Outsmart Your Brain: Why Learning Is Hard and How You Can Make It Easy
by Daniel T. Willingham
Gallery Books, 2023, $28.99; 336 pages.

As reviewed by Stephen M. Kosslyn

In Outsmart Your Brain, Daniel Willingham has written three useful books in one, seamlessly integrated and mutually reinforcing. The book in the foreground offers a series of tips and advice to help students learn effectively and, more generally, navigate the school experience. One of the books in the background provides a review of research findings in cognitive science that buttress his tips and advice. The other gives advice to instructors on how to help students make the most of the suggestions.

Each of the book’s 14 chapters begins with a brief overview followed by a box containing two sections, one labeled “What Your Brain Will Do” (that is, what your default behavior will probably be) and the other “How to Outsmart Your Brain” (that is, how to avoid falling into the default-behavior trap). Willingham then unpacks the “How to Outsmart Your Brain” idea with a series of numbered tips (the book offers a total of 94). He describes most of these tips in a page or two and concludes each with a one-sentence summary. At the end of each chapter is a section for instructors, which itself ends with a brief summary of the main points in that section. The chapters not only cover bread-and-butter topics—such as how to understand a lecture or a difficult book, how to take notes, and how to study for and take an exam—but also offer useful tips on life skills, such as how to avoid procrastination, stay focused, and cope with anxiety.

The book is chock-full of useful, specific, and concrete advice that will help students of all stripes, from high school through graduate school. No learning stone has been left unturned, and I would venture to say that there’s something here for everyone. The writing is clear and compelling, with a warm and inviting tone. Moreover, the numerous analogies, brief demonstrations, clear explanations, and wise reflections serve to bolster the author’s points. For example, he points out that the brain evolved to function in everyday conversation, which is not organized hierarchically, and thus if you just relax and do what comes naturally while listening to lectures (which are typically organized hierarchically), you will often fail to mentally organize and understand the content. Similarly, he notes that memory is the residue of thought, and thus thinking is a crucial part of learning—even while you are listening to a lecture. In spite of the humility that he often expresses in the book, Dan Willingham was an impressive grad student when I was one of his teachers, and he has clearly grown even more capable with the passage of time.

No book is perfect, of course, and this excellent book is no exception. My main critique is that, in many cases, carrying out Willingham’s advice would require a lot of work. As I read, I jotted a “W” in the margin whenever I thought the extent of this work might discourage students from actually following the advice; I made 109 such notations. The author readily acknowledges that the student will have to put in some work to follow his advice, and he makes a good case that the investment in time and energy will ultimately be worth it. Unfortunately, we humans are prone to “temporal discounting”—we tend to discount future rewards as compared to current efforts. Thus, the sheer amount of work required may hinder students from drawing full value from this book.

Aside from this workload, students will have to contend with another hurdle, which I’ll call “meta-cognitive load”—how difficult it is to keep the material in mind, recognize later when it’s relevant, and then see how to apply it appropriately.

I think the most effective tips and advice will be those that don’t require too much effort to execute and that have low meta-cognitive load (for example, Tip 4: advice on when it’s better to do assigned readings before vs. after a lecture; Tip 39: do not cram; Tip 63: how to use a calendar effectively; Tip 76: choose your work location with care). Tips such as these offer relatively simple, straightforward advice that can be followed immediately.

However, much of the book’s advice requires considerable work to execute (for example, Tips 1 and 21: analyze a lecture into a hierarchical structure; Tip 17: master a six-step process to learn general skills; Tip 28: write a summary and about three statements for each of a book’s headings; Tip 56: categorize mistakes made on an exam; Tip 32: create an encyclopedic study guide that includes absolutely everything you need to know). Similarly, many tips entail high meta-cognitive load (Tip 47: when taking an exam, remember to engage in a four-step process to get oriented and check your work; Tip 55: remember to follow three specific steps when writing essay exams; Tip 70: when you are about to procrastinate, reframe the choice to highlight the opportunity cost and focus on the least aversive part of the task; and Tip 92: if you know you will be doing something that will make you anxious, use a specific three-step process a day or two beforehand).

The book’s subtitle—“Why Learning Is Hard and How You Can Make It Easy”—is not quite apt. Willingham certainly makes it clear why learning is hard, but it’s a bit of a stretch to say that he shows how to make learning easy, as he acknowledges at the end of the introduction and at various points throughout
the book.

To use all of the advice in this book, the reader would need to be highly motivated to learn, have a lot of energy, be very organized and focused, and have a lot of time. For example, the author recommends that students meet with a study group to discuss what will probably be on the exam, then create encyclopedic individual study guides, then meet again (perhaps 48 hours before an exam) to quiz each other (Tip 38); this is no doubt a good idea but not realistic for many students. In fact, most college students today are not “traditional”—they need to work, or they have other responsibilities that prevent them from devoting the time to, say, preparing the kind of study guide that is recommended here (Tip 32). Willingham knows this and, at the outset, suggests that students pick and choose which chapters to read, try out tips to see whether they work well for them, and try another one if they don’t.

The author is clearly aware that he is asking a lot of students, and he has tried to help in various ways—for example, by putting key phrases or sentences in boldface and including the one-sentence summaries. However, there is some tension between these devices and some of the advice offered. For instance, providing bolded terms may reduce the need for the student to think through the material to decide what’s important, and such thinking is known to enhance learning (Tips 3, 13, and 33); and putting terms in boldface can actually undermine learning if students use that material as a substitute for doing the reading (Tip 29).

Most of the tips and advice sit on a solid foundation of research, and, to Willingham’s credit, he tells the reader when his guidance is based on intuition or personal experience rather than empirical data. Each chapter has its own list of references at the end of the book, but it isn’t always clear which references support which points in the chapter. The author probably made the right call in not using standard academic references, which would have undercut the flow and the friendly tone, and footnotes would have injected an unwanted sense of formality. However, it would have been helpful if the citations had included the page number and a brief phrase from the text to anchor specific references.

What to make of all of this? At the outset of this review, I observed that Willingham has written three books in one. The book in the foreground, tips and advice for students, is probably most useful (as Willingham suggests) for students who are highly motivated to do better in school and need to identify a few techniques to help them improve. The book in the background that reviews research findings is superb and should be read by anyone interested in applications of cognitive science. And finally, the advice to instructors on how to help students make the most of the suggestions was sometimes too abbreviated to be very useful. However, that said, instructors can easily use the tips and advice as a springboard to improve their own teaching—and, crucially, to enhance student learning.

Stephen M. Kosslyn is president and CEO of Active Learning Sciences, Inc., chief academic officer of Foundry College, and John Lindsley Professor of Psychology Emeritus at Harvard University.

This article appeared in the Winter 2023 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Kosslyn, S.M. (2023). Tip 39: Don’t Cram: And other techniques for successful learning. Education Next, 23(1), 78-80.

When we asked Rachel Skerritt to reflect for Education Next on her tenure as head of Boston Latin School (see “What I Learned Leading America’s First Public School,” features), we didn’t know what to expect. Our managing editor, a Boston Latin parent and recipient of many an email penned by Skerritt, assured me that the piece would be well written. But we had little inkling of what lessons she would draw from steering the school through a global pandemic, a national reckoning on issues of race, and local attacks on Boston Latin’s exam-based admissions system.

What I did not expect was that Skerritt would assert that a “culture of urgency is essential” to effective school leadership. Urgency is out of fashion in education circles—derided along with perfectionism and objectivity as a defining characteristic of “white supremacy culture” in diversity training materials based on the work of author Tema Okun that are widely used in the sector. Yet here was a Black woman, who spent much of her tenure leading Boston Latin’s response to Black students’ concerns about the school’s racial climate, arguing that urgency is just what schools need.

The “urgency” issue surfaces in a different way in Robert Pondiscio’s article about the future of charter schools in New York (see “What Next for New York Charter Schools?” features). Pondiscio reports that at BES, a Boston-based leadership-development program known for launching many of the nation’s highest-performing charter schools, founder Linda Brown “routinely plastered the word ‘urgency’ in office windows and around the walls at Fellows’ training sessions.” That practice changed after Brown retired in 2018 and, as part of a broader rebrand, BES changed its name from “Building Excellent Schools” to “Build. Excel. Sustain.” BES’s long-time chief academic officer, Sue Walsh, told Pondiscio she left the organization after “we were given readings as a staff that ‘urgency’ was racist.”

