The Future of Smart: How Our Education System Needs to Change to Help All Young People Thrive

[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.

[00:13] SPEAKER_00:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to welcome to the program today, Olka Joshi Hansen. Olka is Chief Program Officer at Grantmakers for Education, and her experiences as an English language learner and first-generation college student inform her perspective on what it means to provide an equitable education for every child and engage communities in that effort. A mother of two and former elementary school teacher, she holds a PhD from the University of Oxford and a law degree from Harvard, and she's the author of The Future of Smart, How Our Education System Needs to Change to Help All Young People Thrive.

[00:47] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[00:50] SPEAKER_00:

Oko, welcome to Principal Center Radio.

[00:52] SPEAKER_01:

Hi, Justin. Thanks for having me.

[00:54] SPEAKER_00:

Well, I'm excited to talk about what we can do to better meet the needs of students that are not currently succeeding, especially in our secondary schools. But you make an argument in your two TED Talks, as well as in The Future of Smart. that we have our schools configured for some purposes that don't necessarily meet the needs of so many of our students. Take us into that argument a little bit about how schools are currently configured.

[01:22] SPEAKER_01:

Sure. So the underlying values of the industrial factory model that I think we've all heard about was really about standardizing education, standardizing notions of what it meant for young people to be capable in ways that aligned with an economy and a society where you were really looking to help fit young people into preconceived roles and boxes. And so when that model was developed about 200 years ago in Europe, very little consideration was taken of human development, about the different developmental needs of young people at different stages. We knew very little about how learning actually took place. And so the design doesn't reflect what we know about science. And so I think what's ended up happening inadvertently, especially over the last 20, 30 years, as we've rightfully pushed for equity and to really serve all young people well, is that we've doubled down on that model.

[02:15]

And we've actually narrowed our conceptions of what it means for young people to be capable and smart in terms of what we measure, what we value. how we've designed our accountability systems, how we're spending the vast majority of our time. So I don't think it's coincidence that over the last 20 years, incidents of special education or various types of diagnoses that basically say to kids, There's something wrong with you because you're not thriving inside of our education system. Those types of diagnoses have actually skyrocketed. And I think that's a really good indicator to us that there's not something wrong with young people. There's something wrong with the system and how it's designed.

[02:55] SPEAKER_00:

I wonder how much you think of this is rooted in the idea that we need to prepare all students for college. Because I feel like there's been this drive in the past couple of generations to say, we're not going to have a college track and a vocational track. We're going to prepare all students for college because that's what they need in the 21st century. And, you know, we can we could change K-12 education in various ways. But if we're going to prepare students for college, it's going to more or less need to get all students to the same place academically during their K-12 career. What do you think of that shift and how does that play into what you're talking about in the future of smart?

[03:31] SPEAKER_01:

I think there is something to that. And again, I underscore this all the time, right? These decisions and these conversations were had out of really good intentions, right? We saw that there was tracking and that poor children, brown children, boys, right, were disproportionately tracked into things like vocational technical education, whereas students who are wealthier, whiter, ended up on college track advanced placement classes. So we looked at that and said, Gosh, we've got to make sure all kids have access to, and we insert college there. First of all, I think post-secondary is probably a better way to think about what we want for young people, right?

[04:07]

We know that we need some type of post-secondary experience, knowledge, skills, training for them to succeed in the world. I don't think it's clear that a BA is there when you look at the research and the data. The types of skills that you get just by getting a BA, it doesn't mean that you're necessarily going to be successful in the workplace and vice versa. There are a lot of really capable people who go on to do amazing things and don't necessarily have a BA. So I think our question should be, how do we help young people access post-secondary pathways, whether that's going straight into work and then being upskilled over time and getting certificates and credentials? Or if what they want to do is to go into four year or graduate school track pathways.

[04:51]

But, you know, part of this is a larger cultural phenomenon here. We've devalued systematically different types of professions, different ways of doing things. I spent high school in Germany. And I remember being struck there that, you know, there were people were paid, people were given benefits, people were given opportunities for a middle class life, regardless of whether they went to university after high school or trade schools or pathways. Right. And so.

