Deliberative Policymaking: Redesigning How We Make Education Policy

[00:01] Announcer:

welcome to principal center radio helping you build capacity for instructional leadership here's your host director of the principal center dr justin bader welcome everyone to principal center radio i'm your host justin bader and i'm honored to welcome to the program dr elizabeth grant dr grant is the superintendent of the salt lake city school district and a former associate professor of education at george washington university's graduate school of education and human development

[00:26] SPEAKER_01:

She holds an M.E.D. from Harvard and a master's in sociology and a Ph.D. in education policy from Stanford University.

[00:33]

And she's the author of the new book, Deliberative Policymaking, Redesigning How We Make Education Policy.

[00:41] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[00:43] SPEAKER_01:

Elizabeth, welcome to Principal Center Radio.

[00:45] SPEAKER_00:

Oh, I'm so glad to join you. Thanks for the invitation and your interest in the topic.

[00:50] SPEAKER_01:

Well, thank you. I'm very interested in talking about how we can make policy more effectively, because certainly the last 10 years have taught us some rather sobering lessons, even with, in some cases, almost unlimited money, even with very broad and bipartisan support. It is not necessarily a slam dunk to implement a policy and have it achieve what it was intended to do. I think in the book, You do a great job of explaining why that is and where we can go wrong and where we can go right. But talk to us a little bit about what led you to write this book.

[01:23] SPEAKER_00:

Well, it's so interesting that you mentioned we've tried policymaking even under conditions where there were enough funds around. I had the opportunity to work at the U.S. Department of Education just at the early years of the Obama administration after the Tens of millions, actually billions of dollars flowing through the education department. Most of it for job stability, handed out to states to keep people in positions, but also a lot tied to policy. So there was a lot of policymaking.

[01:52]

We weren't hampered by the need to find more resources. And we spent a lot of time and effort and energy with an amazingly smart and talented, passionate group. And we still got it wrong. And that question of how we got it wrong led me to this book. And I've had a few experiences in policy and nonprofit organizations, a short fellowship in a U.S. Senate office.

[02:16]

And those sorts of perspectives helped me see that it wasn't that we were Actually choosing the wrong thing. Sometimes we were actually going about the process wrong. So there was something about the way we were engaging in the development and creation, the writing of policy that was just getting us to policy that wasn't as effective as we'd hoped for.

[02:41] SPEAKER_01:

Tell me a little bit about that connection there, because it seems like a good policy is a good policy regardless of how it's created, regardless of how it's produced. But in the book, you make the argument that the way we produce a policy, the way we create a policy and craft it actually does matter beyond whether it's the right policy. What are some of the reasons for that? Why can't we just get to the right policy by any means necessary and then see success?

[03:07] SPEAKER_00:

I think there's two parts to that. First, I think getting to the right policy is harder than we sometimes imagine. And that rightness is not certain. And if it hasn't been well informed, it's not going to meet that goal of fixing the problem that we're seeking to fix. So I think in a more deliberative, democratic process that brings in more voices to the table, that we can actually get that chance to hit the mark of better policy. But beyond that, and I think this part is important too, there are effects from the way we go about making policy.

[03:42]

When we think about particularly policy implementation, We're expecting people who've not been involved in the development of the ideas and the background of what's happening in any of the argument for and against this policy and its unrolling, we're expecting them to implement it. There is no transfer of learning and knowledge and understanding and perspective from those who develop policy, who spent a lot of time thinking about it, reading research, talking to the most thoughtful people around the country, and those who actually have the task of implementation. It is only through opening up that policymaking process and bringing in people who have the responsibility to take it on, to implement it, increasing the amount of learning that's happening in policymaking, that we have the chance of getting

[04:37]

more support, more understanding, more knowledge about that policy, and really greater buy-in. There's also that wonderful work of Cynthia Coburn and others that talks about how those who are implementing reform have to take ownership of it. And actually only through learning and understanding can people take ownership. It's very rarely through the mandates that we often use from government agency to the classrooms that people will take any sort of ownership of it. And so that process of learning and constructing policy is benefited from having people more deliberatively democratic open processes. My argument is that we too often make policy at small tables and that we need to make policy at bigger tables and we need to have more tables, more opportunities for that policy to be made by more people, more engagement in that work.

