Last Saturday I went to Baltimore to attend an education conference and hear a talk by Shelley Moore, a Canadian educator, researcher and storyteller.

Shelley asked us to define for ourselves each of these terms:

• Exclusion
• Segregation
• Inclusion
• Integration

​Next, she showed us this slide:​

What do you think? Which one of A, B, C or D represents inclusion? Which one shows integration? How about exclusion and segregation?

(You think about it for a minute while I eat a quick snack. :) Then scroll down a little for the Big Reveal.)

What’s the difference between “exclusion” and “segregation”? According to Shelley, exclusion is when the people inside the circle decide that individuals can’t be part of their community. Segregation happens when the people inside the circle decide that a particular group (or groups) don’t belong.

Shelley distinguishes between “integration” and “inclusion” in this way: integration happens when someone decides that it’s a good idea for those outside the circle to be brought in—but it’s often not by their own choice. She says it’s like a mandatory all-staff meeting: you know you have to attend, but when you get to the meeting you’ll likely sit next to your closest co-workers and you may not be all that interested in the updates from other teams or departments (particularly if you’re thinking, “This meeting could have been an email!”)

FYI, this tendency to prefer the company of your own group is perfectly natural, and at times necessary and comforting: Shelley calls it “congregation” when we are birds of a feather flocking together. (As a side question, Shelley asks: do our schools offer spaces and opportunities for congregation?)

Inclusion is different from integration because instead of thinking “I have to,” we think “I want to.”  That’s why the community in Shelley’s top circle looks different from the one on the lower right.


Except… after she’d shared this slide dozens if not hundreds of times, one of Shelley’s graduate students told her, “Shelley, I don’t think that this diagram [the top circle] is inclusion either.” And once her student pointed out a few things, Shelley realized the student was absolutely right.

Can you figure out why? There’s more than one change Shelley made; I’ll share them in Part Two next week.

 Good teachers and school leaders routinely work to connect the curriculum to their students' local community. "Place-based education" leverages local heritage, cultures, landscapes, opportunities and experiences to make learning more relevant and engaging.

Often this takes the form of interdisciplinary projects involving field work or culminating in field trips. For older students, it might be service learning or internships.

But there's a more radical form of place-based learning, one that dissolves the traditional distinctions between "school" and "community." Teaching and learning are happening in spaces shared by local businesses, cultural institutions and other organizations--to everyone's benefit. 

​Here are nine examples from across the country:

(if you are looking at this on a phone, I apologize that the captions are covering up the pictures...)
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Examples like these inspire me. I think about the incredible assets and opportunities we have here in Arlington and I wonder: what kinds of programs and partnerships could we create in the future?

For instance, (and purely hypothetically), what about a high school program with a focus on  international relations, offered in partnership with the State Department's Foreign Service Institute, USAID (Crystal City office), IDS International, the International Foundation for Electoral Systems and/or GMU's Schar School of Policy and Government?

While we're dreaming, how about a healthcare-focused high school program, where students are learning at INOVA, Virginia Hospital Center, and/or one of the many national associations headquartered in the county (the National Alliance on Mental Illness, the National Council on Aging, the National Diabetes Association, the Asthma and Allergy Foundation, and more)?

Students interested in the environment could enroll in a program that places them at the Nature Conservancy, Conservation International, the EPA (Crystal City office), the Student Conservation Association, or Trout Unlimited.

In the area of aerospace, engineering and national defense we have in Arlington Raytheon, BAE, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, CNA and the Office of Naval Research. 

Performing arts: Signature Theater, Synetic Theater, Avant Bard, the Museum of Contemporary Art and more.

Education: Council for Exceptional Children, National Board of Professional Teaching Standards, Communities in Schools, National Science Teachers Association, Organization for Autism Research, National Association of Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies and more.

Media: PBS, WETA, Politico, Axios, WJLA, and Arlington Independent Media. 

This is by no means a complete list--but you get the idea. 

Local governments are grappling with rising commercial vacancy rates. Companies are feeling their way forward in the new world of hybrid and remote work. School districts are looking for ways to reimagine teaching and learning so that students are engaged and ready to thrive in their lives after graduation.

I think there's an opportunity here. If schools co-locate with organizations that can contribute real-world, place-based learning experiences, could we use our urban spaces more effectively and imaginatively? Would companies feel a different and deeper sense of commitment to our community, and less tempted to relocate? 

​I'm intrigued by the possibilities, and I'd be curious to learn what you think, too.

