Rachael Maves: Hi, I'm Rachael Maves and you're listening to the Getting Naked with leaders in education podcast, 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 Andy Rotherham. Andy is co-founder of and partner at, Bellwether, a national nonprofit that exists to transform education to ensure systematically marginalized young people achieve outcomes that lead to fulfilling lives and flourishing communities. Rotherham also works in Bellwether's policy and evaluation practice areas and serves on the Virginia Board of Education. He occupies a unique place in the US education sector, working across silos. He has been appointed to senior policymaking roles by Democrats and Republicans, works at the intersection of research in policy, media and practice, and is a longtime champion of heterodoxy, empiricism and pragmatism in education policy.

Andy, thank you for join me today on the Getting Naked with education leaders podcast.

Andy Rotherham: Rachael, thanks for having me. You didn't. You didn't tell me the name of the podcast before I'm not over. Am I overdressed?

Rachael Maves: Nope, you're just perfect.

Andy Rotherham: App excited to be here. Thanks for having me.

Rachael Maves: I'm excited for this conversation, Andy. I have to. I have to start out by just saying I'm a huge fan. I'm trying not to Fan girl and being able just to connect with you during this time, but what I read in your bio really is part of what re deeply resonates with me is the way that you write and connect about education policy. It transcends party lines. It gets to what I feel like is the raw kind of meat of the situations and the context and education we should be talking about.

And I'd love to start out just hearing from you what drove you to education. I mean, why, in all of the fields and possibilities, why did you spe specifically choose that career and focus?

Andy Rotherham: Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, I've worked on some other issues, but there is something special about education. You know, I went to college and I went thinking I was going to study one thing and I think it was like well-intentioned people who knew me were, you know, was resource economics, and they're like, oh, you like both of those things, economics and natural resources and I quickly learned like the career paths there were great but they weren't career paths for me and so I transitioned. And I didn't transition to education. I studied history and political science but when I got out of school and I was, I'd been working which I guess what you would probably Now call like Dei back then we called it team building and inclusion in that space in sort of an outdoor wreck setting, and I'd work. I'd had at that point, classroom experience.

I'd done a few things because I started to think about, like, what do I actually want to do more seriously in my career? You know, education there's a couple reasons that it's it's extremely appealing, was appealing to me. I mean, one is just its importance. It's how Society transmits knowledge and values and so forth, and that's that's hugely important. And then also, which is so important for the flourishing of people, and in things I had done whether it was teaching, whether it was outdoor wreck you saw how you could use various kinds of Education to really help people realize that in general, their own limits are much more than what they may think, and how to sort of how to flourish and realize their own potential. And so that was one reason so like and I come from a family where people have been involved in education different ways, so I'd seen that, so that was important to me.

And then the other reason, simply it seems like a very fixable to me. So where I grew up you know I was, you know we were just comfortably sort of middle class, we had good public schools, and it was. It was very apparent to me that right, you know, because my parents did a job of instilling this in me that right nearby, not far away at all, there was people who didn't have access to good Public Schools. They weren't any different than us, they just lived in a different community, and that really, like, left an impression on me, and so I've always felt like this problem is much more solvable. You often hear the word education intractable, and I feel like it's just exactly the opposite it, this stuff is much more solvable. So that also attracted me to it was like: this is this seems like a field where all else equal.

We can do better and if we actually change some of the alll SQL things, we could probably do substantially better. And I think there's plenty of evidence to that, and I that's why I still, you know, come to work every day excited to work in this sector.

Rachael Maves: So tell me a little bit about what that progression looks like for you, because I mean, it sounds like there were some things in education that were instilled that you saw at a young age. But is there, like, are there points where you caught like a different bug, like what Drew you into the policy aspect of it? You have, like in know, wide array of experiences and places where you're really focusing your time serving on a state board of education, contributing to podcasts and the what's written about education, like how did that all kind of come about and capture your interest, where you felt like this is the space where I can make the biggest impact?

