Rachael Maves: Hello everyone, you are-

to the Rachael Maves podcast and I am Rachael Maves, your host. Today we are speaking with Roman Stearns. Roman is the founder and executive director of Scaling Student Success, a California partnership dedicated to advancing whole child education through locally defined graduate profiles. He believes every child deserves an education that prepares them with the skills needed for a sustainable future. Roman approaches this work through collaboration, dismantling inequities, valuing local and

innovation and building systems that foster real change. As a father of two mixed-race sons, he has experienced the effects of systemic bias. His mission to him is deeply personal. Roman, thank you for joining me today. So I'm really excited to dive into the first question and just get to know you a little bit more and hear more about your story. Tell me why you chose a career in education.

Roman Stearns: It's my pleasure, Rachael.

Roman Stearns: Well, that's a good question and I'm a little bit of an anomaly, I think, within the field. I always wanted to change the system and I knew that education wasn't serving kids well. And I knew that from, you know, when I went through school and I could tell, you know, I was one of those kids who jumped through the hoops, played the game.

but didn't see a whole lot of relevance in education. And I think most kids feel the same today. So unfortunately, we haven't changed much in my 40 years of education, not enough anyway. But I thought about ways to change the system. I thought about documentary filmmaking and research and other things. But ultimately, I realized that in order to have credibility working within the system of education, I needed to plop myself down into the middle of it. And so I got my teaching credential and my master's degree. And I started teaching. I thought I'd teach for...

maybe four or five years to get grounded and then move on to something else. I ended up teaching for nine or 10. And as I was getting my administrative credential, I was reminded of my purpose in that on the very first day of class, the professor asked all of us, we went around the room, why did you get into education? Same question you asked me. And 20 people before me all said some version of for the kids. And I thought,

I must be an odd duck here because that's not why I got into it. Ultimately, yes, for all the kids in kind of a big E equity kind of way, but I got into it to change the system and improve the system so that it better served all students. And so that's been my path and it's been my purpose all along.

Rachael Maves: So in that, because you had this piece around graduate profiles in your introduction and its centers around the work that you do, could you, for our people who are non-educators that may not know what graduate profiles are, would you mind just explaining and unpacking that a little bit? And then I'd love to hear kind of the through line and connection when you think about the system, how this work is leading towards that change that you were hoping to see.

Roman Stearns: Sure. Well, it's funny because in January 2023, started to... My New Year's resolution was to be more provocative. So I'm going to answer your question in a minute, but I'm going to work my way around to it. And I started doing that by starting each meeting with a provocation, which was as educators in society, we've become complicit. Valuing what we measure.

rather than measuring what we value. And Babatunde, Lorie Parsic, took that on and he was part of one those early meetings in 2020-30. He had just stepped into this new role as executive director at Parsic. And...

And he just embraced it and kind of ran in his run with it since and has a February conference every year that is around that topic. And the bottom line is this, that to answer your question, we've been focused on a very narrow set of outcomes for young people. Ones that seem to be elevated by the media, by policy makers around standardized test scores, attendance, suspensions, a few other indicators, right? And those are important, but they are certainly not sufficient for young people to be successful. So graduate profile, to answer your

question or a portrait of a graduate as it's sometimes called, is a process of engaging local community members, bringing them together into a forum or multiple forums and asking them one simple question, which is what is it the young people need to be successful? And the answer is almost always about the same. There's some set of competencies, skills, and mindsets that sound like this.

Students need to be a self-directed lifelong learner. They need to be culturally competent and globally aware citizens. They need to be critical and creative thinkers. They need to be effective communicators and collaborators. They need to be digitally and financially literate. They need to be adaptable, have resilience, be curious, be socially responsible.

Roman Stearns: This is kind of the list of things that communities come up with and as educators we pay lip service to those things perhaps, but we don't hold ourselves accountable. That is not the purpose of our education system. And so we need to flip the purpose of our education system to truly attend to those needs that every single community that's asked this question has landed on the same like 70 or 80 percent overlap.

the same kinds of competencies. And here we are still today where we're not paying enough attention to those skills. And there is no one at the State Department of Education, I know you have history there, State Board of Education, legislature, or the governor's office that has taken initiative to support or incentivize or even encourage school districts moving in this direction.

All 100 plus school districts in California that have done this work, which represents one-third of the students in the state, have done so in spite of the system, not with support from it.

