I’d been a high school teacher for four years when I determined it was time to earn my masters degree. I was deciding between UVA and NYU in the spring of 1996 when I answered a long-distance phone call (remember those??) from a professor named Alan Howard. “I’m calling to recruit you,” he told me.

Two years earlier, Alan had started a masters program in American Studies within the UVA English Department. The program required one intensive year and aimed to equip graduates with marketable skills as much as intellectual ballast. It also emphasized production of information and resources for public good: rather than writing theses that might be read by half a dozen people and then archived in the university library, we would be learning how to build websites to publish our work and we’d serve as interns with local museums, historical societies, and arts organizations. Alan’s motto was “We DO American Studies.”

I was flattered to be recruited and I accepted his invitation, joining four other grad students for what would be quite literally a life-changing experience.

Our summer reading list included George Landow’s Hypertext, which explored how the internet—and more specifically, clickable hypertext links—would change the way humans construct and consume information. Four decades later, it’s almost impossible for us to remember a time when we couldn’t follow links, but at the time it felt (and was) groundbreaking. In Alan’s American Studies program, I hand-coded websites instead of turning in papers for my courses. This included the courses Alan himself designed and taught, which explored the American West, Washington, DC, and the 1930s.

My year in the American Studies program taught me new ways to think, new ways to understand America and its place in the world, and new ways to produce and share information and ideas. When I returned to high school teaching, it changed the way I taught and how I thought about assessment. Later, it enabled me to land a job at PBS in its fledgling Interactive Learning division, where we used the internet for then-revolutionary purposes like virtual interactive field trips, online professional learning, and on-demand video streaming.

I kept in touch with Alan after I left UVA. He helped me teach HTML to my ninth graders so that they could publish an online magazine of their writing. He followed my work at PBS with great interest and shared his own work, which after retirement from UVA included establishing a scholarship for nurse practitioners in southwest Virginia and using technology to connect and support nurses in Appalachia.

He came to my wedding and I went to his retirement celebration. When I was considering moving to Arlington, he put me in touch with his son, whose children attended Arlington Public Schools. He talked with my husband, who at the time worked in real estate and construction, about housing developments that were springing up around his beautiful cattle farm just outside Charlottesville.

Two weeks ago I learned from his daughter-in-law that Alan had passed away. He died at home on his farm, and he was 85 years old.


I’ve been blessed in my life to have had some really wonderful teachers, and Alan was one of the best.

He understood that there are all kinds of things humans can know, and only a fraction of them are things that we value in our schools. Several times during that year, Alan invited me and my classmates to visit his farm, where I got the sense that his accomplishments as a farmer meant just as much, if not more, to him than his degrees from Princeton and Stanford. In his obituary, his family wrote: “He felt equally at home with William Faulkner and John Deere.”

He understood that there are all kinds of ways for humans to demonstrate and share what they know, way beyond the papers and standardized tests that we prize in education. Alan explained to my classmates and me that the UVA English Department had examined whether high scores on the Verbal section of the GRE predicted the long-term academic and professional success of its graduate program alumni: according to Alan, they discovered that the only thing correlated with high GRE scores was a greater likelihood of mental breakdown. (This led us, over the course of the year, to warn each other that we were having a “High Verbal” kind of day.)

He demanded a lot from himself as a teacher and believed that we should demand more of our systems of education. After single-handedly launching and running the American Studies program for five years, he asked the English Department to evaluate it and make recommendations for its improvement. He contributed a Self Study Narrative to that evaluation, in which he wrote:

I came to believe in 1994 that the English Department had reached a critical juncture in its graduate program: it had passed from an institution unwittingly accumulating the world's largest stock of unemployed Ph.D.s and ABDs and had become a knowing producer of unemployable graduate students in English. Unable to accept what one of my colleagues termed the "recreational Ph.D.," I determined to create a terminal M.A. in English that would re-tool bright and capable students for productive work outside the academy.

​…[the] Humanities had—by their resistance to public accountability and their inability to articulate the social value of their enterprise, by their inability to imagine the undergraduate and graduate curricula as anything more than the means to produce even more unemployable academics, and by their inability to engage in meaningful examination and reform of their own institutions, programs and curricula—essentially defaulted on its traditional obligations and filed for bankruptcy.

