An Interview with Rick Hess: Education Unbound: The Promise and Practice of Greenfield Schooling

Greenfield Schooling

3.4.10 - Michael F. Shaughnessy - The term “greenfield” typically refers to wide open areas with significant opportunities to invent or build. In real estate, greenfield refers to a piece of previously undeveloped land, one that is in its natural state or used for agriculture.

An Interview with Rick Hess: Education Unbound: The Promise and Practice of Greenfield Schooling

Michael F. Shaughnessy

Eastern New Mexico University

Portales, New Mexico

1.      What is "greenfield schooling"?

The term “greenfield” typically refers to wide open areas with significant opportunities to invent or build. In real estate, greenfield refers to a piece of previously undeveloped land, one that is in its natural state or used for agriculture. Not surprisingly, it’s not a term we hear often in the context of schooling. For all their virtues, schools in the United States are not noted for their embrace of creative problem solvers. Indeed, most educators labor in bureaucratic, rule-driven school systems that owe more credit to the practices of early 20th century factory management than to any notion of how to foster great teaching and learning in the 21st century.

Greenfield schooling requires scrubbing away our assumptions about districts, schoolhouses, teacher training and other familiar arrangements so that we might use resources, talent and technology to support excellent teaching and effective learning in smarter, better ways. This approach presumes that our biggest obstacle to improving today’s education experience is not a dearth of “best practices” but the creaky, rule-bound system in which they unfold. The greenfield reform strategy seeks to create an environment that invites new solutions to surface and provides the infrastructure necessary for such ventures to succeed.

2. Why don't you think "best practices" are the answer?

The presumption is that improving schools and systems is primarily a matter of additional spending, measuring achievement, coaching educators, and applying additional expertise. Best practices assume the challenge is primarily a technical one of program design, professional development, and implementation. However, these best practices fail to bring noticeable reform over and over again.  Such failure isn’t necessarily linked the sensibility of the reform, but often it’s due to the barnacles that encumber today’s school systems, including inefficient human resource departments, intrusive collective bargaining agreements, outdated technology, poorly designed management information systems, and other structural impediments—all problems that must be address at a systemic level.

3.      How does a “greenfield” approach to school reform differ from a “best practices” approach?

Greenfielders do not reject the value of reasonable best practices, whether instructional or adminstraive, but they question the assumption that the best practice mind-set will be enough to overcome systemic obstacles—and express doubt that best practices can prove fully effective, given the shape of today’s school systems, colleges of education, and educational ecosystem.

The greenfield strategy is both more modest and more ambitious than the best practice approach. It is more modest in that it doesn’t imagine we will “fix” our schools in the next few years—or the next few decades—but instead treats school improvement as an uneven, ongoing project. It’s more ambitious in that it does not simply seek to improve schools but envisions the continuous emergence of better ways to deliver and support teaching and learning.

4.      So what are the essential elements for greenfield schooling?

The key here is to create supportive, dynamic environments for creative-problem solvers to address our changing education needs. In doing so, we must remove barriers, both formal and informal, in order for would be-entrepreneurs to begin problem-solving. Second, greenfield creates opportunities for great providers and ultimately services kids well only if quality is all-encompassing—focusing on helpful input and output metrics. Third, an entrepreneurial environment relies on talented individuals. Finally, the availability of financial capital to support promising venture is crucial to their long-term viability.

5.      We seem to have a "fix it now" approach without any long term planning for what the world will be like in say 2020 or 2030. Are we all shortsighted, or is the technology simply increasing faster than we can cope with it?

Interestingly, there's a funny tension here.  There's both a "fix it now" mentality and a vague conviction that we need to anticipate and then plan for the future.  The problem is both that our patchwork fixes tend not to satisfy and that we have real difficulty knowing what the world will look like in 2030.  It's not that we're bad at predicting the future in education-- it's that we're bad at predicting the future in all walks of life.  It's not like the big brains who did the huge AOL-Time Warner merger a decade ago weren't thinking about the future.  They thought they had a sense of what it would look like.  They were mistaken.  Same for so many of the exuberant dot-com investors in the late 1990s. 

