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About Daniel Bauer

[progressally_objectives][thrive_toggles_group”][thrive_toggles title=”Show Transcript” no=”1/1″]Justin Baeder: Welcome everyone to the Instructional Leadership Directors’ Roundtable. I’m your host Justin Baeder and I’m honored to welcome as our October 2020 guest Daniel Bauer of Better Leaders Better Schools. Daniel is a prolific podcaster who has interviewed both practitioners and authors and many thought leaders in our profession. And I asked Daniel to be our guest for this particular Roundtable because I think he has a perspective and a wisdom and a sense of compassion and a commitment to equity that really drives us to the right questions and to framing those questions in ways that are ultimately going to be helpful to our school systems and the students that they serve. So Daniel thanks so much for doing this and welcome to the Roundtable.
Daniel Bauer: Anytime I get to connect with you Justin is a big win for my day so thank you so much for inviting me to this webinar.
Justin: Well thanks I’m honored to have you here and look forward to getting into it so we’ve titled this Designing Anti-Racist Systems K-12. And there’s been a lot of talk in the U.S over the last couple of months about anti-racism and the differences between simply being not racist and being actually anti-racist. I think you and I probably both read Ibram Kendi’s book on becoming an anti-racist. What is the difference between not racist— I mean almost everyone in our society would say well I am not racist—but what’s the difference between that and anti-racist?

Daniel: Yeah I think at least from what my study has shown and this is just my perspective and this is my journey that I’ll be sharing today, but it’s is that you’re active—if you’re anti you’re doing something that you’re taking ownership over and you’re taking steps to make sure that racism doesn’t exist within the system. Saying I’m not a racist is a very comfortable and easy thing, and probably 99.9 of people would agree. Even racists would say I’m not racist—and that’s almost like what I’m sure we’ll get into like why being silent is a challenge and a problem. But to answer your question again just to rephrase, to me, it’s about being active—taking ownership over, dismantling those systems that are creating inequitable opportunities and outcomes for your population.

Justin: Good deal. Yeah I appreciate that active role and the idea that being a silent bystander—being a person who sees things that are not okay happening and says nothing and does nothing is not okay. And I think we saw that most clearly this summer when we saw a number of police killings. And I think that prompted a lot of white Americans, in particular, to start taking this seriously for the first time and start reading some of the books and engaging with some of those ideas that maybe do make us uncomfortable at times, but are really conversations that we need to be having. Welcome, John and Lorraine thanks so much for being here, and feel free to chime in in the chat, or if you’d like to come on camera and ask a question just let me know. So let’s talk a little bit about the difference between—I think there are a lot of differing definitions out there right now and I think that’s got a lot of people kind of up in arms for various reasons—differing definitions of racism and what that means at the personal level at the institutional level at the systemic level. But one that I think the research base is really solid on and has been for a long time is this idea of implicit bias. And you sent out some tools in an email I’m a big fan of your email list and you send out to your subscribers some tools and some kind of self-assessments and other resources around implicit bias. What is implicit bias and how does that differ from what we would consider the kind of personal animosity that we would associate with the word racism?

Daniel: Yeah well when it comes to bias you know we all have it and we got to start there. The fact that just because of how we’re brought up don’t put any judgment on there but all the experiences that got you to this point is going to inform biases within your experience in your life. So I think that email that you were describing I was citing some resources I found and so I’ll just show the book cover and highlight this for everybody watching, but this is a great book called Overcoming Bias and so I know that there are things that I prefer right and other things that just sort of rub me the wrong way. And when my self-awareness is high and I note those things then I get curious about what’s going on there and how that might impact my relationships right. From a systems-level whether it’s the superintendent or principal or somewhere in between those biases inform our actions right and we have to be aware of that because again getting back to racism and anti-racism. We’re creating systems that drive inequitable outcomes. so let’s start with just saying hey we all have biases let’s get curious, let’s explore them, not judge them, and then be very reflective on how they might be impacting the outcomes we create in our systems.

Justin: Yeah very very well said. And I think probably most people’s first introduction to the idea of systemic bias or systems that maybe need to be redesigned as educators at least for me based on when I came into the profession the term in those days and this is in the very early 2000s was disproportionality and we had pretty good measures thanks to the flawed law of No Child Left Behind, you know, at least for all the things that No Child Left Behind did that may or may not have been helpful, at least it gave us data for the first time and we were able to look at what we at that time called disproportionality. I suppose I don’t knoIw if people can let me know if that’s not a good term anymore, but feel like there was a concept that was captured there that’s helpful in identifying both what was happening in measurable ways in various different aspects of how we serve our students, and describing it as a consequence of the systems that we have in place. What are your thoughts on disproportionality? Because I want to make sure we talk about the evidence-based side of this.

