Talent matters. That seems like an obvious statement, but for much of its history our public education system failed to identify, prioritize, or value talent in a meaningful way. No organization has done more to shed light on this failure--or to try to change it--than TNTP. Their seminal 2009 report The Widget Effect highlighted the ways in which our education system ignores differences in teacher performance and quality, and the consequences of that for students. TNTP also works with school districts to redesign their approaches to human capital to prioritize effective teaching and improve outcomes for students. As a Vice President with TNTP, Crystal Harmon plays a critical role in this work, overseeing large, multi-year partnerships with districts and capturing and sharing knowledge from TNTP's work on the ground. Raised in Pittsburgh, Harmon earned a Bachelor's degree in Journalism from the University of Pittsburgh and a Master's of Arts in Teaching from Johns Hopkins University. She lives in Madison, New Jersey, with her husband and two sons.

You oversee TNTP's Performance Management Group--what does that mean you do on a day to day basis?
At TNTP I get to work with amazing people to address a critical question: What structures and systems need to change to ensure kids in high-poverty and high-needs schools consistently get access to great teachers? With our Performance Management work we want to show that strategically managing teacher effectiveness (through smart policies and practices around recruitment, evaluation, compensation, professional development and retention) improves outcomes for kids.

The teams I oversee get at that work in a couple different ways. One of them manages our major, multi-year partnerships with large districts (currently Houston and Memphis) to implement comprehensive reforms--essentially, helping these districts reorganize themselves around effective teaching. We call them our Foundations of Teacher Excellence projects. Another team is more internal and focuses on capturing and sharing emerging knowledge from our work and providing data analysis support and other expertise to our staff across the country. Since we're a virtual organization, with people all over, this can be a real challenge. Sharing our learnings in real time helps us do better work, faster.

On any given day you can find me on-site in Memphis or Houston or at my home office in New Jersey. I spend a lot of the time on the phone and in meetings, often engaged in really inspiring conversations about how we can work with our district partners to make the biggest difference for kids. I also spend a lot of time thinking about and managing the 50 or so staff members I oversee. We need talented people to do this work, so hiring, growing and keeping them is a huge priority for me.

What are some of the things you're proudest to have accomplished in that role?
I'm most proud of the people I work with every day, both district leadership in Memphis and Houston who are working with us to push through some really innovative and exciting initiatives, and the staff on my teams, who are nothing short of amazing. The commitment they show to ensuring all kids have great teachers is exceptional. They work long, hard hours to get the work done and they don't settle for anything less than results. I'm most proud of them.

What are some of the biggest challenges of this type of work?
I think the biggest challenge is the slow pace of real change. I want to see students in high-needs schools making incredible gains; I want to see graduation rates jumping from 60% to 95%. I don't want a parent's zip code to determine the quality of their child's education. With every year that goes by, we're cheating millions of students of the chance they deserve to succeed. But doing something meaningful about that often means shifting deeply rooted cultures and practices, which takes tremendous focus and persistence. Change takes time, but that's a difficult reality to stomach.

What do you think of the recent wave of state and district work to adopt new evaluation systems?
It's movement in the right direction, and I think the potential is astounding. Without great teachers, we won't be able to ensure that our students are not just catching up with their peers in other countries but actually surging ahead. Meaningful evaluation practices ensure teachers get substantive feedback so they can hone their craft. They tell us who our best teachers are so we can recognize them, reward them, and expand their reach to more students. They define a bar for excellent instruction that has the potential to improve student outcomes with far-reaching effects for the American workforce and economy.
But an evaluation model alone won't get us anywhere, especially if it's implemented in isolation from everything else happening in a district. Evaluation needs to be thoughtfully executed and integrated into other initiatives, such as the adoption of the Common Core standards. Districts need to realign themselves as dynamic organizations focused on the quality of talent across all departments and at every level. Implementing a meaningful evaluation system is an important first step in a much longer process of reimagining the way we think about talent in our schools--how we get more kids in front of the best teachers, how we set and hold high standards for performance for everyone, how we keep our Irreplaceables. I really applaud the districts and states that have taken bold action here. Their work isn't over - maintaining and evolving an effective evaluation system takes ongoing refection and refining. But they are leading the way, both for change in their own communities and for districts across the country.

What do you see as the most important challenges/needs related to human capital in education?
There are so many innovative reforms happening across the United States at the state, district and school level. If we want to see real results then we need to take these efforts to scale, and for districts to take a truly comprehensive approach to reform. We need to make sure every district central office has the people, policies and structures in place to support their schools, focus on student results, and hold everyone accountable to incredibly high standards. Kids deserve nothing less.

How did you come to work in education?
I taught first grade through Teach For America in Baltimore City. From my first day in the classroom, they had me. I knew I had found my place in the workforce and that I would spend my career working to give all students a fair shot. TFA helped me find TNTP, a place that has felt like home for almost nine years.

Who are some of your heroes/mentors/people you respect whose examples shape your work?
I've been very fortunate to work with some incredible people at TNTP, including my boss, Dan Weisberg, who pushes me and my team to be bold and relentless. But the person who has shaped my professional life the most is my dad. I grew up in a home with really loving parents, and a father who worked tirelessly to take care of our family. He taught me to work incredibly hard and that the things in life worth doing aren't usually easy. My work in education is grounded in the belief that mediocre isn't good enough, and I got that from him.

What do you hope to be doing 5-10 years from now? What do you hope to have accomplished?
I'm in this for the long haul. We're making progress, but the achievement gap won't close overnight. In five years I think we'll still be working to improve outcomes for students by refining many of the reforms we're working on today. But in 10 years I have great confidence that we'll be educating students in new ways. I think we'll be moving away from the standard education that we all experienced (one teacher in a room, standing in front of 25 kids), and experimenting with new possibilities. And I'll be doing my best to tackle education's thorniest challenges wherever I'm needed most, whether that's working in a district or leading our work at TNTP.

What interests do you have outside of work?
I have two amazing little boys. Noah, 5 and Zachary, 2. Every moment I'm not working I try to spend with them and my husband, Tal. I'm teaching Noah to ski, one of my favorite activities. When I can sneak away I either go for a run or drop in on a kickboxing class. I also love to cook and I'm obsessed with all of the competitive cooking shows - Iron Chef America, Chopped and Top Chef.