Andy Rotherham: I don't know, I guess when we call this Getting Naked, I should be honest like I that's a hard question, because if people who know me like I'm con, like the guy I used to lead Wilderness trips for he still hears from me now and then I'm like, hey, maybe like this summer you want me to like take one group b, that'd be really like. I still like Miss that and I'm like you know I'll take, I'll take a group of kids canoeing. That'd be fantastic. You know, like if he needs a, if when he needs a pinch hitter, I'm like I'll do that. I'm always tugging on his sleeve. And you know I still teach.

I still teach when I can. Right now, with being back on the state board, but right before I went on the State Board, I was actually about to teach a Hopkins I was really excited about. I enjoy that, I get good feedback on it and so forth. So a little bit I've had trouble having that one like this is the thing. And so policy is appealing to me because of the leverage and the importance, and I've like long been a believer in the power of that. Done right, government really can change people's lives for the better.

I'm not one of these people who thinks, like, you know, government is inherently you know, inherently going to be, get in the way or be malevolent, and so policy, there's just a lot of power there. How do you actually get that right? How do you leverage things? And so that's where I break my pick most of the time. But, like those other things are still very attractive. So I didn't have that like inflection point where I was like, oh, this is not for me.

It's more, I've tried to carve out different things and you see that, like, look, I'm not a professional journalist but I've been a columnist for time for us news. I still do some stuff with the 74. So I've tried, like to sort of blend aspects of things that I enjoy and be able to sort of synthesize those, and so far I've been able to, I've been able to do.

Rachael Maves: I love that and I love that you stay connected to the kids. I mean it's what we do right, like it grounds us and all that we're thinking about and the why behind it.

Andy Rotherham: Yeah, I mean it's a weird thing kids like and it may be just the point I'm I'm in an age where my kids are about to, you know, be heading off to college and so forth. So my wife and I are reflecting on this a lot, but I mean they're just fantastic, and not just your own kids, just young people. And generally I like having our friends kids around and so forth. I like having my daughter's friends, you know, when they're around they bring so much energy and there's a lot of challenging things in teaching. Always it's a difficult job. There's some uniquely challenging things right now with where we are, but I feel like we unell just how much fun it is.

And one of the things that's sort of a drag about our field is as you move into other things, they tend to take you away from the kids and that's a bummer because they're like young people. They just they. It's fun to listen to them, to how they're thinking about things and so forth. It's fun to help them and they, just they have an energy that, at least in my exper experience, you just don't get anywhere else. That's why when I'm, like you know, frustrated or saying and energizing things, just go sit with a group of kindergarteners and read is like, yeah, right, that will make you feel better about whatever, like professional frustration, whatever you're having right, and there aren't that many place where you get that kind of, that kind of energy.

Rachael Maves: Yeah, I love that. Well, I think. On that note, I want to Circle up with our second question, which is really, as you're looking at this educational landscape and polic landscape within education and everything that we've been through in the last few years and the ripple effect that's continuing to have, what keeps you up at night, what are the things that are just those persistent thoughts in the back of your head around education that are worrying or sit on?

Andy Rotherham: Yeah, such a good question. I mean, boy, what? So a couple things. One, the fact that this is solvable. One of the things that does keep me up is: I mean, there's divis. We should talk about that.

We can talk about those and sort of legitimate areas of disagreement, but there's just so much sort of false noise and so forth. So one of the things that just does keep me up is how much of this is solvable and yet we choose, for political reasons or whatever, not to solve it. And then like, more immediately, obviously and I think I'm not the only person who this is Weighing on is, you know, the pandemic was a disaster for a lot of kids. You see it in the data, you see it anecdotally, and that it's both in terms of classroom, mental health, all of it. And you know, when I got into this field, if you had told me that we would have a disaster like that and people wouldn't like come together at some level and really like all hands on deck to solve it, I would have been. I would have said, no, that's not that.

I don't think that's how it's going to play out, like people will sort of a crisis, like that. And yet you look at the reaction. I mean there's some people working really hard. Obviously there's lots of stuff that happen subsurface and states are doing great stuff that never makes you know the news. But like you haven't seen that we still can't have an honest Reckoning on. People are still arguing about school closures.