Daniel: yeah well the hard part with that question it has a few too many syllables for me to track with you but you know uh i was i was interviewing a friend marcus campbell dr marcus campbell and he’s an assistant superintendent principal he has a really interesting role in evanston illinois and i don’t remember if you uh recall that conversation or podcast justin but you know one of the things we talked about there was just uh access to classes right and so um in terms of honors in ap his uh students of color uh just didn’t have the access and so that would produce disproportionate outcomes in terms of uh you know ability to earn college credit right the type of colleges you might be uh able to get into um and just access past uh secondary level education so if that’s what you mean by disproportionality you know i think that’s what’s going on there and so what marcus did is just again get curious about the bias that existed in the system why are my brown and black kids not in the same classes as their white peers and if if we can’t find a solid justification for why they’re not in there let’s open up the doors right and uh if there’s any needs right in terms of catching folks up or or just supporting in a way and providing interventions that might be necessary let’s do all that as a school to wrap around the students and help them be successful and what he found and i think most schools that look at systems like this if we provide the right support and we provide access kids meet the challenge you know and if you say the bars up here they’ll meet that and and kids are really great at sensing where we think that they’re able to achieve or if they uh fit in the space or not so back to kenny’s book and not to get too deep into that but you know he talks about spaces quite a bit right and the spaces we create and are they welcoming and open and inclusive to all students uh or when somebody steps in that’s not a part of the majority do they automatically feel excluded right one thing that i’ll never have to experience at least i don’t think as a white male my friend demetrius was describing to me a principal in northern california he’s uh he’s a black male principal and he says every day when he leaves his house he does like a body scan almost like a mindfulness like checking in on his emotions and thinking about how he shows up in public because he said i have to show up in a way where i’m not threatening at all every space that i walk into it’s a predominantly white space as a school leader in the school that he serves and if i come off as threatening for whatever reason i mean trouble is behind that door and so that’s something that he’s constantly i’m not you’re never going to have to do that justin i’m never going to have to do it uh and so i think that gets to a little bit of the root of things that we’re talking about.

Justin: yeah yeah certainly and i’m i’m thinking about a uh a software developer friend of mine in seattle who has said some of the the same things about just that like the level of vigilance and self-awareness you know if he’s taking the garbage out he has to think how do i make sure that i when i come back into my house it doesn’t look like i’m trying to break in like i live here my neighbors sometimes still don’t you know he’s lived there for years and years and says you know his neighbors still you know don’t know him well enough that you know that he can count on them not calling the police and causing some uh some sort of deadly situation so yeah i totally agree there’s a level of self-awareness there that it’s easy for us as you know as white men to really take for granted that we don’t have to think about those things uh and yet our our students do have to think about those things they are weighing on our students on a on a daily basis um and i wanted to get back to what you said about access to classes because i think they’re in you know into advanced programs into our most uh you know most advanced uh you know kind of college prep uh you know kind of programs that we give students access to and i think the the 1.0 version of this problem was of course segregation right just just full-on exclusion separate and unequal systems of education then in the uh you know starting in the the 60s and 70s we had integrated schools but then we also had tracking and we had uh you know and i know in some places we still have what we would describe as tracking and you know hopefully we’ve we’ve made some progress in minimizing tracking because i think what tracking for you know to a lot of people tracking it just looks to a lot of people like serving students where they are you know giving them what they need and there’s the sense of kind of inevitability right and you know that there are students who are on the path to college and of course we would give them what they need and there are other students who are on the path to uh you know to more of a vocational program or entering the workforce after high school and as we as a profession started to to unpack tracking and say well wait a minute is this just meeting students where where they are or are we actually producing some of these outcomes that are unequal that are unfair that are uh you know advantaging some students over others we’ve started to see those tracking systems kind of maybe formally get dismantled um but but how are some of those living on today and what’s kind of like the 3.0 and 4.0 version of you know it used to be segregation it used to be uh formal tracking how do you see some of those unequitable systems uh showing up today?