Posted by Sara Mead at 1:25 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Urban schools have long been the focus of education reform efforts, because of the shockingly poor outcomes that many large city school systems have produced. Yet a growing number of cities across the country--New Orleans; Washington, D.C.; Denver; and Indianapolis, to name a few--have become models of new approaches to public education that combine vibrant charter sectors, district-level reforms, and a rich network of external human capital and support organizations to drive improved results for students. In these cities, improving education is no longer simply about the school district, but is an "it takes a city" effort in which philanthropic organizations, Mayors, and intermediaries are playing a key role in driving and coordinating a range of bold initiatives and activities designed to improve student learning. CEE-Trust Executive Director Ethan Gray calls these increasingly important organizations "harbormasters," and the organization he leads works to bring these harbormasters together in a national network to help them create vibrant ecosystems for education innovation and reform in their cities.

I first met Ethan in 2005, when I brought him on as the first-ever intern at Education Sector. Since then, I've been incredibly proud to watch him develop as an education reform leader and found CEE-Trust to play a critical role in education reform.

Raised in Boston and Vermont, Ethan holds both Bachelor's and Master's degrees from Harvard. He currently lives in Denver with his wife.

What does CEE-Trust do?
CEE-Trust is a national network of 30 city-based education reform organizations. Our members are outside-the-system "harbormasters" for the education reform movement in their cities. They align funding for entrepreneurs and new schools, they support teacher talent organizations and the charter movement, they engage the public through events and media activities, and they make connections between cross-sector leaders to accelerate the pace of reform.

At CEE-Trust, we convene the full network, run a series of working groups on topics like blended learning and charter school incubation, facilitate multi-city collaborations, and consult to leaders in a variety of different cities. We hope that through our convening, collaborating, and consulting activities we can build capacity for reform in cities across the country.

What has CEE-Trust accomplished to date? What do you hope to accomplish going forward?
We've built a dynamic community of practice among the most effective city-based reform organizations. And now we're leveraging that community to drive change in how city-based reformers go about their work. Our core accomplishments relate to the activities of our working groups. Our Blended Learning Working Group has increased the number of cities actively seeking new blended school models, and we're hosting a series of six design workshops to ensure that those cities understand what quality blended learning looks like. We've also helped increase the number of charter school incubators across the country by consulting to new incubator leaders and publishing research on how incubators are accelerating the smart growth of the charter sector in different cities. Lastly, through our recent report - "Kick-Starting Reform" - we've begun to document best practices in city-based education reform that leaders in other cities can learn from. Going forward, we hope to leverage our growing set of national best-practices to increase the number of effective education reform harbormasters in cities across the country.

What are some of the biggest challenges of this type of work?
The biggest challenge is overcoming the traditional grammar of schooling. Our country still thinks the agrarian calendar, the traditional district/board governance model, and the reliance on direct instruction are givens. But the education model in urban America is totally obsolete; we've been doing the same things for generations with terrible results for kids. That's why we've tried to make CEE-Trust a place where leaders can explore big new ideas that get at the very foundations of how we structure and organize public schools in America. It's clear that structural reform is hard to accomplish, but leading cities like New Orleans; Washington, D.C.; and Indianapolis are proving that it's possible and that the city is the right unit of change in this work.

Another challenge is that every city's political context is a little different, so while there are plenty of core lessons learned that we are trying to share with our members, there's always a challenge customizing those lessons for the local context.

What most excites you about the urban education reform landscape today?
There are some incredible city-based education reform organizations that I think have the potential to achieve some of the most significant, structural changes to education over 100 years. Groups like New Schools for New Orleans, The Mind Trust in Indianapolis, the Donnell-Kay Foundation in Denver, and the CityBridge Foundation in D.C. are the brains and brawn behind major transformation efforts in their cities. They're accelerating the growth of high-performing charter schools; they're recruiting outstanding new teachers into the sector; and they're building grassroots support for bold new visions of public education. I think that more major cities today are open to innovation and entrepreneurship than ever before. And it's these outside-the-system harbormasters that are the driving force behind these efforts.

Are there any cities that you're particularly excited about or that people should be paying attention to and aren't?
There are a few smaller cities that aren't getting a ton of attention where the conditions are getting ripe for big change. I suspect that folks will be talking a lot about Indianapolis, San Antonio, and Kansas City in the next several years.

Why/how did you come to work in education?
I studied school design and educational philosophy with Ted Sizer when I was an undergrad. He helped me think about how schools did or didn't prepare students to seek the "good" life, and how to spot a healthy school culture that empowered kids and adults alike. But when I graduated I knew nothing about public policy. That's when I went to DC with 50 resumes and stormed the Hill for a week. I ended up across the desk from one of the nation's leading diminutive pre-k and public policy experts and lucked my way into the first research assistant role at start-up think tank Education Sector. During my second day on the job Kevin Carey had me on the phone grilling the Connecticut secretary of education about something to do with NCLB and I knew I'd scored a great first step in my education career.

Who are some of your heroes/mentors/people you respect whose examples shape your work?
My own thinking about education reform has been most influenced by my colleague David Harris at The Mind Trust. He's incredibly smart, politically shrewd, and endowed with great instincts about people and the process of system change. He's helped me understand how all the different pieces fit together when you're trying to catalyze major change at the city level. Andy Rotherham has also been a real mentor to me ever since my days at Education Sector. Working with Andy, Kevin, you, and Tom Toch gave me a better primer on policy analysis than I could have gotten anywhere else. I also admire big thinkers like my friends Neerav Kingsland of NSNO, Jal Mehta at Harvard, Paul Hill and Robin Lake from CRPE, and Bryan Hassel at Public Impact.

