Will Austin, CEO of Boston Schools Fund

Mike speak with Will Austin, CEO of Boston Schools Fund, discusses the state of education and unique ways to improve the quality of childhood learning.

Episode Transcript

(00:06):
Welcome back to What's at Risk.I'm Mike Christian. Will Austin is the
founder and chief executive officer of BostonSchools Fund. Will served as a math
teacher at Roxbury Prep and was nominatedfor Massachusetts Teacher of the Year. He
subsequently served as co director for RoxburyPrep and then as Chief Operating Officer for

(00:29):
Roxbury Prep for Uncommon Schools, overseeingthe school's expansion from one to four campuses.
Prior to Roxbury Prep, Will servedas a fellow at Steppingstone Foundation.
A lifetime resident of Boston and agraduate of Boston Public Schools, Will earned
his ab in government from Harvard Collegeand a master's degree in education from Tufts

(00:51):
University. We're here with Will Austin, founder and CEO of Boston Schools Fun.

(01:14):
Will, You're an educator at heart. What inspired you to follow that
path in life? Good question,Stott, Thanks Mike, good to see
you. Appreciate the chance to talkto you today. You know, I
think it starts for me where itstarts for everybody, which is everyone believes
that all kids deserve a good school. And I think for me and probably
for you, Mike, and I'dguess a lot of listeners that either you

(01:38):
or someone in your family for youhad access to a great school and that
changed trajectory of your life and maybeeven even your family's life. And so
no, it's definitely the case forme. I grew up in Boston,
and as much as I can saythat I had very very fortunate opportunities to
attend great schools that given the opportunity, and you gave me and my sister

(02:01):
the opportunity be the first FAMI membersof ours go to college. I also
grew up and live in a citythat's highly segregated by race and class,
and so I know and remember thenames and faces of kids that grew up
on my street went to the sameschools as me up until point and didn't
get the same opportunities. And soI think that that sense of inequity was

(02:24):
really burnt into me at a reallyyoung age. And so after graduating from
college, I just knew that Iwanted to be committed to schools and specifically
making sure that all kids, particularlystudents of call up, especially disadvantaged kids,
low income kids, had access togreat schools because they were possible and
available for them. And so that'swhy I became a teacher. That's why

(02:45):
I was a principal, and that'swhy I started Boston Schools On in twenty
fifteen. Tell us a little bitabout Boston Schools Fund, how came came
about its mission, the scope ofit today, and from my standpoint,
why is it even needed in alarge public school system like Boston. I
think it sounds kind of reductive totalk about the naming an organization, but
it sounds kind of simple. Butwe're called Boston Schools Fun because we really

(03:07):
do believe in schools. And Ithink part of the conflict is that there's
no shortage of money, good ideas, good people that have committed to try
to make a lot of better schoolsfor kids, especially in Boston. But
what I think we've learned over thelast many years is that switching and changing

(03:30):
a system from the top down,as it were, was really hard and
doesn't necessarily have a great track record. And so through my experience working with
schools and seeing schools and different typesthat they were effective, I became really
convinced the idea to develop system quality, you know, more access for kids
throughout the city, efectively marginalized kidswas actually through the creation and expansion of

(03:53):
more good schools, and so reallyfocusing on individual school quality and kind of
asking ourselves of a question of ifwe have a good school or school that's
near good, how do we growit? How does it serve more kids?
How does it get what it needsto sustain and grow over time?
We're saying to ourselves, how canwe get even just one more kid to

(04:15):
go to good school in Boston everyday? And we do that through working
schools? That idea for Boston schools. Fun did that occur to you when
you were a principal or teacher ordid that that something that evolved over time
as you were experience getting more experiencein the education field. I'd like to
say that it was some some wellconceived idea or plan. It was a

(04:39):
little bit of an accident. Honestly. I was at Roxbury Prep for thirteen
years, and then coming from goingfrom a teacher to a principal, then
actually expanding the school to multiple campuses, I began kind of the difficult work
of growing, expanding something that wasworking and serving more kids. And even
though that work was very different,cult and imperfect, it was very clear

(05:01):
to me at the time that notjust some charter schools, but also some
boss public schools and also some parochialand private schools had the ability to add
kids and continue to be popular andget good results for kids. And so
I think from an experience level,intuitively it made sense to me and say
where that met opportunity was that.You know, the joke that I've told