Daniel: i’m not going to remember the guest’s name which i feel terrible about it uh just met the guy um but he he’s a former principal he’s not a principal anymore and he talked about the problems of um what do you call them uh kind of like that honors level sort of in the middle between uh regular right and then but not ap not ib right and he called them fake college prep so i can’t remember like what the the real the real school type of name is but he said they’re fake college prep i said tell me more what this is all about um his name was dave i can’t remember his last name and uh he said well really this was this was um in my community his community right uh it was white parents way of separating their kids from black and brown students this this is just this how i re he read it and but those kids weren’t ready for the ap right but they wanted a separate class and so they created these uh these honors or accelerated you know english and algebra and etc etc and they really weren’t doing anything different just uh they looked different when you walked into the classroom okay and so once he saw that and became principal leader of his his local school he put an end to it just because it it made no sense to him. so i think that’s one version of 3.0 i can i can share my experience in chicago i told you about too the last school i served at was a selective enrollment and at the time i think there was there was 12 or 14 schools where the cream of the crop your your highest performing students would go through a sort of hogwarts sorting process and would end up from the elementary schools into these really high achieving high schools and as long as they perform well on these tests uh did okay with their elementary grades and that kind of thing um they jumped through the hoops and they were able to get in these these uh high schools uh it was open to all right if you qualified for the test then you took the test but then there were all sorts of hidden rules that uh families of privilege knew about and families from more challenging backgrounds had no idea existed so for example one really easy one is that there was a ranking system so payton college proud is the best best north side college prep second best whitney young and then on and on and it’s it’s the kids had a desire to get into the harvard of what cps offered right that was payton uh but they might not have the matching score and the problem is if the student filled out their rankings incorrectly and their score didn’t match what the the school could receive in terms of enrollment then they were locked out of the system completely so essentially what happened was students who had proved through the first you know uh eight grades that man they are high achieving like the best that chicago has to offer just because they put their rankings wrong they got locked out and then went to a poor performing school. that seems absolutely ridiculous and again the privileged families knew all that stuff they hired tutors so that their students could do well on the assessment uh and and you know students from the south and west side of the city had no idea how the system existed and a good portion of them got locked out so that that was one piece of it. secondly i always thought it was crazy that we would go on these you know recruitment fairs and uh when i would try to collaborate with peers and say what’s working what’s not are there kids interested in your school that you know will never get in ever like how can we collaborate and help help each other win because after all it’s for the kids? it drives me nuts in some public education circles that it’s more about the competition and keeping up the ranking and the prestige as opposed to doing what’s right for that young justin who might get locked out completely so that was a that was the second part of uh you know bias and racism 3.0. and then the last part too you know and this is just sort of a personal fun uh story is i got involved in creating a website that put out the information of how to navigate the system uh correctly and formally from the district level you know i told you i was shut down right i received like a cease and dissist letter like you’re gonna get fired and sued if you continue to put out the information in a transparent way and so that that was really interesting when what you’re trying to do to to help out right to create a more equitable environment bumps up into this system like you said at the beginning of this round table perfectly designed to get the outcomes it wants.

Justin: yeah and i i really that blew my mind when you told me that story that the the system thrived on secrecy really on you know there being an official public published set of directions for for how to apply for these selective enrollment schools but the parents who were in the know knew that there was really this kind of second tier of information that if you didn’t have that your kid who was equally well qualified or more qualified compared to the kids who were getting in your kid did not really have a shot because the process was so confusing and there were some some really arbitrary things built into it that were i mean really intentionally kept secret so that the system could serve the students that it was currently serving and exclude others i mean is that is that a fair way to characterize it?
Daniel: yeah i think so and who knows what happens behind closed doors right and i do want to give people the benefit of the doubt and the folks running the program at the time there was only two in the whole department to serve the entire city so i’m sure they were overloaded with questions. but then you think about just access and opportunity as well and so if they held a parent night and it’s in the evening when a bunch of parents that have quote unquote normal nine to five jobs and can make it or you know one income right and one of the partners can stay at home and be more focused on childhood they can make those workshops versus people that are working graveyard shifts you know or single parents and how they’re going to get to those information uh sessions too? so then that’s that’s i think where bias you know comes in as well and one of the interesting things that the pandemic has done to us in the forced disruption is you see kids and you see um adults thriving who weren’t thriving in the normal setting because it’s become a little more fluid and flexible so i find that very interesting

Justin: yeah for sure you know so much there it seems to me to come down to communication right the just if we if we can you know share accurate information with everyone in a way that’s accessible to everyone and an obvious example to me uh comes down to electronic communication you know i’m old enough that i remember before we really had good ways to text people you know before remind 101 or remind before you know all the different kind of texting systems there were many schools that were relying pretty heavily on email even though many parents did not have email and we would you know still send flyers home and things like that but i think that’s just one concrete example where you know if if our system is designed to communicate with parents who have certain preferences who have certain work habits you know maybe at their computer uh they’re at their computer all day at work and they can check email and send email to the principal and reply to emails and and read about parent nights uh that are coming up and happening in the evening when they happen to not be working and other parents are working and they don’t have email they maybe only do uh you know text and things like that you know the uh you know the the result of that is somewhat predictable and i think we’ve got to take responsibility for that as leaders and and say to ourselves you know how can we redesign the system to stop producing these predictable inequitable outcomes so thank you for that uh those three concrete examples and i want to invite heather to to jump in here with a question uh so heather feel free to unmute if you’re ready.
Heather: great thanks it’s wonderful to talk with you today thanks for having me um i’m blown away as well i’m i’m thinking of those examples that you both gave around your friends and colleagues and particularly the gentleman who had to think about the perception when he was coming in from putting his own trash can out um yes so i’m completely blown away by that um and the idea of the hidden rules and the tears you both mentioned self-awareness justin you mentioned it at the beginning around or sorry danny about awareness when my awareness is high and i’m self-aware i get curious and justin you mentioned self-awareness how do we my questions related to parents of kids in my predominantly white school um i thought i have an incident last week with a with a student she was who made some very very um inappropriate comments to a child from a different race and the mom was very um you know well we don’t have a lot of uh folks from different races around here and you should do more at the school to teach about anti-racism those kinds of things and so i’m wondering how i can raise self-awareness in the parent community what are your thoughts about that.