None of this let students off the hook, however: he expected us to own our own learning. Early in the program, I met with him in his office and he asked me what I thought I wanted to study. I had no clue, and I blathered extemporaneously about a dozen or so topics that seemed like they could be fun to investigate. He gave me what can only be described as a world-class side eye, took a long drag on his cigarette, blew smoke in the direction of the window, and said drily, “Then I can’t help you.” The meeting was over.

We need more Alan Howards in education: people with high expectations of themselves and their students, who reject complacency and catalyze change. He wrote, “Like a shark, the Program must keep moving just to stay alive. Course content can, to some degree, be rolled forward; but in very fundamental ways, it has to be new and different each year. Both the students' work and my own is in plain sight. Neither of us can simply repeat what someone else did last year because it’s already been done! And this takes a good deal of energy on everyone's part.”

Alan’s sense of responsibility to his students—his conviction that he needed to push himself, to get it right for us—is accountability in its finest form. It’s not at all the same thing as the accountability peddled by many policy makers and measured in things like Virginia’s new school accountability standards—more about that in my next post.

I’m sure that after nearly four decades as a professor, Alan’s legacy includes a stack of scholarly books and articles. I don’t know much about that, because I never read them and he never talked about them. I think he believed his students were his real legacy: “As I explain to them, they are their own best work, and they are uniquely qualified to tell you whether or not it proved a job worth doing.”

In the spring of 2007, while I was counting down the weeks until the birth of my oldest child, millions of other people were counting down the weeks until they could get their hands on this new thing called an iPhone.

I’d had a Blackberry when I was employed full-time, but when I left that job, had a baby, and switched to freelance work, I wasn’t convinced the juice was worth the financial squeeze. My flip phone and I stayed together for seven more years.

But in 2014 I relented, and right away, I was hooked. Check my email from anywhere? Text with babysitters twice as fast? Take pictures, edit them, and post on social media? What took me so long?

Still, I was acutely conscious of my device habits: I was pretty careful about my kids’ screen time and I wanted to be sure I was modeling moderation. I remember keeping my phone out of reach during certain periods of the day, and intentionally stating why I was using my phone if I had to interrupt my time with them: “I need to look up directions to the restaurant where we’re meeting Grandma and Grandpa,” or “I need to check for one email about a work deadline.”

Ten years on in 2024, things are different. When my kids stagger out of their rooms in the morning, I’m likely to be on my phone trying to finish the NYT Spelling Bee game or reading the news on the NPR app. When I cook I’m listening to Apple Music and following a recipe on my phone. Family conversations and outings are punctuated by pulling out phones to fact-check each other, pull up trivia, or sink periodically into our own texts, games, videos, and other diversions. It’s not uncommon for all four of us to be in a room together, each on their own device, in companionable silence.

I find this unsettling. Is it different from when I grew up and we’d all be at home, but each doing our own thing? When I’m on my phone, do I seem less accessible to other people than if I were reading a magazine or writing in a notebook or watching TV on a TV set?

Research conducted last year suggests that on average, American adults spend four and a half hours each day on their phones, up from three hours just a year before. We check our phones an average of 144 times each day, and 75% of us check our phones within five minutes of receiving a notification. A third of all US adults report that they go online “almost constantly,” up 10% from 2015.

This is the context for “Away for the Day” phone policies that school districts are implementing. APS will introduce an “Away for the Day” policy for students in all of its schools starting in August.  (Previously, some administrators and staff members had established an “Away for the Day” rule in certain schools and classrooms, but it was not standard practice.)

Teachers are tired of competing with phones for their students’ attention: Mitchell Rutherford, a veteran Arizona science teacher, recently made headlines when he left the profession, citing frustration with smartphones in school. He said, “It’s kind of like the frog in the boiling water. I guess it’s always been increasing as an issue. And then finally, I was like: Oh, we’re boiling now.” During the last school board meeting here in Arlington, one teacher gave public comment that phones have become “a black hole for brain power in every classroom.”