(05:21):
people is that I didn't leave schoolfor thirteen years. We didn't go to
conferences, we didn't do panels.We just worked every day to make sure
more kids of color from Boston wereready for college and beyond. That's what
we're supposed to do. And itso happened. There was a conference in
Boston twenty fourteen and I was askedto speak at it, to talk a

(05:42):
little bit about the city and whatwas happening in education, And frankly,
I had a little bit of anaivete asked one of the conference organizes,
you know, what do you wantme to do? What am I supposed
to say here? And they said, both just make a point, say
whatever you want to say, talkabout the city, blah blah blah.
And so I spoke on a panelabout the state of education, talked conceptually
about some of the stuff we're sayingwe're talking about right now. And and

(06:08):
I funders recruited me Carol Lynch's passedaway, Peter Lynch's wife, the Foundation,
in their executive director, Katie Everett. They thought I was onto something.
And at first of frankly blew bluepeople off. It's like, it's
like I have a job, aday job running schools. We're in high
school busy. And the more thatI kind of itched that, I realized

(06:30):
that there was something there because atthat time there's a lot of transition in
this city. We had no superintendentof the time, Carol Johnson was just
retiring. We had to do mayorwith Mayor Walsh. At that time,
Governor Patrick had just announced that hewasn't running for governor, and so there
was this real sense of like kindof openness to reform and innovation. And
I happened to kind of fit intothat space, and so wrote a business

(06:53):
plan Nights and Weekends. Took abouta year, a year and a half,
and we said in twenty fifteen,yeah, that's terrific. And I
know that Peter Lynch and the LynchFamily Foundation has been keenly focused on education
on many, many different levels indecades. Now, why is there such
a difference in the quality of educationat different schools, especially those with black,

(07:15):
Hispanics, special needs kids. Well, I guess we'll start big and
then we'll get small. And sothe two big ideas that drive inequality in
schools in America are race and systemicracism. That's one. And then secondly
is the way that in America we'vechosen to provide schooling, which is a

(07:36):
highly decentralized way of schooling. Wehave I forget the exact bond, it's
definitely in the ten thousand, it'smaybe thirteen thousand different school districts in Amica.
In Massachusetts we've round three hundred andfifty one school districts for about a
million kids. Right, Maryland hastwenty six for a million kids. And
so with that level of decentralization,you have variants. Right, We've chosen

(08:01):
to let local communities in local schoolsmake decisions. And although there's benefit to
that because you have kind of localauthority, you have folks that are close
to the kids and close to thecommunities and know what their needs are,
it also creates a lot of areasand absent government checks can go in very
dark places. What I also describeis what logen pro to happen. And

(08:22):
so this decentralization allows for this inequality, and in a lot of ways bakes
in the other features of the systemthat stack the decks against folks who aren't
white, So residential segregation, differencein income levels, access to healthcare,
those are kind of baked into thegeography of our schools mostly too. And
so when you put those two factorstogether, you end up in a situation

(08:45):
where the quality of the schools offeredvery very dramatically from town to town,
neighborhood to neighborhood. The funding isit reflective of that? Is, you
know, how does the fund schoolsas they as their quality maybe evens out
or down. Does the funding godown at the same time or just closely

(09:05):
behind them. So, like alot of questions, this is it's easier
to answer locally than nationally because whenyou talk about things like teacher shortages,
funding, et cetera. Come backto the theme of variance, things are
very different depending on what state you'rein, right and what community you're in.
So I'll kind of answer your questionsrelates to Massachusetts. We spend a
lot of money on public head inMassachusetts, definitely one of the leading states

(09:28):
in the country. Boston spends themost money per people of any major city
in the United States, more thanNew York City or in Chicago, and
so there's a high spend. Theother side of that, of course,
is high need, right, andso part of the reason why we have
high pupil costs and bosses because whenwe have high cost of living, got
to pay teacher salaries, got topay for the gas to the buses.