Daniel: you know at least one thing that i think about initially is just a model you know great leaders are not only on casting vision about where we need to head right but they walked the walk as well so i would ask you heather you know what are you doing to talk about your own journey understanding these these issues and i know that uh people love you i’ve been able to interact with you a number of times i know you’re wonderful and so i think uh i think you could have big influence in that way um the reason we’re having this this roundtable right now is like justin said he saw the overcoming bias email i put out and i tried to be transparent you know through the podcast and the blog posts and coaching and all of that and just describing my journey you know i get i i think one of my weaknesses i can take things personally right and it’s really hard for me to take emotion out so i think about that a lot um i should have my wife probably right uh communication that might be emotionally charged because she’s so objective she’s a scientist she’s great at it. but if you can communicate in an objective manner but most importantly just sharing your story here’s what i’m learning you know and inviting people to a conversation i think a lot of times especially with schools and and the principalship uh it feels like i’m the expert and i’m gonna tell you parents how to parent uh what you know how kids learn and what you need to do to set up a uh you know an environment conducive for them to thrive but how can you elevate them so that they’re on the same level and you can have a discussion as peers as colleagues and again with curiosity at the center because isn’t that about you know um just design thinking and and what’s at the root of empathy uh and i i think that would be a good route to take.

Heather: thanks for that um that that’s very helpful very practical um we we have our own you know every community or every region would have their own set of circumstances where we’re biased some of it racial some of it other issues comes out and i was chatting with justin earlier today around the notion of a situation that’s brewing here between indigenous fisher folks and non-indigenous fisher folks in the eastern coast primarily in nova scotia right now but that would be a great example it’s in the news there’s lots of opinions on all sides of that so that would be a great example to use when i’m chatting with parents and it would be very relevant to start a conversation about what i’m learning in that context so thank you

Daniel: the other thing i want to add to that too heather you know what what’s the opposite or antithesis of like curiosity you know and mindedness might be close-mindedness and ignorance right and so i think a lot of times um at least in my lived experience when people hold on to a view that just is like off-putting and hurtful to me that’s because they don’t have any experience uh dealing with people that they’re making these claims about or whatever um and they’re only getting these ideas passed down right through family or maybe from the media and that kind of thing and so that’s my way of saying i know some principals who have had great success running restorative circles within the community i don’t know which parent right because there was the parent of the kid who said something inappropriate and the one that was harmed i’m not sure which parent was the one on who communicated with you but can you imagine um on the best situation right the parent of the student who said something inappropriate and could hear how that really impacted them right and see them as a human being and understand where they’re coming from i would hope that that would soften their hearts and help them be more open-minded to how they show up how they communicate you know what comes out of their mouths how they treat people
Heather: that’s great that’s taking me back thank you let’s take me back to the training many many years ago about restorative justice circles and all of that thank you for the reminder

Justin: Yeah. Thank you, Heather, for that. Lorraine you want to jump in. Thank you.

Lorraine: yeah i would like to jump in um i think one of the biases that we have right now and i’m i’m struggling of how i’m going to address this um with our district office and it’s the bias of access to technology and internet in in particular um i’m at a high poverty school um i’m going into classrooms connect like collecting data and we have about 130 hot spots out but the or dreaded orange triangle is severely impacting their access to even teaching and learning but the biases about what we provide our kids that are on this spectrum i i’m trying to do it in a way that is advocating for kids but when you’re going against biases well that’s their problem um i i i’m trying to get it solved do you have any suggestions as to um how to even address their unconscious bias because that’s what it is it’s unconscious bias it’s not that they don’t want to help provide the internet for our kids but i think it’s more along the lines of well um internet is out there they’re free to get it without realizing that it could be the difference between food and internet what are you gonna choose. i mean it’s Maslow’s hierarchy of needs that’s just the bottom line. but the biases that surround that and then the um the plan for how do you make it work and what are the options that are out there working around the biases that they’re not even aware that they have

Justin: so if i understand correctly lorraine uh you’re saying that um there’s there’s just limited support among staff for this idea that we need to provide these hot spots and that that we need to take that seriously as as part of our responsibility if we have students who are not able to you know to get online um yeah

Lorraine: i think what it comes down to is that the hot spots are not sufficient but because we have provided the hot spots we have done our due diligence for ensuring that they’re getting education and and it’s more than that the hot spots that we’re using do not have enough data capacity and so it what it’s doing is creating another layer of disenfranchised students and students who are not receiving an education that they need yeah and deserve yeah well

Justin: and it strikes me as an issue of you know who are we designing this experience for are we designing this experience for the students that we imagine that we have you know do we imagine that we have you know 100 students who have unlimited high-speed internet at home and can just watch you know anything that we send them and participate fully uh you know if everything depends heavily on that internet access or are we designing the experience for the students that we actually have who do have a limited access to the internet uh are we providing things that they can actually be successful with you know and i think at at heart you know and and danny feel free to jump in on this you know every educator knows that they would not teach something that their students were not ready for right you know. if you’re going to read a novel you’re not necessarily going to change the novel just because your students aren’t ready for it but you are going to pre-teach the vocabulary right you are going to scaffold. and and to me this seems like an issue of scaffolding as as you said at a very maslow’s level right like. if we’re just you know like if if students cannot even get on the school bus because the step is too high well we’re probably going to fix that problem before we blame the you know the student for not being able to step up on the school bus um daniel thoughts on that?