I chair the BES board, and I tend to agree with Skerritt that urgency is a key ingredient in educational improvement; it’s certainly not inherently racist. Linking urgency to white supremacy strikes me as simplistic and counterproductive, at least if the goal is to shift people’s thinking. Absence of urgency can mean delaying change. That prolongs problems for those ill-served by the status quo.

But that doesn’t mean that there is nothing for organizations like BES to learn from aspects of Okun’s critique. When a sense of urgency “makes it difficult to take time to be inclusive [and] encourage democratic and/or thoughtful decision-making,” it can be oppressive, says Okun, who describes herself as white. When a sense of urgency produces “unrealistic expectations about how much can get done in any period of time,” it can become self-defeating, Okun argues. Skerritt herself is quick to emphasize that “Urgency does not mean to place so much pressure on teachers and staff that their longevity in the profession is unlikely.”

The task confronting education leaders is to convey and maintain a sense of urgency that’s shared and sustainable. It is to cultivate a sense of urgency within a community rather than to impose it from above.

That task is especially key as we emerge from the pandemic. Results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress released in September confirmed that American 9-year-olds lost the equivalent of four months of learning in reading and more than five months in math since 2020. Making up that ground will surely require a multi-year effort. Yet our May 2022 Education Next survey (see “Parental Anxieties over Student Learning Dissipate as Schools Relax Anti-Covid Measures,” features) reveals that the parents of only 9 percent of students said they are not confident their child will “catch up” from Covid-related learning loss within a year or two; the parents of the rest either were confident the child will catch up (49 percent of students) or perceive no learning loss in the first place (43 percent of students).

The “urgency” issue, in other words, extends beyond school leaders and educators to parents and policymakers, some of whom may be operating with an unrealistically rosy sense of the pandemic’s effects on children’s education. Better informing education decisionmakers at all levels—from households to the White House—is a task to which we at Education Next bring our own sense of urgency.

Martin R. West

This article appeared in the Winter 2023 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

West, M.R. (2023). The “Urgency” Issue. Education Next, 23(1), 5.

One of the hottest developments in education technology is schools banning technology.

After successive years of remote or hybrid learning, you might imagine tech-weary educators would be going after laptops and Zoom. But they are focused on cellphones, driven by three major concerns: students’ mental health, ability to stay engaged and learn during class, and struggles to focus for long stretches of time without task switching.

There’s an irony here. These bans are proliferating even as there are more useful, engaging, and instructionally sound mobile-learning applications than ever before. That suggests that cellphone bans, while useful in many school settings, shouldn’t be universal. We risk barring teachers, schools, and districts from productively using these apps to drive learning gains.

Where the Phones Aren’t

Some bans are blanket ones at the country or state level. In 2018, France passed a law that prohibited students under 15 from using phones, tablets, and smart watches in schools. The Australian state of Victoria bans phones in primary and secondary schools.

Some schools in the United States have taken similarly dramatic actions. Public schools and districts in Missouri, Pennsylvania, Maine, and New York State have instituted bans, often citing the devices’ ability to distract students from learning. And the Buxton School, a boarding school in Western Massachusetts, instituted a total ban on smartphones on campus after one of its students live streamed two others engaged in a fight. Students now are allowed “dumb” phones, but the constant alerts and capabilities of the smartphones are gone.

Other educators have counseled more moderate approaches to the same effect. Doug Lemov, author of Teach Like a Champion, wrote recently in Education Next that restricting cellphone use doesn’t “mean banning phones, it just means setting rules. These can take different forms, like setting up cellphone lockers at the main entrance, requiring students to use cellphone-collection baskets at the classroom door, or limiting use to cellphone-approved zones in the school building” (see “Take Away Their Cellphones” feature, Summer 2022).

One common method requires that students check their phones when they enter the school building. At several middle and high schools in and around Springfield, Massachusetts, phones are stored in a magnetic pouch that only educators can open until the end of the day. These metal pouches—like the one developed by Yondr, a San Francisco-based company founded in 2014—are commonly used at concerts and comedy shows to eliminate the distraction of mobile phones and allow people to engage fully in the experience before them. That same sales pitch has made pouches popular at many schools.

Although publications like the Boston Globe have editorialized in favor of these bans, not every school system is on board. Tragedies like mass school shootings in Uvalde, Texas, and Parkland, Florida, have given many parents pause about banning phones. The New York City Department of Education, for example, ended a ban on cellphones in schools in 2015, citing parents’ wishes to reach their children during the school day.

According to the federal education department, more than three quarters of public schools prohibited the non-academic use of cellphones during school hours in 2019–20. The phrasing suggests that in that number are schools that are outright banning phones, as well as those who have restricted phones but are consciously leveraging them for academic reasons.

Worries about Mental Health and Focus

Momentum to moderate cellphone usage stems from concerns about students’ mental health. American teenagers are experiencing a significant mental health crisis. According to the Centers for Disease Control, in 2021 44 percent of U.S. high-school students reported “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness” in the past year—up from 26 percent in 2009. Visits to emergency rooms for mental health emergencies and attempted suicides are up as well.

What is causing the crisis is disputed. Many pediatric groups and researchers—most prominently psychologist Jean Twenge, the author of the book iGen—have cited correlations in the rise of social media and smartphone use with teenagers’ increasing depression and anxiety to suggest that excessive smartphone and social media use is damaging a generation. But the reality appears more nuanced. One set of studies published in Child Development, for example, used a randomized design to tease apart the emotional impact of receiving fewer likes on social media. It found that although all students suffered a relatively immediate disappointment, it was only teenagers who were more vulnerable to social rejection that suffered a more enduring and significant negative impact.

Still, as Atlantic writer Derek Thompson observed, Twenge’s point may be misunderstood. “Social media isn’t like rat poison, which is toxic to almost everyone,” he wrote. “It’s more like alcohol: a mildly addictive substance that can enhance social situations but can also lead to dependency and depression among a minority of users.”

The other challenge with social media that Twenge cites isn’t the social media itself, but that it replaces sleep and in-person social interactions to such a high degree. Although some have argued there are silver linings to this—such as declines in binge drinking and sexual activity among teens—the impact on adolescents’ loneliness may be contributing to their decline in mental health. And if isolation is the true driver, of course pandemic-related lockdowns and school closures likely contributed to and accelerated some of these trends.

During class, student cellphones present two pressing challenges for teachers: disruption when students use their phones for non-academic purposes during class, and teenagers’ struggles to maintain the deep focus that rigorous academics demand. Sustained attention is unlike many students’ more typical mode of frequent task switching, where they toggle between different apps, which frequent smartphone alerts encourage.

As Lemov wrote, “This is no small thing. … The more rigorous the task, the more it requires what experts call selective or directed attention. To learn well, you must be able to maintain self-discipline about where you direct your attention.”

A lack of practice in focusing could damage students’ abilities to learn and do difficult work, in other words. And some studies have suggested that cellphone bans lead to better learning. One study of high schools in the United Kingdom, for example, showed that schools that banned mobile phones had improved test scores on a year-end test.

It’s All About the Learning Model

Yet while these concerns have led to more cellphone bans, there also has been an explosion in useful learning applications for mobile devices. Think of Duolingo for learning language, or ABC Mouse for learning elementary school subjects, or Quizlet for checking understanding. The ability to learn nearly anything from a phone is better than it’s ever been for all ages of learners.

With the active learning methodologies at the heart of these apps, the learning opportunities on mobile devices are in many ways superior to many of the more passive, video- and text-based ones built for laptops and personal computers. Cellphones may distract from traditional lectures or whole-class instruction. But they also command and can hold individual students’ attention—a precious resource that fuels learning, even if that learning doesn’t look like what we’ve seen before. Phones also may get in the way of students mastering required academic standards, while also connecting students to the information about which they are most curious.

How to explain the paradoxes?

In many learning models, there simply isn’t a productive place for smartphones. But is that the fault of the phone or the model?

Take a case-study classroom, for example. In it, all students are expected to participate in a group discussion to work through a specific situation with a joint set of case facts. If students are instead paying attention to their own devices, the conversation suffers and student learning slows as well.

Contrast that with a foreign-language class where all students work on personalized language modules on Duolingo, for example. They then put their phones away to participate in small-group conversations. (Even before smartphones, a version of this called “language lab” put individual students at headphone stations to work independently with the education technology of the day before rejoining group conversations.) The phone is central to the design of the learning experience. Of course, there’s a risk that students will work on tasks outside of the one assigned. But schools and teachers can use technology to block access to other apps or build on the social dynamics of the classroom to incentivize students to stay on task.