What do you hope to be doing 5-10 years from now? What do you hope to have accomplished?
I wish I had a good answer to where I want to be in 10 years but I don't. I only know a few general things. I want to be a dad. I want to have an impactful job. I want to be engaging with big ideas and smart people. I want my loved ones to be happy and healthy. It'll take some luck, but I'm pretty sure there are multiple paths to getting where I want to go. I think there's also a pretty good chance I'll still be leading CEE-Trust, as I'd be hard pressed to work with more effective, kinder, or more mission-driven people then the members of our network.

In terms of accomplishments, I hope I can look back and know that I've helped disrupt the broken systems that are inflicting structural violence against our country's urban youth. I want to look back and say that I helped cities create the conditions through which legions of new high-quality schools emerged to transformed neighborhoods of need to neighborhoods of opportunity.

What do you do for fun?
CEE-Trust is a virtual organization so to celebrate the end of the week my colleagues and I host a google hangout called "Hip-Hop Fridays" where we watch random hip-hop and R&B videos together on YouTube and do a little home office dancing.
I'm a classical cellist and love to play chamber music. I also like nothing more than mucking around in the woods of northern Vermont with my chainsaw.

Posted by Sara Mead at 10:13 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Educators, parents, and policymakers increasingly recognize the critical importance of developing students' skills and knowledge in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields--both for national economic competitiveness and for the individual opportunities that skills in these fields open up to students. Yet international assessments show that U.S. students lag behind their international peers in science and math, and many schools are ill-equipped to prepare students for a world of increasingly rapid technological innovation.

Andrew Coy is working to change that. As Executive Director of the Baltimore-based Digital Harbor Foundation, he works to connect students with opportunities to use and develop technology skills in real-world situations, improve technology curriculum in schools, and build teachers' competence in technology. This work draws on his own personal experience as a classroom teacher, web developer, and technologist. Raised in Eagle River, Alaska, he now lives in Baltimore with his wife and one-year-old daughter.

What does the Digital Harbor Foundation do? What do you do there?
The Digital Harbor Foundation (DHF) is a non-profit organization that fosters innovation, tech advancement, and entrepreneurship initiatives in our hometown of Baltimore and beyond. In January of this year, we just re-opened a closed-down Rec Center as a brand new Tech Center, located in Baltimore's inner-city. In addition to providing out of school-time opportunities for students passionate about STEM, the Tech Center functions as a unique R&D lab focused on how education technology can enhance and improve technology education. We are able to help students gain valuable tech-based skills (such as web development, app development, 3D design and fabrication, or audio/video production) as well as general soft-skills (i.e. interpersonal, professional, or digital communication). Participants who have learned enough are even able to gain valuable work experience through our STEM Engine program where student teams build real projects for real clients.

As the Executive Director I do a little bit of everything at DHF. While most of my time is spent on vision, fundraising, and building an EdTech ecosystem in Baltimore, I also make sure to spend time each week with students -- working on projects, visiting local tech businesses, or otherwise just making stuff with technology.

You say you're interested in bridging the gap between education and technology: What is the nature of that gap?
Over the past hundred years of formal education, school work has been created to be something separate from "real work." At one time, that made sense, especially as most "real work" was very dangerous, exploitative, and didn't involve a lot of intellectual activity. But today, this isn't true and it is increasingly the case that isolated school work is obsolete--both from the student's perspective and future employer perspective. In other words, an employer doesn't care how many worksheets a kid has done. Instead, employers want to see examples of a student's dynamic problem solving ability, which is often best portrayed not through a numerical value but rather a portfolio of work demonstrating design thinking, iterations, problem-solving.

Education is, however, a huge bureaucratic system with lots of inputs and factors. To change any aspect of it requires both a large-scale vision and precise incisions. To accomplish the monumental task of doing our part at DHF to shift the conversation and focus of education, I outlined three main problem sets and began solving them in a micro-environment.

We began with educator development. Teachers have been told for so long that their role is to be the content expert in the classroom. This used to be true when content was scarce and difficult to transfer from one geographic location to another. In our time, however, information has become infinitely available and widely dispersed. It has also simultaneously increased the rate at which it changes. As if these two facts were not enough to demand a shift in educator training and development, there is an added, unintended consequences that is stunting budding technologists in millions of classrooms -- and that is an unintended culture of fear. If a teacher has been told he or she is suppose to be the content expert, and that teacher feels anything but an expert in the rapid changing world of technology, it is only natural to feel unqualified to talk about technology. This fear, the fear of appearing to not be an expert, has paralyzed teachers from using technology in the classroom and encouraging students to pursue careers in the high-demand tech sector.

What educators have to understand is that no one is an expert in all aspects of technology. On the cutting edge, you have to be comfortable with a constant degree of uncertainty -- with figuring it out as you go along. My goal, therefore, is to transform the culture around teachers from one in which they feel they have to be the content expert who knows everything, to one in which they are comfortable as an expert in the process of learning and social networking. This is the same behavior I wanted to see students exhibit around technology -- to say, in effect, "if I don't know something, I can figure it out because I've learned how to learn and I've learned how to connect with the experts."

Funded by the Abell Foundation, the Digital Harbor Foundation launched last spring with a cohort of 10 teachers -- each of whom received more than 300 hours of educator development. Working with researchers from Johns Hopkins University, we took a look at what was most effective in that intensive experience and have since boiled it down to the most crucial 50 or so hours. Just this spring, we actually spun that out of the non-profit into a for-profit entity, called An Estuary, to expand its scope and reach. That company is now serving, starting this summer, as a premier source of educator development for clients from around the country.

The second problem I saw revolved around curriculum. So much of the technology curriculum in schools is outdated and hasn't been revised to reflect the realities of the modern tech world. Even at technology schools, like the one where I started my teaching career, curriculum development has remained a bureaucratic and slow process -- which is antithetical to a fast-paced, dispersed tech environment. Technology classes around the country are woefully slow to respond to business-sector needs. In the tech community, there is a substantial unmet demand for web or app developers, cyber-security professionals, or digital fabrication technicians, just to name a few. Yet, the education systems have not been able to respond adequately, if at all. A Tech Center, like the one DHF just launched, is a perfect place for us to develop and learn firsthand about the types of technology education methods that work. By diving into new models of education and new content, our own "R&D lab" will give us invaluable feedback from the students about what works and what doesn't. School systems will then be able to learn from us and take to scale what we have shown effective.