Over the winter break, I’ve been thinking a lot about our APS students who are ready for advanced work. These students have been on my mind because of a recent report-out from the Gifted Services Advisory Committee and the recommendation currently under consideration by the School Board to expand intensified course offerings in middle school.

During my campaign and in my first year as a board member, I’ve talked a lot about every student getting the right level of support and challenge. This includes students who are testing and performing above grade level: they deserve their year's worth of academic growth, too, and to argue otherwise would mean accepting the idea that public education can only serve certain kinds of kids. I don’t believe any of us are well-served by a scarcity mindset.

So, how do we educate students who are ready for advanced work? (Note that I use the term “capable of advanced work” instead of “gifted” intentionally; these are separate but often related groups.) In broad strokes, the approaches have included separate magnet schools; acceleration by skipping grades or particular subjects; separate classes within a school; ability grouping within a general ed classroom; and personalized instruction. It’s a question with a complicated history and no perfect solution (yet).

I was one of these students and experienced all of the approaches mentioned above. I’m the parent of a student who craves more challenge and has on more than one occasion pleaded to be homeschooled or attend private school. And I’m a former teacher.

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In 1992, I was a first year high school teacher and in my school system, like most across the country, tracking was accepted practice.

​“Tracking” was the pre-Harry Potter version of the Sorting Hat. Teachers and guidance counselors determined whether a student should be sorted into a vocational track, a college track, or honors-level coursework.

In my first year I taught two sections of “Tech Prep 10” and three sections of “College Prep 9” English. The Tech Prep English curriculum was very different and emphasized the kinds of real-world reading and writing tasks that students going straight into the workforce would be most likely to perform: interpreting lease agreements and employment contracts; filling out applications for jobs and bank accounts; writing resumes and cover letters.

Leaders in our school system launched Tech Prep with good intentions: the idea was to make the curriculum more relevant to students’ lives after high school. The problem, of course, was that the adults in charge got to determine each student’s life trajectory before they’d turned 14, and that often these decisions were colored by implicit (or sometimes explicit) bias.

In the 1980s and ‘90s, groups like the National Governors Association, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the Children’s Defense Fund rallied to end tracking, correctly arguing that it perpetuated racial and economic inequity by setting up segregated school experiences within single school buildings.

Mixed-ability classrooms then became the norm. Teachers were tasked with meeting a wider range of student interests, abilities and needs, as had been the case decades before in the days of one-room, mixed-age schoolhouses. In modern mixed-ability classrooms, “differentiated instruction” (which had always been a part of teaching, even in the days of tracking) became even more important.
​
In her book The Differentiated Classroom: Responding to the Needs of All Learners, Carol Ann Tomlinson writes that teachers who excel at differentiated instruction

​There’s a whole body of literature describing the strategies that teachers can use to do this well; three overriding considerations are training, class size and time.

I mention training because most often, teachers themselves weren’t taught this way. In their undergraduate schools of education, professors may have talked about differentiated instruction, but they weren’t modeling it in a large lecture hall. And once they’ve started teaching, educators’ ongoing professional learning is all too often a one-size-fits-all affair.

Class size is a factor because it’s harder to be a “student of your students” when your average high school class size is 29 (California) versus 15-16 (Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire).

And last but not least, teachers need the time to design differentiated learning experiences and continually assess student progress. But in reality, teachers’ time to plan and collaborate with colleagues on this most essential task is often insufficient, because there are too many other competing demands.


Perhaps due to the challenges cited above, or the top-down pressures created by federally-mandated school accountability and accreditation measures, ability grouping is again on the rise, though in different forms than 20th century tracking. These new forms of ability grouping are more flexible and (ideally) give students and families more say--but they still draw criticism. The debate about how to meet the full range of student needs continues.

Short of a serious overhaul of our Industrial-era public education system (which I’ve written about before, here and here), we need to continually question our assumptions and fine-tune our practices. Former school principal and author Peter DeWitt says it well:

It’s Friday morning, about nine hours after I wrapped a five hour School Board meeting and the tail end of week-long business trip (currently on Amtrak coming home).

If you asked me this week, “How’s work?” I would reply, “Hard.” I have no doubt you’ve felt the same at one point or another in your adult life.

But what do we mean when we say our work is “hard”?  And why did I get so nerdy-excited in my Uber an hour ago when I thought, “OMG! That is so connected to last night’s School Board meeting!”?

What we mean by “hard work”

First off, let me say that what I am about to write has some privilege attached to it. For many people, “hard work” involves hazardous conditions, needing to work multiple jobs because their labor is undervalued, or not being able to find work at all.

