Tackling All That K12 Schools Try to Do: The Solutions (Part 2)

Diane Tavenner and I welcomed Stacey Childress, Senior Education Advisor at McKinsey & Co., back for our second episode in our two-part series on the challenges facing K–12 education and promising strategies for addressing them. In this episode, each of us made the case for one high-impact reform to address the challenges laid out in the previous episode. We talked about: reforming how schools evaluate and recommend students, unbundling the core education experience, and doing more to instill character in values through education. 

Diane Tavenner:

Hey, Michael and Stacey. Wow.

Michael Horn:

You got to say hi to both of us. This is fun.

Stacey Childress:

Hi, Diane. Hi, Michael.

The Two-Part Series on K12

Diane Tavenner:

Good to be back together with you two. This is part two of a two-part episode the three of us are doing together. The premise for this episode started when we did a two-part episode previously around higher ed, and some of our devoted listeners and folks said that they enjoyed it so much, and they encouraged us to do something similar for K12, which we are doing. So this is our second episode, and it's so much fun to be back together with the two of you.

Michael Horn:

Hopefully, our listeners are not regretting that request after listening to the first part, but we're going to be briefer this time. It's our resolution.

Stacey Childress:

Yeah, we even wore ourselves out on episode one of this series. So, yes.

Diane Tavenner:

Just to remind folks, if you haven't heard it, part one was identifying the elements of the K12 system that are the core elements and then identifying the problems with them right now. That's all to lay the foundation so we could propose solutions. Since we recorded the first problem episode, we've had some good conversations, the three of us, and really pressed each other about how we wanted to approach solutions. We ran through a bunch of different options. But I think the one we got most excited about, and where we ended up landing, is rather than trying to go through a laundry list of all nine elements. Because it's expansive, if you listened to the first one, you had to hang in there for quite a long time with us. We decided that we would each pick one of the nine to work on solutions for. And it turned out we all picked different ones.

So I think the approach we're going to take today is to make our case for why we would try to solve the element that we're picking, how we might solve it, and what solutions might be in the world already that are attempting to solve it. And in that, is there a way to unbundle it from the others to make it more possible? The other two of us will react to that and see if we have anything to add. Does that sound right?

Michael Horn:

Let's go forward with that as a plan. Diane, you get to go first, so you model what this looks like for us.

Diane's Proposal: Reforming Schools’ Evaluator-Recommender Role 

Diane Tavenner:

All right, well, I'm happy to go first. I suspect some folks might be taking some bets right now on which of the nine we chose. I am going to pick what was item number six in our first episode, the evaluator recommender. Let me just start by saying I think there is a huge opportunity. You both know I've spent the last several years trying to figure out what I want to do post-Summit. As part of that exploration, I've been searching for what I think is the greatest lever we have for change in the K12 system. I keep returning, sort of sadly and reluctantly, to assessment at the big level. I am attracted to this category because I think it's a huge opportunity.

I also think it's one of the easier things to unbundle from the rest of the K12