Khan Academy Ed Talks with Marc Sternberg - Wednesday, March 10

Hello! Welcome everyone to Ed Talks with Khan Academy. I'm Christine DeCervo, the Chief Learning Officer here at Khan Academy, and today I'm excited to talk to Mark Steinberg, who is the K-12 Education Program Director at the Walton Family Foundation.

So we're looking forward to that conversation to talk a lot about COVID response, education, and philanthropy as we think about what lies ahead for our schools after the results of all of this COVID experience that we've all been through. Sal is going to be back on Friday; his guest will be chess world champion Magnus Carlsen. So look out for that!

As we think about COVID, we also want to recognize some of the sponsors who have stepped up and helped us make it through some of the tough times here at Khan Academy, including Bank of America, AT&T, Google.org, Novartis, Fastly, and General Motors. Thank you for your support!

And with that, let's dive right in. So first, let me say welcome. Thanks for coming and joining us today.

Mark Steinberg: It is a pleasure, Kristin, to be with you. I am no international chess champion, but I'm an education advocate par excellence, and I'll do my best to keep up.

Christine: Awesome! We all have our own strengths. So I mentioned to you off-air, I love chess, so I will be tuning in on Friday, you can be sure, and hopefully we'll go through some openings or, I don't know, engage...

Mark: Yeah, I can't wait to hear that conversation. I think it'll be good.

Christine: But for everyone that is here today, first let's just kick off and tell us a little bit about yourself. Tell us how you ended up in this position and a bit of your path to get here.

Mark: Great! I'm happy to. And in all seriousness, thank you for having me, and thank you, Kristin, to you, to Sal, and to the entire Khan Academy family and team for the amazing work you guys have done for so many years, and especially frankly over the last year. I think we'll wind up talking a bit about that in our time together.

My path into this role runs through the classroom. Right out of college, I took a job teaching. I work for the Walton Family Foundation, which is of course based in Bentonville, Arkansas. I am based in Brooklyn. Much of my professional life before coming to Walton was in public service to this city as a teacher right out of college, as a school leader, and a school founder. I started a high school that I led for six years in the Bronx, the Bronx Lab School. Then, as a policymaker, I served as a deputy to Chancellor Klein in the last term of the Bloomberg administration.

So I cut my teeth as a pedagogue, working with a group of students, then with the school community, and then in service to New York City at the policy level. All of which have been a great preparation for this work with the Waltons, thinking about education on the national stage.

Christine: That's great! Tell us just a little bit about founding a school. What prompted that, and what were you thinking as you considered this different experience or a new way of thinking about school that you wanted to take?

Mark: Well, a lot of it came from a desire to have impact, which is a little bit in my DNA of being a doer. The match that lit the fire for the school was my teaching experience, where I observed what many educators in your community surely feel – the incredible passion, energy, and potential of my students, who probably taught me a lot more in my years of teaching, especially those early years.

I wanted to build a school community in the Bronx that would help my first students meet their full potential. Starting teaching in the mid-90s in the Bronx, there was a sense that we could just do better. A sense that schools were too often mixed up about how they were making decisions. My school had three principals during the years I was there, so I experienced both the wonders and the tragedies of that.

There was a brief interlude of grad school between teaching and coming back to start the school. I felt like that was my calling. I was called back to craft something very different for high school students. I have a high school student of my own who's walking into the room right now to visit his dog, just keeping it real for your viewers.

This was also at a moment of remarkable policy opportunity and a window of leadership for New York City schools. The mayor and chancellor looked at the landscape of options and saw a cohort of schools that had been failing students for decades, with graduation rates in the teens and 20s. They were sick and tired of being sick and tired and looking for a round of entrepreneurs to come in and think about a better path forward.

Christine: Yeah, that definitely makes sense. Tell me a little bit more about your role now at the foundation and what that entails. What do you do?

Mark: Education has been a huge pillar of the Walton family's philanthropic interest for 30 years. Long before I got here and going far into the future, the family has cared about this work. It's been the center of their philanthropic strategy, which is rooted in the belief that education matters and is a central pillar for helping communities, families, and students live self-determined lives and reach their full potential.

Much of what we do is unlock the potential of both students and educators. The center of our strategy is looking to teachers and educators, looking to folks who know the work best because they've done it and lived it for insights on how schools and classrooms can work differently. So it’s the privilege of a lifetime to be in a position to help the family do its work.

Christine: So tell me a little bit about what you do. Are you looking for opportunities and groups that you want to support? What is that like?

Mark: We are focused on a few key pillars. At the center of our work is the school and a quality school. A lot of what we've done over the years and will continue to do is find educators with ideas for a different kind of school, whether that’s a new charter school or a new public school. We elevate talented educators who aim to start schools or become school leaders and find their path to leadership.

It requires cohorts of educators, folks who want to come into the profession, so we invest in pipelines into the profession, investing in community advocacy and community voice to help communities develop a vision of what school can look like, how school can meet the needs of their community, which I think is critically important.

I think it’s also critical at this moment to invest in what the future of learning can look like. We apply a deep focus on innovation in teaching and innovation in models to explore what the future can be.

Christine: There’s a lot to follow up on there. So let me start with the thought that as COVID hit, what did you see as ways you could bring your resources to bear on what was happening? As COVID started just about a year ago this week, we started to see a lot of impact.

Mark: Our first instinct – like everybody – took us a minute to understand the scope of this. I hope we are now at the end and past the point of questions like how many days a week are kids going to be in school or when can we get kids back into the building. I’m living in New York City, and what I can report is that we’re sort of seeing the other side of that discussion.

