The NCEE Blueprint for Reinventing Schools

Founded in 1988, the NCEE (National Center on Education and the Economy) is a non-profit organization dedicated to helping states, districts, and schools discover, design, and lead high-performing education systems. I had the chance to sit down with Vicki Phillips, CEO at NCEE and formerly of National Geographic and the Gates Foundation, and Jason Dougal, President and COO at NCEE, to discuss the organization’s Blueprint for a High-Performing Education System report. Many of the themes echo recommendations from my new book, From Reopen to Reinvent, which was fascinating to explore in the conversation, including competency-based assessments, the role of content, team teaching, and the importance of teachers not being the final assessors of their own students.

As always, you can read the transcript of the conversation, listen to it, or watch it below.

Michael Horn:                Vicki and Jason, thanks so much for being here today.

Jason Dougal:             It's a pleasure to be here.

Vicki Phillips:             Thanks, Michael. It's great to see you as always.

Horn:                Yeah. So I'm delighted and I want to start with how you all came into these roles with NCEE. Vicki, we've known each other for many years now, obviously from teacher to superintendent to the Gates Foundation, and then National Geographic, and then now to NCEE. I suspect a lot of folks would love to hear why this felt like the right next step for you. If we could start with you, Vicki.

Phillips:             Well, as you said, I've been fortunate over my career to sit in a lot of chairs from teachers to state chief to philanthropy. But what people might not know is that my very first job when I left my home state of Kentucky was actually with the National Center on Education and the Economy. So it was along my career path, and one of the things I so valued about what I learned there was that the international benchmarking and the other work that the Center was doing helped set for me when I went out to be a superintendent a north star of what really worked in terms of practice. And even though I needed to translate that into my own context, it gave me a much broader view from which to work from. So I'm actually coming back to family in many ways.

Horn:                Makes total sense. There's going to be a separate podcast at some point, by the way, about why Kentucky has been the birthplace of so many influential education leaders and policies, I think. But we'll hold that for another time. Jason, I want to go to you next. And tell us about your path because as I understand it, you were a lawyer. I'm not sure what the connection with education was, so I would love to know your own path into the president COO role at NCEE.

Dougal:             Yeah. I guess I'm an alternative route candidate here. I did work in a Manhattan law firm doing mergers and acquisitions, of all things. I was lucky enough about 19 years ago to meet Mark Tucker and Judy Cotting, who were running the National Center at that time, and we were working on a small transaction. I got to know the organization as an outside attorney. I fell in love with the mission, I fell in love with the people, and they invited me in to join the organization just a little less than 18 years ago. I have held many roles here at the center from originally being a business and lawyer person, and got involved in operations, got involved in the research, got involved in the leadership aspects of the organization, and ran our National Institute for School Leadership, which is the largest provider of leadership professional learning in the country. And I was able to lead a pilot program that researched competency-based approaches to high school in four different states. So I've done a little bit of everything around here over the years.

Horn:                So I want to dig into a bunch of those strands. But in particular, there's so much that the center does that we could talk about. But you all put out a report that I believe predates you joining, Vicki, the Blueprint on Education. And I want to spend some time on it because many of the themes from it, certainly not all, but many of them echo a lot of the findings and recommendations in my new book, From Reopen to Reinvent, which Vicki, you, of course, read in advance.

                        And so I just want to dig into these because there's areas that you write across from rigorous and adaptive learning systems to effective teachers and principals, and then equitable foundation of supports. But the part about the teachers and principals really spoke to me on many dimensions that I thought, frankly undergirded the other two areas of the report. So I want to spend a lot of time on it.

                        And the first recommendation that jumped out that I was like, "Whoa, I need to learn more," was you actually said that higher performing systems tend to have fewer teacher preparation programs. And you pointed out that some states might have 50-plus, I think the number was, teacher preparation programs, and we should be aiming for 10 instead. And I'd love to know the why behind that. Why is the number important? If we shrunk the number of teacher preparation programs, how would we still produce the volume of teachers that this country needs, and things of that nature. And just unpack that a little bit for us.

