Greg Richmond: Why is it important for Mott Haven Academy to exist?

Nauiokas: Haven Academy began because of our partner organization, , deep history and commitment to serving families in the South Bronx. Back in the early 2000s, they recognized that kids in the child welfare system, specifically in foster care, were being underserved by traditional school settings. So they came up with the idea that, if we created a learning environment that better understood child welfare-impacted youth, we may be able to stabilize that educational experience and hopefully reverse some of the negative outcomes.

In 2008, we opened in the Mott Haven section of the South Bronx, which is rich with culture and history, wonderful people and food. But it also happens to be a community that has struggled historically with poverty, and with a number of other factors that have made it difficult for families to find quality schools.

We intentionally save seats for kids in the child welfare system: one-third children from foster care, one-third children from the prevention system and one third children from the general Mott Haven community.

We spend almost as much time thinking about students’ social and emotional needs, and skills, and learning as we do the academic needs, and skills, and path to success.

We specialize by having staff members that are a little different than traditional schools’: behavior therapists, art therapists, crisis workers, mental health counselors and intensive academic interventionists.

By having specialized staff members, we’re able to isolate and identify what those barriers are for kids in the child welfare system and traditional school systems, and make sure that we’re offering a program that’s a bit more tailored to their specific needs.

Almost all schools serve students that have been impacted by foster care or students that are receiving prevention services because of an instance of abuse and neglect. However, most schools don’t have the training, the knowhow and the staffing to truly be able to meet those children’s needs. As a result, well-intentioned educational environments end up misidentifying child welfare-involved kids with more special education needs. Perhaps they misdiagnose deficits in learning to be a special-needs issue versus really being disruption to schooling and kids needing more time to be able to catch up on that content.

For a whole host of reasons, our country has always let zip code be a determining factor on where a child goes to school, and for children in foster care, their zip code changes frequently. And each time that zip code changes, they’re asked to meet a new school community, and new friends, and a new teacher at a time when they’re having the most disruption to their home life. I do feel it’s our responsibility as educators to say that if we have the ability to try to stabilize something for a child who’s going into crisis, then if schools can be the place we do that, we ought to make sure that we’re having that happen.

2020 has been pretty tough on everybody. How have the pandemic and the recession affected your students?

Students in the Haven community have been significantly impacted by both the health crisis and the world pandemic, as well as the race pandemic that we’re experiencing in our country right now.

Some of the biggest challenges our families have faced have been around food insecurity, child care, health crisis, access to health care and true impact from losing family members from the coronavirus.

We’ve had several students whose parents have died, or grandparents, because of coronavirus. And so immediately, Haven Academy mobilized our crisis therapy systems. We’ve made sure that we’ve been able to give cash grants to families to help with those immediate costs that are associated with a big crisis like that. We’ve made sure that we’ve done the follow-up support needed, and kept and leveraged our relationships with students and families to make sure that we were aware of their needs and connecting them to resources.

Beyond health and safety, there are basic needs — shelter, making sure you have a roof over your head, making sure you have food, making sure you can pay bills. Through generous donations by partner organizations, our work with The New York Foundling, our work with a number of other nonprofits, we’ve been able to give cash grants, give food pantry items, do deliveries of basic and essential supplies to families — you name it. Our team has been creative on how to get that into the hands of our kids and families.

Then, the next category, which is just as important, is attending to the children’s educational experiences and their need for social connections. While we were taking care of all of those other primary needs, we had to make sure we were establishing a program where kids wanted to log on virtually, had the equipment and the technology to be able to connect virtually with teachers and friends. And then, once they’re logged on, we need to make sure they have ample opportunities to engage both with their learning and with their peers. That’s been our primary focus over the past couple of months.

What can other schools and other educators learn from Haven Academy?

At the core of our success, I truly believe our commitment to creating and maintaining a safe, predictable learning environment that holds kids to high expectations has helped anchor our work. That is coupled with our deep belief that understanding empathy, teaching empathy and showing kids how to practice empathy toward others has helped them not only make sense of their own challenges and struggles, but build relationships with important peers and teachers through the building. Those are two principles that I really think have anchored our work.

