Khan Academy Ed Talks featuring Asst. Supt. Beth Gonzalez - Thursday, Dec. 17

Hi everyone! Sal here from Khan Academy. Welcome to the Ed Talks live stream subset of the Homeroom. We have a very exciting conversation with Beth Gonzalez, Assistant Superintendent of Detroit Public Schools. So, start thinking of questions for Beth, and you can put those in the message board.

But before we go into that, I'll give my standard announcements. Reminder that we are a not-for-profit; we can only exist through philanthropic donations. So, if you're in a position to do so, please think about going to khanacademy.org/donate. Any donation makes a huge difference.

Uh, there's good analysis that even one every dollar donated to Khan Academy has four to five hundred dollars of social impact. So, it's hard to find anything out there that gives you that type of social return. So hopefully, think about making those donations.

Special shout out to the organizations that stepped up during COVID when they saw that the need for Khan Academy was even larger. Traffic had gone up dramatically to Khan Academy, but we were running higher costs. So, special thanks to Bank of America, Google.org, AT&T, Fastly, Novartis, and many others for helping us fill that gap.

But we still need more help, especially since we saw this multi-million dollar gap going into 2021. Last but not least, there's a version of this that you can get in podcast form, "Homeroom with Sal," the podcast. Check that out wherever you get your podcasts.

So with that, I'm excited to introduce Beth Gonzalez, Assistant Superintendent of Detroit Public Schools. Beth, welcome!

Hi Sal, thank you so much! So happy to be here this afternoon.

No, and we're so happy to have you! You know, you, and other administrators, yourselves or district leaders around the country, or in the world really, have had a very non-enviable job over the last nine months or so. I'd love to hear more about how Detroit Public Schools has thought about learning as early as last March, when the schools had to start being closed physically, through the summer, and all the way until now.

Great! Yes, our roles certainly have been dynamic. I have been really fortunate to connect with other leaders and like roles like mine in other cities. It's been, you know, probably one of the most least anticipated and greatest challenges, but also a landscape of opportunity as well.

So, as we navigate through this, we think really critically about what our decisions mean for students, and then what does it mean for right now, and how can we use this opportunity long term as well?

So in Detroit, it's been a really interesting journey. Beginning in the spring, obviously, like most districts nationally, we closed without any warning. Initially, we distributed paper packets to students for a three-week period that led us up into spring break.

During that almost four-week timeline, my team and other teams working with actually in our district about 126 educators and a number of partner organizations really launched what we called a distance learning plan. That was where we shifted from online instruction, right, with pre-recorded lessons. We developed over a thousand of them, leveraged Khan Academy content, and daily instruction for a limited period of time with our educators using a platform we had already been using but not at scale: Microsoft Teams.

What we learned during that time was we were able to ensure continuity of learning. We built on the high-quality instructional materials that we had adopted over the last few years to continue instruction aligned to our vision of excellent instruction. However, all of our students did not have equitable access to that instruction. Some students were watching these YouTube videos on phones, participating in class through Teams on cell phones through apps versus actually having a stable computer.

In the spring, our superintendent and chief strategy officer, along with senior-level leaders in the district, really started thinking about how do we address the huge digital divide in the city and the inequity that still existed in our system that wasn’t present in other systems, where students were able to just go home and use computers.

When we started leading here in the district, the device ratio was, at its best, like six to one, making it really difficult to actually do any at-scale digital learning in classrooms district-wide. We had been doing some really intense work to move our schools to one-to-one, and last spring we were in the last deployments of our high schools, but what our students needed was devices in their homes.

We were very thankful to work with the philanthropic community and receive a $23 million investment for an initiative that we call Connected Futures. Through that and through summer, we deployed about forty-four thousand devices to the students in our district, which we sit just above fifty thousand students.

Through the summer, as we reached fall, we really worked on closing the digital divide in terms of access to devices. However, that did not mean that all families and students were well equipped to use that device to learn on a daily basis.

Um, while we celebrated that opportunity, we've faced a number of challenges. Even after students had access, the district actually made about a $4 million investment and students having access to internet connectivity in their homes. That's a commitment that we will continue.

So, we've just really been constantly reflecting on what we've been able to accomplish, where we are, and what challenges our students and families are still facing. Because despite having done that work, there are a lot of cities nationally who have similar stories, and I think that in itself is progress.