Rachael Maves: It's interesting Roman, I hadn't thought about it like this, but do you remember when the Common Core state standards were first came out and that that massive reform effort that went across the nation? And one of the things that was critical in the math component of it was the eight mathematical practices. And it was all grounded in what are the skill sets and mindsets that you need to be successful in math? And, and unfortunately,

it turned into very much like what you're saying, the standards became the primary focus and these skills and mindsets were like a, they're nice and you need to be thinking about it, but this is the thing as opposed to the skills and mindsets that you're talking about become the thing. And the standards that we have to meet are the vehicle by which we can start to support activating those, right, deepening those skills and mindsets, which is just a, it's a different way of teaching.

way of thinking about it. It really is a flip, I would say, for education.

And understanding, you know, and this is always the tricky part, is then what do we measure? How will we know that we are successful? And how do we ensure that there's a benchmark to do that across the board so that we can identify those places that need some additional support that aren't executing as well in that, or developing those as well?

Roman Stearns: Yeah, I have a colleague who often says how we teach is more important than what we teach. And I subscribe to that. You know, we can teach any subject in a way that's very kind of teacher-centered, lecture-based. Students don't, students can learn content knowledge that way.

But they don't learn to be good collaborators or critical thinkers or communicators or they don't develop resilience or adaptability. Those skills don't come from a teacher lecturing at students. Those skills come from having productive struggle with peers around challenging topics of interest.

Rachael Maves: Yeah.

Roman Stearns: You know, and ideally students doing projects, you know, through project-based learning, civic learning, work-based learning, service learning, some form of student-centered experiential learning that enables them to pursue their interests and passions and make a real impact on their communities or on society. And so serving a real kind of real world learning for a real world purpose. And we seem to have a hard time getting to that.

Rachael Maves: Yeah, well on that note, I'd love to hear just a little bit more from you as you think about the context of education as it is right now. What are the one or two things that keep you up at night?

Roman Stearns: Yeah, I mean, some version of the same, would say we're still bound up in Ed code regulations that it forces superintendents, boards, principals, others to remain very compliance focused, which flies in the face of being learner centered. And somehow we need to flip that and we need to free up leaders from being so compliance focused and being so concerned about all the different regulations and statutes that they're trying to meet simultaneously.

grant requirements and reporting requirements. It's just, it's really, it's an obnoxious amount of reporting that's respond, that every district is responsible for. So that's one thing. A second is that we are, as I said before, we've been shooting at the wrong target. You know, while the state standards are necessary, they're just simply not sufficient. And we knew need these kind of competencies and mindsets that community has surfaced in their graduate profiles or portraits of a graduate.

that those are just so core and central. And the reality is that it's not that complex. Like we know how to do this. there's nothing, there's no silver bullet and there's nothing that's missing in our research base or understanding of how to move forward. We know how to do it and we just seem not to have the will or the way to move forward.

Rachael Maves: Yeah.

Rachael Maves: Yeah, well, I.

I often talk about the things that we know that our research space that moved the needle for kids are not the fun, exciting things. It's like the slow slog, disciplined approach that leads to the greatest change. And that's hard. It's just really hard work. So I want to take both of those things because I mean, you gave two very distinct and I would say different responses to the things that keep you up at night one just around all of the Ed code and regulations.

And I will just like give you all the praise for that because I completely agree And then the other one is shooting at the wrong target. So if we take just the Regulations having been at this date I'm really curious to see what your response would be because there are some policy isn't created in a vacuum they usually it's for a reason and Unfortunately, I think sometimes we try to solve problems with policy that actually aren't so much about the policy is about the practice But it becomes a

So when you think of those regulations and the approaches that we're taking right now, what is one way that you feel like that could be mitigated, but still meeting, I would say, some of the needs that the policies were put into place in the first place?

Roman Stearns: Yeah, I think there's one seemingly relatively simple but ultimately will be very complex in its implementation solution, which is to set a vision for California education. We have never ever had a vision for California education. And any organization, whether it's PARSEC, whether it's Scaling Student Success, always starts with vision, mission, values.

And then when we get to a place where we're not sure about how to proceed or trying to make decisions or trying to build coherence, we go back to the vision and mission to help us streamline and stay focused.

