Q and A: Ron Gleason | Philanthropy in Ed. Reform

Q & A: Ron Gleason

Winter 2003

Ron Gleason is the former executive director of the Reinventing Schools Coalition, a non-profit organization based in Anchorage, Alaska, whose goal is to help schools and districts implement the Quality Schools model. He spoke with Northwest Education coeditor, Denise Jarrett Weeks, from his office in Anchorage.

Tell me a little bit about the scope and the goals of your recent Gates grant.

This all started with what Chugach was able to accomplish. Chugach took a rural district comprised of three sites that had been doing very, very poorly. They said let's meet with all of our stakeholders. They went to parents, students, community members, and business people, as well as staff, and just said 'what should we be doing? What do you want out of the school system?' And lo and behold there were common strands from each of the different groups. So they identified those strands and reported back and said, 'would you support a system that did what you wanted to do, based on the input you gave us?'

What that meant was certainly basic skills—reading, writing, and math—but in addition to that, personal social standards. People were concerned with transition. Are kids, when they leave school, really prepared for today's world? So, that boiled down to creating Chugach, a system that worked with the whole child and had non-traditional content areas: career development, cultural awareness, service learning. And the expectation was that you would have to meet what was determined to be a high school graduation level in all of those content areas. Including the "non-traditional."

So it used conventional standards and assessments?

They had to come up with what standards fit. How do we teach so that applications are a good percentage, maybe even 50 percent of our teaching? How do we [create] assessment tools that are reliable and valid?

One other very important component that came out of this was that students should advance based on knowledge performance, not on time. How we are going to have them learn shouldn't be restricted by time.

And from all of that, Tom VanderArk, from the Gates Foundation, said, 'I will give you some money if people are interested in replicating this and committed to doing it. I'll give you money not to encourage them to do it but to accelerate them.' The money is not to say 'would you do it?' The money is for people [who say] 'we're going to do it.'

So this is where business can play a big role in your particular vision?

Absolutely. We are working with a representative of business organizations in the state: APIC, the Alaska Processing Industries Career Consortium, the heart of which is BP [British Petroleum]. It's for mining, water, development, production, oil, you know, many of the resource development industries. They are working to collaborate with the building trade, the IT people, the hospitality industry—all of these industries have consortium to try and build their capacity within the state. We are working with APIC and then hopefully other consortia to align: What do you need and want, and does it align? Can we be a collaborative partner?

You mean what do they need and want in an employee?

[It's] not just creating worker bees. They have a sense of citizenship, believe it or not. They want kids prepared for multiple opportunities—careers, not just jobs. When you talk to them about that they talk about interpersonal skills in work, communication, problem solving. You have to really work at them before you hear them say basic skills. They expect basic skills, but they expect them embedded in these other activities.

The best projects are real world projects, when [students] have to interface with businesses or community organizations or people in the community. Look at the communication—interpersonal to problem solving—that are built in to that.

Then we have assessment tools. None of these tools are invisible. They know what the assessment piece will be before they begin the activity. They know where the bar is set in terms of performance, so it encourages independent learners as opposed to a learner in a traditional system that turns and says to the teacher 'Is this what you want? Is this good enough?'

When you present a rubric, a scoring guide, at the front end, and you discuss it and make sure it's clear, rarely do you have students saying 'Is this what you want?' The whole system is trying to be as consistent as possible. We are trying to create independent learners.

The other piece is about application and interfacing with business. A big part of what we do is to get you out interfacing with the community, interacting. Wouldn't it be nice to learn what skills are really needed, so you have choices in particular careers or multiple career fields? Wouldn't it be nice to have knowledge while you are still in a system that is a free?

When you are talking to businesses, is their interest about 'Where can we best put our philanthropic dollars?', or is it about 'How can we bring kids in for job shadows?' Where is the focus? Is it some of both?

Actually, foundations are doing the philanthropic stuff. Businesses, from mom and pop to conglomerate, are very interested in doing the job shadowing, and then moving into extended job shadowing and mentorships. They are very supportive of getting students who have gone through a system that aligned with expectations that they would have. In the quality schools model, we have much more specific feedback than who is a "good" kid. We have standards in career development; we have standards in personal social. So we have concrete, objective data to say who is ready for this experience.

From the student perspective, if you are interested we can tell you clearly what kind of knowledge and skill performances you [need to] have demonstrated to not only do this experience but to maximize the benefits.

