Rachael Maves: Hi, I'm Rachael Maves and you're listening to the Getting Naked with educational leaders, where we strip away the layers and get to the raw, unfiltered stories behind the leaders shaping the future of Education. My guest today is Cindi Williams, CEO of Waypoint education partners and co-founder of Learning Heroes. Founded in 2024, Waypoint education Partners Envision a world where education, research, policy and Communications put students and families the people our education system serves at the center. Additionally, Cindi is the co-founder of Learning Heroes, a nonprofit that provides parents with research based resources to support their child's academic and social emotional development. Cindi, thank you for joining me today on the Getting Naked with educational leaders podcast.

Cindi Williams: Glad to be here and glad that you allow us to show up fully. Closed.

Rachael Maves: Yeah, yes, it is not a prerequisite. I'm just so glad that you're here, Cindi, and that we get to talk about education, and I want to start with just hearing a little bit about your story. You have a pretty significant background and I'd love for you just to share a little bit of that and what you have done led to this space and that you hold within education now.

Cindi Williams: Thank you, Rachael, and thanks for letting me be here today. I really appreciate. I've been watching your podcast. I've learned a lot. It's been fun. I have had a series of great bosses like I've just had some pretty remarkable humans who've been willing to Mentor me on this professional journey of mine, and so I came to education, I would say, in two different ways.

One is my personal story and, just to be brief, you, my parents, lived on the wrong side of the tracks in an apartment and couldn't afford for me to go to private school, and so I was in my District School in Tennessee and it ended up being one of the toughest, least high- performing schools in the state, and they actually asked a family member to buy a mailbox on a piece of property in the good, in the good school district so that I could move schools. And so if my parents hadn't asked a member of our family to buy a little plot of land and put a mailbox on it which I know we're not supposed to say now and in some states you can get in huge trouble for this, but this was a long time ago that allowed me to then move to a great school and this was, you know, around second grade and so profoundly changed the trajectory of my educational experience right. So I kind of live the difference between being in a great school and being in a school that was chronically failing and so know the change that can make in your life's trajectory. I was on the other side of that, but I came to education from a professional standpoint through a c? Circuitous route. Actually it was in the Bush White House when I was leading the women's Outreach work and was knee in Afghanistan and it was right after 911, had several roles there in the office of public leaon and made a really good friend there named Margaret spellings, who became just a close personal friend and, as you know, she's an evangelist in the education space.

She was, you know, still running around the country explaining the soft bigotry of expectations we were in the middle of. No Child Left Behind. She wrote me into some of that work from a Communications perspective inside the building and help me understand this big idea of disaggregating data. You know how is it that you can aggregate data in Virginia which was her one of her big talking points or Utah and make it look like the district is doing something extraordinary? And then when you disaggregate it and you look at how these school districts are serving our black and brown students, you see that the numbers are dramatically different. And that idea had never occurred to me, even though I myself had gone from a low performing school to a high performing school.

This idea that school districts were getting away with sort of masking their performance and the students they were serving, the students that they were not, it literally had never occurred to me. So when I left the white house after four years, when they sort of kick you out and say, if you haven't left it all in the field, too bad for you, time to let somebody else have this great job she asked me to come with her to the Department of Education and join her in trying to really implement this thing called No Child Left Behind. And so, under her leadership, I became an education person and have been in that space ever since.

Rachael Maves: That's amazing, Cindi, I didn't know that part about your story, like the earlier story of your parents asking family members to buy a piece of land, and that experience and I mean in a really real, tangible way, and we hear that story often, right where parents figure out a way to sacrifice so that their kids can go to a different school, because not all schools are serving kids equally. Cindi, I love what you said in your story about this equity in the education that you received and your family really making a sacrifice and asking your family to kind of figure out a way to make this happen. And we know that I mean even today that still exists because parents are find that valuable in our invested in how do I get my child the best education. And that ties in to me to that what you had just said about the soft bigotry of low expectations, when I mean that phrase is really powerful. When you use that phrase, what does that mean and look like from your lens?