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Dougal:             Sure, Michael. I'll start. What we noticed from our research, and if you look at Finland, where I believe there are seven, maybe eight schools for teacher preparation, Singapore where there's a single one, Shanghai where there are just a couple, what you see in each of those jurisdictions is that the standard for teacher preparation is quite high, and therefore, only their most respected research universities have teacher prep programs. That allows for the jurisdiction to control the flow of future teachers and keep the standard very high so that the number of applicants as a proportion to the number of those accepted can be anywhere from 1 in 10 to 1 in 20 in these high-performing jurisdictions, which is very different from what we have here in a typical United States state where we may have 40, 50 such institutions, and where quite frankly, the academic standards for acceptance are lower. And I think that leads to a less rigorous preparation program and drives some of the challenges that we have in the profession that I'm sure we're going to talk about throughout the podcast.

Phillips:             And as you might imagine, because expectations, the profession are high, the standards are high, satisfaction among teachers is also very high in those places.

Horn:                That's interesting. So in essence, resets the entering expectations of those humans when they enter the profession from the get-go. It raises them up. Is your sense that if we shrunk the programs tomorrow and change the standards for getting in and raise them, that we would start to see really the market in the US, for lack of a better word, start to adjust? Or are there other steps that we would have to take on that road to really changing the way we prepare teachers and who we're preparing?

Dougal:             Yeah. Michael, as you might expect, I mean, there's both a supply and a demand aspect of this. If all we did was limit the number of teacher prep slots by limiting the number of teacher prep institutions and increasing the rigor without changing the compensation and the work environment of the job itself, probably all you would see is a significant reduction in applications to teacher prep institutions. So you can't make it as difficult and as rigorous to get into a teacher prep institution as to get into a law school or a medical school and expect that you'd get similar applicants if the job on the other side is so different. So I think that not only would we need to be looking at the supply side where teachers are coming from, where they're being sourced from, and how they're being admitted into teacher prep institutions, but the demand side. What does the job really look like? What's it compensated like? How professional is it to work in a school environment versus say, a law firm or a hospital or any number of white collar occupations?

Phillips:             We'd also have to set right now a reasonable path toward that because there are serious teacher shortages across the country depending on how you look at the data.

Horn:                And it gets into another piece. I want to go to the demand side in a moment, actually Jason, where you started to go. But I want to stick on the supply side for another moment because another part of the report talks about the importance of having programs, and I'm going to quote here from it, "That emphasize deep understanding of content, whereas the US has no common curriculum, and therefore often trains teachers on a set of generalized principles for effective pedagogy. Universities in the highest performing systems design preparation programs specifically focused on the curriculum that teachers will be expected to teach. Candidates learn first to understand where students are in their learning, and then how best to support them to make progress."

                        There's a lot in there, but a few things jump out to me. One, the importance of content knowledge, the importance of clarity around what you're going to be teaching, and then the importance of understanding where students, individual students presumably, are in their own progression of learning and mastering that knowledge, and presumably skills around it and so forth. I'd love you just to talk about the importance and the centrality of that in teacher preparation and making for effective teachers.

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Phillips:             Well, it's actually important not just in teacher preparation, but once teachers get into the profession and they're continuing to grow, and almost all of these high, or really virtually every one of these high-performing places has rigorous, aligned, more national curriculum, if you will. In this country, it might be state by state, but they actually have common curriculum and aligned ways of determining student progress. And then they have ways of helping emerging teachers get better at that as well as helping veteran teachers take leadership.

                        Michael, you speak to this in your book about all the ways in this country we might think about having teachers come to that level in their craft by helping each other and having more master experts that then help emerging educators. So there's multiple ways to get to that path, but virtually every high-performing place really thinks hard about the rigor of the curriculum and the alignment of that and the ways in which teachers both through preparation programs and once they get into their ongoing profession continue to get better and better.

Horn:                I'm curious just as a follow-up, and Jason, you could take this as well because obviously, the Common Core, I suspect, try to do some of that. Vicki, I won't try to rehash all that we went through around that. But I guess I'm curious. There have been states like Louisiana that have tried to make common curriculum and assessments a more central part of the craft and what actually occurs in schools for students. Is that the example of what we're thinking about or is it something different?

Dougal:             I think Louisiana is actually a pretty good example of that, and it's a state that we've worked with extensively over the last five to eight years. And as you can see in Louisiana, and some of the most recent research about learning and achievement in Louisiana really supports this, that when you have something more of a common curriculum, it helps support teacher pedagogy. It helps support teacher preparation because those teacher prep institutions understand what the curriculum is that their future teachers that they're training are going to actually be teaching. It really helps support the focus of those teacher prep institutions. And of course, it helps support the focus of the way in which teachers work together, either within schools or across schools within a district, or even across districts.

