Podcast: Nick Donohue on Promoting Racial Equity & Fighting Personal, Institutional and Structural Racism

We’re listening to the Getting Smart podcast where we unpack what is new and innovative in education. We’re your host, Jessica and Caroline. And today we’re bringing you an episode with Nick Donahue. Nick went from teacher to trainer to deputy commissioner, then commissioner in New Hampshire. A dozen years ago, Nick took over at the Nellie May Education Foundation, where he developed a strategy focused on student-centered learning.

The teams focused on personalized learning, student agency, progress on mastery, and anytime anywhere learning was about 10 years ahead of the sector. That’s right. And now the foundation is leading again. In January, they announced a new strategy that recognizes that racism in many forms, personal, institutional, and structural, is a big part of the education problem. Let’s listen in as Nick talks to Tom about the implications

for New England schools and communities of a renewed focus on race equity. Nick will start off by recalling his youth, where he was familiar with wealth, but was living in poverty. So when I was born into a family with great means or significant means, my mother would come from a Pittsburgh, Coal and Rail family. But for various reasons, she was like the

last generation of any wealth, so she inherited wealth, born into a upper class community, living in a co-op apartment on the Upper East Side of New York. And then by the time I’m seven, my parents have burned through all the money. I think I heard it was partly because of their concern about nuclear annihilation. So they were in the 60s. It’s not a good time to bring children to the world because we’re all going to die. So they ran out of the money.

So I’m a wealthy class person. I’m now being raised poor. My social stream sends me to a private school because I can get in. I kind of had some fortunate moments of… And where’d you go to high school? I went to Trinity High School. One of the oldest schools in the country now continues to be one of the most elite. And they don’t even do any fundraising with former alumni because

their current student body represents more wealth than all the classes past. And so what was interesting about that was being in a white upper class culture, living in a more significantly Puerto Rican and Jewish immigrant neighborhood. Now I moved to the Upper West Side. And so I know how to be in the social scene because I’m raised that way, but I don’t have any money. And that wasn’t… And when I joined, when I went there in seventh grade,

I was humiliated at being poor, or… And then by the time I was a senior, I was a little more indignant about it because I was a little more self-righteous about more liberal-minded social justice ideas. Anyway, so that part of the story is living that double life of sort of living and growing up with a couple of young Puerto Rican male friends. And I’m not… I didn’t grow up in the hood. I didn’t… But it was a neighborhood where

you face a lot of things every day that people aren’t familiar with. So anyway, it’s just this dual… That to me was fundamental for me. It was living the kind of high-end traditional education, but also experiencing this different social situation. So that had some roots. My parents were liberally-minded and thoughtful. So there’s just that dualism had something to do with… When I think about what has moved me to work on education and with some

sort of familiar liberal social bent, that’s it. You ended up becoming commissioner in New Hampshire. So let’s do the quick backstory of that. When and how did you decide on education? So I went to Wesleyan, another artifact of my privilege, and I ended up taking a bunch of classes. And beginning of junior year, I looked at my transcript and I saw that I’d

taken a bunch of education classes and I was like, oh, I think I’m interested in education. So that… It wasn’t a plan. It was sort of subconscious. And then I… And I had been in high school, I did a senior project of being a phys-ed intern. I did an internship after my sophomore year back at Trinity as the first education intern. So I was attracted to young kids basically. And then I out of Wesleyan went and taught elementary school

or private school in Weston, Massachusetts, another elite setting. And then found my way out of the classroom because I really discovered professional development work. I did a TV turnoff week. And for my school, then I got asked to do it in another school. It kind of brought me out of my classroom into the field. Ended up getting a job with a non-profit in Boston, went to work at the regional lab in Andover as a state representative, and then

did some consulting work for the department in New Hampshire as a staff at the regional lab. And then, you know, part of that story is I helped the department reorganize itself around learning. And I rewrote the deputy commissioner job description. And then the current commissioner at one point said, why don’t you take this job description home, you know, for the weekend. And I was like, well, I wrote it. I don’t really take it home.