Cindi Williams: Well, my lens is really the lens of President George W Bush, like this was sort of the Mantra that got him reelected, or got him elected the first time in 2000. You know, education is not typically a republican issue because philosophically it's seen as being so decentralized, right and such a local issue. Except that George Bush, because he'd been a governor in Texas and education had been his lead issue there, with the no pass, no play and all those other sort of things that he was working on, he brought education into the campaign in a way that most Republicans don't, and so he ran on this idea of the soft bigotry, of low expectations, and I think in that situation he was really talking about in Texas and the ability for the state to educate English language Learners and the people who were coming across the border, who really needed to become citizens and to become, you know, actively engaged in their communities, which starts with education. So just the not having high expectations for the students in your classroom, you know understanding that of course your affluent parents are going to be fine because they're going to get all the resources that they need as supplemental to the system if they so choose, but really making sure that we are expecting the same both from and with our students who don't have those sort of resources?

Rachael Maves: Yeah, that's right. We've come through, I mean, quite a past, three, four years now in education and with the pandemic, with this massive shift that we had to go to online learning, many states having been shut down for 18 months or longer, others jumping in a little bit earlier, and now we're seeing all of the data that tells us what the impact has been. When you because I know that you're looking at this and having lots of conversations Across the Nation with different states when you listen and hear State leaders and what the data is telling you about the impact, what keeps you up at. Night.

Cindi Williams: So, Rachael, there's so many things that keep us up at night right now. It's hard actually to sort of create a hierarchy of those things. You know. We know from our work at Learning Heroes that if your child is struggling with mental health issues, that's like the number one thing right now is making sure that your student is okay mentally and feels good about themselves. We see an endless list of concerns as we look across our states and state leaders, but I think for me personally, the place where I feel, like you know, I can make a unique contribution is around the findings that Bib hubard and I had about 10 years ago that haven't changed around parents confidence in their child's academic abilities. You know, when we ask them, how is it that you think your kids at or above grade level?

It's because my child's bringing home mostly A's and B's. B's are better is what they say, and so you know we saw Co almost exacerbate that as we watched the need for grades to become more lenient in order to protect mental health and to create less anxiety. And for all of the reasons, many of them really good intentioned, the grades actually got less rigorous, and so here we sit, on the other side of. Co with learning loss in this incredibly challenging place where we're seeing a year or two years behind in most districts and the trajectory is not moving in the right direction or it's not moving quickly enough, and so that means that the grades didn't get any more rigorous once we came back to business as usual. And so what keeps me up at night is all of these parents thinking their kids are fine and knowing the power of a parent and knowing how engaged you and I get when our kids need extra help, whether it's math or English or whatever it is, we're leaving that help on the table. All these parents who could be engaged, who could be supporting whatever that academic loss is or that place of struggle and helping them catch up and get back on track.

You know, none of that's happening because parents actually think their kids are okay and they can't solve a problem they don't have, and that's sort of been the message that Bib and I have been, you know, putting out in the world, which is Meaningful. Parent engagement right now is a lever we're not pulling, and it feels a little bit crazy.

Rachael Maves: I remember, Cindi, when you and I first met and I was serving at the California Department of. And you were sharing this data with me that n out of 10 parents think that their kids are at or above grade level and the reality is somewhere around. What 28%? And this massive disconnect that we have.

Rachael Maves: [speaker uncertain] Go ahead, I know.

Cindi Williams: I just say it's even worse when you disaggregate that right, like in some areas. 28% is not even.

Rachael Maves: Close, yeah, which is crazy to me. I mean just crazy to me. So when we have this massive misalignment, I know, with your support, we launched, I mean, a number of pretty big initiatives, from redoing the report cards that went home from our annual assessments, making the lexiles and quantiles more accessible online and parent friendly language, developing those pretty robust videos that now live on tools for teachers that every California teacher has access to, about how do you have these meaningful conversations for with parents. And still we have this Gap and I'd love to hear, just based on all of the work that you've been doing with districts and States, like what are two really effective ways that you have seeing people start to kind of close this knowledge Gap that parents have about how their students are performing.