Daniel: get more data how can you you know get them hot spots and it’s not enough data so i don’t know i don’t know what uh the district’s doing and if um your position and if you’re able to bring in uh you know somebody that could help this central office understand what people are going through right well

Lorraine: i think yes well what danny one of the things that that we did um figure out is that the the hot spots have two gigs of data total and if a student is online for two weeks they have used up all their data right just two weeks and so um but i i ran across i tried to bring it up to our our director and it was just like hey we’ve given what we can give but it’s not enough and so you’re right it’s the kids that we have not the kids we wish we had because i i compare and contrast my granddaughter experience what she’s doing with high speed internet compared to what my kids are getting here at school right there’s a huge difference and and it comes down to well we’ve done what we can there’s nothing else we can do but we can’t do that because we’re all virtual

Daniel: yeah that’s why i was wondering if like if you could bring someone in to do some sort of diversity training you know there’s a lot of exercises of what it’s like to walk a mile in my tech shoe exercises you know in college they lined us up shoulder to shoulder and it was hey if you if you had somebody in your family right that’s been incarcerated take a step back and so after a number of rounds me as a white male looked back and i was way ahead of all my peers of color and that brought privilege like it was visceral you know there’s nothing i did to get that privilege there’s nothing they did to get a worse start so to speak um but that made it real for me. my wife with her her students she’s teaching on health outcomes uh in minority populations right in the unequitable health outcomes that uh occur in the u.s but she found something in the uk where it’s it’s basically right you have a family and justin was saying it’s it’s the bills or groceries and it just takes people through the type of uh decision trees that are their reality right if you have x amount of dollars and it’s the internet or groceries or a bus ticket to get to the job right and if you’re sick but you don’t have health care do you go in sick or you know it’s like it gets out of control quickly and i think we just need to have these experiences that help us understand back to your point who the kids are that are in front of us it feels good to pat myself on the back and say from you know in a press release that 130 hot spots went out right and and you should be applauded for making that effort but it’s not enough we can do more and and i think with a lot of creativity we can do more and there’s a great book um you know about the the beauty of constraints right uh that you can turn these obstacles um and challenges into the the solution right the way that things um can be whether it’s uh green eggs and ham and the author being challenged to use only a certain amount of syllables and words and that’s how it came came to fruition or these formula cars where i forget which brand but they wanted to win the race and do it with diesel fuel and so it had never been done before they had to completely redesign the car but by putting constraints around the challenge they designed a faster more efficient car they had to make fewer pit stops and they won the race as a result so um that’s the challenge but that can make you guys be a leader in excellence by just figuring it out and getting more creative.

Lorraine: Thank you thank you very much well

Justin: and lorraine to your question i think sometimes it’s a matter of not just looking at how do we solve this particular problem you know like it may be that there is no way to increase the data maybe you know maybe there is maybe you can go to the telecom provider and say hey we really need these to be unlimited data and maybe they’ll you know maybe they’ll value the press that they you know the positive press that they get out of that but maybe they won’t and in that case i think there is a an opportunity that we have as leaders and i’m i’m drawing heavily from my knowledge of toyota and the kind of quality movement uh that taught us to ask the five whys right the the you know why why is this system the way it is why is this in place or why does this problem exist and how can we solve the the problem kind of but that’s behind it and i think this is an incredible year for maslow i mean maslow i assume has been dead for a long time but is probably uh turning in his grave because people keep saying his name you know what’s what’s all this about maslow but you know we really need to be looking at those those fundamental needs that are the the chief barriers you know we’re not going to solve an internet access problem by making our teaching on zoom more engaging right we have to solve the fundamental problem first. and it may be that we have to look not just at can we get kids on the internet with unlimited data but can we design and provide learning experiences in a way that work for kids whether they have internet or not you know are there things that kids can be doing online can we get books into kids hands when they’re at home without internet? you know i think so much of what kids are missing out on right now is is reading and there may be other ways that we can uh you know can can make some of that happen without you know without internet access. but i think you know daniel to your point earlier about access to uh you know to kind of call true college prep coursework um i think if we if we ask those five whys of you know why do we have kids who are arriving in 11th grade unprepared to take pre-calculus why do we have a whole bunch of you know upper-middle-class white students who are ready to take pre-calculus in 11th grade and that’s it you know the the rest of our students are are not prepared for that coursework? why is that? and when we ask why that is we can start to do something about it um so so let’s talk a little bit more if we could about that kind of backwards design you know when we look for those some sort you know those sort of root causes when we see an outcome that’s inequitable right like we have an AP exam all of our students are who are passing the ap exam are upper-middle-class white students let’s let’s kind of do a scenario here where where we work that backwards and and ask those five whys. if if we’re really committed to uh anti-racist design and we spot an inequity like that that seems like it’s the result of of lots of things that are beyond our control what can we do to to kind of work backwards and and redesign those systems?

