Donohue harney-transcript-1

Nick Donohue Interview for The New England Journal of Higher Education

NICK DONOHUE INTERVIEW FOR THE NEW ENGLAND JOURNAL OF HIGHER EDUCATION

Q: Hello. I’m John Harney. I’m the Executive Editor of The New England Journal of Higher
Education. I’m here today with Nick Donohue, who’s been President and CEO of the
Nellie Mae Education Foundation since late 2006. This past year, Nick and his colleagues
have been reframing the Foundation’s strategic focus for the next four years and beyond.

Nick, in a nutshell, what is the Foundation’s new focus?

A: John, a couple of years ago, the board began to look at our past and current performance,
and they asked themselves some really good questions. What difference were we
making? How much of a difference were we making? And for whom were we making
that kind of difference? And they asked us to look into that question and really reflect on
where we had been in the past six or seven years as a foundation. We took a look, and we
discovered some interesting things. We looked at the context in the world around us,
and we realized that issues of global competition had really changed things for schooling.
Where in the past it was OK to have a subset of learners really achieve and excel and
move on to, really, the gold standard, which is postsecondary success, that if in our
society, we’re serious about remaining competitive, we needed a lot more learners
achieving those levels of skills and knowledge: that those were the new currency for
success.

We looked around at issues of not just more learners learning, but more learners learning
more; that the way we had in our education systems established the outcomes, the
standards, if you will, for performance, they really were focused on the basics, somewhat
due to federal policies, somewhat due to the natural evolution of schooling. But that it
was the combination of those two challenges – more learners needing to succeed and
more learners needing to succeed at higher and more complex levels that really led us to
rethink our approach.

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So when we started to think, well, what would you do to accommodate achievement in
that kind of context? What would it look like? Is it really enough to continue to support
the improvement in school as we know it? We came to a different conclusion. Through a
rigorous process, we looked at the data, the information, and we came to the conclusion
that it really wasn’t about [simply] making the classroom structure that we know today
better and working better.

The notion we came up with was student-centered learning opportunities – opportunities
that put learners really at the center of the design, where we explore different ways of
engaging students, different places where students learn, different agents of learning,
different people they connect with to help them achieve skills and knowledge— where
we really make the learning the constant, and make time and agency and location the
variable. Because right now in school; time, location, and agency are the constants and
learning’s the variable. And we’d like to turn that around.

We think this is a solution, in part, to issues around equity. There are lots of reasons why
we have differential levels of achievement. But the outcome levels are so low, especially
for those who are low-income, low-income of color, underserved populations in our
communities across the region, that we think one of the root causes is the actual design
of the learning environment. And the way that people of all different kinds need to adapt
to a system that is really based on one principle, which is “one size fits all.”

And that doesn’t make any sense in today’s world, especially if you incorporate the
notion that technology has just turned on its head the notion of information flow.
Classroom structures of the past were designed so that a teacher in front of the class
could convey and parcel out information through textbooks and lecture, and some
experience. And now, of course, the information is a fire hydrant, gushing out all over us.
The question is, how do you organize schooling and learning opportunities to take
advantage of that flow of information, take advantage of the differences learners bring,
to build on their needs and their interests, and to really get more creative and bring our
schooling system up into the 21st century?

So student-centered learning is what we call it. It’s about calling into question the
variables, as I said, of when learning happens, where learning happens, who are the
agents, if you will. We think there’s room to expand those notions. Everyone has a
variety of adults who are important, who help them learn. Well, let’s make that part of
how we organize for school. Let’s integrate technology in real ways, and let’s be careful
about how we assess learning and how we hold ourselves accountable, make sure we
keep our eyes on the right things.

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Q: Can you offer an example of how a student-centered learning model would bring in other
agents?

A: A lot of communities have internship [and] community-service learning activities, and
these are rich, powerful experiences. In fact, when you ask people to describe the
powerful learning experiences they have had in their lives, and you allow them to
consider school opportunities and other opportunities, they will frequently talk about the
out-of-school, if you will, or unofficial relationships they had that led to learning. So
internships, community-service opportunities, life experience -we’re very interested in
understanding better how to assess the learning people get in a wide variety of arenas.
So these processes —internships and service-learning opportunities — are rich. Not
enough of them are actually for credit. People are learning skills and knowledge in these
arenas that they should get credit for.