For those of us who are fortunate enough to have a safe, stable job that pays a living wage, “hard work” usually means some combination of three things:

1. The knowledge and skills needed to do the job. Sometimes our work is hard because we feel ill-equipped to do it. For example, in the job I took last year at TED I create online courses for adult learners. I know a lot about instructional design and educational media, but I have never had to film anyone in a studio. Words cannot convey how little A-Game I brought to this task. Fortunately, I found freelancers who are helping and schooling me. What once seemed overwhelming is now really exciting.

For managers and leaders, this means making sure your employees have the professional learning they need to do their job well and feel like they are learning and growing. For employees, it means speaking up to ask for the training and resources you need.

2. The time we need to do our jobs well (and live the rest of our lives). Work can be hard because there’s simply too much of it at any given time. Sometimes we are tasked with too much, and other times it’s because we overcommit ourselves. (My husband and I talk about my overscheduling All. The. Time.)

​This can be painfully obvious, as in “You are now expected to create eight reports a week instead of five.” But often it’s more subtle and accumulates over time—we find ourselves logging in an hour earlier, dining al desko, taking on more work to be a “team player” during a hiring freeze.

3. The emotional labor that work requires. Researchers define “emotional labor” as the work of managing one’s own emotions that is required by certain professions. Think about flight attendants, who are expected to be friendly and respectful to passengers even in stressful situations. I include in “emotional labor” the significant emotional freight that’s inherent in certain kinds of work: for example, ICU nursing, human rights law, the ministry.

If we care about our colleagues and the people we serve in our jobs, then a certain amount of emotional labor comes with the territory. We run into trouble, however, when we pile on additional, unnecessary emotional labor for others. Office politics. Dysfunctional communication. A hostile work environment.

I once joined a nonprofit as its executive director and discovered that its financial health had been wildly overstated during the hiring process. Because my predecessor hadn’t been able to bring herself to conduct the necessary layoffs I had to do it, two months in and a week after my father died. It was one of the hardest times in my life. There was no question the layoffs had to be done, but it mattered a lot to me how it was done. I had to combine a dispassionate acceptance of our finances with a lot of compassionate, honest and vulnerable communication with my team.


When I talk to people about how their work is “hard,” most often they tell me about the emotional labor they’re performing. It’s been my experience that we’ll go the extra mile to upskill or take on an extra task, but it’s harder for us to accept feeling undervalued, patronized or taken for granted.

I’ve been a perpetrator and a victim of this. [Note to self: need to watch a little less Law & Order.]  For example, last December I wrote about my initial impressions as a School Board Member-Elect.

I had only good intentions when I wrote this piece: were were coming out of a tense time when the relationship between the community and the School Board had been badly damaged. I felt (and still do) that there was room for improvement on both sides to communicate more effectively.

But in writing about the School Board as an institution, I unintentionally harmed the individual humans who serve in this role and who were still grappling with (and I think it’s fair to say “recovering from”) the tremendous emotional labor of the previous year and a half. (Whether you agree with the decisions they made during that time—I think we can all agree that the emotional labor involved was significant.) In short, I ended up creating extra, unnecessary emotional labor for them.

For that, I am sorry. The job is hard enough as it is.


Why I’m thinking about last night’s School Board meeting

I see application of what I’ve written above in so many parts of my School Board work—last night’s meeting is a fine example. For instance:

Staff retention and engagement.  Last night several APS employees spoke during public comment. I am reflecting on the question: How can we make their work “less hard”?

• Are we doing all we can to provide them with the knowledge, skills, resources and time to do their jobs well?
• Are we equipping them to perform the emotional labor that’s inherent in their work and not creating extra, unnecessary emotional labor for them?
• How can we navigate the advent of collective bargaining—new territory for all of us—in a way that allows us to communicate institutionally/collectively and human-to-human?

Consequential votes. Last night APS Facilities staff presented the proposed schematic design for the Career Center. This is a significant and costly project, and one that’s understandably emotional for the school community involved.

• How do School Board members acquire and analyze the necessary information? How do we respect the expertise of APS staff and use a “critical friend” lens to achieve the best possible governance?
• How do we make decisions dispassionately (looking as objectively as possible at the data, weighing the needs across the system now and in the future) and compassionately?

My first consequential vote as a School Board member was to pause the VLP program last February. I’d been assigned to be the VLP School Board liaison and had gotten to know several of these families pretty well during my first six weeks. For me, this vote was as emotional as the layoffs I’d had to make in a previous work life.