Daniel: so you’re saying what are the five whys that we could ask or what are some of the questions that we might ask

Justin: yeah what are some of the questions we might ask and and and how do we kind of approach that you know not knowing what the the actual causes might be and and what the solutions might be but um you know what what might that look like and what kinds of conversations might we have as educators to to start to unpack that because you know i think especially you’re more of a high school guy than i am i think especially at the high school level you know high schools receive a lot in terms of you know the the output of elementary and and middle school they receive a lot in terms you know like there are there is a lot that feels like it’s already the die is already cast by the time students walk in the door in high school so so how especially can can secondary uh high school educators think about some of these problems and start to address them?

Daniel: yeah that’s awesome question and then first and foremost too because i think one of the the biggest um challenges or excuses or reasons that it’s okay to let us off the hook that the kids failed would be um you know thinking about their social net economic status or some sort of judgment on parents right. so i would say too if you’re going to get into the curiosity and go the five whys take off parents take off socioeconomics because if we’re honest and candid i think we just use it as an excuse too frequently. i i’d be really curious off the bat uh what what courses did they take prior to that AP class right so what was what was their entry point um you know what what was yeah sort of the track that got them there uh i’d be curious um about what middle school elementary school that they came through that got him there i’d be curious about uh if this teacher is teaching another form of an ap class or even not an ap class what does their grade distribution look like? you know is it potentially something with the adult where i can work on this one human being and help them out right and that benefits all the kids and is the magic piece of the puzzle there. when i started investigating what kind of classes they’re coming from where the elementary and middle school experience if i have any sort of assessment data that leading up to it and it shows that some skills were potentially lacking well what did we do as a school to address those skills part of them get into the AP class you know like i mentioned opening the doors and providing access is one thing but then you have to have the wrap around supports too so another question would be what kind of wrap around supports are we offering? are they well attended? if they’re not well attended why not? you know i i have a hypothesis that you know open open house or any type of event where you see poor attendance you know maybe it’s just because it’s kind of a boring event it’s kind of the simplest solution but if you made it more engaging and interesting and provided something that really was a draw you’d have great attendance doesn’t that seem to make sense? so anyways if there’s like tutoring in these kind of things and it’s not well attended you know what’s going on there so that’s a start i don’t know if that’s everything you were looking for or if you have any to add

Justin: i appreciate your your point about curiosity there that you know that there’s going to have to be some digging that takes place we’re not going to know all of the answers to those things in advance and as you said looking at the the previous coursework well why why are students in eighth grade taking the courses that they’re taking why do we have uh vast over-representation of upper-middle class white students taking pre-algebra in seventh grade taking algebra one in eighth grade well that is going to produce the results that we’re seeing in 11th grade if you know if we’re willing to dig a little bit and the solution again especially you know to the to the needs of high school administrators the solution may involve things that we don’t directly control you know and i think that’s one that’s one of the tensions of the principleship that leaders at all levels face that we’re responsible for outcomes that are based on things that we do not totally control but i think there are still opportunities there Daniel: big opportunities and you know i was i think i mentioned to you we’re reading uh simon sinek’s uh the infinite game within the community uh that i lead and um he he introduces this idea of a just cause which is a bit different than mission or vision and it’s it’s it’s inspiring it’s lofty but he says even ultimately unachievable. but the neat thing about a just cause and i’ll provide a story to illustrate it is that it gets more people involved into you advancing the just cause. so for example when apple was building personal computers windows he hasn’t hadn’t been uh you know on the scene yet and then IBM out of the blue they’re there you know they’re doing personal computing as well well obviously in the business setting and I talked about it with selective enrollment schools you see you see that normally that’s competition right and so in a fixed finite-minded business apple would say how do we crush ibm and just absolutely destroy them as a market competitor? but instead with a growth mindset an infinite mindset they said this is great with ibm entering the marketplace we both could advance this just cause to make personal computing accessible to everyone. so even if you don’t know how to code a computer wait there’s this thing called a mouse and i could just drag it around the screen and click something and the computer does amazing stuff this is great and so Apple took out a full full-page new york times advertisement which is not cheap and they said welcome IBM seriously right and then basically had a little riff about why them entering the marketplace to advance personal computing was a great thing and they wish them the best. right so to our point about dismantling uh racist systems within schools uh in with what lorraine was talking about with data and all this kind of stuff what if we had a cause big enough and bold enough that would stretch across middle school high school and elementary and get us all rallying towards the same place? ultimately maybe unachievable but inspiring enough that we’re all rowing in the same direction and those kind of questions really get me quite excited uh and the last thing i’ll say too just uh for Lorraine you know we’re thinking about this in a binary like school uh in in the um internet provider sort of way but there’s a million other people again the constraint is the opportunity that could potentially help you solve it and uh who knows who it might be but there might be folks that want to invest uh into having kids have access right to this internet and they’d feel great about doing that. right um and so i think there’s just like there’s a lot more players within the community than just school and internet provider that could be a part of the solution