Q: And you’ve referred to how the internships can be tied back to the academics. Is there a
specific role for that in the student-centered model?

A: I think it’s essential to varying degrees. We have some actual experience organizing
events, where there are learners who were on the brink of dropping out, and they
needed one more civics course or credit to get their high school graduation. And they
participated in really complex and interesting analyses of community-based issues related
to public water supply, voting rights, a myriad of things that are real-world opportunities.
And they produced documents, they gave presentations, they studied, they researched,
they analyzed, they did all the things that our schools purport to be about. And those
experiences and skills and knowledge were vetted by professional teachers. And those
learners get credit for those opportunities. That kind of situation, more and more, ought
to be available to people.

Lots of issues [are] related to it – quality control, making sure they’re rigorous; making
sure it’s not just the easy secondary route, where people kind of recover some credit in a
less rigorous way. But we think it really jibes with where we are in the world, because we
want our young people to function in a high-functioning way in real-world settings, and
our employers and our community leaders tell us we definitely need more of that.

Q: Does the teaching establishment seem receptive to these kinds of ideas that in a sense
are turning the old ideas of schooling on their head?

A: Absolutely. I think that it’s a breath of fresh air for, I think, most teachers. Teachers
enter teaching because they want to engage young people, help them learn, and have a
fulfilling experience for themselves while they do it. There are many who tell us they’re
really eager to exercise this option, because it liberates, if you will, the expertise and the
aspirations they brought. They want to do some interesting things. And there will

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always be a place for classroom lecture and engagement, and some very traditional
methods. We’re not saying abandon those completely.

Q: What about time and location?

A: When it comes to time and location, we’ve really learned a lot in the past couple of years.
Our work around after-school and out-of-school time, our work in adult learning, our
work in a whole range of areas has been about trying to organize high-quality academic
experiences for learners when they’re not in school. It’s a very simple notion: that school
is a place where people learn, and should learn; and they learn and engage and grow
outside of school and outside of the school hours as well. So anyone who’s been on a
sports team, or had a job or studies on their own, knows what it’s like to accrue
information and knowledge. Everybody has a story of the young person who’s doing
pretty well in school, but who excels in this curricular activity around art or technology, or
something they’re self-motivated about.

And so while staying inside of the box of making sure that we focus on the skills and
knowledge people need to succeed – because we do support a standards-based approach
to this … that there are things people really need to learn – that the places and times that
they can learn these things just vary. It does not all happen between 8:00 and 2:00 or
9:00 and 3:00, or some schools, 7:30 and 1:00. I mean, learning does not stop when the
bell rings and the kids walk out on the street. There are lots of opportunities. We want
to help people make those part of what counts for learning in a high-quality, rigorous
way.

Q: Is there an issue in terms of the out-of-school opportunities being as inequitable as school
has been for some groups of kids? If you’re relying on visits to museums and things like
that in out-of-school time, doesn’t that vary with family income and preparation, that sort
of thing?

A: Absolutely. And that’s part of why normalizing these kinds of opportunities as part of our
normal educational opportunities, our public educational opportunities, is so important.
More well-to-do people have better opportunities to learn. We don’t capture that
learning. But they have the opportunities. You can never do this just based on people’s
natural, available opportunities that they have as families. That would not address the
issues of equity, which are at the core of our purpose. We’re about providing greater
equity of opportunity. So those opportunities we’re suggesting ought to be lined up with
things that work for the higher achievers.

So for example, we know that low-income children lose more learning in the summer,
and that higher-income children actually sustain and gain learning in the summer. Well,
we know why that is: the richer activities, more time with adults, all the things that you
might think would lead to higher achievement. How do you make those part of a school
experience?

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So one of the implications for student-centered learning is not just using time differently,
but thinking about the school year differently. We don’t think that, to have an equitable
system of any kind, you can continue to have a gap that’s two or three months long
where you’re risking the learning that happened in the last part of the last school year,
and you’re taking up the beginning of the next school year. Basing our school calendar on
an agrarian calendar, which is at its roots … we wonder if the time has come to reconsider
that.

