Rachael Maves: Hi everyone. You are listening to the Rachael Maves podcast and I'm Rachael Maves, your host. This podcast is part of the lead up to the upcoming measure what we value Summit, scheduled for February 5th through 6 2025 in Fresno, California. The summit emphasizes honoring and amplifying student voices, fostering inclusive classrooms and equipping Educators with tools for impactful change. You can find more information at Parsec education.com. Today we are talking to Diego Arambula.

Diego is the vice president for educational transformation at the Carnegie foundation for the advancement of teaching, where he leads efforts to transform K-12 education and Foster post-secondary Innovation. Previously, he served as the managing partner at transcend, collaborating with Educators and leaders to reimagine learning environments Nationwide. Diego began his work in public education at Summit Public Schools, where he was a teacher, founding principal and chief growth and Innovation officer, helping to advance personalized learning and scalable School models. He also founded GO Public Schools Fresno, advocating for Innovative education in his hometown. Diego holds degrees from Harvard and Stanford and lives in Fresno with his wife and two daughters. Diego, Thank you for joining me today.

I'm so excited to be here.

Diego Arambula: I was looking at your bio and the quick aside: two daughters: I have three daughters and my husband always says dads of daughters only dodos, but he finds dads and daughters, so welcome to the dodo Club, thank you. And the interesting part is I have two brothers and one sister. All of the boys in my generation only have girls and only has boys, and so we are. It seems like a trend in our family. Well, I don't know about you, but I love it.

Diego Arambula: [speaker uncertain] I just like it's wonderful. Yeah, that's awesome.

Rachael Maves: So like always, Diego, when we start out the podcast, we just want to be able to give you space to elevate and share your story and a little bit about your journey and why, education and how you came to your current role. Yeah, I so.

Diego Arambula: I grew up here in Fresno, California. With two amazing parents who instilled in us from a pretty young age that it was our job to try and find ways to give back and make the world a better place, and I watched my parents do this through local elected office, and so when I grew up I sort of thought that's, of course, the path I was going to go to try and create change. Went, got my degree, I had interned for a member of Congress in DC who represented the Central Valley, Cal Dooley, and so I had only seen my dad and Cal Dooley. And so when I graduated and went to DC, I thought this is how I'm going to create change in the world. And when I got to DC I realized, oh my gosh, the world is not full of my dad and Cal. And so I made a pretty hard pivot and was like, okay, now what, how else do I give back?

I'd always loved School. I started Heaton Elementary here in town here in Fresno and then went to Manchester and computech and Edison and really just thought: like th? So I love school, I love kids, I just think they're so fun. And so I thought of course the next step is teaching. And so I got into teaching and the minute I steep foot into a large Comprehensive. School, I realized that the schools that I loved and that had worked so well for me really weren't set up to work for everyone.

And the rest of my professional career since then and you Nam some of those various stops have been trying to figure out, from all of these different seats, how we ensure that schools that work so well for young people like me are actually set up to work so well for all young people. Yeah, and so you know, I tried this as a classroom teacher. I tried this as a school leader. I tried this in a district setting supporting principals. I tried this from a nonprofit seat. I tried this from, you know, a local nonprofit SE, a national nonprofit.

And now I find myself at the Carnegie Foundation really trying to work with High School Systems across the country who are trying to rethink what school can and should look like. Yeah, so that we can live into the purpose of schools. But all of this just stems back to. You know, every bit of this change Rachael is has always started with this, the charge I feel that my parents set, the Legacy that they've left, that I hope to leave for my own girls, which is, you know, if you can, you try and find ways to give back, and to me that giving back is in public education and if we can make it an engine of transformation for all young people, just what a powerful city and state and Country we'd live in. Yeah, well, and what a what better vehicle than through education.

Rachael Maves: Diego, I love that and we have a lot of people who listen to the podcasts that aren't necessarily from education and, if you would mind, I think sometimes what you just shared is key: that Education Works for some people, like the traditional models and the structures that we have work for some people and others it don't. It doesn't. But if it worked for you, it's hard to understand. Like what do you mean? Like what do you mean that it's not working for others? And if you wouldn't mind just sharing a little bit about some of the things that you've seen and the experiences that you've seen with students, yeah, so I'll tell you the one that hit me in 200, four or five.

Diego Arambula: It was a while ago. Let's just say it was a while ago. The one that hit me right out of the Geeks was this idea that when I went and was teaching, I had a chance in my very first year teaching in a large, comprehensive public high school 2,000 students and I was teaching. One of my classes that I was prepping for was an AP government course and another one was a modern world history class. That I'm going to say a regular modern world history class, and by that I mean a non-honors modern world history. It's very important for the purposes of the story to share that my AP Gov class had 26.