We can't have an honest Reckoning about with the Daya, you know, with the Daya show and so forth, and that's a problem. And I'm I'm always, like I've always been a believer in that sort of basic idea, that slesinger idea that you everyone gets their own, can have your own opinions about things, but you don't get your own facts. And so our inability just to ground in a set of facts on a lot of things and then people can disagree about like what those facts where they Point what they tell us we should do as a policy remedy. But we're in this sort of Posta world where we can't even get people aligned on sort of the magnitude of a problem and that is that's, that's.

Rachael Maves: Yeah, and it's one of the like ba basic premises of improvement, science and continuous Improvement, right, if you can't see the current reality and acknowledge the current reality, then there's actually no way to be able to move forward. So this barrier I think exactly of what you said and you mentioned about this noise that I think distracts us and keeps us from having the right conversations. Tell me a little bit more about that. What do you see as that noise that's particularly loud?

Andy Rotherham: Now, yeah, and I should, we should know like it's easy to get into, oh my gosh, education. This is like a broad problem, right, we are having trouble, like as a society, with this, and so it's whether it's people arguing that, like you know, January 6 was some sort of like peaceful demonstration or, like you know, mostly peaceful, the famous, mostly peaceful, you know, protests on CNN, like all of it like we have, we're having trouble as a society with this, so I think it's important to like acknowledge that it's not. Somehow. Education is like auty: we can't get our act together. This is a broader problem. It's.

It's infecting us too, though, and we have to figure out, in our part of the world, how do we sort of resist that contagion. So, I think the thing, though, to answer your question, I think one of the things we're just not good at here that causes this is education is about both empiricism and values, and we can flate those things an awful lot. We weaponize them a fair amount, and I think that's like you know. So, for ex school, choice is a great example of this. Like to me, it's a perfectly legitimate position to be for someone to say: you know what? I just think you know school districts are really important, small D Democratic institutions, and you know it's people that we should, that we should have basically that residential assignment and so forth.

This is important. I'm against school choice. That's fine. It's also fine to say, hey, you know what? I think in a society like ours, in a liberal Society, people should be able to make a range of choices and the schools shouldn't have a monopoly and we should have a broad range of free choice because I think the market will be a better. That's legitimate as well.

Some of those things you can look at data and so forth and you can falsify some of those things are simply, as value, judgments on what you think is the proper relationship between family and school and state and so forth, and we can flate those things. So you have these debates, like we're seeing it now with these education savings accounts, where people it's too early to really know a lot of things about them but everybody position on it is basically based on whatever their priors are right, and there's sort of a loud acrimonious debate instead of, hey, we might be surprised, let's kind of see how this goes. There's reasons for concern, there's reasons for optimism, and so I think, and you see that, on sort of issue after issue, this conflating and like we're having a reckoning on it around reading right now, where people have finally been like, wow, okay, for decades we infused reading instruction with, just you know, rampant politics, and that is a problem in ter. In terms of effective reading, instruction has diminished literally millions of lives, particularly for kids with special needs, but more generally, kids who struggle to learn to read, and that was because we conflated, like politics and empiricism in some really dangerous ways. And so that, I think, is we. It is okay to have values and people shouldn't shy away from those.

It's okay to also use empirism. There's sort of different Well Springs that you pull on to think about things, but it's important to disentangle them and like, what actually are we talking about here? And I think we and that is a place where I think you know you see this in different sectors and different ways, but this is a place with education is, given the nature of it, where I think this problem is more acute than in some other sectors.

Rachael Maves: Yeah, and I think what you said earlier in my mind when I think about the noise it really is in this debate of ideas, the acrimony that comes along with it, that there's not this discourse around. Let's talk through, let's push each other's thinking and we may not end up at the same place, but we can agree that we're going to see how this plays out. It's not. That's not just not where we are in so many different areas within our society. I think you're right, it's not just education, it's just it. This is just where we are and the kind of the water we're swimming in right now.

Andy Rotherham: I think so and I think it's hardening in some ways. That should sort of worry us. When I first got into this business. You education was one of these weird issues, you'd be in rooms with lots of people and everybody would kind of joke like most you know. It's like the bar scene from Star Wars reference. You know people would be like this is like.