Cindi Williams: So there are two areas where I'm really optimistic one you just mentioned, which is you know teachers. We've done research now across teachers and parents and students. It's called a Triad, where you can actually talk to all three and then bring them back together and have the conversation. But so we've done this both in a qualitative and a quantitative sense, and what we have found is, you know, teachers basically say: I know exactly where that child is and I'll tell you why I haven't told the parent. It's because the principal doesn't have my back. It's cu the parents going to blame me and nobody's taught me how.

So if we know,. Why, then we can start to solve for some of the why, and so I would say you know the training piece that's doable, like we created together in the state of California, the learns and unlearns. How do you show up to a conversation with a parent where the power Dynamic is equal, where you're being super respectful of who they are and you're treating them like a partner, not something to be managed right? The parent teacher conference as it currently stands in our country is pretty arbitrary and it can be as much about Behavior or a cute piece of art or a note they wrote than actually understanding their achievement. And so one of the one of the big Solutions we think is for professional development for teachers to include how you have conversations about data hard conversations if students are behind in a meaningful and productive and constructive way, and that training is something that Learning Heroes is spending a ton of time on it's. They have a FY inst Institute where principals and teachers get to go deep in this work and to do some role playing and to really feel confident that they can.

I don't blame them. These conversations are hard to ask a teacher, on top of everything else that is on their plate, to sit down with a parent and say, oh, by the way, your fifth grader is reading at a second grade level and nobody's ever told you before. That is a super hard thing to do. But we also talk to families All Over America that when they are told, they jump into action and they totally change the trajectory of that student's academic life because they get in and they create space at home to learn and they create tutoring and they create all these other things that allow for more instructional time. So I'm optimistic that the training exists, but it has to be integrated into the professional development sequence, whether that's over the course of the summer, whether that's part of onboarding for the new year, whether that's something we start to teach new teachers as they come into the profession. And then the other thing that we're seeing, that we're really optimistic about is actually using multiple measures to our best Advantage, right, so right now teachers have so much data at their fingertips you know if you're, whether you're, it's I ready or it's map growth or it's your Lexile scores that you talked about.

Like, there's so many formative things that teachers get over the course of a school year that it's okay that it is super possible Now to create a report out of one of those. You know whether it's a report out of I ready or report out of a map, or you whatever you choose that you can hand to a parent four times a year and say let's have this conversation, not a oneand done, right, but like let's have this conversation over the course of the school year because, as you know, most of the state reports come out in July, which is crazy. Right, like we've been trying to fix this one for five or six years. It's, why are we sending the state report about their child scores home at a time when they can't talk to a teacher, they can't ask a question and it's disconnected from the school year, so the teacher that they would have loved to have asked is gone and the new teacher doesn't know their child yet, and it just feels like we're disadvantaging everybody with that time stamp. But for most every state that report comes home over the summer. So, leaning into multiple measures, we can do it.

Everything we need is. There. It's just a matter of creating an expectation and a system whereby talking to the parent and engaging them as partners is something that is intentional.

Rachael Maves: Yeah, that's one thing. Usually I don't talk about Parsec very much on these podcasts actually at all but because I'm like, I feel so strongly about this piece after you had shared that data with me and I mean enough that even when I went to Tennessee, it was a now come help us here, because we have to do something about this, and one of the things on our anal itics platform is: every partner that works with us gets that multiple measures report, and we have some work to do to like from what you've taught me, Cindi. How do we put it into parent friendly language? How do we ensure that it's something that's not just filled with education jargon? Does it make sense in the way that they're going to look at it and make meaning of it? But I think it's so critically important to be able to show, like that whole picture of how a student's doing, and it's not just about this fixed point in time around Ela or math.