                        What you see in these high-performing jurisdictions, and I think you'll see it the more and more that states here in the US try to focus on curriculum, is that you can teach pedagogy in a very different way if it's deep inside a discipline. It's hard to teach pedagogy generically. And so you need teachers who deeply understand their discipline in order to deeply understand a more disciplinary approach to pedagogy. The way in which you approach math teaching is not the same as you approach science teaching. I mean, obviously there are some commonalities, but when you really get into the depth of the pedagogical approaches across disciplines, having a deep content knowledge is really important.

Phillips:             And there are states in the country in addition to Louisiana that have a rich history in that. I think about Massachusetts. And for example, right now, they're tackling project-based learning and helping many teachers in the state understand what that looks like and what that looks like inside deep content knowledge and expertise.

Horn:                Yeah. It's a good point, Vicki, obviously in my home state. So hoping that we can fig continue to push the bounds on that and deepening the commitment there. I'm curious just to go where you went, Vicki, also in your answer, which is around these pathways for teachers. And the report does a really good job, I think, of outlining how we'd start to change what, in my book, I call them motivators, if you will. And part of that is that... And again, I'll quote from the report, that teachers have the opportunity to take on different, increasingly demanding roles without having to leave the classroom. And you obviously contrast this to the traditional system in the US where teachers have the same job on the day they retire as they did when they first entered the classroom, or if they want career pathways, they leave the classroom in many cases.

                        But part of this, and again, quoting, "The work of schools would be organized around the idea of the strongest teachers leading and mentoring new and struggling teachers through formal dedicated roles like lead and master teacher." It goes on and talks about what those responsibilities would be, how you would earn it not just through tenure, but through real mastery of the craft itself and evidence of that. It's really a rich section of the report. And it sounds a lot like, say what public impact has done in a bunch of districts with these multi-classroom leaders, for example, or the work of maybe what Arizona State University is doing out of its teachers college right now with working with districts with teams of teachers. I'm just curious how you all envision this going out and happening. Which countries also do this well today? Where should people be learning from around creating these rich, vibrant pathways where you can deepen your expertise, deepen your responsibility in a variety of ways without leaving the classroom?

Phillips:             Well, virtually, again, almost every high-performing country and jurisdiction, including some in this country, do that. And they are not only making sure that teachers get those kinds of leadership opportunities, but they're addressing the single number one thing that teachers in this country say they need, which is time, time to come together and learn how to work together to share practice.

                        I mean, the experts that teachers trust most are other teachers. And what a lot of high-performing places do is really maximize that expertise among their veteran teachers having multiple opportunities to coach and support and mentor emerging teachers to teach larger classrooms, and the subject area, and then to have facilitated support going on in the classroom with others that can learn from that. There's a variety of models both in this country and in other places where teachers get those opportunities in a routine basis. And I think the question for us is how do we rethink time and talent in particular in districts and in states in order to afford teachers here that opportunity, and particularly that opportunity to share and collaborate in the way teachers want and with the people they trust the most to help them gain better knowledge of practice in a way that's nonjudgmental and elevates them.

Dougal:             If you put a real fine point on it, what these top-performing jurisdictions are trying to do is identify their best teachers and then leverage that expertise, as Vicki was referencing. Of course, we're trying to do the same in this country, but often, what that translates to is taking your best teachers and moving them out of the classroom, moving them into administration, whereas in a Singapore, as an example, which probably has the richest example of a very well-engineered career set of pathways, but this is also true if you look at Shanghai, if you look in Finland and Estonia, that you'd also see less formal structures, but still the same conceptual approach, and that is, find your best teachers. Don't pull them out of the classroom, but lessen their teaching load. So rather than teach a full load, maybe they'll teach 80% or 60% of a full load.

                        That enables those teachers to establish what are essentially model classrooms for other teachers to come and observe. But it also creates 20% or 40% of the time for those expert teachers to support their colleagues so they will act in mentor and coaching roles. So there's a tremendous amount of mentoring and coaching going on in these jurisdictions, but they don't have dedicated roles to being a mentor full-time or a coach full-time because they want that expertise to stay in the classroom as well.

                        And so those teachers, those expert teachers, those lead and master teachers will lead the learning of... And that might be across disciplines at a particular grade level or deeply within a discipline across multiple grade levels. It might mean a one-on-one type of mentor-mentee relationship within a new teacher to make sure that that new teacher gets the support they need to become a competent and then an expert teacher in the future. So there's all sorts of ways in which those relationships, especially powerful, are the way that supports induction because these expert teachers can support it. A teacher, they can use their own classroom for observation and then debrief. It's a tremendously supportive model, and it would help with teacher retention, which is just a bit of an issue here in this country.

