Rachael Maves: Hi, you're listening to the Rachael Maves podcast and I'm your host, Rachael Maves. Today we have the pleasure of speaking with Todd Lyle, the superintendent of Madera Unified School District. Todd is a Madera native, has dedicated 27 years to education and has been serving as superintendent of Madera Unified since 2017. He's a graduate of California State University, Fresno, with a bachelor's in history and a master's in educational leadership from the College of New Jersey. Todd began his teaching career at Clovis High School and went on to teach overseas in Honduras, in Dubai. After returning to California, he led leadership roles as vice principal and principal at Madera South High School before becoming Chief academic officer in 2015.

Todd is known for his passion for educational Innovation and is also a founding member of the center for advanced research and technology in Clovis Unified. Throughout his career, he has consistently prioritized student centered learning and academic Improvement within Madera School, and I'm excited and just so grateful to have you joining me today, Todd.

Todd Lile: Well thanks, Rachael. That is a introduction that makes my career sound a whole lot better than it's ever. Felt I it's very illustrious.

Rachael Maves: You've had a lot of different experiences in different places.

Todd Lile: That's true. In fact, it was funny when you said 27 years in education. I was like, Wow, wait a second. I think I just had my 30th High School reunion. How could that be, cuz I started in 1992, so I actually it's actually longer than that.

Rachael Maves: Oh, that's crazy.

Todd Lile: Yeah, I started as a PA professional in 1992, at my old elementary school, as a matter of fact, and in a special ed program.

Rachael Maves: Oh you're kidding.

Todd Lile: No, I think I could still teach open Court Reading if I had to.

Rachael Maves: That's so. Funny. That's awesome. I love too. That's a track. I mean you kind of almost started in a grow your own type of track before it was act like, became a thing like it is now.

That's pretty amazing, Todd.

Todd Lile: Well, one of the things that has been sort of front and center in my thought process lately is how important our support staff actually is, our classified staff, and you know I was one and when I be. When I came back to the district I started there. I was there for like four and a half years, I think, all told, and I was sort of out of Education in a formal way for half a SE, like for one semester, while I was student teaching. So I guess it really wasn't out. Just there were no dollars exchange for time at that point. Right, that was the.

That's the only time in my adulthood when I haven't had a time and dollar exchange in education was just as a student teacher for one semester anyway. The point being that when I came back to Madera because I left in 1996, like in I don't know the middle of December of 1996, trying to learn how to be a vice principal, I would never have learned if not for the support staff. It was my admin assistant. You know my the safety officers that helped some pair of professionals that helped especially the ones that were doing like the, you know, one-on-one with students with special needs it was. I mean, I just learned so much from them and then it's kind of grounding to go. Oh yeah, I started there too.

Rachael Maves: Yeah, that's amazing. I mean that's a great segue into first question that I have is: why education? I mean, clearly you got the bug early if you graduated from high school and then jumped into a, her, a position and then that's been your trajectory ever since. Why education? Why choose that field?

Todd Lile: Well, it's the family business, but that's part of it. I think you know it's it's. I think it's very interesting that you know so often in education it is the family business and you know there's the nature of nurture thing. But I think more and more I'm subscribing to the nature part of it. I think there's an awful lot of inheritance in this work and maybe it's not that everybody that goes into education, but they go into like some sort of service field. It seems there's a lot of us who are, you know, the children of Educators, who find ourselves on some level working directly with people out there in need in one way or another, and whether that's education is probably just the single profession in that general you know genre of professions that has the most availability.

And once you've gone through it right, you can imagine it, you have a paradigm, and so I grew up in a household full of Educators. My mom and dad were both teachers when I was a little kid, so I grew up hearing about the district and its history and the schools and their challenges and what the people in town were saying and the criticisms and not being able to a school bond and schools are overcrowded and the economy and tax dollars and negotiations and all of that. And my uncle was a vice principal and his wife, my aunt, who I'm still very close to, was a special educator here in town and this was her hotel. We're all here because of her. Oh, wow, yeah, and her dad was a principal and before that, a teacher. So I just was yeah, I was just sharing with someone that my living history, to some degree of Education in the city of Madera goes back into the 40s.

Rachael Maves: That's amazing. I mean very few people can track that like what you're sharing. That's pretty powerful.

Todd Lile: Well, it was pretty cool. My neighborhood actually was a pretty neat neighborhood to grow up intoo and not only was it really diverse and Multicultural you know, multi-racial and all of that, and lot intergenerational too, but there were teachers in and around our neighborhood growing up. So one of the L that I think is probably one of the more inspirational leaders in the history of this District was a former principal here, first female of superintendent, and she's absolutely brilliant and like when she walks in the room, you know the lights get brighter and the birds sing better. You know she's that kind of person. But she lived around the corter from me and I used to. I used to water her plants when she went on vacation.