And she goes, just take it home and look at it. And I said, you know, she goes, show it to Mary Ann and then come back and talk to me Monday. And I was like, oh, so I’ve never been a principal. I’ve never been a superintendent. Now I’m deputy commissioner. She, Betty Toomey, mentor of mine. I remember the first year I said, you know, do you think I’ll ever be commissioner? I didn’t really want to be parking space. And, you know, I

said for deputy, I said, you know, aside from the fact that I’ve never really managed anybody and I have no budget experience, and I’m responsible 300 people at a billion dollar state aid budget, you know, perfect fit for the job. And she said, I’m not hiring you because you know how to do this. I’m hiring you because I think you’re smart enough to figure it out. There’s no school for deputy commissioner. So it’s really rewarding cut

through all my fraud stuff. And then, you know, in a year, I said, do you think I’ll be commissioner? She said, no, you don’t want to be commissioner. You’re not qualified. You’re not going to be commissioner. And then two years later, she announced her retirement and recommended me for the job. And I’m like, you know, what happened? She goes, you’ve learned a lot in context, you know? So that was a, you know, there were issues with the

field, obviously, because the superintendents in New Hampshire were a little puzzled about their new commissioner, but I built some credibility. And, you know, I so it was through the consulting door. So let’s fast forward to the Nellie May education foundation. This is this is one of the there must be like eight of these foundations that were formed out of sale of a bundle of student

loans, so knowledge works in Lumina and college spark in Washington, Elios, Elios in Arizona. You joined about 12 years ago. Yes. And you had a pretty good strategic plan. But by 2010, I think it was you launched a super thoughtful plan focused on student centered learning. I’m just struck that you were about 10 years ahead of the sector. It’s just it’s pretty remarkable that the way the sector has come to the plan that you developed back in like

2009. So maybe you can go back 10 years ago and talk about the influences that led to student centered learning and sort of the remarkable definition that that you guys developed. So, you know, for better or worse, that was, you know, an idea that sort of came out of a just some thinking I’d been doing for a long time. So I’m not trying to claim credit as a sole author, but the positive and negative thing is it was an expression of some vision I had. And the

negative thing is it was just an expression of vision I had. So and it wasn’t surreal. There were people who for whom it made sense, it just seemed like a logical path. If you wanted to create better outcomes, you need to modify and tailor if you want to call in sort, provide a uniform, moderated experience and see who succeeds. So I don’t remember all the thinking behind it, but I remember it was it was actually a a it was an outcome of spending the previous couple of

years trying to trying to insert and grow alternative programs in the current context. So this I remember we had experienced in New Hampshire extended learning opportunities for credit. We had built in New Hampshire when I was commissioner, an approach to competency based assessment out of a school to work move. And I think those things we tried to do in New Hampshire before 2002, were pushed back because of no child left behind. So it was like unrequited

continuation. I mean, if we go if we go all the way back, there were interesting things happening. Doc Litke is running a super progressive school in New Hampshire, became the first school in the coalition of essential schools Ted Seiser is running a great school not far from here that Francis Parker. So a lot of super thoughtful people about secondary education that laid the groundwork for your framework here. And I wish I could say that I was attentive enough to other

people’s work to have made benefit of that. But again, the plus minuses sort of inside my own head. And then hearing about things that resonated versus growing off other people’s ideas. And I think those examples are powerful ones. And they don’t really align with some of the more dramatic departures from traditional organization. I mean, I think our experience with trying to, you know, press extended learning opportunities into an opening around a traditional school model

defined by policies that are more seat time oriented, proved impossible. So that was that was actually catalyst was moving from let’s create alternative experiences inside the current frame to provide, you know, different modes of learning, and then seeing how the current system would never allow that and then moving to a larger system change orientation that, you know, reminded people of the sangay forester hierarchy of you can’t just stick new practices in an old structure,

you can’t just put new practices and new structures in with current policies. And if you have correct policies and structures and practices, if you don’t have a cultural mindset around the purpose of the system, you’ll get the same results you always had. So that led us to public work, the mindset work around really people reflecting on the purposes of education, which for us are, you know, that we’re at a time now in our culture where it’s, you know, we’re

one foot in a system competitive system that focuses on individual attainment and as a private good, versus the historic piece of education, public education in the US actually being a hallowed public good. And that whole set of thinking about seeing the limits of trying to crowbar the current system led to some outsized aspirations around trying to change the current system and make it more student centered.