Restorative practices. Gradis White talked last night about restorative work with students in our schools. I think we can apply this in other areas, too.

Are we taking the time to understand the root causes of other people’s statements and actions?

When tough calls need to be made—whether it’s a mandatory student suspension, a grievance  or a consequential School Board vote—are we taking steps to follow up with those affected and repair relationships that may have been damaged so that we can interact productively in the future?


As a public servant, I can’t make everyone happy. But I can aim to avoid missteps that create unnecessary “hard work” for myself and others.

How much influence should parents have over what happens in their children’s schools?

You already know this question has sparked some lively discussion across our state and in the national news.

And it doesn’t have a simple answer.

At one extreme: an old-school approach. Parents are “informed” more often than “engaged” as collaborators. Parents are invited to support the school in certain limited ways: as a room parent, a chaperone, a fundraiser.

I don’t like this approach because I know parents have more to offer and that schools are stronger when parents play a larger role. Research tells us that schools with strong family engagement are 10 times more likely to improve student learning outcomes, and that it matters as much as rigorous curriculum and high-quality school leadership.

At the other extreme, however, is an approach that feels equally untenable to me: parents who feel like they can—and must—weigh in on nearly every facet of their school’s operation. This approach is cumbersome, advantages those parents with the time and skills to advocate, telegraphs mistrust of school staff, and often has unintended negative consequences for the students we’re trying to educate.

For example, a new state law in Tennessee requires educators to catalog every book in every school. Some teachers who have built up sizable classroom libraries are opting to dismantle them because the cataloguing directive seems too daunting; it’s Tennessee’s students—only one-third of whom are reading at a “proficient” level—who will suffer.

So how do we strike the right balance? To help guide my own thinking, I’ve been spending some time with the PTA’s National Standards for Family-School Partnerships. There are several national organizations that have produced guidance about family engagement, but I am partial to the PTA’s work because it is a nonpartisan group with well-established governance regulations and financial transparency.

Just this year the PTA updated its Standards for Family-School Partnerships. The PTA’s iterative process involved more than 600 local and state PTA leaders, members, researchers and administrators.

​Each of the six standards has related goals and performance indicators. You can find the full text on the PTA website, but in brief here are the standards:

If you dig into what changed when the PTA updated its standards this year, you’ll find the following revisions, which feel very significant to me:

1. A shift from “opportunities to volunteer” to “opportunities to contribute”—signaling that parents have more to offer than simply filling volunteer slots. (But keep doing that, too!)
2. Where the standards previously acknowledged “economic barriers to participation,” they now speak to other linguistic and cultural barriers.
3. The standards now talk about co-developing communication expectations and protocols with families and staff.
4. Adding clear statements about eliminating bias in family engagement approaches and encouraging leadership among historically marginalized groups.
5. A shift from “informing” families about students’ academic progress to partnering with families to ensure two-way communication about students’ strengths and needs and to set goals.
6. Engaging families in decision making in ways that go beyond surveys. Tracking data and filling gaps for representative input and power in decisions so that diverse perspectives are considered.
7. Describing in more detail how school-community partnerships could be conceived and managed to benefit students and staff, including mapping community assets and needs, and aligning community partners to school improvement planning.

In short, what I see (that I like) in these standards is a shift towards inclusiveness, collaboration and sharing power.

​But what does “sharing power” between schools and families entail?

I think it means drawing upon the strengths of the various players. Parents know their students in a way that teachers can’t. They know what may be particularly motivating or challenging for their kids, and this knowledge is gold in the hands of an interested teacher. Educators know the research-based approaches that will help all kinds of students move from Point A to Point B. They also have additional context: they’ve worked with dozens (or hundreds, or thousands) of students who may have benefitted from similar instructional strategies. 

Educators also commit to serve the greater good—that means doing what’s right for all kids, not just what I think is right for my kid. Think about that: the significant work it takes and the incredible promise of every child feeing safe, valued, appropriately supported and intellectually challenged.  No parent should ever have the right, in the name of “sharing power” or “parental control,” to take that away from another parent’s child.

Creating effective family-school partnerships is complex and increasingly contentious work. But just because it’s hard doesn’t mean it’s not worthwhile. The answer is not to double down on the old-school model that shuts families out or boxes them in. Instead, maybe we can create spaces where we can talk about this partnership model. Maybe in your parent group or school staff meeting—or better yet, all together—you can explore questions like these:

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• How can we learn about and meet families’ communication preferences?
• How can parents improve the ways they communicate with school staff?
• What would it look like if teachers, families and students worked together to set social, emotional and academic goals?
• What are some new and potentially promising ways that school staff could get to know students and families and their strengths?
• What work do we need to do (all around) to recognize and eliminate biases?
• How could we give families and students a voice in decisions that affect children? What kinds of decisions? What does “a voice” mean to us?

