A Conversation with Jon Schnur

As the cofounder and chairman of New Leaders for New Schools, and an important contributor to the education policy of both the Clinton and Obama administrations, Jon Schnur has been actively involved in reinventing the American education system for almost two decades. His work has focused on teacher and school leadership quality, charter schools, and reforming urban school systems. He helped create the Race to the Top program, which was introduced as part of the 2009 stimulus package, and is now widely considered one of the most successful innovations in education policy in recent years.

SJ: I think we all agree that something has started to change in the education space over the past five years or so, in that there’s a new interest in innovation in how schools work: how we teach teachers, how we compensate them, how the classrooms are structured. People seemed open to new ideas—why is this happening now?

 

JS: I started working on this full-time in 1993, and it felt like those of us who were working on education did not have that sense of national focus and urgency and possibility then. And that has changed. I think there are a few drivers. I think one of them is the economic shift; the country’s understanding of the role that education plays in tomorrow’s economy. It’s gotten both educators but also business leaders and the media interested in education. In the 1970s, a quarter of jobs required postsecondary education, and today more than two-thirds require it. In a few decades, to have that kind of macroeconomic shift, it’s seismic. People recognize that education is really the key to economic competitiveness, so that’s driven people across the political spectrum and the labor business world.

The second thing is that one of the great successes over the past ten or fifteen years is that we in this country now have hundreds of schools serving low-income kids that are getting dramatic results, which is really dispelling the myth that poverty and social background [are] the driver of educational outcomes. When you have really quality schools and quality teaching, they can be a powerful strategy in countering poverty, though of course it’s not the only thing that’s needed. So we have these proof points of schools that work—some in the betterbranded charter schools, but some in traditional public schools, too.

And the third thing that I would say—and this is something that comes out of our work at New Leaders—we started looking in 2004–2005 at schools that were getting really dramatic results compared to schools that were getting only average results. Our team visited a hundred schools and we looked at what patterns were leading to breakthrough improvements in those schools—and the patterns were so consistent. It wasn’t just that there was this amazing, charismatic leader who could somehow defy gravity. It was that there were some consistent patterns in different neighborhoods all around the country that actually were pretty similar. So it’s not just that individual schools can generate success, but the patterns that drive that success are so consistent that it gives you a sense of confidence that we actually can take this to [a] greater scale.

 

SJ: Let’s talk about the innovation in education that you’ve been most closely associated with: Race to the Top.

 

JS: Race to the Top is one vehicle in education to try to support taking some of these breakthrough successes we’ve seen and help take them to greater scale. During the transition period after the 2008 election, President-elect Obama set aside almost a seventh of the stimulus package for education, and what he proposed was a large amount of funding to prevent layoffs of teachers—in return for significant reform and innovation in the schools. The piece that became the center of the reform and innovation component was Race to the Top. It was essentially a $5 billion carveout that became a competition. There were three components, but [the] main competition involved $4 billion. Essentially, Obama said to the state governors and state superintendents: “If you agree on significant reform and innovation, if you really focus on continuous improvement in your schools—if you really come up with a plan to do this, we’ll give you a share of four billion dollars in this competitive process.” Actually, this competitive funding is a small share of education funding nationally—it’s $4 billion out of more than $400 billion being spent on education.

 

SJ: What’s appealing about the structure of it is that you have essentially this mix of top down and bottom up: you have the federal government saying here are some macro goals that we think are important, but the specific changes and new ideas and innovation that are going to be most helpful in achieving those goals—we’re not going to tell you what those are. That’s a very powerful mix.

 

JS: And it was controversial! When the president proposed this, most of the Republicans opposed it because they didn’t want to increase education funds. Many of the Democrats opposed it because they didn’t want to fund competition. They just wanted to put the money into existing programs. So there was no constituency for it. And the only reason it got done, I would say, is because the president said, “This is a top priority for me, and in order for me to support this package, I want this to be included.” There’s no other way this would have happened. There were a few individual members of Congress that were intrigued by the idea, but at the time, it just ran counter to the way both parties were working.

 

SJ: Are there good metrics on how well it worked?

 

JS: I think a lot of people would say Race to the Top has been a great success so far, but in another way, I think it’s still too early to tell. The successes are—for one, there has been great focus and energy around reform and innovation in education, which has been pushed further by this; and two, I think people cite a lot of the policy changes that states have made, saying that this has been the biggest example of the federal government incent[iviz]ing and driving change in policy. So there are states that had barriers to innovation that have been removed: things like caps on the number of high-quality charter schools, or prohibitions on looking at results-oriented evaluations for teachers and principals. It’s interesting—and this is really connected to innovation—a number of states have adopted this “common core” of assessments. Which may not seem like it’s related to innovation, but it’s actually crucial to innovation, because one problem in the country is that we have all these different bars for success . . . many of them fairly dumbed down. So creating a much higher bar for student success, that’s also streamlined, so we have fewer, higher standards for student success across the country—that actually creates a kind of space for innovation nationally. If people can figure out ways to help kids do well on those, they can now have their tools and their ideas spread across the whole country the way you couldn’t before.