[05:19]

For the leaders who are listening to this, right, I'm very sympathetic that there's a conversation here that is much broader than just what goes on in schools. But I do think that our push for college for all inadvertently had the downside of kind of narrowing us into the things that college admissions officers looked for, right, in the form of SAT scores, SAT scores, did you get the right coursework, etc. ?

[05:41] SPEAKER_00:

That's so interesting that you went to high school in Germany, because I was thinking as I read about the book and watched your TED Talks that what you're describing does sound a little bit like the German apprenticeship system. And that gets me to this idea that you share that In schools, what we're essentially doing is we're pulling students out of the real world, right? And we're putting them in these specialized places where learning as it's defined in a certain way can take place. And you say we need to bring the whole range of human experience back into education. What does that mean and what can that look like to bring that fuller range of human experience into education?

[06:19] SPEAKER_01:

So I decided when I was writing this book that the whole first third of the book was really going to be about exploring this question, right? We often don't ask the question, how did we get here? In what ways did our history and some of the choices that we made end up putting us inside of a system that just becomes our water, right? Just for fish, you're in water every day, you barely notice it. And I think we sit inside of a cultural stew of values that we often don't examine and look at. And so in the first part of the book, I really talk about this shift that happened in Europe about 400 years ago, where there were different values that existed among human societies and communities, right?

[06:57]

There was a value to this idea of connectedness, being connected to the earth, being connected to each other inside of communities. This idea of being contextualized, right? You existed inside of the context that you were in and you were shaped by it and you shaped it. And then this idea of embodiment. So what happened in your body, right? Your experience as a living embodied being was really important.

[07:22]

And right around the scientific revolution, there was this very interesting shift that I track in the book that started to kind of fragment the world. It started to decontextualize the world, right? We were going to take things out of context. Think of a randomized control trial. We try and isolate a variable and say, we're going to look at that variable and not consider anything else. This idea of conceptualization.

[07:43]

So Rene Descartes said, I think, therefore, I am. And inadvertently, that was this idea that what we think, what we can cognate is most important. And those values of fragmentation and decontextualizing and conceptualization, when you look at our schools, that sort of factory industrial model, they're really deeply embedded in that. We take subjects and we we would break them apart. I was talking with my middle school son, who's like, there are three types of science. There's biological science, physical science, and earth science.

[08:13]

And I said, yeah, but they're all kind of connected, right? And he's like, yeah, I can kind of get that. But in our schools, we break everything apart. And we ask young people to understand them without always understanding how they're relevant in the real world. And so those values, I think, are one's that at this moment in the world as it is today, we really need to be attentive to them, attentive to the ways that they shape our behaviors, shape our system, shape our curriculum, our accountability. And I think the pandemic is a fascinating moment to do it, right?

[08:47]

The pandemic comes at a moment when I think what the world needs and what this old model, this conventional model of education produced were just not aligned. And so I think we're being given a moment to really kind of transform and reimagine what things could look like.

[09:03] SPEAKER_00:

And a lot of that seems to involve getting kids out of school and into other types of environments where they're learning, where they're applying their learning, where they're exploring their interests. And you talk about a number of students who do kind of an internship in a restaurant, students who build a treehouse in their community. What do some of those out of school experiences look like and what do they do for the students who engage in them?

[09:25] SPEAKER_01:

So in the book, I talk a lot about big picture learning, and actually those stories were inspired a lot by the schools that I visited over the course of about two years as I did this research project that was really aimed at trying to understand how schools organize themselves in ways that support the developmental needs of young people and kind of what we know about the learning sciences. And you said we were particularly interested in high school. Well, when you think about high school age students, they're trying to answer the question, who am I? Who do I want to be in the world? And they're trying to connect that to this idea of their education and why they're doing their education. What's the purpose?