In addition to that, I believe schools haven’t been places where we’ve done a lot of teaching around what attachment theory looks like and means, and what understanding the arc of trauma means for learning. Educators should start to investigate whether that body of knowledge for their staff and their team could help them.

From the start, both The New York Foundling and Haven Academy have acknowledged that if we get this right, if we get this experiment of working on making a school for kids that have been impacted by the child welfare system correct, then it is our responsibility and duty to share our learnings. I invite anyone who has large groups of students who are either living through foster care experiences or at risk of being placed in foster care to reach out to us, because we welcome the opportunity to be thought partners and to think about how we collectively, as educators, can make better experiences for kids.

Richmond: How does the classical education your students are receiving differ from what students receive in other schools?

Lambert: Our mission is to train the mind and improve the hearts of our students through a classical, content-rich curriculum that emphasizes virtuous living, traditional learning and civic responsibility. That mission statement is deeply rooted in ideas that have existed in Western civilization for thousands of years, beginning with the ancient Greeks. And it is that citizens have to be prepared to take on their role in a civil society. In order to do that, we need to form and shape character and to provide knowledge.

James Madison, the father of the Constitution, said that in order for us to keep our republic, we need citizens of virtue and knowledge. He said that in Federalist 55, in defense of the Constitution. Plato wrote that even a just man will do unjust things given the right circumstances. That’s negative inertia if you’re trying to build a civil society. So, you have to form and shape character. Plato’s most famous student, Aristotle, said it takes a lifetime of hard work to become a person of good habits. So, we’re in the daily work of shaping virtue and building good habits in these future citizens.

I think that is probably one of the biggest points of departure from other public schools: Our school culture and ethos has character-building deeply embedded in it. Another difference is the part about training minds. We use a content-rich curriculum that is overseen by the Barney Charter School Initiative and Hillsdale College [in Michigan] in order to build in our students what Dr. E.D. Hirsch has called cultural literacy. In other words, to become American citizens, you have to have a lexicon and the background, the idiom, the vocabulary, the knowledge to understand what these things mean in context.

Hirsch says that by eighth grade, roughly, students should have an 80,000-word working vocabulary that helps them understand what it means to be an American citizen. It lays the foundation for the great work that is in our scope and sequence for the high school years. We read the great books, we read the great minds. This is a liberal arts and science education that truly is well-rounded and prepares students to, at the end of their senior year in high school, have lots of opportunities at their fingertips.

How does a classical education speak to the challenges our country is facing right now?

If you observe our civic culture, it is brittle, it’s fragile. We’ve forgotten how to have a civil discourse. Instead, we yell at each other, often in individual echo chambers. We have forgotten what the national motto means. It is “E pluribus unum” — out of many, one. For us to be able to live by that motto, we have to have a common base from which to work. That is not to say we all must be ideologically in lockstep and in agreement with each other. In fact, the Western tradition has a healthy record of lively discourse and debate in pursuit of the truth.

I don’t think we can repair our society overnight. The so-called civic institutions that are the bedrock of our society and culture — family, schools, churches and other types of civic organizations like them — they’re all under assault. Families are struggling. Schools have lost their way. Churches are no longer the moral conscience of our society. So, it should be no surprise that it is tough out there.

One of my favorite lessons from history is of a 28-year-old Abraham Lincoln. I believe the year was 1838 in which he gave his first notable political address. It’s known as his Address to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois. Think about what was going on in the 1830s: the Western expansion. And the political question of the day: whether Kansas and Nebraska were going to join the Union as free states or slave states. This is pre-Civil War, and it’s ugly out there. There are agitators in the territories. Houses are being burned down. People are dying. Sound familiar?

Lincoln looks across this messy landscape and he looks back at the American founding, and he says, our country was founded based on an experiment. It was an experiment about whether we could govern ourselves. If the answer to that question was no, we would remain subjects to a king, to a crown, to a tyrant. But if the experiment in self-government worked, we would become something else. We would become citizens of a republic, with rights and responsibilities.