You know, that was my. As.

Rachael Maves: So I'm curious, Todd, since you been there for so long and you've had family who have been there for even longer, how has Madera kind of shifted and changed in the education side? I mean now, because now you're a superintendent and you're leading this District. What have you seen?

Todd Lile: Well, I mean, leading is a subjective word, right like sometimes I feel like I'm riding out the back field holding on, for you know, just trying to get eight seconds out of it if I can't right, but it has. I mean it's really changed a great deal. It used to be the education was a pretty well-defined profession, and today we have spilled out and the edges of Education are really blurry and they continue to expand outward, right like I think that for in a large, in a larger sense, education has kind of become a catchall. It's where Services can be provided to anybody who needs them, and we continue to add more and more services to older and older people, who we do not get any need tax dollars for right, and younger kids too, for which we get no tax dollars. So we're we're learning how to, we are beginning to develop plans to interface with families not too long after they give birth, because we need them to start thinking about structuring the household, structuring you know some, or really battling back against all the forces that I think are damaging the internal structures of our own home lives. There's just so much, there's so much escapism, there's so many pressures, there's so much stress, so much anxiety that we really do need to help our families.

Think about U making the healthiest decisions they can for their children as early as possible. And then we have to think about the people who have come through the system, who were probably underserved and maybe, you know, overd, disciplined and were maybe. I think in many cases they feel as though they were undervalued and they were. They weren't as well educated or as cared for or as inspired as they felt like now, in retrospect, they needed to be. And so in a lot of cases we have created some inborn animosity with generations of, you know, young madaran that came through the system, who felt criminalized or who felt as though they weren't necessarily see, seen or heard. And now they are.

Now they're parents and they're grandparents and they're not necessarily willing partners with us. So we have a lot of work we have to do on both ends and we've got a lot of Mental Health Services we need to provide and we have extra nutritional Services we need to provide and we've got after school programs and now we've developed a community athletic and Recreation Department that provides, you know, really high quality. Youth sports right now: flag football, wrestling, basketball, we've done some golf and some bab Ruth, baseball and softball. I mean we're kind of expanding all over the place, but it's all free and it's align to our Varsity Sports. We have our kids and our coaches as part of that, because we need to get our people out playing and struggling together. There's so much we can learn from all of that right.

So we have just, you know, used to be that school was what happened from, yeah, you know, 8:00 a.m to 3:00 p.m. And there was a nurse there sometimes who did hearing tests once in a while and there might have been a little bit of special education. That happened somewhere. We probably didn't talk about it too much because inclusion wasn't a thing. In fact, we probably didn't want to. You know, some point in our institutional careers and, man, we are just so much more Dynamic and service oriented than that.

And, you know, it just seems like every time I look at maso's hierarchy, which is right here framed on my wall. We're coming up with a new way to meet some really serious basic needs so that our kids can self-actualize, and it is really challenging.

Rachael Maves: Yeah, what you said was really powerful, Todd, and I hadn't thought about it. In a community where people stay, they're going to have their experience of what K-12 education is like and then, when they become parents and their kids are going through that system, the fracturing that can create between the relationship and partnership between the district and the families, that's, I mean, that's pretty amazing. That's a area of focus for you guys and really, I mean it sounds like to me. What you're saying is: how do we start to make some repair in those places so that those parents see themselves as part of our community in the education sector?

Todd Lile: Now, is that you nailed it, I mean? So it's very important, obviously, that we create boundaries so that kids don't cross them, and when they do, there's got to be some consequences in accountability. But we want to. We want, from that point forward, to turn them back into the school. Yeah, you know, not to force them out. We want to force them back in again and we need to figure out a way to interact with those students that are really struggling inside the boundaries of school to learn how to live within it successfully with us.

I mean, that's the analog for a later healthy Community. Right, we need to be able to get them to live healthily, in a healthy way, inside of our community. Well, when they're young, that Community is the school. Yeah, and used to be that. Our kneejerk reaction was suspension and, you know down the Rope, expulsion, and those still have to be on the table. There's a time in place for those consequences.