The trick is that our usual modus operandi for predicting the future is either to romanticize technology and ignore real-world constraints (think the Jetsons) or to just extrapolate forward from present trends (think of Francis Fukuyama arguing two decades ago that we are beyond the age of ideologically-fueled international tensions).  A greenfield perspective is skeptical that anyone can predict the future, and focuses on creating conditions where a diverse mix of problem-solvers with different visions are all beavering away.

6.      What are the formal and informal barriers that hinder entrepreneurs from what greenfield schooling?

Formal barriers are laws or rules that make it difficult or impossible to launch and expand new ventures. These include statutes that prohibit or limit the number of charter schools, restrict alternative licensure of teachers and administrators, or require lengthy and extensive textbook-approval processes that only industry giants can navigate or afford. Informal barriers are the political, operational, and cultural routines that make it difficult for new ventures to gain a foothold or pioneer new practices. Most ventures face both kinds of obstacles. The extent and variety of barriers force entrepreneurs to compromise their models and slow their efforts to win allies and appease enemies.

Greenfield laws provide equitable funding for charters,  streamline requirements for prospective teachers, and lift legal requirements that make it hard for new providers to compete, to name a few.

7.      You extol the efforts of various entrepreneurs- KIPP, Green Dot and the various charter schools. Is this the road that you think education should go in the future? How does school choice fit in a world of greenfield schooling?

These ventures are very effectively serving their students.  They benefit from autonomy that allows them to focus intensely upon a particular mission and ethos, the ability to insist upon strong behavioral norms, a talented pool of teachers eager to work in these schools, the fact that students and parents are choosing to become members of the school community, and the fact that they the education vision is lodged in a coherent organization that is insulated from the political push-and-pull that buffets districts trying to serve a wealth of competing needs.  The chartering mechanism makes it much more possible for coherent, focused networks of schools to emerge and expand.  At the same time, qualities like autonomy and the teaching pool may or may not continue in the present form--states can restrict charter autonomy and the TFA-heavy pool of teachers upon which these schools rely may eventually run thin.  It is not that these schools have any special sauce; rather, they have used charter schooling to create the kind of coherent schools that rules, regulations, and political demands make so difficult for school districts. 

That said, these ventures are only one narrow slice of a world of greenfield schooling.  All of these school models are relatively conventional.  These schools have chosen to focus on doing simple things really well.  They have not opted to reimagine the teaching role, lean heavily on new technology, reinvent the schoolhouse, or try to address challenges in fundamentally different ways.  This is not a knock on these schools.  I think they're terrific. But they should be seen as one small step into a greenfield world.  In that sense, school choice can help create room for new schools to emerge and for families and schools to form coherent communities marked by shared vision.  This is a good and useful thing, but it is only one component of creating a greenfield environment.  Just as KIPP or Green Dot are two examples of what greenfield makes possible, so the ability of families to select one school rather than another is one element of the flexibility and customization that greenfield can make possible. 

8.      What are the problems that you see with NCLB-style accountability?

While the test-based metrics of NCLB-style accountability have an important role, their utility shouldn’t be exaggerated. There is real peril in overreliance on student assessments, especially the crude tests, the simplistic performance measures, and the narrows focus on reading and math in grades 3 through 8.  To start, such an approach targets too narrow a range of excellence.  Second, the emphasis on thresholds of student achievement fails to recognize the specific value that schools or educators are adding. And, finally, the single-minded focus on these narrowly circumscribed student outcomes means little attention is page id other kinds of measure that more fully reflect the value of different providers—whether that is providing high-quality data systems or helping districts fix broken human resource department.

Smart quality control doesn’t always lead to simple “yes/no” decisions about whether a school or product “works” but provides a floor for gauging product quality and guides consumers in determining the performance and value of their options. The answer begins with the realizing that not everything can be measured by the same set of metrics.

9.      What kind of metrics do you believe should be used to determine school quality?

Quality-control metrics should focus on outcomes, but those outcomes cannot, and should not, simply be reading and math test scores. Metrics need to fully and accurately reflect the work and value that recruiters, tool builders, school builders, support personnel, and school staff deliver. Bad or incomplete information, whether in the hands of parents or educators, will lead to poor decisions and too often excuse mediocrity.

