Beyond Test Scores: Redefining Success with Whole Child Learning

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It's a gateway of immigration and refugees. Predominantly Latin X students, but also Asian Pacific and a smattering of others. Like I said, a lot of middle Easterners and growing Muslim population. So a very interesting and challenging mix given that we are in Orange County, a very affluent county in California.

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d we also are home of Oxford [: 00:02:00

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d true both at the Cal State [: 00:03:00

That has garnered a lot of state and national attention, and Chan Zuckerberg Foundation has given us a grant with the University of California to study what's going on, and I'm going to talk more about that later, but I wanted to lead with that because it's important that the audience understand that we have very powerful longitudinal data even though we do not teach to the test in AUHSD.

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Tell me about that transition and then I'd love to dive into your leadership roles later on in education as well.

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I'm really all about innovation and change and being more entrepreneurial in terms of how we approach our educational product with our kids and our families. So you could say that's good and bad because I did not have that traditional site school experience.

But I also know that because I did not. Our cabinet, I made sure that our assistant supes have strong principles. So I think it's really important as a leader to be aware of your sort of gaps that you have in terms of your resume or whatever you want to call it, your life experiences.

And to be honest about that, I think that's really important not to pretend that you are something that you're not.

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Shifting gears completely. I had a retail store, high end retail store on Melrose in West Hollywood and got into a lot of business and entrepreneurship. I rode that, ended up losing money and finding myself at 32 living back at home. And my dad saying, what the hell is all this education for?

I really had to look at the mirror and re examine what my purpose was. And a good friend of mine who became a teacher said, Mike, I really think you would love teaching. You love kids and you should consider this. So I really am grateful for having a mentor early on that brought me into the profession because I fell in love with teaching.

At the same time, I [: 00:06:00

That combined to a interest in politics as well. So I became a teacher, but I also became an elected official as a North Orange County Community College trustee. So I learned a lot about macro educational systems and also about working with higher ed. I brought that all into my experience as a superintendent, and I think that really helped shape me.

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And then moving to education where it's very purpose driven, where you're impacting the lives of so many kids. What was that first leadership role in education that you accepted?

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I knew I had instructional chops and I brought a lot of work ethic from the private sector. I worked very hard and took teaching very seriously. And at that, this was before all the standards. So I was really into developing lesson plans with other teachers that were engaging in a lot of project based management type of things.

My mentor Donna Perry, [: 00:08:00

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in and no child left behind,: 2000

I was really upset by that and when I did become superintendent, I had a big decision to make as to whether we were going to continue to be a district that were focused on test scores or focused on the whole child. And I knew I had enough support of the teacher leaders to back me on that.

And with a board that was interested in whole child education in terms of career pathways and visual performing arts, and offering a wide array of curricular opportunities rather than narrowing the curriculum, which many urban districts are doing, to reading and math and what was tested.

ion and real problem solving [: 00:10:00

Now, not every teacher did that. Some kind of just took advantage of that, but we had enough of a critical mass that said, okay, we're gonna do this. Because our test scores did not go down. In fact, many of our, especially in writing, that actually went up. I knew we were on to something special when those teachers, they would rise to the occasion.

And I think now we're at an inflection point so many years later that I think enough of the country is tired of focus on test scores because post pandemic we're seeing high chronic absenteeism. Kids are not coming back to school and because they're choosing, I think public schools are realizing they have a product and if you're not sticky. To use Disney's term, if you don't intentionally infuse dopamine into the school day, why should they, right?

hose dopamine moments in the [: 00:11:00

They're going to be talking about amazing experiences they had in the classroom, solving some of these tremendous problems that are facing Gen Z. Climate change, homelessness, racial relations, all these things that matter to this generation.

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but it's going to take some [: 00:12:00

How long was that lag time for you guys? And how did you navigate the conversations in that kind of interim window as a leader?

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udience at gymnasium full of [: 00:13:00

So that was a huge thing too, in terms of shifting as a driver test scores to career preparation and jobs. And part of this performance test assessments are these truncated TED Talks where our parent stakeholders they approved of the shift early on. Now in our district, no one even talks about test scores.

of skills and what types of [: 00:14:00

We've gone along, we've done a lot of this career preparation where our teachers now are part of that talent scout and they're helping to identify a kid's talents, helping the kid identify their own talents, and then working with counseling teams on developing what this might mean, your purpose and your passion, your calling for a job or major.

And this is why UC Irvine is saying your kids are coming out. They might want to be doctors or engineers, but importantly, they know why they want to be a doctor. And that's the difference between your kids and kids from other districts. They've done a lot of that self introspection on what they want to do.

d that's okay. This is why a [: 00:15:00

She says, Mike, you're one of the few districts we know of that are taking this all to scale. And we want to study your kids from junior high to high school and actually measure brain growth and development. We have the capacity to do that. So we're very interested in working with folks like that. I know we're on the cusp of a lot of different types of things that are going to be useful in terms of K 16 spaces.