But we need to figure out as many steps in between suspension and expulsion is humanly possible and we need to really think through the relationship between culture and behavior. And if culture crafts behavior and we're seeing a rash of bad behavior, then we need to take a really hard look at our own culture and try to understand what forces in it we can control, that we can change. So restorative justice and restorative relationships are really important and we need to make sure that we're thinking about those with our kids. Our students need that from us ethically, but then we need to think more pragmatically and understand that our parents need that too, because in many cases they feel as though somebody you know held them accountable for bad behavior but never asked them why. Yeah, and they have a life story and at their age now, in their 30s or 40s or 50s, they're able to wrap their heads around what was going wrong in their childhood that nobody asks about. Yeah, and their feelings are hurt.

You know, here these people were. That made my life more difficult, while my life was already very difficult, and nobody asked and nobody cared, and that's the sense of that's the takeaway. So what do we do about that? If we're going to be a healthier immediately, well, we have to take that on and, to the degree we can, you know, repair it if it's possible now. When it can't be possible, like sometimes we there is just Behavior that's going to H, that occurs in our classrooms and in our schools, that we just can't walk away from. We can't necessarily easily restore certain kinds of violations, but hopefully we can take those downward rather than upward.

You know, proving that we're tough isn't necessary so much, yeah, proving that we're balanced and we can. We can love kids and still be tough. That's that's more important.

Rachael Maves: Yeah, we'll love kids and still hold them to high expectations.

Todd Lile: For sure, yeah, and I think that's been the hard part in our community's history has been this EB and flow between expectations and excuses. And you know, while it's, it's never been easy to grow up in the San Joaquin Valley. It's never been easy to grow up in Madera County. You know, we're not these are not communities or a region of the country, that's, you know, well endowed with a lot. You know we, there are people here who have plenty, but there are a lot more people that just don't. And for us to be to get caught up on the excuses rather than the expectations really does a disservice to the potential of our students, means the raw material has always been there, right, it's just a matter of can we work with it, can it be shaped, and we have to have some patience to do that, but we have to have high expectations too.

Rachael Maves: Yeah, I love that. So, as you think about everything that you've just been sharing and where we're at right now and education coming still, I think, recovering from the ripple effect of the pandemic what's the one thing that really keeps you up at night, I see that we're in a revolution, right?

Todd Lile: Professionally and we're it's not, and I think the easy money is to think you know, okay, yeah, AR icial intelligence, and that's it's absolutely accurate. But we're also in a revolution right now to move education out of tradition and into things that are more clinically based in terms of Common Sense tells us that when students do X, we apply y. If they do X again, then we apply. Why? Harder and stronger? Sure, and if we're honest, looking backwards,.

That only worked for the kids that manage to stop themselves. But we also, if we look back at the time period, we used to bleed out 20 to 40% of students who never finished, and if you go back in time you know 60 years our Dropout rates and were just brutal and we accepted that it was just collateral damage in the system. The these were kids that just couldn't right. So they didn't and they moved on and the system expected that it really was built for that to some degree, or at least on that sense of potential outcome, like, well, if you can't hack it here, then they'll drop out. You know they'll, the world will sort them out. But we don't accept that anymore.

And so as we're, as we're dealing in the post-pandemic world with all of this anxiety and all of these students who don't know how to interact with one another, who are more tuned into their phones and social media and the comparative environment that inauthentically they engage in just all the time, right like looking at each other's dinners and vacations, and you know the falseness of all of that sort of you know low-level, you know lifestyle propaganda that we see out there. We a lot of people feel excluded, they feel left behind, they don't feel like they have friends, they feel criticized. Yeah. And that's really manifesting itself in a lot of really bad behavior. And it's concerning because we already had School violence that we see on the Nightly News, you know, every few weeks some terrible tragedy in some school. It seems like it's never all that far away when you learn about the population and the impacts and just feels like it could always be here.

Yeah, and just knowing that these forces are all kind of converging on this moment, right like when we know that tradition doesn't suffice anymore, we know that all this technology is creating this sense of isolation and this lowgrade animosity and this sense of jealousy and anxiety and comparison and this lack of self-esteem and this lack of friendship and lack of resilience. All these things used to come with a play-based, you know, childhood. Yeah, I just see how, like there's this race that I feel like we're up against to really figure out how to help our students, to really help our parents understand the nature of this moment, to make sure that we're as revolutionary as possible and that we get as clinical as possible, that we maintain the Traditions that make sense but we ditch those that don't. And the urgency of this just feels so. Pressurized, that it feels like if we don't get it right and we have to get it right every single day right getting it wrong once in modern America, in our schools, feels life-threatening. Yeah, and that keeps me up at night.

That giant menu of dilemmas all at one convergence like this, many cars passing through an intersection all at once with no stop lights. That's how it feels, and every day we get through those intersections without something that hurts us or anybody else. Makes it feel, makes us, makes me feel like you. How many more days can we go? We've got to just really press hard to get better and better.