Q: In terms of assessments, how do you measure whether it would be more equitable with
these programs if that’s part of the student-centered model?

A: Well, we support really rigorous assessment and accountability. We think, especially for
reasons of equity and just basic quality, that you need to stay on top of whether you’re
delivering the goods for learners. So we want to be clear about that. Assessment and
accountability are important features of the system we envision, and the one we talk
about and want to support. No Child Left Behind [had]lots of issues with it, one thing it
did is it shined a light on the differential outcomes. There will always be differences in
learning. Not everybody has to have the exact same outcome. But the notion that you
can equalize that is very critical to us. We think holding education, ourselves, and all the
players in education accountable is critical.

So to do that, you have to assess student results. Have to gather information about
whether learners are learning what you want them to learn. Now, testing has gotten a
bad name lately, because what we mean by testing now is a very rigid, very narrow
experience that tests in very narrow ways some basic skills. It’s not robust enough, it’s
not varied enough, and it doesn’t gather enough different kinds of evidence about
student learning.

You want to know if somebody can add, you can give them a set of math problems. You
want to know if they can write, you can give them something to write. You want to know
if they can think or problem-solve, you’ve got to give them a problem to solve. So we
believe that assessments need to involve more evidence, more performance, if you will,
more demonstration—opportunities for students to show in varied ways what they can
do. You want someone to be good at teamwork, put them in a setting where they got to
work with other people and see how well they do. You want to assess whether people
can present themselves publicly, then give them a chance to present themselves publicly.

And there are a myriad of ways that have been worked on for years of being able to
measure these kinds of things in thoughtful, rigorous ways that are both reliable and
valid, which are two assessment terms. “Reliable” means you have to get the same
estimation of performance no matter who is doing the judgment, and “valid” means that
the assessment opportunity actually measures what you want to know about. And there
are ways to do those more creative assessment processes as part of a varied system. So

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there’s going to be a place for “sit down, take the test” the way we did and some of our
parents did, and there’s got to be an opportunity for students to show what they know. If
you know it and you can show it, then you ought to get some credit for it.

Q: So is part your work collecting models on that sort of thing?

A: Yeah, we’ve been researching different forms of this kind of assessment. We’ve got a
number of grants out, actually, where people are developing some original designs to see
whether these systems can really work and be up to the standards that we need them to
be. And we’ve got some research … looking at what people have been doing for years,
because this kind of approach is not brand new. Our education system has been defined,
especially in the past decade or so, by a much more rigid set of expectations and ways of
measuring. People understand that it’s time to move forward. There’s a lot of public
concern about the narrowness of how we measure learning. It just doesn’t make sense
that it’s the only sufficient way we can do this.

Q: And what’s an example of how you can get the students to show mastery in these things
without filling in the bubbles, as you say?

A: When it comes to demonstrating mastery of a complicated task or a problem-solving
challenge, you actually have to give somebody a problem to solve. And that defies filling
in a bubble, because you need to see whether they understand the problem. You know
what, they should get credit for understanding the problem, they should get credit for
organizing around the problem, they should get credit for enlisting resources to solve the
problem, and they should get credit for partial achievement of the problem.

Q: Who does the assessment? Maybe that’s the question. How do you judge the mastery?

A: Some of the models we’ve examined include classroom teachers being presented with
information and evidence. There are places where there are panels and juries of other
community members who have some say or contribute to judgment without having the
high-stakes final say in the matter. When it comes to really some of the formative or
interim or basic assessments, engaging a wider array of people and making those
determinations is just real-world practice.

There’s no other context where we put determination of skill and proficiency in the hands
of a Scantron machine. We know there are ways, and we’ve invested in ways to bring lots
of different people together to judge work. And people are pretty good at it. People
know quality when they see it, if they are given some guidance. And so there’s a lot of
precedent for this in the workplace, and in higher education. I mean, the most famous is
the presentation of a dissertation to a panel, and that’s a written piece, oral presentation
with a lot of hard questions that are hard to quantify ahead of time.

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Q: And at lower levels, there’s the example of the Boston Arts Academy that has the artists
come in, basically, and watch performances and productions.