The third bucket of problems I saw revolved around youth workforce development. Students who have spent their academic careers doing worksheets where discrete problems have definite answers are ill-equipped to work in an innovation economy where there are multiple answers to often amorphous problems. Students need grit, determination, convergent and divergent thinking skills, and above all else--passion. This is gained not by repetitive worksheets and multiple-choice testing, but by real work with real outcomes. The work we do with our STEM Engine program is designed to give students this exact type of experience. We take students who have gone through our curriculum and have basic skill sets in app or web development and pair them up with clients who have real world needs. Students make apps or websites for these clients, get paid, and then are able to bank that money into personal scholarship accounts. The value of working on something real for a client that that person needs and wants is something you don't get anywhere else.

To truly bridge the gap between education and technology, we need to move towards having students spend much more time solving problems that don't have answers instead of ones that do. A multiple choice question already has an answer and we know what it is--we're only asking the student to find out if they know. I'm more interested in asking students questions that don't have answers and teaching them the skill sets to help them solve an unsolved problem. Yes, students need a baseline of knowledge, but when the focus is on passing a test, we're asking them to do their minimum instead of their maximum.
Teachers, students, administrators, parents, and the public at large all will have to adjust to this new mind-set and approach to learning. If we want to stay relevant in today's innovation economy, however, this is not optional.

You're engaged in a variety of education and entrepreneurship-related activities in Baltimore: What excited you about the education reform and entrepreneurial climate in Baltimore today? Best case scenario, what can we expect to see emerge in Baltimore over the next few years?
The EdTech space, as I see it, currently has some real unanswered needs. Nationally, most EdTech has focused on how to achieve better student test scores. This does not get at the real problems in education, which are increasingly apparent in the current economic climate. It is my belief (based not on test-score data but on unemployment and vacant jobs data) that we don't have a jobs crisis, we have an education one -- the sheer number of vacant tech jobs despite the overwhelming unemployment makes that apparent.

To answer the question specifically about Baltimore though -- I believe our geographic location makes us a perfect place to figure out some of the hardest problems facing education. In the greater Baltimore region: we're within 20 minutes of the country's best and worst schools; we have the opportunity to develop solutions for students in urban, rural, and suburban communities; and we have access to some of the highest concentrations of STEM professionals. For example, in the state of Maryland there are currently 19,000 unfilled cyber-security jobs and we have the highest concentration of cyber professionals in the triangle formed by Aberdeen, Fort Meade, and Washington DC. We have both a massive need in the workforce and available mentors. These numbers are only growing -- and yet, the education system's ability to supply enough highly-trained and interested individuals is weak or non-existent. Given the right set of supports, we can solve that problem and the whole country will benefit greatly. My overarching goal is to create an ecosystem where we are able to leverage education technology for technology education and I believe Baltimore is the #1 place in world to do that.

Why/how did you come to work in education?
Education found me in a very round-about way. Despite doing well in school I always seemed to find my most valuable learning outside of it. For example, I dropped out of college four times. Every single time, however, it was to do something I cared deeply about and from which experience I learned more than any set of classes could have taught. Experience was my real education and life my real school.

When I came to Baltimore through Teach for America, I was driven to open up real opportunities for my students through bridging the digital divide for my students. I saw that my students had tremendous needs and I wanted to be part of helping them realize they could solve them. I knew based on my background in web development that there were countless opportunities out there for students who had the necessary technology skill set and I saw no reason why inner-city students shouldn't take part in that world. The school-day curriculum and opportunities had sever limitations, though, but as I had learned throughout my college experiences, it was the out-of-school time that really allowed one to explore one's passion. Before the end of my first year in the classroom, I founded an after-school club to teach students web and app development.

More important than the question of how I came to work in education, however, is perhaps the question of why I keep working in education. For me, it is all about individual students. Seeing a student's potential, working with them, caring that they find their way out of poverty and all while having fun with technology at the same time -- these are the things that keep me in education. The Digital Harbor Foundation is the most pure representation of passion-based learning and it is all about ending the cycle of poverty (both financial and intellectual) for all of the students we can reach.

Who are some of your heroes/mentors/people you respect whose examples shape your work?
I'm particularly inspired by the work of Will Richardson, Steve Anderson, Mary Beth Hertz, Seth Godin, Clay Shirkey, and Chris Lehmann, as well as Shelly Blake-Plock, who was initially the Co Executive Director with me at Digital Harbor Foundation (and now the CEO of the recently spun out for-profit company). They all are doing amazing things and have done far more than I have already to affect the kind of change in the larger education system I am advocating for as well.

What is your long-term goal/What do you hope to be doing 5-10 years from now? What do you hope to have accomplished?
I want to see the conversation in education shift from a focus on test scores to real world outcomes. Once you are done with school, a test score does not matter in the least. What really matters is how your schooling prepares you for what happens 5-10 years after it formally ends? Are you still thinking of things it helped equip you with, or did you really just start learning when you finished school? People like to say, "school should be about learning for learning's sake." I couldn't agree more -- I just don't believe it should cost $50,000 a year to do that. Information is abundantly available and, if you're passionate and driven, through the internet you can connect with people to become an expert in anything you want. What's necessary is a context or roadmap to help navigate that space. That's what education should be providing. It should be answering the question of how to help people think creatively and solve unsolved problems. To get there, the education system needs to develop an overall acceptance for measures of learning that don't revolve around traditional tests: we need portfolios, demonstrations of work, and real world application instead of isolated and artificial demonstration of discrete content knowledge.

Ultimately, however, my personal goal is to end poverty (financial and intellectual) for all of the students who take part in programs at the Digital Harbor Foundation. I want to see today's students in high-paying jobs using technology. I want to see them engineering the world to be a better place -- one that is empathetic, passionate, and purposeful.

Posted by Sara Mead at 12:20 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Managing student behavior is one of the biggest challenges teachers face. Further, how schools choose to deal with student behavior can have a significant impact on children's character and social-emotional development. ClassDojo is a technology-based classroom tool that was designed to help teachers improve classroom behavior and share information on student behavior with parents and administrators. Sam Chaudhary and Liam Don, two education technology entrepreneurs with experience as teachers, launched ClassDojo in 2011 and have seen it grow to reach more than one million users.