Rachael Maves: Yeah, as you're talking about that, Tim, I think what comes to mind, too, is we have a generation still of adults in schools that you know, technology is a huge barrier for them. And then we have this generation coming up where, I mean, that is all they know, I mean they, that is, that has been their reality since, you know, they were Toddlers. And then I agree with what you're saying there are some unintended consequences, I think, that have come for to that for us with, as an, a society. But then it's almost like, how do we find that middle ground? And how do we find that middle ground with groups that are in such diametrically opposed positions too? You know, so it's.

It really is this amazing Clash of very Divergent life experiences that we're trying to figure out how we make something different work.

Todd Lile: You know, and it's oh, you're right, yeah, Gen X, right, we grew up in a world with, you know, just a few television channels. Yeah, and you know, we wrecked our bikes and we ate a lot of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. We drank water out of the hose, you know we.

Rachael Maves: Bal, yeah, a lot of baloney.

Todd Lile: Slurpees were really big deal. And this group of kids, they're growing up and they'll. And we have students, you know, in TK, who will never, ever know a world without artificial intelligence.

Rachael Maves: [speaker uncertain] Yeah, and they're all.

Todd Lile: And they will also never ride their bikes because they just don't. Yeah, right, so there's a, there's a sense of like, physical and personal, in Independence that they just won't ever know unless we can figure out a way to help them get there. And in all human history there'll be the first generations to not know it.

Rachael Maves: Yeah, well, and I would say I wonder too if they'll end up finding Independence even in a different way. You know, like looking for information, how quick and fast and easy that is, as opposed to having to go to somebody who potentially knows, or connecting with other people, or finding and Mining information in a different way. Now it's had a touch of a button. So I wonder, like if part of that will be, what does independence look like differently? Because I just, you know it's like the cat's out of the bag, we're not going to go back. But then what does that mean?

Going forward? And I think everyone's kind of wondering about that right now.

Todd Lile: It's interesting, isn't it?

Rachael Maves: [speaker uncertain] Yeah, that's, I think that's. It's really fascinating.

Todd Lile: A really smart guy that I get to interact with made the comment not long ago that for every piece of technology that we adopt, we get something and we lose something. Yeah, true, yeah, and you know, in human history, we, what we're losing now are things that we've never lost before. Yes, that's right, what we're gaining now are things we've never gained before, and what we're gaining is like the sense of efficiency, the sense of getting everything as fast as we can, but we're also losing a lot of human connections and in a Human Service. Education, losing the human connection feels very antithetical to the mission.

Rachael Maves: Yeah, and it doesn't feel like that in our evolutionary history we were ever evolved for the level of efficiency that we are able to get to now, yeah, and the level of satisfaction that we seem to never get to either, yeah, and it's so strange too, you know, like, because I do think even in these conversations where we talk about Ai and what that means for education and if it's going to end up replacing teachers and I just keep coming back to one of the key lessons, I think that came out of the pandemic when we had all of our kids across the United States and the world now, not having that regular human connection and only being able to learn via Zoom or whatever method was set up, what that did to their social, emotional, learning and mental health. Like we saw suicidal ideation go up, we saw rates of depression go up. I mean it was awful. So that's like. There's this weird like. So what is the middle ground?

Because it can't be this and it can't be that. But right, yeah, I love. Todd, just as you guys are grappling with all this, are there one or two things that you're finding you've had Success With or ways that you're moving forward in all of this that you feel like would be helpful just to share or think about?

Todd Lile: Well, we recognized coming. We were doing a lot of interesting research with a really large community stakeholder group, along with our board and our labor partners and a lot of site and District leaders. We were really trying to investigate what was working around the country and around the world and then the pandemic hit and we already had some key ingredients as to what was. Elsewhere. But it occurred to me at some point. I came to work every day during the pandemic.

I never worked from home, I worked right here, in This Very spot and I kept thinking: like we're burning this down, like this education is never going to be the same for any of us, like we can try to return to it the way we knew it, but it'll never really be the same and our teachers will tell us that they don't think our students are the same and that I think my children are not the same. And you know, my wife and I both have had that discussion. You know, I don't think I'm the same. After all of this I it affected us in a pretty substantial way. So we decided here we started having some pretty difficult discussions and we decided to just lean into that. So if education is going to burn itself down, you know this system has by necessity been altered to serve kids in whatever way we could.

Here we are on. We've all had so many Zoom experiences now, haven't we? And what we decided to do was try to create an environment that would. Touch our kids' hearts a whole lot more and Inspire their attendance better. And so what we decided to do was we already had some pretty cool music programs in elementary and we had an elementary PE program we were really proud of and we had just great people hired in those roles. They were just doing really good work.