It's hard to argue with the idea that phones can be a seductive distraction: after all, haven’t they seduced most of us at this point?

In an ideal world, we’d teach students how to exercise good judgment about when and why they’re on their phones. We’d acknowledge that digital platforms can provide important information and social support for individuals who may be marginalized in their physical communities. An outright ban in schools wouldn’t be the answer: rather, we’d help students self-regulate and reflect on their relationship with digital devices and content.

The arguments against this approach include the “David and Goliath” concern that immensely powerful companies have created platforms and algorithms that are purposely addictive and undermine our volition. It’s also been noted that the executive functioning skills necessary for effective self-regulation aren’t fully developed in the adolescent brain.

I have a third concern: Who is going to teach and model this sound judgment and self-regulation? What will we do about the cognitive dissonance that comes up when young people hear us talk about their phone dependency while remaining oblivious to our own?

This is a school problem and a social problem. (If you agree that our relationships with our phones are becoming problematic, which I think is a fair assessment.) I’m intrigued by communities that are taking a holistic view of the issue and designing comprehensive solutions. In New York City, for example, the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene considers unregulated social media to be a “digital toxin” and states: “We take a classic public health approach that emphasizes regulations to minimize the production of the toxin, guidance to the public to reduce exposure, and support to individuals to build skills that buffer the toxin’s effects.”  
 
The City’s public health response to social media (which is a piece of, but not equivalent to, problematic phone use) includes encouraging families to delay the initiation of smartphone use until children are at least 14 years old and set shared norms of reducing screen time, especially near bedtime; establishing tech-free zones in schools and other community facilities; and creating community programs that avoid smartphone use during certain times or in certain places to promote social connection.
 
I’m interested in this example and curious how other communities are promoting  wellbeing, which surely must include encouraging healthy media and technology habits for people of all ages.
 
In 2007, Steve Jobs said of the iPhone, “Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything.” Putting it Away for the Day feels to me like a necessary though vexingly limited response to a phenomenon that is profoundly altering how we think, behave, and build community.
 ​

​One of the things I have learned in my first two years on the school board is that it can be tempting to receive the budget and immediately jump into its specifics—in essence, the problem of not seeing the forest for the trees. There will be time in the weeks ahead to dig in, question, and scrutinize the details. Tonight, though, I believe it’s important that we intentionally spend some time talking about the larger, structural elements that we’re seeing in this budget.
 
The first element is revenue. I have spoken before about my concern that we do not operate in a world where we can be completely confident that revenue growth will exceed the growth in our expenses. I have spoken about my concern that we cannot rely forever on using reserves to plug the gap in our budget and fund ongoing costs. Over the past few years, we’ve used reserves in large measure to fund a compensation increase that was several years overdue for our staff. This is an ongoing cost if we are to fairly compensate our employees for their work and recruit new people who want to work in Arlington.
 
Since I have been on the board, and even during the years before, I have heard various people bristle at the claim that APS has a “structural deficit.” In fact, we do. Our share of local tax revenue, our funding from the state, the very small amount we get from the federal government, fees we collect from programs like Extended Day and our pools—these revenues do not cover ongoing expenses.  Our Budget Advisory Council has expressed this concern multiple times, and I am grateful for the volunteer energy and ideas that group brings to this challenge.
 
Other local school divisions acknowledge the revenue issue as well. Fairfax County Public Schools states: “A structurally balanced budget occurs when recurring revenues are equal to recurring expenditures in the adopted budget. Since FCPS has needed to use one-time savings from the prior fiscal year to meet recurring expenditures, FCPS has a structural deficit. While this helps address funding needs in the short term, FCPS and the County both recognize that using one-time funding for recurring expenditures is not fiscally sound over the long term.” 

In Loudoun County, the school division notes “Since the current state funding methodology significantly underfunds the true cost of the mandated minimum instructional program, each school division in the state uses a greater share of its local revenues to cover the costs of education.” 

