, there were teacher and principal evaluations where merit pay was sort of a key part of those evaluation systems. 0:02:36.1 JD: And so the basic theory is that if you pay people based on results, that motivator to make money will drive improvement of outcomes in schools. And I think one sort of key differentiation, because pay in all sectors, but especially in education, is a hot button topic. I'm not talking about sort of the core salary, whether or not teachers are paid enough or not. Those sort of base salary levels are sort of a separate discussion topic altogether. I'm just talking about sort of merit pay, bonus pay, performance pay, that type of thing. And when I think of merit pay, I mean a lot of these ideas, I think, sort of sound good before you really dig in and start to think about them. 0:03:34.0 AS: And that's, Dr. Deming would say pay for performance makes sense. Seems like you're gonna get a good outcome, but in fact it's a little different or a little bit more complex than that. 0:03:44.9 JD: It's a lot, yeah. A lot more complex, I think that's exactly right. When I was thinking about merit pay and the theory behind it, what are the problems, especially in education? So for me, problem number one is paramount, and that's how do you define a meaningful measure of performance by which to judge individual educators? That's a pretty thorny problem. I think problem two is that the basic theory suggests that additional money will incentivize these...improves teaching and in turn improve student outcomes. But for that to be true, that means that teachers were previously withholding their best efforts and if you just paid them this bonus, that they would then sort of unleash this previously withheld power. And then another really thorny problem is this idea, if you sort of create this environment where you have a merit pay system, it sort of disincentivizes the behaviors that are important to improving any complex system. 0:05:00.2 JD: Things like, cooperation and teamwork. And so, especially in a merit pay system, the ones that I've sort of been aware of, the merit pay calculation is often sort of viewed as sort of opaque. How is this calculated? Often sort of the algorithms are proprietary, they're viewed as unfair, and then they can lead to these undesirable behaviors like unwillingness to share ideas or, just as problematic, unwillingness to take on certain teaching assignments, the tougher assignments. The very kids that you want to have the best teachers are often the toughest to get results with. And so you're sort of disincentivizing people taking those assignments because of the differential pay or the poor rating. 0:05:57.9 AS: Yeah, it's interesting too - that the point that people are withholding their best work. If we just give them merit pay, then...and I just had a vision in my mind. Imagine that we had a peaceful cage of tigers, and they're all chilling out and these tigers consume, at every meal, they consume, let's say all of them consume a hundred kilos of meat. [laughter] And we end up putting in 50 kilos in there and say, "okay, you gotta fight for this." 0:06:44.9 JD: Yeah. 0:06:47.4 AS: What's it gonna look like? 0:06:48.8 JD: What's it gonna look like? Yeah. 0:06:50.2 AS: And in a way, like what we're doing with merit pay is saying there's a limited pool. We've allocated a pool that's available to you. Yes, you've got your survival pay, but here is this pool of additional merit pay. And then...yeah, some people, some of them may just some people may sit back and go, "I'm not doing the work for that. I'll stick with my monthly pay." Whereas others will be extremely competitive to get that pay. 0:07:19.8 JD: Yeah. Yeah. But all of it assumes that, let's say, today I don't have the merit pay system. I get certain results. Tomorrow, I have this merit pay system. It assumes I'd know what to do tomorrow to get the outcomes, right? And I think that's a huge problematic assumption. 0:07:42.7 AS: So is that's part... If you think about what you're saying, that's part of the myth that, you know, you just think... 0:07:47.8 JD: It's part of the the myth. Yeah. 0:07:49.3 AS: It's like "just put this in place." I mean, come on. It's internal competition. We want everybody to...well, wait a minute. Internal competition in the company? 0:08:00.4 JD: Yeah. I mean, I could work, potentially, work harder for some period of time, but if I don't have any different methods for bringing about these outcomes, then the merit pay itself is...assuming everything else went well, assuming it was seen as fair and transparent, the fact that you don't have any new methods with which to bring about this improvement is a serious impediment to just thinking that merit pay in and of itself is gonna be an effective system. Putting aside all the other issues like disincentivizing the very behaviors or taking on the various assignments that you want the sort of top-notch teachers to do. 0:08:36.5 AS: Yeah. I guess that's another way of thinking about it too, is that it's like you have a certain set of tools on the tool floor, on the factory floor or in the classroom or whatever. There's a certain set, and you're not adding to any of that. You're just saying, "we're gonna pay you to get more out of that," and it's just...there's a limit as to what you can get on that. All right. 0:09:01.9 JD: Yeah, and I think the most typical way this has showed up in, say, the last 15 years or so, are these value-added models, that instead of just focusing on the absolute test scores of individual students, what percentage are hitting that proficiency standard? The value-added models did allow you to sort of attempt to measure the progress of individual students. So even if they didn't hit proficiency, you could look at, well, did they grow a lot? And a lot of the sort of merit pay schemes, during the Race to the Top era, were based on these value-added models. But I was...just as an example, I was reading a working paper from a Cal Berkeley economics professor who looked at some of these models. And one of the things that he said really stood out, he said, Teachers gain... "Value-added model scores are evidently inflated or depressed, in part due to the students who they teach, who differ in unobserved ways that are stable over time. 0:10:04.5 JD: This bias accounts for as much as one third of the variation in teachers value-added scores, enough to create a great deal of misclassification in value-added model based evaluations of teacher effectiveness." So I think that that type of finding is exactly the thing that I'm talking about. Creating these models is very, very difficult. And according to at least that one research study, up to a third of the variance in the results of teachers value-added gains for their students was not attributable to the teacher themselves. It was for...to these other things. 0:10:41.5 AS: And so... Go ahead. 0:10:43.7 JD: Oh, go ahead. Yeah. 0:10:45.1 AS: I was just gonna say that one of the takeaways that people take from this type of discussion is, oh, I see, but okay, so merit pay needs to be better implemented. [laughter] 0:10:56.0 AS: Right? Like, and I had...there was a LinkedIn discussion where someone posted something about KPIs, and I said the damage caused by KPIs is almost immeasurable. And I mentioned something about that and pretty much every post said it's not KPIs that are bad, it's just that we didn't train people well or they weren't explained well or they weren't implemented well. And that's a cover that can keep you doing merit pay or that type of thing for a decade - trying to create something that's fair and all of that. And I think that is part of the myth, part of the...where people get lost for years. 0:11:39.5 JD: Yeah. Yeah. And even in those systems, they were heavily focused on reading and math, because those were the heavy focus areas of No Child Left Behind, which was the key legislation at that time. Race to the Top was sort of a supplemental sort of grant-making process that sort of layered on top of No Child Left Behind. So even the models in reading and math weren't great at pinpointing where results were coming from. But then you also had this whole other problem where reading and math teachers make up a fairly small percentage of any staff. I mean, there's social studies teachers, science teachers, teachers in the arts, the physical education teacher, the administrators, the support staff and so you really have to finagle just the reading and math scores, to sort of make them applicable to all those other people, that have much less of a sort of direct impact on reading and math score. So that's just a sort of another problem with those systems, is how do you include the vast majority of school staff? 0:12:41.6 AS: And so I would say, let's wrap up this particular one by also saying that it's not about doing merit pay better. 0:12:50.9 JD: No, it's not. Nope. I think the practices themselves, whether it's performance appraisal or merit pay, they lead to sub optimization of the system as a whole. But I think what happens when you don't have profound knowledge, and this definitely happened to me with all of these myths, and I sort of latched onto them, when you don't have profound knowledge, these practices are continually recycled by education policy and political leaders, which is why I think you see them in the '80s during the Reagan administration, then you see 'em about 20 years later [chuckle] with the Obama administration. They get recycled, these bad ideas. When you don't have that solid philosophical foundation, you get latching onto these sort of policy implications or policies that have been tried before. You sort of forget that they didn't work the first time. 0:13:44.4 AS: Yeah, I think about Dr. Deming saying, how could they know? 0:13:47.8 JD: Right. 0:13:48.7 AS: And that there's just so many people that are kind of misguided by - just because something is done, that there's actually a foundational evidence that this is really the way that we optimize. So, all right, what's.... 0:14:08.9 JD: And that was exactly what he said when he found out that President Reagan had, or his advisors, had proposed this merit pay system for schools. He said, "the problem lies in the difficulty to define a meaningful measure of performance. The only verifiable measure is a short term count of some kind, where were the President's economic advisors? He was only doing his best." So basically he was saying to the President exactly what you said. So I think the real key here is things like joy in work, intrinsic motivation, cooperation, are key to a healthy organizational culture. And these things sort of upend that. I think what we should have what Deming is telling us to do: just work to optimize the system, rather to try to incentivize those individuals working within the systems, the system as a whole that you want to work on. 0:15:00.7 AS: Okay. So accountability. 0:15:03.9 JD: Accountability. Yeah. So when we say "accountability" in school systems, what we're typically talking about is state education department accountability systems, so basically all 50 states have some type of district and school report cards. School system gets it, individual school within the school system, get them. And they're typically based on performance metrics, like proficiency rates on standardized tests, absenteeism rates, college and career readiness indicators - which on their face seem like sort of noble things to keep track of. In my home state where I am in Ohio, that sort of system trickles down to not only individual schools, but in the teacher rating system, those ratings are applied to individual educators at many traditional public schools as well. I think when we're talking about accountability systems, if you're reading Deming, he often labeled them something like "management by objective" or "management by the numbers." But really those are all the same thing. It's some type of practice where you're focused heavily on outcomes. But I think like the merit pay, several problems with the myth of accountability. 0:16:26.3 JD: So one we've talked about before, but I think a key one is that too often goals for accountability and goals for improvement get conflated as if they're one and the same. But accountability goals, they're sort of like inspection. They come after the fact, they don't improve the processes that produce the defective results in the first place. So when you get these results and you haven't been sort of getting sort of local data that tells you how your practices are doing, the idea is that you're supposed to then take this once a year data and then figure out what to do when it doesn't look like you want it to. And that data is not very good at that. So those two things, improvement goals and accountability goals get conflated. The sort of second problem is we talked before about how you can react to data. 0:17:20.9 JD: You can take it and try to improve your system, or you can distort the system itself or distort the data that's coming from the system. So a second problem, that I saw up close when No Child Left Behind was launched in the early 2000s, I was teaching in Atlanta, the legislation comes out. And if you ask teachers, what did you experience? Very often, they're gonna tell you some version of what I experienced, where as a teacher in Atlanta, we were required to spend an inordinate amount of the day on reading and math, recess got cut from an elementary schedule. I taught in an elementary school at first, and gym and the arts, while we had them, they were for very, very short periods of time and a couple times a week. Big chunks of the day on reading and math. 0:18:14.4 JD: And so that's a good example of distortion of the system because the legislation focused on math and reading results, to the exclusion of science and social studies and the arts and these other things. Well, that's where the school schedule then focused. And I don't think if you asked anybody that was sort of delivering schooling in that way, that that was in the best interest of kids in terms of giving them a well-rounded educational experience. The third problem is the distortion of the data. And this is something that happened many places, especially during Bush two and Obama's administrations, when No Child Left Behind was in full swing. So if you ask any educator and even many people outside of education, can you remember some major cheating scandals that happen with state test scores? Everybody can remember a few. There's a big one in Atlanta a few years after I left. I know there was a major one in DC. 0:19:13.1 JD: There was a major one here in Columbus in the Columbus City schools in like the 2013-2012 range, and they happened all over the country. I mean, even the one in Atlanta, the superintendent of the schools was charged with running a corrupt organization. They used the RICO statute because they were actually giving bonuses based on test scores that were - I forget how they were cheating exactly. And obviously, this isn't the majority of people. But it is sort of a product of a system that's putting so much focus on these test scores, and then you're layering the merit pay on top of it, and this is sort of what you get. 0:20:01.3 AS: That's the problem around here. We don't have enough accountability. 0:20:04.2 JD: Right, right. 0:20:05.4 AS: So, we're getting everybody accountable, everybody's gonna be... And we are gonna get tough on accountability. 0:20:12.5 JD: Yeah, yeah. 0:20:13.1 AS: Squeeze. 0:20:14.0 JD: I think that's the Deming sort of point with management by objective accountability system, is stop holding people accountable in lieu of improving processes. Of course accountable to our teammates, Deming talks about a system, where do you fall in the system? Understanding the system's view versus the organizational chart. Who's relying on me? Who do I rely on? Those are important...that's accountability. But what he's talking about is when all of this focuses on accountability by inspection rather than sort of working together to improve the processes that ultimately lead to the outcome. 0:20:54.1 AS: Yeah, and seeing the data as a tool, a feedback mechanism that helps us understand, and test what we're doing with the system. So, yeah. 0:21:05.2 JD: I think another thing that's really underappreciated is that one, numerical goals don't produce quality especially when those goals are outside the capability of the system as it's currently designed. So, if you remember back when we looked at those third grade reading test scores, they were sort of bouncing around about a 60% average, if I remember right. They were like 58% then up to 62% and down to 60% and up to 61% and down to 59%. And so, they're bouncing around about a 60% average, the goal is 80%. That goal is outside of the capability of the system. 