There's one so many other data points and then two, there's all of this really rich local formative data that should that contrast what we're seeing with that annual state test. I just think it's great work that you guys are doing and so critically important. One of the. That I' love to hear a little bit more about, too is when you're thinking about that kind of shoulder Tosh, shoulder, elbow support that you provide with districts. What do you see as some of the biggest barriers in getting them to take this on? Be and I'll frame it this way all of our Esser money is drying up right now.

A lot of states are looking at budget cuts, trying to figure out how do we continue to fund at the levels that we've been funding, and districts are having to make some hard choices. Knowing that this is such a critical piece like, what response would you have for State leaders and then also for district leaders, about the value ad in the midst of all of this that they have going on?

Cindi Williams: So the training has a cost attached to it, no doubt, and I would love to advocate for professional development around parent engagement meaningful parent engagement to still stay a part of the services that the central office and the schools and the soups you know, provide to their teachers. But I think, other than that, so much of what schools and districts can do is free right, like making the scoreboards, the pieces of paper with their child's name on them. Understandable, shouldn't be as hard as it is. And so if the actual piece of paper is intended for a parent, if that's the consumer, then making sure the consumer can understand the thing that you're creating for them. They're not looking for the margin of error. They're looking for tell me if my kid is fine and tell me in a way that I can know and understand it and do something.

If we just pressure test these documents with actual parents, which we've now spent 10 years doing and we can actually save everybody some time just by saying: here's how a parent reacts to this phrase: proficiency. There's many definitions of that word for a parent, as there are parents you ask, so being very overt and clear and accessible. Is free, but we are not doing it well.

Rachael Maves: And I think you're exactly right. We get so caught up in our tunnel vision of all these other things that to really kind of take a step back and try to come at it from a different lens, and that's where I found that partnership with Learning Heroes just so invaluable in just helping my eyes to be opened of. Oh, I'm looking at this as an educator and it makes perfect sense to me, but if I flip that and then I say as a parent, it's a whole different meaning. What question in education are we not asking currently that we really should be?

Cindi Williams: There's so many right given that I help lead an organization that is focused on parent mindsets, and what is it like as a parent to be on the other side of the? System. For me, the question is: what is it going to take for this, for the public education system to see parents as partners, not something to be managed because it takes time or because it might not have the ROI that a teacher is going to expect it to have, even though it might. But what would it take for us as a. Country to really think of parents as partners in the school system, adding value and contributing not only to their own child's ability to grow and develop but to other kids ability to grow and develop. I think they are an untapped resource, a huge untapped resource, and we have created school systems that feel very closed, like we go in the school and we shut the door.

And how do we open that up so that improving public education isn't the problem of just the people inside that building? But it's a parent problem, it's a community problem. It's it's so much bigger. Right now the situation is so much more urgent than it's ever been, given the covid impli implications on learning loss, like and we're not, as a country, really understanding the bigness of the loss like it's just gigantic. We're passing kids year to year through a system that's timestamped, whether they can learn or not. We're just going to keep giving them Ma and bees and at some point we have to disrupt that, and I think parents could be a huge part of it.

But as we look across the country, it's just a question not many systems are asking.

Rachael Maves: What you said is true: we are still hitting this learning loss that we have not recovered from. We are going to have an entire generation that's impacted into this well, into their life. That we know of, and the work that you've done with Thomas Kane around this, I mean, is pretty disheartening around what we're going to still yet see. And yet here's this resource that we haven't really explored yet, and I think it requires and begs that question of: so how do we, how do we, leverage every resource that we have in? Parents are such a vital one, and it's right in front of us. And to exactly what you said, it's free.

So I hope it gives everybody pause. It's a good one, Cindi.

Cindi Williams: Okay, thank you.

Rachael Maves: So everyone, my guest today has been Cindi Williams, CEO of Waypoint education partners and co-founder of Learning Heroes. Thank you, Cindi, for joining me today on the Getting Naked with educational leaders. Podcast.

Cindi Williams: Thank you, Rachael, privilege to be.

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This transcript was created from the episode's captions and lightly edited for readability. It may contain small errors; please refer to the audio for exact wording.