(09:50):
But also because we have high needsstudents in urban populations. And so all
I have to say is that moneydoes matter accounts. When you look at
research across the board, you dodefinitely an indication that increased in spending definitely
helps student ow comes. That's true. Equally important, of course, those
height spending and how that how thoseresources are allocated and what they're spent on

(10:11):
really matters too. So Boston School'sFund basically is a funder correct make funny
and things we did you attributed toschools that you that you've looked at.
Maybe just give us just a shortoverview of the number of schools you work

(10:35):
with and what's the scope of Bostonschools fun today? Yes, beside in
twenty fifteen, at this point,we've worked with about fifty one schools in
the City of Boston. Put akind of a denominator on that. There's
about two hundred and twenty five publicand private schools in the City of Boston,
and so work about fifty one schoolsover time. Those schools combined,

(10:58):
you know, serve a population ofover twenty thousand kids. And so when
you think about the schools we've workedwith and the ones we have impact on,
we're talking about essentially a third ofthe school age population in city of
Boston. Big of an area asa low or lawrence and that group and
really intentional. Most of that groupof schools is you know, in every
neighborhood, every grade span definitely reflectsthe highest needs students in the city as

(11:20):
well. It's really important that we'remaking sure that marginalized communities have greater access
to resources. And the thing Iwould say lastly when you think about impact
is that the thing we really payattention to is of those schools. Those
schools over time have continued to addstudents and grow their enrollment even with the
pandemic, and so those schools continueto grow and serve more kids and maintain

(11:41):
quality. And although the outcome datehas been more challenging to kind of follow
in the last couple of years acrossthe pandemic, we can say from our
past data are pretty confidently that thatgroup of schools has higher high school graduation
rates, has higher MCAST scores,has higher attendance. And so we've kind
of begun to do what I talkedabout doing individual school levels. How do
we take more of what's good andsustain that quality as of those I know

(12:05):
you're very processed driven in Boston schools. Fun, what is the measurement of
success or the measurements of success?I'm sure it's more than one. How
do you measure your effectiveness? AndI won't even use the word impact,
but just how you're able to showthat you've made progress, not just on

(12:26):
a quantitative basis, qualitative basis too. Yeah, I mean, so I've
touched on some of the quantitative stuff. There's a bunch of different indicators around
kind of school quality and outcomes thatwe really track on an annual basis and
want to continue to see your schoolsand proven, and of course those are
a lot of times, it's alsokind of leading indicators to that what are
some of the things schools are doingdifferently or along the way to kind of

(12:48):
get their So that's kind of touchedon the quantitative piece. On the qualitative
piece, the thing that we've reallybeen really aspiring to and I think we've
made some impact on, at leastbased on the last couple of years,
is that we really want to makesure that public education is a central kind
of plank of public discussion and publicattention in the city. And so we

(13:11):
see as really critical to our missionthat folks in power mayor superintendent, school
committee, media, elected official,community leaders, parents feel accountable for the
system to be improving and serving kidswell. And you know, qualitatively,
you know, everything from the workwe did on stimulus dollars, the work

(13:33):
we've done on enrollment, some ofthe work we've done now on evidence based
curriculum and classrooms. On a qualitativefront, I can definitely point to things
where I feel like we've helped changedthe conversation. There's been a lot of
talk about changes since COVID, sincethe time that the kids were not going
to school, maybe even for atwo year period of time that was remote

(13:56):
school that had a dramatic impact,and I think that then led to,
you know, some of the mentalhealth issues we hear about. And then
also a third impact is that alot of kids just going to school,
yes or not just in Boston,it's across these I saw staff the other

(14:16):
day to ten percent of the studentsjust don't go to school anymore post COVID.
What how do you think about thosethree areas from Boston's perspective. Yeah,
I mean that's a that's a bigquestion, you know, and I
would say that what is good andbad about schools is they are enduring.
Right. We've had basically the sameapproach to schools in America for really last

(14:39):
one hundred years, with some shiftsalong the way. You know. I
DA obviously being the biggest one forkind of documenting the rights and students of
special needs, things like Title nine. But about one hundred years ago or
so, when we invented the conceptof a teenager, right, because they
didn't really exist before, like onehundred years ago, they at work.

(15:00):
As soon as we stopped making themdo that, we started doing this thing
we call school, which largely consistsof, especially in urban areas, large
buildings, graring calendar eight to two. A lot of that stuff's kind of
enduring. And it is interesting tosay that that essential characteristics survived the pandemic.
Right like we went We didn't goback to something different. We kind

(15:22):
of went back to the same structures. And so a lot of ways the
pandemic did not affect that we arestill fundamentally doing school the same way.
Not a criticism, just an observation. What has changed One is that generally
we've talked about n work, whetherit was the initial COVID response or the
academic approperty work we supported, isthat it's not that the pandemic necessarily changed

(15:46):
things. It either revealed or acceleratedwhat was already happening. So let's take
mental health, children's mental health,which at large was showing characteristics of concerns
going back eight ten years, right, and I'm going to separate rant,
but it's very curious that a lotof those characteristics map the proliferation of social
media and smartphones. So put thataside for a second. But there were

(16:08):
concerns from national data, local datathat there were mental health issues raising up
a teenagers before the pandemic, andso obviously the isolation, the trauma of
the interruption just accelerated that and madethat significantly more rampant. The learning piece
pretty clearly has been documented all overthe place. There is some political debate
about to call it. Is itlearning loss, is it interrupted learning?