This phenomenon has been true with Internet-connected laptops as well. A 2016 study about a set of West Point classrooms showed that allowing computers when there wasn’t a key purpose for them diminished learning (see “Should Professors Ban Laptops?” research, Fall 2016). On the other hand, a blended-learning model like New Classrooms’ Teach to One relies on laptops to personalize math instruction for middle school students. Research has found students make outsized gains on math tests after successive years of participating in Teach to One classrooms.

One last argument for maintaining cellphones is that schools must teach students to use them responsibly. But many educators’ retort is that they are simply helping show students that there is a time and place for such devices—and school isn’t it.

In that respect, cellphone bans are following the larger trend of banning many things in schools—from books to speakers to certain kinds of speech or topics of debate. Cellphones may make for another easy bogeyman, but blanket bans are ill-informed and regressive. Though we might not see a big reversal in phone bans anytime soon, we should. Educators on the ground should choose for themselves when and whether to allow their students to carry cellphones to class, so they can leverage learning apps to help students make progress.

Michael Horn is an executive editor of Education Next, co-founder of and a distinguished fellow at the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation, and author of From Reopen to Reinvent.

This article appeared in the Winter 2023 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Horn, M.B. (2023). Ban the Cellphone Ban: Blanket policies ignore the potential of app-powered learning. Education Next, 23(1), 76-77.

This article appeared in the Winter 2023 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Carter III, J.S., Hughes, R.P., Lenard, M.A., Liebowitz, D.D., and Perera, R.M. (2023). Assessing Integration in Wake County:Loud debate, but muted effects for students and schools. Education Next, 23(1), 60-67.

Few people in education policy get to see visible evidence of their work in real time and three dimensions. Not once, but whenever she wants it, Susie Miller Carello can stand on a subway platform in Harlem, and, for a few minutes on any given school day, watch the world she helped midwife pass before her eyes. “If you go to the subway station at 125th Street and Lenox from 7:15 to 7:30 in the morning, it’s filled with kiddos with school uniforms and backpacks,” she says. The kids in navy blue and white are en route to Harlem Village Academies. The bright orange polo shirts and ties or plaid jumpers belong to children who attend one of the four Success Academy schools in the neighborhood. Scholars in yellow and blue are on their way to Democracy Prep a few blocks up the street.

For a dozen years Carello served as executive director of the State University of New York’s Charter Schools Institute, the lead authorizer for well over half of the state’s 357 charter schools. The explosive growth of New York City’s charter sector happened first on her watch, and then under her nose. “The first time it happened, I had just hopped on the train in Times Square and noticed the moms and dads and the kids in the subway car,” she recalls. “And when I got off the train, I was like, ‘Oh my God, look at this! These are all our kids.’ And they’re going to these schools that are providing them much better options than they would’ve had 20 years ago.”

At a different moment, both politically and in education reform, Carello might have lots of company taking in the view from that subway platform. For some politicians, philanthropists, and other members of New York’s elite, the city’s charter sector has been an object of civic pride. That’s so particularly in neighborhoods like Harlem, the South Bronx, and downtown Brooklyn, where educational failure stretches back decades. Those neighborhoods have large concentrations of charter schools, including dozens run by the largest and most well-established charter management organizations in the country: KIPP, Success Academy, Uncommon Schools, and Achievement First, among others. A visitor might look at the passing parade of school uniforms and smile at the sight of disadvantaged children put on the “path to possible,” as one charter advocacy group’s slogan puts it, by energetic reform efforts backed by philanthropy and effective public policy. Over the last 20 years, New York City charters have launched tens of thousands of low-income Black and brown children to college and beyond.

In recent years, though, those cheering on the charter sector have seen their numbers dwindle. With few exceptions, the bipartisanship that ushered in the heyday of the education-reform movement has badly eroded. That means diminished political support for charter schools and minimal appetite to thwart the will of the powerful teachers union in deep-blue New York City. In March 2019, the city reached a state-imposed cap on the number of charter schools permitted to operate. Less closely examined or well understood is the resistance that has risen from within the education-reform movement itself. Charter schools, particularly those run by networks with resources sufficient to staff energetic recruitment efforts, have long relied disproportionately on young, recent college graduates to staff their classrooms. But the energy, idealism, and agenda of those recruits has changed. To the founding generation of New York’s highest-performing charter schools, strict classroom management, academic rigor, and high expectations were the hallmarks of well-run schools and conditions necessary for student achievement. But that same school culture can register as abusive and harmful, even grounded in white supremacy, to younger staffers steeped in the argot of social justice and committed to “anti-racism.” This clash of ideals happens largely over the heads of parents, who continue to swell charter-school waitlists and whose vision of a good school never seems to change much: safety, solid academics, character education, and a fair shot at college and upward mobility, whether their children attend a school that’s part of a large network or a single-site “mom and pop” charter school.

New York is emblematic of charter schools nationwide and indicative of the growing pains in the sector, buffeted by changing ideals and priorities, including from within the sector itself.

* * *

After disgorging students onto the platform in Harlem, the 2 train rumbles north to 241st street in the Bronx, where other high-performing charter networks like Icahn Charter Schools and Bronx Classical opened schools in neighborhoods long beset by educational failure. But to catch a glimpse of an up-to-the-minute symbol of the state’s charter sector, you need to leave the City entirely and travel 150 miles up the Hudson River to New York’s capital region. There you will find Re’Shawn Rogers, one of the state’s newest charter-school pioneers.

There is still “cap space” to create new charter schools in New York state outside of the five boroughs of New York City. Thus, in September of 2021, Carello and her staff recommended to the SUNY board of trustees that they approve Rogers’ application to launch Destine Preparatory Charter School the following fall with 116 students in kindergarten and 1st grade and to enroll 435 children up to and including 5th grade over the next five years. The school’s name is meant to invoke “Destiny,” but there’s a Destiny Prep in Jacksonville, Florida. Rogers didn’t want to risk copyright infringement or bad press, so “destiny” became “destine.” The shortened name is meant to invoke the great things the school’s students are destined to achieve.

On a Saturday morning in May 2022, Rogers is expecting about half a dozen families for an information session in a nondescript office building in between Union College and a riverside casino in Schenectady. The place once grandly called itself “the city that lights and hauls the world,” a reference to General Electric, which was headquartered here, and the American Locomotive Company, which went out of business in 1969. The city has been losing population for nearly 100 years. A demographic mix of 65,000 people call Schenectady home today, nearly one third fewer than at the city’s 1930 peak. The poverty rate is 20 percent, roughly double the national average.

The first person to arrive for the information session is Osei, a bright, energetic, and chatty five-year-old boy, who bounds into the third-floor conference room several strides ahead of his father and announces boisterously, “I’m here to meet my new school!” Almost immediately his attention is captured by a pile of donuts on the conference table. Without breaking stride, he marches around the table and grabs one, which his dad orders him to put down. When Rogers asks the child to say his name again, perhaps to redirect his attention from the treats, the little boy reaches for a pen and paper and insists on writing it out, first and last name. He pushes the paper across the table to Rogers. “Now I get a donut,” Osei says, making an announcement, not asking permission. His father, Harry Rolle, smiles and relents. “You worked up an appetite writing.”

“Good job, buddy,” Rogers smiles warmly at the child. “Hard work gets rewards. I’m in the same bucket as you.”

Rogers has been working hard on the launch of Destine Prep for two years; his reward is only now coming into focus as the school moves from two years of planning and authorization to meetings with prospective students and their parents. Charter-school applications are mind-numbingly detailed, running hundreds of pages. Would-be school founders must document a demonstrated need for a new school, describe their academic model in detail, and show community support in the form of a strong local board of directors. Then there is the nuts-and-bolts work of real estate, contracts, construction management, hiring staff, fundraising, and persuading families to take a chance on a school that exists only as a PowerPoint presentation.

“I helped scale up Success Academy, but we had extraordinary resources, seemingly unlimited support, and [Success founder] Eva Moskowitz busting through barriers,” remarks Emily Kim, who founded the Zeta Charter School network after several years as general counsel at Success. “I know exactly what needs to be done because I’ve done it so many times. When I think about independent charter schools, given all the challenges school founders face, I don’t know how they overcome these massive obstacles solo.”

When no other families arrive for the information session, Rogers gamely launches into his presentation with Destine’s operations manager, Mashoma Brydie, who joins the meeting via Zoom. Much of Rogers’s talk could have come straight from a pitch for a no-excuses charter school two decades ago: Destine will offer an extended school day and year; kids are expected to be in school every day; and learning doesn’t stop over the summer. Rogers believes in “logical consequences” for behavior management and stresses he’s “big on communicating” with parents. Osei starts running laps around the table and trying to get his father’s attention as Rogers finishes his presentation. The mission of Destine Prep is to develop students in grades K–5 to become FUTURE CHANGE MAKERS (the PowerPoint slide renders this in all caps) through “rigorous academics, social and emotional learning, and affirmation of their identities.”