It's like everybody here they don't agree. It's like what a weird assortment of people and they don't agree on much, but they agree on this issue. Here's what we can do and you see that same energy in some ways. On climate, now people are really trying to work across like L how do you, how do we actually address climate? You've got, you know, folks from sort of Industry, environmental groups trying to figure out how to. You don't see that same energy on education as much.

Anymore. People are much more, you know, in their, you know in their trend es sticking their heads up now and again and that's that's a problem. Because you need that, you need that cross fertilization. You need people who, like, can disagree on a bunch of stuff but can agree on and come together on certain things.

Rachael Maves: Yeah, so, as you're thinking about just kind of next steps, in light of some of the issues that you're highlighting, what do you think are two really practical ways that we would be able to move? Forward.

Andy Rotherham: Yeah, the big one. I encourage and I try to get our like: read widely. If you are not reading regularly stuff you disagree with and reading widely in the sector, you're going to struggle. And I'm I'm struck how often I bump into people and they have like very narrow takes and you're like, well, because they have't they're, they're they're struck by stuff that's actually in some way sometimes relatively common knowledge. That's the first thing and I encourage people AR. Like you know, I mean myself I consume like a lot of you know substacks and things like that all the major newspapers.

But also, like you know, I subscribe to the nation, I subscribe to National Review. Like you just have to, you know reason magazines doing some of the best coverage on some things right now. And you have to, you just have to read like super broadly and I think that is a that is a problem in our sector. It's very insor. That starts with the way we train teachers. It starts with how information flows across the sector and it confuses people.

I mean you've seen this whole conversation about book bands, you know, is like incredibly confused and in part like everybody's in their Echo chamber, right. Yeah, that's the. That would be the first thing. And then I think the second one is everybody, we all are in our own bubbles in different ways and so forth. And so just making an effort to like get outside of that and you can't just do that by reading, and I think it's important. You know they.

You know they say fish don't notice. You know the water they swim in or whatever, which isn't as a fisherman I can say it's not quite right. They certainly notice when they're out of it. But this idea that you have to also this, the sector, the formative experiences of most of the people in it, are fairly similar, right, and that cuts across lines of difference, generally good at school, sort of certain social markers, educational markers, professional markers, experiences, all that. And you have to, especially because we're talking about parents and communities and so forth. You have to actually just get out there and talk to people because often their preferences, their desires, first of all, are not uniform, not like you can just listen the right way and here they're all over the place because they're humans but also are often very different from whatever sort of received wisdom in our sector is.

So I think that's the, that's the second thing. And when I say that, sometimes it can be heard like oh, you should change your mind or you should. You know, it's like stick your finger in the air. It's nothing like that, like it's totally. I mean people should believe what they want to believe and like if you know, have a vision for school in society that you have deep commitment to, you should work to bring that into the world. It's not that like you might be wrong, it's more just it gives you a better understanding the landscape, we operating, what other people think and so forth.

Like, again, you can be against school choice, that's fine. But if you're out there saying that there's not a lot of support for school choice, like that's something that's actually that's, that's an empirical point. It is also falsifiable. If you look at the surveys particularly, you know black Americans, ESP, spanic Americans in particular, very strongly supportive of school choice. Again, that, is that a reason to be for or against it? Not necessarily, but it's certainly a reason to understand sort of where, however you come down, fits on the on the landscape.

So, like that, I think, is it's just. I think there's no substitute for that. It's unfortunately not encouraged right now. Every everything, if you look at the way money flows in the sector, the way Prestige flows in the sector, all of it encourages people to be tribal, be in their trenches, to mix metaphors, all that. And I think we need to figure out some ways to break out of that, because it's a complicated, diverse country, you know, yeah, way more complicated than you probably heard on MSNBC or Fox News or Twitter or whatever, and so you got to get out there and figure that out, yeah, and I, what I appreciate about what you're saying is that it comes back to that very human component of like coming to conversations with curiosity with one another, where, okay, you're not seeing it from the same lens that I am, but tell me more about that. At least help me to understand how you're thinking about it, and we may not agree, but at least I'm trying to see and understand a different perspective other than just I think exactly what you said: the echo chamber that we tend to put ourselves in and I moved from in this sector from like more of a pluralistic approach with curiosity about what others think, and then we all have to kind of figure out how to navigate this to much more of a sort of coercive posture, and that's like on all sides, where it's less, like it's okay for you to think differently than I do about some things.