Sometimes think about our education system as a pile of Legos that someone just started slapping together based on policy and like, you know, there was no, there's no instructions. There's no guidebook. There's no image of what it's supposed to look like at the end. People just keep slapping Legos on and this monstrosity just keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. And I feel like it's now at the point where it's just going to crumble, you know, because it's like, it's unmanageable.

Rachael Maves: you

Roman Stearns: what folks are doing, teachers and administrators are just like being crushed under the weight of the demands. And it's completely unfair for all of them that the state doesn't have a vision for where we're going. And so, you know, unfortunately, I don't have a lot of confidence in the governor's office, the legislature.

the State Board of Ed, State Department of Ed to establish a vision. And so with PARSEC, we're moving down a path of creating a vision for California education by students for students. So we've partnered with a bunch of student organizations. We're gonna be doing this work in September and October. We're gonna ask thousands of students across the state from every demographic.

you know, basically, what would the future look like in your ideal world? If you had a magic wand. We haven't decided on the prompts quite yet. We're, have a meeting for that next week. and I fully trust students to come forward with a vision of, for education that will, push on innovation and change and reflect a different kind of system than what we have today. And, you know, I'm not sure where that's going to go. it could be that.

powers up be embrace it wholeheartedly and say let's just run with it and let's align policy and let's you know chances are that's not going to happen knowing how adults operate they're going to say this is cute you know you know but or they'll say this is good and it's informative but now we'll do it ourselves and that's an okay solution too you know it might light a fire under the adults to say students have shown us what we haven't done and now we need to take that seriously and do it ourselves

And so think any result can, I think it be a positive result. But when we think of the lack of coherence in our system and when we think of the complexities and just all the regulations and statutes, I think having a vision for California education could help streamline all that and simplify all of it in a way.

Roman Stearns: that could give freedom, flexibility, allow creativity among local leaders to pursue it without getting so caught up.

Rachael Maves: Yeah, I...

I love the picture that you gave Roman of the pile of Legos and then somebody just putting it together. I think I would add to that one of my ah-has coming when I first started at the state level was, not only do we have a pile of Legos, but we have four or five different groups that are all playing with the Legos and have very different ideas, agendas, vision, values that

don't always align. And so you layer that in with no instructions and everybody trying to build something disparate, but it has to actually work together. It ends up in this, I would say, you know, patchwork piece. And that's where I feel like there, when I think about education, some of the complexity for me that hits is what you're bringing forward is, is just in the way that we have those foundational structures in place for decision making for

Roman Stearns: Thanks.

Rachael Maves: vision setting actually is designed to not create coherence to keep us in a place of chaos, which is unfortunate because I don't I actually don't know how we get to where you're talking about with that current state of competing interests. It's it's just an interesting dynamic that California has and some other states are designed that way too, but definitely for California for sure. I'd love to hear when you think about shooting

the wrong target. I appreciate that you didn't say, like, standards just need to have nothing to do to me, it doesn't sound like an either or to me, it sounds like what you're saying is there's a yes and here. The I'd love to hear just unpacking that a little bit of when you say that we're shooting at the wrong target. And that's keeping you up at night. What what do you see is that?

Roman Stearns: Yes.

Roman Stearns: What do I see as the wrong target or what do I see as the right target?

Rachael Maves: Well, the wrong target and then let's then let's talk about the one or two ways we can move forward.

Roman Stearns: Yeah, mean, look, standardized test scores and admissions into elite universities. Those are the two things that I think are the primary targets for educators and for some students and some parents. But I feel like those are driving us to get the kinds of results in our system that are manufactured in a way that don't serve kids.

Rachael Maves: So when you think about those two things that you brought forward, over-regulation and then, and not having a vision, an aligned coherent vision, and then shooting at the wrong target, what are one or two ways we can move forward? I know that we're gonna be doing this massive data collection from students and getting their feedback, but other things that you'd like to note or elaborate on?

Roman Stearns: Yeah, a few additional things that I would have oftentimes mentioned and sometimes they're hard to grab onto and pick up by practitioners. One is that we tend to imagine that learning only happens within the confines of the classroom, the clock or the school day, the calendar, the school year and the curriculum. You know that that's the only place where learning happens.

And that has never, ever been the case for any of us, students or adults. There's always been learning that happens 24-7 in all different settings. Somehow we need to honor and value the learning that happens in other settings at other times. So whether it's a family-run business or an internship or a faith-based leadership program or a community-based cultural center or an internship or...

after-school program or whatever, like that's, there's a lot of learning that happens and there are many, many youth-serving adults in those expanded learning systems that have an important role to play as teachers. Because we also tend to believe that the only ones who can validate learning are credentialed teachers. And I dismiss that as a reality. I believe that the math teacher is best at assessing student progress in math.