Students who are mostly white, asian. My regular modern world history class had 37 38 students who were almost all Latino, black, Southeast Asian. This was in Sunnyvale and from the jump what I noticed is the tracking system that existed, where mostly white and Asian, mostly middle class students were on a college going honors AP track yeah, and. Lowincome students of color Latino, black, Southeast Asian were on a different track and that didn't mean that I didn't have students going in both directions, but it meant by and large you could almost predict when you looked at the students which track they would be on. It was hard to move from one track to another. Yeah, and it was singular.

And what that meant is we had a lot of students who were not getting prepared to choose College as an option, if that's the option they wanted, and we had a lot of students who were disengaging as such. It was harder for me to meet the needs of my students when I had 37 in a non-honors modern world history class. It was hard to admit that what we were doing was tracking and choosing for young people, and so that problem existed plus years ago. Lots of folks have been finding different ways to attack that problem, but it still exists in too many places. That's. That's just one of the ways.

I'd argue that we have a whole lot of others about how learning actually works, what we ask of young people to be successful, the courses we ask them to sit in, the ways in which we ask them to sit in those courses to show what they know. There are just so many ways in which our school is set up for a system and not set up for the actual young people who go to those places. And yeah, it's. You know, we're. We're seeing this today. With lots of teachers who are not all that excited about showing up every day, even though kids are great and teaching is such an important and fun job when you're set up for success.

We're seeing that because lots of young people aren't showing up and when they do they're, they're quite disengaged. We're seeing because the workforce is saying those, the young people who are leaving, aren't prepared with the skills. I mean there are just so many pieces about what we have in school that are not set up today and. So often we just keep sort of musing forward and we just keep going with the world as it has been. Yeah, one of the things that you just said I think is key, because there's a there's a lot of conversation right now around.

Rachael Maves: You know, not everyone is going to go to college. How do we prepare students for careers too? But what you said and I think we should actually put it on a t-shirt someplace is that we're, but we're the ones who are actually choosing for the young people. It's one thing if a young person, a student, has the choice to say I want to go into this field or I want to go on this college track and feel prepared, and they have what they need, versus you're immediately tracked, whether you want that or not, into this pathway and your options immediately become less. I feel very strongly about this and so in line with what you said.

Diego Arambula: So I will try and keep this brief, but forgive me. My dad, the very first seat my dad sat in was on the freser Unified School Board. Let's see if I'm going to get these years right. He won that seat I think in mid 80s, and at that time we called it vocational Ed. Ven, I was in high school when I remember my dad saying: the day that voed classes have just as many white students as they have brown students, great. Then I can support that kind of work, yeah.

And the day that college going classes have just as many Latino students as they have white students, great. Let's support that work. But too often what was happening is in. Creating multiple Pathways, and the reality is we want multiple Pathways. Not every young person wants to go to college, nor should they have to go to college to lead a healthy, dignified life. And yet too often, this tracking, these pathways, have led to tracking in which we, as adults, are choosing for young people.

Oh, Rachael, you're really good with your hands. Yeah, let's get you in aoke, Ed, and we're seeing that you know the students for whom we choose those things. It is. It's not Equitable, and so I believe deeply that every young person deserves the chance and the opportunities and the supports they need to choose College as an option, and I believe just as deeply that some of the schools that I used to lead that at the time were college. For all that, we also made a mistake in shoehorning every student into the only way to lead a healthy, dignified, fulfilling life is going to college. I do think what we got right is ensuring that every student had that as a choice.

I hope that every school across this country could live into that reality and isn't choosing for a young person, but that we're opening a whole lot more doors and finding ways for young people to find success, happiness and. Liberation in whatever path they choose. Yeah, we could.

Rachael Maves: I feel like we could probably camp out here and just talk the rest of the podcast, because my brain is going in so many different directions, Diego. But I also want to give you the opportunity to share a little bit about your keynote address that you're going to have at the upcoming Summit, because I think that this topic is so timely and important in the work that you're leading is so significant. So maybe you could start with just telling all of our listeners a little bit about the Carnegie unit itself, why it's significant kind of laying that Foundation of common understanding and then maybe give us some teasers about why it's necessary right now that we start to rethink some of these architectures that we have in place. Man, I so wanted to camp out there, but I do think you're right.

Diego Arambula: Let's, I'll invite you back. We'll H we'll, we'll do another one. So I've spent 20 plus years trying to figure out how to run high schools in a way that better meet the needs of young people, and it wasn't until two or three years ago that I learned about this term, the Carnegie unit, which is so funny to me. I mean, I just have to say that right off the bat, because once people understand what it is, for you to only have really understood it like two or three years ago is significant. Well, and part of the reason I never understood is because when you're actually inside of the system, no one ever talks about the Carnegie unit. They only talk about all of the different ways in which the Carnegie unit shows up.