Phillips:             And in general, if we speak to Singapore, again, teachers there have 55% more time to collaborate, to conduct research, to improve their practice, to work with other teachers. So it's across the board that teachers have more time than we afford here. And it's a big question for us. I mean, we're not Singapore, obviously, and we have various context to think about in this country. But the opportunity to give teachers more of what they say is their number one need is something that we need to be as school district and state leaders thinking hard about and creating a path toward.

Horn:                It's interesting hearing you say that on a couple of dimensions. One, it seems if we had more common curriculum also within jurisdictions, that would create more compatibility for these interactions and more leverage, if you will, in the system for these collaborations and cooperation. The other piece that I think of when you talk about rethinking the nature of time and talent and the reconfigurations there is that so many schools during the pandemic, for all the challenges they had, many of them by default went to this structure where they had the master teacher and different teachers maybe doing the module with a small set of students or helping answer questions over Zoom or things like that. And it worked where there was common content that they could leverage across the grade or subject or whatever it might be. Where that was absent, a lot of schools struggled, I think, more because teachers were on their own at a particularly brutal, isolating time in the world's history.

                        But the other piece of this that strikes me is something else you talk about in the report, which is the changing nature of time along another dimension, which is perhaps my favorite topic, which is getting out of our time-based learning variable system and moving to competency-based or mastery-based learning. And you talk first and foremost about how teacher education like the K-12 education system ought to be competency-based and, "Exiting teacher education requires a meaningful demonstration of mastery of craft. This can involve some combination of a written reflection, a videotaped lesson submitted for peer review, a challenging exam, or a demonstration lesson given to a live panel of experts." I think that's a really rich vision with a lot of options.

                        I'd love to start with the teacher side of this, and then as we end the conversation, flip to the student side of this. But just what would a competency-based teacher preparation program truly look like and how would we get there, in your mind?

Dougal:             So if I could, I'll use an example. It's not a perfect analogy, but an example from Shanghai where teacher prep institutions really focused on content knowledge. And then when you're assigned to your first school, the focus is on how you build your pedagogical skill in that content. And so by the end of your first year in a Shanghai school, you're going to have to teach a lesson that's going to be critiqued, and it is based on a competency metric that proves that you're ready to continue in your job. You're essentially not a full-fledged teacher until you've gotten through that competency measure. And of course, many do because of the great support that they're given. Some do not. And what happens there is that they'll be given additional support and they'll have another opportunity in the second year. Obviously, if it's a situation where the teacher isn't likely to meet that competency-based standard, they'll be counseled out of the profession.

                        But that's not the only piece of the competency-based system. They also have to do some research. And then the interesting thing is, I had read about this and I thought, "Well, that doesn't sound very competency-based," until I found out it's more what we would call action research. You have to study your own practice and then publish a paper in a peer-reviewed journal of what you learned about your own practice. And so when I was in Shanghai to visit, I was enthralled by this and I asked a lot of questions of young teachers about it. And not surprisingly, they didn't all love it. It was a serious challenge that they had to get over. But what it did do is it made them very reflective about their own practice. Long after they passed the criteria to remain a teacher, they were still much more reflective, much more engaged, in much more metacognition about their own teaching, not only individually, but with their peers. And I think it's because of that standard that exists.

Horn:                That piece of metacognition makes a ton of sense also in terms of being reflective of your own craft. And if we're serious in this country, not just in our K-12 education system, but frankly all the professions about having us be forever learners or lifelong learners, that development of metacognition to learn how you learn and continue to upskill yourself and your chosen craft is obviously critical, which comes to the last topic, which is the student side of this and competency-based learning for them. And the question that I have there, obviously, I've said if we're serious about embedding success as opposed to failure in the system, we need to move to that bar. I'm curious. Who does this well, in your opinion? It's been hard for me to pinpoint one system that I think really puts it at the center, but what have you found in terms of your research internationally?

Phillips:             Well, I'll start and Jason can add, but virtually what most systems do that's different than what we do in the United States is they assess competency at certain points along a student's trajectory. And typically it's to understand if they're ready for the next level. So it's a key transition points along a student's career. And then the professionalization that we just talked about of teachers allows teachers to all the way along be judging growth and progress toward those competencies. And then those competencies typically include some core that is the demand of the country or the jurisdiction, and some actual choice options that students get to decide.