Lorraine: Danny, thank you for that. I want to say that one of our teachers is already making connections with a cable company to see what we can do for our kids because I knew that there was no way we would be able to solve it. So we have people on the ground going out to do that but as you were speaking I think one thing that I’ve encountered as I was trying to get kids into advanced coursework, kids of color specifically, into advanced coursework are the gatekeepers that are the teachers themselves in those high-level classes. And so if you do not have the wrap system that you’re talking about, the tutoring, the work with college tutors coming in and what it takes for those kids to be successful within the content, what you get is a lot of pushback and kids not being successful and not seeing themselves as those scholars. And so I think the gatekeepers it’s not just the parents it’s also the actual teachers of those high content areas and getting their biases and working with those biases and working through it you can create some really great things and great things for our kids of color or kids of poverty. And I will tell you great success with Avid and of our class of 29 that went through when we pushed for them to get into those get into advanced classes, we had 15 of them that went on to higher ed. That was a huge shift for the school that I was at that time and so I really loved what you said about the wrap services and not just thinking about it in terms of just the class, but also the other needs of how to navigate the system. Thank you for that.
Justin: yeah thank you Lorraine really really uh compelling examples and uh a great description of some of the challenge there um and uh I will also say great things about Avid. I was a teacher in a middle school that used avid to uh you know to really design a school experience that would prepare kids for uh yeah for going to college so appreciate the uh the mention there Lorraine um danny let’s talk just uh briefly I know we’re uh about out of time here uh but i wanted to talk about uh this this design issue a little bit more and uh lorraine you mentioned uh the the idea among teachers that you know if i’m going to teach calculus for example or if i’m going to teach AP history that the students will come to me in a certain condition right they will come to me with certain work habits and dispositions and prior knowledge and parental support and things like that. and it strikes me as um you know not only something that we need to kind of rethink and redesign if we’re going to set up more students for success in those courses but also it strikes me as something that is fundamentally inequitable as a norm in our profession and Danny i don’t know if you’ve seen this in uh in your career in the schools that you’ve worked in. but it’s it’s been my experience that teaching advanced classes that have the highest achieving students is seen as something of a privilege and the longer you stay in a school the more you increase your status and professional authority in a school the more you can work your way into those you know i only teach seniors i only teach AP courses all of my classes are half the size of everybody else’s and it’s seen as a a status symbol for the teacher to not have freshmen to not have non-college prep classes to not have non-ap classes. how do we start to have some of those conversations as educators? because you know i don’t think we’re going to change this by saying well hey actually you know what you’re racist and you need to not want to teach ap anymore but really there are some very harmful outcomes that come from treating those ap classes you know and not teaching the you know the general ninth grade classes or whatever as uh as a status symbol. how do we how do we start to change the status uh and and the way people think about their their own course load and the the students that they work?

Daniel: i with some uh i’m trying to filter my smart alec responses you should hear what’s going on in my mind right now but as you were sharing that story i was just thinking you know aren’t those the best teachers right or they like to think so you know even to lorraine’s point she was talking about the teachers as the gatekeepers we can’t let the power that we have as school leaders we can’t let that just go right and so whether that’s the uh the teacher is the gatekeeper or the you know like you’re mentioning the ones on with half the class size not teaching freshmen only ap blah blah blah um well that’s up to us i mean it’s a dance right it’s something you negotiate and hopefully you’re not predominantly top down like this is how things are but you do have power and so i mean uh change up the schedule you know or have some sort of rule like why does that teacher always teach in that class you know um yeah so those are some things that i think can can happen but again bringing teachers to the table and what i was sharing with heather and her community in terms of parents what would it look like to have a very open and curious discussion about why are only these certain kids in these classes? i would love to hear just what my faculty would say because they that’s an assessment right there a formative assessment of where they’re at right and potentially on the unconscious bias that we’ve been talking about you know what they see perceive. and we know the impact of expectations on our students. and so if i know that this teacher feels this way about certain types of kids well of course they are going to struggle in their class. um so that that might be some things that you could look into