[10:01]

And how does my learning tie to this growing sense of identity? And so I think some of the most interesting human-centered liberatory schools, these schools that are grounded in these different values, They sort of flip high school on its head. There are a lot of people now that are thinking about internships, but it's a five-week, six-week sort of thing, and it's one and done. But a lot of these schools say, you know what, we're going to start by asking you, who are you? What are you interested in? What do you do when people aren't telling you what to do?

[10:30]

What do you think you might want to do when you leave the confines of this place called high school? And they'll have kids do informational interviews with people in different fields and then say, hey, I'd like to do the following four or five internships. And they work really hard to work with community partners. to get intentional mentoring relationships and internship opportunities up. And these young people go. A young woman named Kylie, who I talked to, she thought she wanted to be a number of different things.

[10:57]

She tried going into a classroom. She thought she wanted to be a teacher. And a few weeks in there, she was like, absolutely not. That's not what I want to do. But she ended up doing an internship in a doctor's office and was really intrigued by nursing. And so she took that first internship and parlayed it into a couple of other work and learning experiences, this idea that she left school to learn.

[11:18]

And she graduated and she was already kind of certified as a kind of initial healthcare provider before she left high school. And then now she's in an actual nursing program working at the same time that she's getting her credential. So that's like a really concrete example, but there are schools where this is the experience of every single school. It's not the exception. It's not the student whose parent can advocate for them to do it. The school is designed in a way that makes that accessible.

[11:46]

And from my perspective, it's, again, recontextualized learning in the real world. It's helping young people understand how all of the things that they're doing in terms of academics are tied together. It's building social capital, which I think is particularly important as we think about equity and we think about some of our students who don't necessarily have the social capital that children like mine do. So there are a lot of benefits to it. And I think There are some great models out there like big picture learning that really show the way and show what it could look like to do this more widely.

[12:18] SPEAKER_00:

When we don't have those opportunities for kids and they get the message that they're not smart, they get the message that school was not built for them. What are some different paths that they tend to take? Because I think the personal stories that you convey are important. are pretty powerful for understanding that. But what tends to happen when kids disengage with school, when school has disengaged them with real life or the real world and sent the message that you're not smart, you don't really have a place here?

[12:47] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, a few things. And I think the statistics bear this out. So our first is disengagement, right? So when you look at the data and at the graphs, after about third grade, engagement in school on the part of young people declines just overall. So they disengage. They sort of, we can't adequately answer the question for them, why should I care?

[13:07]

And they're smart enough to kind of be like, well, you know, a test is not it. Getting the SATs is not it. Getting into XYZ college is not it. So they disengage. I think then different kids take different paths, right? Some of them really end up with kind of depression, kind of being disengaged and getting into different types of activities.

[13:26]

When you think about middle and high school age students, there's a real developmental need to push themselves, to take risks, to try new things. And if we're not giving them healthy ways to take risks and to engage their minds and their bodies and their kind of spirits in sort of adventure and learning, they're going to find different ways to do it. So I think this is exactly the age we see them start to try drugs or or getting involved with kind of the wrong, I'm using air quotes, right, kind of crowd of kids. I think drug, alcohol abuse, eating disorders, right? All of these, I think, are external manifestations of young people's internal world being not fulfilled, feeling not connected, feeling not purposeful, right? These are deeply human, very basic needs.

[14:13]

And if we can't fulfill them, and school is a huge part of their lives, if we can't help schools and help their education be a place where those needs are fulfilled, I think we see what we're seeing.

[14:24] SPEAKER_00:

So when students do have those opportunities to engage in meaningful work, to explore their interests, to connect with their community, what are some of the things that they discover that they might have forgotten or might not have learned in school? What do you see happening as kids do get to engage in those experiences connecting with the outside world?

[14:42] SPEAKER_01:

So for this research project that I did, I went to about 75 schools around the country over a couple of years. And I spent a couple of days at all sorts of schools, pre-K through high school, public, private, public charter. And I spent a couple of days kind of observing, talking with educators, leaders, looking at curriculum, interviewing students. And I think what struck me about this kind of these sets of schools that I call human centered laboratory, right, that are designed out of these different values is we love to point at young people. as though they're exceptional when they do amazing things, right? So we think about Greta Thunberg or we think about young people who started their own business or started nonprofits and we point to them and they're like, wow, they're so amazing.