Unit record systems, which track student learning over time and with records that are linked to schools, teachers, and providers, allow decision makers to gauge performance and use it to hold educators and providers responsible. Performance is most usefully judged not merely by seeing who has the highest-achieving students but also by determining whose students are making the greatest progress over time. This emphasis on “value-added” assessment, when coupled with data systems that track individual students from year to year, provides the building blocks for rigorous outcome-based accountability.

10.  You discuss the New York Center for Charter School Quality in the book. What made their approach such a departure from the norm?

Former chief operating officer Matt Candler explains that with $40 million at its disposal, the Center “would not protect weak schools. In fact, we pleaded for school leaders to self-police and put pressure on one another.”  The Center’s quality-control strategy had three key components. The first was to first seek strong candidates; the second was doing early, initial quality screening; and the third was to support and nurture new ventures. After the information session, interested applicants would fill out a simple technical assistance application. If approved, they were eligible for $10,000 worth of free start-up advice.

The Center encouraged the most promising candidates to apply for a larger, more intensive, $35,000 planning grant. Candler explained, “We were willing to lose the $35,000 investment in a school if during that grant period we learned a school was not up to the challenge. . . . $35,000 was a small price to pay to keep a bad school off the street.” Once schools were approved, they applied for $50,000 start-up grants, and the founding team was introduced to similarly situated “teammates,” providing a network of mutual support as they tackled the operational and instructional challenges of launching a new school. This strategy enabled the schools to avoid logistical headaches that plague so many charters and to focus from day one on delivering high-quality instruction.

11.  Rick, you know I owe you a steak and a beer, but I still have to ask this question- what about the ever increasing number of students with exceptionalities, special needs, disabilities, whatever politically correct term you want to use....how are our future entrepreneurs going to address their needs?

This is a terrific question. Today, our solution has been to promote mainstreaming and differentiated instruction, essentially asking all of our teachers to find ways to juggle more and more responsibilities and demands. We keep making the teaching job more complicated.  I am dubious that we can find and train 3.4 million teachers to excel in this manner.  A greenfield perspective presumes that there are ways to build knowledge that will permit us to more effectively diagnose and serve children with particular needs and that we can devise new tools and train teachers accordingly. 

However, translating research into consistent practice and getting away from compliance-driven special needs systems requires schools and providers that are able to focus relentless on doing certain things well.  Today, a big district may employ hundreds of special needs teachers, many of whom may have conflicting views on the research, desirable diagnostic practices, and appropriate interventions.  That incoherence is embedded in systems and schools that are charged with serving a raft of students with different needs and who will benefit from different kinds of school cultures.  The result is fragmentation and a lack of focus.  

A greenfield environment in which it is easier for providers, schools, or anyone else to commit to certain strategies can make it easier to serve students effectively.  I would argue that this is particularly promising when it comes to students with special needs or unusual gifts, as one-size-fits-all schools today typically wind up shortchanging these children in their default tendency to focus on basic skills or the median student.  

12.  One of your chapters is on Talent-and rightfully so. It seems we need talented teachers, leaders, principals and entrepreneurs--yet there seems to be a scarcity of these talented leaders--and some are fickle--schools are in this "unending race to find talented, qualified candidates." How does this factor into "greenfield schooling"?

You’re right, Mike. Our schools are in a constant, unending race to annually recruit and then retain some 200,000 plus teachers. We still assume that we need to fill the hiring quota with talented 22-year-olds who will line up for teaching jobs that they will hopefully hold into the late 2030s or 2040s. That is not the way most college-educated 22-year-olds approach the workforce today—especially not those who are the most energetic or have strong academic backgrounds.

We need to leverage the strategies used in other fields to recruit from other sectors. This entails pioneering staffing models and harnessing technology to allow educators to more effectively serve children, more fully exploit instructional tools, and wrestle with questions of school and system design. One important part of this is developing hybrid positions that allow teachers to remain in the classrooms while building skill sets and gaining experience in other contexts.

13.  How has New Schools for New Orleans sought to attract teachers in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina? What lessons can be drawn from this approach?

In the Katrina aftermath, New Schools for New Orleans founder Sarah Usdin reached out to partners such as The New Teacher Project and New Leaders for New Schools and took steps to help make their models work under especially chaotic circumstances. NSNO functioned as “a one-stop shop” to help the programs avoid the fragmentation inherent in serving dozens of standalone schools and especially exacerbated in New Orleans, where half of the local schools were charters. NSNO also managed to lower costs for each provider by giving free office space and subsidizing a portion of staff costs.