Justin: yeah well and i love the the idea that you brought in earlier from simon sinek about having a just cause and i think the the just cause that comes to mind for me with this is this idea of uh you know of breaking the mold and of creating opportunity where if we didn’t create that opportunity it it wouldn’t exist for for kids— you know this idea that schools to to great an extent reproduce the existing social and class structure of society right that that the the attitudes and assumptions that we have that say well you know the kids who’ve already taken the the most advanced coursework the kids who have the most parental support the kids who already have the most uh you know outside tutoring and background knowledge and all of those advantages that show up uh you know when it comes to taking an AP class for example those are simply ways that society reproduces itself and i think one of the the challenges that we’ve got to take on as a just cause as educational leaders is to say you know what we’re actually here not to help society reproduce itself and help the upper middle class parents produce upper-middle-class children who become upper-middle-class adults and people who come from poverty will stay in poverty and have children who will stay in poverty. like that’s kind of our our whole reason that we exist as educators is is to create that that social mobility and to create that opportunity where it wouldn’t exist without us i think to uh to a great extent and yet we often don’t you know don’t put that at the forefront you know

Daniel: Yeah I agree with that for sure. I mentioned my friend who’s a principal in Northern California and his school right now is trying to answer a question. If we have this idea—at least in the States—that’s liberty and justice for all— is that true? And so that’s a bigger broader question, nationally. But he’s trying to answer that just locally and within our school. Within the things that we can control. Can we say that there’s liberty and justice for all our students and our staff? And so again getting back to those big juicy questions of what might motivate and rally people uh and start the discussions you know i think that’s what it’s about um you know we talked about no i’m not a racist and going back to the idea well if you don’t say anything right if you don’t even ask those difficult questions because we know that the conversations could get uncomfortable then what’s going to change? how are we going to progress and become an even better society?

Justin: Yeah. Very well said. Let’s talk about a few resources if we could. I know we could probably keep talking for another hour but we are out of time and i want to respect everybody’s time uh what are some of your uh top resources that you send people to on this topic of designing anti-racist systems and understanding implicit bias?

Daniel: Yeah thanks well I mentioned that one book that I’m reading right now overcoming bias by Tiffany Jana and Matthew Freeman. We mentioned on Kendi’s How to Be An Antiracist so nice you’ve picked it up too. I just picked up a book called Caste because that was recommended to me and then I would search that right like uh look for anti-racist education resources and see what comes up in Google I made a antiracist podcast playlist at least for my show um and there are some people that come off the top of my mind. They’re all doctors—Tracy Benson, Sheldon Eakins, Darnisa Amante—they’re all doing incredible work and so I would have them on speed dial. I would hire them, join their workshops, and get involved in their world because they have so much knowledge and can help schools navigating these difficult waters for sure.

Justin: Yeah excellent resources and I know we’ve both interviewed Dr. Tracy Benson and you’ve had him on your podcast a number of times and he’s doing some very innovative programs right now to help people in some of these areas. I also want to plug the implicit bias test that you sent out at implicit.harvard.edu. I think a great tool for kind of understanding how some of these things work at an almost subconscious level .

Daniel: Did you take any of those tests?

Justin: I did. I might have taken them too slowly. I think I was afraid to answer fast enough—I was like if I’m just really careful and thoughtful then I won’t be biased but yeah those are really interesting and there are lots of them. I was still biased. I’m like wait. I thought I kind of get it, but there’s a lot of work to be done. There is and I want to close by addressing something that might seem strange or that might be a little bit obvious. I mean we are two white men discussing this topic and I wanted to normalize that. I mean we are not here to sell anything on this topic and I think you’ve done a great job of pointing to some of the experts that people can bring in some of the books that people can read. I think more people need to be talking about this though I don’t know What’s your thought on the role of white educators in particular?

Daniel: You have a voice use it. Don’t be a wimp and stay silent. Like it takes courage, you know. And I don’t have kids yet. I really really—I can’t express enough how much I want kids—but I want to be able to tell my nephews and hopefully, future children where I stood on issues of importance to me. I know what my core principles are. I’m very clear on that and so I’m not going to be quiet about this kind of stuff. No way. There’s no way. So that’s one thing. Just have the conversation understand the power that you have. And admit when you make mistakes. It’s okay, it makes you human. I lead a group of 60 leaders from around the world and I was looking a couple of years ago—this is three years ago—looking at our books. They were mostly white and male. Dang it. And I know better. So I made sure to incorporate more authors of color and women authors. And the School Leadership Series, right? And so instead of just me hosting that podcast, I knew it would benefit if I created a diverse team with diverse experiences. So now that team is like 50 percent female and I forget the percentage of hosts that are leaders of color, but I’m proud of that type of stuff right. So it’s just it’s looking at where you have influence where you have control and say something do something—and even these small steps, I think they add up to quite a big change.

Justin: Well said. Well, let’s leave it at that. Daniel thank you so much for joining me on the Roundtable. If people want to learn more about your work where can they find you online?

Daniel: Yeah so BetterLeadersBetterSchools.com is the website @alienearbud is the username on all social channels. And just Daniel@betterleadersbetterschools.com if you want to email.

Justin: Well thank you to our panel. Thank you Lorraine and Heather for your participation and questions today. And thank you everyone for engaging with this topic and drawing attention to it. So Daniel again thank you and we’ll talk soon. Bye.[/thrive_toggles][/thrive_toggles_group]

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