I mean, I think we all have like our bright lines where it's like okay, wow, that's like over the line, but like most education questions don't actually take you to that. They're more, you know, reasonable people can disagree, kinds of things, and but we've lost that ability and it's much more. You know how do I? You know you have to sort of Bend people around to your way of thinking of it.

Rachael Maves: Yeah, before we go to our final question, Andy, I one of the things I'd love to hear from you is, when I talk about policy with people that are in the trenches our district superintendents, principes, Educators it really is typically meant with a little. You're already smiling like this. You know, and I understand where that coming from. I remember when I first kind of had my eyes open to this intersection of policy and practice and wanting to be involved in it, and I understand the disenfranchisement that comes with feeling like this policy keeps getting put down on people and it's not implemented well. And, as you're, I really do feel. Like, at this National perspective of watching policy across states, do you have a couple of places that you would say wow, from a state level perspective?

Ive here are some policies that were put into place that really did move and change the needle for students and student outcomes.

Andy Rotherham: Oh yeah, I mean look and you can go back some of the greatest hits in the 90s States like Texas and North Carolina. Again, like this is how everything gets political, you know. So there was some problems with some districts in Texas, I think, like Houston, like cheating on their graduation rates, and people then extrapolated that oh, Texas was all nonsense. No, Texas did really well. Florida like an amazing success story, albeit for a lot of people politically inconvenient one, because you know Jeb Bush was the governor and so you had this whole, you know, cottage industry and like how do we run it down? But if you look, like at the results on NAEP and so forth, and there's been like lots of studies, Washington DC like again Michelle re, it became all about Michelle Ree and there's been so little attention.

There was just an article the other day in the newspaper, in the, literally in the Washington Post, so the hometown newspaper of Washington DC, and the article was like, wouldn't it be great if we could pay teachers $100,000 and have a system to remove low performers and reward High performers? And it's like, yeah, gosh, where is like, where is that Eden? Like place? Oh right, that's Washington DC, because system right, like, and so I think there's, there's tons of examples. I would keep an eye on Arkansas. There's, there's aspects of what they have done that I'm not a fan of, but it's a big, ambitious education package and they're they're serious bets I would keep an eye on.

I would keep an eye on that. Hopefully, in Virginia very soon we're going to have a new accountability system. Most people don't realize we don't actually have an accountability system in Virginia, which is one reason there's a lot of confusion about school performance. But again, how do you implement that like? Implementation is everything and we are not. You know, Michael Barber, you know, used to call it deliverology, still calls it, you know, and there is something to that like, and I think we in this sector, because of the way it's on the politics, work delivery and implementation becomes an afterthought and people get antagonistic about it, because it's really frustrating to be on the receiving end of poor implementation.

We just put a report out of Bellwether on science of reading with exactly in mind like the implementation of Science and of reading is going to be really important to whether or not teachers are allies or adversaries, and so that is super important. Yeah, I think there's tons of examples. I'm actually really struck, Rachael, like you go, everybody runs around education like, oh, nothing works. I hear people all the time: we spent 30 years and, like you know, I have some thoughts on why people probably say that stuff and some of it's probably sincere belief and some of it's probably careerism. But, like, empirically that's just not the case. You can look across a range of domains and like: and I don't understand.

You don't see that on any other issue, right, I don't see. You know the climate. People don't say it's hopeless. They talk about what we can do. You know I do a lot of work personally to raise money for cancer research, which is hard and slowo because Cancer's awful and difficult. But you don't hear nobody raises money for cancer by talking about it's hopeless.

You talk about, like, the successes and what's and what's been gained and how much, and on some cancers the trajectory has changed and so it's a weird thing. It's a really weird thing and it's just, it's just wrong we've made, have we? And I get the argument. If you say we've made progress, people like: go, you're minimizing all the problems. You can hold both those ideas in your head at the same time. There's lots of problem that's why I come to work but there's also been, like enormous success and I think to have an effective politics, you have to balance both of those.