0:21:40.6 JD: And so, if people over time, depending on what sanctions are being issued, realize that there is literally almost no chance that they're gonna hit that mark within the current system, what are they gonna do? Again, they can work to improve the system, which is hopefully what happens. But you're very likely to see some type of distortion of the system or distortion of the data, even if it doesn't rise to cheating on state tests. I only report out on certain data results that make my organization look good or whatever. I spend all my time trying to write this fiction instead of actually improving the system. And I think that's something that happens all the time, and we don't understand what's the current system capable of. 0:22:23.7 AS: And how do you counter the argument that some people say is that: some of your employees, some of your teachers or administrators, just they don't care that much, and they need accountability. If you don't have accountability, they're not gonna step up and try to improve the system and all that stuff. How do you handle somebody who says, "You're living in a fantasy world, John. And the fact is that we need to crack the whip around here." [laughter] 0:22:50.4 JD: Yeah. Yeah. I can appreciate that, I think I grew up with, show up on time and do your job. That was a part of my upbringing. However, it just hasn't been my experience that most people are slackers. Sure, have there been a handful of people across my 20 years in various cities and states that probably shouldn't be teaching or leading a school? Yeah. I've definitely come across some people like that. 0:23:18.1 AS: And I guess the answer to that is really, that's a management job, to assess a person and try to make a decision, coach them, help them, move them, whatever. 0:23:27.1 JD: It's a management decision or a management sort of responsibility. And I think a key thing is, when I have seen teachers that maybe would have the attitude that you're describing. If you unpack why that is, it's often in education because let's say there are a 15-year teacher... I saw this a little bit in Atlanta. I was a newer teacher, there were some 15-year teachers on my team. They were gonna do their own thing, but if you unpack why that is, it's because, "look, I've been through four or five superintendents in my 15 years, each one brought a new set of reform ideas. I had to get trained on all these new things, and then those things were gone in two or three years. And I've been through that cycle three or four or five times." Of course, you're gonna have that attitude, who's not gonna have that attitude? You sort of have initiative fatigue. 0:24:18.4 AS: Yeah. And I'm sure as those cycles went through, there was times that those people were beaten down on a particular thing that they didn't get right, and then it's like, "Sorry, I'm not taking the risk." 0:24:30.3 JD: Yeah, yeah. 0:24:31.1 AS: Alright. 0:24:31.3 JD: So that just goes back to, the problematic employee is a very small percentage. And generally what we're talking about are systems problems that require leadership to fix. Yeah. 0:24:44.3 AS: So: extrinsic motivators. 0:24:48.7 JD: Yeah. I think the things we've been talking about are extrinsic motivators too. Performance pay, performance appraisal systems, those are all sort of forms of extrinsic motivators. But I think the basic premise of this myth is that you can improve performance by putting the right extrinsic motivators into place. So, the basic theory or supposition is that if you just get the right balance between reward and punishment, then that's gonna improve your system. And I think it's definitely true that people are differentialy motivated by extrinsic and intrinsic factors. 0:25:31.9 JD: Some people require far less of the other, or one or the other than other people. But I think it is a false premise that you can improve performance using carrots and sticks. Just sort of full stop. And I think what I've seen when I've read about this is that, one, in most contexts within complex systems like schools, extrinsic motivators don't work to improve performance like some people might think they do. They typically only work in the short term, and even in those short term settings, they typically only work for simple and repetitive tasks. And those don't sound like what teachers or principals do on a daily basis, basically. 0:26:24.6 JD: I think there's also these unintended consequences that stem from practices like teacher evaluations and merit pay that heavily rely on extrinsic motivation, because they do lead to these distortions in the data or the data within the system. Distortions of the system or data within the system. Because again, they're optimizing competition within the organization versus cooperation. They actually make it harder to achieve your goals. And then I think that this all brings us to the primary issue when you try to use extrinsic motivators targeted at individuals, is that individual performance only accounts for a tiny fraction of organizational performance. 0:27:18.2 JD: And I think Deming pegged that number depending on the exact situation, that 94% to 97% of the troubles and possibilities for improvement in any given organization actually belong to the system, and are the responsibility of management. So, if you do the opposite and try to incentivize individuals who have little control over the system in the first place, at best it's pointless. And at worst, these incentive systems have the exact opposite effect and actually decrease organizational performance. [laughter] I think that's really what is behind the Deming philosophy. The common thread is that these things work to sub-optimize the system as a whole, all of them. So yeah, when you fail to appreciate the organization as a system, you're actually making the improvement of that system much, much, much harder. The Deming philosophy does the opposite of that. 0:28:20.4 AS: Yeah. I'm thinking about taking like a test tube and putting some things in it and then shaking it up, [laughter] agitating it, and really putting pressure on it and all that. And then when you open the container, it goes, pop, and it explodes because you've agitated. And you're agitating a small part of the overall, that's a part that has probably the smallest impact on the overall system, of the overall output of the system. So, yeah. Interesting. [laughter] 0:29:00.0 JD: Well, and I think a key part of this mentally is that even for people that have at least a moderate grasp of the Deming philosophy, when you're actually a leader and you're in a high pressure situation: I just got my state test scores, well, how did we do last year? We have to have done better than last year, and we have to do better than these three competitors. As long as that's okay, I'm okay, I'm okay. But then you sort of have forgotten in the moment of stress all of the things you've learned about this philosophy. Like, well, how does this data look over time? Is it really just bouncing around? It's not really improvement. But the trick is assuming that you know the philosophy in the first place, that you can then step back and employ it or fully use it in those times of stress when community members or board members, your boss, is asking you for these results and you're trying to figure out a way to sort of paint them in a positive light. 0:30:00.0 JD: And so, even if you're a believer in this, you can see how people start to distort that system or distort the data. Again, not rising to the level of the cheating scandals that I talked about in Atlanta and Columbus, but in these everyday and in these everyday ways. So, I think that's why you have to explicitly say the Deming philosophy - it's how you manage your organization. It's why you have to get top leaders an understanding of the philosophy. And then you have to live it day in and day out, not only when it's easy, but especially in those times of high pressure when you wanna revert back to the myths. 0:30:42.9 AS: And the exam results come out. 0:30:43.8 JD: When the exam results come out, and someone's calling, you have to be ready to talk about it in this way, even in those high pressure, those pressure time periods, yeah. Yeah. 0:30:53.6 AS: So, let's wrap this up. We're talking about the management myths that keep fooling us, and we're talking about merit pay, accountability, and extrinsic motivators. What we were saying about merit pay, you were saying that it assumes that additional money is what's going to get a better output from teachers as if maybe they're holding something back right now. And also, you mentioned that it disincentivizes teamwork, and it's not clear how it's calculated, and it leads to sub-optimization of the system. About accountability, you were talking about how Dr. Deming talked about management by objective or management by numbers and the problems that you face with that. You also talked about the accountability versus improvement goals. I think that was a really helpful discussion to kind of understand that improvement and accountability are two separate things. And then also, you talked about distortions of the data, distortions of the systems and that type of things. 0:32:01.5 AS: And that only also you mentioned finally on the accountability is that, if you're holding people accountable to numerical goals that are outside of the system's capability, it's not reasonable at all. And then extrinsic motivators, you talked about that there's a myth that we can improve performance with the right balance between reward and punishment. But you mentioned about unintended consequences of that and causing distortions of the system. And in a sense, you're optimizing for competition within the system rather than cooperation and coordination. And then finally you wrap that up, which probably applies to all of it, with the idea that Dr. Deming clearly stated that the output of a system, maybe, 95%, 96% or so of the output of a system is actually attributable to the system, not the individuals running about doing the best that they can within that system. And so therefore, it doesn't make so much sense to overly focus on these things when they really are not the key to getting the output that you want. Is there anything you would add to that? 0:33:18.6 JD: Yeah, no, that's exactly right. I think systems leaders have to understand the management myths, so they can avoid them. And then sort of the next step beyond avoiding the management myths is, well, what do you do? What are the things that you do? And that's informed by the system of profound knowledge. And I think it's also informed by that set of guiding principles that I alluded to at the beginning. And I think that's sort of where to go next. Those are the dos of the Deming management philosophy. So, you have some principles to operate by, so you don't get caught up in these myths when things get tough. 0:33:54.3 AS: Beautiful. Well, John, on behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute, I wanna thank you again for this discussion. For listeners, remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey. This is your host, Andrew Stotz saying, I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming. "People are entitled to joy in work."

Our guest in this episode, Rie Algeo Gilsdorf, describes herself as someone who believes in “seeing and integrating the big picture”. She believes in the whole person and integrating us all. She comes by this attitude honestly as you will hear. From attending a number of different schools while still living in the same house to how she learned through the years to live her life, Rie has made it her mission in life to help eliminate inequality in mind, body, and spirit. One of the fascinating things Rie talks about is why she obtained master's degrees in Biology and Dance. As you will hear, it's all about understanding the mind and body as part of the whole person picture. We get to have an interesting discussion about making choices, or not. As Rie discusses she was told often while getting her Dance Master's degree, “You have to make a choice of either being a dancer or a choreographer. Her response from the “big picture standpoint, “Why can't I be both is I choose to?” As we discuss, often people tell us to make choices, but it is because of simply the other person's point of view, not from a more general viewpoint or the point of view of the person who is thinking about what choice to make. I promise that our discussion will intrigue you. One very important concept Rie discusses concerns leaning into what we don't know. That is, when we do not know something or how to accomplish a task stop and look at the problem Learn from all your tools and sources how to deal with the issue. Most important, do not hesitate to ask others and especially don't hesitate to ask those who will be affected by your decisions. Big picture mentality again. My time with Rie is why Unstoppable Mindset is such a great podcast not only due to inclusion and Diversity but because we really do get to encounter the Unexpected in so many ways. As usual with our guests, Rie gives us all life lessons we can value and use. Enjoy, please. About the Guest: Rie Algeo Gilsdorf (She/Her) is passionate about seeing and integrating the big picture. Whether she's connecting people across distance and difference, integrating mind and body, science and art, or healing and change-making, Rie is dedicated to restoring wholeness to our common culture that heals and upholds us all. With Masters' degrees in Biology and Dance, Rie has an appreciation for the perceptions of the mind, heart and body, and the critical thinking and creativity they can provoke. Rie integrates Systems Change and Embodiment with an understanding of the physiology of trauma and the history of dominant and marginalized groups, applying all of this to overcoming systemic racism on a personal, social and global level. She is a national leader in the use of Social Presencing Theater (SPT) in antiracism work. Throughout her career Rie has facilitated adult learning that develops capacity to achieve equity across race, gender, sexuality and ability as well as urban, suburban and rural cultures.Currently, she provides Cultural Ways of Being audits, facilitation, coaching and SPT practice groups to individuals, schools, organizations and faith communities via Embody Equity. Ways to connect with Rie: Links for my website, LinkedIn, Instagram, class registrations and more are all found on LinkTree: https://linktr.ee/embodyequity About the Host: Michael Hingson is a New York Times best-selling author, international lecturer, and Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe. Michael, blind since birth, survived the 9/11 attacks with the help of his guide dog Roselle. This story is the subject of his best-selling book, Thunder Dog. Michael gives over 100 presentations around the world each year speaking to influential groups such as Exxon Mobile, AT&T, Federal Express, Scripps College, Rutgers University, Children's Hospital, and the American Red Cross just to name a few. He is Ambassador for the National Braille Literacy Campaign for the National Federation of the Blind and also serves as Ambassador for the American Humane Association's 2012 Hero Dog Awards. https://michaelhingson.com https://www.facebook.com/michael.hingson.author.speaker/ https://twitter.com/mhingson https://www.youtube.com/user/mhingson https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelhingson/ accessiBe Links https://accessibe.com/ https://www.youtube.com/c/accessiBe https://www.linkedin.com/company/accessibe/mycompany/ https://www.facebook.com/accessibe/ Thanks for listening! Thanks so much for listening to our podcast! If you enjoyed this episode and think that others could benefit from listening, please share it using the social media buttons on this page. Do you have some feedback or questions about this episode? Leave a comment in the section below! Subscribe to the podcast If you would like to get automatic updates of new podcast episodes, you can subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher. You can also subscribe in your favorite podcast app. Leave us an Apple Podcasts review Ratings and reviews from our listeners are extremely valuable to us and greatly appreciated. They help our podcast rank higher on Apple Podcasts, which exposes our show to more awesome listeners like you. If you have a minute, please leave an honest review on Apple Podcasts. Transcription Notes Michael Hingson  00:00 Access Cast and accessiBe Initiative presents Unstoppable Mindset. The podcast where inclusion, diversity and the unexpected meet. Hi, I'm Michael Hingson, Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe and the author of the number one New York Times bestselling book, Thunder dog, the story of a blind man, his guide dog and the triumph of trust. Thanks for joining me on my podcast as we explore our own blinding fears of inclusion unacceptance and our resistance to change. We will discover the idea that no matter the situation, or the people we encounter, our own fears, and prejudices often are our strongest barriers to moving forward. The unstoppable mindset podcast is sponsored by accessiBe, that's a c c e s s i  capital B e. Visit www.accessibe.com to learn how you can make your website accessible for persons with disabilities. And to help make the internet fully inclusive by the year 2025. Glad you dropped by we're happy to meet you and to have you here with us.     