* * *

There was a time, fast receding into memory, when big-city charter schools were media darlings, lionized in movies like Waiting For Superman, and the subject of fawning coverage on 60 Minutes. They were the flagships of a fast-growing education-reform movement, luring the best and brightest new graduates of elite universities away from law schools and investment banks and into Teach For America, and from there to inner-city classrooms aspirationally named Harvard, Princeton, Georgetown, or Michigan instead of Room 222. Tightly run charter schools were celebrated as a rebuke to district-run dropout factories, which had relegated generations of low-income students to second-class citizenship. Charters bristled with do-gooder energy and dubbed themselves “no-excuses” schools, in the belief that the Black-white achievement gap was evidence of low expectations and indifference, not poverty and certainly not race. When students failed, it proved merely that adults had failed them. And there must be no excuses for adult failures. Period.

At the federal level, charter schools had patrons and champions from across the political spectrum. Bill Clinton was an early charter-school supporter; so was George W. Bush. The number of U.S. students in charters more than doubled from 2009 to 2018, to 3.3 million from 1.6 million, with most of those gains coming during the eight years of the Obama presidency. In the years since, bipartisan support for charter schools has significantly weakened. Earlier this year, President Biden’s Department of Education proposed new regulations on the $440 million federal Charter School Program. Progressives cheered the move to rein in money “squandered on unneeded, mismanaged schools and the operators.” Conservatives complained the move was “designed to bring the boisterous, popular charter school sector to heel.”

No single event heralded the change in the weather. In 2011, the biggest and most well-established urban charter network, KIPP, released a study showing that one third of its earliest cohorts of students had graduated from college—four times the rate for low-income Black and brown children at large, but less than half of the figure its founders believed they could achieve. The report led to significant changes in KIPP’s program and pedagogy. As the decade wore on, a palpable reform fatigue set in as some Americans soured on the standards, testing, and accountability regime that had come to dominate public education at large. Antagonists like Diane Ravitch hammered relentlessly at charter schools, questioning their results, attacking their “harsh disciplinary policies,” and turning “no excuses” from a rallying cry to an epithet. When widespread protests over racial discrimination inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement broke out on college campuses in 2015, charter critics adopted the protesters’ language. Teaching “taxonomy moves” common to no-excuses teachers represented “carceral pedagogy” aimed at “controlling Black bodies.” Students marching through school hallways in tightly supervised straight lines was “practice for prison.” White-led charter schools were said to echo power structures in society at large.

The charter sector has largely accepted the criticism as sincere and tried to adjust to it rather than rejecting it outright. That’s somewhat puzzling, given that there was ample material with which to construct a defense. First, college-preparatory no-excuses schools had lost little of their luster among parents for whom high expectations, tight classroom management, and school uniforms were reassuring signs of safe, well-run schools and an antidote to chaotic inner-city classrooms. Internal measures of parent satisfaction and “net promoter” scores (e.g. “How likely are you to recommend your child’s school to a friend or family member?”) remained consistently strong. Even more pertinently, the schools delivered measurable results. A 2017 study by Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes examined charter schools across 24 states, New York City, and Washington, D.C., and found that attending an urban charter school run by a larger network of schools was associated with improved educational outcomes.

That was precisely the point of nearly two decades of education policy. As the authors of the Stanford report observed, “we would expect that only charter organizations with a demonstrated track record of success would be allowed to open multiple schools.” The report concluded, “it is reasonable to expect current policies to result in continued improvement. However, there is still room for charter school authorizers to accelerate the rate of improvement by ensuring only the finest of charter school organizations are given the privilege of expanding their services to multiple schools.”

Written only five years ago, that language already feels anachronistic. New York has gone in a different direction, functionally denying high-performing charter management organizations the privilege of expanding their services to meet the demand. The sector itself now responds to different sets of impulses and metrics than in its days of heady and explosive growth.

* * *

When charter schooling’s old guard talked about the importance of their schools and movement being “led by people who look like the people we serve” and mused about the day their students would come back to teach in the schools they once attended, they were imagining Re’Shawn Rogers. He was a charter-school student in his native Detroit and worked as a teacher for several years after graduating from Eastern Michigan University in 2012, rising to be humanities dean at Achievement First’s Aspire Elementary school in Brooklyn’s East New York neighborhood.

As a child he struggled in school. “I didn’t really learn how to read until middle school,” Rogers says. During those years, his family moved from Detroit to Lansing, Michigan, where Rogers attended a diverse public school and got involved with its theatre and band programs. For high school, he moved back to Detroit and attended one of the city’s first charters, operated by Detroit Community Schools. “My teachers were just great and met us wherever we were,” he recalls. “For the first time I started to feel successful. I got into AP classes and stuff that I never would have imagined in elementary school.”

His dream was to open a charter school back home in the Detroit area, but in the summer of 2020, he was accepted as a fellow at BES, a Boston-based leadership-development program (the initials originally stood for “Building Excellent Schools”) that identifies and supports emerging school leaders. It was BES that encouraged him to consider applying for a charter in upstate New York, which was terra incognita to Rogers. “I created this huge spreadsheet of anyone who was doing anything important in the Capital region and started calling them,” he says. “‘Did you go to school here? What was your experience like? What do you think about a new school?’” His initial impulse was to apply to SUNY to open a school in Albany, but neighboring Schenectady hadn’t had a charter school in 15 years, since International Charter School was closed due to poor academic performance and financial stress.

As a BES fellow, and with both financial and technical support and advice from the organization, Rogers began working on the application for what would become Destine Prep at a tumultuous time in the charter-school movement and the nation. The Covid-19 pandemic had closed schools for the last several months of the school year and put much of the country on lockdown; the May 2020 death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police ignited profound anger among many. The summer when Rogers began his BES fellowship brought to a boil tensions that had long simmered in charter-school networks and the broader education-reform movement.

Seemingly overnight, social media accounts such as Uncommon Truth, Survivors of Success Academy, BnB@DP (Black and Brown at Democracy Prep) and dozens of others began springing up with students and staff posting accounts of perceived racist slights and abusive practices in their schools. KIPP, a national network of more than 240 schools serving more than 100,000 students, announced it would retire its famous “Work Hard. Be Nice.” slogan. CEO Richard Barth explained that the trademark phrase “ignores the significant effort required to dismantle systemic racism, places value on being compliant and submissive, [and] supports the illusion of meritocracy.”

“As a white man, I did not do enough as we built KIPP to fully understand how systemic and interpersonal racism, and specifically anti-Blackness, impacts you and your families—both inside of KIPP and beyond,” co-founder Dave Levin wrote in a plaintive letter to KIPP alumni. “It is clear that I, and others, came up short in fully acknowledging the ways in which the school and organizational culture we built and how some of our practices perpetuated white supremacy and anti-Blackness.”

KIPP was the most visible example of the culture clash between veteran figures in the charter-school movement and younger staff and alumni more attuned to current thinking about social justice. However, few organizations are more emblematic of the shift in values and mindset than BES, which was also transforming itself in response to activism and heightened racial consciousness.

“The big networks—KIPP, IDEA, Uncommon, Green Dot, Achievement First, and more—build from within,” wrote Richard Whitmire in his 2016 book about early charter schools, The Founders, in an admiring chapter about BES. “It’s a winning formula, but it skips over another promising glide path: potential charter leaders who come from outside that pipeline—school pioneers who could build networks every bit as successful as KIPP and Achievement First.”

For nearly two decades under its founder Linda Brown and chief academic officer Sue Walsh, BES had operated as a kind of boot camp for school leaders who would visit top charter schools across the country like Newark’s North Star Academy; Brooke Charter Schools in Boston; and Purpose Prep and Nashville Classical in Tennessee. Brown routinely plastered the word “urgency” in office windows and around the walls at Fellows’ training sessions, which sometimes began at 5:30 in the morning. “If you’re going to start a school, you’re going to be showing up at your office at 5:30 in the morning,” explains Walsh, “because your teachers are showing up at 6:30 and your kids are showing up at seven.”