Rachael Maves: [speaker uncertain] That's right.

Andy Rotherham: He wants to be part of a movement that's like the nothing works and we're bad at all. This movement. That's crazy.

Rachael Maves: Yeah, and I think what you said is so right. We talk about that often, as we're, you know, looking about change management within schools. We actually have a massive body of research that says what works over time and it hasn't shifted. If we look at data, we create effective plc's a lot of what Hattie's work is but, like to be frank, it's not the sexy work, it is the disciplined systems. Structures, like having those routines set up and then building our pedagog in capacity to deliver high quality instruction. Like we know this works and you're getting in something really important.

Andy Rotherham: So, like we talk, you hear about the states and like everybody's, like you know, wants to what you know whether, if their team blue, they want to attack you know Iowa and arason, if their team read they want to attack, you know Massachusetts and New York. And all this and behind the scenes, whether it's at NASBE or CCSSO, there's like groups coming together across political lines working on implementation, doing all this work like these, you know, when you said the plcs, that's what made me think. All these like where serious people are coming together and trying to solve this stuff but we are so driven in the media, the stuff that they are interested in, so forth. It's all the sort of conflict narrative rather than like there's, yeah, there's lots of just really good work going on, it just never, you know, it just never gets a lot of attention, except, you know, except by the Nerds people follow, like. Include myself in that like people follow this like really closely, but it's just not, you know, you just don't see a lot of these, a lot of these good news stories, yeah.

Rachael Maves: So final question, Andy, and this is just meant to give any of our listeners something just to ponder on as they leave the session: but what's one question in education that we're not asking that we should be, I think.

Andy Rotherham: More generally, I think the pandemic actually opened up an opportunity for this. Like a lot of stuff we do, we just do it because it's it's the way we've done things, and I think we should be asking some fairly fundamental questions. I'm not like an unschooling person, like we should just get rid of school and all that, but like there's there's a bunch of things that we have in place. I'm thinking like, for example, like high school exit exams, which you know we were told by civil rights groups, like, yes, like they will be some externalities to those, but in general they make diplomas worthwhile. We don't actually like maybe, like we haven't been able to test that, because you can't give half the kids an exit exam and not the other half. Yeah, pandemic actually created a natural experiment with that.

We stopped doing those and so we're actually be able to compare over time and Dan goldaber and I are working on a project like this we can start to compare teacher. You're seeing a lot of research around teacher lure. What happened with changes there? So it's not one question. I think what it is like a whole set of counterfactuals that it behooves us. We, you know it behooves us ask, and what that gets to is then we think about, like redesigning high school, like mostly we're redesigning based on people's various theories and you know quasi religious beliefs about this stuff, like we can actually do it more empirically.

I think there's like. So I think there's like a whole. I'm not trying to dodge your question by not giving you the one thing. I think it's a whole set of sort of counterfactual questions that it behooves us to really look at, because we ask kids to do a lot of stuff. It's a not insignificant part of lives and it behooves us to ask some hard questions about how kids are spending time and how we're, how we're thinking about that. Again, I don't think it leads to some of the placees where people are like, oh you know, get rid of school, whatever.

But it would lead us to potentially think differently. There's some schools that do that, but they tend to be more marginal edge cases and to think more generally. So that's one and then the other one I will give you. I do think we have to think completely differently about the teaching job. People don't want to work s to two, 7 to three, five days a week. We've got to figure out some ways to make that job more flexible and I actually think it seems counterintuitive.

It's bit odds. We can actually expand the day and the experience for students and give teachers more flexibility if we're creative about it, and I think that thinking about that a tremendous opportunity to make the job more sustainable, more engaging. People want more flexibility in their lives. Than 12 employment right now.

Rachael Maves: I love it well, my guest today has been Andy Rotherham, co-founder partner at Bellwether. Thank you, Andy, for joining me today on the Getting Naked with leaders and education podcast.

Andy Rotherham: I appreciate it. Hey, thank you for having me. I really do appreciate the opportunity.

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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.