Last week, a break in persistent midwestern rain provided an opportunity to engage at a local organization’s candle light vigil, paying respects to the 19 children and two teachers killed at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. A pastor read the name of each child and teacher lost in the shooting, while we—the audience—chanted the word “presente” after each name, conjuring their presence, honoring their lives. At the end reading, an attendee shouts the name “Manuel Guzman”—a Kansas City middle schooler who was stabbed to death in a school bathroom in April.
While innovation, technology, the state school safety, and larger-scale policy reform may feel disconnected, we must reckon with the reality of how we’ve reemerged from the pandemic:
Public schools experienced enormous disruptions as they moved to remote instruction/distance learning.
Schools in urban areas, and often schools serving black/brown students and students experiencing poverty were more likely to stay remote for longer.
Schools with a majority of students of color are 20 percentage-points behind their white peers in reading and 10 points behind in math. They are now grappling with how students will catch up.
Schools returned to face staffing shortages and an increase in student behavior instances.
Violence has returned to our classrooms in record numbers since the pandemic. The highest number of students seriously injured or killed on record occurred in 2021 and 2022.
““if we can’t ensure the quality of these technological advancements or measure their effectiveness in clear, coherent ways, is this evolution a breakthrough?””
Through it all, we, as Americans, have remained reluctant to substantially increase funding formulas for schools, meaningfully increase teacher salaries, or relax restrictions on standardized testing to allow for innovation.
Some speculate a teacher—or student—level labor movement might be what’s necessary to tip the scales and force us to think critically and seriously about how we’re preparing (and protecting) our children for the future.
Most of us eduwonks are waiting to pore over final teacher attrition data, looking for a signal of teachers voting with their feet, forcing the industry to change. Such an exodus could fuel meaningful policy change. Others say it could also destabilize the public education system as we know it, creating more pathways for automation and technology companies to replace labor, and increase their profitability.
At its best, technology has the potential to create more access to quality learning opportunities for students, and more sustainable and efficient careers for educators and administrators. I believe that this potential is real and true.
However, if we can’t ensure the quality of these technological advancements or measure their effectiveness in clear, coherent ways, is this evolution a breakthrough? Or does it threaten to simply automate a status quo education system that continues to perpetuate inequities along the lines of race and class?
“We’re tired, but I don’t see total burn-out. We’re tired, but we’re committed.”
The week after Uvalde, I called up a friend who leads a local elementary school. I needed to be in a school, to see children, and hear how teachers are doing. The day was a normal late spring day. Teachers were in the hall, hauling carts of supplies ready to be sorted and put away for summer. A few students lingered at the front, sent out of class temporarily for being disruptive. One read a kids magazine. Another filled out an apology form. I met with the school’s Executive Director over coffee.
“We’re tired,” she said. “We’re tired, but I don’t see total burn-out. We’re tired, but we’re committed.”
She talked of plans for evolving the teaching model—she’s worked to secure funds to implement a team-teaching model that will reduce teacher load and class sizes. She has early comparative growth data from an early pilot of the model that demonstrates promising results. She’s secured some funds, she’s ready to launch, she wants to find a way to evaluate and measure the impact of this novel model over time.
I left the school feeling more hopeful, but couldn’t help recalling a comment a fellow ed executive said at a recent conference, “the thing is teachers have Stockholm syndrome… no matter how bad it gets, they’ll never leave.”
““Education is deeply human work, and it needs to evolve in a way that enhances the human experience.” ”
One thing was clear in that school visit—and remains clear from the thousands of data points we’ve collected and analyzed from school communities throughout the pandemic. Education is deeply human work, and it needs to evolve in a way that enhances the human experience.
There are meaningful moves that can be made that would re-center our educators and students' needs, requiring shifts in policy and funding. We could:
Decrease class sizes
Professionalize the teaching profession,
Allow for increased autonomy and flexibility
Increase teacher pay
Increase social emotional supports on and off school sites
California’s Prop 98 will be a telling experiment in what’s possible for student outcomes when social emotional resources are financially supported.
Reform school funding formulas,
Equitably distributing money and resources so that the zipcode a child lives in no longer determines the opportunities they have access to.
Require instructional vendors (edtech and others) to be evidence based and effective.
Moving the burden of high-stakes accountability culture off the backs of teachers and onto the tools they are using.
However, reckoning with the reality of polarized and gridlocked policy conditions, I believe an additional route to change must emerge:
We need to mobilize a base of educators and equip the with the skills to innovate and advocate.
We need to build the evidence base pointing to what needs to change and how.
We need to leverage the potential of education technology product research and evaluation as a new advocacy tool.
The core thesis behind founding Leanlab was to create a vehicle where the voices most impacted by education—parents, students and educators—were the ones influencing and building the future.
In today’s fraught political climate, organizing, advocacy and change is still necessary—and hard won. However, in a 21st century context of advanced technology and late-stage capitalism, there is another growing force to contend with. We are seeing a swift increase in investment as many race to digitize an industry that had been left behind. In 2021 $8 billion of venture capital was invested into edtech (4x of what we saw in 2020),
While this investment only represents about 3% of the total American education budget, the reach and influence that technology tools will have on our classrooms shouldn’t be underestimated. With little regulation in place to hold the quality and effectiveness of such tools accountable, it’s up to us to find new ways to influence how our education systems are evolving toward the future.
This is why I argue that a new kind of advocacy must also emerge—an advocacy of self-organized educators that are comfortable with research, development, and innovation processes. This will allow them to better advocate for how education technologies and resources are developed and measured.
Leanlab’s iterative product research, what we call Codesign, allows education stakeholders to advocate for, and inform, product solutions that serve their needs the most. Teachers and students become active participants in the creation of emerging innovations, and they are active participants in research designs that evaluate how effective edtech tools are, and precisely under what conditions they can yield positive results and be additive within the complex environments of schools.
This Codesign approach is the basis of our product research journey—and results in highly usable, effective tools.
This process also equips teachers and students with innovation frameworks like design thinking, and organizing principles like participatory research and needs assessments.
These skills are transferable—often we hear of educators taking the skill sets they used in our pilot research process to practice more inclusive decision making, pilot new initiatives, or evaluate the effectiveness of a newly adopted program.
In a 21st century context where huge power imbalances exist within our public school bureaucracies, I would argue that it is essential that we equip today’s educators with the capacity to advocate in a rapidly changing environment.
Through these types of participatory frameworks, the power dynamics can be shifted back towards those who are most impacted, our students and teachers. And we can create a more humane and just education system.