I remember my own high school experience, where you just tried to muddle through on your own.

Truly. And again, two pieces that are very important with this model: One, no student is invisible because your grades are no longer dependent on a class average, a curve, or even a general performance on a paper. In our system it's standards-driven, so everyone could be at the "best" level. Or everyone could be at the bottom. It's not driven by competing against each other; it's truly a comparison with the standards, so no one is invisible. That's an important piece.

Another piece [is that] the road map to success is painfully clear. It's no longer controlled by the teacher; they are no longer the bottleneck of knowledge. They play the critical role, and they are absolutely essential, but they are much more a facilitator, because everyone knows what's expected and they are not tied to time.

What do you think attracted the Gates Foundation to you? I know that everybody is very interested in this idea of scaling up and trying to find good models and have them proliferate.

A couple of components: the first of which was the ownership. The parents, kids, teachers, community members—everyone understood the system. It reflected what they wanted. I think that really captured the Gates Foundation's interest. Here was a system that wasn't done to people, it was created by those people, and that increases the likelihood of sustainability.

The second piece is that it leads to positive student results. It was a shared vision first. Then it lead to increased student performance.

So what is the Gates Foundation's role now, after they've given you the grant money? Do they just give you the money and sit back or how does that work?

They are marvelous to work with. They want deliverables. They want the people who are best suited to that to do it. So their role is to make it clear what is expected, but then we do that. We propose what we think we can do, and then they meet our proposal.

Our proposal was that we would assist, fuel, and facilitate districts that were committed to implementing what we call the Quality Schools model.

Was there a limit on the number of schools or districts you would take?

Not at the onset. The only condition was the commitment to do the total model. The model is very simple. There is nothing in it that is new. The only difference is that you have to do all of them. Gates allowed us to set the criteria. They haven't said to people, 'No, you can't be in it.' But some people have looked at it and said we'd like to be in it, and then decided [they're] not committed to going through this kind of shared visioning.

We believe the system will lead to what we call raising the bar and closing the gap. We'll challenge the most successful kids—successful defined by traditional methods. We'll raise the bar for them, and we'll catch other kids up.

How does a partnership with a funder like Gates help?

The tragedy is, the Quality Schools model is such a simple model, but the majority of educators are not prepared to work effectively in that model. The Gates Foundation recognizes that people need to be trained or retrained. Their resources are for staff development. They don't say it in those words, but they don't want their funds going into facilities. You know, they recognize that it's about training.

Tell me more about the kinds of qualities or skills that your staff need that they are not prepared for.

First, they are not prepared to work in a system that truly operates off of a shared vision. A shared vision is one that is inclusive as opposed to exclusive, one that connects goals and objectives to a program, one that has continuous improvement. So that's the first piece: a belief set and a skill set, in terms of staff development.

Simultaneously we have to train people on how to teach using standards and rigorous assessments. The teachers need to change how they teach.

Yes, that's a whole new way of working and a whole new way of recreating yourself as a teacher isn't it?

It is. And that's why I say it's a tragedy. The tragedy is that we have old teachers, but in particular new teachers who come out and say 'Gosh, I just finished my pre-service program and we didn't really learn this.'

And this is where a person or an organization like the Gates Foundation can come in?

Yes. But they will say, 'Look, schools are strapped, we are not going to entice you, because we don't have enough funds to do that.' Those people and organizations that are committed to systemic change—we get [the grant].

So if you are looking for schools that already have that commitment, and not trying to raise someone's readiness, are you leaving out low performing schools? Are you going only to the schools that are already successful?

No, it's just the opposite. The low performing schools, many if not most, are recognizing that they need to move away from blame. It doesn't matter if the kid isn't holding up his or her responsibility as a student. It really doesn't matter that the parent isn't doing what a parent should do. It doesn't matter that the school is not providing you with adequate supplies or staff development. There comes a point when you have to stop being a victim and say—what can I control, and then, what can I do to maximize what I can control? There are more and more schools and districts coming to that reality.

What is the most important tip you would share with others who are interested in partnering with businesses?

The most important piece is: be clear on what problems you are trying to solve or address. Don't look for solutions before you've organized and focused on what are your real issues.

And two: any process that you use that deals with improving the educational system should engage all stakeholders. And then three: whatever you do, look to benchmark, look to find out what are best practices. Don't reinvent the wheel. And finally: you are only going to do those three steps comprehensively if you have leadership; just having a good heart is not enough.

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