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.

If you’ve read about teen (and child) mental health these days, I’m betting the headline contained the word “crisis” or the phrase “the kids are not all right” (Google it and see).

I once thought in these terms, until I stopped to consider what message it sends to the young people we’re concerned about.

When we say things like this, we’re branding a whole generation as broken. (This is my issue with the term “learning loss,” too).

By age 40, about 50% of us will have or have had a mental health issue. I’ve had them, and it never once helped me to feel like I was branded, broken, or exceptional. It helped me to know: Lots of other people feel this way sometime in their lives. You are still you, with all the qualities and talents that make you wonderful. This won’t last forever. There are ways to get help. Matthew Biel, Chief of Adolescent and Child Psychiatry at Georgetown Hospital, says, “Talk about it as part of the human condition, in every place humans spend time.”

It’s true that by many measures, there are more young people reporting mental health issues today than in years past. The pandemic undoubtedly took its toll on mental health, but there were signs of something going on even before 2020. There’s been a lot of research and discussion about the effects of social media; changes in diet, sleep and exercise; and the advent of new drugs that are more addictive than ever before.

While we untangle the answers to the “What’s going on?” question, in parallel we need to make good on the assurance “This won’t last forever. There are ways to get help.”

Part of the “crisis” is our ability to respond to those who need help. In Arlington, as in other communities, supply of treatment isn’t keeping up with demand. We don’t have enough clinicians who work with children and teens, and families are on waiting lists for public and private providers. There aren’t enough inpatient beds in public and private hospitals and treatment centers for young people who are truly in crisis.

It’s easy to feel paralyzed by problems that are hard to solve. As a nation (world?) we’ve never invested in mental health the way we should. I can’t wave a wand to conjure a new army of mental health providers. But there are smaller, more local steps we can take.

​I’ve been doing a lot of listening, reading and studying to understand what’s already in place in our community and what more might be possible. I compiled what I learned here, including twelve steps I think we could consider for Arlington. I’ll share a few of them below.

In Arlington, 14% of students in grades 4-5 and 23% in grades 6-12 feel not at all connected or only slightly connected to other students at school. 1 in 3 of our students in grades 4-12 say they do not have a trusted adult outside of school they can talk to when they need help.

Some of the steps we could take to create more connection and belonging—an incredible protective factor for mental health—could include:

• Creating smaller communities (school size, class size) and intentional relationship mapping: ensuring that every student has a trusted adult mentor within the school. Some schools will map peer relationships, too, and offer social skills groups or other ways to help students feel more included.
• Community mentors: I love this article by teacher Renee Moore describing how mentoring worked at her school in Mississippi. And with a nod to Arlington Public Library’s Human Library Event tomorrow—what if we could create a human library of local citizens who are willing to share their talents and experiences with young people and their families?
• Parent-to-parent mentors: In DC, the Early Childhood Intervention Network is training parents to become Family Leads and help other parents and caregivers with similar lived experiences. Family Leads go through a nine-month training and two-month apprenticeship. 100% of applicants have completed the training program, 100% are people of color, and Family Leads gain income and marketable skills by participating.
• Teen Centers: Many communities are experimenting with models of care that combine recreational spaces where youth can spend time with peers in addition to attending appointments for mental health, tutoring, and college and career counseling. They’re located in storefronts, shopping centers and community centers, and accessible via public transportation including bus routes from schools. UpStreet in Pittsburgh is a great example. (Or, if you want to go abroad, check out Jigsaw at multiple locations throughout Ireland).

Many communities are making the decision to place critically needed services like medical, behavioral, dental, and vision care directly in schools so that all young people have easy access. Here’s what that looks like in communities close to ours:

• At 31 schools in Montgomery County, the Department of Health and Human Services along with other local public and private nonprofit agencies offer counseling, psychiatric care, support groups and more. At 12 school-based health centers youth and families can get physicals, immunizations and prescriptions.
• In DC Public Schools, the Department of Behavioral Services and community-based organizations offer family functional therapy, trauma-focused cognitive behavior therapy, parent-child interaction therapy, substance abuse services and more—even if students also have an outside provider.
• At Alexandria’s two high school campuses, any resident aged 12-19 can visit the Teen Wellness Center tp receive free, confidential care including mental health and substance abuse counseling and reproductive health services. Non-confidential services include vaccines and treatment for minor illnesses.

One final point I’ll make: if we really want our young people to feel capable, resourceful and valuable, we have to treat them that way. And that means using a human-centered design approach that centers their ideas and involves them in creating any programs or solutions we develop for their benefit. We also know that having a sense of purpose protects our mental health—which means the young person who co-creates the solution may happily never need it.

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...)
​
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.