Michael Hingson  01:20 Well, hello, once again, it is time for another episode of unstoppable mindset where inclusion, diversity and the unexpected meet. Oh, and our guest today is Rei Gilsdorf. And she's going to yell at me because I didn't include equity. I just said inclusion and diversity. But that's okay. We'll get to that. Rie is a big picture person. And she will tell you and she has master's degrees in biology and dance, which is pretty unique, and a lot of other kinds of things to go along with that. So I think we're gonna have a lot of fun today. I am certainly looking forward to it and looking forward to learning a lot and having a wonderful discussion. So Rie welcome to unstoppable mindset.   Rei Gilsdorf  02:05 Well, thank you so much, Michael. It's good to be here.   Michael Hingson  02:09 I'll it's always a pleasure to have somebody who comes on and really does look at the big picture. So we'll get there. But yes, let's let's talk about you growing up a little bit, your childhood and all that sort of how did you get somewhere and moving forward and all that? Yeah.   Rei Gilsdorf  02:27 Well, you know, the interesting thing is, I grew up in California in a small town, and my town at Santa Ynez, California, also also very close to solving that more people have put up right, with the cookies in the ABL fever.   Michael Hingson  02:44 But Zaca Mesa wine comes from Santa   Rei Gilsdorf  02:48 does, yes, it certainly does. And lots of other good ones. So when I was a child, my dad was in agriculture. He was an animal nutritionist, actually. And he worked mainly with large animals, cattle and horses. And so our fortunes were directly tied to those markets, which are very cyclical. And so what would happen for me is I started out my educational life in a private school, and then the bottom fell out of the Cadillac, and then I landed in a public school, and then I would be there for a couple of years until some egregious thing happened. Like, you know, they're going to put 24 Children in one classroom, which, of course, by today's standards, you know, there are teachers that would kill to have only 20. in their room, right. But back in the day, that was just unheard of. And so then,   Michael Hingson  03:40 when was that roughly?   Rei Gilsdorf  03:41 That was that would have been in the late 60s. Okay. So so you know, then I would move to a private school, and we'd be there for a few years, and then the market would fall, and then I'd go back to public school, and then some awful thing would happen, then I go back to private school. So even though I grew up my entire childhood in one house, I went to five different schools. So for me, I didn't have language for it at the time, of course, but there were cultural differences between those programs, right? So I would say things like, as a seven year old, I said to my mom, when I first went to public school, mom, they were in their 20s to school, because at the private school, there was a uniform and you had to have leather shoes, and then you came home and you changed into your play clothes and your tennis shoes. Right. So so like, I didn't understand what that meant. Or, you know, socioeconomically, that you know, not everybody has shoes for every occasion, you know, and that it's funny to wear your tennis shoes to school. It was just different to me. And over the course of all my schooling, I think the message that I got was, there are more than one way to be. There's one more than one way that is considered normal in different places. And so there's a skill of figuring out what is called for, and how I need to be in different places.   Michael Hingson  05:11 When you were when you were growing up, and you made that comment to your mom, I'm curious if you remember, what did she say?   Rei Gilsdorf  05:18 You know, I don't think she just said, Oh, honey, that's just how, you know, that's just a different school, and they just have different ways. And she started just minimize that she didn't really talk about it much.   Michael Hingson  05:30 Anyway, go ahead.   Rei Gilsdorf  05:32 Yeah. So anyway, I think that that like looking back on it, I think that's really, you know, how I first began to understand that there's more than one way to be, right, and that, that things that seem perfectly normal in one environment are like really not normal in another environment. And, and that, you know, like, wow, there's the way that we act in my home is not the way that everyone acts in their home. So then, you know, fast forward is that I go, and I get a degree in biology, and I get a degree, I get a degree in biology, because, you know, my dad, in agriculture thought that that would be great, because I could go to vet school, or I could go to med school, or I could go into research, or I could, you know, so I was, you know, didn't really know what I wanted to do. And I did that. And then actually got a master's in zoology and animal behavior. And, and it's very interesting if you if you want to learn the skills about observing, and describing animal behavior is a great place to start, because you don't know what that Sparrow is thinking. But you know, that he's trying to get to the top of the dominance hierarchy. And he's, he's like, there's a literal pecking order, and he's picking on the next slightly smaller Sparrow. Right. So so there are, there are things I think I learned about describing that, as opposed to interpreting and laying my story on that have been really helpful, because as much as we are all humans, and we all share, you know, one physiology and, you know, there's a lot of really lovely sentiments about, you know, we all smile on one language. And also, people have really different experiences. And it can feel like you're being erased, if somebody who has more power or is little more dominant in that situation just sort of is like, Oh, we're all alike, comma, you're like me? Well, like Michael, you're just like me, except for that. You're blind. And I'm not, but I'm just gonna say we're all alike. You know, so there's something that's just a little it again, it doesn't capture the big picture, we have to go out to the big picture of people's different experiences and needs, and then we can come back in to the immediate picture of okay, what does everybody need right now? And how are we like, and how are we going to be one group here today?   Michael Hingson  08:08 But what really got you to the point where you emotionally and intellectually understood the value or need for the big picture? Oh,   Rei Gilsdorf  08:18 you know, what? That's? That's an excellent question. Part of it is, I think that I have kind of always had a propensity for that when I was about 12, or 13, a pastor, actually, who was a friend of my older sisters said to me, you know, what, you're a middle person, you can see both sides, and people are going to try to make you choose. And really your gift is see both sides. And it was one of those moments where I knew that he had said something profound, even though you don't like it, well, I wasn't quite ready for it to be that profound. But then, you know, then the other piece is, then I go, and I get a degree in dance. And you know, my mother is beside herself, because like, what are you going to do with these two things that are so do science degree and an art degree and how you know, but really, I can see that it's all about the body. And there's, you know, like, cognitively, understanding how the body works, and the systems and all of those kinds of things. And then there's physically understanding what it is to inhabit your body and express something or understand body language or that sort of thing. So I think that I think it was probably in those years when I was, you know, getting my dance masters. So I would have been in my 20s when, you know, I began to really go Okay, wait, there's a bigger picture here. And even in dance, people were saying, you know, you have to choose, you have to either be a teacher or a performer you have to either be a choreographer or a teacher, you know, and realizing like, Well, no, those aren't, you know, what, why couldn't a person do both of those things? Life is long.   Michael Hingson  10:04 Yeah. And everybody always wants you to make a choice according to their definitions. And of course, that's the real issue is it's their view, and they don't look at other views that may cause them to stretch and grow, because they're too comfortable with the one thing that they know.   Rei Gilsdorf  10:25 Yes, very well said, really well said, Yeah. And because, you know, for that person, making some drastic choice early in their life might have been a really smart decision for them, it might be the best choice they ever made. Right? But that doesn't necessarily mean it's the right choice for me.   Michael Hingson  10:43 Yeah, it's, it is an interesting world we live in. And it's all too often that people just don't see the value of a big picture. And I also think that it is important that although you see the big picture, it's important to be able to bring it back down and focus in on whatever it is that you have to deal with the endeavor or whatever at the time.   Rei Gilsdorf  11:06 Absolutely. zooming out and zooming in. View, and then you've got because if you say the whole time with your head in the clouds really, then then you're not practical. And that's, you know, that there are people who use the big picture to kind of bypass that, you know, they get to that we all smile in the same language place, and then they, they don't get to like it. Okay, well, how are we going to make that work? Right?   Michael Hingson  11:34 What Where did you go to college,   Rei Gilsdorf  11:36 I took my first degree at Occidental College in Los Angeles, which is a small liberal arts college, which was a good step for me coming from a very small town going through a smallish college, you know, I think if I had gone to Washington State, which was my next step, which had probably 30,000 students at the time, you know, that would have been a too big of a step for me at the time. But, but yeah, then I went to Washington State for my science degree, and then I was dancing all along. And I had in my head, this, this old trope about how you know, you don't make it and dance by the time you're 30 your career is over, you know, and so I didn't allow myself to realize how much I love to dance and, and you know, how it could be a career path. Until, until I was almost done with my though ology masters. And so then I went to the University of Utah, because they have a great choreography program. And also, by the way, they have what's called the kinesiology program, dance, kinesiology. So that's the study of the body in motion. And so that was really kind of a sweet spot for me, you know, it really allowed me again, to develop both halves of that, although, you know, I was the first graduate student in their history, to write a thesis and produce a concert, you know, like, usually, if you're a choreography major, you're going to produce a concert. And if you're a science major, you know, kinesiology major, you're going to do a thesis. And I was like, No, I don't really do both of these things.   Michael Hingson  13:11 So you had a lot of fun doing it. I should it. What made you pick combination of science and dance, though? They are very different in a lot of ways. Which isn't to say, it's a good idea or not, but what what made you do both of those,   Rei Gilsdorf  13:29 you know, well, like I said, my dad had a science background, he was an animal scientist to be exact. And so really, I got my biology degree just to be compliant, you know, and my, my mom said to me, don't worry, if you don't know what you want to major, and you're like, Go start your biology major, and go, you're going to a liberal arts school and take a lot of classes, and you're going to meet some professor that just excites you and sees your potential, and you're going to just want to hang out with them and learn from them. And then you'll know like, that's where you should go. And I got into my senior year of college, and then I was really disappointed because I thought, oh, my gosh, I never met that professor, like, what's wrong with me? And then I realized that actually, it was my dance teacher. And because dance was an adjunct subject at that school, you know, she she wasn't a professor, right. So. So then what happened was, I went up to Washington State because I'd gotten a teaching assistantship, and by the way, that's where I fell in love with teaching because there were there were graduate students who had research assistantships, and teaching assistantship and the research assistant people were like, the people with the spotless transcript and the, you know, they were like that was that the you know, prize position. And other people like, well, I guess you're gonna have to teach and then even amongst Teaching, I got assigned biology 101 basic basic class. And I loved those beginners, you know, and I realized that I actually had a gift for helping make things clear to beginners. So, so I went up there, and I was part of a dance group, you know, just as an extracurricular thing. And, you know, the, the poor fortune of my professor there was that she was going through a very messy divorce, and she was depressed, and she didn't really have the wherewithal to run the group. So she turned it over to us. So then that was my good fortune, because that's where I found choreography. And I was like, Oh, wow, you could keep choreographing. But you know, like, it wouldn't matter if your viewer aging. So, so that's where I really got turned on by, you know, that bit by the choreography bug. And then, you know, finished out my thesis and went went on down to Utah from there.   Michael Hingson  16:02 Wow. So then what did you do once you have these two degrees, and you had to go out into the workforce and do something with them all?   Rei Gilsdorf  16:13 Exactly. So for a long time, I had a day job.   Michael Hingson  16:18 To have one of those occasionally.   Rei Gilsdorf  16:20 Yeah, yes. Gotta have those. And, and then, interestingly, you know, some years later, well, what   Michael Hingson  16:28 was your day job?   Rei Gilsdorf  16:29 Oh, my gosh, I had a sequence of data ups. But I'll tell you the most astounding one is I, I worked at a medical clinic, because growing up, I had worked in my dad's office, so I knew how to do office things. And and I worked at a medical clinic in the collections department. Like, I'm not exactly who you would think of the collector, just not, you know, firm in that way. Like I am not someone you think is going to break your kneecaps at all, you know. And so, so that was a rough job. And then actually, when I first kind of Mind, Body Jobs was the last year we were living that we were living there, because my husband at the time was getting his degree at Cal Poly University in San Luis Obispo. Yeah. And so I actually got offered a job being the physical therapy assistant at a day program for disabled adult. And they mainly were folks who had mild cognitive impairment and significant mobility issues. So a lot of folks that had had head injuries or, you know, cerebral palsy, or those sorts of things. And I, part of how I got this was that in college, I had done a semester with a professor who was really a pioneer in dance for folks with disabilities. And so I remember calling her because I was so nervous that I'd been offered the job. And I said, and I just feel like, you know, how do I know if what I'm doing is hurting them? Are they? And she said, Oh, well, there's a way to know. And I said, What is it? And she said, Why you ask them? They've been living in their body their whole life? Oh, God,   Michael Hingson  18:24 and how often we don't in all seriousness, and how often we don't we, we, and one end of the scale, we think we're the experts. And so we don't need to ask, and I've seen that so many times. The other end, we just don't think about asking even though it's the logical thing to do, and we don't, we don't work view ourselves as the expert.   