But let me just enumerate your definition of student centered learning because it turned out to be, I think super smart. Even 10 years ago, you were talking about student centered learning as including personalized learning. And for us, that means meeting the student where they are, not where we wish they were. Student owned learning. So you were one of the first people to really start talking about agency,

students in the driver’s seat, competency based learning, to show what you know and move on when ready, and then anywhere anytime learning. Right, which at the time, early time was extended learning opportunities out of school physically, and then obviously the explosion of mediated technology allowed that definition to expand. Yeah, it’s really, it is interesting how

these ideas were all percolating 30 years ago, not just 10 years ago. And as you noted, how no child left behind became unintentionally this radical focus on grade level proficiency. And that sort of locked in teacher centered course and grade level centered grade centered

system that in a lot of ways postponed development on these elements. It’s dead. And that’s why having left the department, having made a start in this student centered direction, being held up by no child left behind, it was a breath of fresh air at the foundation to be able to kind of exercise those muscles. So you now at Nellie Mae Education Foundation, you work across the five or six states of New England? Six New England states, yeah.

I’ve often said, I think you’re an example of an organization that does regional work, but does it well enough and communicates it well enough that it’s of national importance? I mean, you think about things in both respects, I think of both providing national leadership and doing work locally. That’s an explicit strategy, you know, a minority strategy for us is that influence nationally. We started by saying that our national work would be in the interest of our regional success.

And because of the way things turned out, you know, it had its own impact of some moderate kind of influence to feel like when you look at a map of the country or the Inaqal report that describes growth of personalized learning, you know, New England’s heat. It’s a hotspot. And I like to think that it, you know, helped to model some things for people and we had something to do with that. So I want to talk about one of your grantees.

I’m in town for the New England Secondary School Consortium meeting. That’s a project of the Great Schools Partnership. David Roof created this nonprofit that I think has been really influential. One of the things that I appreciate about you and David is the sort of triangular approach to your work and that he took this vision of student centered learning and not only created a network of schools, but also moved with policy supports, a set of states and also built a coalition of higher ed institutions that

that accepted a master proficiency based diploma. So it’s difficult doing any one of those things. And to do the three in concert is really, I think, an interesting and important example of thoughtful work. No, I would credit Great Schools Partnership with helping to advance, you know, our early interests. I think they were the boots on the ground that, you know, help spread things around the region.

I mean, someone’s got to actually do the work of helping schools, you know, implement and discover a student centered approach. We have been able to support and sort of catalyze some things, but it doesn’t happen without, you know, agents who are working with school people. And we’re glad to have funded some of that. And there are other entities that have, you know, grown and move. But I think Great Schools Partnership and David have obviously been leaders in the, you know, the good position New England’s in.

I want to get back to the some communication and advocacy. You’ve supported demand development activity, both public demand and educator demand. Could you give us a quick summary of what you’ve learned about that? So what we learned and the reason we framed it that way was that, you know, in order to move on the cultural dimensions and the belief in value dimensions of system exchange, you know, you need people need a reason to reconsider their set views. So we lightly tried to move in the direction of building and increasing public dissatisfaction with the current mode.

You know, so for example, and that still plagues us today, you know, there’s a report out this year, 66% of everybody thinks they’re young people going to be prepared after high school for post-secondary success. And we look at a place like Boston and we think the readiness rates are in the 20s. So you need to kind of excite some dissonance for people. So we learned that you can enlist youth and youth organizing to advance student-centered learning, but they have precedent concerns around discipline policies, restorative justice, and making sure that, you know, teacher bias is addressed. So it pointed us to the sort of fundamental structural issues that were limiting the implementation of student-centered learning in a way that would be most effective for all learners.

We learned that when you’re building public demand among policymakers, you know, we rediscovered you need the data and the information and the models. We learned, we relearned the truth of Rogers Adopter Curve, because I’m an early adopter, borderline innovator, and you can’t use that same information to move public conversations for everybody. You need a broader base of information and evidence. And we learned that you, you know, in terms of pushing these ideas out more broadly, that you can build a concept and you can provide people space to grow and address the concept, but they really need help in moving the concept. It’s hard to get out of our own way when we’re redesigning.