BES fellows have founded more than 200 schools in 50 U.S. cities, educating more than 63,000 students. In 2018, Brown stepped down from the organization she founded. Aasimah Navlakhi was promoted from chief of staff to chief executive officer; she had initially joined BES as communications director four years earlier. She began her tenure with a listening tour, meeting with past and present BES fellows. “These conversations illuminated a gap between BES’s stated mission and lived values,” said Navlakhi in an interview posted on the organization’s website. She responded by launching an effort to “evaluate our programs and internal operations through a DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion] lens.” It concluded with a commitment to make BES “an actively anti-racist organization.”

“I felt in my gut that this path forward was the only way that we could support leaders to truly transform education for the students in their communities,” Navlakhi said. The organization soon rebranded itself, keeping the acronym BES but changing its name from “Building Excellent Schools” to “Build. Excel. Sustain.” Walsh followed Brown out the door. “The seminal moment for me was when we were given readings as a staff that ‘urgency’ was racist,” Walsh told me.

Interviewed jointly, both Brown and Walsh make a point of praising Navlakhi’s “commitment to equity and humanity.” But Walsh adds, “What we did not expect was the clear rejection and denigration of our work and our intentions, which are manifest in so many strong schools that are the platform on which the work of BES sits.”

“It’s become clear they’ve shifted from the primacy of academic excellence to the primacy of anti-racism,” observes Ed Kirby, an ed-reform fixture who was intimately involved in the design and launch of BES, and authored its “core principles,” which guided its work for two decades. “I’m not going to get into judging them and their new direction. But the place is completely unrecognizable to me,” he says. For her part, Navlakhi says she sees no tension in BES’ evolution. “In quality schools, academic excellence and anti-racism reinforce one another,” she says. “Promoting anti-racism and a community-centered approach creates an environment that respects students and families and, in turn, contributes to academic success.”

Some New York charter-school leaders are worried, however, that these shifts in emphasis will adversely affect students. Stephanie Saroki de Garcia, who runs the Brilla charter school network in the South Bronx, describes what she sees as competing priorities of charter-school parents versus staff “who have gone to elite colleges” and see schools as vehicles to promote societal change. “I think it’s going to have a real impact on academic outcomes for underserved kids, and the opposite of the intended effect. Kids are not getting what they need academically,” she says. “Even in my own child’s charter school, half of their professional development is on racial equity. How are they learning how to be excellent teachers? It’s really worrisome.” Saroki de Garcia has occasionally faced pushback from her own staff over Brilla’s classical curriculum and school culture. “Our response has always been, ‘Look, we’re here because the state has given us permission to teach kids a set of academic standards, and that’s Job One.’ If we don’t do that well, we shouldn’t be in business,” she says.

The transformation of BES stunned Brown. Walsh suggests that current voices in education reform “don’t have enough grounding in bad schools.” This last point comes up frequently in conversations with charter-school veterans: as the movement has grown and evolved, younger staffers have either forgotten or never knew the conditions to which no-excuses charters were created as an antidote.

“The numbers certainly show that parents prefer order and safety over chaos. It also shows in high school and college matriculation,” observes Lester Long, a 2004 BES fellow and the founder of Classical Charter Schools, a network of four schools in the South Bronx. “Deep learning can’t happen in fearful environments, either of other students in a too-chaotic school or of the teacher in a too-strict one. Ultimately, great teachers and schools find that balance.” Long also points out that “no excuses” was too poorly defined, but it was “a shorthand form of deep respect for Black and brown students. The key point was ‘I know you can do this. I believe in you.’ There were disappointing exceptions, but the original meaning and intent was one of empowerment,” says Long, whose schools were frequently visited by BES fellows prior to the change in leadership, but not since.

For Re’Shawn Rogers, meanwhile, the die was cast when there was an opening to become the interim principal at his school, but Achievement First turned him down. “We had a number of meetings with [co-CEOs] Doug [McCurry] and Dacia [Toll] about equity and just having more Black people in positions of senior leadership within the network,” Rogers says. But he didn’t see that happening for himself. “My overall feeling was that there was not a place for me as evident by the lack of senior leadership that looked like me or thought like me.”

* * *

In hindsight, New York was an unlikely locus of charter-school dynamism. “There was never a moment where there was great political enthusiasm for charters in New York,” notes James Merriman, the longtime head of the New York Charter Center, an advocacy organization. “It was just not in the DNA of New York, New York,” a Democratic stronghold and a stalwart union town. In 1999, Governor George Pataki approved a pay raise for state lawmakers in a political bargain that led to passage of the law authorizing charter schools. In New York City, a few years later, charter-school operators lucked into a pair of staunch allies in Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his schools chancellor Joel Klein, who raised millions of philanthropic dollars and lured the most successful charter management organizations with the promise of rent-free “co-located” space alongside traditional schools in buildings owned and run by the city’s Department of Education. The availability of facilities for start-up charter schools was “more than a shot in the arm,” Merriman recalls. “It was life itself.”

Bloomberg’s last day as mayor was December 31, 2013, but he remains a player in the city and in education reform. In April 2022, Bloomberg Philanthropies announced a pair of $100 million dollar gifts, one each for Harlem Children’s Zone and Success Academy. In Schenectady, Re’Shawn Rogers is operating on a much smaller scale. He and his school have received grants totaling $100,000 from BES, another $50,000 from the Albany’s Brighter Choice Foundation, and $70,000 from the Schenectady Foundation. “I had to work for that myself, so I’m very proud of that,” Rogers tells me over sandwiches and coffee at a downtown Schenectady pub. He’s equally pleased to have secured a deal that folds construction costs for his new school into the monthly rent for the space, which also offers room to expand as he enrolls more students in the next five years. And there’s another thing he’s proud of, now that he’s left a big charter management organization to open his own school: “It’s become important to me to make sure I see people of color in positions of power, and now I have the opportunity to put people in those positions.” A lot of his friends who are leading and starting schools are people of color, he adds, “so it’s starting to become more normalized to me.”

After lunch, we walk a few blocks to his school. Destine Prep is wallboard, insulation, and ductwork—a construction site, not an elementary school. It seems inconceivable that more than 100 kindergarteners and 1st graders will march up the stairs and into classrooms in less than two months. Rogers is unfazed. Like those early charter-school founders, he does not suffer from a lack of confidence.

But it’s all different now. The mission and vision of charter schools, the politics, the concerns of activists and advocates, and the deliverables demanded by philanthropists have all shifted over time. So have the values and ideals of the young people who still flock to this work, albeit in fewer numbers than in its halcyon days. Carello left SUNY over the summer to join the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. New York’s charter-school cap remains in place, but lobbyists and advocates suggest things might be different under Governor Kathy Hochul and New York City mayor Eric Adams, who sometimes sounds more favorably disposed to charter schools than the staunch enemy he replaced, Bill de Blasio. When charter advocates nowadays pitch lawmakers on lifting the cap, conversation is more likely than not to mention creating opportunities for more community-based charter schools like Destine Prep, rather than giving more charters to the big networks.

The one thing that hasn’t changed in 25 years are the parents. On an unseasonably chilly Saturday afternoon in June, Mashoma Brydie welcomes parents to a community center in Schenectady. Two dozen kindergarten and 1st graders are scheduled to be fitted for school uniforms for the school year that’s now just two months away. One of the first to arrive is Christine Lawson, whose grandson Jayceon will start kindergarten this fall.

If Re’Shawn Rogers is the school leader that charter trailblazers imagined would one day lead their movement, Lawson is the matriarch of the archetypal family charters were built to serve. Her own mother worked for the New York City Board of Education, but Lawson wanted something better for her five children, who today range from 18 to 45 years of age. So she cobbled together a mix of public, private, and Catholic schools in Brooklyn and the Bronx for them. All five graduated, which she suggests was no mean feat “during the drug era” in New York City. One went on to earn a degree from the University of California, Berkeley. Jayceon’s mom Whitney is also at the uniform fitting, but when it comes to schools, Lawson is clearly the decision maker in the family.

Her youngest son is about to graduate from Schenectady High School, but Lawson’s grandson will not be setting foot in the city’s schools. “Public school? Nah,” she says, then quickly adds she has nothing against them. The teachers in her son’s school “go hard for the kids,” but public schools “believe in social promotion” and don’t have high enough standards. “You’re just not walking out of high school with everything you need. I know that for a fact,” Lawson tells me. She’s certain Destine Prep will offer a “deeper level” of attention for her grandson. “It’s a brand-new school, but I trust them. I just trust them,” she explains. “We need more attentive people and hard-working teachers, and they’re in charter schools.” She learned about Destine Prep via a Facebook post. If she hadn’t, she would have “done her homework” on other options for her grandson. Even now, her daughter is still considering moving back to New York City. “If she goes back, then I’m gonna follow her, and we’re going to choose a Catholic school” for Jayceon.