But we still have students that aren't able to participate in school on a daily basis, and we're launching a number of things to address that but certainly still have more room to grow. So I would describe that overarchingly as sort of what's happened in Detroit.

For me, you know, one of the things I in my role as Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum Instruction, teaching and learning is at the core, the heart of what I do. We have been really focused on making sure that our students have continued access, and our teachers have continued access to high-quality instructional materials that are highly rated.

That's part of our work, and that's part of what we're really still pursuing—culturally relevant materials. That's a point of pride. There are still nuances, like there are multiple platforms, and that's hard for kids and families. So even as I share celebrations, each of those accomplishments are coupled with things that we're still working on to improve what we're doing for our students.

And you know, there's a lot in that. Once again, thank you for the heroic effort that you and your fellow district leaders have been doing. I'm curious about that percentage of kids that, or whatever the percentage is, that haven't been able to engage. You know, how large has that been?

We've been hearing that from a lot of districts. You know, I live in a middle-income, upper-middle-income suburban small school district. A school teacher shares the cul-de-sac with me. She was telling me that 5-10% of her kids haven't been engaged. I could imagine the problem could be worse in Detroit. How big is the problem there, and what are the best explanations for why these kids haven't been able to engage? What are you all trying to do to keep them engaged?

Yeah, great question. You know, we've really been looking at student engagement and attendance from a number of different perspectives. Our enrollment actually, as a district, has continued to increase, and we were making really significant progress on both reducing the number of chronically absent students, increasing enrollment and increasing just healthy daily attendance rates district-wide with some exemplar schools.

But the pandemic has really impacted that, and our data looks similar to what it did about two years ago. Students are, you know, it's not consistent. We don’t have students who are not coming at all, but it's inconsistent in terms of period of the day or day of the week.

So the way that we're really thinking about that in two ways—the first is really intentional outreach. We’ve leveraged all school staff to reach out to families, do well-checks, and offer supports beyond just academic support.

We're thinking about the mental health of the family or what additional needs they may have, such as food insecurity or utility assistance. In our school culture facilitators and our deans, it’s all hands on deck trying to reach out to families to understand why their students may not be participating.

Beyond that, we have a team of district team members who led a large effort including district volunteers and others to canvas and really go to every home for our students who haven't showed up. That was work I actually did myself in our neighborhoods, meeting families and talking to them face to face, of course, outside, socially distanced, safely with masks on, about what challenges they’re facing.

We communicated with them to make sure they understand their child does have a device; their school's waiting for them, and we're eager to provide instruction and supports to their family. We now are at a place where it is really about home visits and outreach.

Despite the increased infection rates in the city and the challenges in terms of being face-to-face, we're trying to engage students as much as possible. We're also studying the impact on their performance.

This is a national conversation that's emerged; I know a number of other school districts are grappling with this. We have studied and we know that district-wide, when we look at quarter one performance of our students in 2019 versus quarter one performance of our students in 2020, we see about a 15% increase in F grades district-wide, with variance across schools—decreases in some of our particularly lower grades, and increases in some of our high schools where we're seeing larger total numbers of students with Fs.

So that’s really pushing us to think about student engagement in a couple different ways, right? Like how do we support kids to make sure they’re coming, and then when they are coming, how do we support them to be successful in this completely new learning environment?

When you did some of these home visits, what did people tell you? Why their kids weren't showing up to the Microsoft Teams classroom? What were the explanations you’ve been hearing?

Yeah, um, there are a number of reasons which are very legitimate. Some families faced challenges with the device they originally received, having already been broken, and not feeling like they had the resources or a solution in order to have that fixed.

To address that, actually, the district recently launched 13 regional hubs throughout the city where we're providing a number of in-person supports to families, including actually device repair, online learning support, mental health resources, and we are offering COVID testing to support families.

So to help make that not be an ongoing issue in the early stages of this work, when I was out in neighborhoods in some ways, families just didn't feel like they had all of the clear communication and information about what was available to them, what they were supposed to do, and how they were to participate.

That's why the home visits were so important because it really helped us, face to face, describe to someone what to do, get their cell phone number, and just solve the problem alongside them. We also launched an online learning help hotline; we've had over 1,000 calls to date so that families can continue to call in and say, "Gosh, I need help! This isn't working. I don't know what to do. How do I enroll now that so much is so different?"

