596. Transforming Education Through Cross-Sector Collaborations + The Mission of Digital Promise - Jean-Claude Brizard

Meet Jean-Claude. He’s the President and CEO of Digital Promise, a nonprofit focused on shaping the future of learning through cross-sector collaboration🤝. He outlines his playbook for driving systemic change - emphasizing the importance of building trust, finding community "protagonists", and aligning diverse stakeholders around a shared vision. This episode offers valuable insights for education leaders, nonprofit professionals, and anyone interested in leveraging cross-sector partnerships to create equitable, systemic change. You don’t want to miss it 🎧

Episode Highlights

• Digital Promise's Mission and Unique Approach (5:00)
• Leveraging Technology to Transform Teaching and Learning (7:00)
• The Importance of Cross-Sector Collaboration for Systemic Change (10:00)
• Strategies for Building Effective Community Coalitions (16:00)
• A Powerful Moment of Philanthropy in Jean-Claude’s Life (19:00)
• Jean-Claude’s One Good Thing: Never negotiate your core values. (23:00)

Learn more: www.weareforgood.com/episode/596

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Chapters

• 0:53 Education Revolution
• 11:11 Cross-Sector Collaboration in Education Transformation
• 21:23 Funding Collaboration for Education Transformation
• 29:16 Empowering Education Transformation Through Connection

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:54

Hey, I'm John.

Speaker 2: 0:55

And I'm Becky.

Speaker 1: 0:56

And this is the we Are For Good podcast.

Speaker 2: 0:58

Nonprofits are faced with more challenges to accomplish their missions and the growing pressure to do more, raise more and be more for the causes that improve our world.

Speaker 1: 1:07

We're here to learn with you from some of the best in the industry, bringing the most innovative ideas, inspirational stories, all to create an impact uprising.

Speaker 2: 1:16

So welcome to the good community. We're nonprofit professionals, philanthropists, world changers and rabid fans who are striving to bring a little more goodness into the world.

Speaker 1: 1:27

So let's get started, becky, what's happening, my friend?

Speaker 2: 1:31

We have an incredible educator in the house today, an education revolutionary, who is coming to us with compassion and ideas. I can't wait to hear what he has to say.

Speaker 1: 1:43

I mean, his story is one of legends too. I mean it's an honor to have Jean-Claude Brassard with us. He's the president and CEO of Digital Promise and y'all you got to know about this organization. We're going to have him share a little bit about their work today and how they really lean into cross-sector collaborations and creating really systemic change.

Speaker 1: 2:01

And, as virtue of just listening to this podcast, we know we share a kinship about that that we don't want to just talk about change, we want to be the change in this generation, and so it's an honor to introduce you to Jean-Claude. He has worked in the education space for over 35 years as a teacher principal, a superintendent, the education space for over 35 years as a teacher principal, a superintendent, and now you know, he leads the president and CEO of Digital Promise Global, which is a global, non-partisan, nonprofit organization focused on shaping the future of learning and advancing equitable educational systems by bridging solutions across research, practice and technology. Before that, he was the former senior advisor and deputy director over at you may have heard of the Gates Foundation, where he focused on education, and he's led several strategies supporting Washington State's educational system.

Speaker 1: 2:46

But growing up, he actually left Haiti as a child, and he found his footing and purpose in a Brooklyn public school. That really led him on this path to want to create similar opportunities for kids like him. And as a high school teacher in Brooklyn, he used tech to transform his physics lab and to get every student excited to learn. That sounds like a story, my friend, and later as a superintendent in Rochester and Chicago, he helped shape learning experiences for educators and students across an entire district. And now, as CEO of a global nonprofit, jean-claude's mission is to use that same tech and innovation to expand opportunity for every student, and so that hasn't changed, although his mission really has evolved over the years. So we're really excited today to learn about how he applies the lessons that he learned as a teacher and how he's really translating that into leading a nonprofit today. My friend, it is an honor to have you on the podcast. Thanks so much for spending time with us today.

Speaker 3: 3:36

John Becky, thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.

Speaker 1: 3:45

Well, we love getting to hear people's stories and I've just barely tipped the iceberg of what your journey looked like, and I wonder if you would take us back to Jean-Claude growing up. What was kind of his interest and what did life look like in kind of your formative stages of life, John?

Speaker 3: 3:55

you know, I spent the first 11 years of my life in Haiti with parents who had to escape a brutal death spot Duvalier you may have heard of this dictator in Haiti. My grandfather, who was an orchestra conductor, was jailed in the 60s, so my family was separated for six years. I would argue that was formative experiences for me. I was raised by my maternal grandmother, my aunt, surrounded by family, lots of kids running around very free, and those were formative, frankly. Years for me Came to the US, landed in a middle school or junior high school in those days in Brooklyn, new York, and I was taught by an amazing teacher. His name was Shir Azar. In many ways also was formative in the sense that I wanted to be him. I wanted to emulate this experience that I had, and I thank him frankly for showing me the way.

Speaker 2: 4:53

I mean, it's just a beautiful beginning where you were sort of raised by this village, this family. I just think that is really what is so beautiful about the education system it doesn't rely on any one person. It is very much the collective that help moves a child through life. And I'm looking at what you're doing over here at Digital Promise and it is absolutely reimagining the way that we are going through the education process. And so, for those of our listeners who may not be familiar, can you kind of dig into your mission for us, tell us the history and get into those programs and those big dreams that we know you have?