[05:36] SPEAKER_01:

You say early on in the book that part of your interest in policy initially was having a seat at that table. But you also say that you found that sitting at that table didn't necessarily put you with all of the people that needed to be there. And that in some way, making policy by its very nature is kind of an arrogant activity. What do you mean when you call policymaking an arrogant activity? And is that an intrinsic feature of policy or is it something we can approach differently?

[06:04] SPEAKER_00:

I think we can approach it differently, but we don't often. Public policymaking is the act of a few people in these positions that have the power to do it, making rules that a lot of other people have to live with. And in that, it has... Within it, the arrogance that what this small group says is the right way to do things will work for the larger good.

[06:34]

And we need, I believe, much more humility. in the way we attack policy, more care and thoughtfulness to understand the condition in which people work in education. I think one of our great failures in policymaking is not understanding those conditions well enough and trying to then impose different conditions or the conditions we think will solve the problem that we see without understanding where people are living and how they're working and what that means for them, what the limitations and barriers are around them,

[07:08] SPEAKER_01:

what the resources are that they have in hand and don't have at hand i think a counter argument could be made though that the arrogance of policy making and kind of the limitation of the seats at the table to experts that those are kind of justified by the demands of the task itself and by the stakes so if if we're going to to bring more people into policy making does that necessarily mean people with less expertise or how do we think about the role of expertise because traditionally that's what we've done right is we've convened experts you know no one has ever said we convened a blue ribbon panel of random idiots off the street right we always want to get experts but at the same time there are a lot of problems with only bringing in experts and especially as domain expertise grows more and more specialized and particularly one of my big concerns is that

[07:59]

in the education profession, research and policy expertise is increasingly bifurcated and just a completely different career track from being a public school educator. Like I think when I was in my PhD program, I might've been the only, you know, certainly the only practicing principal in my program, learning about policy and things like that. So like, how do we actually end up with relevant expertise, but not this kind of elitist and arrogant and kind of ivory tower view of policy? Because I think there are some real tensions there.

[08:29] SPEAKER_00:

There are, and I think they're long running. John Dewey spoke to this a hundred years ago about how people in elite positions can begin to lose the situated knowledge, the knowledge on the ground that's important for policymaking. And as he describes it, their knowledge, that expertise growing with, as you mentioned, in a rather narrow world, Dewey says that's no knowledge at all when it comes to policymaking because so much of it is about getting it right in terms of implementation. We have separated policymaking so much from implementation that we even neglect implementation at our peril that way, that we aren't looking at how did this roll out? How did it work? What should we do differently?

[09:19]

How can we tweak this policy to get it better next time? What have we learned in this process? Instead, policymakers continue to churn out policy. Research comes back a few years later, and by then we abandon the whole process. idea rather than trying to make it better, trying to improve it based on that implementation. So there's this general disconnect between the policymaking and the implementation world that I think makes our policies weaker and less wise, less effective in what we're doing.

[09:52]

I also believe that expertise is important in policymaking. And where I find it particularly is that It's very hard for a lay person or somebody who doesn't spend their time being a policy wonk, like perhaps the two of us, that they would understand all the logistical pieces, the machinery behind Title I policy, for example. So to think about how you would improve Title I policy requires a certain expertise about the law, about the resources that flow, where they flow, who they go to, what the rules are around that. That sort of expertise is very valuable. But at the front end, before that even happens, there are places in the policymaking process where people can engage without that kind of expertise. This is why in the book I talk a lot about design thinking.

[10:42]

The design thinking process is so different from our rational policy making process where we look at a problem, come up with different alternative solutions, weigh the pros and cons and choose one and run with it. Design thinking takes a rather different approach to decision making and problem solving by first spending a great deal of time in a stage, what they're called empathy. This questioning and understanding the conditions in which people work and live. That also leads to a more robust understanding of what the problem is. This idea of problem definition being, I think, so fundamentally important in policymaking, but yet we as human beings want to jump so quickly to solving problems that we spend very little time defining it. People without expertise can define their problems very well.

