Derek Mitchell:
It’s really one of the most brilliant things to see in the work. A teacher who’s leaned back with her arms crossed, who’s seen all this before, because she has.

Stacey Caillier:
Right, right.

Derek Mitchell:
And we understand. We look at them like, oh, they’re the recalcitrant, the entrenched. But the truth of the matter is all these things they have, if you talk longer than a hot minute, you’ve seen and heard all of this before and there’s no reason to think that your way is going to be any different than all the other experiences that they’ve had before. But we turn that on its ear because we pull them into the work.

Alec Patton:
This is High Tech High Unboxed. I’m Alec Patton, and that was the voice of Derek Mitchell, the CEO of Partners in School Innovation. In this episode, Stacey Caillier interviews him about what he’s learned about how to help schools get better at giving every kid what they need to thrive and about why this work matters so much to him. If you work in a school or if you work with schools, or if you just want the world to be a kinder more just place for all of us, this episode is for you. With that, I’m going to get out of the way and let Stacey take it from here.

Stacey Caillier:
Derek Mitchell is one of my favorite leaders and provocateurs. Every time I have been in a room with him, there’s this mic drop moment where he flips some assumption on its head or asks the question that gets everyone to think differently and more expansively. Derek is the CEO for Partners in School Innovation, an organization that has spent the last 30 years developing, refining and expanding an improvement science approach to whole school transformation.
They have worked with hundreds of public schools in the most challenged urban centers from the Bay Area to the Mississippi Delta and have demonstrated time and again that even the most struggling schools can dramatically shift outcomes for students if they’re supported and resourced to do so. Their work in their approach is documented in a fabulous book called “Change Agents” written by Justin Cohen that came out last year.
Our whole team at High Tech High is reading it together right now. Some of us like me for the second time, big fan. It’s one of the best illustrations of what improvement looks and feels like when it’s truly collaborative and human centered. And it functions like a guidebook pointing out all the places we as educators might get tripped up in the change process and how we can do better. So Derek, thank you so much for being here to share your wisdom with us.

Derek Mitchell:
Wonderful. Thank you for having me.

Stacey Caillier:
I hear you majored in writing at Pomona, as an English and physics major myself that makes my heart soar. And you also wrote the introduction to “Change Agents” and in that you share the story of how your own equity journey began in a middle school on Chicago’s West side. Can you share the story of the science fair so we can just get grounded in who you are and what drives you in this work?

Derek Mitchell:
Sure. But only if you give me permission to get emotional because-

Stacey Caillier:
Yes, always.

Derek Mitchell:
… Like most kids, growing up in Chicago’s Southwest side, I was being educated in a school that was severely underresourced. And as a child, I didn’t know that until I had an opportunity to do a science fair in another school on the North side of the city. And so I guess it starts with me being a little bit of a weird precocious kid in that I was the kind of kid who read encyclopedia. I felt like I wanted to be a scientist as a kid.
And somewhere along the way I read somewhere that cockroaches would be the only thing surviving if we had nuclear war. And I thought about that and they were pretty plentiful in my community and I thought, “I wonder if that’s really true.” So like a true scientist, I started this series of experiments to determine just what roaches could survive and I documented everything.
I had a little pamphlet and a booklet and kept time the whole bit and a whole series from drowning them in water to freezing them in freezers, to just a long list of torturers, trying to figure out exactly how resilient these creatures were. And I got a bug in my ear one moment to do a presentation for my school, my classroom on just the survivability of cockroaches, which might surprise you went over very well.
I had a poster. I had a cockroaches glued to the poster. I’d cut and pasted pictures of the dermis in different parts and the whole bit and it was really a fun and fascinating sort of project. And the principal who had heard about it from my teacher thought, “Huh, this guy’s got a fun project here. Maybe we should submit it for some of the citywide science fairs.” And so she did.
And so some Saturday, a couple months later, I found myself taking a bus, a train, and another bus with my mom to a whole nother part of the city in Chicago, a part I’d never been to before. And as we traveled, I noticed some pretty tremendous changes in the communities from my neighborhood, which was essentially concrete and tarmac everywhere to really hills and green grass and trees and houses with gardens and a whole bit.
And I’m thinking to myself, “Is this Chicago?” And of course it was a long trip too. How big is this city actually travel for almost two hours and still be in it? And so finally we get to this school which is on Chicago’s far North side, and it looked like a castle. It was this magnificent, brilliant, beautiful building surrounded by rolling hills of green grass and plain fields. It even had a garden up front and for that time it was ahead of its time as a school garden.
And so I’m blown away carrying the poster and looking at this place and watching as kids and their parents are collecting all of their gear and moving it into this school and I start to think, “Wow, some of the examples from the science fair are going to be pretty amazing.” And so we go inside and they direct us to the gym room, which where we all got our knowledge about where we’re going to be in the building because they had the science fair in the science wing.
And right off the bat, a science wing, my school didn’t even have science, so that’s part of why my exhibit was so surprising. We were really just math and English and social studies at my school. My whole science thing was just a bug that I had. We had no instruction in science at that time, but this school had a science wing.
And so when we made it to the classroom where we were going to do our work, I observed for the first time what a really well provisioned science classroom looked like. They had cabinets with all kinds of chemicals and beakers. They had running water in the classrooms and different bins situated around the room. They also had burners fired in the actual classroom. I could have done my experiments, not in my mom’s kitchen, but literally-

Stacey Caillier:
Which she would’ve loved.