[15:23]

I think what I was struck by was, A, how many conversations I had with young people who thought of themselves as capable, as kind of curious, as able to kind of bring something to the world in their community, whether that was, you know, a club they wanted to start, an interest that they had where they were contributing art or something else to the world, whether it was their long-term aspirations. I think they feel grounded and connected with other people. So in these schools, right, the foundation of them is relationship because they feel seen. They feel known. They feel like they can bring their whole selves to school. And if their whole self is, gosh, you know, I'm a little bit, I need to move around.

[16:08]

I need to kind of like fidget with my pen or I need to take lots of breaks. I'm seen for that. I'm known for that. I'm accepted for that. And this school has space for me to do that without being labeled ADHD or defiant or having some sort of a behavioral disorder. And because they feel accepted themselves, I think they feel able to connect to other people So kind of holding space for other young people.

[16:33]

So the things that I kept hearing over and over again, you know, as we hear about bullying and we hear about the pandemic and young people being really glad not to go to school because they were bullied or they felt excluded in these schools, I did not hear that. I heard young people say, look, everyone's not my best friend, but we're like family here. And I know so-and-so and I know who they are. And so, yeah, sometimes they're annoying, but that's just who they are. So I think we see young people feeling grounded in who they are, feeling accepted for who they are. feeling like their identity is valued and sort of thriving from that place.

[17:09]

And I think that has benefits both in terms of what they can create for other young people in terms of the relationality and the social context. And I think it also drives the sense that I am capable. And that I have a unique constellation of gifts and interests and talents and things to bring to the world. And I'm given permission to explore the intersection of those things with what the world needs and what that means for how I define myself, both in school and then beyond.

[17:38] SPEAKER_00:

What you're describing sounds to me a lot like what happens in a good alternative school. A lot of the students that we're talking about and the staff who get that and who know how to build those relationships with students, a lot of them are currently in alternative schools. Are you advocating for more alternative schools? Are you advocating for comprehensive high schools to change and become more like alternative schools? Or what might this look like organizationally?

[18:07] SPEAKER_01:

So I didn't lay out this framework, but let me lay out the framework. It's a three parts, the kind of three different buckets of schools I think about them, right? The first is this industrial factory model that we all know and we know doesn't really work well for kids. Then we've got this huge bucket in the middle that I would call whole child innovative reform. And those are all the schools that understand what doesn't work. with the conventional model.

[18:29]

And they have all sorts of interventions and programs that they try and bolt on, culturally responsive practice, socio-emotional learning, project-based learning, all sorts of things. And they kind of bolt it onto this structure that doesn't work. And what ends up happening is that it sort of buckles under its own weight, right? I know your leaders who are listening to this, many of them are probably exhausted because it feels like the last 10, 15, 20 years of their career have been one thing after another, one more thing that they're supposed to do and try and sort of add without taking anything off. That's whole child innovative reform. We take the same structure from full-time interventions.

[19:08]

This third bucket of schools, these human-centered laboratory, again, they're designed out of a very different set of values around the purpose of education. So the purpose is about helping each young person to fulfill their unique potential, helping meet their developmental needs, helping reflect what we know about learning. Inside that bucket, you see alternative schools that are functioning really well, right? You see a lot of progressive kind of independent schools, things like Montessori, Steiner, Waldorf. So you ask about alternative high schools. I think kids in alternative high schools are some of the most remarkable young people because they were the ones who all along, right, probably starting from their first day in school, they were like, this doesn't work for me.

[19:48]

And instead of kind of buckling to a sense of like, OK, I'm just going to play the game. They have continued to be like, no, like I deserve more. And they have to wait until high school. to get to a place where they can be seen, they can be sort of acknowledged for who they are, for how they learn, and when it works well, they can be sort of provided an environment and sets of relationships where they can function. Now, of course, that's after their sense of self has been decimated. It's after they spent many years not learning in the ways that we would want them to, right?

