Andre Spicer:
Fast forward, and I don't know, just a few years, when I became principal, the proud principal, of Helen Bernstein High School. Never, ever, ever will you love a job so hard. Community and the commitment, this is where I learned you meet the children where they are.

Alec Patton:
This is High Tech High Unboxed I'm Alec Patton. I'm coming to you from the 2023 Deeper Learning Conference, and I'm just so stoked to be here amongst so many wonderful people. Deeper learning does things a little differently, and the opening keynote consists of three stories of deeper learning told by a student, a teacher and a superintendent. In this episode, you'll hear from the third storyteller, superintendent Andre Spicer.

Andre Spicer:
What's happening? Oh no, you can do better than that. Any liberators in the house? Any anti-racist in the house? Anybody who loves babies in the house? Good afternoon, I am Andre Spicer. I happen to be a region south superintendent for Los Angeles Unified School District. I'm so honored to be with you today. Want to tell you a little bit about myself, my journey, because we all, you as educators, parents, families, students, we all have ups and downs. We all have challenges. My story is no different than anyone else's. I've had challenges. I've had ups and downs.

Who you see here today is not who I was yesterday. Why is that so important for us as educators? Because we have to look through that same lens when we're looking at each and every student. Come on now, do you hear me out there? Am I out here by myself? We like to start every conversation with what's good for kids, and we like to end every conversation with what's good for kids. Student centered. It is about them and that's why we're here. Look at that.

As a child, you see this picture here? I was four years old. That's my mama's favorite picture. Make some noise if you love your mama. Four years old, never would she have imagined that I would be standing here with you today and I would be superintendent responsible for 210 schools, 90,000 students and families. I'm going to tell you what else she wouldn't imagine. By the time that I was 17 years old, I had been to jail twice, kicked out of the house, shelter and food insecurities, and just barely graduated from high school. She wouldn't imagine that either when she was looking at her favorite picture.

I grew up in Compton, California. That's right. Compton is in the house, but during the worst times, the '80s, the crack pandemic had just about ruined our childhoods, our promise, our dreams. History is important. I graduated from Dominguez High School in 1988, but the school was trash. That's right. The school of prison pipeline was like a well-oiled machine. We might be in class one day, juvenile hall the next. It was dysfunctional. Our teachers were burnt out. Let's just say we did not have the exemplars of deeper learning in 1988. Not to say there weren't some good souls there, but this is when I first started to understand equity.

We understood we didn't have what our brothers and sisters had across the bay in better neighborhoods, Beverly Hills or the beach areas. We knew where we were from. We knew where we were experiencing police brutality. We knew it was hard just to get to school every day. We knew that it wasn't in the cards for most of us. I heard the young brother Walter say he's happy that he made it, so many of his friends didn't. The first time I went to jail, my best friend went with me. Problem is he killed another kid when we were there. Spent the better part of his life in jail for strangling a kid he had never met prior to that. It was our circumstance. It was our circumstance, and us as teachers, us as educators, we have to be those warm demanders that can break that cycle. Can we do that?

Because of everything that I went through during my high school years, I took a detour, brother Caleb, we to go straight. You see these planes that keep coming by try to interrupt the best part of all these beautiful people's speeches, we're right on the other side of that airport at somewhere called MCRD, Marine Corps Recruiting Depot. That's right. Changed my life. 17 years old in 1988, I was the youngest Marine in the Marine Corps. This is when I learned about leadership, commitment, and also started to travel a little bit, learn a little bit about the world that was just a little bit bigger than Compton, California. Changed my life. Teamwork, what was really important. Understanding your why about everything that you do. Shout out to all the Marines in the house.

But I had enough after four years. Some other Marines here said, "I feel you." I decided I wanted to go back and give back to my community, so I rode Cal State Long Beach, three and a half years later, I ended up in a school called Lauren Miller Elementary School where I started my teaching career. Now you're talking about some of the most underserved populations in the country. 77th and Hoover, we used to call it South Central LA, now we say South LA and so on, but this is where I met children that had it way worse than I ever thought I had it growing up in Compton. Hadn't seen their parents days and days at a time. They were getting a last leg of what we called that crack pandemic. This is where I found the love for teaching. This is where I found that we have to teach children a little differently than what I was taught, because quite frankly, when I went to school, here's the book. You get it. You don't. That's on you.

That wasn't the way to teach, so this is where I began to learn about deeper learning. This is where I began to experience how to differentiate instruction to give the control to the classroom, to those babies. This is where we wanted to give them the opportunities to problem solve because we know we have a lot of problems that we need solutions for here in the United States, do we not? And the only person that's going to solve them for them are these babies.

The hardest job you'll ever learn, fast forward, and I don't know, just a few years when I became principal, the proud principal of Helen Bernstein High School. Never, ever, ever will you love a job so hard. Community and the commitment, this is where I learned, you meet the children where they are. A hundred percent of our children were poor. Not ninety-five, not the title one threshold, eighty-five. One hundred. Many of them were immigrants or what we call newcomers, international students. They're just coming to the country already in high school, didn't speak a word of English. They're coming from horrible circumstance, everything from human trafficking. Everything from poverty, violence, they're coming here to escape. They're coming here for the same reason everybody else came. Everybody else who came that didn't come and change, for a better opportunity. Come on, y'all said y'all wanted the fire today. Am I out here by myself?

