Derek Mitchell:
You can follow the steps in learning to improve and not get anywhere. The minute you go into a conversation and the teachers go, “Nope. Sorry, we’re not going to do that,” and you’re like, “Okay. So, what does the book say about…”

Alec Patton:
This is a High Tech High Unboxed. I’m Alec Patton and that was the voice of Derek Mitchell. This episode is a recording of a den talk at the Gates Foundation, Network for School Improvement Fall of 2022 Community of Practice event in San Diego. If the term den talk is new to you, it’s basically a cross between a traditional panel discussion and eavesdropping on a really interesting conversation happening at the next table in a cafe. This particular conversation takes place between Derek, who you just heard, and Justin Cohen. It’s moderated by Jennifer Husbands. Derek and Justin have known each other for years and it’s just a pleasure to hear them riffing off each other. About halfway through listening to this conversation, I was texting my colleagues trying to find out how I could get a copy of Justin’s book. I just love this and I’m so excited to be able to share it with you.

Jennifer Husbands:
Thank you so much for spending the next hour with us. I am honored to be here with my dear friends, Justin Cohen and Derek Mitchell. I think between the two of them is about 30 years of friendship at least, so I feel very lucky to be here with them, for all of us to learn more about this wonderful book, Change Agents, which focuses on the work of Partners in School Innovation, which Derek leads and the book which was authored by Justin. So, honored to be here with you guys. They were kind enough to share a pre-release version of the book with me, so I have read the whole thing and it’s so good.
Mostly, this Den Talk will be a conversation between the two of them, but I do have a few questions to kind of get things started, and then we’ll open it up to you all, so please think about the questions that you have, so that when we open that up, we don’t have two minutes of silence. We can get right into it. First, I’d love for each of you to introduce yourselves and just share a little bit of the journey that literally brings you into this room today. Either of you can start. I don’t mind. Just use the mic because we’re recording with the hopes of editing pieces of this to create a podcast that will be shared by High Tech High through their Unboxed journal. Go for it.

Justin Cohen:
Thank you all for being here. Thank you to my friend Derek, my friend Jen. I’m just grateful to be with you both. This is such a joy. My journey starts in Camden County, New Jersey just outside of Philadelphia where I was born. My mother was a special ed teacher. My grandfather was a superintendent. They were like, “You can be anything you want to be. Just please, please, God, do not go into public education.” So, that is exactly what I did. Look, I was a white, upper middle class kid with privilege in a public school in New Jersey. That was designed for me. My mom was a teacher. Everything catered to every one of my whims and impulses. I spent the first 10, 12, 13 years of my career in the education sector in nonprofit jobs, and right around 2012 when Trayvon Martin was killed, I began what became basically a midlife crisis of conscience around my own position in a world that was designed for me, and that I discovered over the course of many years to be deeply oppressive to the people around me.
I left the sector and spent the last 10 years really listening and trying to understand whether it was possible to get out of that matrix. I don’t know the answer to that question, but what I do know is that from the day I was born, and then in that last 10 years, the people who shaped my thinking more than anything else about what is right with this world are teachers. This book is a love letter to them, as Derek has said a hundred times. I spent a lot of time listening to teachers, to parents, to kids about what we were getting right and wrong in public schools.
Not all of my thinking is in this book, but a lot of it is, and I’m grateful to Derek and the team at Partners in School Innovation for letting me be creative with how we told the story of the work they do with educators. We’ll talk much more about it, but suffice it to say, I think that if we are going to really think about our culture transforming as a whole, I don’t just mean schools, we are at a deeply problematic place in our country, in our world right now. And if we do not empower our educators to be liberators, we have no chance. That’s what I hope at its heart this book is about and this project is about.