I’d love to hear how you would answer these questions. Please reach out. I’m interested as a parent, a former PTA leader, and as a School Board member—because of course I believe that what the PTA has outlined for family-school partnerships is relevant for family-school district partnerships, too.

At Harvard, Rose founded the Laboratory for the Science of Individuality. In 2016, he combined his personal story and his research in The End of Average--a book that rocked my world. (And no, that’s not hyperbole.) It’s changed the way I think about education.

​Rose opens the book with a problem that puzzled the U.S. Air Force in the 1950s: multiple, mysterious accidents that could not be explained by pilot error or mechanical malfunction in the aircraft.

They eventually discovered the cause: the cockpits had been designed using the average range of 10 body measurements from a population of approximately 4,000 pilots (e.g. height, thigh circumference, arm length, etc.). But zero pilots were “average” across all ten measurements. If a cockpit was designed for an average pilot, the cockpit fit no pilot. So the Air Force banned the average and forced jet manufacturers to design “to the edges,” meaning a cockpit that would be adjustable for even the tallest, shortest, thickest and thinnest.

What does this mean for education?

Think of a classroom or school designed for “the average.” It would likely feature

• One style and size of student desks
• Lots of whole-group instruction
• One way for students to demonstrate what they know—e.g., a multiple-choice end-of-unit test that every student must take
• Seat time: a standard number of hours all students must log to get a class credit.
• One-dimensional, high-level reporting against an average: “I am a B student in math because I am above average.”
• You’re gifted. Or not.
• Rigid tracking systems where students are sorted based on performance relative to an average (that is, you are “honors track” or “remedial track” in most or all of your classes)
• Standard operating procedures: all students are expected to eat at an assigned table in the cafeteria, walk silently in a straight line, and take notes in a certain way.

​This was Todd Rose’s K-12 school experience (and maybe yours, too). It wasn’t until college, when he discovered an honors program built around inquiry and the Socratic Method, that he felt inspired and challenged. Rose says, “I gradually realized that if I could just figure out how to improve the fit between my environment and myself, I might be able to turn my life around.”

In The End of Average, Rose explores the ways that none of us is really “average.” Instead, he argues, each of us has “jaggedness”— a unique set of strengths and weaknesses that all too often get obscured when we use overly simplistic, one-dimensional measurements.

Here's an example. Which man is bigger?

​Here's another example: Which 9th grade English student is smarter?

​Rose says, “If we want to know your intelligence, we give you an IQ test that is supposed to tap a range of abilities, but then we merge that into a single score. Imagine two young students have the same IQ score of 110 — the exact same number. One has great spatial abilities but poor working memory, and the other has the exact opposite jaggedness. If we just want to rank them then we could say the students are more or less the same in intelligence because they have the same aggregate scores. But if we wanted to really understand who they are as individuals enough to nurture their potential, we can’t ignore the jaggedness.”

"Right now because we believe in the myth of average, we believe that opportunity means providing equal access to standardized educational experiences,” Rose says in a Harvard interview. “However, since we know that nobody is actually average, it is obvious that equal access to standardized experiences is not nearly enough… it requires equal fit between individuals and their educational environments.”

What would a school or classroom committed to equal fit include?

• Flexible seating
• Dynamic grouping of students based on the level of support they need to master a particular skill or topic during that day/week/month
• Multiple ways for students to demonstrate what they know
• Multiple styles of instruction: project-based learning; workplace apprenticeships; virtual learning; etc.
• Self-assessment and reflection: helping students understand their own strengths and weaknesses
• Multiple categories of giftedness
• More nuanced assessment and reporting. Instead of “I am a B student in math because I am above average,” a student could say, “I worked on these six math standards this quarter and here’s information about how well I understand each one.”
• Flexible pacing: students can take the time they need to master a particular concept or skill. As soon as they’re ready for something more challenging, they move on.
• Advancement based on competency instead of seat time.

School doesn’t have to feel like a 1950s Air Force fighter jet cockpit. Indeed, it can’t. For Rose, this is a social justice issue, it’s an economic imperative, and it’s deeply personal. “I know what it feels like, at least in my context, when you don't fit into the current system. Like the kid who is always feeling … worthless. And I also know what it means to find your fit—to actually find your potential and your calling in life. It leaves me with this sense that from the so-called bottom to the top of our academic system, there's an enormous amount of talent and potential and contributions waiting to tapped.”