Dougal:             If I could, I want to focus just slightly differently, and that's on the importance of the assessment and the transparency of the assessment. In the jurisdictions that have really strong competency-based systems... And I know I've referenced Singapore repeatedly already, but it is really a fabulous example. They actually use as the basis for their examination system, at least in the academic subjects, the Cambridge exams produced by Cambridge University, very similar to the International Baccalaureate exams. And what's so special about these exams is that not only do they not include any multiple choice, but all of their prior exams are released to the public along with often student responses that met certain scores. So you can see a score that's an 8 out of 12, a 10 out of 12, and a 12 out of 12. And it allows for students and teachers and parents, anybody who cares to understand it, to really see the difference between what an 8 or a 10 or a 12 out of 12 really means.

                        It's very different from the way standards are often approached here in the US where they're often written in very flowery language and we really concentrate hard on getting the description exactly right. But then you could ask five different teachers to interpret that standard and they will see it in five different ways. But it's very different from using examples of student work with a transparent assessment to really understand what proficiency means.

                        And the reason why I wanted to highlight that, Michael, is because I think it really speaks to metacognition. It allows for students to own their own learning and think about how they improve because that's going to be a skill they're going to need no matter what. I mean, the truth is we're preparing students for a world of work that very few of us can imagine. But what's going to be really important is that the current students, future workforce, are able to learn throughout their lives. They're going to have to be dynamic. They have to be able to engage in that metacognition. And a proficiency based system done with transparent assessments that use student work as the examples of the standard and not just some really flowery written description, that really allows for students to take agency and engage in metacognition. And it allows their parents to support them in a different way. It allows their teachers to support them in a very different way. That's the type of system we're talking about.

Phillips:             Yeah. And Michael, one thing I want to put a pin in about that is that this issue of student agency follows the course of their career in the same way that teacher agency does. So while teacher agency is incredibly strong, part of what they understand in terms of professional practice is to also empower learners and engage them in different ways than sometimes we think about on a day-to-day basis.

Horn:                We could honestly geek out on this for a while. I'm getting excited hearing about these systems and the Cambridge set of assessments. I had forgotten about those, frankly. I looked into them several years ago and I was taken with how robust the questions are and the demands on performance. But you're right. The fact that they make that transparent really empowers both students. But to your point, what a great professional development tool also for the teachers to understand what are we working toward in terms of what mastery looks like against these standards?

                        And I've always said the standards are one thing, but really, how you assess it is where you put teeth into these things. So it really stands out there. And then just the last piece of this that you're raising, Vicki, I think, that's so important is those clear thresholds, some of which are common, to your point. Like we say, as a society, like it or not, this is what is critical to having cultural competence and being able to partake in the civil society of our country and having that conversation, but also some choice and giving students the ability to start making decisions about who they are going to be and how they're going to contribute. But understanding what mastery looks like in those as well just seems so important as we think about what a comprehensive system looks like.

                        And then the last piece I'll just call out is these assessments are not graded ultimately by your own teacher, but by other teachers who are looking at the work. And that seems like a really other important design principle. So I can't complain that I didn't master something because my teacher didn't like me, or because they did, and therefore, they passed me on, but that were really being serious about the rigor in a very human way that's not just multiple choice questions.

Phillips:             Right. And teachers trust other teachers to be able to do that in a way that is truly reflective of what students are learning and the kind of common practice that they all hold as being the hallmarks of the profession.

Dougal:             And it changes the relationship between teacher and students because teachers no longer judge. Teacher is the support to help you get over that challenge, to help you slay that dragon. And I think in schools all across this country, if you see the way students and AP teachers have a relationship because the AP is [inaudible 00:33:59] that gauntlet that needs to be run, and not view your teacher as somebody who's going to pass or fail you based on whatever criteria they might have, they really become your guide and your support.

Horn:                And as Carol Dweck wrote in her book, Mindset, "If students think that their teachers are judging them, then they will sabotage their performance." And well, gosh, we shouldn't be surprised when they do so as a result. With that, Jason, Vicki, we could spend all day, I think, talking about a lot of these topics, but I'm so glad you're out there pushing this blueprint to help us question these critical precepts of what our school systems look like. And deeply appreciate you being with me on The Future of Education today.

Phillips:             Thank you. We appreciate being here.

Dougal:             Thank you so much.

Horn:                Thank you all for tuning in, and we'll be back next time.

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