Former NSNO CEO Matt Candler points to NSNO’s program for nurturing new schools as an obvious example of how greenfielders can boost the likelihood that new schools will have the leaders they need. He notes, “Our School Incubation Program, a 12- to 14-month residency-based training program that prepares promising educators to open their own charter schools, is designed to recruit talent from the rest of the country and to train bench players in the strongest local schools to speed replication efforts. . . . Ours is, for now, positioned to train more new founders than successors in existing schools..”

14.  What are some of the limits of traditional philanthropic support?

The philanthropic market for educational entrepreneurs lacks many of the elements that make for success in the capital markets of other industries, such as clear definition of success and good performance information. Given the dearth of good data on providers, and the near-absence of data on cost-effectiveness, funders have limited information available when making investment decisions.

As a result, donors are frequently tempted to spread their available funds thinly among multiple ventures, embrace outsized personalities, jump on the bandwagon of the latest fad, or rely too heavily on people they happen to know and which schools they have seen. As one funder told me, “In the absence of good-quality data, relationships matter too much.” All of this adds up to investments that do less than they might to seed greenfield.

15.   How is venture philanthropy different from traditional philanthropy, and what are some examples of venture-minded philanthropies?

Some leading “new” philanthropies, like the Gates, Walton, and Broad Foundations, have attempted to adopt the venture investment mind-set to the social sector. Funders have begun to weigh criteria like scalability and financial sustainability more heavily, have taken seats on nonprofit boards, and have requested regular performance updates. This marks a shift in thinking—though it’s a development that has also encountered skepticism as to how willing these funders actually are to take bold chances and whether their efforts sometimes cross from smart oversight into micromanagement.

In education circles, the two best-known venture philanthropies may be the decade-old NewSchools Venture Fund and the much younger Charter School Growth Fund. The San Francisco-based NewSchools Venture Fund secures investments from both for-profit and nonprofit sources and then seeks to provide startup capital to ventures—both nonprofit and for-profit organizations—that are sustainable and designed to achieve scale. The

Colorado-based Charter School Growth Fund, with over $150 million in support, provides grants and loans to promote the growth of high-quality charter management and support organizations. These venture philanthropists accept that some investments will fail, so long as the failures are the product of efforts to address hard, important challenges.

16.   What should a would-be entrepreneur aim for in creating a new venture?  And what should entrepreneurs keep in mind when thinking about the growth of their venture?

Entrepreneurs need to be scrappy about locating initial resources, finding sites to test their idea, and collecting data to demonstrate that their venture has merit. From the outset, entrepreneurs need to be aggressive and strategic about collecting data and documenting their impact. Fortunately, there is a whole population constantly seeking significant new programs and ventures to evaluate and study: graduate students and university professors. In return for exclusive access, entrepreneurs can get both the independent data and empirical analysis they need. Evidence of effectiveness can open doors and help secure resources.

There is an advantage to ventures that can be scaled cost-effectively. Entrepreneurial endeavors that are highly dependent on talent, passion, and committed staff tend to be the most successful but also the least equipped to expand rapidly or operate on a grand scale. Models reliant on limited resources, like phenomenal talent or philanthropic support, will always be more difficult to expand than models that leverage more plentiful resources. New ventures should always have one eye on the question of how their work might “scale”—or should seek R&D partners who will.

17.   How can district leaders help create a greenfield for education reform?

District leaders looking to create greenfield can start by embracing information and technological advancements that lower geographical barriers to the provision of instruction, support services, and professional development. One way is to follow

New York City Chancellor Joel Klein’s lead in seeking to turn his into a “Silicon Valley” of school reform.

They can nurture networks and scaffolding by championing city-based efforts like New Schools for New Orleans or The Mind Trust in Indianapolis. They can aid in the search for talent and dollars by working to attract The New Teacher Project or Education Pioneers and by reaching out to venture philanthropists like the NewSchools Venture Fund. They should also work with funders and state officials to make facilities available to new providers and to erect the kinds of supports and resources that can make such efforts successful.