Sam was born in the United Kingdom and lived in Wales and Abu Dhabi before earning a degree in economics from Cambridge. Liam was born in Germany and grew up in London before earning a degree in computer science from the University of Durham. They both live in San Francisco.

What's your "elevator pitch" for ClassDojo?
Sam: ClassDojo helps parents, teachers, and students build positive behavior at school and at home. Started 1.5 years ago, ClassDojo has now grown to serve millions of students in over 30 countries.
ClassDojo is currently available for free to parents, teachers and students. Teachers sign up and they invite students and parents to join, too. Parents are highly engaged because they can now get real time information from the classroom about how their child is developing character strengths, beyond just grades.

Why focus on classroom behavior?
Sam: I studied economics at university and taught economics in high school as my first job. Then I worked at McKinsey in London in their education group.

Liam: I was doing a Phd.D. in computer science, and I had spent some time teaching robotics to high school kids too - so we both had some experience in the classroom.

Sam: We realized that some education companies seem to make things no one really wanted. We thought it was important to make tools that appealed to parents and teachers. In our first few weeks after moving to California, we cold-called thousands of teachers in the United States and the United Kingdom, and were able to talk to hundreds of teachers before we even started building anything. From these interviews, as well as our own teaching experience, we found that improving student behavior is one of the biggest problems teachers face. Forty percent of teachers say they spend more than half of their time managing behavior rather than teaching--and it's often one of the biggest reasons they quit teaching altogether. But there are very few tools to help teachers with behavior - let along actually improve behavior. Nearly all the tools teachers are given are punitive: you wait for kids to screw up and then you punish them. It's humiliating for kids, and it's not how teachers want to spend their days: those tools force make 'behavior' synonymous with obedience and discipline. We wanted to develop a way to help teachers actually build positive behavior with their students.

Liam: We try to shift the focus to expecting and reinforcing positive behaviors from children, instead of punishing them for being bad. ClassDojo collects millions of behavior observations every day and 95 percent of them are positive. That's the way we wanted it to work and what's most beneficial for students; focusing on the positive turns the whole classroom dynamic around.

Sam: Early on we realized most companies and tools focused on grades and testing. After speaking to teachers we realized there's this whole other half of education that's completely unaddressed by technology at the moment. Education goes beyond just a test score to developing who the student is as a person--including all the character strengths like curiosity, creativity, teamwork and persistence. There's so much research showing that if you focus on building students' character and persistence early on, that creates a 3 to 5 times multiplier on education results, graduation rates, health outcomes. It's pretty intuitive. We shouldn't just reduce people to how much content they know; we have to develop them as individuals.

What have been some of your biggest successes to date?
Liam: One of most rewarding things since we started has been massive uptake of the tool and the fact that teachers are using it as we hoped, to build positive behavior. Watching the graph of the user numbers go up has been incredible; there are now millions of students and teachers are using this every day. We hear incredibly powerful stories about the impact the tool is having for students and teachers - they often write to us about it!

Sam: There are few things you can do in life--teaching is one, and ClassDojo happens to be another!--where you get so much positive emotional feedback every day. We get loads and loads of emails (and sometimes even actual mail!) from teachers and parents telling us how ClassDojo has changed their lives and improved their classrooms.

What are some of the biggest challenges?
Sam: One of the biggest ones was actually the emotional side of starting a company. Liam and I had left the UK, left all our friends and jobs, and moved to California. We knew no one, we had nowhere to stay - but we had this dream of having some impact in education. There was this huge risk of failure, and we really had to believe that we could build something people wanted - we had to keep going. It was emotionally tough.

Liam: Right after that stage, there was a total absence of any opportunity to get feedback from teachers to know if we were going in the right direction. Carrying on through that is tough. We were building a tool and talking to teachers to find what they wanted, but since it was summer teachers weren't in their classrooms, and we had to wait to get feedback on actually using it in practice.

What advice do you have for other prospective education entrepreneurs?

Liam: I'm not going to say "just jump in and soldier on" - I actually think that's wrong. I think one of the things we did that was important was that we worked really hard to identify the right problem before identifying the solution. We called over a thousand teachers and spoke to hundreds in order to do that. If you find a problem that people talk about emotionally as a serious problem in their lives--which behavior was for teachers--you can take that leap to developing the solution. The biggest problem most people have is not having a problem.

Sam: I agree. It also really helps not to do it alone. It's such an emotional ride, with lots of ups and downs--it helps to have a co-founder who's going through the same things with you.

What do you hope to accomplish in the next 5-10 years?

Liam: Looking back in 5-10 years I hope to see that this other half of education--going beyond test scores to focus on building students as people--has become really important and that we helped to make that happen by connecting teachers, parents and students. Furthermore, in our first 18 months we've grown faster than any other ed tech company at our stage has. I'd like to see that continue.

Why/how did you come to work in education?
Sam: My whole background is in education. I went to a middle and high school where if you were doing well academically, you were allowed to teach. I majored in economics in University, and after that I taught as my first job out of college. I left teaching because I wanted to have a more scalable impact; I joined McKinsey to do education work with their education group in London. After a while, I started feeling like I wanted to see more direct impact.

Liam: We both had an education background from an early age. My mum was a teacher. I was getting a Ph.D. in computer science and had spent some time teaching robotics to high school students on the side, so I had some classroom experience. We both were drawn to education and we both came to the idea that starting a company might be the most high-impact way of solving real problems in education - so I quit my Ph.D. and moved to San Francisco. And, so far, that idea is proving true.

Who are some of your heroes/mentors/people you respect whose examples shape your work?

Liam: My English teacher in high school had a completely transformative impact on me and is part of the reason I was drawn to education. Boys at the school were having more trouble with English, and weren't focusing. So they combined top three groups of boys in a single sex class and really turned around the aspirations and outcomes for those kids. Tim Brady, one of the founders of Imagine K-12, has been a real mentor to us. He was the first investor in ClassDojo and helped us think through a lot of issues as we were building it.