You know, couple of them had been, you know, honored at the and National level for the work they were doing. This was like an area of success. Can we expand that? And so what we started to really think about was: what would it be like if we offered PE from PE coaches, art from art teachers, music from music teachers? Stem from stem teachers. And what if we were able to get kids in the library and get real books in their hands at least once a week, every week?

What would that be like if we could do that for our TK to6 students? Yeah, and with that extra time while those kids go to those enrichment. Classes. What if our teachers, what if the regular classroom teachers, could meet together and try to find ways to respond to what the kids you know are displaying in terms of being different after the pandemic? What can we do that's different, more engaging, more authentic, more intrinsically motivating, more relevant. Could we challenge ourselves with higher expectations if we had the time to do it and if it, if worked that way for other countries, why not for us?

So what we tried to do is think through a private school education for public school kids that provided their teachers with more time, and we were just thinking what would it be like to come through, you know, TK, through six, having all of those inspiring experiences? Would we have more artists? Would we have, you know, more musicians? Would we have, right, more readers? Would we have kids that wanted to be more active? You know, that's a really massive investment, Millions upon millions of dollars for tens of thousands of kids to have, you know, that experience every week, compounded over all those years of school, what would that be like in seventh and eighth grade and Beyond, yeah, and so we felt like that was really important to do, and we needed to align that to our graduate profile, which is probably a whole podcast in and of itself.

But we've doubled down on this idea of joy in school and that's what we kept talking about it as it's like reinspect into tracking all the experiences our kids are having. So they are more metacognitive about those experiences, more reflective, and we want them to earn some medals and awards that they can even wear all the way if they get in sixth grade, that it's so important that they wear it in 12th grade on their, you know, at graduation that night. Like. We want them to feel so empowered and validated about you, wearing their school colors and bringing some honor to their school and representing their classmates, that they take these experiences and manifest them in athletics and arts and activities to the degree where they feel really connected, where they feel like their Community cares about them, where they're wanted at school, where their lives matter and where they feel like they have a home away from home. And if we can't create that in our schools, then we have to, then we have to hope that our individual teachers do that all by themselves. You know, in absence of all this cultural architecture and as I've learned from several of my colleagues in the area, hope is not a strategy.

Rachael Maves: That's right, yes, that's right, yeah. So wrapping this up with our final question, Todd, what is one question in education we're not asking that we shouldn't. Be.

Todd Lile: I think a huge question we're not asking in education is what students imagine would motivate them intrinsically. We do a lot of imagining for them rather than asking them, and we keep finding that the more we talk to our students, the more we understand their point of view and especially this generation of students coming through the system. When you ask them, they'll tell you, and if you don't ask them, they'll still tell you. So you might as well might as well create the venue and pose the question: how can we do this better? What would motivate you? What would make you want to be here?

What would make you want to learn? They don't learn for their teachers as often as we think they should. From The Adult point of view, they don't. They don't work real hard for grades always, but, man well, they work hard for people they care about, yeah, and that might be their peers, that might be their teachers, that might be their school Community. But they work hard when they know that it's valuable and it feels like it makes sense and when it feels like it's for people that make sense to them. And when we try to take those things out of the equation and we make it be about standards only and about compliance only and about GPA only, we just find that does not motivate this generation of kids.

It sure as hell didn't generate. It didn't motivate me. I'm not. It's not motivating yet.

Rachael Maves: Absolutely, this sounds like the perfect next real campaign. I mean, just that question, nothing else. Just that question. What would you imagine would like? What motivates you like? Just general, I would love to hear what the kids say.

Todd Lile: With that, yeah, there's authenticity is the answer and it's just, it's a matter of understanding what that means.

Rachael Maves: [speaker uncertain] Yeah, to students, and that's going to be a moving Target, right?

Todd Lile: I mean, yeah, that's that's right. Yeah, for sure, yeah.

Rachael Maves: Well, Todd, I want to thank you for joining me today on the podcast. It's been a pleasure just to even get in some of these philosophical things with you and have talk through technology and Ai and some of that, disconnect networks and how to move forward. I really will appreciate you giving your time to.

Todd Lile: Well, no, I appreciate the opportunity and it's this is a pretty exciting time we're living in these days, so it does. You know. Ferris Bueller had it right: you have to stop, and you have to stop and smell the roses like life moves fast.

Rachael Maves: Yeah, right, yeah, that's right. Well, thanks, DD, I appreciate it.

Todd Lile: Thank you, have a good afternoon.

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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.