But at the beginning, I think we all thought this was going to be just muddling through for a while. We deeply confronted this as an organization. I would characterize the work we have done in the wake of COVID in parts. First, we wanted to be a resource for leaders and the folks we’ve worked with in various cities. We provided flexibility around resources and additional funding, so that school leaders could do things like delivering books and materials, meals, and making sure families in their communities had hotspots to access online instruction.

The first order of business was about providing extra resources to meet the moment. We knew we could never do everything, but we needed to do something.

Christine: That's interesting, especially as we are an education technology organization and often struggle with this. Part of equity is actually getting the resources to the students who need it most, and we are always thinking about how there is a group of students we can't reach because they lack connectivity. Have you guys been working on that issue?

Mark: We have, and that sort of bridges to the second big part of what we've done, and that’s thinking through an advocacy lens. We’ve been addressing the needs that became so acute at the moment. At the top of that list was access to clear broadband and connectivity. We’ve got good news coming; the legislation that is making its way to the president's desk has some good news for families living on the wrong side of the digital divide. That's encouraging, and we're ready to celebrate that.

However, we also must acknowledge that there are still families in this country that suffered without high-speed internet for the last 12 months. I'm thrilled that there’s a solution coming and that federal resources are on their way, but just because those resources are available doesn’t mean the problem is solved. There's much work to ensure those dollars go to the right places and build permanent solutions.

This experience has raised awareness of problems like this and generated a lot of public will to solve them. I hope we can hold onto the urgency of solving some of these challenges that predated COVID, which we tolerated before.

Christine: Definitely! So thinking about that future, what do you see may change in education from where we are now?

Mark: I think this is a moment to grab for a different kind of future in the classroom. That future has always been something we've talked about, but it has always seemed just over the horizon. I credit Khan Academy and Sal for helping us see it more clearly.

It’s become a necessity for the equity agenda and the work of lifting up the teaching profession. We’ve seen data—one in five teachers report they are not coming back to the classroom, on top of a decade-long challenge of attracting and retaining quality talent in the classroom. We need to make the profession more sustainable and help teachers be more effective.

There are significant leaps forward that must happen for schools to meet their promise; software-based solutions need to be part of that. Despite some great progress over the last decade, we see that teachers are saying the profession has gotten harder, not easier. This is a time to look over that horizon, develop solutions, and figure out what those are to bring coherence to the teaching and learning experience.

Christine: We’ve got a question from Facebook: "Please define success for students, teachers, and schools." It’s an interesting question to think about what success means.

Mark: For us, success is about self-determination. It’s about preparing students to lead the lives they want to lead, so at the student level, we need to focus on skill development and self-determination. There must be a focus on content mastery, basic skills in numeracy, literacy, and critical thinking that will prepare students.

Additionally, we need to attend to the social and emotional health of our students. The last year has been a massive reminder and a setback for children in this country. We’ll have to confront that as a nation and prioritize the emotional well-being of students when we think about success.

I believe that developing hard skills, which are important for a self-determined life, is quite consistent with the idea of emotional health. So when I think about student success, those elements come to mind.

As for teacher success, I think about moving educators to focus on human-centered pedagogy and developing tools that work harder for teachers so that their jobs and lives become easier. It allows them to support student learning more effectively. If we can do that at scale, we lift the profession up.

Christine: You talked about self-determination for students while also discussing community-driven or community demand initiatives. How do you bring that into your work, and how do you hear or listen to community demands?

Mark: We engage in conversations that are like kitchen table discussions with folks who have the most at stake in their communities - whether in the South or the Pacific Northwest. We recognize that while there are many commonalities across communities, all problems are very local.

For us, this has been about building a listening muscle. This doesn’t mean we leave behind our experience and perspectives; we bring them into these conversations. It’s about classic organizing, and I will say it’s a skill that philanthropy needs to build. Listening first and acting second isn't the natural instinct of philanthropy.

Christine: That makes sense! When you listen, you sometimes hear conflicting viewpoints. School reopening has been a prime example of that. Different stakeholders often see things in different ways. How do you navigate those differences?

Mark: This is the trick and the risk. There are many well-intentioned change agendas that fall apart because they reach for absolute consensus, and that can’t be the approach. This is about balancing the patience of listening with urgency of action and focusing on the problems that can be solved, which if left unsolved, create cascading, pernicious effects.

So it’s essential to understand the local nature of the problem. In this case, for instance, how do we get kids back into school? If we can’t do that, how do we ensure we are not left with a learning loss challenge? This micro version of the problem is what we’ve been solving for 30 years: achieving better educational experiences for more students in the community. We are clear on our orientation, seeking local partners with better ideas about how to do this.

Christine: Great! You talked about innovation and community. Can you share some innovative initiatives you’re seeing or working on that excite you?

Mark: Let me start with assessment and accountability. I hesitate to mention the words because they’re like four-letter words these days. Keeping me up at night—and many advocates—is how perilous the moment is for data collection and student performance. How do we know how students are performing?

Even without COVID, we’re confronting decision points at the state and federal level about whether we should collect student data for comparability to know how one group performs relative to another. And now, with COVID, we’re looking at two consecutive school years without clear data. I believe this is a massive threat to the equity agenda.

This moment represents an innovation challenge—figuring out how to capture what students know and measure the full spectrum of what we care about relative to performance. This includes their social and emotional health, content mastery, and skill development. Imagine a day where we think beyond traditional assessments…

Apologies for the disruption earlier with audio issues!

Christine: No problem!

Mark: Thank you! I appreciate your patience. I think that wraps it up nicely. Thank you for the opportunity to have this discussion.

Christine: Absolutely! Thank you so much for joining us and for the important work you’re doing to support learners and learning during these times.

Mark: Great! Thank you, Kristin. Goodbye to all our listeners, and we look forward to seeing you on Friday!