She joins a handful of other families in front of a long table, covered with an array of neatly folded sky-blue Destine Prep uniform shirts and khaki pants. Lawson smiles, sighs, and says to no one in particular, “There’s just something about a charter school.”

Robert Pondiscio is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He is author of How The Other Half Learns: Equality, Excellence, and the Battle Over School Choice.

This article appeared in the Winter 2023 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Pondiscio, R. (2023). What Next for New York Charter Schools? The era of explosive growth of network-run, “no excuses” charter schools is over. Tentatively emerging: “community-based” charter schools. Education Next, 23(1), 36-44.

In the Summer 2022 issue of Education Next, in an article headlined “Locally Elected School Board Are Failing,” Vladimir Kogan synthesized the research and recommended, “reformers should remain laser focused on improving school governance—to ensure that the reform process prioritizes the interests of kids rather than the demands and political agendas of adults.” The article has generated a response from Rachel S. White, assistant professor at the University of Tennessee Knoxville; Sarah Stitzlein, professor at University of Cincinnati; Kathleen Knight Abowitz, professor at Miami University; Derek Gottlieb, associate professor at University of Northern Colorado; and Jack Schneider, associate professor at University of Massachusetts Lowell. Kogan, associate professor at The Ohio State University, responds to the response. The resulting exchange offers an excellent encapsulation of the range of views about the purpose, performance, and possibilities of not only the boards but also the schools they govern.

Are Locally Elected School Boards Really Failing?
A work in progress, with multiple purposes
By Rachel S. White, Sarah Stitzlein, Kathleen Knight Abowitz, Derek Gottlieb, and Jack Schneider

 

The Choice in Education Governance Debates: Complacency or Reform?
Too many school districts are the equivalent of municipal water systems constantly producing cholera outbreaks
By Vladimir Kogan

This article appeared in the Winter 2023 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

White, R.S., Stitzlein, S., Abowitz, K.K., Gottlieb, D., Schneider, J., and Kogan, V. (2023). Are School Boards Failing? A feature sparks a response and a defense. Education Next, 23(1), 68-74.

This is part of the forum, “Are School Boards Failing?” For an alternate take, please see “The Choice in Education Governance Debates: Complacency or Reform?,” by Vladimir Kogan.

This article appeared in the Winter 2023 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

White, R.S., Stitzlein, S., Abowitz, K.K., Gottlieb, D., Schneider, J., and Kogan, V. (2023). Are School Boards Failing? A feature sparks a response and a defense. Education Next, 23(1), 68-74.

This is part of the forum, “Are School Boards Failing?” For an alternate take, please see “Are Locally Elected School Boards Really Failing?,” by Rachel S. White, Sarah Stitzlein, Kathleen Knight Abowitz, Derek Gottlieb, and Jack Schneider.

This article appeared in the Winter 2023 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

White, R.S., Stitzlein, S., Abowitz, K.K., Gottlieb, D., Schneider, J., and Kogan, V. (2023). Are School Boards Failing? A feature sparks a response and a defense. Education Next, 23(1), 68-74.

When I recently decided to step down from leading Blackstone Valley Prep, an organization I cofounded and helped develop over 13 years, I was flooded with emotion. BVP is a highly acclaimed and intentionally diverse K–12 public charter-school network in Rhode Island that serves more than 2,200 students. To help process my thoughts and feelings about leaving, I turned to journaling, which helped shape an open letter to my school community.

Many people reached out to me about this letter and my upcoming departure. Several of them asked me to expand on a particular paragraph—my musings on mission:

Mission is everything. BVP needs to better articulate its mission to ensure that families know what they are signing up for and that BVP is delivering on the promise of that mission. BVP’s current mission is focused on college success, in large part because of a founding belief that college readiness is truly a path to accessing the American dream. Many people in the BVP community, however, want something else entirely. While that may be perfectly fine, BVP’s efforts should be to either find them a school that offers what it is that they are actually seeking, or BVP should revisit its mission and reinvent itself accordingly.

The importance of articulating a clear and ambitious mission seems obvious. Mission statements set the foundation for strategic plans and help guide the work of the staff. In a healthy organization, every employee should be able to look at their daily work and know that their time was spent in direct support of the mission.

The mission at Blackstone Valley Prep has been the same since 2010: to prepare every scholar for success in college and the world beyond. Each year since, I have led professional-development workshops with incoming staff where we reflect deeply on our mission statement. We discuss the words and phrases that resonate the most and the elements that might ring hollow to some. By the end of the session, everyone is expected to be able to recite the mission and be ready to explain it in their own words.

Over the years, every word in our mission statement has been affirmed by some and challenged by others. I have observed that the most celebrated word has been “every,” while the most polarizing word has been “college.”

I understand both sentiments. “Every” epitomizes aspiration. The idea that a school would aim to serve “almost every” or just “some” students is the antithesis of what we, as educators, are called to do. I cannot imagine walking into a classroom and celebrating a teacher who was doing an excellent job with “most” of the students while ignoring others. Even so, “every” has its detractors. Should every school seek to excel at teaching every field of study? Is every school equipped to serve every type of learner? If one school does not have the expertise or resources to serve a certain population, but another school nearby has both, why not match the learner with the better-equipped school? Are these not the very reasons that different types of schools exist? (Think Career and Technical Education schools or those that specialize in serving students with severe disabilities.)

“College” is also aspirational. The data on lifetime outcomes are clear: college graduates, on average, earn more, are more engaged in society, and live longer than those without postsecondary degrees. One of my greatest motivations in joining BVP was to address the not-so-soft “bigotry of low expectations” displayed by too many schools that counsel young people, especially low-income and BIPOC students, away from college.

My heart sinks whenever friends and colleagues recount that they told their own guidance counselors they wanted to attend a particular highly selective college only to be redirected to a less-distinguished institution. I myself had such an experience with a college counselor—I shared that I wanted to go to Prestigious University and was instead pointed to a small local college. That was all the motivation I needed. At that moment, I resolved to attend a school ranked at least as high as PU. For many students, however, that counselor downgrade is not a motivation but a permanent deflation. Yet, over the past several years at BVP, there have always been at least a few new teachers (every one of whom has at least a bachelor’s degree) who question whether college should be in our mission.

What is most perplexing to me, however, is that despite how clearly we communicate our mission, several young people each year tell us they have no desire to attend a two- or four-year college. I understand that a kindergartener may have little or no conception of college, but it baffles me that we have high school students who do not want college in their future. Why would students attend a high school that is focused on college—where classrooms are named for teachers’ college alma maters and which offers more than a dozen AP courses each year—if they have no desire to attend college?

At BVP, we are committed to serving the students who are in front of us, which may include counseling them on options such as non-degree pathways or careers in the military. But the question is, should every school be expected to serve everyone? Should a pre-nursing or pre-culinary high school serve students who have no desire to become nurses or chefs? Should a school designed for pregnant or parenting teens enroll students who are neither? And should BVP serve students who don’t want to go to college? If the answer to this last question is yes, should BVP change its mission accordingly?

As a strong believer in school choice, I am proud that BVP recently added a “high school transition counselor” who focuses on helping every 8th grader find their “best match” high school, including, for example, an acclaimed CTE school with specialized programs and an arts-themed school with a portfolio admissions process. What we are learning from this work is underscoring something we have known for a long time: no school is perfect for everyone, and there are not nearly enough great choices for our kids, especially those who live in certain zip codes. My greatest hope for the K–12 system is that we continue to attract and retain innovators, educators, and entrepreneurs who will do whatever it takes to ensure every child has a choice and an opportunity-filled life. I wish BVP well as it continues to wrestle with these crucial questions.

This article appeared in the Winter 2023 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Chiappetta, J. (2023). Mission Is Everything: The most celebrated word has been “every.” The most polarizing? “College.” Education Next, 23(1), 83-84

Settle into a wooden seat in the auditorium of Boston Latin School. Before long, your eyes will notice the names, painted and carved into room’s high walls, of the alumni who have made history since the school was founded in 1635. Early attendees include Benjamin Franklin, John Hancock, and Samuel Adams. Among the other graduates listed are philosopher and poet George Santayana, Class of 1882; political patriarch Joseph Kennedy, Class of 1908; composer Leonard Bernstein, Class of 1935; and Clifton Wharton, Jr., the first Black president of a major research university, Class of 1943.