But when we start talking about the durable skills that I mentioned, communication, collaboration, creativity, et cetera, a math teacher has no more credential or credibility to assess a student's level of collaboration than an after-school provider or an internship supervisor or someone else. And we somehow have to bring these youth-serving adults into the system and make the learning that happens in other settings part of a student's learning record.

And I worry especially for equity reasons about the students who are trying to get through the day. And you know them, I know them. Kids who are bullied, kids who have language challenges, kids who are struggling with identity issues, are just really trying to get through the day unscathed. And those kids can thrive in other settings, much more so than in the school sometimes. And so we honestly need to value the learning that happens outside.

Roman Stearns: in order to outside the school, you the classroom, in order to fully capture. One way to do that is through e-portfolios and allowing students to personalize, customize a portfolio of their curated best work, reflect on that learning, capture it in the learning inside and outside and place it into a kind of a portable credential for themselves that they can carry forward beyond school, their schooling years. There's so much power in that. It's a best practice.

Rachael Maves: Yeah.

Roman Stearns: We haven't found a way to incentivize that at a state level yet. But that's an opportunity for transformational change. It also taps into the need to move towards a competency-based system of education, which many states are doing. We have some great examples in California, in Lindsay, Eureka's starting to do this work, Placer, there are a few other places, but nothing in our Ed code enables that. In fact, I just got an email this morning from a superintendent up in Eureka saying,

What kind of waivers would we need from the State Board of Education to really fully implement a competency-based system? And we're hardly even having that discussion in California, whereas other states are pretty far down the road.

Rachael Maves: Yeah, well in my last question as we wrap up our time together, Roman, and I'm curious to see how you respond to this one because we've been talking about some pretty meaty topics. What question in education are we not asking that we should be?

Roman Stearns: I probably tapped on most of them. You know, what's our vision? What do students need? And really asking students and really listening. Listening and really listening and then responding appropriately and shifting based on what students' needs are. And that's probably a matter of co-designing with students. You know, what the system looks like, what learning looks like in the classroom and beyond. How can we capture learning that happens beyond the boundaries of the classroom clock and calendar?

How can we unlock the potential of community groups and other youth serving adults to be part of a broader education system or ecosystem? And then the bottom line is on all this, I think is how can we simplify the jobs and the lives of teachers and administrators? Like they are such burden in such a way and there's good reason why teachers are flocking from the education system, like why we're having a hard time hanging on to teachers.

It's really an, it's an unmanageable expectation.

Rachael Maves: Yeah, I agree. you mentioned something that I'm going to actually have to take some time to noodle on that I just hadn't thought about before. One is, to your point that you made earlier, there are so many opportunities that we have with adults that do want to be part of the education system that are credentialed teachers. And you highlighting a math teacher is truly best positioned to discuss and to rate competency.

in the math standards, but if we bring in these skills and some of the competencies that you're talking about around critical thinking and collaboration and all of those pieces, that any adult who's also performing those well and knows what they look like can be a partner in that work. just, I hadn't thought about it quite like that before and it's something I'm gonna have to think about because we have so many different states and I think California is moving in that direction where we're creating additional opportunities

for that push in of experts, adults that are bringing in other expertise, but I don't think there's that formal alignment around we can be partners and validators of what we're seeing and helping develop and build within students around these skill sets. I haven't seen that codified yet.

Roman Stearns: Yeah, we tend to put up boundaries that are non-porous as opposed to porous ones that enable flexibility, freedom to adapt and adjust and innovate.

Rachael Maves: Yes.

Yeah, I appreciate it today, Rome. This was a great conversation. Thank you for joining me today.

Roman Stearns: it's been my pleasure. Thanks so much, Rachael.

Rachael Maves: A friendly reminder that Parsec Education's updated early bird sale for Parsec partners is live until September 30th. Partners get 25 % off tickets for the 2026 Measure What We Value Summit happening February 4th in Fresno, California. Don't miss this limited time offer and the opportunity to experience our incredible MC Brandon Lee, Season 15 winner of America's Got Talent. Secure your tickets now at parsecsummit.com.

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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.