A few months before she died unexpectedly at age 61, Texas educator Rita Pierson gave a TED Talk and recalled a colleague telling her, "They don't pay me to like the kids." Her response: "Kids don't learn from people they don't like." 

We’ve known for quite some time that positive teacher-student relationships boost students’ academic achievement. We’ve always assumed that this is because students feel safe to take risks with someone they trust and are motivated to do their best work.

Research published earlier this month, however, explores a different explanation for the higher test scores and GPAs in classrooms where relationships are strongest: Are these students learning more because they are being taught more effectively? That is: do positive teacher-student relationships actually change the way that teachers teach?

It turns out the answer is “Yes.” This is some of the first research that really examines the effect of positive teacher-student relationships on teachers themselves.

The study recently published in the journal Learning and Instruction focused on evaluation data gathered over two school years for Missouri educators teaching grades 4-10. The researchers conclude:

Positive teacher-student relationships lead primary and secondary teachers to move effectively implement three complex teaching practices examined in this study: cognitive engagement in the content, problem solving and critical thinking, and instructional monitoring… teachers are more likely to check in, monitor, scaffold, provide more constructive feedback to students, have greater confidence in their students’ abilities and use better scaffolding strategies for critical thinking.

The researchers were also able to test “the direction of effect,” meaning they were able to show that the positive teacher-student relationships predict and precede higher-quality instruction. This was true regardless of the teacher’s years of experience, the percentage of economically disadvantaged students at the school, and the school-level proficiency rate on state tests.

Why do I bring this up right now? Because we’re heading into a new school year, and we would do well to spend some time in the first weeks attending to relationships. I don’t mean the traditional “fill out this questionnaire, Back To School Night” kinds of interactions: I mean prioritizing and investing the time it takes for teachers to deeply know their students, and vice versa. This investment will pay dividends all year long. Last August, I wrote about what this could look like. At the time I was thinking about its effect on students, but this recent research now has me considering its effect on teachers, too.

When I was a teacher a million years ago, conventional wisdom held that teachers should be especially stern the first few weeks of school. Lay down the law. Demonstrate that you are in control. This was especially true if you were a 23-year-old teaching high school students just seven or eight years younger than you.
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There’s no question that teachers need classroom management skills. But they also need relationship skills, and the time to apply them, which I believe create the conditions for a well-functioning classroom.

Good relationships improve student learning. And it just may be that teachers have as much to gain as their students in the bargain.

This newsletter is usually my space to share what I’m learning and thinking about in my role as a school board member.

But this time, now six months into the job, I want to share to share what I’m hearing from all of you: essentially, what’s on your mind.

I’ll be real—it’s a lot. The list below is a snapshot of all the issues and questions that you’ve sent my way that are above and beyond the items that were already queued up for discussion and voting during regular School Board meetings (like the budget or the bell time study).

These are the ones you’re emailing about, raising during office hours, or asking to discuss in a phone call or meeting.

Each of these issues is important to somebody, and so they all deserve some kind of acknowledgement and response.

However, you can see (I hope) how easy it would be to go “an inch deep and a mile wide” on everything, or to get distracted to such a degree that no issue gets completely worked through.

So what to do? For me, I try to make sure I’m focusing the majority of my time and attention in these areas:

1. Basic needs. If students are hungry, or sick, or in crisis in some way, it will be really hard for them to learn.

2. A healthy school (and school district) culture. Students may arrive at school ready to learn (basic needs met!) but if they’re put in a toxic environment, they likely won’t be able or willing to do their best work. The same is true for school staff. (Readers, can you think of a workplace you were glad to escape at some point in your adult life?) Everyone in the school community needs to be safe, seen and valued.

3. Teaching and learning that is relevant, rigorous and research-based. To me, "relevant” means that students understand how what they are learning relates to the world outside of school and to their own experiences, interests and aspirations. “Rigorous” means there is just the right level of challenge, and “research-based” means it’s grounded in what we know about the science of learning.

But enough from me. Let’s hear from all of you.

From January through June, here’s what you’ve asked about.

Since I joined the School Board in January, there hasn’t been a week that’s gone by when I haven’t been part of a conversation about mental health and school safety.

