Designing Education
A podcast hosted by Robert Balfanz, director of the Everyone Graduates Center.
Conversations with leaders in education from around the country on bold new ideas and research-based strategies for redesigning American education to more effectively engage all students and equip them for the challenges of today’s workplace and world.
Season Two
A Place Where Everyone Wants to Be
Season 2, Episode 8 | 30min
In Season 2, Episode 8, Sofia Russo, Principal of High School for Media and Communications located in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City joins Robert Balfanz for a conversation about what is possible when school leaders, teachers, students, families and community members are given opportunities to engage in school redesign. With just a little support and structure, Media and Communications has instituted practices to incorporate wisdom from the perspectives of their full school community resulting in a school where everyone wants to be. As a result, learning and opportunities for post-secondary success expands.
Graduation Requirements Leading to a Pathway for Each Student
Season 2, Episode 7 | 30min
In Season 2, Episode 7 Graham Wood, Director of the Office of Graduate Success, at the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce joins Robert Balfanz for a conversation about how high school graduation requirements and the very design of high schools can be re-imagined so that all students graduate high school on a pathway to adult success.
The great American high school of the 20th century enabled more people than in any other nation in the world to obtain secondary education from 1920 to 1970. Standardization helped high schools scale secondary education around a common experience, that was recognizable, from high school to high school.
But the world is very different in 2023 than it was in 1970, and high schools, have a different role to play. This requires quality and customization. Ohio is showing the way and we look forward to learning, what it learns.
Designing an Education System That Works for All Students
Season 2, Episode 6 | 36min
Celebrating its one-year anniversary, the National Partnership for Student Success (NPSS), a partnership between the U.S. Department of Education, AmeriCorps, and the Johns Hopkins Everyone Graduates Center, was launched following a call to action from the Biden-Harris Administration for more Americans to serve as tutors, mentors, college/career advisors, student success coaches, and integrated student support coordinators to provide young people with supportive learning environments and experiences that will support them to recover from the impacts of the pandemic and thrive.
In Season Two’s sixth episode, Cindy Marten, the U.S. Deputy Secretary of Education, joins Robert Balfanz for a conversation about how local innovation, K-12 and higher education collaboration, NPSS, and federal education policy all have key roles to play in enabling design of an education system that works for all students.
Reimagining Seat Time and the Traditional School Bell Schedule, Part 2
Season 2, Episode 5 | 27min
In this episode, Robert Balfanz continues the conversation with New Hampshire’s Extended Learning Opportunity Network’s Kerrie Alley-Violette and Sean Peschel, two on-the-ground educators working to make “learning anywhere, anytime” real.
At the time when the sources and locations of knowledge and training have multiplied exponentially, innovative efforts like New Hampshire’s ELO Network help break seat time requirements, drawing on the realization that learning is not determined by the amount of time a student spends in a classroom, but rather occurs both in school and through experiences outside of schools. What Kerrie and Sean’s groundbreaking work shows is that challenging seat time is being done—and thus that it can be done.
Reimagining Seat Time and the Traditional School Bell Schedule, Part 1
Season 2, Episode 4 | 26min
When teams of educators, students, and community members across the nation work to redesign high schools, one thing that repeatedly stands in the way is the school schedule and the need to meet seat time requirements. There is no better example of how the 20th Century designed high school no longer works in the 21st century than seat time. It is based in the idea that how much you learn is determined by how long you spend sitting in a classroom and originated at the turn of the 20th century as it means to standardize student learning experiences.
A hundred years later, the standards and accountability of credit students needed to graduate remains largely the same, and this essentially leaves no flexibility in a student’s schedule for any form of experiential or out-of-school learning. At the time when the sources and location of knowledge and training have multiplied exponentially, it is the innovative efforts like New Hampshire’s Extended Learning Opportunity Network that helps to break the gridlock of seat time requirements.
In this episode, Robert Balfanz is joined by Kerrie Alley-Violette, ELO coordinator of the Sanborn Regional High School and president of the ELO Network, and Sean Peschel, ELO coordinator at Oyster River High School and vice president of the ELO Network to discuss the innovative work happening in New Hampshire.
Equalizing Opportunities to Learn
Season 2, Episode 3 | 36min
As a species, humans are smart, adaptive, and resilient. We all have the capacity to think, create, and contribute to society at a high level. What stands between this shared capacity and everyone realizing its full potential is the opportunity to learn. This is where human shortcomings come in … including greed, power, fear, racism, and othering. They play a role in the development of schools and education systems that are not only far from equal in the provision of opportunity to learn, but are too often designed in ways that undermine the agency, belonging, and connection we all need to thrive, especially for those furthest from opportunity.
In today’s episode Bob Balfanz is joined by Michael Wotorson, director of the Schott Foundation for Public Education’s National Opportunity to Learn Network, who has been at the forefront of efforts to organize and support community-driven efforts to push schools towards opportunity to learn for all.
Chronic Absenteeism and Keys to Reingaging Students
Season 2, Episode 2 | 44min
The evidence is clear. Students need to attend school on a regular basis to succeed. If the purpose of school is to help students learn and development, then being there is important.
Until quite recently, however, we did not regularly measure the extent to which the students enrolled in a school were attending on a regular basis. Until 2017 or so, the most common measure used to measure a school’s attendance was average daily attendance (ADA), or how of the many students enrolled in the school are present on the typical day. It turns out that this measure hides as much as it reveals. This is because it’s very possible for a school to have an ADA in the low 90’s, but still have 20% of its students chronically absent — missing ten percent (or about a month) or more of the school year.
Since the mid 2000’s, Hedy Chang and her organization, Attendance Works, has called attention to chronic absenteeism, its consequences and prevalence, and optimal solutions.
The Necessity of Supportive Relationships
Season 2, Episode 1 | 33min
As we kick off season two of the Designing Education podcast during National Mentoring Month, Bob Balfanz is joined by Tim Wills, Chief Impact Officer for MENTOR, the leading organization in the nation working to scale high-quality mentoring in and out of school.
Positive relationships enable trust, which enables cooperation, and collective and engaged effort. They also serve as a buffer to the impacts of trauma and life’s challenges. It is becoming more and more recognized that positive supportive relationships with adults are essential to school success. The pandemic drove home how important supportive relationships in schools between adults and students were to the wellbeing of all. Yet, middle and high schools have not been designed to support and enable strong adult-student relationships. Teachers often see 120 to 150 students a day, students interact with six to 10 or more adults every day for short periods of highly scripted time, which leaves little time or opportunity for students and teachers to get to know each other. As a result, everyone tends to interact with each other based on their role in the school. Thus, only about half of high school students report there is an adult at school who knows and cares about them as a person, with only about one third of students from historically underserved populations saying this. Those that said they had a supportive adult at school reported half the mental health challenges during the pandemic as those who did not. We can see that relationships really matter. They are not nice. They are necessary. So how do we close the relationship gap in schools? Tune in as we dig deep into this question.