Sam: On people whose example shapes our work, I think of thought leaders in the field of behavior and building character: James Heckman and his work on power of building character early in life; Angela Duckworth's work on persistence and grit; Carol Dweck work on the growth mindset and the praise we give kids. Doug Lemov and Lee Canter talk about the principles that ClassDojo is built on. In addition to the teachers we spoke with, we also looked to the work of these experts for guidance on how to build ClassDojo, hoping we could build something that would have impact. That's beginning to happen!

Posted by Sara Mead at 7:47 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Parents are children's most important teachers and advocates. But parent voices--particularly the voices of parents of underserved students--are often absent from public debates about education reform, and many parents feel powerless to change a system that persistently fails to serve their children. Sharhonda Bossier is working to change that. As the Deputy Director of Families for Excellent Schools, she leads and supports that organization's work to organize and mobilize families in support of aggressive education reform. Raised in the Watts area of Los Angeles, she earned her Bachelor's degree and Master's in education from the University of California Santa Cruz and taught in Austin, Texas and Brooklyn before shifting to organizing parents full-time. She lives in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.

What does Families for Excellent Schools do?
We are an organization that partners with the highest performance charters in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut to organize and mobilize their families around education and education reform issues. We do this through four key strategies:

First, we educate and organize parents. Through our parent training program we build parents' basic civic knowledge and skills to be organizers and advocates in their own communities and schools. We organize parents by neighborhoods chapters. We've divided NYC into neighborhood zones and have assigned organizers to build a chapter in each community in order to create a sustained grassroots pressure for education reform.

Second, we mobilize large numbers of parents a few time a year to demonstrate broad support for education reform and build power and influence. Recently in Connecticut we mobilized parents to demonstrate support for charter schools. Last year in early June we had 5,000 parents attend a rally aimed and demonstrating our strength to the then-developing field of Mayoral candidates. Right as people were throwing hats in the ring, we organized parents to send a message of, "don't ignore us, we're organized, we're effective, we care."

Third, we catalyze or join coalitions. We have a reputation for playing well with others in the sandbox and that's important to broaden our reach. Because charter schools are a small segment of the population, it's important we forge coalitions with other community and education reform groups, from ConnCAN, to Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration, to 500 Black Men. Sometimes this means we're working on issues that are not directly related to education reform, but we're building trust with our partners.

Finally, we work with parents to take political action. This includes registering parents to vote, turning them out on election day, encouraging them to canvass or phone bank.

I guide our executive team's work together to enable this work--a kind of Chief of Staff role. I lead, develop, and run all our parent trainings. I develop the curriculum, lead trainings, and develop other members of our staff to train. I also lead part of our NYC campaign work.

Some of my readers may not be familiar with the concept of organizing--what does it actually mean to organize parents and families to improve their children's education?
This is a big conversation in education right now. Organizing is about helping make individual struggles political. If one parent is struggling with the public school system, that's an individual problem, but if two parents come together, they can tap their power and begin to make change in their community. The thing that distinguishes the kind of organizing we do is that we are committed to be around for a long time, to put down roots in the community and build local leadership.

Why is organizing families important?
The education reform movement for a long time was able to focus efforts on people with power--Mayors, chancellors, etc.--but didn't think about developing roots in the communities most impacted by reform. As some of those powerful allies move on, a lot of valuable reforms are at risk of being rolled back. The only way to prevent that is by developing sustained infrastructure and support in communities.

What are the challenges of doing this kind of work?
If you ask parents who speaks for them or who knows what's best for kids, they are not likely to say any reformer or reform advocacy organization. They're most likely to identify with their kid's teacher. By focusing at the grasstops and on people with power, the reform movement has ceded parents to the teachers unions and to community organizations that are not pro-reform. A lot of community-based organizations have close ties to the unions or are funded by them and we're playing catch up.

Before you started doing this, you were a teacher--how is organizing similar to or different from teaching?
I was a social science teacher--U.S. history and government, senior social science elective. I saw my role as social science teachers as getting kids excited about changing the world around them, thinking about power, who has it, and how you can gain and utilize power. Organizing is similar to that. A lot of parents come from communities with historically low rates of civic participation and engagement because they don't think they have any power or see value of changing, so we need to show them how they can have power and get them excited about making change.

Organizing is different in the sense that it's not as linear as people would like to believe. We're talking about real people and having to respond to a political reality that changes quite often in the places where we work.

Why did you get involved in education reform?
When I took on this job, if someone had said "Are you an education reformer?" I would have said I didn't know what that means. I was a teacher and had done some volunteer work in campaigns and run the caucus for my precinct when I lived in Texas. I was in the classroom for 5 years, but I didn't want to become grade team lead, department chair, principal, which were the logical next steps to advance in my career. (This is one of the big challenges of keeping people who are good teachers in the field, by the way, the limited range of options for advancement that our system offers.)

I wanted to do something else and figured this was a good way to combine my experience on campaigns and passion for civic engagement.

Who are some of your heroes/mentors/people you respect whose examples shape your work?
Dr. Howard Fuller. The thing I admire about him is that long before it was cool he was an education reformer and he was trying to do what he thought was best for kids.

Jeremiah Kittredge, our Executive Director. In starting Families for Excellent Schools, he took a risk by asking for a long time, selling people on the value of parent organizing when they didn't believe there was any real value to it at all. This is his gut paying off and people are starting to come to the recognition that it matters. It's hard to take that risk when you're young.

My U.S. History teacher, Cynthia Lee. She and I are still in contact. She allowed me to start a student group and get a bunch of kids in high school to volunteer on mayoral campaigns. That was critical in that it got me hooked on politics and interested in changing community.

What is you long-term goal?
Fundamentally change the way schools see their relationship with parents. Parents can and should be doing more than volunteering. They should really be leading the community engagement work on behalf of their schools. They're the people who benefit and have roots in community. My hope is also that the work we do empowers parents to transform their communities beyond the public schools. I hope that the skills they learn from us translate to other areas and they begin to see themselves as agents as change in other parts of their lives. Finally, I want to shift the way elected officials and power players see these communities. By and large the communities where we work are ignored because the people in them don't participate in the electoral process. You can say to people: You may not have a lot of money, but you have time, skills, expertise. You can't write a check but a canvasser is often more valuable to a campaign.