[11:33]

They can describe in detail how their world works and doesn't work, what kinds of things they may need in education. That piece requires very little understanding of Title I when you're trying to describe the problem. Parents can describe it, teachers can describe it, principals can describe it. And that part of policymaking, up at that front end particularly, is one where expertise isn't needed, as also in the back end of design thinking, where after you've gone through a brainstorming ideation phase, come up with some products to test. You go through this prototype and testing where you put something out there and get the feedback and put it out there again a little improved and get more feedback. That process, again, doesn't require any expertise to give that feedback.

[12:23]

People don't have to know all of the legal ramifications of some of the changes that you have made, they can see it on the ground and offer deliberatively democratic strand of thinking, articulate this situated knowledge. They can bring that to the table without that expertise. I am in this not trying to argue against expertise, but rather trying to find the place for policy influence to come from many more directions.

[12:52] SPEAKER_01:

Very well said. One big example that comes to mind for me is the race to the top teacher and principal evaluation reforms that were rolled out. And I happened to be a grad student and principal during that time and saw the efforts that were made to really make teacher evaluations more accurate, frankly, and the various levers that were pulled to try to bring that about. So I wonder if we could use that briefly as a kind of a case study and kind of a what could we have done differently to make teachers let's say, teacher evaluation reform more effective? Because it seems to me that one of the things that happened on the ground was that it has always been the case that principals rate almost all teachers satisfactory or highly effective. There are very, very few poor ratings given out, even in cases where it's clearly the case that someone is not meeting expectations.

[13:45]

And that turned out to continue to be the case after all of this money was spent, all of these laws were passed, all of these policies were changed, all of these systems were put in place. So how would you think about what went wrong there in terms of those efforts? Because certainly it was not for lack of trying. It was not for lack of powerful policy levers to pull. It was not for lack of money. Something, though...

[14:09]

went wrong to such an extent that almost everyone would agree now we didn't really fix teacher evaluation or teacher evaluation changes did not really improve teaching and learning k-12 the way we had expected and hoped that they would so how do you think about that issue

[14:25] SPEAKER_00:

That's such a great question. I take up that example itself in the book from a different perspective. I was not on the Race to the Top team, but was working on the NCLB waivers team that was giving waivers from ESEA in exchange for taking on a great many changes. in schools, one of them being the development at the state level of teacher evaluation systems. And from that perspective, my diagnosis of what happened is an example of policymaking gone awry, where I saw that we were pressured by the political world around us, thinking the Obama administration will end at some time. We only have this short window to make this happen.

[15:09]

We have to incentivize states to move forward. We have to make sure these teacher evaluations are in place. And then placed on that the conditions of not only do you have to have them in place, but we're going to have you make high stakes employment decisions based on these evaluations. So ramped up the demand of what it would take and how important it was to teachers on the ground. without giving states any time to figure it out. We were so pressured by the political demands that we said, no, you've got two years to figure out how to do teacher evaluation policy with the new Common Core state standards.

[15:53]

It was a demand that was much greater than people could take on. And we didn't allow for an R&D approach to evaluation over maybe eight to 10 years, which was a moment of opportunity where we really could. The country as a whole, educators as a whole, were supportive, I believe, of the idea of, yeah, we can see the value in teacher evaluations really meaning something and getting good at that and finding ways to use that to improve instruction. But by not paying attention to the conditions in which people were trying to create that policy and develop those systems and share them with the community and teachers having time to weigh in on what they thought was fair and unfair...

[16:38]

in the development of those systems, we actually, I think ended up undermining the whole process in ways in this. And I, in some ways, and then talking with colleagues who worked on this as well, We think it may have been one of the larger mistakes that we made at that time in that I call it in the book a failure of empathy, not that it was a failure of kindness or sincerity. It was rather a failure of understanding the conditions under which states were working and teachers were working and not paying enough attention to that to have developed the policy well.