In Loudoun last year, the local government funded 69% of the school division’s operating budget, and the state funded 29%. That left just 2% to be covered by other sources, including federal funding. In Fairfax, 69% was funded locally and 27% was funded by the state. In Arlington, our FY24 school operating budget is 78% locally funded and 15% supported by state funds—leaving a larger gap, of 7%, to be covered by federal dollars, fees we can collect, and reserves. $38M in reserves that we used to plug the expense gap and balance our budget. (See breakdown of funding for local school divisions here.) 
 
This brings me to the second structural element, which is expenses. If you don’t have the revenue you’d like to have—whether that’s in your family, in your company, for your faith community—you look to cut expenses. Some will naturally wonder why expenses and enrollment don’t track at the exact same rate in a school division. I have two things to say about this.
 
The first thing I’d encourage us to acknowledge: our schools, not just in Arlington but across the country, are being asked to do more and more. First and foremost, we expect our schools to modernize and personalize instruction according to what research is telling us about the science of reading, necessary supports for English Learners, the most effective accommodations for students with disabilities, and more. We expect our schools to operate in an environmentally sustainable way to mitigate the climate crisis, which is both a practical measure and a moral obligation to our youngest citizens. We expect our schools to be the first responders to students with mental health needs—which our local and national data show are escalating. We expect our schools to educate students about drugs that are more addictive, lethal, and accessible than anything previous generations had to reckon with. And at the most basic level, we expect our schools to be safe places, in an era of all-too-common school shootings.
 
Even if enrollment held steady over the past ten years—and even building in market-competitive salaries for our staff—due to the factors I’ve just described and more, our financial needs would increase.
 
The second thing I will say about expenses is this: we absolutely must be getting the maximum value for every dollar we spend. I have spoken before about our need to have a more intentional process for evaluating return on investment. This is true in all times, not just in times when we are revenue-challenged, because we are stewards of a significant amount of public money and trust.

None of what I have stated tonight absolves us of our responsibility to operate as strategically and efficiently as possible, and in a way that aligns with our values and priorities. And while I hope we will continue to talk about our budget in this high-level, structural way, the immediate work before us is to balance our budget. We have to do that in a manner that invests in the most high-leverage, critical components of our work—even as society’s definition of our work is expanding.
 
To do that, we need to leverage all the expertise at our disposal, and I believe many individuals and groups have expertise to contribute.

Families, you know better than anyone how high-level budget and operations changes will affect the real day-to-day of your children and your home.

Our school staff contribute their practical, on-the-ground experience to say, “Here’s how policies and investments actually impact our direct work with students.”

Our central office staff look across schools to understand trends, meet shared needs, and apply research and best practices from the field.

The superintendent applies his expertise to say, “Here are my recommendations about the best ways to invest to meet our strategic goals.”

Our County Board colleagues hold the expertise to understand how APS’s needs align and coexist with other community needs, and within our shared, long term revenue forecast.

It is my belief that the School Board makes its best decisions when we listen carefully to the expertise each of these groups can contribute and synthesize these perspectives into a fuller, more informed understanding to guide decision making. I look forward to doing that work together.

Kate Nyegaard was the first person who ever spoke to me about serving on a school board. Nyegaard is a civic leader in arts, education, and healthcare in her hometown of Modesto, California, where she served on the Modesto City Schools Board of Education from 1993-2005. She also happens to be George Lucas’s sister.

I met Kate when I was doing some consulting work for the George Lucas Educational Foundation about a dozen years ago. Kate, a Foundation board member, was attending an event I’d helped to plan for a group of teacher advisors and contributors at Skywalker Ranch. 

During a very enjoyable chat about many topics in education, she said to me, “You should run for school board.”

It must be said that part of my brain was distracted with I AM STANDING NEXT TO DARTH VADER’S ACTUAL LIGHTSABER OMG OMG OMG. But the rest of my brain had the following immediate reactions:

1. I cannot imagine anything more boring than a school board meeting. And
2. I have two children under the age of five. I’ve been wondering what I could add to fill all my empty time, LOL.

But a decade later, I ran for school board in Arlington, Virginia. It’s one of the best decisions I’ve ever made, and one you should consider, too.

Why serve on a school board?