Derek Mitchell:
Thank you Justin and sister Jen. Hard as you know. Thank you everybody for being here to listen to this conversation and maybe even participate a little bit in it, if we can manage how to do that. I’m Derek Mitchell. I’m a CEO of Partners, has been at this work at Partners for 13 years, 14 years, but I’ve been doing the work of helping schools better serve kids who look like me since I was in middle school. I mean, honestly, I’ve pretty much broken or challenged every infrastructure of every school I’ve ever attended because they just weren’t organized to meet my needs. I was the kind of kid who was like, “Well, if you’re not going to meet them, I’ll meet them someplace else,” which to them meant I was disobedient, and truant, and I mean all the things they like to describe us as when we aren’t getting our needs met there and finding some other outlets for it.
I grew up in Chicago, inner city South and Southwest. Chi-town in the hizzy. All of you probably have a sense of what Chicago is like, but I’ll just characterize it by saying that the Secretary of Education at that time when I was in middle school called Chicago the worst public school system in the country. Ironically, at that time when he said that, I was having a great experience in my school, and I’m reading a paper and going, “What? What school did he visit,” to make that statement. But I had the opportunity to go from Chicago to a private school in Connecticut, a place called Taft. And then, I kind of understood what he was talking about because I went from a place that pretty much was desk chair, consoles, chalk most of the time, paper until about March, and chapters of books xerox copied and handed out because no one’s going to spend money on books for kids like us, to a place that was ridiculously abundant. I mean, ridiculously abundant.
I lost a book. They gave me another one honestly, and no skin off anybody’s nose. It was like, “Oh, of course, here.” You could eat all day, all day. So, I’m experiencing this incredible learning space that’s rolling hills of green grass, and red brick buildings that look like castles, and I’m thinking to myself, “Why can’t we have this in Chicago?” Right? And I’ve pretty much been trying to answer that question for the rest of my career.
Justin and Sister Jen described this book as a book about the Partner’s work, but it’s really a book about all of our work. It’s a book about coaching for equity, and it tackles the hardest parts of doing this work that for some reason have been sort of excluded from everybody else’s books, which is how do you build the will to do this work or how do you create the relationships that sustain themselves in the hard times of actually challenging equity, among your colleagues in schools that are heavily and extraordinarily challenged? All of us are tackling this problem, but the tones about this work often stick with the upper level above the green line pieces, the structures, the tools, the processes, the skills that none of the actual really meaningful and thoughtful work of having hard conversations and sustaining yourself when you’re being faced with a set of colleagues, who basically say you are racist if you wanted a segregate data.
So, these stories are the stories of the actual practitioners. I mean, I think the name of Partners in School Innovation in the narrative of the book appears twice, and the story are told by the actual teachers and leaders who are tackling this work in five different communities around the country. So, when you read it, you will hear yourself, you will see yourself, you’ll hear your clients and recognize what you see.

Jennifer Husbands:
Thank you so much. It’s a book, so I have kind of a two part question for you, which is why a book? It could have been a journal article. It could have been a documentary film. It could have been a lot of things. So, one question is why a book, and then why this book? Right? You’ve already started to touch on that, but I’d love to hear a little bit more about why this book, and what is some of the impact that you hope that a book like this might be able to have?

Derek Mitchell:
Yeah. Raise your head, if you’re a leader in another nonprofit like ours that’s supporting schools and districts. I highly recommend you consider a book about your work. Honestly, I’ll stick around after, if you want to talk about how the heck did we get this resource and all that kind of stuff and I can just share our experience with it. For me, there were really four reasons. I’ll start at the first, which is that the really meaty work is missing from everyone else’s books, and you can follow the steps in learning to improve and not get anywhere. The minute you go into a conversation and the teachers go, “Nope. Sorry, we’re not going to do that,” and you’re like, “Okay. So, what does the book say about resistance?” And it doesn’t say anything about it. So, Partners has had an aspiration for a book for a very long time. It was on the list of to-dos when I was hired, just to give you an idea of how long the org has wanted a book about this work, and I was hired in 2009.
My first thought was, “Well, there’s a lot of books about school and school transformation. Why would we do one?” So, we started gathering the books that have informed our own work, Zaretta Hammond. I mean, the list goes on and on and they’re all referenced in the chapters too. And started figuring out, “Okay. What’s actually does Partners have to contribute to this tome, this knowledge base that’s out there already?” And it was clear, it was in the work of partnering itself. Right? The work of matching your acumen, your skill, your knowledge to the needs of your clients in the work. So, we then started to write that book, and then we started in 2014, and it was all of us in the organization writing chapters and moving it around, and it ended up being this thick and we couldn’t even get staff to read it.
Honestly, it was an encyclopedic kind of mishmash of very dry and uninteresting stuff. Who knows? We may end up publishing and getting it all going to university places. So, we started rethinking the overall idea and we decided that we wanted to tell the stories of the folks trying to tackle this work on the ground, and that’s when we sort of ripped out the thought that it needed to be driven by partners because we don’t even drive the work in the schools. It’s their wheel we’re putting our shoulders to, so the book is literally constructed with that idea.

Justin Cohen:
I would just say stories are stickier than jargon, and we use a lot of jargon in our field, and every chapter in this book is anchored in the story of real people using their real names with one exception. That’s a separate story. It’s real people doing hard stuff. There’s a whole story in here about a fishbowl where a bunch of white teachers push back on being called racist, and then they have to come back the next day and deal with the fallout. That’s what happens. That is what actually happens, right? It’s not like, “Oh, we did the driver diagram, and then things got better.” That’s not how it works, so we wanted to describe how it happens and what’s likely to go down if you try to do hard shit. That’s what the book is about.
Primarily, it was about telling stories, so that people would remember it and not just think that they can have jargon inform their practice. The second thing is, one thing that you and I have talked about a lot is just democratizing access to this work. Improvement science is a very academic thing. Let’s be honest, the jargon isn’t inviting a lot of the time, and just saying, improvement science sounds like it’s like, “Oh, god. People talk about white supremacy culture. I don’t know anything that sounds more white supremacy culture than improvement science.” Sorry. But I mean, no knock on it. I love them, so my best friends are improvement scientists. But the vibe was like how do you do something that allows your average classroom teacher to sit down with this and read it? My mom was a teacher for 45 years, and I wanted her to look at this and be like, after retiring, “Because No Child Left Behind messed me up, I can feel good about this profession again.”