(16:32):
Is it academic acceleration. We cancall it all a bunch of different things.
But the kids missed a bunch ofschool and they didn't learn as much
stuff as they were supposed to doat the time they were supposed to.
And so there's been obviously a lotof effort intention to focus on that and
on the last piece around the absenteesand piece. And I share your fascination
with this mic, and this issomething we've been tracking here for the last

(16:52):
year or two something. I don'tknow what you can of call it the
habit, is the social contract,I don't know the right term. But
kids just miss a lot more schoolnow. And it's not specific to one
area. I mean, we justdid it a little bit of an analysis
that showed that the chronic absenteeism andurban areas like Boston aren't the rates of
changed haven't been that different than thestate written large right, wealthy communities like

(17:15):
Brookline or Wayland have seen their chronicapps and teism also goes to the roof,
and so there's something very concerning anddisturbing about that about what do we
do to kind of rebuild the kindof social habits of kids just going to
school and feeling like they should.That's I think that's only becoming clear to
policymakers that this isn't uplift. SoI don't really have a great theory about

(17:36):
what the intervention looks like on thesocial emotional piece and the academic piece.
You know, there's obviously been aton of money by the federal government,
additional money by the state government,and a lot of innovation and work done
by schools to do that. AndI think we'll know later which intervention is
more effective more so than others.But there's no shorter money or effort going
at least the first two on themental health side, specific to Boston schools

(18:00):
fun, Is there an effort emanatingfrom you because you add so much value
to the schools with are you focusedalso on that at Austin School's fun in
addition to what the BPS is doing. Yeah, man, we talked a
little bit more at some point abouthow we work with schools, but a
lot of what we're trying to dois trying to figure out where's the place
we can add value, and specificallyin the case of social emotional health.

(18:25):
One thing we did do is witha set of our grantees in the first
year when kids are back in school, we funded the support and training of
teachers and new social emotional curriculum.I think the social emotional piece is really
tough in schools because it's a relativelynew field. We already asked teachers a
lot to do. There's only somany counselors in every single building, and

(18:48):
so a lot of what at leastwhat we supported around an evidence based approach
is really teaching folks how to properlyuse curriculum and training and such, but
also frankly, like how to trioge. You know, there's a certain to
fall into the jag and of education, but you know, one of us
subscribe to this concept of response tointervention, which is that you have to
train folks in how to intervene asbest they can given the severity or need

(19:15):
of the situation. So there aresome times like a phone call home is
kind of what a kid needs,right, They don't necessarily need a referral.
They interesting their play group, andso training folks and kind of that
kind of triage or escalation of supportis really critical so that you can meet
the needs of all the kids.Yeah, so you bring up a good
point, and I'm sure you'll agreethat the parents have a big role in

(19:38):
all of this. How do youencourage, educate, exhibit to parents that
it's not just sending the kid toschool every day. They really have a
responsibility in this. Is there afocus on that? Yeah, there's two
things that's say about. The oneis that that's a core part of our
diligence process with schools, and solike would like to say is that when

(20:00):
we decide to work with the schooland we made the judgment that we think
are a high quality school, that'snot a function of like a rubric or
a school cut. It's a decisionmade through a process, right, And
through that process, one of thethings we really look for is families.
What is family demand for the school? Like, right, what is it?