So let me first describe what the Carnegie unit actually is and, really briefly, the history, and then how it shows up and why it. As you said, it's so interesting that I didn't know about this thing until a couple of years ago. So back in the early 1900s, when the us became the first country in the world to create a high school movement. Everyone is going to go to high school. We have lots of young people moving into cities we now have a need for no longer do we have one room School houses. We have really big places with lots of young.

People and they were getting wildly experiences. Depending on where you lived, you might get really good teachers and really great experiences, but no one really knew what was happening. The Carnegie Foundation got launched at that time and created something called The Carnegie unit, which was a way to try and standardize and create equity in what young people were getting. And so it said: the way we're going to know here the things we think you should learn about, yep, and here the ways will'll know whether a young pce person has learned about those things. And it equated time and learning and it said: one unit of learning equals this much time, about 120 hours, which typically in a year is you know. That's why we've got 170, some odd your school days and about an hour at a time.

It's got to be with the credential teacher because we said well, for it to be valued, we've got to know that the teacher knows what they're talking about. This. Why we have State Testing at the end is then we say, well, we want to validate that the time you've spent has actually led to. Something, and so that Carnegie unit got created for a very Noble, important reason: to try and standardize and create some measures to ensure that all young people were getting an education of value deeply needed at the time. Yet here we are in 2024, soon to be 2025 we know so much more about actual learning science, right? We have so many more Tools in our tool belt than we've ever.

Had. What young people themselves, higher education, the workforce are demanding, the skills they're demanding, are so wildly different. Just what young people are ready for, attuned to, excited about doing, is so different. And yet we have hung on to. This amount of time in one place equals this amount of learning. Yeah, that's lot.

Rachael Maves: And so for almost 20 years I hit up against all of the vestages of the C Unit, things like: gosh, this master schedule.

Diego Arambula: If I could just find a way to break the master schedule. We at one of the high schools that I led, we move towards a more Competency Based system of education. We started just with math. We moved into all subjects where we said: you don't need to sit and learn about fractions if you already know about fractions, yeah, show us that you know that and then move to the next thing. But I still had to take attendance with a teacher of record and they and when someone came to visit, they were supposed to be in the place where that thing was happening. Yeah and all.

So how I took attendance, the courses that I put on a transcript, grades got put into those, the teachers of record, the assessments on the back end every one of those were the things I was working and budding up against as I tried to rethink. Schools and I didn't realize that all of them actually had one starting place, which was this thing called The Carnegie unit. And so when I learned that the Carnegie Foundation that launched this, our president, Tim nolles, came out a few years ago and said we brought it to the world and were ready to upend it and try and create a new architecture of where we need to go, I was sold and I was like: great, that's. That seems like the Lynch pin, that, if we can figure that piece out, that's going to unlock Educators across this country who, like me, have been fighting and fighting to try and find ways to run schools in a way that's better for kids. Yeah, and that's like the perfect teaser too, because that's that's what your keynote is all about, right, like, what are those things that we can start to look at and how do we rethink this?

Rachael Maves: And, as you're taking this lead now at Carnegie which I'm so excited about, Diego, that you're holding kind of that mantle of what that change is like, how do we break up against and rethink what high school can look like for students and learning can look like for students in assessments can look like for students? Yeah, well, and I think I don't want to give a too much of the keynote, but I'll say.

Diego Arambula: We need to rethink the Carnegie unit. Doing that is going to force us to think about what are the goals, what are the different ways in which learning happens and, as you touched upon, a critical Third Leg of the stool is going to be and then how are we signaling success towards those goals? So what are a new batch of Assessments that are reliable, that are valid, that means something to young people, that means something to their families, that means something to Educators and that also translate to the outside world, to higher education, to the workforce, and signal some of that same value, if we can find a way to capture these new. That meant something to a young person themselves, where they said this: I want to become a better communicator, and I see that doing this is showing that I'm a better communicator. And if that was equally valued by their parents, by an employer, by Fresno State, my goodness, we could really unlock motivation and we can really unlock some amazing experiences in schools. Yeah, that's right it so, knowing our audience, Diego, of people who come to the summit, we have lots of school leaders and practitioners and, as you're talking about, like really some highlevel policy pieces.

Rachael Maves: What do you feel like are some of those tangible takeaways that they'll be able to leave and either understand or apply to their context? I mean, the really exciting piece around this assessment piece in particular, is that Educators aren't alone in trying to build these, and, in fact, I'd encourage them to.