Derek Mitchell:
For me, it was also the question of the lived experience of teachers who repeatedly had the ground put on from under them. Right? So, there’s a story in here of a teacher who prepared all summer, first year teacher, to teach in a particular grade level and two weeks in, she’s switched to a whole another grade level, and she’s like, “What the heck?” She was from Michigan. She actually said, “What the heck?” And she finds she’s in a grade level with folks who don’t want to do what is needed for the very kids that they’re serving because her class is all kids of color, many of whom with language issues, and she’s recommending things, and her grade level were like, “Nope.” You’re the interloper. You’re the young whippersnapper. No.
So, she’s in this weird space where she feels responsibility for not just the 28 in her classroom, but for all the other kids who need a different instructional model that what her colleagues are actually advocating for, without the means to make that change. So, you literally follow her story of how she actually got her colleagues on board for the kind of change that she needed, and then routed that change up the chain through her system.
This is the hard and the real work of this book and of the work that we’re all doing, and that’s why we call it Change Agents because she became more than just what folks think of as a teacher in that paradigm. She shifted and became an actual agent for change, and her impact was tremendous in her system. But just one early career teacher, one person with the right tools and the right skills and a little bit of support can actually accomplish tremendously powerful things, and in the process, she gets shut down. Right? There’s-

Justin Cohen:
Repeatedly.

Derek Mitchell:
Repeatedly. There’s this whole narrative about the fourth grade team at the school versus the fifth grade team. In the fifth grade, it seems like the grizzled old teachers, and the fourth grade team is the young upstart teachers. And every time the fourth grade team is like, “Let’s try something new,” the fifth grade teachers are like, “Nah.” So, what do you do with that? Right? And there’s a whole chapter about change management and culture building in a context where nobody wants to do anything, and I think we thought about the teacher workforce in America, right? Predominantly white, predominantly female, and with huge generational gaps right now, that are only going to get more pronounced given the boomers exiting the workforce.
So, you basically have the situation where you have a lot of teachers who are at the end of their careers who are grizzle, and a bunch of younger teachers who are not yet there, but within a few years after COVID of just getting knocked around by the system, they will be. So, what do you do? Can you do something that reaches both of those polls, and everybody that doesn’t fit into those paradigms? How do you do that? Is that possible to do? It has to be if we’re going to do anything about our schools.

Jennifer Husbands:
Okay, helpful. Thank you. The book, it igs-

Derek Mitchell:
Was that it?

Jennifer Husbands:
… your question… Oh, yeah, a hundred percent. We’re good. We’re good. Book is here. It’s a different kind of… It’s really about that adaptive work, and I think I might have learned that term from my NCS colleagues. Not the technical work, which you can pick up learning to improve. That’s a technical work. This is about the adaptive work. Now, that it is out there, it’s out here, how do you imagine people can use it? What are some of the sort of use cases? How do we turn it from a book into practice that spreads across the country?

Derek Mitchell:
Yeah. Justin did a brilliant thing in how he organized it. So, chapters are paired, and there’s sort of a crescendo of angst in one chapter and a path toward resolution in the next one. Right? So, when you read it, it feels like a roller coaster ride, the way that an action movie might feel, where you’re facing new challenges and then seeing resolutions for it. But one real powerful way to use it is in basic learning, professional learning communities where you pair the chapters and actually talk about them together, in relationship to the work that’s happening on the ground in your school and your district.
He also did this funky thing that I challenged at the start but turned out to be I think a brilliant moves is he put key questions to ask yourself at the end of every chapter that helps the readers be reflective about their own context as a result of the experience of the teachers and leaders that they’re listening to and reading about. And then, he offers resources. If you want to tackle something like this in your school, here’s some places to start, and they’re not all Partners’ resources. They’re things we’ve used from other places that are all referenced there. So, in a sense this is a kind of unbundled strategy for folks on the ground in schools to do this work themselves, without the need for all of us. And I firmly believe that there’s a change agent in the making in every school in our country. Probably dozens of them, right?
They just need to be empowered, be respected well enough, and then of course, commit themselves collectively and individually to making it happen. If we were able to find enough folks to do that, the book might be a key way to catalyze those folks. Right? That was one of my main motivations is that one teacher in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, whose school is getting increasingly diverse over time and who’s figuring out that doing what’s worked before is not going to work for this other set of kids, and wants to know how to actually execute that pivot. For both her own instruction and then for the school that she’s serving, this is a tremendous resource for that teacher.