Schools used to understand how you prepare young men and women to be citizens of our republic. They used to understand that teaching self-governance started at those early ages. And that if we did that well, we would provide the citizens that Madison calls for in Federalist 55. But we’ve lost that. So our schools — it’s not just this one, but other schools in this network across the country — are deeply wedded to rediscovering that duty to prepare and shape citizens. And hopefully, over time, we’re planting the seeds for a recovery of the civil society that I think we all yearn for.

You had a distinguished career in the Air Force. What did you learn there that you’re now applying in your current role?

On May 30, 1990, I took an oath of office to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; to bear true faith and allegiance to the same; to take that obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and to well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office upon which I was about to enter, so help me God. And I served for over 24 years.

When I retired, I realized I wanted to continue to do that. I wanted to help perpetuate the Constitution and the republic. What I figured out is, I am doing that. It’s not by training and preparing to fly airplanes into combat. Rather, it is by raising up the next generation to protect this fragile experiment with liberty. Because here’s the thing: A famous president of the previous century once said, liberty is only ever one generation away from extinction. That it’s not in our bloodstream. The generation that loses it shall never recover it. We need to teach generations how to protect this fragile experiment with liberty.

We have in our school a historical timeline. It’s downstairs in one of our hallways, mounted on the wall. It tracks all the different traditions and histories that we are aware of about humankind. It has all the different ages — the Iron Age, the Bronze Age. It’s 27 feet long, and the United States doesn’t show up until the last 8 inches.

We show this to our students, and it creates a sense of appreciation for how young we are and how long mankind existed without this kind of blessing, without this liberty. It’s not guaranteed in perpetuity. If we don’t raise up the next citizens to protect it, we will, like the warning says, lose it forever.

Richmond: As someone in facilities finance, you see schools through a different lens than most people in education. When you look at a school, what are you looking for, and is it different from what educators are looking at?

Kesavan: We’re investing for the long term, for 30-plus years. Because it’s such a long-term lens, there are a handful of things that are very different, that transcend annual metrics or the five-year renewal metrics. First would be the people and the culture. The second would be school quality. And third, which may be the one that’s the most unique compared to how educators may look at it, is long-term operational sustainability.

People and culture are where we start. It’s the community, the ecosystem of people who support the school. That includes the board members, community leaders, the founder and the C-level leadership team, the school leader, teachers — especially teachers who have been there for some time — students, parents, parent organizations, funders, local supporters and, of course, the authorizer, and many others who are part of that ecosystem.

We believe that strong people in ecosystems are an indication of long-term success and sustainability.

Second, school quality. Of course, everybody looks at this closely. We look at the big picture. Are our scholars better off in this school? How has that changed over time? Is there a really strong demand for this school? We will look at what parents are thinking, how enrollment looks, how wait lists look, and then try to project that over several years and what might change in time to either increase or decrease that demand.

We look at how the school itself measures quality. Every school model’s different. Is the school really focused on growth, or focused on proficiency, or both? Is the school focused on college prep, college persistence, lifetime vocational training? Then we’ll use the school’s own metrics to create metrics for success. We believe that schools that are very focused on hitting whatever metrics they define as success are the ones that are going to really thrive in the long term.

Third is long-term operational sustainability. I bucket that into a few things: financial metrics — and make no mistake, financial metrics matter — operating margin, fair and sustainable compensation, liquidity, making sure you have enough cash to pay the bills and making sure that, over a long period of time, not just this year, you have excess revenues over your expenses. We spent a lot of time at schools trying to make sure they set the right budgets, have a culture of hitting budgets, both this year and into the future.

Second in this bucket of operational sustainability is facilities. Facilities matter, specifically permanent facilities and permanent facilities financing. What are the risks they’re taking if they are going to be in a temporary site or have temporary financing?

And the third bucket, long-term operational sustainability, means we ask if the staffing model is sustainable. Is it affordable? Does it meet the academic needs of the school? Are those teachers and staff members actually available?

The charter schools you just described are academically and financially successful, and they are good, safe investments for you. But they could get funded by someone else if you did not exist. On the other hand, there are new operators with unproven schools who might turn out to be good, but they’re a higher risk for you. How do you think about the fact that schools that have the greatest need for low-cost financing are often the schools that are riskier and less likely to get financed?