Rei Gilsdorf  18:45 Exactly. Or there's the scripts about how it's not polite, you know, like when your mother has taught you that it's not polite to look or point at someone who is different, right, who has a disability, then that gets internalized? Well, I'm certainly not going to talk about it, but you like they've been living in their body their whole life, they would certainly rather, you know, my clients would certainly rather have me ask them, then, like, try some idiotic thing that does hurt, right. Oh, anyway. So that was really one of my first places of combining, you know, because we were doing physical therapy. But it was so you know, such a sort of great outlet and then i i Of course put some dance in there. And, and then from there we we moved to Colorado and then I was able to work in both like a it was probably a for profit colleges called Denver Technical College. So I was able to teach you know, anatomy physiology, those things there and then there must have been a baby boom like three years earlier in Colorado Springs because There were so many preschool programs that wanted to have a creative dance thing. So I was teaching, you know, college kids at night and little four year olds, and three year olds in the daytime. So that was a little schizophrenic, but lots of fun. And and then we ended up moving to Portland, Oregon. And at that point, there was a, an arts high school being built. And I ended up getting hired into that program. And amazingly enough, you had to have an art and an academic to teach full time, because they put the academics in the morning, when people's minds were fresh. And then they put the arts which are all things that you physically do in the afternoon, and which also are things that kids you know, tended to love. So they would like show up and focus and, you know, and all of that sort of thing. And because I had a background in biology and dance, I could teach full time there. And if the time was, when it opened, it was an alternative school. So it didn't matter like that. I didn't have the right licensure, and really, not very many states were licensing dance teachers in those days. And then along comes No Child Left Behind. And they had requirements for being a quote, unquote, highly qualified teacher. And even though by that point, I had been teaching dance and integrating, I mean, part of that program was that we integrated the art and the academics together, because we knew that children learn what we all learned, we don't learn in a box, right? Like, I never really thought a whole lot about math until I had to replace the floor and a bathroom. And I had to figure out the foreign tile, right? There was a lot of math in that. So the learning by doing thing is is very important. So anyway, I, I was very happy, happy as a clam there for 10 years, then No Child Left Behind came along, and they were like, well, you're gonna have to quit, and you're gonna have to go get your teaching degree. And in fact, it means that you're going to have to student teach in someone's classroom, that probably has less experience than you. And I just couldn't do I mean, a lot of my colleagues did it, bless their hearts. But at that point, then I got to principals license, and then shortly after that, I ended up moving to Minnesota, to be the principal of a different arts high school,   Michael Hingson  22:27 you certainly moved around a lot from California to Colorado to Oregon and then in a soda.   Rei Gilsdorf  22:35 Exactly, did a lot of moving.   Michael Hingson  22:40 So was was it all because of you or husband? Or was it job related? Or just you guys decided you wanted to see different kinds of snow?   Rei Gilsdorf  22:54 Well, you know, we did find that both Colorado and Oregon are the Birkenstocks was sock state. So um, so we moved to, we moved to Colorado for his job. And then he was really sort of burning out from that job. And he had gone on a trip to Portland, actually a whole bunch of West Coast cities and fell in love with Portland, he said, You have to come out here and see this. So we up and move to Portland, just because it felt really good. And managed to both get jobs there. And then move to Minnesota for my job. He has been the trailing spouse, as we say. So.   Michael Hingson  23:41 So when did you move to Minnesota? What What year was   Rei Gilsdorf  23:44 moved there? It moved here in 2004.   Michael Hingson  23:48 Okay. And then you put your principals license to work   Rei Gilsdorf  23:52 with the principals license to work. And as I got hired in that job, the superintendent who hired me, said he told me this little story about how the year before the prior principal, had had 11 openings for teachers, which I mean, I think there were only about 25 teachers in the school. So that's, that's a huge number of staff. And despite, you know, some pressure to diversify, the staff had managed to hire 100%, white able bodied folks, and even when those folks were, you know, like met each other for the first time, you know, I get the back to school, you know, welcome new teachers kind of event. They were kind of surprised and disappointed. And so this superintendent said to me, if you can't hire at least 50% diverse staff staff of color in particular, you will lose the trust of your faculty. And so I thought, wow, okay, so he's telling me to This is very important. And Hmm, I'm not sure I know how to do that. So at that point, I leaned into what I didn't know and started, you know, started my educational journey. And, and really, it was probably about 10 years after that, that I ended up kind of really fully going into this work. But I think that's another really important point is, you know, like this, this is the same thing as as asking people what their preferences are, or what what, you know, what they need, or whatever, that, you know, leaning into what we don't know. Like, there is no shame in that none of us knows everything. And if you try to make like, you know, things, then you're not really going to make progress. You've got to say, Well, okay, can I go to this conference? Can I pull together this learning group? Can I, you know, Can I try this? Can I try that? And that's, that's how we progress.   Michael Hingson  26:05 Did you happen to think of asking any of your faculty members for help and ideas about how to hire a more, at least racially diverse population and seizures?   Rei Gilsdorf  26:17 Yes, definitely. Good. Because the, you know, like, often the wisdom, a lot of the wisdom is in the room. Right. And there also are people that have networks of, you know, beyond I mean, certainly, especially as I was a brand new person in Minnesota, it's not like I knew a lot of people here, you know, and other people did. So. Yeah.   Michael Hingson  26:39 Well, and you'd already had lessons in the value of asking, so that's why I asked that question.   Rei Gilsdorf  26:46 Yes, definitely. Well, so   Michael Hingson  26:47 what do you do today? Exactly.   Rei Gilsdorf  26:50 So what I do at this point is, I have a little company, I'm a sole proprietor, it's called embody equity, because, of course, I'm gonna bring the body into thing. And, and I kind of do this on two levels. So there's the personal level, where people need to, myself included, you know, we need to learn how to listen to our bodies, which sometimes means quieting our minds in our mouths. And we need to overcome some of these fears and biases. I love that in one of your taglines, you talk about how, you know, we can't be inclusive until we tackle what's inside of ourselves. And I think that is so true. And very often, people will understand cognitively why it's a good idea to be inclusive, and all those things, but they can't quite, you know, when when a situation happens, things come out of their mouth, or they make decisions that they perhaps aren't real proud of, or wouldn't have if they'd had more time to think or whatever. And, and a lot of that is because a lot of these a lot of these fears and biases are things that we hold in our bodies. And again, if we've been trained that it's like, it's not polite to think about that or talk about that, it's certainly not polite to feel a feeling that doesn't feel good about another person. And so part of that is just like learning to feel into that feeling, allow it to come over, you understand what it's coming from, and then you can get to like, oh, well, that's a silly thing to be afraid of. I guess that's nothing to beat. That's nothing to worry about. Or, oh, wow, I guess, I guess that person might have a different perspective. And maybe I could listen to that. But if you, if you start from the body, then you can understand that, you know, a lot of wisdom and a lot of opening up can come out and a lot of letting go can come out of working with your body. So so really, you know, I also like to say the body's like that person in the meeting that doesn't speak up until the end of the meeting. And then they open their mouth and they just wow you that this amazing thought comes out that sums everything up. And clearly they've been paying attention the whole time. Your body's like that person in the meaning of you, your mind and your body. Your body is the one who's like very quiet they're not going to assert themselves but they know a lot and a lot of it is getting the mind to be a little quiet so we can listen to the body now. So that's one level. And you know, sometimes people even come to me for coaching on you know, gosh, I have a new daughter in law that's a person of color or I have a new co worker or I'm supervising this group of people and I realized that I'm I'm acting nervous around people who are different than me. So those kinds of things you know, I can do coaching on on those kinds of things. And then the other thing is, whole organizations need to embody that, that the statement that they have, right or that that eloquent thing that they came out with, after some hideous situation was in the news. And they wanted to differentiate themselves. And they said, We stand with the cause. And yet, then they don't actually know how to, as an organization, stand with the cause. So So really, what I do is I look for I have gotten in the habit of looking at people's documents, like, personnel, manual job posting those sorts of things, and finding the language in there that is pushing for the status quo. Because it's going to be in there because it's it's been written, like, you know, companies occur out of the status quo, companies, churches, schools. In fact, I thought it was fascinating. You had told a story about being in a church that was considering putting, I think, an elevator in place. And what was fascinating about that, Michael, is the pushback on that sounds exactly like the kind of pushback that I hear about other situations that are about race or gender or other other aspects of diversity. So see, that's where, like, I'm so tempted to then like, oh, let's come out to the big picture, what is this consciousness that people are inhabiting? That I'm only safe if things stay exactly like they are. And there's something vaguely unsafe about us putting an elevator here, because someone different than me is going to come to this church, you know, and how, like, if you if you really just play that tape on out to the end, like the logical end of that statement, that's, that's ridiculous on the face. You know,   Michael Hingson  32:02 so isn't it, and it's, it totally violates the the doctrine and the precepts of the church to not be inclusive, and it happens a whole lot more than we would like to think some people just think they own the church, it's theirs. It's not theirs, the last time I checked, but you know, it is amazing. And there's so many things, it's not ours, we're a part of a community. And the sooner we truly recognize that we're part of a bigger community, the better it will be all the way around. But as much as we hear it takes a village, we, when it comes to us, we don't like to think about that.   Rei Gilsdorf  32:42 Absolutely. You know, when I was at that first art school in Vancouver, Washington, where you know, you had to have an art and an academic to teach full time. That meant that we all shared classrooms, because I might be in a classroom in the morning that was suitable to do science in because it had sinks and counters and that sort of thing. Well, that's also a great kind of room to do visual art in and mix paint is not a great room to dance in. So I was gonna go to a gym, or some other large room to teach dance and an art teacher was going to come in behind me. So we all shared not only the children, but also the rooms and the resources. And as we were planning the school, our principal actually instituted what she called the my jar, which is kind of like the swearing jar and put 25 cents in if you say a bad word. So if anybody said, my kids, my kid my room, we had to put 25 cents into my jar. And let me tell you, that was quite an education about this idea that it's, it's ours, it's not mine. And it was hard was surprisingly hard again, even though on a cognitive level, I was all about this community. It took a couple of years to really learn how to live into that. Yeah.   Michael Hingson  34:00 And it is one of those things that all too often we don't learn very fast, and we should learn it more quickly. It isn't, there's no I in team, that's what it really comes down to. And there's a lot to be said for that. Exactly. So when did you actually give up being a principal?   Rei Gilsdorf  34:20 Um, you know, I did that job. I will tell you that that job. The thing about the State Arts High School is that it is a line item in the governor's budget. It's not a regular school district, and the governor appoints your school board. So I was politically over my head almost immediately. You know, came from out of state didn't really get Minnesota politics to begin with, and then had these board members who may or may not have really been interested in being a board member may have donated to a governor's campaign, you know, and so, so I left there after three years, but I went to another school to be they had a brand new position opening up, that was an arts department chair. So that was lovely, because then I got to really do a lot of coaching of teachers, which is one of my favorite things, you know, watching teachers teach. And coaching them was really a lot of fun. And then though, that was a private school, and I and I missed, oddly enough, the public school environment of like, really, you know, in a public school, you you accept the children that come to your doorstep. And in a private school, you have to go looking for diversity. And so it's, it's just a slightly different mindset there. So I went back to that school. And then that's where I really met the folks from courageous conversation, because that school was what was called an integration district. It's something that there had been a number of I wouldn't want to say in the late 1990s and early 2000s. And so it was a joint powers district of Minneapolis in the 11 surrounding suburbs, because what was found was that, that different suburbs were able to segregate themselves by having their own school district. And so this was a way that all of those districts had to submit an integration plan, you know, it got very wonky, but yeah, what we did, one of the things that we realized was, okay, so, so different kinds of children are going to these different districts and these teachers, it's not like normal, neighborhood change has happened, and you have, you know, a few kids who are different than you when you're in and then a few more, a few more, and you gradually learn your way into it, it's like, suddenly, now they've got a busload of children coming from this other part of town. And then they would do these things that just, you know, like, sometimes just getting out of yourself, and seeing, you know, having a set of outside eyes is really important. So for instance, there was a suburban school district here that was majority white. And they started getting a busload of mostly black children in and those children like that bus was arriving, like at a slightly earlier or later time, there was something weird about like, the timing and what was going on at the front entrance. And so they they just decided that they would have that bus come to the back door, you know, not thinking what does it look like when the black children have to come through the back door? Like what's, what's the inclusion message there? Yeah. Oh, and and given our shared history in this country, what's the message there? You know, so, so? Yeah, so we put together this thing that was called the cultural collaborative, that was a learning exchange for teachers, and, you know, at school administrators, and one year, my boss said to me, because at that point, and I was a, I was like, the curriculum integration specialists. So I was helping people pull the arts into the academics and, and by the way, look at how we can have different kinds of kids work together on arts projects, and learn from each other, and just have the experience of being together. So, so when you're my boss said to me, you know, we have this one company called courageous conversation that's coming in, and they're doing a lot of our classes, and then we have a whole bunch of other people. And I would like you to take as many of these classes as you can report back to me just as a quality control. And so in one year, I think I took 36 different one and two day courses. I mean, I really, I probably should have written up another Master's degree for that, but having to I didn't feel like getting a third. But at that point, you know, I learned a lot more of the technical pieces of it. And then there was a huge budget issue and all the people who were teachers on special assignment, in other words, who didn't have a classroom like B got laid off. And so after that, I ended up going to work for courageous conversation, which was the consultancy that was providing a lot of that. So I worked there for about six years. And then, at the beginning of the pandemic, by that time, I had really I discovered social presencing Theatre, which is the physical discipline that I'm working in now. And, and of course, when you work for someone that has conversation in the name of the business. And you say, Hey, I think we should do some movement seminars that aren't so heavily talk oriented, that you said, you know, our brand is conversation   Michael Hingson  40:15 comes in many forms.   