Justin Cohen:
I mean, we got to know each other at a time when one of the dominant themes in education policy was we have to import talent to fix schools and this book is anti that. This book is about, there is amazing talent in every community, often underpaid black and brown folks, who have been doing this work forever without calling it education reform, and those stories have not been told with the same level of enthusiasm and funding that the stories of the imported talent has been told. So, I think hopefully that people can pick this up and be like, “Oh, I know that principal. That’s Mrs. so-and-so down the street who’s been doing this without any credit for the last 25 years.”

Derek Mitchell:
Just to make it a little bit more crystal for you, when Justin and I met, he was one of Michelle Rhee’s sharpest tools for producing charter schools in-

Justin Cohen:
No, no, no. No, no, no. I was working on it.

Derek Mitchell:
… in DC.

Justin Cohen:
She was trying to compete with the charter schools.

Derek Mitchell:
And I was responsible for innovation schools in Prince George’s County, Maryland. So, we shared that little bit of barrier, DC and Maryland, which probably should be one district, because they’re from different states. They were. And we realized that we shared a lot more than just our ideas about having schools be more robust, more innovative, more successful places. We shared parents, often kids, so we started a conversation about, “Okay, why does this sort of inorganic barrier between our places keep us from collaborating, learning from each other, and working together?” So, when I was thinking about who should write this book, because Justin described his sort of crisis of faith that then resulted in a different sort of mental model around how this work should go, because we were often like this in our conversations… We love each other but did not agree on very much at all, but he’s come to our side of the fence now.

Justin Cohen:
Well, I just want to say, Derek met me when I was much younger and much less likable than I am now. No. We’ve been friends ever. I mean, we were always very close, and he has been right about this for as long as I’ve known him, and a lot of people have not. And a lot of other organizations and other people in the field, and not just Derek, but folks who have been working and doing continuous incremental improvement have not had a day in the sun in education policy for the last generation. It’s been about splashy innovation that fizzles, and you, to your credit-

Derek Mitchell:
Unsustainable.

Justin Cohen:
Yeah. Have been on this for a minute.

Derek Mitchell:
So, when we say that the work comes from a place of understanding what doesn’t work, we’re talking about the fact that most of what we’re asking schools to do really from prior to Brown v. Board, but if we could just use Brown v. Board as the place where equity needed to be a core strategy in schools, we’ve changed expectations of schools two or three times every decade since then. Right? And we’ve never given schools and the leaders and teachers in these places the time to accommodate and learn what they need to, to actually deliver on the incredible expectations that we have of them. So, it’s this weird situation where you’re shifting a goal post every couple of years, and then blaming the very people who have to actually figure out how to deliver. So, this whole frame is different. The entire frame of this book is the solution to the work of transformational outcomes for poor kids of color, and all kids already exist inside the schools where they are. It’s there. That’s where it is.
Here’s the thing, if it isn’t there, it’s not going to be anywhere else. Right? Because if you think about it, even the reforms that have seen the work sustainably, the places that have done transformational sort of whole school new models, the ones that have sustained, have sustained because of what? Because teachers and leaders in those buildings sustained them, right? So, it’s one of these strangest things where we dismiss and disrespect the very thing that’s going to make us all successful, and we wanted to upend that mental model. Right?

Justin Cohen:
The other thing, I think, the use case for the book… How do I say this? Anybody who is going to read White Fragility, read it already. Right? I feel like the culture’s zeitgeisty infatuation with anti-racism work as fad is over. People that were calling… I mean, we just had a session about this in this room before, whereas Z Hammond was saying, “We got a ton of calls from people in 2020 saying, ‘We care about diversity and equity now,’ and here we are two years out from George Floyd being murdered on television, and where is the uproar? Where are the white folks newly radicalized to participate fully everyday in anti-racism work? It’s not where it was, and we are in a moment of backlash.” So, what are the other avenues for candidly radicalizing people? There’s a lot in this book if you have not yet encountered real stories about the way your community was organized explicitly to exclude black people and brown people. That’s in here. It doesn’t say that on the cover.

Jennifer Husbands:
Because we want to sell copies in Florida and Texas, so we didn’t put that cover.

Justin Cohen:
Well, that ship may have sailed.

Derek Mitchell:
We want the teachers in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho to get access to it, and we want the teachers in Alabama to have access to it, and they won’t if we put the wrong things on the cover. That’s just an awful statement of the society where we are right now today.

Jennifer Husbands:
Yeah. I have one last question for you two, and then we’re going to turn it over to this wonderful audience, so please think about what you want to ask. We’ve talked a lot about… You have mentioned sustainability in a couple different ways, but obviously, this pandemic, not over, like you said, backlash against racism, backlash against teaching actual history, all of these things that are happening that are really scary, backlash against science, evidence, state, all these things. So, we still are in a very tough spot. We have not had the chance to recharge batteries yet. So, as we want to inspire change agents, find change agents, lift up change agents, how do we support their sustainability? How do they sustain themselves? How do they sustain the work? How do they sustain their impact when they inevitably move on, move up, move out? What have you learned at Partners? What have you learned from the stories that you told in the book about how this kind of positive change can be sustained?