Simply put, it’s a really rewarding job. You’ll learn an incredible amount about public schools and about your community. I’ve worked for about 30 years in education, and I’m still learning new things every week because I’m a school board member. 

If you’re an introvert like I am, the role gives you an opportunity to get to know people you might never meet otherwise. I talk with parents, teachers, students, school bus drivers, principals, school safety coordinators, nonprofit leaders, cafeteria workers, retirees, civic association members, social service providers, social justice advocates, the superintendent, school counselors, faith communities, scout troops, and more. These connections have been wonderful, even when (and maybe especially when) we’ve met over something contentious and found some common ground.

Best of all, you’ll get to be useful, in ways that really matter. George Lucas says, “Education is the single most important endeavor of the human race.” I believe this is true. He urges, “We have to plan for our collective future -- and the first step begins with the social, emotional, and intellectual tools we provide to our children.” School boards are the stewards of public education, accountable to their communities for the care and development of our youngest citizens. 

What's the job like?

School boards typically have four primary responsibilities:

• Setting policies that govern the operation of the school district,
• Approving operating and capital improvement budgets,
• Hiring and managing the superintendent, and
• Engaging with the communities they represent.

Additionally, in many parts of the country, school boards have independent taxing authority to generate revenue for school operations. In Virginia, we don’t.

School boards govern but do not directly manage the school system–that’s the superintendent’s job. It’s sometimes difficult to make that distinction, which can lead to micromanaging.

The other tension is that school boards are not help desks. (See above note about governance versus operations.) Board members hear from parents who are concerned about something that happened to their children at school; district employees who would like to see a particular change in their work assignments; community members who live adjacent to schools and want relief from bus and car traffic; and more. As a school board member, you’ll want to encourage people to work with the decision makers who are most closely connected to their concern, like their child’s counselor, the school principal, or the human resources team. You’ll also want to consider that there is often more to the story than you might initially understand. 

That said, as a school board member I try to remain curious and look for patterns in what I’m hearing. Are multiple people raising the same issue? Is it repeating over time? Does it point to a policy that’s not being followed, a policy that might need to be changed, a part of the budget that should be adjusted, or something to be discussed as part of the superintendent’s annual evaluation cycle? If so, then it’s a matter for the school board. 

My day-to-day activities as a school board member include things like:

• Preparing for and participating in the regular public meetings of the school board (every two weeks, anywhere from 2-5 hours per meeting).
• Preparing for and participating in regular closed meetings of the school board. By law, we can only hold closed meetings on certain topics, like personnel issues or confidential legal matters. 
• Talking and emailing with other school board members, usually multiple times each week.
• Meeting one-on-one with the superintendent each month, and sharing questions and ideas more frequently as needed.
• Attending meetings and community events, particularly for my “assigned” schools. In Arlington, each school board member serves a liaison to a handful of specific schools, and the assignments rotate annually. We also liaise with specific civic associations.
• Engaging with citizen advisory groups. Advisory groups share feedback and recommendations with the whole board, but individual board members act as liaisons to one or more advisory groups, attending meetings and talking with committee members.
• Conferring and collaborating with county board members. In Arlington, the chairs and vice chairs of each board gather for monthly joint leadership meetings, but it’s also helpful for individual board members to get to know each other one-on-one.
• Reading weekly updates from the superintendent, which usually include answers to questions gathered from school board members over the previous week.
• Reading other information shared by the superintendent, his leadership team, and others within the school district; asking questions or setting up meetings as needed to learn more.
• Studying what is happening at the federal and state levels that will influence how the district operates.
• Researching what other school divisions are doing so that we can learn from and adapt promising practices. 
• Reading, listening to, and responding to community input via email, in meetings, and in one-on-one conversations.

To a certain extent state law and district policies dictate what school board members can and can’t do. Beyond that, it’s up to each school board member to determine how they’ll perform the role, which is supposed to be a part-time job. I encourage you to talk to multiple school board members about their experiences, as they may have different perspectives from what I’m sharing here. 

How to prepare

I recommend talking with current and former school board members to learn more about the job. Many (including me!) are happy to share what it’s like. 