Rei Gilsdorf  40:17 Exactly. So, you know, at the beginning of the pandemic, you know, of course, conversation was not a good idea in person. And so they laid off almost all of us. And at that point, I just knew like, oh, okay, right. So now's the time for me to really pull this together and figure out how this works. How do I work together with people to, to really embody equity. So that's, that's how I got there.   Michael Hingson  40:44 So you, you started your company, then somewhere in the early 2020? Yes, that's about three years old, which is, which is good. But you talk about equity, and you don't talk about or you don't have in your name, inclusion or diversity. Now, why is that?   Rei Gilsdorf  41:07 Yeah, so that's. So here's the thing. I think that diversity and inclusion are weak T compared to equity. And I'll tell you why. Diversity is the easiest thing to measure, because you can measure diversity just by counting and there are many categories that people disclose or, or are just visible. And so that, you know, in a way, that's the easiest your hat, what is what is the C suite look like who's in there who's not in inclusion is, there's a great book called The person you mean to be by Dolly too, and she talks about the metric of inclusion is how did your last meeting go? Like, who was talking, who was not talking? Who was even allowed in the meeting, you know, so so. So that's one way to think of it, I first really heard about inclusion when I was working at a school, and the parent association of the elementary part of the school had decided that if birthday invitations are going to be handed out at school, then you'd have to invite everyone in your class. And so I decided that that's a really fitting metaphor for inclusion, because I'm going to invite everyone to my party. And you know, of course, we're, we're all offered the same cake in the same punch and whatever, but it's still my party. And I might not be playing music that you like, and I might not have a cake that you like, or that you're even allowed to eat. And by the way, you have to bring me a present. So in a corporate sense, or in a school sense. Inclusion means I'm gonna make some overtures to make you minimally comfortable, you know, I'm going to acknowledge that you're here. And that you might have a couple of different needs, I might make a few accommodations, as I'm required to by law. But the program was designed for me, and for people like me. And so equity is about requires you to pull back and look at the big picture and say, Okay, if you have a diversity problem, what's the pipeline? Why aren't people finding their way to your business, or organization or church or whatever it is? What's going on, that is off putting, or that is disqualifying for people. And in the inclusion realm, equity is going to say, Okay, well, what are the cultural things that you are doing that, you know, you're like a fish in the water, you don't see your own culture, but people from outside your culture for sure can see it? And so what are the tools that you know, how can we expand your tool belt for equity, so that you can respond to multiple kinds of people, and so that it doesn't feel like a little weird exception has been made for this one person?   Michael Hingson  44:16 Yeah, it's interesting. I have to think about that. And what you said, my, my general experience is, certainly diversity does not include disabilities. Because as a society, we still believe disability means a lack of ability. And I think that in reality, we can change words. We can change definitions, we don't need to create necessarily new words. So diversity doesn't mean disabilities anymore, because that's what everyone has allowed to happen. So from my perspective, I I won't accept and I encourage people not to accept that inclusion doesn't include disabilities, either you are inclusive or you not it is a quantum, one way or the other, there is no partial inclusion, you either fully include all or you don't include anyone. And that disabilities are not things that mean a lack of ability, but rather, disability is a characteristic. And in some my point of saying that is, you are a person with a disability because you're light dependent. And, and the reality is, if the lights go out, power goes out, you run to find a smartphone, or a flashlight or a candle or something to keep light. Because mostly, the world has invented technologies to continue to allow you to have light all the time. And so for some of us, that's a catching up, and technology is getting better. But still intellectually, society doesn't accept that. So they don't include, for example, my need for a screen reader software package, as opposed to using a computer monitor like you use, although inclusion ought to be part of the cost of doing business, period.   Rei Gilsdorf  46:14 Okay, so the big picture, I'm fascinated, because what what just came to me when you're talking is, one could think of the desk lamp that I have in my office as an assistive device, it allows him to work past 5pm Yep. Whereas you would not need that assistive device. And and the thing is, none of us thinks of my desk lamp as an assistive device, whereas it is pretty early reader, it is an in in, you know, in the in the kind of historical equity work that I do often. There's this, there's a lot of talk about affirmative action, and who does that benefit and so on. But we don't think back to, you know, the 40 acres and a mule thing that actually, after the Civil War, the idea was that, that the enslaved people who had been freed, were going to get this little land grant so they could start their own farm and do their own work. And then that was actually reversed after a while into that administration. But meanwhile, the what would they call the Sooners and the boomers who like went through Oklahoma and everything they were given, like, more acres, a mule and several sacks of grain, right. So that was affirmative action for white people, white and indentured, you could get that. So there are these things where we don't think of it as affirmative action for the dominant group. But that is how the dominant group got dominant. And then I would say, we also don't think of assistive devices for the dominant group. But that's part of what keeps us dominant.   Michael Hingson  47:57 But the reality is that assistive technology was mostly first invented for the dominant people. Yeah, the dominant, the dominant. I won't say race, because it's different races, but the the dominant force. And what happened as a result is that that occurred, and those who were not classified by the dominant people as part of the dominant group, were left behind. And, and it has become worse, which is very unfortunate. But that is the reality of it that in fact, assistive technology was invented for you, long before it really was invented for me. Now, we can take it the other way. So Apple, for example, has put assistive technology in every one of its devices. If you go buy an iPhone, you can take any iPhone and Acrobat, activate a screen reader called VoiceOver. And it will verbalize whatever is coming up on the screen. Except that they haven't mandated that app developers make sure that they accommodate voiceover necessarily as they're creating their apps. So an app can be accessible one day and not the next, but leave that alone for them. But leave that alone for the moment. What I don't see Apple doing still is saying, you know, we've got this great verbal technology, audio technology, and creating new and better ways for you like dependent people to be able to use it. For example, when you're driving a car, you don't turn on VoiceOver so that it will tell you who's calling. And so you have to still look at the phone to see or you have to look at the phone to answer it. And we as much as we talk about safe driving and all that. We encourage people to look elsewhere other than just the road look at Tesla. Tesla uses touchscreens to control most What goes on in his cars? That means, yeah, you do have copilot, and so on, which in theory work to some degree. But why is it that we discourage people from continuing to look at the road, and not use the other technologies that in reality benefit me, but would also benefit you? And would benefit me more if we did it? Right. So the the Tesla, for example, it's all touchscreen. So I can't turn on the radio, I can't change a radio station. I can't do anything with it, because it's all touchscreen. And we don't we don't accommodate that stuff. We don't recognize the value of things like audio output, and, and using even audio input more, because we still have the dominant group that doesn't recognize that in reality, alternatives might improve their lives as well. Oh, wow.   Rei Gilsdorf  50:51 Yeah. Oh, for sure. For sure. And you know, what you're saying about it being because it's visual, it's, it's distracting. You know, my son has an electric car, not a Tesla. But it is like, it's, it's difficult for me, like I have to set things and adjust them before I start moving in the car, because it's too distracting for me, you know, so interesting.   Michael Hingson  51:14 Yeah. And it would be very easy to make the world much more inclusive for all, but it is a mindset change that we have not developed yet. But we need to have that conversation. And really encourage it because it would make life better. In 2010, the National Federation of the Blind were to get a law passed, called the pedestrian enhancement Safety Act, more and more cars were going hybrid or totally silent or becoming very quiet. So we don't hear that when they're coming down the road a lot of times, yeah. And a law was eventually passed, saying that cars needed to make a noise. Now, they're still working on citing white noise to us 12 years later, which is unfortunate. But leave that alone for the moment. The law didn't really get traction at being passed until NITSA, the National Institute for Highway or transportation, safety and so on, until NITSA, discovered that there were 1.5 times as many accidents that would happen to pedestrians, as a result of encountering a quiet car or hybrid vehicle, then would be encountering just a regular internal combustion engine. So when they discovered that other people, then people who happen to be blind, also were affected by my cars, then people's attitude started to change. You know, we're still not dealing with the inclusive mindset. And we need to well, you started your company. And so what exactly do you do today?   Rei Gilsdorf  53:05 Well, I do a couple of things I do, what I call equity audits, I'm beginning to to switch that name around to cultural ways of being audits. Because there are, you know, 18, different things that people do that are called equity audit, like sometimes it has to do with going in, and having focus groups of people of color and seeing what's working, what's not working. And so what that when I hear that I refer to that as a functional audit, like what is going on what's working, what's not working. And what I do is more structural, and it has to do with really looking at those, you know, hiring documents, policy manuals, I and I've done audits for, you know, churches and, like larger Diocese of churches. I did one, I've done a couple that have to do with what's the route to becoming a clergy member? And how is that like? What's the application? What's the selection process? What are the criteria, because if your organization was founded by people in the dominant, the, you know, the words are going to express that and they're going to express it in a way that is, you know, it's it's hidden in plain sight. It's just absolutely hidden in plain sight. So one of the one of the main ones, boy, let me back up and say, What I love about this approach is, you know, where I used to work, they would just come in, and they would do a seminar that was about, you know, Equity and Diversity, right? And it's very easy for people to launch that into the abstract realm and not bring it down to earth, right, like, oh, well, theoretically, that could happen. But surely we don't do that. Like I don't, you know, and so it's really lovely to come back with a report that says, Here are these things things that are in your documents. And can you see why, then when you go to hire someone who is different on any axis, that there's this conversation among the hiring committee afterwards, and they say, you know, what, just don't know if they're a good fit. And they're not a good fit. You know, your your your hiring document hasn't captured. You know, what, what do you hope to gain from this more inclusive atmosphere that's more inclusive, higher? And if all you can say is, well, we want more people who are different than you need to think more about, like, what are the unique perspectives that people could be bringing to you, and you write those into the job description, and then magically guess what more different kinds of people apply? And they answer the questions in such a way that shows what they have to offer. And at the end, the conversation is not about like, Hmm, they don't quite fit. It's like, wow, they've got some perspectives we really need. Right? So. So anyway, one of one of the things that comes up often is this idea of professionalism. Word, you know, I'm not advocating that we go away from being professional. And you know, each profession has some standards, they need to do tap, right. But if you don't define it, then it falls back to what is the dominant group do? Right, and, and all the other things are considered unprofessional. And so one of my favorite things that I love to do is if I'm talking, for instance, to a white group, I say, what was the consequence in your childhood home for showing up to supper late? Or? Another way to think of that is, what was the vibe in your house when you had to get the whole family bundled into the car at the same time to go somewhere to be at a place on time? And, you know, I don't know, Mike, what was what was it? What consequences in your house for showing up late to dinner was that a bad thing   Michael Hingson  57:05 was a bad thing, unless unless you had let mom and or dad know in advance, then there was a reason for it, which is a different animal. But if you just showed up late, or even getting everyone in the car, well, there were