Derek Mitchell:
Yeah. Let me start that question first by reiterating the other reason for those of you who are leading organizations that I think would be really powerful to write books. It’s going to drop a little uncomfortable knowledge on us about this. Right? All of us are orgs that are in some culmination supported by philanthropy and fees, which means that the districts we serve are privileged because they have wealthy people willing to invest in us doing the work to help them get better. Not all districts have such privilege.
So, when I was thinking about the sustainability of Partners’ work and the coming Gates’ cliff that we’re all going to be implicated by or have to survive through, I started asking myself the question of how do we democratize what we know? Right? Even if we can’t get coaches and tools into the hands of everybody, how can we get the knowledge of what we’ve learned in this time into the hands of more people, so that when the funders move off to their next shiny bauble that they’re going to invest in, there’s a knowledge that’s dropped that communities can pick up and carry forward on their own.
So, the book is itself a sustainability strategy because it takes the core strategies of how to build your teams and build the will to do transformational equity work on the ground in your communities to scale. I mean, everywhere that book is 15 years of Partners’ knowledge, as expressed by the folks who were doing it, the teachers and leaders in the schools and systems. So, even if we’re not able to sustain us, the ideas are going to be sustained and the book is the mechanism for doing that. So, seriously consider it, I think, because the waste of public education is that someone determined this and learned this 15 years ago and 15 years before that and 15 years before that, and that knowledge was not accessible to us, so we had to relearn it. So, God, we’re hoping that we’re solving new problems 15 years from now, and not still trying to tackle this one.

Justin Cohen:
I mean, there’s this part where in the book we poke fun at Eurocentric hero traditions in chapter nine, and that’s intentional because sustainability requires a collective, and this book is about collective work and not individual work. There are no individual heroes. There are no saviors. There is nobody’s perfect. So, with that, I also think we’re painting a realistic picture of what it takes, collective effort among people working together against a common goal where everybody is flawed but does not ignore those flaws. It mitigates them or works towards improving them.

Derek Mitchell:
One of the book titles we bounced around was Stop Waiting for Superman. Right? Just as a way to signal-

Justin Cohen:
Superman’s not coming.

Derek Mitchell:
Right. As a way of signaling you, that entire mental model is wrong. It’s built on white saviorism. Yeah. I mean, there’s tons of things wrong with it, and it inherently depowers the very folks in context who need to be empowered to do the right work. Of course, we didn’t go with that title because it would’ve caused a scene. Tough, I myself still think it would’ve been kind of fun. [inaudible 00:32:37]. It would’ve been kind of fun to be in a room like this and-

Justin Cohen:
Derek and I would have these conversations where Derek would call me, and be like, “I have nine things you need to change,” where he’s like, “or nine things that I figured…” And then, we just go back and forth because we both have strong opinions about some of this stuff and we’re mostly aligned, but once in a while, we’d be like, “Let’s do this differently. That’s fucked.”

Derek Mitchell:
Justin really wanted to connect education to its liberatory roots, which was not core in my heart at that time of producing the book, but as I read through the chapters and saw the connections that he drew with redlining, with the civil rights movement then the leaders of those movements as educators, I started to then think, “Oh, my god, there’s a long-standing tradition that teachers should know they’re already a part of.” Right? There’s a reason why black folks used to be killed if they knew to read, right? There’s a reason for that. It was to keep the power of knowledge from liberating them. Right? That was the purpose. So, teachers are inherently liberators. Also, all teachers cross difference, every single one. If you’re a man, you’re teaching women a lot of times. Right? If you’re middle class, you’re teaching poor students or wealthy students. I mean, the list goes on and on whatever vector of change. So, you are a teacher across differences, so stop thinking about yourself as being someone who’s complete for whom there’s just one way. There can never be one way.
I learned this the hard way when a young student in my class… I taught high school and I had a hell of a color purple module, mind you. I mean, I was a womanist at that time, dating a woman who taught me that term. And I was doing my thing and this young woman stood up and she said, “Mr. Mitchell, you talk a good game, but it’s been a month since women’s read aloud or had a question answered in this class.” And I’m like, “Okay.” I’m a young teacher, and I didn’t quite click with the young women in my class anyway and I knew that at that time, and I’m thinking, “Here’s another instance where they…” I started thinking to myself, “Okay. When was it?” So, I asked the class. I said, “Sean, it can’t be true. Who was the last woman to ask a question and get a chance to read?” We read every day in my classes, but nobody could remember.
Here I am thinking that I’m this shit about this work, right? I’m Mr. Equity. I’m Mr. Inclusive. And I was wrong. I was not. I was into my module to pay attention to what actually was happening among the young people in my classroom, and it was devastating. I even thought I would quit teaching behind it. And I went to my mentor teacher and I said, “Jenny, this thing happened in my class,” and she goes, “Of course, it happened,” and laid it all out for me. It wasn’t just this class, so it was clear, unconscious bias is real, and just because you have black skin doesn’t mean it’s not real for you. Right? I had to create a system because I couldn’t trust myself, so I had to create a system. That’s the pivotal work that’s crystallized in this book, that these teachers and leaders, they’re creating systems that enable themselves and others to come to the equity work in an authentic and powerful way, and it inherently makes it more sustainable as well. Welcome.