[17:18] SPEAKER_01:

I've continued since then to see examples of policies and practices rolled out where it seems like if they had simply asked a few teachers or a few principals or a few students to kind of critique the idea, perhaps we could have avoided some missteps. I wonder your thoughts on the question of time and progress versus getting bogged down, because you talked about how we could have approached teacher evaluation reform over an eight to 10 year period. But for the reasons of our political cycle, for reasons of, you know, momentum, we feel like eight to 10 years is probably kind of too long, right? Like some of the kids that we're trying to improve results for will graduate or not by then, you know, their lives, you know, kids grow up fairly quickly and there's a sense of urgency, but especially in any kind of political context, there's a tremendous sense of urgency that sometimes works against wisdom or effectiveness in actually implementing something successfully, right?

[18:14]

How do you think about the issue of urgency when it comes to getting things right?

[18:20] SPEAKER_00:

It feels like it needs to be done today.

[18:22] SPEAKER_01:

Or yesterday. We could go back in time as well, right?

[18:26] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, or yesterday. If we had only completed that yesterday. All of us feel that sense of urgency. I mean, today even more than yesterday and the year before and 10 years before, education feels like an imperative. And getting it right, making sure that it increases opportunity for children and their future and growing an educated society and having all of those benefits of good education, that it's even more important now than it was yesterday. And so we do work under this sense of urgency, but We also don't let the world develop and iterate better.

[19:07]

We don't let policy iterate over time into something better. We could set up policy in a prototype and testing R&D sort of situation where we put out that teacher evaluation policy. and then in two years get feedback from states and change it and then get feedback from states and districts again and get and change it and continue to do that there are political implications to doing that i mean um you may lose some support there is a risk involved in that for sure and that is one reason it often doesn't happen but i don't think we have yet tested those parameters either we have some underlying ideas of what works. We know, particularly in preschool education, there's a great bang for your buck in high quality preschool education. And yet we don't give time for those kinds of programs to show their outcomes.

[20:01]

Now we know that the very earliest Harry Preschool Abbasidarian Project studies show that it had effects on people into their 20s, that they're finding the children of those who went through those programs have better outcomes, that there are these long-term effects. And once we get to a sense of what is right and working. We all now live in a world where we believe that preschool is a valuable investment. It's them working to figure out what does the policy look like to build more high quality preschools. And with that shared understanding of the definition of the problem and an understanding and knowledge of how it ought to enroll, we can take our time to make programs better and better. We assume that they must solve the problem, a policy must solve the problem, rather than it can just make things a little better, and then it can make things a little better again.

[21:02]

And because it hasn't solved the problem, we tend to dismiss the idea rather than improving it.

[21:09] SPEAKER_01:

I think nobody wants to go to bat for incrementalism in any kind of reform setting, right? But the reality is, that's what we end up with in reality for a variety of reasons, huh?

[21:19] SPEAKER_00:

It's a hard one politically, but you know, as a superintendent now in a district, I think about that often. I think about a school district like Long Beach Unified in California, which has over time developed a system such that their students are perform above expectations. They have some really wonderful outcomes. And much like the district I live in, they face similar demographics and yet are outperforming. What would be expected with that? That happened over time.

[21:55]

They had a couple of really long running superintendents in that role. And you can imagine building a system over 10, 15 years and the difference between that and the revolving superintendency now that is three-ish years on average and what that means and what it took to then build that system that is producing outcomes to be proud of.

[22:23] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, that long-term perspective. And I think with a lot of policies, we have that issue of tenure and turnover. And one of the things that we perhaps did not anticipate when thinking about teacher evaluation reform as a lever for improving teaching practice was just the huge amount of turnover we would have in the profession and the potential for evaluation reforms to increase that turnover so that we're not helping... the same people improve and we're not helping the wrong people leave and the right people come on board.