Next, I’d suggest a little soul-searching. Why do you want to serve on the school board? If it’s for a very specific reason–say, you are upset that your school division ended its French Immersion program last year–you might want to reconsider running. That narrow motivation won’t fuel you through a full term of service. 

You’ll need to have another source of income, since most school board members earn very little (and in fact, they are still volunteers in certain parts of the country). In Arlington, school board members earn $25,000 a year. If you’re employed full-time, consider how you’ll balance your “regular work” schedule with school board commitments. I work 9-5 on weekdays, and I’m lucky to have an employer that offers some flexibility for the school board business that needs to happen during those hours.

​You’ll want to learn more about your local school division before you seek a seat on the school board. Look at publicly-available achievement data, program evaluations, advisory committee reports, school climate surveys, and the district’s strategic plan. Attend public meetings and get involved as a volunteer, as you are able. Talk to other, longtime volunteers, community leaders, school division employees, and activists. Ask them “What’s been your experience with our public schools?” and “What would you change?” Ask them to introduce you to one other person so you can keep listening and learning.

In Arlington and many other locales, school boards are elected, not appointed (fun fact: Virginia was the last state to allow–but not mandate–elected school boards, in 1992). This means you’ll have to become a candidate and run for office. Campaigning felt really intimidating to me: it took me a full year to get comfortable with the idea and learn what campaigning would really entail. 

As a candidate, you’ll worry that you need a perfect answer to every question about your school system. While it’s true that you’ll want to sound knowledgeable about your school district, you can’t know everything about all parts of its operation. (As a board member, I still don’t.)  And the issues that come up during your campaign may recede from the public consciousness, only to be replaced by entirely new issues in the next campaign cycle. 

I think it’s more important that you describe how you will go about learning the issues and weighing multiple options as a school board member, so that voters can be confident that you are reasonable, open-minded, and willing to put in the work.

Above all, people want to know what motivates you, what you value, and what you hope for. My favorite question as a candidate was, “What would you want to be different by the end of your term?” 

If that question lights you up–and if you believe that public education is important to our individual and collective futures–I hope you’ll raise your hand to serve on a school board.

On Wednesday, I woke up early because I could hear the garbage truck and we’d forgotten to put out the bins. After I rolled them out to the curb, and as I made a cup of coffee, a name randomly popped into my head—a former student I hadn’t recalled in many years.

I wondered where she ended up. On LinkedIn, I discovered she’s working as a freelance writer and editor in New York. I remember her as a yearbook staff member and student in my creative writing class. Good for her, I thought.

And then, as one does when it is a rainy day, the office is closed, and one’s teenage children will be asleep for five more hours, I descended into a giant internet rabbit hole.

It started by looking up a few more of her classmates and then it mushroomed into: “Wouldn’t it be something to look up all the members of the Class of 1996?” And so, with their yearbook to supply the names, I did. (Mercifully, it was a small school.)

This class started high school the same year I started teaching. They were 14 and I was 22, a gulf in age and experience that seemed meaningful then and is meaningless now. Thirty years later, they’re in their mid-40s.

I taught them English, biology, and creative writing. I was their class sponsor, and when they graduated I did too, leaving to get my masters degree at UVA.

I paid two of my students to help me move all my stuff from Winchester to Charlottesville. One had grown a giant beard and I worried he would pass out in the August heat. The other I called “Pepper Boy” because of a Saturday Night Live skit we both found hilarious.

Pepper Boy was a wrestler who quoted T.S. Eliot and edited our school literary magazine. He’s now raising two boys and working with unhoused people at the regional community services board. His good friend, the bearded mover, leaves a lighter internet footprint but I believe he’s now managing a convenience store in their hometown. I remember them both with great affection. Others in that writing class work for Winchester Parks & Rec, Microsoft, and Dominion Energy. One heads up user experience design at a firm in Paris, one manages a Taco Bell, and one performs his own original bluesy folk music.