Jennifer Husbands:
That was a very powerful anecdote that you just shared, so thank you for that vulnerability. Questions. I told y’all this was coming. Yes?

Audience Member 1:
All right. I have one, but I feel like it’s a little boring.

Derek Mitchell:
It’s okay.

Jennifer Husbands:
That’s okay. Maybe you’re warming us up.

Audience Member 1:
I’m not a teacher. I’m not even in one of these organizations that are supporting teachers, but I do feel like I have a lot of skills and resources that could be helpful. You said at the end of each chapter, you’ve got questions and point people towards resources. What was missing? What were the resources you wish you could have pointed people that don’t exist?

Jennifer Husbands:
Great question. That’s not boring. Provocative. I love it.

Derek Mitchell:
Don’t self-edit sister.

Audience Member 1:
Okay.

Derek Mitchell:
That was a great question.

Justin Cohen:
That’s a great question.

Derek Mitchell:
We have to probably think of a specific time that we [inaudible 00:37:47].

Justin Cohen:
Okay. There’s a running theme of the teams in the book having complementary skill sets. So, you have somebody who’s really talented at breaking down data and only teachers can understand. You have somebody else who’s the community whisperer. You have somebody else who’s really great at interpersonal dynamics and managing teams. I personally don’t see schools for the most part, understanding that sort of complementarity well, and we don’t really point any. I think there’s a missing piece here of identifying what those characteristics are of successful teams that is not really germane to the field, that a lot of other fields do as a matter of course. So, that’s one thing where I think if you’re sort of coming from outside the classroom and you have something to lend, that’s a place where I think it would be nice to have more.

Derek Mitchell:
I’ve got two quick answers to that. I think one of the things I learned closing schools in Prince George’s County, Maryland is that they’re more than just schools, that they’re sort of robust hubs of community health and wellness, and I don’t think we understand them as such. Now, coming off the COVID, you would think we would because they basically saved our hash, but folks aren’t reflecting on that. They’re basically looking at the test score data and saying that it was just another mechanism for failure. Right?
So, what’s missing is really an understanding of the role schools play in that more robust, more dynamic, more collaborative community space, and some of the community schools work is getting at that, but it’s facing inward to the school. What I’m talking about is the role the school plays out around it and the community around it. I learned that the hard way because we closed a bunch of schools, and then I went and visited years later after I’m no longer in the district, then all kinds of awful things are going on in and around those buildings. And I’m like, “Oh, my God, this wasn’t just about schools and enrollment.” I sort of got it after the fact.
The other thing that’s not in the book that would be in the next book or the book that someone else here is writing is the power of networks. Right? Networks appear in the book, bringing people together, working together across context and other pieces, but the mechanism itself and its power to be a force multiplier for improvement as a device isn’t something that we tackle directly in the book. And I think it will be really powerful for maybe my brother, who leads core back there can produce the book to do.

Jennifer Husbands:
Great. Thank you. Okay. More questions? Jill.

Audience Member 2:
Was there a theme that emerged that surprised you that you were not expecting to have surfaced in the book?

Derek Mitchell:
Can I talk about food?

Jennifer Husbands:
There is a lot of talk about food in the book. That is true.

Derek Mitchell:
After reading it its fourth or fifth time, it hit me that every freaking scenario had food in it. And then, I talked to staff and they’re like, “Of course.” I mean, that’s why I have a bag of Hershey’s Kisses everywhere I go in schools and districts. So, I talked to Justin. I said, Justin, “What’s going on with this theme of food?” He basically characterized for me that your staff have figured out that food is a lubricant for social relationship building and that the place-

Jennifer Husbands:
So is booze, but food is a little more acceptable in schools.

Derek Mitchell:
Right. And that eating together often became the way in which teams can step outside of their current context and paradigms, and have conversations that they wouldn’t be able to have inside. So, a theme that surprised me in the book that I didn’t even know about as CEO, but that all my team members were like, “no, duh,” is the power of food. Right.

Jennifer Husbands:
I remember there’s a chapter that’s pretty much about tacos, basically.

Justin Cohen:
Tacos El Cuñado.

Jennifer Husbands:
What is it?

Justin Cohen:
Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Jennifer Husbands:
Yes. Yeah. Yep. Any other themes or anything else that popped up that surprised you?