A: Yeah. Boston Day and Evening has a competency-based piece in Boston. (So does) Parker
Academy in Worcester. There are schools in every state in the region that are
experimenting with this approach, and doing well with it.

Q: Stepping back a little bit, you’ve spoken about standards a few times. What are some of
the things that we think students do have to know to succeed, whether in work or higher
education?

A: It starts with some very basic, familiar things. Literacy: you need to be able to read and
write. Numeracy: you’ve got to be able to work numbers in today’s society. Knowing
something about history, we do learn from the past, and we’ve taken it for granted lately.
Some social science is critical. Understanding the scientific process is a critical dimension
of what we need to do. Understanding some of what people would call higher-end
cognitive skills around analysis, creative thinking, problem-solving – these kinds of things
that employers have been clamoring for, for the past decade, [as they] have seen the
coming of a global economy. And they know, to be competitive, we need people who can
think, work on teams, solve the problem that they don’t know about today, communicate
well with their colleagues and others, who have a sense of purpose, who have a
connection to the civic life,—another area we think is critical. But rooted, again, in a
really incredibly strong and important deep grasp of some of what people would call basic
skills, because those are still critically important.

Q: And you made the point in the piece that you recently wrote for The New England Journal
of Higher Education about the fact that higher education does encourage this student-
centered learning in a lot of instances. So why is there that chasm between K-12 and
higher education in terms of personalizing the experience?

A: One of the ways we look at it is that higher education has had a primary spot in our
culture in terms of currency and quality. So we’re proud in this country of having a high-
end higher education system. And, admittedly, it was really an opportunity that only a
few got to take full advantage of, because of access in terms of money, resources,
selectivity. There’s still a premium put on being elite and selective. We’re coming around
in higher ed. to understand that we need more opportunity. Community colleges’ day
has come in terms of being seen as really a viable opportunity, where quality and rigor
and practicality can be addressed.

On the K-12 side, we have had a right emphasis on equity and universal access and
engagement. And we – it’s kind of like the train tracks between France and Spain you
used to have the place where you’d have to get off, and there’d be one gauge on one side
and one gauge on the other. And we worked ourselves into that situation. Had some
different priorities at the lower end, different priorities at the upper end, and now we’re

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trying to reconcile things. Our focus is, what do we do about it? And we think the
opportunity is really working both ends of that divide. Our focus for the future is going to
be much more on the sort of middle school/high school end of things. We hope, over
time – and we’d like to support a sort of a secondary agenda – to help our higher ed
friends think about, how do you take what you’ve learned about personalizing or student-
centered approaches in higher ed, and how do you help inform what’s going on at the K-
12 end of things?

So that will have implications for admission processes, it’ll mean rethinking the
ACCUPLACER in terms of the only way to measure whether a student’s ready, because
that reinforces the basic skills piece. And it’ll be, I think, a really interesting and rich
conversation, because higher ed really is leading the conversation recently, around
innovative designs, partly because it’s a more market-based industry, and they’ve got to
respond, because people are coming around saying, “We need this, I want this.” And
they’re responding, and K-12 ought to be able to do the same.

Q: And if higher ed could help K-12 with that, they’d be helping themselves in terms of their
enrollment being stronger – or their pools being stronger, I would think.

A: We think so.

Q: How does the new vision balance school needs with district needs with state needs with
federal needs, such as No Child Left Behind, and do they reinforce each other?

A: Absolutely. They do reinforce each other. And we think that it’s critical to work on a
number of those levels in concert at the same time. That’s why we have an integrated
approach to our work.

And that’s why we’re involved in national discussions to help sort of shape and support
an evolution of assessment and policies at the federal level, because they really do define
what the states do, and in a trickle-down way, what the districts do and what the local
folks do. There’s nobody in our country now who doesn’t know the enormous test
pressure and the narrow test pressure that our classroom teachers are under. It’s evident
to almost everybody, including our learners. And we have an opportunity to rebalance
that in a way that affects local practice, district practice, state, and federal practice. So
they are connected in that way, and that’s one example of how we’re trying to work on a
number of different fronts to address that connected issue.