I think that’s simple. You know, there’s a lot of data around what can practitioners do to build themselves a better box. It’s hard to climb up over the walls and look outside the box to do that. So there’s more provocative things and guidance, design thinking, some of the things that current providers are exploring now. Nick, a couple of months ago published a book on school networks and it, New England is, seems like an anomaly.

They don’t join networks in the, in the same, at the same rates that we’d see in other parts of the country, both voluntary, you know, loose networks all the way up to tight networks. There’s very few managed networks in, in New England. What’s that about? I think it says something about what doesn’t exist in the rest of the country. So you build a network because you need a gathering spot for people with like-minded interests that don’t have a place to gather.

So, you know, in New Hampshire now, the state is a network. It’s a growing network of people interested in students that are learning in Vermont. They have policies around, you know, individual learning plans and personalization in Connecticut. They have options around proficiency, but the superintendent association has been a champion of moving student-centered approaches forward. The rest, the regional education centers in New Hampshire, a couple of them are full bore on this.

So they are networks that, you know, they were existing networks that, that it adapted their focus. And even in Rhode Island, you know, Rhode Island claims it wants to be the first state to be fully personalized, you know, it’s a statement by the governor. So I think there’s some homegrown opportunities that really don’t demand another network. And that’s been an instruction for us because it’s a foundation. You know, foundations love to build their own networks and clubs.

And that’s the last thing that you need to do if you want to build system change is to build another distracting, you know, fraternity or sorority. When, you know, the work is system change, that means changing the existing structures and having them adapt, not exiting and finding a new oasis. So that’s somehow how I think about it. Let’s talk about your new strategy. You recently announced an interesting new strategy.

One of the things that you’ve said about it is while the reasons for education inequities are many, we must realize that racism and its many renditions personal, institutional and structural is part of the problem. So we’d love to dive into sort of your personal and organizational journey of the last 24 months and what brought this to the surface for you? You know, one of the things that brought it forward, a couple of things. One, the evolution of our board and our staff. We’d had kind of a, you know, familiar mainstream value around diversifying the people in our orbit, you know, and so I have now come to think about diversity as an early step toward racial equity and racial justice.

It’s the people you gather. We started to then address the issue of participation, which is another dimension of, you know, inclusion in the DEI frame, diversity, equity, inclusion. As you actually, these people get to participate. And then we came to see at the same time that we’re exploring the sort of diversity inclusion piece just socially as an organization. We started to see the kind of outcomes of the practice development work we’ve been doing in districts and the innovations were moderated.

You know, they were not necessarily driving broad based system change. Some of the charter groups, some isolated places where people were reconsidering more fully, really deep structural changes in how they operated schools, but interrogating grade level structures, age based grouping structures, assessment structures, even outcome structures, teaching and organization structures. So, but we weren’t seeing a dramatic departure because the purposes of these systems were not driven by making sure that, you know, all the students were really succeeding. And that’s institutional structural racism is when you don’t really attend to the reality that a large portion of learners who can be identified by race zip code class are not benefiting from an innovation. So it was an insight for us is not new.

It’s not, you know, I’m not bragging about it, that in the case of trying to adopt a big innovation, a universalist approach with hopes that it would reach other people was not working and that we needed to take a tact of a more targeted approach to really privilege racial equity outcomes as a litmus test and put our hopes on the fact that it would work for the rest of the population. So that targeted universalism piece was a big moment for us. And we think it’s practical and and, you know, it’s also also socially correct. I want to link.

I want to look at a statement that you released with the plan that sort of links the new strategy and the old strategy. You said we will revisit the definition of student centered learning to put attention on racial equity outcomes and increase attention and focus on the cultural structural policies that reinforce inequities in our education system in the community. So tell me what this new focus on racial inequities will mean for your support for student centered learning? How do these how do you square the sort of the new plan and the old plan? Right. So there are only three big impacts for us to relate to the kind of conceptual framework around student centered learning.

And they are that we had really focused on student centered learning as an instructional package that fit inside a system. And so as it is that the idea that you, you know, you have you organize teacher student activities around the four tenants you described. That means interrogating them for things like cultural relevancy. When you’re organizing personalization, it means taking into account the trauma of growing up in a racist society as a person of color. It means accounting for the kind of teacher student relationships that need to change.