Locally and nationally, we have data confirming that many of our young people are struggling, socially and mentally. And that struggle manifests in many ways: anxiety, depression, self-harm, truancy, substance abuse, withdrawal, bullying, fighting and more.(1)

“We’re seeing a lot of juvenile behavior this year,” Martin Urbach, a teacher at Harvest Collegiate High School in New York City, told me during a Zoom conversation a few weeks ago. “Misbehavior in class, throwing things, horsing around. Also more interpersonal issues—many students have lost the ability to socialize.” He’s also concerned about behaviors stemming from deep trauma that many students have experienced. “Life is not OK.”

I reached out to Martin because I had visited his school in 2018 and 2019. At the time, I was struck by the strong culture they’d created in a public high school serving predominantly students of color and students from lower-income families. I was curious how the school was faring since the onset of COVID.

Martin, who now works full-time as the school’s restorative justice coordinator, told me that it has been “exhausting.” The 31 students trained in peer mediation at Harvest have run more than 200 restorative justice circles this year—a significant increase over prior years.

In response to what they’re seeing, Martin and his students (at Harvest they’re called “Circle Keepers”) have added a mentorship component to their restorative justice work.  Every 10th grade Circle Keeper is mentoring a 9th grader who’s been involved in a circle due to concerning behavior. Amber, one of the 10th grade mentors, told me, “I want them to think of me friend-wise, and just to be there to help them whenever they need.”

Martin, Amber, and the other students involved in Harvest’s restorative justice work are part of a larger movement to infuse restorative practices at schools across the country. Restorative justice is an approach that emphasizes mediation, helping students understand the causes and consequences of their behavior, and making amends for harm that was done in order to repair and restore relationships.

"We have to change the paradigm of how we look at ‘infractions,’” Martin told me when we talked earlier this month. “We reframe it from ‘rules are broken’ to ‘people are harmed.’”

Across the country at Balboa High School in San Francisco, principal Kevin Kerr has pinned to his bulletin board a list of five “restorative questions” to ask students in trouble. Among them is the one he considers most important: “What do you think needs to be done to make things as right as possible?”

Restorative practices are gaining traction as many school districts move away from the “zero-tolerance” exclusionary discipline popularized in previous decades. “In the ‘90s and 2000s, schools started cracking down on minor misbehavior,” said Aaron Kupchik, a professor of sociology and criminal justice at the University of Delaware. “These behaviors posed no threat to student safety—talking back, cursing, dress code violations. Suspension became the normal reaction.”

In contrast, restorative justice aims to keep students integrated into the school community whenever possible. “We want to be sure they don’t think they’re throwaways,” Martin told me. Students can be suspended at Harvest, or even expelled, if restorative practices haven’t worked or if the school is legally required to suspend in response to certain behaviors (e.g., bringing a knife to school). But it’s widely understood to be the option of last resort, and the school follows specific restorative protocols when it’s time for the student to rejoin the school community.

I wasn’t sure if the uptick in concerning behaviors at Harvest this year (as in many other schools across the country) would have compelled school leaders to adopt more traditional discipline. I get it: school staff members are under tremendous pressure this year. Parents are worried. Police have been called to both of my own kids’ schools in the past few months in response to threats. Why, especially now, would anyone take on the extra work that real restorative justice requires?


The trouble with suspensions and the benefits of belonging

When a student is a danger to themselves or others, it’s absolutely appropriate to remove them to a setting where danger is minimized and they can get help. In theory, this is what suspension is supposed to accomplish.

​In many US schools, however, it’s overused, and that has negative consequences for the whole school community.(2) Suspended students are less likely to graduate from high school and more likely to be incarcerated. Students with disabilities and Black students are suspended at disproportionately high rates, and research has confirmed that this overrepresentation is because they are punished more harshly for similar offenses.

Are suspensions an effective deterrent to future misbehavior? No—in fact, they increase its likelihood. What does deter fighting, bullying, and other troubling behaviors are restorative practices.  Recent, rigorous evaluations in Minnesota and California confirm that restorative approaches also improve academic performance.

This makes sense to me, because I believe that behavior is a form of communication, and “misbehavior” is a student trying to communicate that something is very wrong. Often it’s difficult (even for adults!) to articulate exactly what’s bothering us and what we need. It can take real time and effort to get to root causes and solutions, and sometimes that’s not our go-to response.

“Our instinct is to hate the other person,” says Tamar Shoshan, a junior at Manhattan Hunter Science High School in New York City. “Cancel culture plays a large part in that. We’re taught that if a person does one thing wrong, we label them as a bad person. [We have to] acknowledge that people are complex, and they have reasons for acting out.” We have to call them in—not call them out.