I found out that the young people I taught 30 years ago are now pulmonologists, cosmetologists, teachers, fundraisers, construction managers, lawyers, electricians, pharmacists, and store owners. Two sell Toyotas and one sells Ferraris. Before she sold luxury cars, I knew her as the student talented in art and shot put who arrived early to school so she could walk the halls with me and talk about troubles at home.

Some of the paths they took don’t surprise me: the student passionate about music and drama now manages theater programs at the Shenandoah Conservatory. Another who was a gifted pianist and singer now plays organ and conducts a choir in upstate New York.

I’m not at all surprised to see that the athlete voted “Most Popular” his senior year is now serving on City Council, nor that the responsible and likeable yearbook editor chose a career in Human Resources.

Two close friends from the tonier part of town now own a fine art gallery and organize galas and events in Virginia’s Hunt Country.  A former Latin scholar and Young Republican is now a conservative columnist who pens a newsletter called “Notes from the Right”. Various other Young Republicans went to UVA, became venture capitalists, and will retire before I do.  

I sponsored the Young Democrats club, which in Winchester meant rooting for the underdog.  The young woman I remember as our most outspoken and wholehearted member, with a wild cloud of curly hair, is now a close-cropped professor at Carnegie Mellon. The club’s president became Obama’s Special Assistant and House Legislative Affairs Liaison.

One of the happiest stories, at least to me: My student who grew up in the city’s residential children’s home is now a mother and an emergency room doctor in another state. I knew her as a soft-spoken sophomore, a copious notetaker when we read Native Son, and a Howard University hopeful. That she’s gone so far, figuratively and literally, is a delight but not a surprise.

Others, however, did deliver some surprising plot twists. The student I was sure would take over his family’s funeral home opted instead to become a tennis pro and then a digital marketer. A school security guard in Loudoun County with extra time during the COVID shutdown switched careers and now she’s a personal trainer. A hospital security guard went on to earn his license as a private investigator and later changed jobs again: he’s now a lead data center design engineer, a job none of us knew anything about in 1996.

​One student who listed no high school activities beside his yearbook senior portrait went on to have a career that’s hard to encapsulate: it involves army service in Oslo, Paris, South Korea and the Gulf of Guinea; co-founding a startup that creates wearable technology for elderly people and their caregivers; co-leading a crowdsourced forecasting project on the security and policy implications of AI; and now advising at a climate communications and consulting agency.

Another surprise involves a student named Sam. At the high school where I taught, every year the eleventh graders stockpiled funds for their senior prom by operating the football concessions stand. The year it was my class’s turn, the football team enjoyed an interminably long season that stretched nearly to winter break: we kept warm by boiling literally thousands of hot dogs. Yesterday I searched online for Sam, a student I associate with that bone-chilling but very lucrative experience; I found him only after I realized he now goes by his middle name. He has the very cool-sounding job “Vice President of Memorabilia and Design” for Hard Rock International, overseeing the largest collection of music and entertainment memorabilia in the world.  

Students in this class have been in rehab centers and psychiatric hospitals. One now lives in a nursing home after a youthful prank led to a terrible accident and brain damage. Two have gone to prison for dealing cocaine and breaking and entering. Two have died: one was a bank manager who was better known to the business teachers at the high school, and the other was a student of mine. I remember his clever sense of humor, his gifts as a three-sport athlete, and his episodes of frustration as a special education student. He was buoyed by his resource teacher, his coaches, and his mother, who was an art teacher. I learned that he later served in the Navy and established a scholarship for aspiring artists graduating from high schools in the Shenandoah Valley. He died in 2021 at 43 and is buried next to the baby he and his wife lost five years earlier.


When I was their teacher, I never thought about my students being in their 40s. I rarely thought about them being 25. Maybe this was because I was so young (could I even envision myself in my 40s?) or maybe as a new teacher I was just focused on keeping one foot in front of the other.

Or maybe—and I think this is the strongest possibility—it’s because I was simply enjoying them in their present state. I loved their lack of self-awareness and their painful self-consciousness, their confidence and their awkwardness, their sense of triumph when they excelled and their hard-won composure in everyday defeats. I loved watching them try on adulthood. I was in no rush to hurry them along.

