Note: Some of the audio and video transcripts have been lightly edited and condensed.

Media 1 (Video): Edited transcript version of this ECS award presentation interview clip

Mike Kirst: Really, we were in the fourth inning of a nine-inning ballgame when we got rained out by Covid. So, as we move to the future this is what I’m working on now.

And the keyword, I think, is “capacity building” of local educators. [That’s] because states, of course, can’t mandate, regulate—we can’t even incentivize very well–what teachers and principals and school people do together. Teachers have to work together on this.

But the state’s role has to be to mount a massive infrastructure, if you will, around the ideas of infrastructure that we are now seen in the country on how we can build that capacity through state leadership. And in doing so I’m looking at other countries that have done it “statewide” –where you just don’t have pockets of full implementation of challenging curriculum, but you scale it all the way up.

Some of those places I’m looking at are Ontario, Canada (which is a very large expansive state), Singapore, some of the big “states” in Australia, and some of the U.S. states that did large scale before [Covid-19].

This capacity-building has many aspects. But as people talk to me in other places, they say, “In the U.S. you go hire experts to get curriculum improvement now often. We build it into the districts; we  build it into the everyday, into the professional work of the teachers through expanded professional development.”

So, I can’t describe all of this to you now. But you’ll be hearing more from me about all this and about big thinking, big infrastructure, big capacity building, [and] statewide scale-up. You’ll be hearing [more] about it in the next months and years. And I look forward to working with ECS on refining this, tailoring it to states, and working with you all to make a better future for education.

Media 2 (Audio): Mike Kirst: “The paper ends very vaguely…”

(35 seconds)  

 

Now, the paper ends very vaguely. And so, what is the limitation of the paper is that it essentially ends with a plea for a detailed plan with very little detail. In effect, the collaborative has gotten into trying to do that for a specific item, the California Mathematics Framework. And so, I’ve learned more now than I have in the paper about how hard it is to do this sort of thing. So, I have a lot more guidance on how states can do this. And the paper just ends with a call for action.

 

Media 3 (Audio): Mike Kirst: “I wish I had more emphasized the “accountability/capacity-imbalance policy trend over many years.”

(39 seconds) 

 

What I call Elmore’s law–which is that when you raise accountability–like the scales of justice–you need to raise capacity building. California just designated a bunch of special schools, gave them some money, but they ratcheted up accountability but with no real systematic capacity building.

So, it’s just a common mistake: lead with accountability and never getting around to capacity building.  It’s a lesson for mass scale up and it’s a lesson generally for the accountability/capacity-imbalance trend of policy over many years.