Seeing others this way requires curiosity, generosity and empathy—but without stinting on accountability. “Nobody is letting anybody off the hook,” said Balboa HS principal Kevin Kerr. “Whenever we have one of these restorative justice sessions, the perpetrator inevitably walks out of the room crying. That’s not our goal, but it’s just natural. We’re human beings, we’re going to have a sense of compassion for this person that we harmed, once we have a chance to see how our actions made them feel.”

What does it take to do it right?

Restorative justice is most effective when it’s part of a larger fabric of restorative practices in schools. “Restorative justice” is commonly understood to be a method for intervening in response to specific conflicts or misdeeds—it’s often reactive. “Restorative practices” encompass a larger set of tactics that schools can use to proactively build strong communities.

Schools that have a holistic approach to restorative practices often have a tiered system that looks something like this:

• Tier One: Community-building activities like morning meetings, small-group advisories, and teachers and students working collaboratively to create classroom rules and jobs. These activities involve all staff and students at the school, and often families. For example, last year at Harvest Collegiate while instruction was virtual, the school coordinated weekly mental health circles co-led by students and staff members.
• Tier Two: Smaller groups convene in response to a specific problem or conflict. The group includes the harmed student, the person causing the harm, and a group of their peers and/or adults. They’ll talk about what happened and what can be done to repair the harm. The student who was harmed must feel no pressure to participate, but often elects to do so.
• Tier Three: Practices aimed at reintegrating students who’ve been out of school due to suspension, expulsion, incarceration or truancy.

It takes real time, effort and intention to do this with fidelity. School staff members need a strong, shared definition of restorative practices: what they are, why they’re important, and how to implement them. Often, one or more staff members are designated as restorative justice coordinators and receive special training for that role; all staff members need time, training and support to implement “Tier One” practices like those described above.

Derek Hinckley, a eighth-grade teacher in Chicago, taught for ten years but still didn’t feel like he had a good working knowledge of restorative practices, despite working in a school that espoused the approach.

“I never received any formal training on what restorative practices look like and how to do them well,” Hinckley said. “I have my understanding of how to use restorative practices in my classroom, but that’s not necessarily what everybody else means.”

Shifting a school to a restorative model is hard work for leaders, too. Dr. Ben Williams, the founding principal of Ron Brown Collegiate Preparatory High School in Washington, DC, talked to me in 2018 about the difficulty of launching the District’s first all-male public high school with a restorative justice culture. “There’s nobody out there trying to do what I’m doing,” he told me. “It’s lonely work.” Even though Williams recruited staff with the understanding that they’d need to buy into the school’s restorative approach, and even though parents actively opted in to send their sons to the new school, he noted that many families and staff members still expected, and even pushed for, exclusionary discipline measures.

Allan Benton, a school principal in California, has been using restorative practices for nearly a decade. He cautions that it’s all too tempting for school and district administrators to distort restorative justice as a “quick fix”solution to unfavorable rates of suspension and expulsion.

“We saw schools quickly turn [toward restorative justice],” Benton said. “Suspensions went to zero, but you had a horrible school climate, and kids were afraid because [their peers] were doing really bad things that weren’t being properly dealt with. Just getting suspensions to disappear isn’t helping, nor is it actually restorative justice.”

With time and effort, however, restorative practices yield good dividends. At Harvest, 98% of students report that their teachers treat them with respect. 97% say they feel safe in the hallways, bathrooms, locker rooms, and cafeteria. And 93% of families say that school staff work hard to build trusting relationships with families like them.

Perfect? No—but I like those odds. I’m curious to learn more and do more in this area, and I hope you are, too.


(1) See for example the CDC Adolescent Behaviors and Experiences Survey; the AACAP’s Declaration of a National Emergency in Children’s Mental Health; and this recent RAND survey of California principals.
(2) For an excellent roundup of relevant research, please see the Learning Policy Institute’s October 2021 brief “Building a Positive School Climate Through Restorative Practices.”

On Wednesday, the Arlington Public Schools hosted its annual "Celebration of Excellence" to honor exemplary employees who have been nominated by their colleagues, students and members of the community.

As a School Board member, it was a treat to be at the ceremony and to recognize the eleven teachers, support employees and principal who were honored. 

One of the honorees, Iris Gibson, is a business education teacher at the Langston High School Continuation Program, and she gave a speech that really moved me. 

It's National Teacher Appreciation Week, and Iris's words remind me how life-changing, complex, and wonderful the work of teaching can be. 

She says it better than I ever could, and she's given me permission to share her words with you. ​