Brandi Hinnant-Crawford and Louis Gomez on Promoting Change and Guiding Resistance

In this live recording from the 2026 National Summit for Improvement in Education, Partners in School Innovation CEO Derek Mitchell interviews Tenette Smith and Elise Brown about their roles in Mississippi's extraordinary improvement in reading, and how they are bringing the lessons from that into their new work in Maryland.

In this live crossover event for the National Summit on Improvement in Education and the Deeper Learning Conference, Alec Patton interviews Ben Daley, Jim May, and Ash Vasudeva about what deeper learning and continuous improvement have to offer each other.

Alec Patton talks to Patrick Yurick about how High Tech High Chula Vista came together to create a mural as a memorial to one of its students, Sean Fuchs. This episode is about a disturbing subject—we don't recommend listening with kids around.

Stacey Caillier talks to Cornelius Minor about what it means to be bold in education right now, and the journey he and his colleagues took from observing a problem to making meaningful change with students.

Alec talks to Robyn Snyder, Director of Supplemental Services at Clovis Unified School District, Ray Gamez, the principal of Janet L. Young Elementary School, and JJ Donat, who’s the guidance instructional specialist at Janet L. Young, about how that school cut the suspension rate for African-American students from 8.7%. to 4.2% in a single year.

Alec Patton talks to Beverley Jenkins and Kate Hogan of the System Improvement Leads Networked Improvement Community and Nicole Leveille of Cloverdale Unified School District about how Cloverdale dramatically increased the percentage of students with IEPs in the general education population, and cut chronic absenteeism among students with disabilities in half.

Alec Patton talks to Liz Chu, Executive Director of the Center for Public Research and Leadership (CPRL) at Columbia University, about the new book she co-authored, The Learning Hive: Leading Collective Innovation to Transform Education Systems.

Alec Patton talks to math teachers Sunny Chan and Sandy Tu, and improvement coach Amanda Meyer, about Fremont High School's remarkable success at improving ninth-grade on track.

Alec Patton talks to teacher High School teacher Karen Shaffran and student Alegria Vargas about how their class created a socially conscious cosmetics business, featuring products made from plants grown hydroponically in a storage room!

Alec Patton talks to Tammy Unck, Maria Smith, and Uchenna Lewis about Bernal Intermediate School's work with Partners in School Innovation on improving outcomes for multilingual learners, using techniques such as "shadow a student" and elements of the AVID curriculum. The result was remarkable: During the 2022-2023 school year, Bernal achieved a 250% increase in the rate of multilingual learners reclassified to fluent English proficient status!

Alec Patton talks to Lincoln High School Principal Melissa Agudelo about the challenges of bringing exhibitions of student learning to a large urban high school, and how they made it successful by literally doing everything all at once.

Alec Patton talks to Michael McDonald, Stephen Rinaldo, and Tarima Levine about how Yonkers Public Schools and Bank Street Education Center improved eighth grade math proficiency particularly for students who are Black, Latinx, or experiencing poverty.