I appreciate the question. I think it’s a good one. I would shift the question to think about the long term instead of just what’s happening today.

We’re unapologetic about advocating for what is best for schools and making our product the lowest-cost, permanent, long-term, lowest rate, simplest, no reserve requirements. In the short term, right now, we have the best product, but we’re not able to serve every school at the moment.

So, what we are doing right now is, we’re building our product so that it’s long-term, sustainable and scalable, so that we can make it a much larger fund. Then, when we’re larger, we can help a lot more people.

You spent more than a decade in traditional investment banking and then came to the nonprofit space. What can the private sector learn from the nonprofit space?

I love this question because I always get asked the opposite. It’s warming to my heart, and I’ll tell you why.

My mother was on the founding team of one of the early charter schools in Michigan back in the 1990s, and she’s still a leader there. I admire my mother so much. Very successful, strong, educated woman who worked in the district for several years and in the middle of her career decided to take on something very challenging by starting a charter school back when there weren’t a lot around. So I learned at an early age that some of the most successful and the most game-changing leaders are in the nonprofit sector because they chose to be.

I think of shining some light on what those banks can learn from Mom rather than the opposite. I’ll tell you what I learned from Mom, and it’s a couple of things. One, to start by focusing on the why. I don’t think this is something only for nonprofits. I think all companies need to think about what their role is in being responsible corporate citizens. Why do I do this work? What our mission is. What is our vision? We focus on that when it comes to hiring, when it comes to our team retreats, when it comes to sharing with our funders and our schools about who we are.

We are unapologetic about the “why” we do this work. And I think that a lot of nonprofits are very strong at this, and I’ve learned this by being in the nonprofit sector. In more than a decade in the private sector, I was almost never exposed to things like values and missions. So, I think that’s one thing the for-profit sector can learn from us.

Second, this focus on long-term, not just quarterly profits or annual metrics. I came from the investment banking world, and we were very interested in closing deals and the revenue potential of those deals. Maybe quarterly, maybe annually, not much longer than that. Whereas in my three jobs in the nonprofit sector, everything was thinking long-term. When I was at KIPP, we were thinking about how our second-graders were going to graduate from a four-year college, and we were backwards-mapping all our decisions to that. That was eye-opening to me, and it was humbling, and it was hard. But that is the game we are playing. The actions we’re taking only make sense if they work long-term. Otherwise, we’re not actually meeting our “why.”

I think the great corporations and great banks are the ones who are thinking long-term. For nonprofits, that’s not a luxury. That’s a necessity, right?

Richmond: What major modifications did you make at your school to reopen this spring?

White: To stay compliant with social distancing regulations, we’re seeing only half of the students each day. We’re kind of in a blended learning model now, which is much better for our students. That relationship with the teacher in the classroom is so paramount to what we do. We were missing that over the break, and it just wasn’t good for anybody. So half the students come Mondays and half Tuesday, and then do it again Wednesday and Thursday. That trickles all the way down to how many students are on a bus, how many are getting dropped off, all those kinds of things, so we’re able to just keep kids as separated as you can keep kids.

We send an extra adult on every bus now to help keep the distancing for students, so the bus driver doesn’t have to manage that. They take the temperature for kids as they get on the bus. If any student has a temperature, they send them straight back home. We check the temperatures of all staff members and students every morning when they come into the building.

We’ve hired an additional custodian whose sole purpose is to wipe down the commonly used surfaces within the building periodically throughout the day. You know, the handrails, doorknobs, the entrance doors, things of that nature. Everything in the building is done by appointment now. You used to be able to just drop in and meet with anybody you wanted to in a school, and that’s how we want it to be again. But just to control traffic within the school, even if a parent is picking up a student, we have them call and then we meet them out front to sign the student out.

For lunchtime, we release the students in small waves where they have time to go and wash their hands with soap and water before they go to eat lunch, and then we [marked off] chairs in the cafeteria. That works to spread students out, and we really try to encourage all students when the weather is good to eat outside, so that when they are closer together, it’s outside.