So not only does it change the milieu of the instructional content, but you also. So we think they’re the students that needs to evolve through the lens I said in a targeted piece. It’s like, how do we know it’s really working for low income learners of color? And if we design against that, then you start talking about cultural relevancy. You start talking about different ways of knowing.

You start talking about accounting for personal experience and not ignoring the social impacts that people of color in this country experience that white people, you know, either forget, ignore. Or just don’t know about. So there’s some design elements for that core piece. That’s one. The second one is student center learning through a racial equity lens obviously brings you out of the what is now known as the classroom, the learning engagement.

And it demands that you address structural issues around the nature of assessment around the implicit bias that still exists in our educating teacher force. You know, the wonderful teachers we have who are 80 percent white in our country. And are we really attending to the impacts of racism on them, the good people that they are? Or are we pretending like it’s a universal experience? It’s just the same for everybody because it’s not.

So the first two dimensions are about the core instructional design. The second is that and we talk about that sort of looking at the core piece. Then there’s this horizontal expansion of what student centered dismeans because it’s not just the instructional experience. It’s are the kids getting in school? How do you attend to discipline and restorative justice?

Are you pushing your kids out of school? Are you attract them into school? So there are those structural issues that are broader. The third dimension that’s really most impactful for us. Well, what I’d say about this first two is we want to work with the field of people who are leading in powerful ways, the edge of personalization in our country.

And we want to ask that question together. What does it mean to build a student centered approach that we actually are fairly sure is going to work for the people whose futures we depend on? And that will be an interesting experience of really privileging racial equity outcomes and saying, if you really want to guarantee an increase in equalization outcomes through the lens of race and class and difference, what would you be looking at? So one specific thing is I think one of the ways that sort of our middle class whiteness shows itself on personalization of students are learning is it’s a supremely individual event. It’s based on the idea that we are free walkers in the world and we just need to prepare in a different way and we can succeed.

And my friends and allies of color and Latino and African-American communities have reminded me that the outcome is more of a collective one. That for them it’s a team sport and that we need to help them build strength and power as a community to fight the social pressures that racism still exert economically and socially in our country. So we can’t just set these kids free in a walkabout. It’s more of a collective effort. And then so that bridges to the third piece, which is which changed for us is we used to advertise opportunities for students and learning.

The people who wanted to do it would tell us we would then pick from among them unilaterally and we would give them resources to do this. And the big shift for us is where our new focus has led us is to prioritize the voices of community leaders who represent those least heard and most harmed by the current system. And if you follow that principle, you can’t force people to adopt a student-centered approach. You need to engage them, negotiate. You need to have a conversation.

You need to really listen to what they think the key levers are for improvement in their community. And if the student-centered futures indicated it’s less about dictating that and more about discussing that and deferring to their position and interests. So we’re trying to just reduce our privilege are, you know, the way we’re unilateral, the way we are very, you know, very directive. And that’s because in the past we found the people who are interested in students and learning and they didn’t represent those communities. Our first foray 10 years ago advertised across the region, we got dozens of inquiries.

We ended up orbiting on a system change framework for four communities and they were all in the North and Tier of New Hampshire, not New Hampshire. They were all in the North and Tier of New England, Maine, Vermont and New Hampshire. And that was startling to us because we’d set up conditions for system change that only small, relatively stable communities could handle. So then the real first move for us was trying to orient ourselves to the South and saying, how can we get entry into the communities where there’s greater need and opportunity? We ended up offering narrow or entry points around mediated technology around flip learning and performance assessment.

And that was really the first step towards thinking, how do we need to orient ourselves toward attending to the gains we could make in the communities that need student-centered learning the most, not just the ones that were kind of ready to do it more moderately. It sounds like this new strategy requires a pretty different approach than you described 10 years ago, kind of a new staffing model, a new investment model to some extent. Yeah, I think the biggest piece is that it demanded and has been a result of a year and a half or two years of direct inquiry around equity, around white culture, around whiteness. I mean, I’m a white middle class man, very traditional in many ways.

You know, I’ve always been a, you know, attentive liberal white person. And, you know, just examining the ways that, that again, the things to get in the way of racial equity. So it’s been an interesting personal journey. My board has been on this path together. The diversity I described and board and staff helped catalyze these conversations.