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It's now for technical skills is now gone down to almost two and a half years. So what that means is the skills that you learn within two and a half years. Almost half of them would be already obsolete or irrelevant, at least for technical skills. And then for general skills, you're looking at a four to five year time horizon.

able to prepare the kids for [: 00:17:00

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We call our main driver the Career Preparedness Systems Framework. It is ultimately about jobs. I think, politically, there's so much divisiveness around education in schools, but I, whether you're from the right or from the left, you're not going to argue about jobs, especially jobs that are connected to your own personal drivers.

ion then can lead to a whole [: 00:18:00

You're going to learn and get stronger and more resilient. That's the lesson of the pandemic itself, that our kids are not a generation of learning losers. There are many academics and people in my position who are crying about learning loss and not realizing that you're actually stigmatizing the whole generation of kids has been losing out on their education.

ing out more resilient. This [: 00:19:00

If that's internalized, that's going to lead to even more disconnectedness, and I think we're at a very dangerous inflection point overall in this country, because if you have a growing number of people, especially from the middle class, a large number of sectors of young people, who say I don't see myself in this country or in this society succeeding. And losing faith in education or in business or in government, law enforcement, whatever. That's a big problem. And I think that there are certain political forces that are leveraging that fear for their own purposes in this country. We're seeing that. And that's very dangerous.

folks together around career [: 00:20:00

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Unfortunately we're seeing that in some of these big districts that are trying to buy into all these shiny objects. And the teachers themselves, are the ones that are the practitioners. Early on, we identified teachers who were very interested in accessing AI tools.

ut AI tools and one teacher, [: 00:22:00

Because we've been sitting down watching how calculators have transformed science and math. And now I have one for history and potentially for English. And I thought that was such a great statement. A calculator for history or English. That's what it is. It's a very powerful tool.

And just like a calculator, you have to know how to prompt that calculator. How to apply that powerful tool. And that's what chat GPT is. We have embraced it. And early on, we found that California, this big tech state does not have an AI framework. So we developed our own, one of the first ones in the state of California.

it in. Allowing teachers to [: 00:23:00

ou're teaching in a way that [: 00:24:00

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for and grow that leadership [: 00:25:00

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I talked earlier about learning loss. If you believe in that, then you're more deficit based because that's what that is, that construct. Or do you believe in our Kids and their assets that they bring to the table. We've really developed some sophisticated hiring tools and evaluation to bring in our admin and teachers.

cious business. And he talks [: 00:26:00

leads to a major in college [: 00:27:00

There's all stakeholders as people that are supporting you and against you and all of that. Second level is really important for principals to understand is the interplay between the district and the school site, that's a second level of chess and many districts are top down where it's like the principal and the sites are saying, Oh, the DO, the district office is making us do this.

erplay between the first and [: 00:28:00

So I think it's very important that districts understand those three levels and develop some fidelity to what you're trying to do as an organization. And by the way, people ask me who's the opponent here? When this three level chess, the opponent at every level is the status quo.

That's who you're playing against. And if you understand that, in terms of transforming systems, and if you have enough people who understand that then you're gonna be able to truly transform at the ground level at that level one, cause that's where things happen ultimately in the classroom.

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functional systems, you can [: 00:30:00

Who's the teacher that helped cultivate that? So going back to the pandemic, it exposed districts in terms of food insecurity. So based on that, and based on this sort of street data coming from kids and families, because we were pushing out 11, 000 meals a day at the height of this. And we were in barrios and all that. Out of that, listening to the stories of the kids themselves, we use some of our COVID monies to develop a working farm at one of our sites charged with solving food deserts.

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And that's why our product of education is much more sticky in terms of kids really identifying problems in the community, but having the freedom to do something about that during the school day. This is not an afterschool program. One of our big partners is Google. We have Google certificates about project management that are being taught in an English class. The English teacher is saying, this is great because kids are learning how to manage projects to solve the problems. And they're still writing and speaking. They're doing all ELA. And this is why our test scores are going up because they're doing a lot of reflective writing about these things and they're feeling empowered because they're actually being heard, which is huge.

and we have the most robust [: 00:32:00

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How would you advise them to get started? What's the first one to three things that they need to be thinking about and doing?

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y's talking about how do you [: 00:34:00

To me, if you think about a Ted Talk construct, it starts with your own story, your own narrative. And I've done this research, and I've looked at this policy, and now I started this club where I'm going to present to the school board or the city council, I've been able to connect the dots in terms of who's responsible, who benefits, who does not benefit and what can be done about it.

So there's a lot of entry points, but I would say that's been very powerful for a lot of folks that have visited us.

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rs and drive impact for your [: 00:36:00

Thank you so much.