To be sure, it was my job to prepare them for what was next, as much as any of us could foresee what that meant. In education we talk about “college and career readiness” a lot.

​But looking back on it now, I think it also meant something to them (and to me) to enjoy them as they were, to convey to them the sense that they were people worth knowing. As a parent of high school students, I see what it does for my own kids when they’re able to build relationships with teachers who think highly of them and take pleasure in their company.

​I want that for everybody’s children, and I want that for every teacher. School board members are bit players in that story, but I hope my work on the board makes some difference. I’d like to think my small role makes it possible for other teachers to feel as alive as I did when I was in the classroom, and for their students to be certain they are people worth knowing, today and thirty years on.

The last time I wrote, it was about how AI will change education (and in fact, when I powered up my computer today, at the top of my inbox was this Education Week article: “AI could save school districts time and money—if they use it correctly").

AI uses algorithms to make decisions, and those algorithms operate by prioritizing certain factors over others. For example, internet advertising companies use an algorithm that prioritizes ads that are topically-related to your most recent browser searches (remember how spooky it felt when this first started happening?). It could just as easily prioritize ads for purple products, or ads related to food if you happen to log on at lunchtime.

Humans use algorithms when we make decisions, too, and that’s what I want to write about today.

Let’s say you’re the owner of a toy store and you want to open a second location. But where? There are lots of factors you’ll weigh, including your budget; how much space you think you’ll need; where your competitors are located; proximity to other businesses that would attract toy-buyers; your employees’ transportation needs; and more. Depending on which of these factors you prioritize in your own algorithm, you’ll likely arrive at different conclusions.

Then there’s the question of how you decide what factors to prioritize. If I’m the sole owner of the business, I could safely argue that I get to create the algorithm all by myself. Proximity to other businesses that would attract toy-buyers is top of mind for me, followed by the cost; if it’s a little smaller than I would like, or it’s a few minutes’ walk from the nearest bus stop, I can live with that.

​Now let’s say I am a public school district and I want to open some magnet schools in order to create more diverse school communities. (Set aside for the moment the question of whether there’s robust evidence that magnet schools are an effective way to desegregate.) Now I have to figure out what type(s) of magnet programs to offer. Some of the factors I could prioritize include:

Any one of these factors would be a perfectly reasonable thing to prioritize in my algorithm—but they’ll yield different results.

In my magnet school example, who gets to decide what factors to prioritize in the algorithm? It’s not as simple as in the toy store example. Who is the “owner” of the business? Who is the “owner” of the decision about how to build the algorithm? Because it’s a public system, what special obligations does that create, if any, for community input?

District leadership, educators, school board members, parents, students, and community members all likely have ideas about what factors should be prioritized, and those ideas may not line up.

We talk a lot about “data-driven decision making” but I’m realizing that this may miss the mark. It’s becoming increasingly clear to me over time that our quarrel in decision making may not be with the data but rather with the algorithms the data are fed into.

​Sometimes if we have inaccurate or missing information we may have a data problem, but more often I think the friction is around:

This has been on my mind a lot this summer as APS staff, the community, the school board and its advisory councils weigh important, upcoming decisions about our facilities. It’s central to other aspects of our school system, too—for example, the school board’s annual budget direction is basically an instrument designed to prioritize factors.

​Maybe these insights have been obvious to everyone else and I’m late to the party (it wouldn’t be the first time). But it feels like this will be useful for me in my job moving forward—and perhaps it will be useful to you, too, particularly as we work to engage each other in constructive and trust-building ways.

​OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman shared this tweet at a conference earlier this year, and it's a great example of how artificial intelligence is going to change the way we teach and learn. Here's another example, in a headline from Education Week:

*Note: ChatGPT is only one manifestation of AI. I highlight it here because it's been in the news and because it's easily accessible for those who want a test drive.

**I am grateful to TED, my former employer, for creating opportunities to learn about AI via TED Talks. I relied heavily on the knowledge shared by TED speakers in creating this piece. I promise I did not ask ChatGPT "Hey, write an overly-long article about how AI will change education using only information in TED Talks" -- though I could have done so. :) ​