Q: The Foundation’s organizational approaches of practice, policy, and public understanding
seem to have evolved and been emphasized with this new focus. Can you speak to that?

A: We’ve long been invested in trying to develop programs, or models, if you will, of
practice, about how you work with young people in different settings, as I said, adult
learning, after school, higher ed. Model development and knowing how to do the thing

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you’re talking about is critical. It’s easy to talk about. You’ve got to demonstrate it, show
it, and make it better. So we’re into model development, or supporting good practices.

If you want to change the system more significantly, and not make these programs just
add-ons or alternatives for those who the system’s failed, then you’ve got to start talking
about policy, got to start talking about the rules that define schooling. So some of the
things we talked about before – the Carnegie units for graduation, time requirements for
school, these things that really build the box that school is today … you need to
reconsider those, or you’ll end up only having these innovations occur in spaces where
they can get away with it. And that’s not what we’re about. We’re about helping the
system really think about a different way forward as a core facet of what is done, not as
an alternative.

The problem is that good ideas done well don’t always push a system forward. So for
other reasons around systems, dynamics, change, and sociology, whatever the
explanation is, big historical systems are hard to change. Higher ed. has gone through
this, K-12, healthcare, transportation – these big systems are hard to change. They’re
well-entrenched.

So in order to move and make the best out of the models or practices, and to really push
the policies forward, we think that it’s necessary to promote public demand. So part of
our work will be to rebalance the conversation and support young people, parents,
teachers, community members, and people inside the educational establishment and
institutions to promote change, but with a real emphasis on trying to grow an expectation
that there might be a better way to do things … that we don’t have to just improve the
situation we’re in, maybe we can change the situation.

Q: You say you want to grow student-centered experiences into a core facet of education,
rather than simply an alternative or an add-on. You also say you want to improve
outcomes for underserved students, which would be in keeping with the Foundation’s
history. Can both be accommodated together?

A: We think that one is really a means to the other. We think that, if you really are serious
about meeting the needs of underserved learners, then it’s time to start thinking about
student-centered approaches to learning as at least a significant core feature. We say it
that way because these kinds of approaches are marginalized. They’re used after failure.
They’re used successfully after failure. There are dozens of programs that have startling
results with dropouts and kids who the system has failed. Why not use the intelligence,
experience, and knowledge that these programs have gained in terms of how to beat the
odds, and make it a preemptive opportunity before failure? It can be done cost-
effectively, it can be done rigorously, and we treat it like an alternative, rather than what
it ought to be, which is a core facet of schooling and how it’s defined.

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Q: What you’re promoting sounds so logical and natural in some ways. So why have these
solutions not taken hold at this point? And why do you think the Foundation can be the
one organization to serve as the catalyst for this type of change?

A: Habits are hard to change. Traditional approaches are hard to change. We do a lot of
things in ways that we could do better. In this case, education is so important at this time
in our society’s history that we’ve got to do something better. And we know what to do.
So we think there’s a new opportunity to push through the status quo and really
antiquated approaches to organizing a really critical experience, which is education.

We don’t think we can do this alone. Our analysis of the context, our analysis of the field,
our look back at ed reform have all told us that partnership and joint purpose are critical.
We’ve found people around the country and around the region who are enlisted in this
kind of effort, who are already working on the same thing. We’re discovering that
emerging field of student-centered education, because it is an emerging field. Even with
that, we know that the limits of that partnership are dependent on a lot of things that
happen outside of our control. So we’re counting on the currents, socially, of increased
attention to equity persisting, the pressure of a changing economy demanding higher
skills, the continued explosion of technology promoting more personal engagements with
information, because that’s on such a steep curve, it’s just unimaginable. It’s about direct
and clear and focused partnerships. It’s about being part of a bigger community of
people working on the same thing. And it’s about a hope that some other things fall in
place along the way and continue.

And we’re going to do the best we can, because our mission is about supporting the
futures of the learners in our region, and making sure that everyone has an opportunity
to succeed, and a really fair opportunity to succeed.

Q: Thank you for your time, Nick, and good luck with the initiative.

M: Copyright 2010, Nellie Mae Education Foundation.

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