only four of us mom, dad, brother in me. So it was pretty easy, because we had afford our cars. Everybody had their own door, but But still, there were expectations that you you abide by rules, and the rules could change. And the rules were created to accommodate everyone. And I think that's part of the issue is that when you're making rules, if you have rules that don't work for some people, then that's a different animal to   Rei Gilsdorf  57:54 write well, and then the other piece is, over time, we attach values. So Punctuality is a good thing. When I go to the doctor, I like that, you know, they haven't slipped me down 18th in line when I had an appointment, right. But I'm sure you have been in a meeting, because I think we all have where somebody said, we're going to respect everyone by starting and ending on time, right. And of course, like today, you and I have an appointment, we're going to try and start it in on time. But if one of us had to leave, because there was a family emergency, you know, if you had to run out of the room right now, I wouldn't feel disrespected. You know, I don't have to feel this perspective. That's just a story, a cultural story that's been told. And another story to just like, tie this one up in a bow is that I recently had a hip surgery. And I was in the hospital. And one of my excellent nurses was this black woman who was an African immigrant. And she, you know, she was very charming and hospitable. And trying to get my mind off of the pain and all that stuff. She would chat me up and everything. She asked me what I did. And so I was telling her about this. And I asked her, like, what's the consequence in your child at home, growing up for not getting to supper on time, and she was like, she couldn't get her head around the idea that there would be a consequence for that. She was like, What are you kidding? It's like where, you know, our value is hospitality. And whenever you show up, we're going to try to show you the most hospitality. We grew up in a different culture. And it's not that they don't have values, it's that they're pulling out a different thing to value more highly than the actual punctuality. Right. So, so, you know, I had to appreciate that. And the other thing that I love about this story is and karma I appreciated that she was punctual in checking in on me to see if my payments had worn off or not right, so that she can help me man Just paying by not letting it get like way too bad and having to take an extra dose and all that sort of thing. So the reason I'm saying that is that often, you know, time is a great example, because we all have some experience with time. But what will happen if people don't want to understand this, and I honestly think it's a willful thing, they'll say, your thing that black people can't tell pride. And I'm not saying that at all, I'm saying that there are different tools to have in our arsenal in our tool belts. And one of them is when to be sticking to the agenda and getting people through, through so that we can leave here on time, and when to like, bend the agenda to attend to somebody's needs, and when to just straight up, be hospitable and say, hey, it's a party show up when you need to, you know, so all of those are possibilities. And it's about becoming aware of what the water that you and your fish are swimming it.   Michael Hingson  1:00:55 And that's exactly the point is that there is something to be said for all of those things. And there is something to be said for if someone is late, before you condemn, understand. And that is just something that we don't see nearly as often as we should, which brings up the point of there are so many people today who are afraid, afraid of saying the wrong thing, you know, and how do you deal with that? Because what really is the wrong thing. And I think that we can define and we do define the wrong thing, if you will, in terms of like how we deal with people who are different than us and so on. But we also don't really know how to deal with that. Yes.   Rei Gilsdorf  1:01:36 So so there's this, there's a there's a whole lot about this. Because there's, you know, am I overhearing someone say the right thing, did somebody say the wrong thing to me, and I say the wrong thing and realize it when it was halfway up my mouth, but I couldn't call it back. Right? So let's start with that one, because that's the easiest one to me is, you know, if you're just genuine and say, oh, that didn't come out at all, like I wanted it to, I'm so sorry. And can we talk about how that landed on you? And just own it, you know, because things come out of our mouth, right. And I think most people understand when you do that. So again, just like at being honest with it. I am a big follower of a woman named Loretta Ross, who is all about what she calls calling in, instead of calling out and her whole thing is, you know, you need to admit that other people's interior lives could be as complicated as yours. Right? So if somebody has said something, you know, who knows what was going on in their mind, we, a lot of times we make an assumption, we jumped to a conclusion about like, oh, my gosh, how mean they're being or how racist or biased or whatever it is. And, you know, her idea is, first of all, if it's happening online, you need to take it offline, you need to have a private conversation, because a conversation about something that has harmed someone or, you know, really touched a nerve that does not benefit from having an audience, you know, that just doesn't. So taking it offline, talking about it, and listening to the other person to see like, what did you mean, when you said this thing? What did you mean? Like, because that is the thing that we don't know, like, we might, you know, we might assume, and sometimes they really did mean to be mean.   Michael Hingson  1:03:40 Always that,   Rei Gilsdorf  1:03:41 there's always that. And if that's the case, you can do what's called calling it off, which means you say, wow, you know, I'm starting to get kind of upset in this conversation. And I feel like I'm not very grounded. And so I'm gonna end this conversation, and then it's up to you whether you want to come back to me like if it's a relative of yours that you care about, maybe you come back when you're both cooler, right? If it's a random person who was trolling you online, that you just just block them, block them and move on.   Michael Hingson  1:04:13 Or if you're somebody who may be a stranger or not a friend, but you decide, well, maybe I handled that wrong, or whatever. And it wasn't intended to be mean, but it's not either, or the first two things you described, then you figure out a way to go back and deal with it.   Rei Gilsdorf  1:04:30 Yes, exactly. And there's even another possibility that there's a woman named Sonya, Renee Taylor that has has suggested is that like, if you're just too exhausted by the situation, and you don't use it, you're gonna call someone in. That's probably even a series of conversations. Just take them some investment of your time and emotional energy. But you could also say, you know, Michael, I have heard many of your podcasts and You are such a compassionate human being. And that just doesn't square with that last thing that you said whatever it was. And I would just like you to think about that.   Michael Hingson  1:05:12 And help me understand it, or help me understand. Right?   Rei Gilsdorf  1:05:15 I would just like, yeah. So so you can put the work on the other person as well. You know, and that's   Michael Hingson  1:05:21 fine. If you do it in a constructive way, that should always be a reasonable thing to do.   Rei Gilsdorf  1:05:30 Yes, yes, absolutely. And then the only other thing is, if you're, for instance, a university presidents, like someone with a significant amount of power, and a group of students is protesting a thing, and they've called you out. One of the things that Loretta Ross says about that is, you have just gotten 1000s of dollars worth of consulting feedback for free. So the thing again, is to Job, listen, ask, engage, understand what they're trying to tell you. Because a, an actual call out from a group of people who really are less powerful like that. That is them saying Ouch, in the only way they can get it to register. And so if you can find another way to listen, that doesn't have to be so dramatic. And if you're actually willing to make some kind of change, then then often that's the way to defuse the situation. But again, it's leaning into it, you know, and it's valuing the other person's experience and what they're telling you.   Michael Hingson  1:06:41 Yes, absolutely. And it gets back to the gift that you just said, but those are very important. If and, yes, we all need to be more open, positive intentions aren't enough. It's the actions that come outside of the positive intentions, you can say, well, I really did want to do that. But what do you really do? And the positive intentions don't mean a thing, unless you add more substance behind them? Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. Which is extremely important. And we should do? Well, I have to tell you, this has been fun. And we went over our hour, but I'm not complaining. It was fun to do. But, you know, we've got to let you go get ready for dinner. It's getting closer to five o'clock there. And it'll be five o'clock soon enough. And then you can go off and decide if you're going to drink alone or with someone. Or whatever.   Rei Gilsdorf  1:07:38 Yeah, thank you so much, Michael, this has been great. How do people   Michael Hingson  1:07:42 reach out to you and learn about your

In this episode, John and Andrew discuss what "transformation" means in education. John juxtaposes two reports, conducted a decade apart, that have influenced education for the last 40 years: A Nation at Risk and the Sandia Report. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.3 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with John Dues, who is part of the new generation of educators striving to apply Dr. Deming's principles to unleash student joy in learning. The topic for today is, Do we really need to transform our education system? [chuckle] John, take it away.   0:00:26.7 John Dues: Andrew, it's good to be back with you. Yeah, I thought... Sort of as a jumping off point from our other conversations, I remember, I think in our first conversation, you mentioned you graduated from high school, 1983 in Cleveland area, went to a solid...   0:00:44.9 AS: Hudson High.   0:00:45.2 JD: Hudson High, good traditional public school in Northeast Ohio. And your question was, if I went back to the high school 40 years later, would it look and sound the same, would it have gotten better? Would it have gotten worse? What's going on with our schools in United States, I think was the basic question, I think... When I answered you, I said two parts, there's the question about what most people probably focus on when you think about that question about Did a school get better? Did the test scores improve or decline over time? And then there was a secondary question of, Did the school transform along the lines of the Deming philosophy? And I think that those two questions would have different answers depending on which schools you're looking at, but I thought it would be interesting to sort of think about this question, Do we really need to transform our education system through the lens of a couple reports...   0:01:48.5 JD: Education reports, one that's well known in our world, one that's lesser known, that took a look at the... At least the test results question in the education sector, and then build from there this idea of whether or not we need to transform our schools. One thing, there's no shortage of calls to transform or some people would use the word reform our schools, and those two words probably in and of themselves, probably have different applications, but we'll use them interchangeably as we go through that question and attempt to maybe answer that over this episode and maybe a couple additional episodes.   0:02:36.7 AS: I find that fascinating as I observe education around the world from my own experience outside of the US, and I look at the US, and I think about the importance of education, the role of education. There's a part of education that you could say is kind of indoctrination in the way a country educates its youth to be a certain way or to understand things a certain way, so I didn't see that part of education when I was young, but now I see every country's got their indoctrination that they do within their school system, so I see it kind of broadly, but I'm just curious, really take us through what you'd like to explain about that.   0:03:20.4 JD: Yeah, I think the sort of start... I think there's this quote in The New Economics where Dr. Deming says that people are asking for better schools with no clear idea how to improve education, nor even how to define improvement in education, and I think if that's... And he's saying this roughly the same time that these reports are coming out, and if that's true, I think what happens is when reports come out about the state of our education sector, it's pretty easy to get pulled this way and that. When you don't have a clear picture in your mind for what schools should look like or how to improve schools, these reports have large impacts. And so the first report is well known. It came out about the same time you were graduating from high school, in 1983 in the first Reagan administration, called A Nation at Risk. It's pretty well known in the education sector, and it's had a lot of far-reaching impact in both time and place, where even today, 40 years later, we still... Some of the roots of the various reforms that we've undergone in our sector, it's still playing a role.   0:04:40.6 JD: The second report is, that I'll sort of juxtapose against The Nation at Risk is a report that came out about a decade later called the Sandia Report, and I think it's really interesting just to look at those two reports and the impact or lack of impact they've had over the last 30 or 40 years in the world of education. So I think I would start with, when A Nation at Risk came out, and it was commissioned by the Reagan Administration, the National Commission on Excellence in Education is the group that released the report and one of the leading statistics that's in the report is that the SAT, the college entrance exam that high school students take demonstrates a virtually unbroken decline from 1963 to 1980, where average verbal scores fell over 50 points, and average mathematic scores dropped nearly 40 points in that roughly 20 year time period. And there's these really memorable quotes that are clearly meant to awaken the public to the state of its schools that people still remember to this day, and I'll read one. It says, "We report to the American people that while we can take justifiable pride in what our schools and colleges have historically accomplished and contributed to the United States and the well-being of its people, the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a nation and a people."   0:06:24.0 JD: You couldn't get much more of wake up type people language, it's really, really interesting. Like I said, this report over the last four decades has been that foundation or bedrock for the various federal reforms that people are probably familiar with, starting with...   0:06:41.0 AS: And to put it into context, that's the kind of talk that was coming out of the Reagan administration, like government's not helping and government can be a problem and we need to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and you need to take personal responsibility, so it's very... It makes sense that that type of language was coming out of the Reagan administration.   0:07:05.4 JD: Yeah, and I think... So this report is floating around, there's a convening of all the governors in the United States in about 1989, and some pretty strong federal education legislation starts getting put together, it starts with the first Bush and then it ends up being passed during Bill Clinton's years called Goals 2000. And has various goals around increasing graduation rates and test scores and things like that, and then that transitions to No Child Left Behind with many people are familiar with that. Came out in the early Bush years and had a lot of impact on schools when my career was first getting started down in Atlanta, but it was federal legislation, so it covered the entire country, and then it even played a role even into the Obama years when he released the Race to the Top legislation, and that was more of a competitive grant program federally that was lots of strings attached a lot of focus on test scores, a lot of focus on teacher evaluations and principal evaluations and using test scores in those evaluations.   