Justin Cohen:
It’s a great question. Hold on. One thing that didn’t surprise me, but… I don’t know if surprise is the right word. We were able to find educators in every community who represented very different identities, and pretty much every place, you had folks working across lines of difference as educators to drive the work, and that was a pleasant surprise for me. I mean, probably the only example that doesn’t really fit that is the Michigan word. You have almost entirely white workforce and a predominantly Latinx and black student body, but in almost every other case, you had a very diverse group of leaders and teachers, and that was encouraging and surprising, that level of sort of intrateam diversity.

Derek Mitchell:
I would say something that surprised me was how difficult it was to find the right lens to tell the Mississippi Delta story.

Justin Cohen:
Huh? Yeah.

Derek Mitchell:
Right? Because talking about race and its role in the patterns that are present in the work down there, for people of color down there is a really challenging thing to do.

Justin Cohen:
I basically wrote two chapters that look almost nothing like what ended up in the book just because I was so lost because we were trying to connect the dots between pre-civil war social structures in Mississippi with the post-war, Jim Crow, sharecropping, and contemporary organization of cities and towns, which is not so different from a wealth and power standpoint than you had in the early 20th century. And folks on the ground were not enthusiastic about the level of truth-telling we were doing about that, and I found myself just candidly, right… Is this being recorded?

Jennifer Husbands:
It is.

Justin Cohen:
It is, okay. Candidly, I found myself in conversations across difference as a white man with black folks, who are saying this is too much about racism, and that was surprising. Also, I should know better than to think that I’m not going to step in it trying to tell someone else’s story in the American Deep South as a white boy from New Jersey.

Derek Mitchell:
It is pretty astounding how pervasive the racial divides are down there. When the white Citizens’ Councils opted out of the public schools after Brown v. Board, they’re still out of the public schools. They’re just not in them in large measure, yet the power systems remain the same systems in the same structures. So, it’s a really challenging conception because the leaders of the schools and districts are all people of color now. Right? Yet the context in which they have to do their work and the resources with which they have to do them, and in some places, even the places that’s accessible to them to do the work is all implicated by this white hegemonic infrastructure, and they don’t like to have to face that directly and to talk about it directly. It’s exceedingly uncomfortable. I mean, it really, really is.

Justin Cohen:
I mean, to put a fine point on it, there’s a story in the book and I’ll just tell a short version of it really quickly. Indianola, Mississippi is the district or the city we focus on. It’s in the Delta. I mean, the history there is so intensely rich and I had to strip out 40 pages that I overwrote because he was like, “Justin, what are you doing? It’s too much.” So, the Citizens’ Councils, which were the uptown clan basically, for folks who aren’t familiar, they raised money explicitly to create segregated schools. They existed until very recently. The schools still exists. The segregation academies, many of them still exist, including the one in Indianola, Mississippi. The first Citizens’ Councils ever was in Indianola. This is the history of this town.
Derek sent me a bunch of agendas from meetings, where I’m looking through agendas and I’m looking at sort of when this meeting was held. I’m cross-referencing. I’m like, “Did this meeting…” Because I’m trying to actually be true to when things happen. One meeting says it took place at the Charles Capps Center. I’m like, “Why is that name so familiar? Charles Capps, where have I heard that name before?” I just google it, and it’s like, “former president of a Citizens’ Council and Mississippi State legislator.” The place, the community college where they were holding the meetings is named after the head of a white supremacist organization still today. Those things and that, but when I asked people in Mississippi like, “What’s your reaction to that,” they’re like, “Life? What do you want me to say?”

Jennifer Husbands:
Okay. Great. I was going to say we have time for one more question and there you are. The little Oprah thing, I kind of like doing this.

Audience Member 3:
Hello. My question is about lens. It’s a two-part question. Does the book feature a lens of a black male instructional leader, and does the book balance stories about cultural systems and instruction?

Justin Cohen:
Wow.

Derek Mitchell:
Yeah. There are actually a couple.

Jennifer Husbands:
That’s a big one.

Derek Mitchell:
There are actually a couple. There’s a school in the Bay Area that’s featured in the book where the leader is a man of color.

Jennifer Husbands:
Is he a black man or is he-

Justin Cohen:
He’s black.

Derek Mitchell:
He’s a black man, who has a kind of cathartic moment where he realizes that much of his career, he’s been used by principals as the heavy, as the disciplined dean, or the culture guy. And he’s like, “I mean, I’m a mathematics expert. Why am I always the dude to chase after truance and related pieces?” He becomes the principal of his school and completely shifts the entire instructional paradigm to make it more child-centered because he was like, “The one thing we haven’t done in my entire time here is listen to our students about what their needs are.” This idea of shifting from being about the culture and the space, to actually also being focused on and committed to the instructional work is a key thing.
There’s also a district leader in the Philadelphia community who had a similar kind of experience, where what’s expected of him… I think he even used the term overseer at one point in the conversation, where there’s so few resources provided to him to help schools improve, that all he could really do is hold people accountable. Right. Just look at the data and say you’re not meeting needs. He just got tired of that, and said, “Okay. What else can I do? How can I be of value and of service?” His strategy was to find the bright spots and to amplify them across his network. So, those are two examples where leaders have gone from the transactional, the “accountability,” quote, unquote, sort of frame to shift into the more proactive, productive, more effective, and instructionally-based foci in their work.