So those are a few of the reasons that families shared with us and some of the things that we've done to try to support them and address that. So it sounds like, it's, you know, in some categories just tech difficulties, and then probably a little bit of activation energy of just not knowing how to engage in this new world.

On the other issue you mentioned, the students failing disproportionately, especially at the high school level—how do you all categorize that? How much of that is the access issue we just talked about? How much of that is stress, mental health, anxiety, and depression? And how much of that is just something else?

Yeah, so we're actually studying the relationship right now between student performance and attendance to see what the relationship is there. We've also been actively engaging in focus groups with our students to hear from them what their perceptions are about this challenge, what ideas they have, how they feel.

We've heard a number of things from students themselves. They articulated that this is hard on them, and it's hard on their teachers. They sometimes are challenged by the number of platforms and what's required of them to submit assignments. They talked about examples where they had submitted work, but their teacher didn't receive it.

They expressed that the expectation for submission of work feels as though, ‘you know, we're not in school, we're at home, we're online, but my teacher's expectation for turning things in on time hasn't really changed,’ and it's really not sensitive to where I am in terms of having to provide care for a younger sibling, or having to, you know, be a caregiver in my own home, or having other responsibilities.

So, I think students are facing a number of things. We also heard from kids just like you said, Sal, where you know their mental health is suffering; they feel isolated; they feel alone. They say, "You know, I wake up in the morning, it's dark. I get on my computer, I finish school, it’s dark." And you know, what I don't have is that same social engagement.

One thing I didn't speak to earlier was that our district was actually one of the first school districts—now I think it was the first school district nationally, certainly large urban—to welcome students back for in-person instruction after the spring closure. We started preparing and launched in-person instruction in summer and had only like three cases in our schools at that time.

Then we opened the school year with three different implementations. One was an in-person opportunity for learning, matching teachers who were willing to teach in person with students who wanted to learn in person or whose families wanted them to learn in person. We also launched learning centers, so these students were learning online but were able to come to an educational environment with the support of other educators, like dean school culture facilitators, assistant principals, paraeducators, and academic interventionists, to ensure they had the support they needed for assignment submission and online participation.

We also had almost 80% of our students participating just online, but unfortunately, because of the increases in infection rates at the very end of November, we had to shift to just online learning again. So, these challenges that some of our high school students are facing are actually increasing, not decreasing, with their siblings not being able to go to learning centers and with them, if they benefited from it, learning in person.

So, lots of this is why we're talking to them to learn from them about the challenges they're facing and to move to strategies that make sense for a pathway to success, including supporting our own educators and guidance on equitable grading practices, for example.

On that last piece, this is something we've always talked about—kind of academic pre-pandemic social mastery learning—that if you get a C, or B, or an F, that you should always have an opportunity to remediate and get it to an A level, especially when COVID, it seems, is important because we all know what it does to a student's self-esteem.

Frankly, if they have a gap in something, they should be able to fill it in; otherwise, they'll have trouble with more advanced topics. Do you see mechanisms by which you all can help these kids who are failing or getting worse grades than they normally would to be able to do makeup work, so to speak, to maybe improve their grades so it doesn't have lasting implications for their life?

Yeah, in fact, what you're describing is something I'm really personally passionate about. I was a math educator, and so much of our work leading up into this pandemic—with the current student performance in the district—we have a number of students already who would be considered one or more years behind.

So, a huge part of our work is providing tiered interventions to those students and making sure that they have the academic time and space to do that work beyond just continuing with high-quality grade level instruction. We do have a foundation around what you specifically spoke to, which is course recovery.

We've done work over the last couple years to have strong course recovery structures in place. Last summer, we had students recover about 600 courses. That's something that we will build upon as we move forward. I think our job right now, given where we are in the school year, is to think about and enact strategies to prevent some of that with our educators so that work can be done before students find themselves in that space.

So not only are we doing work for success with grade level instruction, but we're also actually expanding and pursuing, with this unique structure, with differentiated schedules, with things being online. There are actually opportunities to provide direct services and interventions to students in a way that you know we can do in person, but the online structures have some value.

In fact, in our high school, we have students who really need reading interventions. I mean, I realize at that point most students are using reading as a tool to learn and achieve in their core courses, but we've made a deep commitment to addressing students' learning gaps.