Each year, 99 percent of Latin School’s senior class matriculates to four-year colleges, with scores of scholars earning admissions to Ivy League institutions and other highly selective universities. Countless alumni across eras attest that the rigor of BLS prepared them so that college actually felt, in some ways, easier and less intense. As an alumna of the school myself and having just completed my tenure as the school’s twenty-eighth headmaster (a term that changed to “head of school” in 2020) and first leader of color, I can affirm that this claim is supported by tens of thousands of success stories. Many of these tales of triumph feature students like myself, whose parents were born in other countries and knew nothing about the American college system, or students whose families have deeper roots in Boston but for whom BLS represented an elevator ride up from multigenerational poverty. For me, those accounts of changed life trajectories are a compelling counterargument to those in Boston and other places like San Francisco and New York who advocate eliminating exam schools in favor of entirely randomized assignments.

Boston Latin School is not only prestigious and historic, but it is also the largest secondary school in the city, serving more than 2,400 students in grades 7–12. If your loved ones have lived in Boston for even one generation, they know someone who graduated from or attended BLS for a period of time.

Until more recent years, the headmaster would assemble students in the auditorium on the first day of school and say, “Look to the left of you. Look to the right of you. Two of you won’t graduate.” When I took a seat as a 7th grader in 1989, things had softened. The speech had been modified: “Look to the left of you. Look to the right of you. One of you will not graduate.” By the time I returned to alma mater as headmaster in 2017, I’d inherited the new speech: “Look to the left of you. Look to the right of you. This journey is not going to be easy, so you will need to support one another along the way.”

Each decade in the modern era has brought positive changes that create more optimal conditions for students to thrive. In 1972, BLS went coed, as did its “sister” school, Boston Latin Academy (formerly Girls Latin School). In 2010, under Lynne Mooney Teta’s leadership, honors classes, which had served as unnecessary barriers to Advanced Placement courses and also to track a school that was already tracked by nature of its selective admissions status, were eliminated. The McCarthy Institute for Transition and Support was created in 2000 to facilitate services such as peer tutoring, Saturday Success School, and workshops for students and parents on topics including executive functioning and time management. BLS has tripled the size of its student-support team, growing its number of counselors, clinicians, and special educators. Seeking help when feeling overwhelmed slowly became something less stigmatized, though we still have a way to go.

BLS students groan about the nightly homework load (three hours on average), though the vast majority wouldn’t choose any other school as their second home. In fact, most spend more hours with us than they do with their families. Our more than 130 extracurricular clubs, 60 athletic teams, and 30 instrumental and choral groups keep them busy. When I was a student, the jazz band and show choir were my no-stress happy places, oftentimes serving as the motivators to get up for school after a late night of homework. Those groups are going strong today, along with the Junior Classical League, fencing team, myriad racial and cultural affinity groups, and hundreds of other activities that, as head of school, I would frantically try to drop in on and capture on my Instagram page.

For more than 50 years, admission to the school has been based on a standardized exam used in concert with report-card grades. During my era as a student, there was a federally mandated set-aside in the admissions process, assuring that at least 35 percent of each class would be Black and Hispanic. That policy was overturned in the late 1990s after a lawsuit. Following the elimination of this set-aside, the percentage of Black students declined significantly, even as Black and Hispanic students comprise the majority of the Boston Public Schools district.

Over the past three years, the confluence of the global pandemic and our nation’s racial reckoning pushed the district to action around the demographics of the city’s three exam schools, with much of the focus on Boston Latin School (in 2020, the school was 45 percent white, 29 percent Asian, 13 percent Hispanic, 8 percent Black, and 4 percent other/multi-racial, by the count of the school district, which uses those terms and categories). A temporary change to the admissions formula due to the inability to administer the standardized admission test during the Covid-19 pandemic ushered in the first students in generations who were admitted without an exam. These students all made the honor roll at their previous schools, though the effects of virtual school due to Covid-19 and the variance in curriculum by elementary school saw some of these young people struggling more than usual at first to find their footing at BLS. Online commenters began to chirp about whether these “sixies” (our term for 7th graders, meaning they have six years left to graduate) deserved a seat at the school, many of the commenters not even veiling their implication that the students’ racial identity and/or socioeconomic background made them less motivated, intelligent, or well behaved.

I had once been a young person whom many would have written off. I lived in the zip code that sent the lowest number of students to BLS. My mother was a single parent. With the support of my mom and grandmother, and through the opportunities afforded to me by Boston Latin School (including a scholarship that covered my undergraduate loans), I graduated magna cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania in three years. The current team of educators at BLS refuse to write off anyone’s potential, ignoring the noise and focusing on the students. I am incredibly proud of the Class of 2027’s achievement in their first year, particularly those who worked to fill in content gaps through math-intervention classes and a daily after-school program instituted with federal pandemic-relief funds.

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At the age of 21, I began my career as an English teacher at Boston Latin School. Before becoming the head of the school, I left for years of rich professional experiences elsewhere, including my first school-leader position as headmaster of Another Course to College (a small pilot high school within the Boston Public Schools), chief of staff for Boston Public Schools, and deputy chief of leadership development for D.C. Public Schools. The leadership experience that most informed my work as head of school at BLS was my role as principal at Eastern Senior High School in Washington, D.C. The student demographics at Eastern are strikingly different from those at BLS; Eastern’s student body is 99 percent Black. There are, though, more threads of commonality between them than you might imagine, or even than I initially did. The Eastern High School building and Latin School’s current building were both built in the 1920s—palatial structures with central marble staircases. Both schools also boast strong alumni networks that take great pride in the accomplishments of their institutions. However, Eastern fell on difficult times in the late 1990s, and by the time I assumed leadership in 2011, the school had experienced more than 10 school leaders in as many years. The district had phased out new cohorts so that it could reboot with just a 9th grade, and I had the opportunity to relaunch the school’s legacy with an incredible hand-selected team over the next four years.

Our team fought to prove that our students could and deserved to compete on every stage—whether that meant testing for the International Baccalaureate Diploma or slaying in national marching-band competitions. With those successes, I returned to BLS with the knowledge that a community as resourced and supported as ours had no excuses not to soar—rapidly and immediately. And then, in March of 2020, the world changed. Every school leader in America has had to employ new skills over these past two years (we should all earn honorary certificates in public health, for instance).

Eventually, while leading a premier school, I realized that many of the same leadership lessons I learned during my experience at a turnaround school still applied. Students need the same conditions, whether a school is high performing or under resourced. To act otherwise enforces a culture of low expectations.

First, a culture of urgency is essential. What I mean by “culture of urgency” is to unite all constituents around a mission and to be clear about where we currently fall short. Urgency does not mean to place so much pressure on teachers and staff that their longevity in the profession is unlikely. Often, in urban education, urgency is created from an incident. Boston Latin School received national attention in 2016 when Black students at BLS shared issues on campus that resulted in their feeling unseen and unheard. After this, we worked in partnership with the Boston Public Schools Office of Equity to build new systems for reporting bias-based incidents. We also engaged in whole-staff professional development and school-wide dialogues about race and equity. Our personnel committee worked intentionally to further diversify our staff so that more students saw themselves in the adults around them—we hired talented educators across racial, gender, and sexuality identities, including the first Asian American and openly LGBTQ+ assistant heads of school in the institution’s history. Hiring with diverse representation as a core value is not, as some would claim, putting identity politics ahead of education. Actually, it’s crucially important to educational success. We watched our students find outlets on staff when experiencing microaggressions, when seeking to institute new programming on campus, or when desiring a space to just be.

The calls for attention to our racial climate were just one of many jump starters of urgency that we experienced in recent years. Our administrators, faculty, and staff have responded promptly to many of these alarm bells even as the work is ongoing—increasing attention to students’ mental health, stepping up vigilance regarding campus safety and visitor protocols, and closing access gaps for technology, Wi-Fi, and comfortable places for students to study after school hours.

The challenge is that some of the areas that require attention are a little less loud at schools where all of the students pass state assessments and head off to college after graduation. Urgency is often an easier sell in “underperforming schools”—the threat of takeover or double-digit failure rates are powerful narratives for why drastic change must take place. However, at “high-performing schools,” a lack of urgency can lead to a feeling of being “good enough.” Yes, students are passing their classes, but are there gaps in performance for BIPOC students? For special-education students? For students whose families don’t speak English? Yes, students attend school daily and generally complete their work. Are they engaged in the content? Do they see connections between their coursework and the world around them? Is their experience with pacing, grading, and assessment similar, regardless of which teacher they’ve been assigned?