(20:22):
Because that's usually your best kind ofrevealed preference, Like are people picking
it right? Like, look,look, at things like climate surveys and
that sort of thing. In pastdiligence, we've actually any viewed parents before
kind of asked how do you pickthe school and what do you think of
it? Because really, at itscore, we're trying to figure out what
a good school, a good hospital, a good organization, anything is that
you're looking for alignment and so evenif families don't know the ins and outs

(20:47):
of every school schedule day, theymay not know as much about the curriculum,
do they understand the essence of theschool and can support that with their
child and their role. Schools needto do that. On a more systemic
level. We do operate a websitecalled Boston School Find Them Boston School bind
aout org if you want to checkit out, which families can use to

(21:07):
learn more about schools and also navigatethe school enrollment process in Boston across all
sectors, whether you want to applyto Bostel for school, or maybe put
them for a lottery for Chad toschool, or send an application to Catholic
school or for all your child andMECO, whatever options available to you.
It helps walk families through that becauseat its core and not to like get

(21:30):
a little too abstract here, butpart of what in this decentralized system we
have in American Massachusetts around schools isthat families execute choice, right and the
most basic form of school choice inAmerica is families buying a house they can
afford to in a community with highproperty taxes, so they have well funded

(21:52):
schools. That's the way we've choseninstructure most this stuff. That system leaves
out low income folks, right,it does because they don't have that same
capacity, they don't have that samesocial capital. And so in an environment
where families can choose where they sendtheir kids to school, whether it's through
Pps's lottery, which has been choicesystem fifty years, or another type of

(22:17):
lottery, you're giving a proxy forchoice. And I don't know, but
you might, but like I alwaysfeel better about something I pick yeah,
and I think that that's right.Well, if I look at it the
other way, just from a macroperspective, looking at those schools that don't
have the opportunity or or there's justnot there's not a way that the parents

(22:38):
can make the choice, or they'renot able to make the choice, or
they're new Americans, or for avariety of different reasons, and then they
are the schools that often get passedover, and obviously then the quality starts
to fall. What do we doabout those schools? You're focused on quality
and the schools that are working,schools that have potential work, What about

(23:00):
the schools that don't have any potentialbut still have a group of kids that
are going there and are serving agroup of families. Yeah, it's tough.
I mean, what you've kind ofdescribed is not unlike kind of a
doom loop you'd hear about from economists, right that you kind of get into
the spiral can't get out of.You know, One is that we have
to have some modesty a what wecan do. You know, we are

(23:21):
not the government, we don't havea gigantic staff. We have to kind
of pick what we can do strategically. And so part of the reason why
we focus on the work we dois because the Boston Public School District,
the city, and the state actuallyhave an immense amount of time and attention
on the schools you're describing, right. So in Massachusetts, over the last
thirty years, we've kind of adopteda system where schools that are struggling academically

(23:48):
having performance issues, having staffing issues, having funding issues. You know that
they will get intervention from either localschool district or the state. Federal government
provides sponds for these things. Theseare really complicated and difficult problems to solve.
We're not experts on that, andso, you know, I think
what I'd like to say is thatwe're adding value which allows the system to

(24:10):
allocate resources to other issues, oneof which being these kind of chronically underperforming
schools. So, will you've hada successful career in education and you've accomplished
a lot, what are you mostproud of? Tough question, Mike,
I don't know. It's hard toput that into a factor a figure accomplishment.
I think the thing that's really greatabout working in schools is you work

(24:32):
with people and you build relationships,and it's really hard to sum that all
up. And one thing that Iremember being really surprised by when you work
in schools and you work with teachers, you do a thousand things a day,
and it's really hard to even accountfor your day sometimes. And I

(24:55):
was at an event well five yearsago with a former student of mind who
I won't embarrass with their name,and she was accepting an awards she won.
She's a very successful professional right now, and I didn't know that.
In her little speech she was goingto thank me, and I'll tell you
when she started to talk and tellthe story, at first, I didn't

(25:18):
remember what she was talking about,because there's a lot you do. And
she was my student in middle school. We stayed in touch. She came
back to school because she was havingtrouble with a financial aid form, and
so I had a couple of minutesbetween meetings. I made a couple of
bone calls with her, talked toher mom, you know, did a

(25:40):
couple of things. She took therest, and I just kind of moved
on with my day. And Ionly found out much much later that like
how dire it was that, youknow, she was going to not be
back in college for the next turn. And so she said something when she
said something like she I kind goingto ruin it. But she said something
like, it's not that he helpedme, it'said he gave me what I
needed to help myself in the situation. So I don't think I don't think

(26:03):
you'd asked more than that. Asan educated I think that's a wonderful way
to end this discussion, well,thank you very much. Will Austin,
CEO of Boston School's Fun, thankyou very much. Thanks, Mike,
appreciate it. I'm a big thankyou to our producer, Ken Carberry of

(26:38):
Chart Productions. What's on your mind? Send us your thoughts, comments and
questions to What's at Risk at gmaildot com. That's one word, What's
at risk at gmail dot com.Thank you, expect