What’s really been impactful in my mind is we’re really working on this new normal. Hopefully, it’s not the forever normal, but it’s our current normal. It’s really been a nice platform to teach students empathy, to teach them boundaries, to teach students it’s about more than just you as an individual; it’s about us as a collective group. Now we have this new culture of what it means to respect other people’s space and how that needs to look because it’s really about a health crisis. You know, one of the biggest changes is just that continual finding that balance of really teaching with the kid — teaching the kids to be mindful of all of that and not making the school a place that feels like a prison.

What have you learned from this experience?

All our students are disenfranchised learners anyway, and we provide this opportunity to change their world and education, and then we had to go online. With the students we’re working for, and I would argue all students — my own kids — struggled with this online. That personal connection between a great teacher and a student can’t be replaced by anything in the world.

While we were out those weeks that we weren’t in school, we had five suicide attempts that resulted in students staying in hospitals and in long-term facilities. We had several children taken from their home and put in foster care. So there’s a great risk in disrupting the routine that we have for students for education.

Throughout the country, I think education is a great equalizer, and when we sent students home for 12 weeks, we minimized the equalizer. That was one of our big driving forces for coming back. A lot of this we knew anecdotally, but to see it play out in real life was almost tragic. So it drove us to take the very calculated risk to come back to school. We know we know what the risks are in our local area, and they’re relatively low compared to many areas of the country.

As far as being back in school, I don’t think we learned anything earth-shattering other than kids are kids and it’s going to take a lot of work to keep them off of each other. They like to play, they like to roughhouse, it’s just how we’re wired innately. It’s funny because we take a lot of the healthiest parts of being a kid and we’re trying to separate that now for health reasons. We’re still learning every day about: What does that balance look like? How do we strike it? How do we make sure that we’re doing what’s best for kids socially, emotionally and academically, while still working to keep them healthy from this invisible enemy that’s surrounding us?

What qualities or values have you relied on as you prepared to open the school and now in the time it has been open?

If I had to boil it down to the main qualities, I think empathy is probably the biggest one. I have 22 teachers and several other staff members and 300 students and families, and all those people come from 300 different backgrounds. Plus, they watch probably 300 different news channels or news sources. They have many different living situations, and the variables go on and on and on. So in order to get to this point, you have to care about the people you’re serving and the people that are working with the students to ensure that you’re putting their needs first. You have to do that from a nonjudgmental lens and respect where they’re coming from, because none of us can really understand where somebody else is coming from through this pandemic. So the biggest thing is to take the time, understand and absorb all those different situations.

The next one is to be responsive, and responsive enough that you can react to the situation. At the end of the day, our main goal is to provide the best education that we can for kids. We need the adults in the building to be able to do that. The adults can do that only if they feel safe and cared for. Everything that we did revolved around a lot of deep conversations, understanding people’s fears. Not minimizing any of the fears, not minimizing any of the people who didn’t have the fears, so we could come back and everybody would be on the same page and ready to go for students. We sat back and worked together as a team to find that place for them that made sense to be here because they wanted to be here.

Richmond: People who want to open public schools have typically launched a charter school network or charter school management organization. What are you doing differently, and why?

Kramer: The main thing is that I feel like a charter school management organization is a means, not an objective. If you want to launch a bunch of charter schools, then launching a charter school management organization sounds like a good way to support that.

We have a different idea for what the thing we’re creating is. We’re creating microschools that use mixed governance models, where one of the core features of the schools is that they are led by teachers who are social entrepreneurs and have authorship of the school’s vision.

So, for us, the question is, how do you support that type of construct? There are two things we’ve settled on. One of them is that we need to be supporting things in a way that is pretty flexible. We can’t have a thing in the center that interacts with the schools in formulaic ways, like requiring all schools to be charter schools.

The second is the degree of centralization. I think even within the world of charter school management organizations, there’s a wide variety of answers to the question of how much the schools are a reflection of the individual leaders’ vision of the world.

In our case, given the centrality of teacher vision for the school concept, given the way we aspire for the schools to be an extension of the teachers’ view about being professionals in the world as opposed to a more institutional concept of a school, given we want this sort of merging of school and teacher, as a blended idea in the world, then you only do the things that don’t undermine that.