So, we're launching, and we've done work district-wide. In fact, our goal is to reach over 9,000 students in tier 3 reading interventions using this opportunity and being able to flexibly group them, right? Because they're not in a brick-and-mortar building. In one space, they can only come together at one time; we can actually pull across schools and cross classrooms to do some deep interventions, whether those be one-on-one or three-on-one.

So, this is all work that we have underway, we're pursuing, and we just hope to expand to your point, to continue to leverage the resources like Khan Academy and math to help support that.

No, the dream scenario is that students should show mastery on Khan Academy that y'all give them—you know, give them credit. But we can talk about that offline. You know, there's a question related to this from on YouTube, nish786, and there are actually three questions in here, each of which are pretty big.

So, they’re asking: does online school work well for both teachers and students? And maybe, you know, we've talked a little bit about where it's not working so well for students. I am curious about the teacher side of things. What are you hearing from teachers about what’s not working for them? Are there some things that are working well for them?

Yeah, great question. If I answered that with a broad stroke—a yes or no—I would not be attending to the nuance here. Our teaching force, like other teachers, actually represents a diverse set of educators with lots of different experiences and perspectives.

The things that I've heard from educators that are working well—one is, you know, obviously we are in a pandemic. There are a number of educators who have clearly expressed their concerns about teaching in person. So, I think the opportunity to teach students online is educators are thankful for that opportunity for their own safety.

But I will say, we also have had a strong group of educators teaching in person, and we've invested in a significant amount of PPE and resources to help make those safe environments for educators and students. Teachers have said they feel supported by us.

We adopted a learning management system called Schoology. We ensured that we procured and provided to educators all of the online options for their existing programs, so we didn't force them to learn something completely new just to do it online—we really transitioned their existing content to a digital platform.

We complemented the use of Schoology with Teams and made improvements there for teachers to deliver instruction, putting our teachers at the center. We think them delivering instruction each day to students is a real priority in our implementation.

I think teachers have grown in their digital literacies and capacities. They actually see growth in kids, especially our teachers who are serving our youngest students. It's really fun to talk to them about the things kids have done on computers and online platforms where they've had success that they didn't anticipate, and teachers still feel deeply connected to their students.

So outside of using a computer, they are connecting with them. I talk to teachers who go to their students' homes to bring them things and work to make them successful. There are struggles for educators and for teachers in this; but we actually as educators, I'm really glad that question was asked because we do need, you know, we're so focused on what we got to do better, but we do need to also reflect on what kinds of things have benefited students.

I'll name one last thing as a benefit, and that is expanded equitable access. We've actually been able to expand students' access to dual enrollment in the district with our university partners because it wasn't happening in person, so we weren't limited to just one school.

We have students participating across schools, and we've been able to serve more students. I think that also has implications district-wide for when we return—how do we make sure every student in the district who wants to take Calculus 3 can with a university professor?

No, that’s great! Well, you know, these conversations always go by faster than I expect. Thank you so much for joining us, and frankly, thank you for the work that you and all the other educators, not just in Detroit but around the world, are doing right now to keep kids learning.

It shows that, you know, y'all are doing better than what we could hope for, given how strained the circumstances are. There’s a lot to worry about with these kids who seem to be kind of falling off and failing or not engaged.

But there are many things to be hopeful for, and it's because of your tireless effort. So thank you for that!

Oh, thank you, Sal! I get to say these things, but I certainly do not do them alone. You know, our superintendent's leadership through this time, and actually our school board's leadership during this time—everyone in our organization is deeply focused on students, putting students first.

We're committed to continue to problem-solve with the community and elevate solutions to improve what they're experiencing now and support them in the years to come. Thank you so much for having me, and I appreciate it!

Thanks for joining us! Well, thank you everyone for joining this conversation. I hope you got as much out of that as I did. Obviously, there are a lot of things to be worried about because of COVID, and some of these were trends that were going on even before COVID, and they've just gotten worse.

With kids' gaps, etc., there's some really good leadership out there in the country and the world that is making some efforts, and I think thinking about things in really interesting ways.

So thanks for joining this week. This was the last Homeroom for this week, and we might take a little bit of a hiatus for the holidays. So, depending, it might be the new year before we see each other again. So happy holidays! See you later!