What interests do you have outside of work?
I'm a runner. I ran the NYC half marathon a few weeks ago. I like reading. I really enjoy cooking. I'm the oldest of 8 kids and I really enjoy spending time with my family.

Posted by Sara Mead at 8:51 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

What's next in education? It's an important question today. Over the past decade, ideas like standards-based accountability and charter schools have been at the center of the education reform conversation--and there's some evidence that these reforms have had positive impacts. But even the strongest supporters of the past decade of reform efforts would acknowledge that they haven't produced nearly the results we need to ensure the nation's economic competitiveness or close achievement gaps for low-income students. That has people across the board questioning what the next set of big (and small) ideas needs to be to produce dramatically better results for children.

Katie Beck is at the center of these efforts. As director of people and idea development for 4.0 Schools, she is directly engaged in identifying and supporting the development of innovative strategies to redesign education and improve results for kids. Raised in Michigan, Beck came to New Orleans as a Teach for America Corps member in 2008, after graduating from Harvard College, and joined 4.0 Schools in 2011. She lives in New Orleans but is spending significant time in New York supporting 4.0 Schools expansion there.

What does 4.0 Schools do? What is your role in this work?
4.0 Schools is a community of curious people - educators, entrepreneurs, techies, designers, and others - who are driving innovation in education. Today, we have both the capability and necessity to redesign education in a way that prepares kids as problem-solvers, and sets up schools to be flexible, evolving structures that can respond to the rapidly change world. Getting there will require innovative people taking risks and trying new ways of supporting teachers, delivering content, and designing new schools. At 4.0, we develop and support people to be great problem finders and then help them test the solutions they envision with real users. Eventually, we support validated solutions to become new businesses and non-profits.

At 4.0, I work with curious people who are obsessed with a problem that needs to be solved. I support them to validate the problem they've identified, and to rapidly prototype their ideas.

What have you accomplished to date?
In my first year at 4.0, I've directed our Lab Cohort program, which supports the incredible work of our early stage entrepreneurs. I work with people who are passionate about a problem that needs to be solved, often identified in their time working on the front lines as educators. We support them to see themselves as entrepreneurs and develop the problem-solving and business acumen to progress from early hunches to battle-tested solutions. Among them, Nicole Jarbo is developing venture called Teacher Gym that reimagines practice-driven teacher development in a Cross-Fit environment; Sam Battan is working to ignite the passions of high school students toward future careers; and Lauren Wooldridge is prototyping ways to increase the conversations between parents and young children to improve language acquisition. These examples and many others demonstrate the active prototyping happening within the 4.0 community.

I'm also excited to be leading our expansion to New York this summer, where we are building a community of entreprenuers, techies, and teachers. We have already encountered many visionary people who will push the 4.0 community with their actions and ideas.

And in general, I see 4.0 consistently pushing the broader education community to invest in earlier, riskier ideas, with the belief that we have to support not only "what works now," but continuously explore and experiment with what school will need to look like 5, 20, and 50 years from now.

What are the challenges of this work?
Because many 4.0 participants have been steeped in the current education system, whether as teachers, people working in/around schools, or even as students, we must constantly balance the pull to solve tough problems facing students, parents, and teachers today with the push to create new solutions that imagine what school could look like, unrelated to its current structures.

We also have to constantly push past the fear of risk and the mantra that "we can't take risks on students." Evolving any system, including our education system, requires smart risk-taking and a willingness to fail.

What most excites you about the education landscape in New Orleans today?
In the years after Katrina, there has been increased school autonomy, community will, and educator energy that has allowed schools to take significant steps to provide kids in New Orleans with a better K-12 educational experience. School-based budgeting and principal autonomy has also paved the way for increased adoption of new tools and methods.

What excites me most now, though, is the challenge facing New Orleans in the upcoming years. Neerav Kingsland, CEO of New Schools for New Orleans says sometimes, "The same things that got us to "C" schools, won't get us to "A" schools". I agree. When combined with a continued energy toward delivering the strongest educational experiences to all students in NOLA, I think this realization could open us to experimenting with new methods and approaches.

Why/how did you come to work in education?
Growing up, I was lucky to have many opportunities, both in and outside of school, that widened my perspective and illuminated the many possibilities available in life.

When I joined Teach For America five years ago, my goal was to ensure all students were afforded those same opportunities and open doors.

Now, I stay in education because I believe that those opportunities I had, weren't just about school, they were about learning. I realize now that we have the potential to create incredible new learning opportunities for students, and one of the largest things holding us back is our willingness to lean in to the risk-taking and creativity that requires.

I think there was some education juju in the Beck family water. My parents are both professors (and give great feedback at 4.0 pitch events), and both of my brothers work in the education world - Andrew as a 1st year teacher in Minneapolis and David, an IDEX fellow supporting innovation within a school in India. I declared I would "never go into education" for a long time, but clearly the family DNA got the best of me.

Who are some of your heroes/mentors/people you respect whose examples shape your work?
Five people jump to mind. Monique Rinere, my first boss in college and mentor for life, taught me what hospitality and user experience looks like in action. Kira Orange Jones is my model for leading with heart and authenticity, which I've seen demonstrated in countless conversations. I have tons of respect for Alex Hernandez, a board member at 4.0, for his dogged vision of the future of education and willingness to call BS. And my parents, who are my #1 examples of passion, driven leadership and "sucking the marrow" out of life.

What is your long-term goal/What do you hope to be doing 5-10 years from now?
4.0's CEO, Matt Candler, got me hooked on the book Anti-Fragile, and it's become a good metaphor for the way I think about the education system and my impact. As long as we continue to search for silver bullets, or blanket solutions, we have the potential to trade in a fragile, outdated education system for a still-fragile new one. "Fixing" education seems like a one time thing. My hope is that we design a system that is nimble and consistently changing to meet kids' evolving and differentiated needs. I want to see innovation built into the DNA of the education system at every level - schools, systems, teacher training, etc. On my end, in 10 years, I would like to still be investing in the earliest stage ideas that allow our education system to continually re-imagine itself and evolve.