And so, for example, we think of the school startup journey as a process that is led by the teacher/social entrepreneur, that they have a vision of creating a school and that our job is to help them figure out whether their school fits in with the Wildflower community, whether their values and our values line up in ways that will make this feel like a comfortable and supportive environment for them.

We set up a process where they stay as the protagonist of the story and they are figuring out what it is they want to do and how they want to do it. We want to serve as pointing people in the right direction, helping them figure out what is right.

But we start from the premise that they have within them the capability, the capacity to figure out what’s right, because we don’t need to do this for them and then to tell them the answer; we just need to help them explore this way that will connect their inner capacity to do this with the supports of the world and the information of the world. They can figure it out and make a decision.

What is a microschool? And within Wildflower, how does one microschool relate to others?

Microschool is a term that is emerging and, I think, does not have a tight definition. I hear people use it to mean more or less anything, any school that is less than 100 kids. We mean it in a particular way. And that distinguishes it from what we might generally call a small school, which is, when you think about what the minimum efficient size for school is, I think the conventional wisdom is it’s hard to run schools that are less than 250 kids or something like that.

But I’d say when you get below a certain threshold, somewhere in the 25-to-50 range, the very thing we think of as school is different. The school is no longer an institutional administrative structure. You don’t need a principal because you’re not trying to get multiple teachers to have practices that merge together and are coherent next to each other. You stop solving those problems.

And instead, the way you get coherence is you allow people’s inner sense of what they want to do in the world, the type of school they want to create, you let that come out unfiltered, unadjusted. So that is how we think about a microschool. The distinction between the teacher and the school sort of goes away.

How does one microschool relate to another microschool? We talk about it being a decentralized network. A lot of the heart of the network happens between peers, between one pair of Wildflower teacher leaders and another pair of Wildflower teacher leaders. And there are multiple dimensions of that relationship.

There’s a support dimension. One thing that our teacher-leader teams want is colleagues to talk to, to share challenges with, to get advice from. Running a school can be a lonely endeavor, the way we set them up. So they want their version of colleagues, not colleagues with whom they have to take votes on what the benefits plan is going to be, but just having people they can rely on and can talk to and commiserate with. So that’s one dimension of the relationship.

Another dimension is there’s a number of ways in which the work of one school supports the work of another more formally, not just collegially. For example, when a new school is starting, they might want to rely on the marketing plan developed by a previous school. Or they might want help talking to the licenser who will be doing the licensing visit for the new school.

A third dimension is helping schools get better in more of an accountability sense.

For us, mostly what we mean by accountability is creating situations in which their peers can hold up a mirror for each other about what they see going on. That situation can be set up where people describe what they’re intending to do and how it’s going in a way that somebody else can say, “Gosh, if that’s what you’re intending to do, I’m not seeing it play out that way,” or other ways, challenging, advising.

You were at Teach for America for 10 years. Many people will not think of Montessori as being a lot like TFA. What did you learn when you went from TFA to Wildflower?

One thing that’s true of Wildflower is that we use the authentic Montessori pedagogy. Teach for America doesn’t really have a pedagogy. Because in Teach for America, the teachers teach in literally hundreds of districts, each of which has their own curriculum and pedagogy.

Long ago, Teach for America accepted the premise that we had to be preparing people to teach in a pedagogically neutral way, because ultimately, we weren’t the deciders of the question. So, the focus at Teach for America was on a set of pedagogically neutral attributes of what educational leadership means. What does it mean to be responsible for a classroom of kids, and to figure out what’s possible and to figure out how to help the kids take ownership of the goals and accomplish them?

But the big thing about Wildflower, setting aside the pedagogy, is the idea of empowering teachers to be able to lead in ways that they can bring the best of their capabilities and vision and experiences to bear, creating an educational landscape.

The thing that is, I would say, most different in terms of the experience of a Wildflower teacher, versus the Teach for America teacher, is in Teach for America, the settings in which teachers are going to teach are often not very conducive to educator leadership. Right? This is not a knock on any individual districts. It’s the very structure of a bureaucracy. The construct of a bureaucracy in a district is one that is about reducing the risk of difference across schools, and various problems that emerge from difference.