Instruction is the heartbeat of schoolwide change. Even a campus that has identified culture and climate as the key issues to address must deeply consider the place where students spend the majority of their time: classrooms. When educators apply for positions at BLS, our personnel committee institutes performance tasks and, in some cases, administers content assessments. Candidates for our inclusion teacher position write plans for how they would support special-education students with accessing a complex text and multistep writing assignment. Candidates for our assistant head of school role analyze performance data and share their steps to work with teachers and assess instruction to address the gaps. We held this same standard of rigorous application for vacancies at Eastern. There are some experts in a subject area who lack the pedagogical effectiveness to make meaning for students. There are also knowledgeable teachers who teach very well as long as every student does exactly what they’re supposed to. We need educators who are fair, flexible, responsive to feedback, and committed to their own growth in anti-racist practices. However, the urgency of now does not allow for educators who do not have the content background required to support students through the attainment of this same information, even if they’re “great with kids.” Districts should create pathways for those educators to become proficient in hard-to-staff content areas so that school leaders do not need to feel forced to choose between content knowledge and the ability to forge trusting relationships with students.

In deciding the courses that we offer to high-school students and in determining the most effective ways for the students to struggle productively with the material, we cannot ignore the fact that high-performing schools are steered by the expectations of selective colleges. These universities want to see their engineering majors take AP Physics, for instance. So at BLS we offer both AP Physics courses, the one in mechanics and the one in electricity and magnetism. We encourage our students interested in engineering to select one or both of them in junior or senior year, sometimes at the sacrifice of an elective they might prefer. Large universities regularly subject their freshmen to impersonal lectures in large halls, with their entire grade depending on a couple of high-stakes exams, so we recognize that there’s a place for students needing to practice taking in large amounts of information verbally and visually. Students learn to break that information down into outlines that they can study from later. We also run a week of final exams at the end of each school year so that students become accustomed to preparing for cumulative timed exams. Admissions officers strain to find ways to sort through students with similar GPAs, poring over evidence of leadership in their extracurricular activities as one potentially distinctive characteristic. So while BLS students are already strapped for time due to the six major subjects they take each year, they pile on deep commitments to their clubs, bands, sports, and part-time jobs.

Certainly there is self examination for BLS to do as a school, especially as surveys reveal students being perpetually sleep deprived and often managing anxiety. That same self reflection is also warranted at schools asserting that students don’t need (or “can’t handle”) homework, or schools that lack a pathway to calculus (or even pre-calculus) or spend an entire year on a single novel in English class in service of “meeting students where they are.” It is a fair criticism of intensely rigorous schools such as BLS that perhaps they are too driven by what external influences deem a “well-rounded” high-school experience. It is appropriate to examine nightly homework to see what is authentic practice of the material and what is unnecessary busy work that doesn’t advance learning. It is right to question whether the College Board drives the pacing of our classes to the point that, at times, depth may be sacrificed for breadth. But the BLS track record of not only getting students in to, but also getting them through, four-year colleges at rates far exceeding those of other urban high schools is real, and it crosses racial and socioeconomic lines.

Still, resting on laurels is not an effective leadership strategy for any school principal. Navigating the tension of high standards and flexibility, recouping lost instructional time from Covid, and ensuring social-emotional learning isn’t an afterthought require considerable time observing classrooms and working with instructional leadership teams. This is an area where I didn’t meet the goals I set for myself—often feeling the pull of returning emails that felt like emergencies instead of keeping to a set schedule of uninterrupted time on instruction.

How can districts help school leaders clear the decks to focus on the main thing? They should more actively borrow from charter-network practices of employing non-educators who are strong in their fields and placing them at school sites to support operations. At Eastern, I had a chief of staff who worked alongside me on community engagement as we fought to rebrand the school’s reputation on rapidly gentrifying Capitol Hill. At Boston Latin School, we have a director of operations whom we recruited back to alma mater (she’s a class of 1998 graduate) after a successful career in restaurant management. Coordinating in-school Covid testing for more than 1,000 students a day fell to her. At some other schools, principals were doing that work entirely by themselves, likely at the cost of their time in classrooms.

Stay true to one’s principles as a leader in the face of political landmines. Boston has a history of racism. While the physical violence of the desegregation era in the city is past, there are often reminders that beliefs last generations, and we are still feeling the daily impact of systemic and individual bias. Especially at schools where BIPOC students are the minority, leaders must deliberately elevate their perspectives and find spaces for them to lift their voices. At BLS, this came in the form of an annual Martin Luther King schoolwide celebration, cultural shows sponsored by groups such as Black Leaders Aspiring for Change and Knowledge (BLACK), Asian Students in Action (ASIA), and Talented and Gifted (TAG) Latino Club, and even a video produced by BIPOC students about their honest experiences at BLS that we watched schoolwide in an advisory block. Sometimes I fell short of the fortitude I needed in challenging moments. This spring, an educator displayed a piece of student work by a young person of color who wrote a poem for his civics class critiquing his predominantly white neighborhood, sparking ire from some BLS families and other residents unaffiliated with our school who were offended by the depiction of the neighborhood as exclusive and racist. While I didn’t, and still do not, believe it to be a wise decision to post the piece publicly, absent context or a space for readers to process or discuss the inevitable strong reactions to its content, and without the student’s explicit consent, I overcorrected in my apology for its display. I failed to state explicitly the student’s right to portray his perspective and experience as he chooses, and I neglected to commend our teachers for fostering the space where students could explore the biases in their own communities. While many conversations, follow-up actions, and additional activities occurred with the students themselves, my public statement on the issue will remain a regret, and it speaks to the danger created when a leader is overly conciliatory, something that can easily occur when you’re trying to keep everyone rowing in the same direction in a community with many different politics.

In every school context, the work must be grounded in love. In one of our most painful situations at Eastern, three of our students were shot and sustained non-life threatening injuries after getting caught in crossfire as we departed from a school basketball game. I remember calling my grandmother in Boston the night before our return to school, wondering what to say to our students after the collective trauma of what we’d survived. In her 90-year-old wisdom, she said, “Tell them you love them.” I don’t remember much about what exactly was said when we somberly assembled in the auditorium the following morning, but I remember our team articulating how much we loved our young people. We promised that we would do all we could to keep them safe. And they knew that there were limitations to what was in our power to do, but they believed and trusted in the community we’d forged.

Over the past five years, there have been so many hardships that our young people have endured. Isolation for over a year of their formative education. Watching, on cellphones, video of the murder of a man by law enforcement and then making decisions about if, when, and how they wanted to enter the national conversation. Struggling to feel safe in the wake of school shootings on a regular basis. Some of the crises were specific to the BLS community, such as the untimely passing of two students and a beloved staff member. At times, it felt like the only promise we could make students was to love them. And to love our students means to love their families. And to love our teachers. And to love so hard that sometimes you feel like you can’t lead anymore because you’re spent. But then you head to a Junior Classical League tournament and watch students in togas riding a homemade chariot, laughing and acting every bit their youthful age. And your cup fills again.

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There are those who will inevitably say that advice from educators at Boston Latin School is nontransferable. Our school admittedly benefits from a significant endowment due to donations over the past century from generous alumni and families, an unusual privilege in the world of public education. This funding provides scholarships to our graduates and supports personnel and programming that enhance our students’ experiences in athletics, the arts, global travel, independent research, and internships. The annual additional amount that we receive from the Boston Latin School Association to support programming is approximately $1,000 per student. Even after counting those additional funds, Boston Latin School still has one of the lowest per-pupil allocations among Boston Public high schools. The attention around this funding creates a distraction and bolsters the idea that high-performing schools should be treated as anomalies that don’t offer any replicable practices. I walked into Eastern Senior High School on the first day of our relaunch, with the motto of Boston Latin School in my head (Sumus Primi: “We are first”), and told our students they were the best. Every single staff member gave their best in return. Five years ago, I walked into Boston Latin School and called upon leadership lessons from my tenure at Eastern to bring us through this tumultuous era. Maybe we should stop claiming that the roadmap is drastically different based on what the students in front of you look like and what their scores are. Instead, let’s hold sacred space for leaders across school types to share best practices, to walk in another’s shoes (and to walk through one another’s schools), and to keep our cups full.

Rachel Skerritt graduated from Boston Latin School in 1995 and served as its head from 2017 to 2022. She is a chief strategy officer at Attuned Education Partners.

This article appeared in the Winter 2023 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Skerritt, R. (2023). What I Learned Leading America’s First Public School: A culture of urgency, grounded in love, is essential, at “high-performing” and “underperforming” schools alike. And try to find a way to refill your cup. Education Next, 23(1), 46-53.