[22:50]

We're just dealing with increased turnover across the board and more difficulty staffing. So the potential for unintended consequences like that is always huge when we're talking about any kind of education policy issue. And I was also thinking about some discussions I've read recently around childcare licensing in preschool, that sometimes we want to improve quality and we don't anticipate that some of the people that we're trying to help improve might just throw in the towel and say, okay, we're out. Like I saw in New York City recently, some of the thinking has been that there is so much attention to the quality of daycares and preschools that fewer and fewer people can remain in that market. And a lot of them are just closing and causing really an unintended situation of a shortage of providers. And some of these things, it seems quite obvious, could have been anticipated if people who actually provide these services, people who work there, you know,

[23:44]

center owners and things like that were actually at the table participating in the formation of those policies. In the book, you talk about the idea of civic capacity and the idea of deliberative democracy. So apart from the value of simply avoiding preventable mistakes when we're making policy, talk to us a little bit about the kind of democratic and civic value. And I would especially love to hear your thoughts on that now

[24:14] SPEAKER_00:

from the the lens of a superintendent i think about it often i wrote the book from the perspective of federal and state policy and now work in a very local policy making world and i'm trying to translate those ideas myself into the workings of our district and how we think about policy making civic capacity it's the ability of communities to collectively solve public problems And Clarence Stone and his colleagues in this work have studied big city districts and looked at this idea of what makes reform stick for a while in those districts. And they came to this idea that there has to be a shared understanding among civic actors across different groups, and Chicago's a good example of this, where universities and nonprofits and philanthropists and the school system itself all gathered around this shared understanding of one aspect of a problem that they had.

[25:14]

And with that shared understanding and the energy of civic mobilization, they were then able to make a difference. So that's really what civic capacity is, this shared understanding, a collective knowledge about what the problem is and how to solve it and the energy then behind that to keep it moving. Stone argues that we have tried to take politics out of education for the last hundred years, unsuccessfully and unwisely because it is in the political sphere, it's in that political space that we argue about our values and what is the common good? What is the public good? And that is the energy that moves this along. That is the shared learning and shared understanding that happens to create civic capacity.

[26:06]

If we remove politics, we have lost that venue for coming up with that common understanding. And that generated knowledge. So the idea of this is that because education is so embedded in so many factors in our society, that we have to have a community approach to solving some of the problems that we face. In order to do that, we have to build civic understanding generally, broadly, across stakeholders, even without the education system and those within as well. I think we spend too little time talking to our principals and teachers about what we ought to be doing at the district level. So that's the notion of civic capacity, and it in ways rests on this idea of deliberative democracy.

[26:54]

There's a strand of scholars working in this field arguing that Democracy is better when it is deliberative, when there is an expanded sense of who's at the table participating, and when we spend more of our time in persuasion and justification and sharing our reasons with each other than we do in using the power that we have within any kind of setting to make decisions. So this notion that people can get together, they can work through the political conundrums, the political challenges that we face, even in a very polarized partisan world that we're living in, and can come to actually some pretty good answers. And they're showing over and over again that this is possible.

[27:45]

And again, it creates a shared learning and a shared understanding that benefits the policy process. I think one of the things that I find most appealing about deliberative democracy is the idea, and this is going back to the notion that the process, the way we get to these policy outcomes is important, is that it increases the legitimacy of our decision making when more people have had an opportunity to weigh in and to voice their opinions about what is happening. In that, it also increases trust in institutions. We are in an era where people do not trust government institutions. School systems themselves have been diminished, I think, in the community's view as being trusted entities, and there's real uncertainty about that.

[28:38]

I think the only way to build back that legitimacy of decision-making and the trust is through sharing with each other our reasons and our justification and setting up the even informal forums to increase the number of people at the policy tables.

[28:58] SPEAKER_01:

So the book is Deliberative Policymaking, Redesigning How We Make Education Policy. Dr. Elizabeth Grant, thank you so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio.

[29:07] SPEAKER_00:

Justin, it's been really a pleasure talking with you. Thank you.

[29:10] Announcer:

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