0:08:21.3 JD: And so you can see this, I think, direct linkage between A Nation at Risk, to Goals 2000, to No Child Left Behind, to Race to the Top, and even to the stuff that you see at the federal level to this day. So when a report like this comes out, it's called A Nation at Risk, the thesis of the report is right in the title. A nation is at risk because of its education sector, and so it's like... Most people say, Well, we gotta do something about this. We need to take action. There's some serious implications. And so about a decade after this report comes out, the Department of Energy sort of commissions its own report. The point of this report, as you might expect, is the department of energy, they're actually looking to do some economic forecasting, so it's not directly about our schools, but they wanna take the same data set that The Nation at Risk authors looked at and analyze it.   0:09:32.3 JD: And interestingly, they entered this analysis thinking that they are going to verify the results from a Nation at Risk, but what actually happened is that on nearly every measure of achievement, the Sandia analysts found actually steady or slightly improving trends in the test data. So they were...   0:10:02.1 AS: And in the same test data or in new test data that was coming out?   0:10:04.7 JD: Same exact data. They actually didn't look just at test data, they were actually looking at graduation rates, dropout rate, college-going rates so on just about every one of those measures, it was either steadily improving or slightly improving. And so you go back to A Nation at Risk and you have this absolute decline in SAT scores from the early '60s to the early '80s, and the Sandia authors aren't disputing that, but they're looking at their analysis and they're saying, wait a second, this decline in average scores, actually doesn't mean that the high school students of the early '80s or early '90s, weren't as capable as their 1960s peers. And so then you start to think, Well, how could this be? It's really, really interesting. And what the Sandia report authors go on to say is that when they broke out the test scores and these other measures like I said, graduation rates and other things like that, they broke them out by race and socioeconomic status, class rank, gender, they found these steady or improving rates in all of these groups, and they chalked it up to this statistical phenomenon called Simpson's Paradox, and basically what that is, is when trends that appear in this aggregated data set, which is sort of A Nation At Risk analysis, that reverses when the data is separated into sub-groups, like it was in the Sandia report.   0:11:45.6 JD: So basically what they're saying is that there are a more diverse mix of students on any number of measure, socioeconomic status, gender, race, those types of things, class rank, that there's a more diverse mix of students taking this test, and that is what causes this sort of change in average test scores and other similar measures.   0:12:10.6 AS: Which I guess A Nation at Risk should have controlled for?   0:12:17.6 JD: At least... I think breaking the scores out in the way that the desegregating the data like Sandia did would have been an important step given that the population of test takers was very different in 1963 than it was in 1983 or 1993. So the Sandia researchers basically found these improving trends on dropout statistics, standardized tests, post-secondary studies, educational funding even, international assessment comparison, so all these different measures that... This sort of earlier report is raising serious alarm bells about. This new report is saying, Well, wait a second, if we look at this data and we drill down in a little bit different way, we get the opposite results, but hardly anybody knows about the Sandia report, and just about everybody in my sector, my age and older knows about the A Nation at Risk Report, it's cited all the time. Even to this day, I just heard someone on a podcast a week or two ago talking about A Nation at Risk.   0:13:24.7 AS: So I guess one of the lessons is be careful with how you handle data.   0:13:30.6 JD: Be very careful. I think one of the principless we use here is data has no meaning apart from its context, and this is a very good example of data taken out of context. I think one of the lessons for me is that when you look at our schools, and I think this is maybe what happened with A Nation at Risk, is that for most people, what you see in educational data that comes out of our schools depends, in large part, on what you thought about our schools before we looked. I think they kind of drew a conclusion and then they sort of found evidence to support that.   0:14:14.2 AS: Supposed to be the opposite way. Good research.   0:14:16.8 JD: Yeah, I think so. I think so, should have been an open question, and the Sandia Report had... I think maybe their eyes were a little more open or their willingness to consider alternative explanations was a little bit more because they were not inside the Education Sector, they were outsiders, they were physicists and economists in the Department of Energy, and so they didn't really have a dog in the fight. I guess you'd say.   0:14:41.5 AS: Well, I guess you could probably say we actually don't really know, but the assumption is because they're outside in the department of energy, they're completely neutral, but they may have had their own biases that they brought into that too, but still...   0:14:56.3 JD: Yeah, for sure. For sure.   0:14:58.2 AS: It's a great lesson on... What was it you said, data has no meaning without...   0:15:02.3 JD: Apart from its context. Yeah. Apart from its context. Yeah, I think that's a good example. Yeah.   0:15:06.6 AS: Yeah, and what it also makes me think about. One of the things that's so interesting about the stock market is that you can take a lot of data, you can analyze it and come up with your opinion, and let's just say that you're not that good at analyzing and you've missed some very key things in that data, and then you put your money down and the market will take it away from you, boom like that. Like as an immediate punishment for poor logic and reason, and I'd say that it's kind of one of the last places where that's kind of allowed and where it's kind of supposed to happen, but I think that the immediate punishment for bad logic and reason is not that common any place anymore.   0:15:53.6 JD: Yeah, I would agree. And the troubling thing is the, like I said, the wide-ranging implications that reports like A Nation at Risk can have even 40 years later.   0:16:11.9 AS: Yeah, and I guess that's another lesson from this, so first lesson is about understanding the data and being very careful of how you're interpreting that, the second one is that I like to say first to the mind wins. It's just... I have a funny story where I moved to Thailand and I didn't have a girlfriend and I lived with my best friend, and basically there was people at that time that took that circumstantial evidence and they said, Andrew is gay. Okay, that circumstantial evidence could point to that, and I didn't make any attempt to answer that question, so 20 years, 25 years later, a friend of mine was at a bar, and he said that he overheard two people talking about me, and they were talking about how I'm gay. And my friend went up and said, Well, actually do you guys know Andrew? And they're like, No, we've never met him. And he said, Well, I'm friends with him, and I can put this to rest that Andrew is in fact not gay. They refused to accept that. And I just thought, first of all, first opinions are very difficult to reverse. It takes a lot of emotional and intellectual energy for somebody to do that, and therefore that partially explains...   0:17:46.9 AS: Now, the second part that explains it, is that when you attach emotion to something, it also emboldens it or it makes it in your mind much more so if you think... If you ask an older person, Where were you when you heard that John F. Kennedy was shot? They know exactly where they were because that scary negative painful motion was attached to that particular event. So that's another lesson. But really, John, I wanna know. So my iPhones improve. The car I drive has improved. The TV I use is improved. Everything around me, the medical advancements have improved. Has education improved?   0:18:35.0 JD: Yeah, that's a great question because, What is education? I think probably in some places, and in some times it has and in other places, in other times it hasn't. And in the same place, in different times, the answer would probably be different and depend a lot on what it means to improve, going back to that original quote from Deming, What does improvement mean?   0:19:01.0 AS: So I'm asking a very non-specific general question, it sounds like what you're saying.   0:19:07.8 JD: Yeah. Well, and...   0:19:10.2 AS: Can I ask it in a little bit different way?   0:19:12.4 JD: Sure, because I was gonna say, before we move on from your story of the bar story, I think somewhere... There's a researcher named Zeynep Tulfekci, and I was listening to her on a podcast, I think she's some type of researcher. She said, I can't remember what they were talking about, maybe it was something COVID-related or something from a few years ago, and she said, "Whatever thing is that you're researching or just hearing about, go to the primary source and read the entire thing." And I wrote that down on a post it note.   0:19:45.7 AS: Nobody does that.   0:19:46.8 JD: 'Cause nobody does it. Now, in fact, I talk about being first to mind in some training or conversation or a book, I am sure that I heard or read about A Nation at Risk, and then I just repeated a few things over and over as if it was truth in fact, for probably 15 years before I went and read the thing myself, and my first impression reading it was, Whoa, this is all that's in here. I forget if it's 30 or 40 pages. There's not a lot of data in it. There are some compelling statistics like the SAT thing and some quotes that jump off the page, but I was struck when I actually read it for myself. There wasn't a lot there, certainly not enough to base 40 years of education reform work. That's for sure.   0:20:31.2 AS: And I think that's another lesson too, related to Dr. Deming's teaching. And let's say sometimes the Japanese were kind of famous about go to the location where the problem is coming from, get out of your office and go out. I think that Dr. Deming really highlighted the importance of valuing the workers and their inputs 'cause they know what's going on, and so that's something that I think if people aren't reading some of the basic research or originations of ideas, they're also probably not going down and checking out what's actually happening and you could find a very different story.   0:21:10.0 JD: Yeah, go to the Gemba, go to the factory floor, in our case, it's go to the classroom to see what's actually happening. Yeah. And you're gonna ask that question.   0:21:17.7 AS: So I wanna break my question then... I'm gonna break it down and make it a little bit more specific in hopes that you...   0:21:26.7 JD: You pin me down.   0:21:28.3 AS: Could answer it. The first question I have is that, If we go back 40 years, and I can remember, I had to take a French class and I wasn't particularly interested in France and French language, and I had no interest in that really at the time. And now, let's say it's 40 years later and a young kid like me has to take a French class: Have we come up with a better methodology for learning a language like, Okay, we've advanced, we've been teaching French for 40 years from that time to now, and now we know that there is a better way to acquire a language that cuts the language acquisition time from 40 hours to proficiency, or let's say, I don't know, 400 hours to proficiency to 300 hours to proficiency, this has nothing to do with education or the system of education, but: Have we come upon methodologies that can allow us to acquire knowledge any better or faster than what we did 40 years ago?   0:22:36.9 JD: That's a good question. I think... how would I answer that? I would say that in many areas of education there have been significant advances in the understanding of cognitive science or the application of cognitive science to improve teaching methods. In many areas, I think over the last 40 years, there have been advances, but like in other areas, whether or not those advances make it into the hands and the practices of the front line people is a different question.   0:23:23.6 AS: Which is separate. That's a separate point.   0:23:27.5 JD: When there's two things too, and let's take medicine for example. In medicine, there are a series of landmark trials that led to standard practices in medicine, so in education, I think in most areas, there's actually fewer of the landmark trials and key areas that everybody knows about.   0:23:52.4 AS: So I guess part of what I'm thinking about is one of the arguments I read in a great book called Future Hype, where the guy talked about how everybody hypes how things are moving so fast, but in fact, most of the progress that we've made in this world was made a long time ago. And he uses one example is jet airplanes, basically, we're flying at the same speed today as we did in 1950.   0:24:15.7 JD: 1950, yeah.   0:24:17.7 AS: There's been no advancement, and I can say flying back and forth from seeing Thailand and the US, there was a slight advancement where we had a plane that could fly from New York to Bangkok, but eventually they cancelled that because it was just too expensive and stuff, so it's like there really has been no... Maybe we hit the limit. And you could argue that when it comes to education, it should be quickly adopted if there's a new technology or a new way of acquiring knowledge, repetition or whatever that is, it's pretty quickly adopted, so it could be that we're at the... There's just so much that the human mind can take in.   0:24:55.2 JD: Well, yeah, I've heard that argument, and the second part too would be, to finish off that landmark trial thing is, in medicine where there have been landmark trials that it takes on average like 16 or 17 years for that landmark trial to then be sort of standard practice in practice by doctors and actual hospitals and clinics and even in that... In those sort of... Even when it hits that tipping point, that's far from majority...   0:25:23.3 AS: So you can tell the parents just wait 17 years.   0:25:28.6 JD: [laughter] And then we'll have this best practice for...   0:25:31.3 AS: I listened to somebody say that, We want you to make an investment in our education system, and the investment is your child. We'll do the best we can, but it's an investment, we're still learning and all that. So that brings me to the second part of the question is... And let's just say that education is mainly done through government in Thailand, in Asia, in Europe, in the US, I guess it's mainly done by government, but let's just say generally: Have we improved the way that we educate? Is there... I'm trying to ask it in a way that would be maybe a better way like... Okay. I don't know how to ask it, but I'll just say, like I said, my iPhone's improved tremendously. The camera that we're using on this, the microphone, the internet service that we're using to do this, all of these things have incrementally improved and at times made a major jump in improvement. And my question is, Has our ability to educate young people improved at the pace of other things or at a certain good pace?   0:26:50.2 JD: The way I would answer that is two parts, one, Have you ever heard of the Flynn effect?   0:26:56.9 AS: The what?   0:27:00.1 JD: The Flynn effect.   0:27:00.6 AS: No.   0:27:00.9 JD: Its name for the psychologist that discovered it. Flynn, F-L-Y-N-N. The fun fact is basically, this idea that IQs rose about three points per decade over the last century or so, I think I have that roughly right, in every population. So because of the modern world over the last 100 years has gotten more complex and there's sort of more to life that's like taking a standardized test. We've gotten better at that type of thinking over the last 100 years, so IQ has risen. So in that respect, we have gotten better, I guess, at least measures that purport to approximate whatever intelligence is. However, I don't think that we've closed gaps between groups. Those gaps that exist between different groups, performance wise, I think those... And that's sort of a key area of work for education reform movement that came out of A Nation at Risk. One of the things that people are working on is closing the achievement gaps between different groups, especially kids that are living in poverty, and their more affluent peers. I think those gaps, I think over time have been stubborn, because if you consider the Flynn effect, and that's not what's being measured on state exams, but when one group is going up and the other group is going up too, right.   