And then Wildflower, what we’re saying is, what would it look like to create a school in which teacher leadership was, instead of anathema to the structure, was actually the core asset that we’re using?

Richmond: Twenty-three years ago, when you started Perspectives Charter School, many other schools were focusing on raising test scores. You went against the grain by proposing a school based on something called “.” What is “A Disciplined Life”?

Shulla-Cose: “A Disciplined Life” is our school culture, and it is created with deep intention. We have a set of 26 principles. We have a set of social, emotional and ethical core practices, and they sit under three buckets: self-perception, relationships and productivity.

We study these principles the way we study algorithms or revolutions and grapple with principles like: “Demonstrate honesty and integrity.” “Demonstrate a hard work ethic.” “Be reliable.” “Love who you are.” “Seek wisdom.” “Be open-minded.” “Respect the differences in others.” “Challenge each other intellectually.”

These are not just on our wall. They are studied by the adults in the building, by our teachers and support staff, our administration, our board members. We take it seriously as adults so we can strive to model and mirror our principles, and study our principles with our kids.

Over the past 20-plus years, we have built out a menu of interesting practices that help us develop social, emotional and ethical learning in our students. These practices are actions that we are trained to implement on a daily basis that build out this culture of trust and curiosity and high quality.

We spend 180 minutes in a class called “A Disciplined Life” every week. It’s very intentional that our kids leave at 18 years old, and our goal is not just to foster young leaders, but ethical leaders.

You can ask one of our 35-year-old graduates, Harold Watson, who is an educator today married with a kid and a dog, and he stands up at an event and says, “‘A Disciplined Life’ is my blueprint for life. Without these principles, I wouldn’t be the person I am.” Our kids leave at 18 carrying values and tools in their pocket to be persistent and to be able to problem-solve and manage challenging situations and make good decisions around the people they are with.

How has Perspectives’s focus on “A Disciplined Life” increased performance on traditional measures?

I think it has helped. When we look at a child holistically, we are truly working to teach that whole child. It’s about the EQ [emotional quotient] and the IQ. Our goal is for students to be intensive thinkers and increase their sense of agency. People who stay at Perspectives from sixth through 12th grade, their GPA is higher and they enroll in college at a higher rate.

It’s about building that trust and building that relationship. I think trust and relationship building are critical for kids to feel safe to be learners. That’s when the magic happens. Kids and teachers have to have that personal connection in the classroom so that remarkable learning and growth can take place. That spills into data looking better.

The other part of “A Disciplined Life” is productivity — get really strategic about how we go about making those scores go up. The idea of being productive is woven in: making sure you are reliable, and that you challenge each other intellectually, and that you are inquisitive. A school that is organized and has a level of respect and love for kids and for the craft of being a teacher really matters. I don’t think that just focusing on test scores gets you that side of the schooling equation.

Your most famous graduate is Anthony Davis. He was the college basketball Player of the Year in 2012. He won an Olympic gold medal. First pick in the NBA draft by the New Orleans Pelicans and now with the Los Angeles Lakers. Seven-time NBA All-Star. All that, yet Perspectives does not even have a gymnasium. How did that happen? How did Perspectives influence his career?

Anthony Davis came from a family where there is love and high expectations. And when that family realized they were raising the best basketball player in the country, they still would not pull him from Perspectives even though recruiters may not be showing up at his school.

He’s just a good guy. Because you come from that family and have all that support at home and you have a school that supports the same kind of values, it was great. Then he could go be a ballplayer. School came naturally for him. He’s smart. He was a real capable student. He is a thoughtful guy who was always humble. Really well-liked. Solid. Easy-going. Lovely young man who has shown that on and off the court.

When he went down to New Orleans, they did a whole piece on him and “A Disciplined Life.” In the , there is a scene of Anthony playing on a basketball court, and it is the “Anthony Davis ‘A Disciplined Life’ Basketball Court.” It is the playground right on our campus. Anthony had given us that court. Remember, this guy graduated from Perspectives and it was a school with no gym. So, he is a cool guy. We love him.