So I think when you look at it that way, I think you could see Race to the Top as a big success. But, my view is that the proof in the pudding is actually in what happens in schools and school systems and student learning. So in a sense, we’ve created an opportunity, but the question is do we seize or squander that opportunity over the next three to five years in leveraging those policy changes to drive really dramatic improvements in the way kids learn and teachers teach.

In a sense it’s the opposite of No Child Left Behind—instead of mandating something to the entire country, let’s empower leaders around the country to figure what they’re going to do. And now there are twelve states that have won grant money from Race to the Top—and, you know, there are going to be failures. That’s one thing that government has a hard time doing: accepting that there will be failures, and systems that don’t succeed. But there are also going to be huge successes, and those successes are going to happen because there wasn’t a one-size-fits-all approach that was mandated.

 

SJ: I’m also interested in the idea itself, and how it came about—it’s been attributed to you in many media accounts, but I imagine it’s a more complex story than that.

 

JS: People love to identify one person as the leader or inventor, but in my experience, that’s just not the case. With Race to the Top, it was really the product of years of work by a lot of different people. My own perspective was grounded in schools that had breakthrough achievements, and we came up with some very consistent patterns in terms of what was driving those improvements. And again, we didn’t train our leaders to do these things; the best leaders just came up with them on their own. It was just that no one had gone around to look at what all these school leaders were doing around the country. So we created this Urban Excellence Framework, but all it was, was this distillation of the patterns that were created by hundreds of leaders and thousands of educators and tens of thousands of students around the country. We just tried to codify that—it’s an example of how I was advising President Obama during the campaign, trying to translate everything effective educators and leaders had taught us into policy recommendations.

And then once Arne Duncan was appointed secretary of education, we had a very short time to make a recommendation of what to do on the stimulus and so at that point I was able to work with Arne to put together a memo that was seizing the opportunity of the stimulus to use it as a vehicle for a lot of these ideas. But all that was, was a channel to communicate what people around the country had already been working on.

 

SJ: What’s on the horizon in terms of educational tools that you are really excited about?

 

JS: One thing I’m really excited about is this process for the common core of assessments that are going to track what it really takes to be able to succeed in college and in a career, and not just fill in the bubbles on some multiple-choice test. Those will be in place, if states choose to adopt them, by 2014, and I think that streamlined higher level of expectation will be enormously helpful.

 

SJ: It’s a bit like the innovation power that you see in technologies when you have a standardized platform. On the one level, you look at it and you say, “Well, the platform just got more boring because it’s standardized”; but on the other hand, it allows other people to build on top of it in reliable ways because the platform is defined.

 

JS: Exactly—and then you’ll have healthy competition for who can develop the best curricula. Who can develop the best model? So that’s one.

But then there’s also something that is more small scale now, but that I think is going to develop into something much bigger in the long run. There are very new innovations that are essentially personalized learning, that give individual kids what they need through a blend of very new technology, with a reinvented teaching role, which creates a new kind of school. People will debate whether it’s over the next five or twenty-five years that this becomes much more pervasive, but I think the future of education is going to be in this blend.

There’s a new approach being used by schools like Rocketship in California and School of One in New York. At School of One, they have three classrooms brought together in one nicely designed space to work with kids in sixth, seventh, and eighthgrade math. Instead of three separate classes of say, twenty kids, they actually have a larger number of groups with seven to twelve kids supported by teachers or teacher’s aides or sometimes working with computers. Data is collected every day on how every kid is doing through a little exit ticket where the kids complete a fivequestion quiz that measures how they are doing on what they did that day. The responses are analyzed by people and technology after the kids leave and based on what that analysis finds, each night a new schedule is created to help them with the skills they need the next day. So instead of one teacher saying, “Here’s my next unit that I’ve planned three weeks ago for all thirty kids,” lesson plans are designed for small groups of kids who are working on different sets of skills that actually draw on different materials and bring them what they need that day. So it sort of reinvents the classroom. It’s far from using technology to replace teachers—it actually empowers teachers to meet the needs of every student. It helps teachers decide: How do I create the right learning environment in my classroom? How do I best deploy the technology?

Now, I don’t mean to overstate or oversell this—it’s still early. I don’t think it solves everything or makes it perfect yet, but I do think it gives you a window into what’s possible over time. Certainly it is next to impossible for teachers to meet the needs of each individual student in their classroom in today’s environment. This opens up a world of potential—with a blended model, technology can be used to ease the administrative burden we put on teachers and enable them to spend more time on instruction.