[20:19]

And so your question, am I advocating for more alternative schools? No, because the notion of alternative is... Let's keep the system as it is. And let's make these new things that we call alternative schools.

[20:32]

I think what I want is more schools to be thinking about the design principles that undergird this third bucket of schools in terms of purpose, what it means to kind of support development, what it means to really think about the different ways in which young people learn and show their learning, how we think about assessment as a result, right? And to really design from that place. And I will say that uniformly in those schools, what's fascinating to me is this is not a what you do. It's a how you show up in the work. And when you talk with leaders and you talk with the teams at these programs, they will say to you, they'll say, you know, when we hire, we're not looking for degrees or credentials. In fact, often people who've been in the conventional system for a really long time have the hardest time transitioning here.

[21:23]

because it's a very different way of thinking about my identity as a teacher, thinking about the relationship that I'm having with a young person, a different way of thinking about young people. So they're often hiring people who were in youth development, maybe people who had never actually taught, maybe people who were summer camp counselors and really loved it, but they're hiring for a set of dispositions. And so if we are going to kind of be trying to move ourselves in the direction of operating out of these different sets of values, you know, I say, and I say this really humbly as a parent, it's about how we show up differently in the work, because that's what creates this kind of social context inside of which all the other things can happen. And I think that's something for us to really think about as leaders, as educators, as policymakers. How do we take the time? How do we give adults the space to really grapple with a change in their own identity and their own set of skills and dispositions that they have to show up with to make this possible?

[22:25]

Because otherwise you just slap a label onto a program. And what I've also seen is that. the label doesn't make the program, right? So there are a lot of places that label themselves kind of in ways that would make you think they're the third bucket of schools. And you walk in and you're like, nope, that's not what's been created. And it has a lot to do with people and how they show up.

[22:43] SPEAKER_00:

Makes me think of the alternative school educators I've known who just are so good at connecting with kids and so much more patient than maybe their more traditional school peers. And so much more ready to give kids a fresh start. You talk about some students who maybe got expelled, maybe threw a desk, maybe just had a really bad day in a way that kind of exceeded the limits of what a traditional school was willing to accept as behavior. It seems to me that what we're talking about creating is a greater sense of belonging and more unconditional belonging longer term. And I think about the way that, you know, privileged students, you know, maybe our own children have this kind of bubble around them where they don't really have to face the real world until, you know, they're they're 20, some let's say they're 20 or 25.

[23:34]

whereas kids who are on maybe you know more of what we think of traditionally as a vocational track they're pressed to think about the real world at 15 or 16 you know what are you going to do after graduation and their their parents may be asking the same thing what are you going to do when you turn 18. and it seems like there's a degree of protection or of nurturing that needs to be extended beyond that 18th birthday beyond that high school graduation date That we probably fully plan to do for our own kids, but that we just have never seen as something that's really there for kids who are not on an obvious college track.

[24:10] SPEAKER_01:

You know, you're raising such important, complex, kind of gray and nuanced areas, right? What I want to say is there are a lot of rich, privileged kids. who are struggling and suffering internally as much as students that maybe we see struggling and suffering more overtly. So when you look at eating disorders, when you look at drug abuse, alcohol abuse, other ways in which we harm ourselves, those cut across race and class in really meaningful ways. I don't want to kind of bucket kids into the if you're privileged and you have family. I also want to be really careful that we're not somehow saying if you're a student that comes from an immigrant family or a family that is lower middle class or poor or working class, that somehow you don't have these things.

[25:01]

Like in many ways, the social fabric of communities of color, communities that are sort of living in less privileged areas, the social fabric of those communities is incredibly strong in ways that I think those of us who live in our houses in the suburbs really disconnected from our families isn't necessarily. So you hit it though, right? It's about belonging. It is about being able to see and navigate the real world, right? The world as it exists. And it is true that the less privileged you are, the more likely it is that your life is going to come into contact with the kind of challenging realities of the world.