He was with us for seven years, from sixth grade through 12th, and his parents knew Perspectives was going to help him grow, not only as an intellectual but also as a human being. It was going to mirror the values in their home.

Greg Richmond is the founder of the National Association of Charter School Authorizers and a senior fellow at the Future Ed think tank at Georgetown University. 

Richmond: Recently, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative released a of schools bringing a whole-child approach to the classroom. What are the characteristics of those schools that make it more likely for them to successfully implement a whole-child approach? 

Stafford-Brizard: One theme we have seen across those 10 schools that have really dedicated to this rigorous and integrated whole-child approach is really intentional model design. Whether they built the school design from the start or revisited the design of their model, it has to be embedded at that level to think about how a broader definition of student success is integrated into models that might have been more academic-centric alone. None of these schools walked away from rigorous academic development. Instead, many of these schools are really doing a phenomenal job with their academic measures, and their leaders attribute that to their whole-child approach.

Also, there is huge attention to the adult community in these schools. It’s in two parts. One is the access that teachers have to support and resources grounded in the latest research on child and adolescent development. We generally don’t train teachers in pre-service education through a human development lens. There is so much opportunity to support our educators with innovative resources grounded in child and adolescent development — for example, leveraging brain science and how that informs how we support positive discipline models in schools. 

There’s the support educators need and are longing for, and then there is also attention to their own whole development. That’s supporting and tapping into the sense of purpose that educators feel, their own identities and what they bring to school in their classroom, as well as addressing levels of stress they might be experiencing. For example, in environments that are doing a really good job addressing trauma, we see significant secondary trauma in our teachers. A huge focus of  is the attention to the teachers and their whole development.

I would also add a connection to families and community. A lot of these schools are really intentional about embracing and embedding the values and strengths and assets that students are bringing from their cultures and their communities into the classroom, and not putting barriers between the classroom and community.

These schools are also really desperate for formative measures and formative assessments, both to help track where they are and how they can get better. Some of these partners have built their own surveys and their own tools in the absence of fieldwide supports.

Finally, the whole-child work in these schools is implemented with deep rigor. Just like the effort that goes behind a strong approach to mathematics or literacy, the same thing is necessary with their approach on these whole-child constructs, like sense of purpose or executive function skills. 

How could public education policies around the country be improved to make it more likely for schools to implement a whole-child approach?

In the policy space, we’re seeing really strong traction and response for demand for mental health supports in schools. We should ensure that those policies that are put in place and the funding routed toward those supports are looking to evidence-based practice and an asset-based lens on students and communities. At the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, we include the assets and skills connected to mental health and well-being in an and have invested in supports for educators to integrate a focus on mental health into their school practice. 

I would point to two main policy areas that are most available for opportunity. This first involves discipline policies and codes of conduct that should be grounded in the science of child and adolescent development and focused on strengths and social-emotional skill development. This includes the most relevant and effective strategies for de-escalating children and adolescents and addressing behaviors that might not be appropriate for the classroom — we know that isolation and immediate punishment is actually not aligned to the science of learning and development. Policies need to represent this science and provide the right implementation support for teachers and leaders.

A second opportunity involves adult development policies, both pre-service and in-service, and what we name as the critical components of educator preparation. The learning and developmental sciences have a lot to teach us about how to best support children, adolescents and adults. The implications are powerful both for teachers and our school leaders. 

What has inspired you to make a career supporting and advancing a whole-child approach to education?

I started my career as a middle school teacher in the Bronx. I was a Teach for America corps member. I wasn’t an education major. I went back to graduate school after I taught middle school, and the program I focused on was cognitive sciences in education, a doctoral program in human development that was part of Teachers College at Columbia, and I learned the science of learning and development. There was so much that I wish I had known as a teacher. My work and my career have been about infusing the science of human development into the way we work with educators and support educators.

Greg Richmond is the founder of the National Association of Charter School Authorizers and a senior fellow at the Future Ed think tank at Georgetown University. 

Disclosure: The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative provides financial support to �鶹��Ʒ.