So it has been a very deep organizational introspection. And the reason I focus on that is that as I get more and more inquiries and philanthropy about the direction we’re going, and we’re not, we’re not the first and only people. There are pioneers ahead of us who’ve been on this front. But the thing I’m worried about is that people treat it like a programmatic innovation versus really a cultural transformation around beliefs and values. So you just have to reset your mind.

You can’t be an autocratic, unilateral foundation and fully respect the voices of people in community. You’ve got to enter a reciprocal relationship, which means different ways of expecting reporting, different ways of negotiating. We’re building a community advisory right now that we’re going to take very seriously to give us and guide us in terms of the things we actually ought to do and the decisions we ought to make. That’s a fascinating journey to get to the subject of inequity. And I mentioned earlier that I’ve been on a different parallel journey in the last few years studying the future work.

And having looked hard at the future work, I’ve come back to the topic of inequity. But because of what appears to me to be the inevitable march of inequity brought on by the automation economy. And so I’m amicably worried about inequity in our future. It’s interesting that you come to it from a set of historical observations about interventions that have been made and what’s worked and what hasn’t. And I guess it’s interesting that both for historical reasons and for what seems inevitable about our future that coming to terms with race and inequity couldn’t be more important.

It’s true. And I think it’s true of every facet of our society. And I’m kind of self conscious of the fact that, you know, we here and I have kind of rediscovered the glue that holds inequity down in our society overall. And it’s sort of this interesting logical thing we do. And I just know that is my own circle of relationships has grown with educators and people of color and people who have different means that, you know, the response is, well, what took you so long? Because, you know, conversations about resource equity are conversations about structural racism, conversations about innovation education or conversations about combating institutional structural racism.

They’re not just conversations about innovation because the needs we have are so well defined by race and class. I mean, they are the structures that keep our society back. So it is a flipping of a lens. Kind of think of it, you know, being at the optometrist where they flip the lenses up and finally things sort of clarify. And when you slap that racial equity lens down, the mission and the problem just comes into focus more.

I thought we could close with your mission. Now that you mentioned it, the new mission for the Nellie Mae Education Foundation is to champion efforts that prioritize community goals that challenge racial inequity and advance excellent student centered public education for all new England youth. Yeah. It sells it well. I hope so.

You know, executing that mission is a challenge. I’m very against self conscious and. You know, the angst and humility I have about being able to pull that off and do that well is very high. But I think we have the right people organized, especially staff here and the people were gathering around us to instruct us. I just hope we can live up to that mission.

I think it’s a good one. I think it’s respectful. And I think it’s an edge of really authorizing more democratic conversations about the future of education and and really elevating listening to and engaging in the future of education. And really elevating listening to and engaging the voices of those with the most at stake. Those who’ve been harmed the most by what we do and those whose futures on which we all depend.

Because we are a interdependent society now in the days of having a Jeffersonian elite based on Plato’s 500. The idea that you could have some, you know, excellent people like you and me leading things. I think those days are over. And I think we need to, you know, we’re a great democracy. So our I feel like our mission is good for three reasons.

One, it’s a practical thing to do because it’s the route to universal success in our society is making sure that education is an equalizing event of some kind. It’s a right thing to do because it enables us to live and really close a gap value gap between what people like you and I say we want to do versus what we’re really doing. I think it means real opportunity, real equity, real justice for people. And the third thing is I think it’s a patriotic thing to do because it guarantees the future success of our society. And it demonstrates around the world what a great democracy does to grow and evolve.

And that is to face equity and embrace justice. Thanks for being on podcast Nick. Thanks for having me. A big thanks to Nick for joining us for today’s episode. We appreciate Nellie Mae’s new mission to challenge racial inequities and advance excellent student centered public education for all New England youth.

And for more on how intentionally designed competency based learning can promote equity. See episode 177, which outlines equity focused strategies for policy and practice. Also check out our equity and access topic on getting smart.com. And don’t forget to leave us a rating and review today’s episode. It helps more people find our podcast and helps us get better.

If you have suggestions for a future episode, you can send those over to editor at gettingsmart.com with podcasts in the subject line and we’ll add it to our list. That’s it for this week listeners. Thanks for tuning in for the Getting Smart podcast. This is Caroline and Jessica signing off. Thank you. Thank you.