The NCEE Blueprint for Reinventing Schools

Founded in 1988, the NCEE (National Center on Education and the Economy) is a non-profit organization dedicated to helping states, districts, and schools discover, design, and lead high-performing education systems. I had the chance to sit down with Vicki Phillips, CEO at NCEE and formerly of National Geographic and the Gates Foundation, and Jason Dougal, President and COO at NCEE, to discuss the organization’s Blueprint for a High-Performing Education System report. Many of the themes echo recommendations from my new book, From Reopen to Reinvent, which was fascinating to explore in the conversation, including competency-based assessments, the role of content, team teaching, and the importance of teachers not being the final assessors of their own students.

As always, you can read the transcript of the conversation, listen to it below, or watch it below.

Michael Horn:                Vicki and Jason, thanks so much for being here today.

Jason Dougal:             It's a pleasure to be here.

Vicki Phillips:             Thanks, Michael. It's great to see you as always.

Horn:                Yeah. So I'm delighted and I want to start with how you all came into these roles with NCEE. Vicki, we've known each other for many years now, obviously from teacher to superintendent to the Gates Foundation, and then National Geographic, and then now to NCEE. I suspect a lot of folks would love to hear why this felt like the right next step for you. If we could start with you, Vicki.

Phillips:             Well, as you said, I've been fortunate over my career to sit in a lot of chairs from teachers to state chief to philanthropy. But what people might not know is that my very first job when I left my home state of Kentucky was actually with the National Center on Education and the Economy. So it was along my career path, and one of the things I so valued about what I learned there was that the international benchmarking and the other work that the Center was doing helped set for me when I went out to be a superintendent a north star of what really worked in terms of practice. And even though I needed to translate that into my own context, it gave me a much broader view from which to work from. So I'm actually coming back to family in many ways.

Horn:                Makes total sense. There's going to be a separate podcast at some point, by the way, about why Kentucky has been the birthplace of so many influential education leaders and policies, I think. But we'll hold that for another time. Jason, I want to go to you next. And tell us about your path because as I understand it, you were a lawyer. I'm not sure what the connection with education was, so I would love to know your own path into the president COO role at NCEE.

Dougal:             Yeah. I guess I'm an alternative route candidate here. I did work in a Manhattan law firm doing mergers and acquisitions, of all things. I was lucky enough about 19 years ago to meet Mark Tucker and Judy Cotting, who were running the National Center at that time, and we were working on a small transaction. I got to know the organization as an outside attorney. I fell in love with the mission, I fell in love with the people, and they invited me in to join the organization just a little less than 18 years ago. I have held many roles here at the center from originally being a business and lawyer person, and got involved in operations, got involved in the research, got involved in the leadership aspects of the organization, and ran our National Institute for School Leadership, which is the largest provider of leadership professional learning in the country. And I was able to lead a pilot program that researched competency-based approaches to high school in four different states. So I've done a little bit of everything around here over the years.

Horn:                So I want to dig into a bunch of those strands. But in particular, there's so much that the center does that we could talk about. But you all put out a report that I believe predates you joining, Vicki, the Blueprint on Education. And I want to spend some time on it because many of the themes from it, certainly not all, but many of them echo a lot of the findings and recommendations in my new book, From Reopen to Reinvent, which Vicki, you, of course, read in advance.

                        And so I just want to dig into these because there's areas that you write across from rigorous and adaptive learning systems to effective teachers and principals, and then equitable foundation of supports. But the part about the teachers and principals really spoke to me on many dimensions that I thought, frankly undergirded the other two areas of the report. So I want to spend a lot of time on it.

                        And the first recommendation that jumped out that I was like, "Whoa, I need to learn more," was you actually said that higher performing systems tend to have fewer teacher preparation programs. And you pointed out that some states might have 50-plus, I think the number was, teacher preparation programs, and we should be aiming for 10 instead. And I'd love to know the why behind that. Why is the number important? If we shrunk the number of teacher preparation programs, how would we still produce the volume of teachers that this country needs, and things of that nature. And just unpack that a little bit for us.