0:28:45.7 JD: So both are relatively higher than, let's say, IQ scores were 50 years ago, but there's still this gap between groups. So again, it depends on exactly what you're talking about and determined what happened.   0:29:02.4 AS: And when I look at Asia, knowing the education system in Asia, first of all, over the last, let's say, 20 to 30 years, you have many, many families that have finally gotten their first kids into college, and you could argue that that's real advancement for that particular family and maybe for that society. The second thing is, you can see the culture in Asia still remains that education is very important, and so there's pressure from family and all of that in society, that it still is there, so whether American education is declining or improving, also you have to think of it in context of what's happening globally. And I think there's two ways to think about it. First is the quality of a country, ultimately the education of the people should have some effect on the quality of the country and the quality of life in that country. And then the second thing is that the position of that country in a global context should have some relationship to the level of education of that country. Those are just my ideas, it's not necessary something proven, but I feel like that could be true. So I wanna wrap this up a little bit, but how would you summarize what you want people to take away from this?   0:30:37.9 JD: Well, a lot of this stuff, there's sort of two counter-intuitive ideas here. When you look at these two reports that we were talking about, so on one hand, I don't think there's clear evidence that schools have been on a steady decline for the last, let's say 50 or 60 years going back to that, the early '60s that a Nation at Risk is talking about. However, on the other hand, I think that to achieve equitable outcomes for all students, that schools must undergo this transformation on an order of magnitude that's never really been seen or seldom seen in the history of organizations. And I think both reports are mostly looking at test scores and that's a pretty narrow definition of success, or there may be some uses there because we don't know how groups are doing and maybe where to allocate resources without some of those results, but they're definitely more of an inspection and in sorting mechanism than they are an improvement tool. So I think the other problem is, is that if there's this narrative that the nation is at risk, and then... Well, then you... You're saying that things are on the decline and then, Who do you blame for that decline?   0:32:12.9 JD: And I think what happened a lot in the last 40 years of the educational reform movement, deliberately non-deliberately, what happened was a lot of a brunt of that blame was placed on teachers and principals, the people that are working in schools. By the time Race to the Top comes out, using student test results in teacher and principal evaluations is sort of like part of getting the money that was there available through Race to the Top. And so I think my whole point with these types of reports is that, something like the Sandia report can have useful insights that maybe can facilitate some sound database decision-making, but so many times these reports come with these preconceived notions, political agendas, those types of things and the only way to make...   0:33:11.8 JD: To have a sound decision-making is if our education system sits on this solid philosophical foundation, and that's where I think Deming comes in, because if you have that foundation, you're not gonna make changes simply because of changes in test scores, you're gonna make changes based on whether or not something is principled and need to change according to the philosophy, and that's where I really see Deming coming in as this solid philosophical foundation, so it doesn't allow you to get swayed by a political agenda, it's a foundation that's grounded in principles, and so that's what I was thinking, we talk about in the next episode is: When you don't have those principles, what are some of the myths that emerge? And then when you identify those myths and can set those to the side, what are the principles that come in that then drive that transformation going forward. And I think Deming's work is at the center of that.   0:34:16.3 AS: And one of the things that makes me think about is: Can the system transform itself? And one of the ways to try to answer this question, it could be right, it could be wrong is, Is there an alternative solution for educating young people? And if there is, has there been an increase or decrease in people turning to that alternative? You could imagine that if there was a competing system and there was a huge outflow of people from one to another, then parents may say, Well, yeah, you guys can't measure what it is that is great output, but I can. That my student has homework that my child is learning, that my child is... Whatever their assessment is, and so there's someone outside, you could say the customer or the outside interested party just says, I vote with my feet. And I'm just curious, as we wrap up, Is there any knowledge that you have on what... Is there an alternative for government education in America? And has that been more or less popular over the last I don't know 10, 20 years?   0:35:31.0 JD: Yeah. Well, I'm gonna say the first part of your answer, I think your hypothesis, your instinct is right, is that you focused on the system. It's that focus on the system versus the focus on the individual, solely on the individuals within the system, like what was happening with the teacher and the principal evaluations and using the test data in those evaluations. So I think Deming said something like: He estimated that 94% of the problems in organization was due to the system, 6% special, and he meant 6% was maybe attributed to issues at the individual level. So the vast majority of the potential for improvement lies with the system. So I think that's what we're talking about here, the redesign of the system.   0:36:17.5 AS: And that also goes back to constancy of purpose, it also goes back to leadership. And is it possible that the system simply can't have constancy of purpose for political reasons or other reasons, and that... It's just a question I've never even thought about, but it is a challenge to think about, Is there constancy of purpose? Is there strong leadership without leadership...   0:36:45.5 JD: Yeah. There has to be fortitude there. Intestinal fortitude for sure. A strong leadership is a prerequisite. One of the things that Deming railed against was the transition, the frequent transitions amongst management leadership in the United States, because you do need that stability of leadership to maintain that focus on the aim that's guiding the system. So I think that is... That's sort of a part of the formula for success, for sure.   0:37:13.0 AS: I kind of interrupted you and you're, I think may be attempting to answer the question, Is there an alternative and has it grown or contracted?   0:37:22.0 JD: Well, so there's government-funded schools, that's traditional public schools, certainly where I am sitting in public charters, that's a government-funded school that has a slightly different governance structure. So that sector didn't exist 35 years ago, and so that now is maybe six or seven percent of the kids in the United States, something like that, attend a public charter school, and then the other component would be kids that attend a private school or are home schooled, now both of those, as I understand it, both of those populations of students rose sort of coming out of the pandemic, for sure. Yeah.   0:38:03.3 AS: Well, an interesting topic, and the original question is, Do we really need to transform our education system and maybe before... As we wrap up here. How would you answer that?   0:38:18.7 JD: So, yes, I think yes, but it's not for the reasons outlined in A Nation at Risk.   0:38:27.7 AS: Got it. John, on behalf of everyone at The Deming Institute, I wanna thank you again for this discussion. For listeners remember to go to Deming.org to continue your journey. This is your host Andrew Stotz, and I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming, "People are entitled to joy in work."

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Meme Simpson and Brittany Carney visit friends and talk about ageist comedy reviews, the defunding of education and more with host Marina Franklin. Brittany Carney began standup comedy in Washington, DC. She now lives in New York, where she regularly performs at the Comedy Cellar, Union Hall, and other clubs/alternative venues around the city. Brittany's staff writing experience includes Season 2 of That Damn Michael Che on HBO Max and Season 2 of Teenage Euthanasia on Adult Swim. Her Comedy Central: Featuring set aired in February, 2021 and is available here. Brittany has opened for headliners including Gary Gulman, Colin Quinn, Moshe Kasher, Chris Gethard, and Jessica Kirson. MeMe Simpson is a writer, comedian, and producer who has performed at The Laugh Factory, The Comedy Store, The Comic Strip, and the Apollo Theater. She currently hosts Laugh Gas, a virtual comedy showcase. This June, she is headlining the Black Women In Comedy Laff Fest.  Always hosted by Marina Franklin - One Hour Comedy Special: Single Black Female ( Amazon Prime, CW Network), TBS's The Last O.G, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, Hysterical on FX, The Movie Trainwreck, Louie Season V, The Jim Gaffigan Show, Conan O'Brien, Stephen Colbert, HBO's Crashing, and The Breaks with Michelle Wolf.    

State testing, No Child Left Behind, state standards, mandates, progress monitoring-you know all the terms! If you are a Teacher who wants to students to succeed in teaching children the way you KNOW they need to learn-without all of the mandates, expectations and crazy rules-this episode is for you! I know what it feels like to have all the anxiety around state testing. What an anxious season full of questioning job security, showing your face behind class scores. school grades. and dreading the possible embarrassment of being called out in front of your peers during a faculty meeting-"Your students didn't hit the benchmark!" Many people who wonder about homeschooling and microschooling, also wonder what it's like to progress monitor, make sure students are growing and excelling and all the while kissing state testing goodbye!  What would it feel like to finally watch students learn and grow in a way that it authentic and matches your style of teaching and their style of learning? Listen up!! Let Your Light Shine, Join Our Facebook Group for “Tip Tuesdays”, a support community and the “best place on the internet corner” https://www.facebook.com/groups/teacherletyourlightshine Book a Clarity Coaching Session: www.teachersletyourlightshine.com/coaching Get started on your dream school right now! Get all the documents you need to jumpstart, market and enroll students! www.teachersletyourlightshine.com/shop  We have step-by-step instructions to help you write powerful marketing brochures, enrollment forms, introductory packets, and so much more! You'll also find easy-to-use templates made to simplify your creation process, as well as beautiful real-life examples used by my micro-school, Lighthouse Learning, to give you creative inspiration when designing your very own forms.  You will be able to seal the deal with peace and clarity when you hand deliver your new handbook and contract.  Tune in to today's episode to find out more and head over to our shop to purchase your documents at teachersletyourlightshine.com/shop Coaching: https://teachersletyourlightshine.com/coaching Do you need help with a plan of action, accountability,  or clarity in your teacher career change? Interested in starting a micro-school, tutoring or homeschooling business?  Don't know where to start? Wanting to make a change but have no idea where to begin or what the change would even look like?  It's time to get "unstuck", have a plan and gain your much needed clarity  so you can experience teacher career growth, build a business blueprint, market with clear messaging, and plan a successful business launch-whether it's a micro-school, tutoring business or homeschooling business.  Click below to learn more… Connect with me on Instagram: @Teacherletyourlightshine Follow us on Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/teacherletyourlightshine Join our email list to be the FIRST to know about our FREE Resources and podcast alerts! Teachersletyourlightshine.com Want to chat? Have some questions? I'd love to hear from you! Send an Email: teacherletyourlightshine@gmail.com Or send me a message on Facebook or Instagram Twitter: @teacher_light Check out Our School on Facebook: https:www.facebook.com/lighthouselearningmicroschool Book a Clarity Coaching Session today: www.teachersletyourlightshine.com/coaching

Y'all ready for this? We've got one more episode for you before we slip into the New Year and it's all about two things: Judaism and Basketball. That's right, Full Court Miracle brings together that classic dynamic duo once again. Come along with us, and our new guest Louie, to the City of Brotherly Love as we witness a miracle take place before our very eyes. Not so much all the oil lasting long and lighting stuff, but more so that one man is able to make 5 teenagers championship basketball players in approximately one month's time. Oh, and they think he's a ghost. It's a whole thing. Emma acknowledges your tweets and shows off her training. Lucas creates a drinking game for once and feels very proud of himself. Louie schools our hosts in basketball as well as “yes and-ing” Talking Points: Breaking The Guest Dry Spell, Our Bad!, A Bit Of A Hanukkah Hodgepodge, What's The Point Of Julie?, Temperature Concerns, A Surprising Lack Of Basketball, Unfortunate Fat Kid Cliches, Cool Rabbis, Is Schlots Good?, Bigger Stakes For The Basketball, Great (And Alive) Parents, The Glass Ceiling Of Negligence, A Small Space Jam Tangent, Meeting Strangers In Parks, Money Makes The World Go ‘Round, Ghost Hunting, Espresso Fundraising, Not Everyone Should Be A Doctor, Those Silly Womenfolk Will Never Understand Basketball, The Team Is Better Now?, Dean Redacted, The Tetanus-Filled Toolshed, FULL COURT PRESS, A Brief BMX Interlude, Living In A Van Down By The River, That One Extra Seven, A Failing Grad of C-, Philadelphia's Worst Realtor, Gotta Have Some Mud In There, No Child Left Behind, The Dogs Start Barking, Basketball Studying, The Team Can Just Win Now, Dramatic Doctor's Office Confrontation, Being Wrong For The Right Reasons, The Out Of Nowhere Dancing, Missed Yarmulke Opportunity, They're Just Doing A Hanukkah, Antisemitic Energy, God Fixes An Internal Combustion Engine, Unnecessary Clock Stoppage, Lamont Returns To Do Nothing, The World's Longest Timeout, The Visual Effects Ruin The Ending

Go to http://functionofbeauty.com/casket to get 20% off your first order when you subscribe.  Welcome to the Corporate Casket, a semiweekly series where bad businesses go to die. We will discuss any and everything from bad charities, terrible CEOs, and businesses that have a lot to hide.  In the early 2000s, something seemed abundantly clear in the United States; the country was falling behind the rest of the world in education. With the academics dropping and, coincidentally, the military enrollment, the government decided it was time to come up with a plan. So, the No Child Left Behind Act was brought into existence. At first, everyone seemed hopeful that the new plan in American education would make a difference—and it did. But, not the kind the United States was searching for.  Connect with me: https://linktr.ee/iilluminaughtii Sources: https://justpaste.it/9nigk Writers/Researchers/Helpers: Jess Hubbert This episode was edited and mixed by: @GThomasCraig  Album cover art created by: Betsy Primes Intro Song Credits: Last to Fall- Will Van De Crommert Outro Song Credits: Sacred and Profane- Nicholas Rowe