Justin Cohen:
Every two chapter… Like Derek mentioned, you have these two-chapter arcs, and then there’s a quote until the final chapter for every one of the stories, and they’re all rooted in a deep instructional problem of practice, basically, and mostly literacy. So, interestingly, when we sent out initial versions of the book to educators to look at, there were a bunch of middle school and high school history teachers who were like, “There’s so much all of this instructional stuff and I really love the cultural aspects of it.” And then, there were these science teachers who were like, “What is all this race stuff?”

Derek Mitchell:
I remember that.

Justin Cohen:
So, it’s interesting. The point is there’s a lot of instruction in here, although it is not sort of a book about classroom instruction necessarily, and there’s a lot of very explicit discussion of instructional techniques because all of the adaptive stuff we’re talking about is anchored in trying to solve for data-driven or data-informed educational practice.

Derek Mitchell:
But at the same time, that work is couched in a context, that helps the readers understand the choices that leaders and teachers in those schools really have. Beyond what we think up here, they should have it. It really helps you understand where they’re coming from, the context which they have to be effective, and the resources and challenges that they have in trying to do it. And that often is that culture piece, right? The whole idea that you can’t even talk about race, or in fact, we had a training session in Michigan where we were talking about equity and halfway through a teacher raised his hand and said, “I thought this was about schools. Why are we talking about home loans?” That was a great learning for us at Partners because we’re coming from California with this privileged set of language for how we talk about what we do, that simply wasn’t in general parlance in that part of the world. We’re like, “Oh, roll back. Roll back. Let’s find the words that have meaning here in order to get the work done.”

Jennifer Husbands:
Wonderful, thank you. I’m going to move us into our closing thoughts. I’m happy to give each of you two, three minutes, whatever you need to just share whatever it is you haven’t shared yet that you want folks to take away from this conversation, from the book. It’s up to you.

Derek Mitchell:
I’ll start. I say this in the book, and I still believe it in my soul that teachers are the most untapped resource for transformational change for our country that there is. I mean, they outnumber police, firemen, social workers combined. They’re also either in community with or they should be in community with everybody who reaches and touches our children. So, for those two factors alone, they are an extraordinarily potentially powerful agency for how we can produce the country that we all aspire for us to have. We have to get out of the political paradigm and into the actual work of becoming the America we imagine for ourselves, and they are, I think, the best kept, best positioned to accelerate that work going forward, but they have to be empowered too. They have to be inspired too, and the book is in part an effort to do that.

Justin Cohen:
Two very personal things. My grandmother used to tell a story where she took me on vacation once and I sat in the hotel room the whole time and read books, and she asked me if I wanted to go outside and I was like, “Books are my life, bubby. I don’t know why I’d do that.” This is the first book I’ve ever written on. I’m just really grateful to team at Partners, and Derek for trusting me with this story, so thank you for that.
Second, you opened the door for this. I’m going to do it. In America, we have this abolitionist tradition, which was a conspiracy against the federal government that was waged by people working across lines of racial difference to dismantle a system that was oppressive, and it still in many cases lives on today. And I did want to situate teachers in that tradition because we are like… Like I said, the teaching workforce is predominantly white and for it has been that way for a very long time, and for better or worse, that’s the world we’re dealing with, and we need people who identify as white to see themselves as a part of that. So, I hope that in telling the stories of all kinds of folks, including white folks, that folks can see themselves as part of a liberatory tradition and embrace that as an identity. Because one of the, I think big challenges with the world we’re in right now is that absence…
Z Hammond in the last session talked about not replacing dominance and supremacy with other forms of dominance and supremacy and having radical humanity as the only a replacement for that, and that’s going to require people to see themselves differently. So, I’m hoping that if we take the dominance and supremacy and oppression out of the world, we need to give people something else to latch onto.

Jennifer Husbands:
Wonderful. All right. Well, I want to thank Derek and his team, many of whom are here in the room, Partners folks. Thank you all for having the courage to imagine that a book like this could exist, and I want to thank Justin for bringing it into existence in such a beautiful way. I want to thank both of them for being my friends and fellow change agents in this work, and I want to thank all of you for joining us and spending this hour that just flew by with us today.

Alec Patton:
High Tech High Unboxed is hosted and edited by me, Alec Patton. Our team music is by brother Herschel. Huge thanks to Jennifer Husbands, Derek Mitchell, and Justin Cohen. This is part of the series of three episodes from the Gates Foundation Network for School Improvement Fall 2022 Community of Practice event. You can also find recordings of all the den talks of the event on the High Tech High Unboxed YouTube channel. There’s a link to that in our show notes. Thanks for listening.