Diego Arambula: Lean into Partnerships rather than to try and build it alone. I remember when I was the in the classroom, I used to try and always build my own rubrics. I have since learned that, you know, a 20-some year old probably doesn't have some of the background to understand what a great rubric, truly yeah, and so I'd encourage Educators to not try and build these assessments on their own, but rather to lean into what already exists in the world. Yeah, two examples and I'll I'll share more about both of these on the stage, and one of them comes from a national partner. So at Carnegie, we're partnering with educational testing services, ETS, the largest assessment provider in the country, bringing us some of the tests that you know we all love to hate rightfully so, because they've. But ETS is deeply committed to trying to rethink and step into this world of how might we signal skills-based Assessments in reliable and valid ways.

So we're partnering with ETS to create a set of pilot assessments to measure communication, collaboration and gosh. I think the third is critical thinking. We're launching in five states in the spring and then they'll plan to have some of those available. So I think you know whether it's Educators finding opportunities like that one with ETS. Or I know we've got an organization right here in town for anyone who's local Imago, who I've also seen, is building out some unbelievable new assessments, leveraging Ai and really thinking about how might we provide some of this feedback on a broader set of skills in meaningful ways. And so, yeah, I would encourage any educator who's there to look around to find who is offering these and then to figure out how might I incorporate some of that into my existing classroom such that, while we wait to transform High School r large, is there something I can be doing tomorrow?

That's, to begin to Center this new set of skills to provide feedback to young people and then, hopefully, to arm them with both a better set of skills and additional information that they can share with future employers with higher education to do that. So I'm excited for anyone who's who's there to get motivated about that and to forge some of those Partnerships so they can begin using some of those assessments. Awesome.

Rachael Maves: Well, and this is this will be your second time joining us, so you are there at our Summit. What are you most looking forward to this year, as you think about the summit coming up in February? Look, this is going to be sort of a cheating answer, but it's just my truth.

Diego Arambula: I love young people. I, when I got into teaching, as I said in answer to your first question, a lot of this was about trying to find a way to create change. But the ra, the reason I chose schools is I just think kids are fun. Yeah, I think they're so smart and they're honest in a way that sometimes as adults, we like temper things and young people just say it. I've got two teenage daughters and you know, I see that every day, that they're just willing to say their truth, and so I like I. The thing I think I'm most looking forward to: I loved the student panel past year on the panel.

I got a chance to moderate. We had a student on the panel and they were amazing, and so I'm just so excited to be around, see young people, and then you know. And then my second answer is just: I love this place, I love Fresno, I love the Central Valley and. Seeing committ, committed, dedicated local Educators in one space who were really trying hard to rethink is exciting and reminds me that you know we've got so much momentum right here in the Central Valley too. Yeah, and I love, I appreciate you bringing up the location, because that's really important in such a commitment that parek has of you know we could go to beautiful locations in San Diego or the beach or Anaheim and next to Disneyland, which is always like a huge draw.

Rachael Maves: But I think if we really truly want to measure what we value and we think about the students in the valley and where some of the biggest needs are, and how are we investing back in this community I mean, that's why parek is so committed to it's we have to continue to bring it back here, because this is where the heart of some of what we're trying to do and the change that we're trying to make lives and exists. Yeah, I appreciate you highlighting that piece, Diego. Okay, as we wrap up, I'd love to give you kind of the final word to our listeners, any Sage advice, that's, to ponder anything that you'd like to leave us with. Here we sit together, December.

Diego Arambula: It's interesting that just 20, 30 minutes ago we were starting with. You know, I was grounding in 2004. It feels impossible for 2004 Diego to predict what 2024 Diego would be doing, yeah, and yet sometimes it feels really hard in moments like these to feel that change is coming and change is with. You know, national elections around us, with all of the powers that be, that can sometimes just make it feel like we're backsliding or, you know, change is really. Challenging. I just sit in a very privileged seat to get to see this kind of work happening across the country.

Looking back with you over 20 years today, in these 20 minutes, I get to see that even the change I've been a part of and the change I person personally I've gone through, and so I have such hope and optimism that what we're after is possible and that what it takes is persistence and belief. And I don't know if this Sage advice or just hopeful optimism, but I just remain deeply hopeful and I'm so proud of everyone who is continuing to just work to try and make schools better for young people every single day, and I hope we don't cave in and just sort of decide, no, this is good enough, and continue to recognize we can do so much better and we're on that path. I love that, yeah.

Rachael Maves: And what a place to do it in community together, yeah, wonderful. Thank you, Diego, for your time today. I really appreciated our conversation and we'll have to find another time to come back and continue our conversation. College and Career we'll do it.

Diego Arambula: Thank you everyone for listening.

Rachael Maves: Parsec education is hosting the measure what we value Summit on February 5th through 6th in Fresno, California. Join us for impactful conversations on empathy, engagement, hard troops and more, alongside leaders like Shaka Booker, Rich sto, Diego Arambula and student speakers like Liliana Sanchez. Tickets are limited, so make sure you secure your spot today. Get your tickets 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.