Derek Mitchell:
… No, don’t get on that. As a side story I had forgotten I had captured a bunch of cockroaches and put them in a Tupperware container and froze them and forgot and left them there. And my mom of course looking to see what she’s going to make for dinner discovered them and that was the end of my experiments happening at home.
But anyway, I’m observing this incredible space and thinking to myself, “Wow, what is it that makes it so valuable for these kids to have all this stuff compared to the place where I was coming from?” And so then it hit me while I’m putting my poster up and I’m looking around at all the other kids who have everything from volcanoes to one kid had a helium balloon, the shape of the space shuttle, I mean just tons of kind of amazing stuff.
It occurred to me that we were the only black people in the room. And so I asked my mom, I said, “Mom, did you see any other black people on the way up here?” She was like, “No, I don’t think so.” And this was my first experience with not just a lot of white people, but a lot of different white people. I mean hair colors, eye colors, shapes and sizes, skin tones, even inflections in how they were speaking English and different accents from different places where their families are from.
And I was kind of overwhelmed by it all and my mom saw me and she said, “Baby calm down, settle it. You hear the teach these people about cockroaches, get your head in the game.” So we did our thing and got an honorable mission. And while I was worried that kids wouldn’t dig my project, they actually really enjoyed my project. A lot of these kids had never seen roaches before, which is an amazing thing to me, and I wish I had known enough about the Science Fair to know that I could have actually brought living roaches because some kid brought ant farms and spiders that were alive.
I was like, “Man, I could have figured out some way to bring with me cockroaches to this thing, which would’ve probably not gone over as well to the principal of that school that we were in.” But I also had a moment where I felt an intense, I guess shame would be the best way to think about it, that I’m looking around at all these kids and they’re super happy and they’re so excited about what their work, some of them were wearing lab coats with their school’s names on them.
And I felt for a moment that I was being set up that my principal thought that she would teach me a lesson and showed me what real science was like. My mom talked me out of that. She’s like, “No, your principal was really trying to look out for you and give you a chance to show your stuff.” But it hit me in my heart that there were incredible differences and just what kids have when they show up to school every day.
And I thought about the building that we were in and I’m looking around and I’m thinking to myself, “Somebody built this school this way. Somebody decided that this neighborhood and this school should have these kinds of resources and those same somebody’s probably decided the same thing about our school and what was it beyond the fact that race, which popped right into my head as a kid, was the difference between us.”
And so I was pretty upset when I left that place, even though I got my honorable mention and yes, even back then everybody got some kind of trophy or certificate. We give the millennials a lot of crap about this, but we were looking back-

Stacey Caillier:
Yeah, this is all this is.

Derek Mitchell:
… Yeah, I took my honorable mention certificate back to the school and the principal was super excited and happy. And she saw that I was not feeling that excited about it and she asked me about it and before I could even start explaining, I found myself in tears just crying about it all. And she like a really great principal, she sat down next to me and grabbed some tissues and listened as I recanted the whole kind of experience.
And then I really accusatorily just started asking her, “Why is this this way?” And she said something that have stuck with me since then. She says, “Derek, I don’t really know why things are the way they are, but maybe you will be the one to change it. Right now you got to go to class, so wipe the tears and get back up to your classroom.
And so I’ve pretty much been in that class since then learning about how schools are organized, what decisions go into where they’re built and how they’re built and who enrolls in them and what resources they have and how all that changed. And I learned a lot about that particular school, Robert Emmett and the fact that it was a Jewish neighborhood before it was a Black neighborhood. And there was in Italian neighborhood before it was in the Jewish neighborhood.
And so it was one of the schools built in the big rush with immigration coming from Europe at the turn of the 19th century and it’s been populated by different peoples over time, but it was built at a time when getting them built fast enough to accommodate the incoming immigrant groups was the priority at the time. But I’ve been studying this question of what really came down to educational equity before we even had the language? And it’s a truism that even today we set kids up for failure.
Even California at a point with the William’s decision decided that there should be a floor below which no school should be, and we have yet to even resource that floor. I mean, think about that. And that took years of litigation for that to happen and we’re still not actually producing the kind of education environment that we would want all our kids to be in, in every place where we expect kids to go to school.
So get this, we are literally requiring children to go to public schools that we know are not provisioned well enough for them to learn and grow. But yet we hire teachers to teach there and leaders to lead there, and we hold them all accountable for getting the same kind of outcomes with clearly a lesser set of resources. That’s kind of the story. And it’s not accidental that kids who are poor and kids of color and kids who speak something other than English are in schools where they’re being resourced less well. It motivated me my whole career that one instance.

Stacey Caillier:
I wish I could meet that principal.

Derek Mitchell:
Yeah, Carol Reardon was her name. She was a brilliant, wonderful woman, petite, bright eyed and she did other things for me too. I was one of these kids who tested well, and so she immediately figured out that I needed to be more challenged and started signing me up for all kinds of different things. I learned photography at a photo studio up the street. I learned to play the guitar. I started the school newspaper. She did for me what we want should do for every child, which is indulge their interests, whatever they are.

Stacey Caillier:
Even if they’re about cockroaches.

Derek Mitchell:
Even if they’re about cockroaches, right? You just indulge their interests and you leverage that to excite them with learning. Then we’ll position most kids for much better outcomes. They’ll at least be able to achieve their dreams, whatever those are, right?

Stacey Caillier:
Yeah. And all that you shared. I mean, there’s many things that strike me. You did something right then that the book does as well throughout that I just loved. Because in the book there are these deep dives as Justin’s telling these stories about the schools and communities in which you all are working.
And he’s going explicitly into the histories and the culture of those places as a way of saying, we cannot do this work and have it be transformational if we don’t know the histories and the cultures of the people who we’re working with. So even just in your story, the fact that you knew the history of that school and could trace it back and how the evolution of it happened, that’s so meaningful and that’s one of the things that I really appreciated about the book.

Derek Mitchell:
Thank you.

Stacey Caillier:
And also, I love her push of like, “Maybe you’re going to be the one who’s going to figure this out.” You’ve devoted your whole life to educational equity. That’s been your focus. And in the introduction I have to quote you because you write this so beautifully. You talk about how one of your biggest learnings is, I quote, “Implementing continuous improvement methods without a clear focus on equity, simply supercharges and codifies opportunity gaps.” Can you say more about where you’ve seen most change efforts, especially those using improvement go awry?

Derek Mitchell:
Yeah, that comment is about a complex set of realizations about accountability systems specifically. And so I’ll out myself as a reformed accountability guy, right? It was my work in graduate school. It was the work I did when I first started in Oakland building these data systems and accountability infrastructures that were meant to empower decision makers with data and then quote unquote hold folks accountable to outcomes, but without a real understanding of how things got the way they are or a deeper appreciation for the assets that are inherent in every community, a blanket accountability model is inherently essentially colonial.
It’s basically somebody somewhere else telling you what you should value and hold you accountable to what they value. We may as well be the Catholic Church in South America. So I say that I’m reformed in that I’ve driven these systems in many different environments where I’ve led, and in every case we come to two really important lessons, which I think I was stubborn because I wasn’t able to take these lessons in until after the third or fourth time running your head long into it.
The first is that personal responsibility and accountability are not the same thing. What we really want people to have is a personal responsibility for kids being successful, right?And if you have that, you’ll problem solve. You’ll jog left when left works and right when right works. You will overcome hurdles, you’ll argue persuasively for resources. You’ll do the things that are going to make a robust difference.
Without that in the presence of really just a set of rules and a set of measures that you’re responsible for producing, when your students are actually coming to you further behind than anyone is actually measured, you run up against this understanding that no matter how hard you press or how much you work to try to meet these externally mandated goals, you’ll fail. And that failure is inattributable to you and not to the systems that have created this divergent set of outcomes and resources.
And so for me, it comes down to the lessons we’ve learned when schools have been able to drive outcomes in this way, and they’ve been nonsustainable, and in some cases they’ve been implemented by gaming the system, the sort of bubble kid kind of strategies and not a reflection of robust, coherent, and powerful learning taking place. They’re basically more rigidity and more managing of behavior, which is part of the story, but not really what our schools are for.
And so I wish I knew what I know now. I know that’s something everybody says at some point in their life because what our approach at Partners has led us to, is a deeper appreciation and commitment to being in robust community with folks when we’re there to support them. We may even come at them from a perspective of their superintendent is aligning resources to help them because they’re furthest from success, but that’s not the conversation we have when we’re in the room with them because that by design owns all of the problems that have created this related structure without a discussion about them.
We instead go into these conversations and ask them what is it they need to get better than normal outcomes? And how can we help them put those things in place? So it’s a much more robust, much more authentic, much more relationship-oriented, relationship and community-appreciated approach to transformation. And it’s important and powerful because without it, when you run into these walls… I remember having this conversation with Tony Bright. “I loved Learning to Improve.” It’s a brilliant and wonderful book.
And I asked them, “What happens when you present this to a classroom and the teachers just say no?” They’re like, “Nope, not going to do that.” Grade level like, “Nope that’s not what we’re going to do.” There’s nothing in the book about what you do, and that’s what you would run into without a robust understanding of the community they’re trying to serve and some transparent conversation about the assets that are already there.
And so the question isn’t then about let’s implement this structure in this repetitious and state way. Instead it’s let’s work together on what we know is going to matter to get outcomes for kids and let’s learn our way forward. Two very different conversations.

Stacey Caillier:
Yeah, I mean, I’ll say from reading the book, one of the things that first struck me, there’s a whole chapter just about relationships and we talk all the time about relationships are so important, they really matter, sense of belonging, all that stuff, and that’s all true. But I appreciate how in the book and what you just said right now, it really makes the point that it’s not just because we all need to feel like we belong. It’s because we’re doing hard work. And it’s hard to do that hard work alone. And so you have to build your band to be able to do that work together because it’s scary and it takes community to do scary things.

Derek Mitchell:
Right. That’s right. Find your crew. That’s right. You got to build your crew. It really is the only way. Why do you think so many chapters features food?

Stacey Caillier:
Right. Yes.

Derek Mitchell:
Right. There’s food all through the book, and frankly, when I first got the Partners, and this was a part of Partners before I even got there, I kept seeing these expenses for food. I’m like, “So we are a food bank? What is going on with all these meals?” And it wasn’t until our program lead walk me through how did we build relationship and the powerful way that food plays in all the communities where we currently serve. In the Latinx community, in the Black community, food is really translates into love in regard.
And so owning the fact that many of our teachers don’t even have time for a robust lunch in the confines of a given day. Our folks show up with food and it draws people to the conversation. And so that’s all about the fact that you need the community to produce outsized outcomes for the community. That’s not something an individual can do in any kind of sustainable way. Our tropes in education, we love the superhero individual.

Stacey Caillier:
Yes, we do.

Derek Mitchell:
The “Common Diseases” principal, “The Superman Teacher”, Jaime Escalante, and the list goes on and on. And these are wonderful, amazing people, but what makes lasting sustainable change is a Jaime Escalante community with others.

Stacey Caillier:
Right a crew.

Derek Mitchell:
A crew. And so we were serious about that in the book, making sure that folks recognize that if they try to do this by themselves, they’ll get burned out and they won’t be able to sustain the effort even if they’re able to get great results, let alone the fact that they’ll leave and everything will go right back to the way it was before.
But what we’ve learned is if you work in robust powerful community and you structure opportunities for that community to get quick wins and produce a sense of efficacy or collective efficacy among them, then they will never go back to the way they work before. I mean they’re going to respond to the right work like [iaudible 00:24:04] day. And so it’s really one of the most brilliant things to see in the work. A teacher who’s leaned back with her arms crossed, who’s seen all this before because she has.

Stacey Caillier:
Right, right.

Derek Mitchell:
I mean you understand? We look at them like, oh, they’re the recalcitrant, entrenched, but the truth of the matter is all these things they have, if you talk longer than a hot minute, you’ve seen and heard all of this before and there’s no reason to think that your way is going to be any different than all the other experiences that they’ve had before. But we turn that on its ear because we pull them into the work. So it’s not our way, it’s your way.

Stacey Caillier:
I love that.

Derek Mitchell:
Right? You have seen it all before for so what’s going to work now for you? Right?

Stacey Caillier:
I love that too because I always like to think of those with the arms crossed and in the back of the room. It’s like those are the rationally resistant, they have very good reasons for feeling the way that they do, especially if they’ve been in schools for any amount of time.

Derek Mitchell:
Absolutely.

Stacey Caillier:
And they’re also your greatest allies if you can get them on your side.

Derek Mitchell:
Just think of standards. How many versions of standards have teachers seen since the 1990s? So if you’ve talked for 30 years, you’ve been in some kind of standards way of working at least four or five times in that time, and the list goes on and on from curricula to assessments to strategies, whole child, and all these are pieces that teachers who’ve been teaching for a while have seen and heard, and they know what happens.
We’ve played this movie before them before, and so they are rationally resistant and we can’t treat them as if they’re not. And so we have to own the fact that we’ve started a bunch of things that we’ve never followed up on, that we’ve initiated resources on things that we couldn’t sustain and to explain how this work is going to be different in order to really break through that resistance.

Stacey Caillier:
Yeah. I mean I love in that same intro, you talk about Partner’s approach as one of investing in people, and you talk a lot about the importance of as you just were, “Don’t just layer stuff on top of each other, learn about the existing structure, learn about the existing culture.” How can you work within that to get change efforts going? Can you say a little bit more about what does that pouring in and working within existing structures look like? And if you have an example, that’s great.

Derek Mitchell:
Part of why that way of working is so important is because so much of our policy advocacy environment has been against us replace half the teachers with cheaper younger versions of the ones who are there now, and somehow that’s going to lead to outsized outcomes for kids. And they show up bright eyed and bushy tails and sometimes they get results, but rarely do they stay long enough for folks to remember their names three years later.
Yet in that same space, our teachers who have been a part of that community for decades, they don’t just know the child, they know the family, right? They know the community. They have a vested interest in that place being better. And so they show up every day, every day.
Sometimes violence happening in and around the school knowing they won’t have everything they need to be successful yet they know that every day families are entrusting them to do what they can for their kids, and so they’re there. And so for us, the fact that there are people who are already committed to that community being better, that was three quarters of the work for us.

Stacey Caillier:
That’s right.

Derek Mitchell:
Because all you need to do then is unlock their change agency, understand what’s needed to empower them to be their best selves every day and put that in place. The best principals do this almost automatically. Know what motivates people, know what empowers people, finds the resourcing, and sometimes even you’re going outside the bounds a bit to make sure that their people have what they need.
And so when we do our work in schools, it is from this perspective that the teachers and leaders in that place are the only ones who can transform it. It’s that simple. And I’ll give you a great example why. Let’s do a thought experiment. Let’s say we’re in a big school district. We have a really high performing elementary school and a really low performing elementary school in the same district, what would happen if we swap the teaching staff? What do you think would happen? Would that low performing school suddenly become high performing?

Stacey Caillier:
No.

Derek Mitchell:
Why not? You just replaced them with a set of teachers from a very high performing elementary school. Why wouldn’t it happen?

Stacey Caillier:
Because I think the teachers coming from that high performing school don’t have an understanding of what has led to that school not performing as well.

Derek Mitchell:
I’m with you. In addition, often the populations are different, and even if the populations aren’t different, you’re going from a school where the kids are ready to one where they’re not. And if you’ve taught for a long time in the place where kids are ready, you lose the juju to help you understand how to manage with the kids who aren’t ready. And I know this from my own experience as a teacher.
I was brilliant for the kids who are just about on grade level and just a little above grade level, but I had about a third of my kids who were well below grade level and another third who knew more about English than I did, right? And I had almost nothing for those two sectors of my school community. I just didn’t know what to do. I had students who could barely read. I taught English. I was never taught how to teach kids to read. I was a high school teacher.

Stacey Caillier:
Yep, yep.

Derek Mitchell:
And so you know what I’m talking about, right? You’ve been through this.

Stacey Caillier:
Yep.

Derek Mitchell:
And so when we restrict the diversity, at least the lecture or academic and the preparation diversity within classrooms, we actually robbing teachers of the ability to learn how to serve a broader set of student needs, especially if you keep them there for long times. And so what will happen is the teachers who are coming from the high performing school won’t stay. They’ll be like, “What? These behavior, dah, dah, dah.” It’ll all be about blaming kids and blaming families, and they’ll want their way back to some other place and they’ll grieve until they get it.
The teachers in a high performing place will be delighted, but they’ll be similarly underprepared, right? Because they haven’t actually prepared to work with kids who are so ready to go. They’ll have a great experience of learning it, but it is quite likely that the performance in both sets of schools would be impeded by that change because of a lack of respect and appreciation for the communities and the contexts in which we’re expecting folks to do that work and the fact that relationships matter.
Think about the parents. Oh my God, we have one set of teachers one year and a whole another set the next year and nobody knows anybody, but we understand we do this all the time. We close schools and swap populations and move teachers around like they’re widgets on the board, and they lose so much of what makes them uniquely powerful for the community that they serve because they know not just the kids but the families in the broader context too.

Stacey Caillier:
Yeah. I have to quote another beloved person in my life, Rob Riordan, who was one of the founders of High Tech High, he would love the example you just gave, and he would often talk about how every choice that you make creates its own set of problems. And you just want to make the choice that gives you the problems you’d rather deal with.
And so he would say that as a way of describing that’s why at High Tech High from the beginning, we’ve never tracked. We have kids of all different levels in the same classroom learning together because we would rather have the problems that go with that of learning how to differentiate, learning how to create those multiple access points, learning how to push and grow kids wherever they might be in community with each other than the problems that you get when you separate out kids and separate adults in that way.

Derek Mitchell:
Right, right.

Stacey Caillier:
So I feel like he would be clapping that.

Derek Mitchell:
Yes, but there’s a bigger purpose you’re serving too, which we often don’t talk about. One way of describing the story of education reform the last 50 years is a tension between two sets of values. The values that are about some kids and the values that they’re about all kids. Our country has always known how to create a special place for some kids. In fact, public education started like that. It was this special environment for just the kids who were ready or the kids whose families were landed or whatever the criteria, and we’ve always known how to do that.
What we’ve never known how to do is create systems for all kids, but every classroom that does what you’ve described that doesn’t parcel out kids and doesn’t have all these layers of preparation requirements for them to get there is a little microcosm of what makes democracy brilliant, which is you have everybody there regardless of what their parents make, regardless of how well they read, regardless of what it is they want to do for themselves. But everyone’s there and they’re learning together. They’re in community together to try to figure this stuff out.
And it’s the doing of that if we’re able to do it in classrooms. Then outside the classrooms, they’re much more adaptively able to learn together with peers in different contexts from different communities. Our Achilles heel is that we segregate racially. If we didn’t do that, I think our democracy would be much stronger today than it’s now. But yeah, having everyone, every type of kid in a classroom is an brilliant way to create masterful teachers.

Stacey Caillier:
Yeah, that’s for sure. Okay. When we last saw each other in person, we were talking about how do we do this work right now? Really equity-centered work in the moment where even the mention of the word equity has become contentious. And you shared some brilliance with me in that moment that I’ve told a few different people of, but I’d love to have you share about what have you learned about how to navigate this tricky cultural moment we’re in where we’re trying to do equity work and we can’t even say the word equity. How do we do that work in places and broaden the tent of folks who are on board to do it?

Derek Mitchell:
If people have an issue with words, don’t use those words, mean honestly, especially since it means different things to different people. One example I might’ve shared was an example in a conversation with parents in San Francisco where there’s this kind of a challenging environment around a belief that equity and excellence are in conflict with each other that we can’t resource need and accelerate kids who are ready at the same time that they have to. It’s a choice that the systems-

Stacey Caillier:
Either-or, yeah.

Derek Mitchell:
… Right, it’s an either-or concept. And with this set of parents, I asked them, “How many of them have ever gotten tutoring for their kids?” And a bunch raised their hand and I asked them, “What did you get tutoring for?” “Well, my daughter was having a problem with math, and so I got a math tutor.” “Anyone else get math tutors for their kids?” A few of them raised their hands.
And we were having this robust conversation. I’m like, “Well, how many of you who got tutors for your students have more than one child?” Most of them did. And I said, “Did you get tutored for all of them?” And they was like, “no, they only got tutors for the kid that needed it.” I’m like, “Well, you believe in equity because that’s what equity is.” Literally, it would be wasteful to get tutored for a student who’s matching a content area. And so what you did was you got resources and you applied them to the place where there was need. That is equity. That’s all the districts are trying to do.
And it would surprise them because they had thought it was something else that there were some other sort of political framing for this issue, but it really isn’t. It’s about recognizing the fact that there are places like the ones I described in my story, where kids are coming into the schools that are underresourced to meet their needs and fixing that in systemic ways so that they have what they need. The tutors, if that’s the problem, the curriculum materials, if that’s the problem, whatever the issue or the problem is.
And again, I still believe in California, there should be a floor underneath no school in our country goals. It may surprise you that we have kids in schools, in this community, in this country that are just astounding. You would think you are in another part of the world based upon the conditions that we’re expecting kids to learn in. It’s just disastrous. We have schools where kids can’t drink the water in several of our major cities, and all this says something about our value for our children, our belief in them, our willingness to solve problems for them.
So all of this is just to say, if you run into these headwinds, the political headwinds around doing social justice work, I keep two things in mind. One is use the language that works. And so in this case, tutoring unlocked it for this set of parents. The second is keep the main thing the main thing, right? So rather than any individual’s tete because people are going to have their, oh, I had a teacher who X, Y, Z’d and one, two, threed, then that’s what every kid should have.
And instead of getting into all of those arguments, keep the main thing the main thing and recognize that not everyone’s going to be on the same page with us about what it is we’re trying to accomplish overall. A lot of my work is fundraising. And I was at a fundraising call with a set of funders, and it was an interesting conversation because after I pitched all our work and showed results and all those sorts of things, you got a lot of nods and some folks handed over checks.
But one guy stuck around and he asked me after when no one else was there, “Dr. Mitchell, this all sounds really good, but why should those kids have for free? Would I pay a lot of money to provide to my kids?” And I thought, “What do you mean?” He was like, “You’re talking about providing kids with a high quality education. I get that. And it’s great if we can resource it for everybody, but we really can’t. So why should some kids get for free what I spend a lot of money providing for my kid?
And it was just a great reminder that not everybody’s on board with this idea and I get that. That’s okay. Let’s not try to convince them. And those of us in the progressive world, we don’t plan for anyone to disagree with us. We just think that if we argue more persuasively and have more examples, people are going to eventually come over to our side of thinking.
But the truth of the matter is, there are people who want segregated schools. There are people who believe that some kids don’t deserve quality education, or worse, they should demonstrate that they deserve it before they get it, as if that’s logical. And in the presence of folks who simply disagree, don’t try to convince them, thank them for their thoughts and send them on their way.

Stacey Caillier:
And then go find your crew.

Derek Mitchell:
That’s right. Retrenching your crew. Huge example to reignite your crew, right?

Stacey Caillier:
Yeah. I mean, in the book you guys, this is a little bit of a bird walk, but one of the concepts that you talk about that really resonated with our team was just this idea of you’re not going to get everybody on your side in any kind of change effort, but you can do what you can to create a warm pool so that they want to jump in. If you’re coming forward with what you guys call cold pool energy, that’s not going to make people want to join. So what are the tricks, do you think, for creating warm pool energy and getting folks?

Derek Mitchell:
Yeah, one of them, I’ve mentioned already food.

Stacey Caillier:
Right.

Derek Mitchell:
Food is a shorthand for we believe in you, we care about you. Let’s spend some time together. And it’s really interesting. Another is the idea of listening more than you’d speak. We train our folks when they’re deployed on the ground in school sites. First couple months they’re there getting in community with each other with folks. They ask the principal, what can I do to lighten your load today?

Stacey Caillier:
Compassion.

Derek Mitchell:
And they do everything from xeroxing, fixing internet wiring, I mean, literally anything the principal needs at that moment, they will do, but it’s a way of showing that nothing is beneath us. We’re part of the community and part of the team, and what’s important for us is for you to have strategic time. So if I can take some tactics away, you’d have strategic time. That’s important.
So having rolling up the sleeves and helping before too long after doing that a little ways, you can say something to the principal like, hey, principal, you have an ELT coming up on Tuesday. What’s the agenda for that meeting? And there you go, because the principal most often would be like, you know what? I haven’t thought about that. Let’s talk about it. Can I give you a draft? What should be the main goals? Literally, reform starts just like that.
Before you know it, they’re the confidant, the chief of staff, the sort of glue to create coherence in the system that hasn’t been very coherent, and coherence is a prerequisite to robust sustainable results.

Stacey Caillier:
Yeah. Yeah. I have to ask you about, because this is a grapple that we were talking about a little bit in that workshop, like after you’ve done this work, you’ve gotten really embedded. You’ve gotten people on board, they’re creating amazing things.
How do you know when it’s time to step away or when you shouldn’t or I think there’s this real tension for those of us working in schools of we want to build up the sustainability and the capacity of folks to do the work without us. And yet at the same time, there’s also this thing, well, everybody deserves a great coach and why not the schools who need it most? How do you make sense of that? How do you navigate that?

Derek Mitchell:
We talk about the difference between capacity and dependence And building capacity or building dependence. And one framework that a lot of folks use that some of my people have adopted too is the I do, we do, you do a mental model, and typically the we do is the longest of the periods because they not only have to understand a tactic and a tool and the process and the thinking behind it, but how it actually plays out in different situations.
And so you have to be with them during that time, during a reflection to make it sticky for adults. Adults have a hard time retaining without reflection, and so we do is the longest of the periods, and it’s easier to tell when capacity’s not in place than to tell when it is because we have leaders in systems that we haven’t worked in 10 years who are still reaching out to my people for support and help because they are the thought partners and they are the collaborators.
And so a lot of times my folks are like, “You know how to do this. And so-and-so still there? Why aren’t they helping you with this?” But also, it speaks to the fact that we build the kind of relationships that make the work personally and professionally meaningful. There are often instances where when leaders we’ve worked with have gone from one place to another, and so they no longer have a crew. And they reach back out, they’re like, Can you come and scaffold a crew?”
We’re like, Well, one of the reasons why we wrote the book is because we wanted to make sure that there was guidance for how to do this work without the need for a rich uncle like Brother Bill to resource us to do it for you. So the book is a democratizing tool that takes the 30 years of partner’s knowledge and puts it out in the context so that anyone with 29 bucks can actually figure out how to do some of this work themselves.
But certainly there’s a tension between building capacity and building dependency, and there’s some natural off-ramps that are typically resource-related that says, “Hey, you’ve got only this much amount of time of this support before we can’t be here anymore, so wouldn’t it be better if not, I did this, but you worked with so-and-so and your staff to get this piece done.”
We’re literally going through this now with the ending of our Gates NSIs. We’re raising the question of whether we’ve built enough capacity and we’re looking at the request for support to see how those have changed over time, and we’re not pushing back, but at least reflecting back to the teachers and leaders we’re working with when there’s something that they’re asking for that they can take on themselves, not to be underestimated the value of another pair of hands in these places that are so severely underresourced. And so that’s a lot of what we provide another set of hands, hands that don’t have a classroom. So you’re like, really?

Stacey Caillier:
You actually have highly viable hands that can do some serious work.

Derek Mitchell:
Highly available, highly viable, right?

Stacey Caillier:
Yeah.

Derek Mitchell:
So that’s not to be underestimated, but yet at the same time, there are dozens of folks in that place who by the time we’re there three years or so, should be so on board and so aligned with where the school is trying to go that if you tap them to take on some of these tactics and some of these tools, they should be excited about the opportunity.

Stacey Caillier:
Yeah. I love the point you made too about the book serving this democratizing function because you really can’t… I mean, when we read it, I literally was like, this is a blueprint for how to actually do improvement in a very change-oriented, transformational way. And if you’re a teacher or a principal or a superintendent or a coach, it’s written for you, and even the tone is so conversational and it was a joy to read.

Derek Mitchell:
Well, part of all of that was intentional, and Justin owns a lot of the benefit of that just by… He’s a journalist at heart, and so communicating more broadly to everybody is a value of his. But when I first hired at Partners, it was a goal that the board had for there to be a book about our work, and part of that was because a report had come out about the value of the work that we had done in partnership with another organization in San Jose, and we weren’t mentioned at all in it.
And the board’s like, “What we were the most critical piece, and nobody talks about, dah, dah, dah.” So we wrote a book way back then. I think 2015 was when the book was written, and it was encyclopedic, and it was something I couldn’t even get staff to read.

Stacey Caillier:
First test.

Derek Mitchell:
Yes. And so we set it aside. It had everything that needed, which is part of the problem, of course.

Stacey Caillier:
Right, right.

Derek Mitchell:
And this effort, we really asked two critical questions. So first is what are the books we ourselves rely on and what do they have in common? So I had my leadership team and a few of my staff members on the project bring those five or six books that are the most compelling books for them, and it was things like “Savage Inequalities” and “Teach Like a Champion.” And these just the typical… Even Tony’s book had made it into that group and we categorized them, and there were basically five categories of books.
There was the Brinn admirers of the problems books, which “Savage Inequalities” is a good example of that. Just well-written, poignant and powerful, but it leaves you devastated because I mean, you read it and you go, oh my God, how could we do this to people? Because there’s no solutions in there. So we want it to be as poignant and as powerful as “Savage Inequalities” but we want it to be solutions focused. We wanted to be uplifted as opposed to the more alive.
Then the second set of books were the education books for non-educators, right? “Tricks of the Trade” kind of books, “Teach Like a Champion” falls into that category, and they are tactically powerful because you read them today and you can change your practice tomorrow kinds of things, which we think was really important. But the tone and frame felt in some ways demeaning of professional practice.
And so we wanted to be as tactically useful, but to be deeply respectful of professional practice and leverage the voices of the folks who are in the work trying to do this work. They’re the research tones that had 19 references for every utterance, and our original book would’ve fallen into that category. But it’s important that we know we’re not experimenting on these kids, that there’s a research base and then we know how to help.
And so we wanted the book to have the resource base embedded within it, but not be so dry and so challenging for your regular reader to make their way through, which is a key part. Then there’s books like Tony’s, which is really the reform books. We read a bunch of those and they basically produce a blueprint, but in some cases divorced from the act of community practice. So you follow these steps and magic is supposed to happen, but the tissue between people and process and teams and-

Stacey Caillier:
The murky stuff.

Derek Mitchell:
… the sausage making is invisible to it. And so we wanted that blue pretty sort of framing, but we really wanted the sausage making, right? The really valuable interactions between well-meaning disagreeing people. That is often the truth in this reform frame. And so we hope just hearing your questions and your reflections on it seems like we struck the right balance.

Stacey Caillier:
You nailed it. Okay. Derek, I have one last question before the final word. I feel like I’ve been in lots of rooms with you at this point, mostly virtual, unfortunately. But when I get the in-person ones, I’m so happy. And I’ve really appreciated that you are so clearly committed to building the field of improvement in education.
Whenever I’m in a room with you, you’re never just promoting your own organization’s work. You’re always speaking in very broad terms about what we as a field need to do to move forward. And I’d just love to know why are you invested in the field of improvement and what are your hopes for that field as we grow?

Derek Mitchell:
A big part of the reason why improvement, particularly the field of improvers is important, is that it’s an investment in producing outcomes that if we don’t get serious about how to embed it into the existing set of systems and structures, it’ll be another dead body along the side of the road of schools getting better. And there are tons of those already. We can list them.
And I think there’s a critical role improvers and improvement science itself can play, and the execution of any reform, why isn’t it the mechanism through which we do any broad-based structural strategy, whether it’s deploying new curricula or new assessments or teaching content? The improvement methodology is the mechanism by which you deepen and broaden understanding while you build agency in learning, and you create the structures by which communities learn forward together.
So the content independent, it’s essentially the delivery system and a powerful delivery system of any structure that can produce outcomes. And so I feel like the most promising thing that have come out of the field in a very, very long time. And if we don’t get serious about how to deepen and broaden this understanding so that it’s part of what teachers are taught and leaders are taught and systems expect, it’ll be another example like the computer. Everybody feels like it’s going to… AI is the latest thing that everyone feels like it’s going to revolutionize.
In my brief life, there’ve been one of those every six or seven years, and nothing seems to really change. With this methodology it could change it all. It’s the thing that could make all the other pieces that have promise, deliver on what they promise. So I’m going to keep plugging away at it and keep pushing my peers to get serious about it, because I think it’s really the main asset that we can produce beyond the work we do with our individual districts and schools.

Stacey Caillier:
I’m on board. You’ve convinced me.

Derek Mitchell:
Awesome.

Stacey Caillier:
Do you have any final thoughts or words of advice?

Derek Mitchell:
What I’m thinking about now, because I’m also on the board of an organization called the California Academy of Sciences, if you haven’t actually visited this place, I highly recommend it. It’s in the San Francisco. It’s this incredible facility that has a rainforest, aquarium, Natural History Museum, and a planetarium all under the same roof. But more important than that, the board has about, I think the last kind of six Nobel Prize-winning scientists on the board. And it has a mission to help regenerate the natural world.
And so part of what I’m thinking about now in terms of the role education needs to play is that nature’s been trying to signal to all of us, it’s distress. I mean, we’ve had fires and floods sometimes in the same spot in the same week, very biblical types of disasters, which I think is nature’s way of saying what you’re talking about Willis. But for me, because this is one of many large problems that we are bequeathing to the next generation, racism being another, just this goes on and on.
I’m thinking about what roles should our schools be playing in preparing the next generation of kids to solve problems that we’re leaving them with? And one question that I’m sitting with is this question of regeneration and regeneration science. Shifting from a mental model that we all have now around conservation, which we did not have 20 years ago, if you remember, but suddenly we have automobile companies commercials talking about conservation. It’s an incredible thing in just 20 years for that kind of thing to happen. But the problem is we can’t conserve our way into a healthy planet anymore. We have to regenerate the natural world, and that means rewilding key parts of the world that we’ve essentially killed by inhabiting them as humans.
And so I’ve been thinking about schools and the role, the kind of young people we are going to need, who are going to be willing to tackle those kinds of big problems, and how do we help them? How do we build them, how do we train them? And it starts with owning the shift from conservation to regeneration, and then helping them recognize the limitations and the solutions that we’ve attempted, right?
And being open to the kind of already crazy, broad-based thinking that they have about the world because we haven’t solved these problems and they’re not going to find solutions running along the same trails that we’ve run along. And so we need to produce young people who are more resilient, more in community, better stewards of air, sea, land than we have been.
And I’m worried that we’re not producing those young people. I’m worried that we’re instead creating a much more fragile, much less motivated group of young people, and we got to do something about that.

Stacey Caillier:
Can I yes and that really briefly?

Derek Mitchell:
Sure.

Stacey Caillier:
The picture that you’re painting for students or young people of being able to regenerate and explore deep questions and address problems that we essentially bequeath to them, I want that for teachers too. I think a big part of our ability to do that for children is going to be our ability and willingness to support that in the adults teaching them, because it’s really hard to teach in a way you have not experienced.

Derek Mitchell:
Absolutely.

Stacey Caillier:
And there’s this opportunity for really beautiful symmetry to have young adults and adults working alongside each other to do that work and exploring.

Derek Mitchell:
Absolutely. Absolutely.

Stacey Caillier:
That’s a dream.

Derek Mitchell:
So that’s where my brain is these days. And I’m looking at organizations that are working hard at helping schools take the work of the environment more serious. And from my own experience with the cockroaches, you can really excite kids with science just by driving their own inquiries. Whatever it is they’re excited about or interested in.
And how can we then build teachers’ capacity to produce a mindset shift in young people that will make new kinds of solutions more readily applicable and available to them than they have them to us? That’s where my brain is these days. Bet you didn’t think that’s where I’d go, huh?

Stacey Caillier:
I didn’t, but I love it. Okay. Oh, Derek, thank you so, so much. This has been a joy to be able to spend this time with you.

Derek Mitchell:
You’re so welcome, Stacey. So great to see you as always. Thank you for everything. This has been fun. It’s always fun to share with you.

Stacey Caillier:
Thanks.

Alec Patton:
High Tech High Unboxed is hosted and edited by me, Alec Patton. Our theme music is by Brother Herschel. Huge thanks to Derek and Stacey for this conversation. You can find links to the book “Change Agents”, as well as lots of resources about school improvement in the show notes. Thanks for listening.