We met our children where they were. We started every conversation with what's best for kids. We ended every conversation, what's best for kids? We wanted to give, empower them. We knew they were only going to be successful if they have the power, if we practiced the pedagogy of the oppress, what free air talked about. If we practice those liberatory pedagogies, if we practice that democratic pedagogy, we say, "You know what? We want you not just to question the community, but you'll question me. You tell me what's wrong here in the community. What's wrong in the school? You take ownership and make sure that you are in a position to come up with a solution." That's what we practice, and that's why the school house, was the hub, was the center of the community. That's why to the day, to this day, our children are doing better than they did when they first came to us and they still come back to the school because they know that's where their family resides.

I would not be standing here with you today, general pleasure. Come on, y'all know it's real, right? Michelle? Give Michelle a big round of applause. I wouldn't be standing here with you today had it not been for a teacher. Not this teacher. This is one of the best teachers I ever met in my life. When you talking about a warm demander, Diana Martinez Favela was a warm demander. She was the center of our school. She was a coordinator then, but now she's an assistant principal working to transform lives every single day. But the teacher that changed my life, her name was Miss Sonya Bankston. 1987, I'll never forget I was having a little trouble and she saw me in the hall and she says, "You know what? You not stupid, you're just a damn fool." And she handed me a book. She said, "I want you to read this book and I want you to bring it back to me in, I don't know, a week or so." I'll never forget, the autobiography of Malcolm X. It was the first time someone handed me a book that showed me any interest that I was interested at all.
Then the next thing she had me debate one of my classmates who were AP classes. Problem is, I had never heard of an AP class, but she started to give me these opportunities, but she was holding me accountable. You can be a warm demander. You can show love, but you're still going to hold our students accountable and are you holding yourself accountable? Right? Did you create the spaces where they could showcase their talent? Did you create a space where they felt validated and affirmed, like we say, in culturally and linguistically responsive pedagogies, right?

This year, and the last couple years, I've been honored and just blessed to be working with the Center for Love and Justice High Tech High Graduate Studies with Caleb, Nikki, Shawnee, and we've been coming up with these ideas, well, they have been coming up with these ideas, and working with our teachers, principals, and our students, how to bring deeper learning, how to bring the power to the student and give it to them. Release, allow them to learn how they want to learn. Allow it to put those learnings in the community, showcase that talent, and guess who feels good after they do that? Our babies do. They feel empowered. I thank y'all for that. Transformed so many of our students' lives.

Here are a few of the programs that I've worked on, I've worked with, I've had the pleasure of working with folks around academic English Mastery. The Center for Access Equity and Acceleration, UCLA Collaborative, all of these are very specific and targeted programs that empower students by having a very intentional focus on them and the work that we're doing to ensure that they'll become successful.
You see all these babies here, every last one of these students, they were just like me. They weren't supposed to be here. I was supposed to be locked up somewhere. Most of them felt the same way. Every last one of them holding a certificate of acceptance to UCLA. And those of you who follow the trends of college acceptance, that's probably the hardest school to get into in the world. If you can get in UCLA, you can get in anywhere, but how does that relate to our deeper learning? Again, examples of how we approach the work, the culturally responsive work, how we uplifted their voice, showcased their student voice, allowed them to be successful.

Now, I did a little more work here in, what we call, local district central, when I worked with the gang from Center of Love and Justice. And just most recently, I was able to help Los Angeles launch the first of its own, the Cultural Arts Passport. What is that? Every student in Los Angeles will have the opportunity to experience the arts and we know the arts is part of deeper learning as well, hello.
All of our students being able to exhibit performing arts, visual arts, but also to travel. To travel all over the world. We're going to send students to Africa. We're going to send them to Italy, Mexico. We're going to send them to DC, Virginia, Miami so they can have those experiences, so they can see that the world is a lot bigger than wherever they live, but we're going to meet them where they are, but we're going to take them someplace else.

So you see here, my positionality is very important to me. I'm a black man. Come on Dale, easy to see. I'm a father. I'm a marine. I'm a urban kid. I'm a hip hop kid. That does form how I feel and how I see the world. We all have that positionality. That's okay to own your positionality, but make sure that you allow your students, make sure that you give them the voice to own their positionality. That it's okay. That it's their right, their divine right, to be who they are. Meet them where they are.

You see this Motley Crew right here? No, Motley Crew. This is my family. This is my wife, my beautiful wife Coco is here with me today, supporting me. The reason that I show you this picture, it's because I love those four children, like any parent, but I bring that same love to my job. We have to love our babies. I had a tweet the other day and I talked about loving the students. Do you know I got flack for that? No really. They were all up in my comments talking shit. "What do you mean you love the kids? You shouldn't be loving the kids. What's this all about?" Yes. I love the kids. Yes, I love the kids. When I drop my kids off, I want somebody there to be loving them. Hello?

I want to leave you with one last thing. We always talk about winning where I'm from. Not winning because we want to win individually, but because we know when we win, the children win. You heard my story. I'm a West Coast kid, a Compton kid. I'm a hip hop baby, I love hip hop. My favorite artist of all time, his name is Christopher Wallace. That's right. Give it up for Biggie.

I want you to listen close to me now, the very first time I ever heard his voice, you know what he said? This is dedicated to all the teachers who said, "I would never amount to shit". That resonated with me. Don't be that teacher. Be the one that's going to be help the kids catch the dreams. Don't be a dream killer because you never know if you're going to be teaching Andre Spicer or Christopher Wallace. I love y'all.

Alec Patton:
High Tech High Unboxed is hosted and edited by me, Alec Patton. Our theme music is by Brother Herschel. Huge thanks to Walter Cortina, Kristin DeLaTorre and Andre Spicer for sharing their stories, and to Michelle Pledger for introducing them. You can learn more about this episode's storyteller and find their social media links in our show notes. To find out more about the Deeper Learning Conference, visit their website deeper-learning.org. Thanks for listening.