[25:41]

So we go back again to the to the idea that this is not just about what happens in schools. I think some of the best schools, these human-centered liberatory programs, mitigate the impact of societal decisions that we've made around how much we pay people, whether we provide health care as a right, all those sorts of things. I think sometimes, and this is very much that shift that I talk about in the book that happened about 400, 500 years ago, this either or mentality. I think moving to this helps everyone because I think our current system and our current approaches are kind of working against our humanity. So in a sense, they're dehumanizing us and that hurts us all. regardless of where we sit on the privilege of spectrum.

[26:31]

So as we move in this direction, for sure, I think it helps and it supports students who in the current system have been the least well-served, whether that's students who are not neurotypical, or whether it's students who come from kind of challenging family or social backgrounds. And I think it also helps and supports young people who right now may look like they're playing the game, but they're sort of like those ducks, right? They're sort of serene on the top, but underneath it, there's this like frantic kind of paddling to stay afloat. So I think I want, you know, and I sort of challenge people in the book to kind of move to this both and, that when we do this, it is helping everybody. And for sure, I don't think we get to equity in education. I don't think we get to racial justice in education until we fundamentally transform the values that undergird it because, and these are conversations we're hearing in different ways all over, many of the values that undergird our current systems

[27:31]

our values that were designed to protect the privileged, however we want to define that, right? Whether it's wealth, race, or class. So in moving towards a different set of values, I think it's a lift all boats. And I think it's a lift all boats for young people. I think it's a lift all boats for their families. I think it's a lift all boats for the adults, right?

[27:49]

The adults that I meet and interview in these schools are, they are doing hard, hard work, but I would say they are emotionally and sort of otherwise more yeah, they're just healthier. They're feeling more fulfilled. They're feeling like they're doing the work that they really wanted to do. Whereas I think there are a lot of educators right now who are struggling because what they want to do, why they went into education, what they know about the young people in front of them is just a complete odds with what the system, right? This very kind of abstracted system that's removed from the reality of the human beings inside the system, right, tells us is important.

[28:32] SPEAKER_00:

So I want to invite our listeners who are educators, especially at the secondary level, to think through some of these issues. And again, the book is The Future of Smart, How Our Education System Needs to Change to Help All Young People Thrive. I also want to encourage people, Oka, to watch your two TED Talks where I think you tell some of the stories that really make this come alive. And I'm sure you tell those in the book as well. If you could leave school leaders with one final piece of advice, what might that be?

[29:02] SPEAKER_01:

You know, I hope that people will be gentle on themselves. I think we are trying to do yeoman's work. every single day inside, again, a cultural stew in context that makes it super hard. I think being okay with the idea that maybe stepping back and going slow to go fast, right, is okay. So taking the time to think about the why of what we're doing, the what we would be creating as a school or as a program, if the end result was to have every young person feeling capable of and able to kind of make choices, right? Agentic, able to make choices about who they wanna be in the world.

[29:44]

And in the book, I try to kind of list out resources and places to go to kind of be inspired, to find like-minded colleagues. But yeah, I think the pandemic has been for everyone and I'm very sympathetic to listeners, right? We are asking schools and leaders and educators to do so much. And I think we are only going to succeed in changing If folks on the ground, including leaders, kind of say, enough, we are going to stop. And what we want to do is not go back to the old normal, because the old normal was never working. And you need to engage us and our educators in really reimagining what it's going to take to move forward, to build a system that is aligned with what the future of work and society need, which I think is this kind of future of smart human capabilities and neurodiversity.

[30:33] SPEAKER_00:

So the book is The Future of Smart, How Our Education System Needs to Change to Help All Young People Thrive. Olga Joshi Hansen, thank you so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio.

[30:42] SPEAKER_01:

Thank you. It's great to be here.

[30:44] Announcer:

Thanks for listening to Principal Center Radio. For more great episodes, subscribe on our website at principalcenter.com slash radio.