What interests do you have outside of work?
Primary interest: living and breathing New Orleans. Since falling madly in love with the city 7 years ago, I've spent my time eating delicious food, listening to brass music, and dancing at festivals, rain or shine. If you visit New Orleans and need recommendations, I'm your woman.

Posted by Sara Mead at 8:20 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

For the last two years, I've published a series of profiles of young education leaders who are helping to transform education today and are likely to have an even greater impact in the coming years. This year's list features ten amazing leaders working in education in a variety of ways:

• Katie Beck, Director of People and Idea Development, 4.0 Schools


• Sharhonda Bossier, Deputy Director, Families for Excellent Schools


• Sam Chaudhary and Liam Don, Co-Founders, ClassDojo


• Andrew Coy, Executive Director, Digital Harbor Foundation


• Ethan Gray, Executive Director, the Cities for Education Entrepreneurship Trust (CEE-Trust)


• Crystal Harmon, Vice President for Strategy and Operations, TNTP


• Rabiah Harris, Teacher, E.L. Haynes Public Charter School


• Kira Orange Jones, Executive Director of Teacher for America Greater New Orleans and Board Member, Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education


• Ryan Smith, Director of Education Programs and Policy, United Way of Greater Los Angeles

These leaders are a diverse bunch. Among them are individuals with professional experience as computer scientists and ap developers, classroom teachers, community organizers, reporters, and politicians, among other things. They are tackling issues from student behavior, to teacher effectiveness, to STEM, to family and parent engagement, to city-wide education reform. They are working in cities and states across the country, including New Orleans, New York City, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles. And for the first time since I started this project three years ago, my list includes and equal number of men and women.

As I've been privileged to speak with all these amazing young leaders over the past few months, three distinct themes emerged to me from their work, all of which I'll say more about in the coming weeks as well:

• Meaningful education reform must be about more than improving student academic achievement and test scores, but must also help students develop character and the full range of skills and competencies they need to enjoy good lives in their families, communities, and workplaces.


• Meaningful education reform must engage and empower the families and communities most in need of better educational opportunities for their children, as well as teachers working with those students.


• Innovation is not just a buzzword--it's becoming a way of life for the next generation of educators and their students.

All of these points seem to add up to one overarching point: Today's young generation of education reformers and innovators has a different--and in many ways richer and more diverse--perspective than the generation immediately preceding them. Today's young education leaders have tremendous respect for reformers who laid the groundwork for them in the 1990s and 2000s--indeed, several were trained in or currently work for organizations, such as Teach for America, TNTP, and the Mind Trust, that were founded by those leaders. But they are not bound by the disputes that have dominated the past decade of education reform. Because they've arrived at the table later, they also may take as self evident some things--such as the value of providing parents with options, or the importance of high expectations for all students--that have been hotly disputed over the past two decades. As a result, this younger generation of education leaders is able to recognize some of the blind spots in recent phases of education reform and to expand their vision to encompass a broader, more ambitious--and in some cases more unique--vision of our education system can achieve for students, as well as their teachers and families. All of this fills me with incredible optimism and excitement about the future of education reform and innovation.

I'll be saying more about each of the specific themes above, as well as sharing profiles of each of these leaders, over the coming weeks.

Posted by Sara Mead at 9:26 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

My former colleagues at the New America Foundation write about a new piece by Kristie Kauerz on why elementary school principals should care about the PreK-3rd years and the critical role they play in building PreK-3rd alignment in their schools and communities. I also wrote about this for the Foundation for Child Development a while back.

Posted by Sara Mead at 3:20 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

I'm sure that people far more knowledgeable about higher education innovation than I have plenty of smart and well-informed things to say about Nathan Heller's recent New Yorker piece on elite universities' entry into the MOOC market. So I'll offer only three observations. First, it's refreshing to read an article in an elite media publication that actually acknowledges that there's a lot more to higher ed than Ivy League schools and state flagship universities. Second, while a minor point in the overall piece, I found this discussion of assessment striking, given the widespread derision of "bubble tests" in K-12 education circles:

In Nagy's "brick-and-mortar" class, students write essays. But multiple-choice questions are almost as good as essays, Nagy said, because they spot-check participants' deeper comprehension of the text. The online testing mechanism explains the right response when students miss an answer. And it lets them see the reasoning behind the correct choice when they're right. "Even in a multiple-choice or a yes-and-no situation, you can actually induce learners to read out of the text, not into the text," Nagy explained. Thinking about that process helped him to redesign his classroom course. He added, "Our ambition is actually to make the Harvard experience now closer to the mooc experience."

You mean multiple choice tests can measure deeper comprehension?!?!?!?!

Third, after reading this piece I really want to check out Harvard Professor Gregory Nagy's CB22x course on heroism in Classical literature--and now I can.

The entire piece is available to non-subscribers on the New Yorker site here.

Posted by Sara Mead at 4:09 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Big announcement from HHS today on proposed new regulations that would significantly expand regulation of childcare providers receiving subsidies through the Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF), a federal program that provides funds to states to help them provide childcare subsidies to low-income parents.

This is a big deal. I haven't had time to read the proposed regulations (all 199 pages of them) yet, so I'll hold off on commenting on the substance for now.

What I will say is that this looks a lot like the Obama administration is extending to child care an approach it's already taken with ESEA waivers: Aggressively interpreting the boundaries of its executive authority in an effort to fix problems in a major piece of underlying legislation that Congress is long overdue to reauthorize. In this case, that legislation is the CCDBG Act and Section 418 of the Social Security Act. CCDBG was last reauthorized as part of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) of 1996--aka welfare reform--and subsequent efforts to reauthorize the law have stalled. The proposed regulation is now open for a 75 day public comment period, which may result in revisions to the proposed rules. In any case, smart folks should keep an eye on this for both its early childhood implications and as a reflection of how the administration is dealing with the larger context in Washington today.

Posted by Sara Mead at 5:59 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend