Sarah Howard:
The kid by kid approach has an assumption in it that there’s something wrong with the kid. And so if we troubleshoot each young person’s scenario, then we can fix them, especially if we take that approach first. If we have first taken the approach of what’s going on for groups of young people and how could we shift the system of how we support this transition, it places it on us first.

Alec Patton:
This is High Tech High Unboxed. I’m Alec Patton, and that was Sarah Howard, Senior Director of the Partner School Network with the Network for College Success or NCS. My colleague, Stacey Caillier, head of the Center for Research on Equity and Innovation at the High Tech High Graduate School of Education sat down with Sarah and NCS Director of Equity and Impact Del McCain to talk about something pretty amazing that’s happened in Chicago Public Schools. At the heart of the story, it’s something ed On Track. It’s a measure of whether a ninth grade student is on track to graduate from high school. It was developed by the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research, and a ninth grader is on track if they fail no more than one semester of a core course and earn enough credits to become a 10th grader.

In 2007, only 61% of ninth graders in Chicago were on track to graduate. 10 years later in 2017, that number had risen to 89%. The story of how Chicago achieved this has been told in a book, the Make or Break Year by Emily Krone Phillips and it’s inspired lots of improvement projects focusing on the transition from eighth grade to ninth grade. One of those projects is the Care Network, which started in Fall 2021 and which is run by the High Tech High Graduate School of Education in partnership with the University of California San Diego and the California Map Project.

Stacey’s one of the people working on that, which is why she really wanted to talk to Sarah and Del. She had some very relevant questions for them. I loved listening to this conversation. To be honest, I’ve not been at my most hopeful over the past year, just generally speaking, but Sarah and Del made me feel really hopeful about what schools can be. Before we get to the interview, two quick definitions. First, you’ll hear the initial CPS, they stand for Chicago Public Schools. Second, you’ll hear the phrase, the One F list. That’s the list of ninth grade students who have one F but are passing the rest of their classes. That’s all you need to know. Now, here’s the interview.

Stacey Caillier:
Sarah and Del, I am so excited to talk with you. Many of us have heard about the work in Chicago to improve the percentage of students who are on track to graduate by focusing on that critical ninth grade year. That work has been featured in the news, in articles, in a fantastic book ed The Make or Break Year, and it’s inspired many districts and networks across the country to get better about knowing which students are struggling and develop systemic ways for supporting those students as they transition to high school and beyond.

You both have been leaders in this work for a while. Sarah, you are currently the Senior Director of the Partner School Network with the Network for College Success at the University of Chicago; and Del, you are the Director of Equity and Impact at NCS. So together you’ve had over three decades of experience on the ground in schools as leadership coaches, as school leaders, as teacher leaders.
And I initially reached out to you because we have our own eighth grade On Track network and we were really grappling with how to balance the need for larger systemic changes that could impact large groups of students, with the need to support particular students who are really struggling. And you had so much great advice to share from your experiences that I essentially was like, can I talk to you again and record it so that more folks can hear what you were doing? So that we all can do better work in improving systems for greater equity. So thank you truly for being here.

Sarah Howard:
Thanks for having us.

Adelric McCain:
Absolutely. Looking forward to it.

Stacey Caillier:
All right, so before we jump into the nitty gritty of what that work actually looked like on the ground and how you all supported it, can you help us just get grounded in who you are by sharing with us your identity markers and how you came to this work?

Sarah Howard:
So, I am Sarah Howard. I’m a lifelong Chicagoan. I am a Whitney Young Dolphin, Chicagoans will get that reference. And 50-something-year-old white woman. I am the mother of a daughter and a bonus daughter, both young Black women, and I have been a Chicago educator my entire adult life and I have seen the Chicago Public School District as a student teacher, principal, parent.

Adelric McCain:
Awesome. I’m Adelric, Del McCain. I’ve been in Chicago for 21 years and throughout that time as a Black male educator who was in the classroom for 12 years and now have a Black daughter in the public education system, I have really made it my goal to not just approach from my experiences in the classroom or outside of the classroom of education leadership, that it’s not just about showing up to do instruction well, which is important. It’s not just to do assessment well, which is important; but it’s also about really building and forging relationships that make the experiences of our young people as they matriculate through school, a joyful experience. A experience where they feel that they’re growing and expanding.
So that’s been my stance. That’s been something how I show up in this work. I have the opportunity to work with an awesome organization with awesome colleagues like Sarah. And mind you, I just want to note really quickly an identifying marker is that we have found ways to work on similar planes and levels even before we’ve got to network for college success both in the small schools movement and whatnot. And so, we both share our kind of desire to approach this work in a very specified way.

Stacey Caillier:
All right, awesome. So I want to get us grounded in the why for the On Track work. Can y’all say something about why did Chicago decide to focus on ninth grade and what was the goal in doing that?

Sarah Howard:
Well, I remember vividly when I graduated from high school in 1986, I think that was the same year that the Secretary of Education at the time labeled us the worst district in the country. One of the reasons was that our dropout rate was pretty high. Our graduation rate was low, it was in the 50 percentile. And so, Chicago has gone through many waves of school reform, but Del and I are fortunate to work at an organization that was started by one of the researchers at the U Chicago Consortium Bond School research, Melissa Roderick.

And her team had discovered from doing some other work trying to help eighth grade teams think about how their kids had done in high school, had they prepared them well enough and discovered this relationship between ninth grade performance and high school graduation. And we were there pretty early in that process, Del and I, and discovered that schools that really focused on the freshman year saw big increases and those increases held even if there wasn’t a extra special effort beyond the freshman year. That just setting kids on the right path that first year made a big difference. And we’ve seen the rate go up into the upper 80s in Chicago. So way to go team.

Stacey Caillier:
Awesome. Anything you want to add, Del?

Adelric McCain:
I think the only thing that I would add is some of the… I think Sarah laid out beautifully the narrative behind this work. Some technical elements is, from a data standpoint, there was a rate of On Track when we first started this work, 54%, which the question became how does that correlate with that coinciding graduation rate, which was very low. And what the work found out through the research actually, started implementing the work from the research, was that there was a direct correlation as the On Track rate increased, so has the graduation rate.

And so, it was one of those successes that when you talk about the why, we constantly lead with this, why, that there are very few things in our realm of education where you can say, guaranteed, if we can focus on this, you will see positive results. Well, here’s one of those things. I feel like that was so revolutionary. It wasn’t just from… The powerful part is the narrative, but there’s a lot of folks out there who want to see the numbers, the numbers correlate with that narrative.

Stacey Caillier:
Thank you so much for making that point. That brings me perfect to the next question, which was I wanted to… In our previous conversation we had talked about the importance of keeping the data or the measures really simple and actionable. Can you tell us how are schools measuring On Track? What was the data they were actually paying attention to, to guide their work?

Adelric McCain:
Okay, sure. So this is one of the more interesting parts of this narrative, right? About what data did adults receive and what data did they have access to, to inform their practice and the decisions that they made. Prior to the focus of this work, there was not a lot of incoming data around eighth graders who were entering into high schools. And if there was that data available, it was not made available for the practitioners. So, after doing a lot of work, the consortium around causal factors and looking at a number of different things from a research perspective that might influence a student’s success, it really drilled down to two pieces of data, which is attendance and grades, attendance and grades.

That is a way that you can really access student experience enough to actually intervene and support that student basically from just a numbers standpoint. And so, what I think that needs to be said here is that while those are the very practical and pragmatic number points or data points that was used, that also invited the qualitative data of really getting to understand why that student was showing up the way that they’re showing up with that data. If they had a 80% or 70% attendance rate in middle school with maybe a two point something GPA, then it prompts you to ask them, “Why? What was your experience in eighth grade that prompted you to do that?” So then that data point gave teachers the access to ask more questions to get to the qualitative data points.

Sarah Howard:
Yeah, I think Dell does a great job of describing that incoming, what’s the starting point? How do we think about kids as they enter into our school? And then we also saw schools checking on kids along the way starting very early. So when the numbers really took off was when Chicago built a couple systems around the data and what Dell described, I think they used to it the watch list, which was this eighth grade data coming to school so they could think about preparing to support groups of kids showing up with different eighth grade performance.

And then there was the warning list, which they got every five weeks to see how are kids doing now. If we were to calculate On Track right now, On Track’s the end of the year metric, but if we were to calculate it right now, what would be going on for these young people? And grades are really the core of the matter, but you can learn about what’s impacting a young person’s performance by seeing is attendance a factor? Are they getting behavior issues, flagging, right? Is that a factor? So we would look at other things. You often hear our schools talking about BAG reports, behavior, attendance, grades, so they could get a sense of where are kids tripping up and how could we take those obstacles away or support them?

Adelric McCain:
I just want to add though too, that attendance and grades does not correlate with On Track, because On Track by itself is that very specified metric. But I think when you’re doing progress monitoring around the metric… And again the definition for Chicago On Track is making sure that you’re… It’s about credit attainment and making sure that you’re failing no more than one core class per semester. And so, it’s a cumulative metric and I just want to make sure that we get that clarity because even when we were starting out this work, it was very important that we made that distinction for our practitioners that when you’re looking at the attendance and grades, that feeds into the actual metric of On Track, but that is not the on track metric.

Stacey Caillier:
Yeah, I think that’s so helpful. I’m glad you brought that up because I think one of the things I was really struck by is that it would take a lot of work for a teacher to calculate On Track metrics in their head, but yet I can look at my grade book or my student information system and see which students have one F or more, and I can focus my work on those students. So just the simplicity of focusing on who are the students who have F’s in core classes, I think was so helpful to us in talking with you all about how do we make this really simple and actionable. And I also was really intrigued, y’all had mentioned that you eventually came to focus on 3.0 GPA or higher because when you analyze your data, you found that 90% of kids who graduate with a 3.0 start with a 3.0, and that actually very few start low and turn it around. So that GPA threshold became an important indicator too. Is there anything else you want to say about that?

Sarah Howard:
I would just add that the reason we were even thinking about a 3.0 GPA to begin with is there’s another piece of research from the consortium that shows us that that’s the point at which we move to over 50% of high school seniors persisting in college. So that high school GPA is a big indicator of what happens after high school. And so, it was like, “Okay, well then how do we get kids to the 3.0 GPA in high school?” And it turns out you got to help them start that way.

Adelric McCain:
Yep. And if I could just add with that, because as you discover a thing, the beauty of this work is that you’re going to ask more questions and do more investigation, and it was really astonishing. The focus also was doubled down by, regardless of how successful of a student that you were in eighth grade, the overwhelming majority of students saw an attrition and loss in their GPA from eighth grade to ninth grade. So even if you were quote-unquote on track, we were still doing students such a disservice at a moment where they can recreate themselves basically giving grade information and data that’s saying that you are less than you were a year ago, which just doesn’t make sense. And we’re talking some astonishing numbers, 50% lost in GPA to particular demographics and speaking directly as a Black man, three quarters of Black and LatinX boys saw a significant decrease in their GPA. So that’s why once you unearth the one causal factor, it just led you to really understand another causal factor which had deep implications.

Sarah Howard:
And what’s critical about that point is that young people aren’t substantially different from June of their eighth grade year to September of their freshman year. So the difference between those two points in time is the school that a kid is in. And one of the things we say frequently… Because everybody wants to talk about, “Well, what else could be the problem? Looking out there somewhere. So in school they didn’t get prepared well enough. We love that story, in high school. They didn’t get prepared well enough. Well, it turns out you can’t high school proof kids in eighth grade.
The problem is that in high school we are supporting young people not well enough, especially in that transition. And no matter what their eighth grade teachers did, kids are still vulnerable to that transition, and our inability to meet them where they are as high school teachers. And that’s what that GPA drop is showing us. And we’re especially bad at it for young Black men and young LatinX men. And so we’ve got to look in the mirror and do some work.

Stacey Caillier:
It’s almost like you’re saying the system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets, Sarah.

Sarah Howard:
Basically. It’s like you’re reading my mind.

Adelric McCain:
That part.

Stacey Caillier:
One of my much loved colleagues, Dr. Michelle Pleasure talks about how we don’t have deficit students, we have deficit systems. We need to stop looking to the students to figure out what we need to fix. They don’t need fixing. We need to fix our systems.

Sarah Howard:
Amen.

Stacey Caillier:
Okay. So now I want to get into the weeds with you both and I just want to hear a little bit about what did ninth grade On Track work actually look like on the ground? And if it’s helpful to talk about a particular school that stands out for you, that’s great. Just paint a picture for us.

Adelric McCain:
I’ll start from the collective global level and then we can maybe… I would love to drill down to what that looks like at a school. The biggest hurdle I think when starting this work was just getting practitioners, teachers, adults in school buildings to talk with each other and collaborate with each other and very intentional, and at this time, unique ways. So instead of convening adults in schools to go through lists of reports and tell them the dos and don’ts of what they should do, let’s create professional learning communities that are taking on problems to solve, and they’re using data to solve those problems. And then through the initial implementation of that with schools and individual schools to say, bring some adults together. Give them some sacred space and time. Give them the data that they need so that they can have these conversations. No schools should be doing this in isolation.

So then the next level would be, or the next step was, how do we bring schools within Chicago together to share experiences, to share best practices, to share dilemmas that they’re facing and experiencing because then that created that collective spirit and energy around this work. And so, the first ask was to team differently, get folks together, remove barriers so that they could team differently, give them time and space. And then, how do we provide opportunities for people to network differently? Right? Right now I feel like improvement science is that thing. It’s really driving a lot of the conversations. Prior to us being very well versed in that language, we were creating, if you will, improvement networks to get schools together to say, “Try something out, bring it back to our group and figure out what we can learn collectively from it.”
And then the other big lift was, especially at this time, I’m hoping and thinking it’s changed quite a bit, but pre-service programs did not give us all the tutelage that we need as classroom practitioners to process data and to process data in a way that makes it actionable. These spaces were professional development spaces for us to start getting in a practice of us all being comfortable with using data to shift our practice. And so, a big mindset shift had to happen from a collective standpoint, which is student outcome data isn’t just student outcome data, it is actually reflection of your practice.

And so I felt like that transition, which really needed to take… You couldn’t do that just with individual schools, you needed to have a collective understanding about that. That is one of those key shifts that occurred while people were trying to develop their teams that really influenced the culture, if you will, of CPS. So, for a while before it became so prominent as it is right now, CPS was really starting to create improvement networks through this work and getting folks together to use data in ways that they had not used it before to actually make them more efficacious and more empowered to make changes.

And I think that that’s best reflected… And I think Sarah and I have opportunities to talk about this quite a bit, because we lived in this experience, we could see that shift in one of the schools that were a part of our larger, which we ed at the time success team collaborative, Tilden, which has been highlighted in Make or Break Year. It’s one of those success stories that I love to learn from because it took a systems approach both on a collective district level and even in a school level systems approach to make this work.

Sarah Howard:
Yeah. So Del and I were both at that school, I coaching the principal and he coaching the lead of a freshman success team as well in Tilden, they had a whole system of grade level teams, which they ed pods and all the pod leaders met together. So when we recognized that the freshman team was part of a larger system or structure, we thought like, “Well, we can’t coach at the top and ground level when there’s this middle structure driving what’s happening, we are going to need to touch that too so we can see the whole through line.” I think that one thing I would say, one other sort of piece of our guiding principles is about how we use data, not just that there is data. Del mentioned one aspect of it, which is it has to be actionable. It can’t be so far away from us or so infrequently connected or collected that we can’t do something with it and act on it.

But another piece of the pie is we have to view data as the start of an inquiry process, not the end of it. It’s not giving us answers, it’s giving us entry points into what might be going on here, how else could we find that out? And the answer to that is frequently talk to the teachers and the young people. So, at Tilden, basiy they had a team that met, I think they met monthly. Del was in those meetings and then he would meet with the lead periodically. I met with the principal, and in those meetings they basiy would look at that point in time On Track data and try to think about it mattered that at the time they had a data strategist.

So it wasn’t like, here’s a raw list of every freshman and their grades, let’s try to figure out the patterns. Someone spent some time ahead of the meeting saying like, “Yo, here’s the data and here’s four patterns I’m noticing.” So that the conversation could start there at the patterns, it mattered that that work happened outside the meeting space. And rather than the teachers spending a bunch of time thinking about what do we do about attendance interventions? That was handed off to a different team so that the teachers could be thinking about what do we do in our classrooms? Del, you want to add to that?

Adelric McCain:
Another example, because I think I appreciate you setting up that example, which I feel like is important because it typically led to another conversation which would require the way we had to partner in schools, which is if you also receive data and you saw high failure rates in one class, working towards getting first of all to the comfort level, if you will, to actually identify and socialize that that’s a reality, but then knowing that there could be a potential mindset behind the teacher that’s given all those F’s, the issues there. You couldn’t just rely on a lead of a team to shift that mindset. It took a collective systems effort or that lead would have to manage up and have conversations with administration to get support on how do we really start changing not only just the practice and assessment behaviors, but also some of the mindset work that has to be done and making sure that people are not handing out like 50% failures in the class or even 40% failures in the class without any justification.

So our work together, that’s kind of how it looked. If you would see something like that, how do I work with the team lead to manage up to the principal and then how can that principal and AP support the team to actually do some mindset work, shifting work, some more instructional assessment work or whatnot? And that’s what kind of was provided from that level leadership.

Sarah Howard:
Yeah. I do think that it takes time for a team to take ownership over the student’s performance and the practice of looking at their data, trying things, and seeing some change helps them realize like, “Oh wait, I have some efficacy here. I actually can change what happens in the classroom.” And during that time where they’re building that sense of collective efficacy, they’re also learning to trust each other and say real talk to each other.

But that doesn’t happen immediately. And if you go too quickly, it can damage the trust where, “Oh, this is a place where I get burned by my colleagues. I’m going to just sit there and be quiet or grade papers or not even come.” And so it was important to strategically hand off the accountability talk to the principal early on. If we noticed that a big chunk of our off-trackness comes from one teacher’s class, instead of us all ganging up on that teacher, that’s a strategic conversation that needed to happen somewhere else so that person doesn’t feel attacked, and they have some opportunity to really reflect and enter the work differently. So we have to think about both the development of the young people and the development of the adults and the development of them as a team.

Stacey Caillier:
Yep. And I remember in our previous conversation, Sarah, that you… I think it was as we were ending, I was like, is there anything else that you want to make sure we know? And you were like, “The biggest factor in the success of teams is the admin.” Is there anything you want to expound on in relation to that? When you saw teams really taking off or not taking off, what were leaders doing or not doing that we should keep in mind as we’re supporting this work?

Sarah Howard:
I feel my partner, go ahead Del.

Adelric McCain:
Okay. Whew. Administration, leadership, they are the condition setters. They are the essential condition setters. That’s the reason why it’s so invaluable. They remove barriers. We hear a lot now as we bathe a lot in improvement science world and being sponsors and the importance of sponsors to work. Administration is that, and that’s a key role. Most important what I’ve saw, you can have an administrator say, “This is my vision for the work,” and that’s almost as good as if they do or they don’t say how they’re setting conditions for that vision to be lived.

So you could actually have a leader that doesn’t say anything about the vision for a freshman On Track work or On Track work in general. But what they have done, which speaks much more louder, is I’ve designated this sacred time, I’ve scheduled, I’ve created a master schedule where this group, this sacred time, they meet routinely. I have worked and created avenues and pipelines for data sources with the either district or network data specialists or if I have one and I’m lucky enough to have one in house.

I’ve created space and opportunity for them, I’ve given a extra prep to the team lead so that they can do their professional development that’s necessary. All of these conditions, that is actually what screams louder about the vision of the work than the actual saying, “I have strong vision for this work and this is what I’d like to do.” And I think that that’s the key role there. And again, I got to reiterate, and to remove barriers, because let’s just simply say that within in any district, especially a district as lot of Chicago, there’s going to be always a lot of competing priorities. The administrator’s the one who quiets all that noise and says, “This is what our focus is.”

Sarah Howard:
Yeah. I hope whoever is listening like rewinds that section and make a list of that kind of stuff because those moves by administrators are critical. Another one we talked about before is really thinking about who’s teaching freshmen and are these people who have a deep understanding of adolescent development, understand what are the developmental tasks for 14-year-olds and enjoy meeting those kids where they are in the tasks that they’re taking on. They’re trying to gain independence. They don’t really have their frontal lobe yet. You do have to be their surrogate frontal lobe, which means we need those highly organized teachers in the ninth grade who help kids keep track of stuff. We need the people who give second chances. Who know that revision is where the learning happens, not the first attempt. And that’s just sort of their standard way of operating. And so, we look for who are those people and recognize the pivotal nature of the freshman year and that it’s not about we need to make sure those teachers are with seniors. Nope. In fact, we need to make sure they’re with the freshmen.

Adelric McCain:
Yeah, yep. And if I could just add a little bit to that thread as we riff because prior to the narrative is that the people with the strongest understanding and implementation of instruction and assessment, well, let’s kick them up to seniors because they’ve earned that of doing the work. Whereas that shift… And again, leadership plays a big role in that, actually those are the folks with that strong instructional practice and understanding and confidence to try things that are going to be in best services students. Make sure that they’re at the ninth grade level and get them to actually say, “It’s my imperative. I have a very significant role of setting the trajectory of success for this young person’s life.” Whereas my senior year, I’m not saying they’re fully baked, but they’ve experienced enough school, they’ve gotten to that point. I play such a really, really integral role and important role in this young person’s life and to get those folks there.

Sarah Howard:
Yeah. I know earlier Stacey, you mentioned Make or Break Year and we had talked before about how do you help people think about this more systemically and not so much as a kid by kid effort. And it’s really important to approach the work that way, especially in schools where initially the off track rate might be higher. So if you take the kid by kid approach, this does not seem doable at all, right? Because I can’t go troubleshoot one kid at a time. We don’t have the staff capacity for that.

Stacey Caillier:
Yes.

Sarah Howard:
So it’s really important to think about how do we group kids. Del mentioned one earlier, which is we look at their eighth grade performance and think about who really knows how to do school well already? What does that mean they need in terms of transition supports? Who was really struggling in eighth grade?

What might they need? What extra touch on the way in or experience in the fall? Do we create a mentor program for that smaller group of kids because we expect they’re going to have some challenges. And then during the year, it could be things like we talked about the One F list. This is something that really builds the sort of holding up the mirror for teachers. In high school, I can remember thinking as a high school teacher that all I knew about the young people in front of me was how they were doing in my class.

And the number of times I had a mind blowing experience when I would hear about this same young person from another teacher, it was like, what? And it could be either direction. They had an A in your class? What? They’re working that hard? Or, “Wait, they’re acting up in your class? They’re so good in my class. What’s happening?” So we get that multi-perspective view of young people. The one F list, if I have kids on that One F list, it tells me really clearly this young person knows how to do school. So what’s off is our connection, my support of the young person, not them. And that experience can be an important catalytic experience for teachers.

Stacey Caillier:
Mm-hmm. I want to dig into that a little bit because that was one of the pieces of advice that you gave to us because when we started in this work, we had all read Make or Break Year. I think we had come away with some ideas that I don’t know if were entirely accurate. And I think many of us, maybe because they were the most compelling stories or something, we were like, oh, if you’re doing On Track work, you’re doing huddles and you’re talking about specific kids in each huddle and coming up with personalized plans of support. And that’s beautiful.

And as you’re saying, not possible if you have more than 50% of your students failing. And so, when we had last talked, you shared that you guys didn’t start with huddles in that way. You started with things like attendance interventions, identifying groups of students to focus on, kids who have one F, kids who did really well in middle school weren’t doing well now. Can you say just a little bit more about what led to that decision? Why didn’t you start with huddles and more about the benefits of starting with groups versus individual kids?

Adelric McCain:
Anybody who does hear this knows me, they’re going to get a kick of one of my favorite quotes that I use consistently from Preta Drucker, that, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” Right? What we recognized early on is a lot of what we were seeing as far as the success of young people in our schools was as much systems issue as it was a culture and mindset issue. Classroom teachers feeling failure is a way to motivate kids, using grades to punish and using grades to get to the student to do what I wanted to do. What we found is if you actually put people and give them data and they huddle, they’re going to revert back to what the existing culture is, myself included. I was guilty of that too. Part of that was a way for you to feel efficacious.

I got this many kids that are not successful in my classroom, so the best thing I can do is since I know how much of a lift is going to be changed my practice or explore how to change my practice to better serve the students, I’m going to go and revert back to, “Oh, it’s the kids.” So if we focus on just creating huddle spaces, we would be actually just in the same culture and in the same existence of people griping about their students and not looking at the data as a reflection of our practice, but looking at the data and seeing the data as, well, these are the way the things are and there’s nothing I can control. However, if we start at a systems level first and say what is in place? One, we’ve depersonalized it. So that gives people access points. You know what I mean by people? I mean adults and teachers.

In addition, we’re taking up something collectively. The idea and what we saw from our theory of action is if we can focus on the systems, build structures that support students and have consistently the right conversations within those systems and structures, right, then eventually the beliefs are going to have to catch up to you doing your work and practice in a different way. And so, then if I have this system and these structures in place to actually support students and we’re still failing kids, well now we’re going to have a different conversation and you can’t really just put it on the kids now, we’re going to have to start doing, as Sarah just mentioned, that mirror work. What is it about my practice that are getting the results that we’re getting to.

Sarah Howard:
The other thing I would add is just that the kid by kid approach has an assumption in it that there’s something wrong with the kid. And so, if we troubleshoot each young person’s scenario, then we can fix them. Especially if we take that approach first. If we have first taken the approach of what’s going on for groups of young people and how could we shift the system of how we support this transition, it places it on us first. So I think that’s kind of a critical pivot that we’re trying to get people to make in the way we approach the work.

Stacey Caillier:
Yeah, I really appreciate that. One thing that I was really struck by in our previous conversation too, you named several system moves that y’all were kind of making a bet on. One being like, let’s put our strongest teachers in ninth grade because the data is showing us actually that even if they don’t have strong teachers later on, if we set them up well in ninth grade, they’re good. There was also this idea of pushing on grading and how teachers think about their grading practices. And I know many folks who are doing on track work right now are really thinking about how do we push on more equitable grading practices within schools? Can you say a little bit about how you all approach that? Because you took a more strategic approach I think, than many of us are where we’re read this book and now change your practices, please. But you were really scaffolded in how you approached it. Can you say a little bit about that?

Sarah Howard:
Well, I’ll start and say that I think our earlier comment about the importance of the 3.0 GPA launched us into this line of inquiry and work. And what Del and I used to say to each other all the time is you can’t intervene your way to a 3.0. And by that we mean, a lot of what would happen in a freshman success team is we would think about these groups of students and then we would come up with interventions that take place outside the classroom. Somebody’s going to go talk to their parents about attendance, not from our team, but from that other team we talked about or we’re going to have tutoring of this or that kind, that happens at this or that time, and we’re going to spend a bunch of energy organizing that or we’re going to have a mentor program.

But it was all things that were designed to help young people complete the work that their teachers were assigning but not change what was being assigned, how it was being graded, or any of that. And that is really pretty effective at preventing failure. And let me just say that even in that universe, we saw not just less F’s, we saw all grades go up, we saw more kids on track, we saw their standardized test score on the ACT, the average go up a whole point right by their junior year because more kids were in school more of the time learning stuff. But even though the GPAs went up some right, they’re not going to get to where we need them to be if we don’t really take up where the learning happens, which is classroom practice, instructional practice.

So I think how we got there is an important piece of the pie. People had to realize the importance of getting that higher GPA in freshman year and the foundation that it laid for life outcomes, not just for your high school GPA, but then what you do after high school. So that was an important foundation and it got us into thinking about, so what are we doing? What are we doing in our instruction? How could it look different?

Adelric McCain:
The only thing I would add is giving the adult learners perspective on this. We lean into NCS’s guiding principles about building capacity and the fact that, the belief, the true belief that adults working within schools, practitioners, they have everything that they need to solve their own problems, and we just need some thought partnership and support. Really believing that. Because again, going back to this culture piece, at the beginning stages of this work, I was still in the classroom and I experienced the district to be a very top down district where you’re mandated to do something, something is given to you, and you’re expected to do this thing instead of being your own problem solver.

Because while this work required systems thinking, each individual school and campus and community had their own individual situations and problems even within that system or within those structures. And so, giving people the opportunity to be efficacious enough to develop their own systems approach and take their own risks to try their own things out, I think was one of the strongest catalyst to make this not just some work but a movement. Because people could honestly say we did that. We were the ones who changed our FOT, our Freshman On Track rate from 60% to 80% and now we’re going to set goals because we know we can till 90. So that kind of ushering in a different way of being, if you will, within a district that for a while had operated in another way.

Stacey Caillier:
I really appreciate that because one of the things that’s sitting with me, going back to your point about the importance of culture and how teaching itself is kind of designed unfortunately to be a fairly isolationist experience. And so, part of what sounds like you’re trying to do in this work is just create collaboration structures that actually work for folks. And I was really struck in just hearing about when you guys first started doing the work around equitable grading. It wasn’t just like, “Hey, change your grading scale.” It literally started with, “Let’s just reduce some confusion for kids. Let’s just all develop some common policies or common practices just so that kids are less confused going between different courses and teachers.” It made me think about just the importance of creating coherence for students. And then, from there, once you get on the same page around how do we create coherence, then you can start to really push on innovative grading practices and shifting those policies. But even just getting people to the same place of, can we agree on a coherent structure for kids, feels very powerful.

Sarah Howard:
It is. And it starts the process of surfacing what we believe about our role as teachers, how we believe young people learn, what we believe they need from us. So that exercise you’re talking about of really centering the young person and their experience, what is it like to go from being in eighth grade, even a departmentalized eighth grade and have three or four teachers to having six or seven different teachers all with a different grading skill, different expectations, different policies, and I’ve got to try to navigate all that? Plus I have way more classes, plus I have to get myself to school. It’s a really different universe. And so, we can make ninth grade more of a transition by bringing some coherence to their experience by… Some schools even do a freshman seminar where they give that extra support on the executive functioning, teach them about how to do school, not just the content of particular classes.

And when we get into that conversation, people start to talk about what they think are their non-negotiables. Right? Well, they start to talk about holding kids accountable, and that my friend is where the rubber meets the road. That is where our whole selves show up and the way we support work in schools has to really change because all of myself comes, all of my White woman-ess, all of my experience in school, all of the ways my parents held me accountable, all that stuff has affected my core beliefs and shows up in the room with me, and I’m thinking about what’s my responsibility to a kid?

Well, it’s I need to teach them to be responsible. And the way that I do that is I put the dead in deadline. How many times have we heard that? Killing me. And I learned in my growing up that the way I was held accountable was not by somebody taking something away from me when I didn’t do it, but by saying to me like, “Oh, it’s actually not an option not to do it, so sit down here because we’re about to do it.” Right? That’s a really different sense of what it means to hold someone accountable because that form of accountability says, “You’re capable of this, I believe you can do it. You are going to do it.” Right? Opting out is not an option. So it values the young person in a really different way. How do we get into those conversations about what we’re communicating to young people with the way that we hold them accountable?

Adelric McCain:
Absolutely. Absolutely. The only thing that I want to again continue with the riffing is that work requires sacred space for adult learners to make that shift. And so, I don’t want to take anything away. We know, we’ve seen the heavy lift that many of our educators throughout Chicago have engaged in the past over a decade, and it’s been remarkable. It’s been remarkable. It takes the condition of having time and sacred spaces, because what we’re asking folks to do when they come to those realizations are make some significant changes. Most of it’s in their practice and a lot of it’s in their beliefs and that change, we always talk about this at NCS, that change equals loss. And so, to have people to nurture adult learners in that experience of I once thought this and now I have to believe and understand that and working from a different belief and assumption, that takes some time and some breaking down and building up. Opportunities to do that also not in isolation, but with others that are also going through that same stroke.

Stacey Caillier:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean I think that highlights, when you’re doing this work, you’re not just shifting practices, you’re shifting beliefs, you’re shifting identities, and that is hard. And there’s loss associated with it for sure. Whether it feels like a good change or a not good change, either way, it feels like a loss. And I’m thinking about another thing that y’all said to me that I was like, ah, why do we have to keep relearning this damn lesson? You talked about just when you’re trying to shift a culture and create this sense of collaboration, we’re in it together, we’re shifting how we do things together. You talked about the importance of having a team pick a one team effort, something they’re all going to do. We’re all going to do retakes or revisions. We’re all going to try no zeros. Can you say a little bit about why is that such a key move?

Adelric McCain:
Again, I think we were bathing in continuous improvement waters even before we had the language. I think that that collective approach to doing tests of change, that collective approach of trying something different really just came from, one, building coherency, but two, recognizing that adults were taking risks in doing this change. And if an adult… And by the way, again, a lot of the culture of school was close my classroom door and do what I need to do, and then maybe I’ll stick my head out if it really push and have to do that. But if any one of us are taking risks within a classroom, that risk is felt differently if I know that the person across the hall has taken that risk along with me. And then, also the dividends are paid even greater when we can come together and consolidate our learning where we have something to stand on that and said, I didn’t just try this thing and I’m an outlier because I have this experience.

We are creating data sets as we try these new things. So it’s not only… And again, by the way, a lot of this work, especially when it starts taking traction and you have the systems and structures in place to actually use student outcome data, then the next time is to graduate to that next level quickly and start doing and collecting adult practice data to bring it back and analyze too. But again, if you do that in isolation, you’re creating a completely different dynamic. And most important, it’s about the energy that you can build around that work. And so, again, asking people to be vulnerable and take risk and try something different, it needs a certain level of energy to sustain, to take the next risk and learn from that. And then take the next one and take the next one.

Sarah Howard:
Yeah, I think when we bring a piece of learning to the table, let’s read about this practice or that practice, we’re in inquiry together. We are trying to figure out a way to better serve the young people in our classes. And so, okay, we take on this reading together. Well, let’s all go try it. Right? Then it isn’t like an indictment of what you believe or I believe or us in battle with each other. We are on the same team together, tinkering, trying, investigating. And so, that’s very different energy culture, team spirit.

Adelric McCain:
The manifestations of that is so brilliant and amazing. When I would go into schools and hear young people say in the hall passing or whatever, “Oh, you are doing that? Miss So-and-So is just doing that. Mr. So-and-So is doing it too. Are y’all all going to be doing this?” I’m like, “Uh-huh, now you’re getting it. Or they heard the same message after the kid has been discussed as far as support goes, I just heard the same thing. And we’re talking about that coherency, it’s also that continuity that our young people need. So I just want to name… It’s just a beautiful thing.

Stacey Caillier:
Yeah. Well, and it makes me think too about when I think about the culture that ideally we’re trying to create for kids, it’s where they see each other as resources in their learning. So there’s this interdependence that needs to happen and that feels like nurtured by what they’re doing. And ideally adults would feel that same sense of interdependence, and we are resources in each other’s learning. That’s why we’re here. Whatever we’re trying to create for students, we are trying to create for adults in our schools too. That is really beautiful in the examples you both just shared. So, thank you.

Okay. One critique that I’ve heard of On Track work is that the focus can become changing students instead of changing systems, which is something that we’ve already talked about a little bit, but that it can become kind of this push for compliance versus shifting our systems or practices. So super classic example, students missing a lot of assignments, common response might be pushing that kid to turn in work instead of questioning whether the assignments are meaningful in the first place or if we’ve created the conditions in our classrooms, our schools where students can learn and be successful? So I’m just curious, can you guys, I know we’ve touched on it already, but can you just riff on that critique a little bit? What would you say to that?

Adelric McCain:
The first level of understanding needs to be that every student who’s not successful is a reflection of my practice. And so, the big thing is this idea of quote-unquote changing students. I think our primary focus is not necessarily about changing students, but as well first and foremost, making sure that in that current environment that students in that they have an avenue for success. Now that is not giving anything away or lowering a standard, but they’re saying that we have enough supports in place and it’s very clear that every student who wants to be successful, we have an opportunity for them be being successful.

And then that will invite some more questions, right? Because when we talk about this work, we don’t it freshman On Track work. We’ve always ed it either transition success work or freshman success work. And that work doesn’t entail us meeting a particular metric around freshman On Track. It really begs the question of, we are responsible for the trajectory of this young person’s successor, at least the four years of school. And if we really internalize the research and understanding we’re actually talking about for the rest of their life in school. That’s our responsibility. So the question becomes, what in our practice are we doing to support that charge, to support that imperative that we are all kind of ed to focus on and do?

If the answer to that is then changing the students, well, then you’re already got somebody out there who doesn’t really understand what the work is that we’re trying to do. So when we’re talking about changing students, I like to always try to usher in language and is that what behaviors, what habits of hearts and mind cultivate greater success in students? Do you think that students are baked here just coming in that way? Or is it your doggone responsibility as an adult who’s got a four-year degree at least to go ahead and be a causal classroom practitioner to support the development of that? So then I think we’ve immediately now said that really, what is it that we’re trying to change? Is it the student? Or are we trying to change the environment so that it actually does what school is supposed to do, which is support the development of young people so that they’re autonomously successful?

Sarah Howard:
Yes, indeed. We started with the right person on that question. Two thoughts that come up for me, listening to my colleague, or Melissa Roderick, our core researcher, she always used to say that, “We’re teaching young people how to work.” So getting into a just turn this stuff in mode doesn’t teach them that. That teaches them to hurry up and hand it in. We’re trying to teach them how to plan, work on the thing. That requires us to understand where they are developmentally and to think about what are the experiences they need to accomplish what I’m trying to help them accomplish, and to think in a more developmental way about what goes on in class every day.
So in that way, it is entirely about the young people, but it’s not about changing who they are, it’s about helping them grow, which is our whole job. We’re super clear on that. When we’re in front of fourth graders and when we get to ninth through 12th graders, we forget they’re still on a developmental trajectory. They’re not done. In fact, 14 is a time of incredible malleability in their brain. They get to totally remake themselves right now, build new neural pathways, be entirely different people if they want to. How are we helping them embrace the best version of themselves? And who’s going to help us best understand that they are? Right? They are going to help us. We got to listen to them.

Stacey Caillier:
Okay. I feel like that was kind of a drop the mic, but if you have a closing thought or challenge you want to throw out, please do.

Adelric McCain:
Well, since you phrase it that way, I would say given where we are with time, and what I mean by time, I’m not talking right, right now, I’m just saying it’s trajectory of the past experiences in the past three to four years, it is important for us to continue on focusing on what matters. I think it is easy for us as professionals to see a challenge and to be immersed in a challenge and to want to come out of the nasty feeling of the work that it takes for us to kind of push through that and revert to ways of being that make us feel comfortable, but also don’t really acknowledge the progress that we have made or the opportunities that we have available for us, even though despite we’re going through challenges.

So I’ll speak very plainly and just say that focusing on what matters a lot of times is going to feel very challenging in these times, but it still matters, and it’s also going to pay the greater dividends for why we’re jumping into this work in the first place. But if we go back to just trying to do things as they were before, just because it makes us feel comfortable, we’re going to have to pay something different later on. So let’s, at this point in time, recognize that this is the time to double down on things that may be a little bit challenging, especially given the circumstances, but also are very, very important.

Sarah Howard:
Yes. In the spirit of the symmetry that you invoked earlier, Stacey, I hear my colleague saying, as adults, we are also not fully baked. That we get to grow, change and develop as well. And as we all know, growth and change is uncomfortable, but if we entered the profession the way I know most teachers have, which is not just to have a job, but a calling to really impact the lives of young people, if we are serious about our original intentions, we’ve got to take up that personal work.

Stacey Caillier:
Thank you so much, both of you, for sharing your experience and your wisdom, and just for leading this work for so long, and to be continued.

Alec Patton:
High Tech High UnBoxed is hosted and edited by me, Alec Patton. Our theme music is by Brother Herschel. Huge thanks to Stacey Caillier, Del McCain and Sarah Howard for this awesome conversation. Thanks for listening.