Speaker 3: 5:38

Becky, we certainly are a unicorn in this sector. So, very quickly, we are an innovation that came out of the US government. If I can say that, the organization was created by an act of Congress in 2008 as a National Center for Research in Advanced Information Technologies, and that was done under George W Bush, and it was launched by Obama in 2011, which is why we call ourselves nonpartisan or bipartisan, because our board initially was appointed by both sides of the aisle, both members of Congress. The organization leans quite a bit on what we often refer to as the golden triangle, which is learning sciences, research, technology, innovation and practice. We center our practitioners. We don't go off in a corner and build a new version of a mobile phone and say, go ahead and buy it.

Speaker 3: 6:28

We actually have teachers and principals and superintendents as part of the design process, which I think makes us unique. We've got a powerful set of learning scientists, a powerful set of technologists who basically work together. I'll give you one specific project that we just launched, called the UGAIN project. It was funded by the Institute for Education Sciences. We're taking the science of reading, which you should be hearing quite a bit about, and artificial intelligence, and working with six school districts five in Pennsylvania, washington DC public schools and iterating with a product developer and changing an existing product and integrate AI into the science of reading. But this is being done by technologists and by teachers. So when we are done, you will see something that really has been built by educators, by teachers in the classroom, for the service of our entire country.

Speaker 1: 7:22

I mean, jean-claude, you're preaching to some folks that love to hear this, let me just say, because we talk a lot about the power of building with community instead of for and that's what you're doing Like you're centering the actual people that understand and know and have the solutions. They just need some wraparound with some funding or some tech to make it to bring it to life. So I want to connect some threads of your story because I'd mentioned, you know, during your time being a teacher in brooklyn, we heard that technology like transformed this physics lab. What happened, you know, in that experience, and how does that still a thread in your work today.

Speaker 3: 8:02

John, it really is. It's an example I use. In fact, I just used it at a conference I was keynoting. If you remember your high school science classroom or science laboratories, we often refer to it as the cookbook lab, where you go through, do this, do this, and do this and do that, and at the end he's like I have no idea what I just accomplished, why this thing was I'm not the only one, no, you're not.

Speaker 3: 8:23

Becky, I have a degree in chemistry and I tell people I learned chemistry as a graduate student, not as an undergrad or in high school.

Speaker 3: 8:31

But what I did in this vocational high school was to leverage the Vernier's set of probes and tools using I'm going to date myself here Macintosh computers, all funded by the City University of New York, and we changed the whole process where the experimentation lasted 30 seconds or a minute and the discussion and explanation lasted 20 minutes or half an hour. So we flipped the whole paradigm and these young people would do an experiment on sort of looking at time and distance and then would engage in conversation about what did you just see? And so that in itself flipped the whole thing around. And this vocational high school with vocational kids, we had 90 to 100% of those kids passing the New York City exam on physics every single year. Wow, because they conceptually began to really understand what they were doing and it was an extension of the classroom discussion and conversation. So for me it really demonstrated the power that technology can have in really moving teaching and learning Not a replacement but a way of really enhancing what we do in the classroom every single day.

Speaker 2: 9:44

Okay, I got to share some of my childhood in there because my father was also a chemist and when it came time for science experiment, like the science fair, that was the worst time of the year for this writer and feeler because it was all about controlling variables and I was missing the conversation. I was missing the what is it? I mean, I know I've done the steps but I didn't connect. And, PS, I won almost every science fair y'all. It is the great joke of our family because I know less about science than anyone. And then I got my first job at the Science Museum of Oklahoma. So it's all irony here.

Speaker 2: 10:27

But I do want to pull in the fact that I think paradigm shift when you give someone the agency to say this is what I'm seeing. This is why I'm confused, this is what I observe, this is how I wonder if this will work next. And then the evolution of education and understanding and curiosity continues to unpack. So I can see this. I wish you were in the 80s with me in Oklahoma schools because I could have used you. But I do think that just this level of reimagination is going to help kids find their lane so much better. It's going to help us as individuals find what lights us up. And something else that we've noticed about your incredible organization is this commitment you have to cross-sector collaborations and just how they create systems of change. So we talk a lot on this podcast about mindsets, especially when we have a chance to visit with incredible leaders like yourself. So please talk to us about your mindsets, your approach to your work and how these collaborations are really lifting the work that you are doing, discovering and learning as you go.

Speaker 3: 11:42

Vicky, I would just say quickly that your experience in the Science Museum, I think, in many ways should have showcased what science teaching should look like, because this is where the fun and inquiry?

Speaker 3: 11:53

actually, yes, and I'm not a unicorn in this by any stretch, I know amazing science teachers who really want to do that kind of work. But to your point, though, around the cross-sector collaboration, I would say two different ways. One, it goes back to this idea of the golden triangle, where we really want to get different groups of people working together, including higher education, k-12, and early learning in reading proficiency, since NCLB has become, with no Child Left Behind, has become the North Star for so many places and many of us argue that's important. But it's a means to an end. The greater end, frankly, is lifelong success, is economic mobility, is well-being, is personal agency. So the question is how do you actually get there? And for us it means really understanding the challenges we have in our systems that causes young people to disengage from education.

Speaker 3: 12:54

If you were to look at data sets and I developed some of those when I was at the Gates Foundation when you look at the journey of a child through the system, you see massive attrition of young people.

Speaker 3: 13:05

Yeah, for example, in one state, if you take every child who's proficient in reading and math, you get anywhere from an 8% to a 25% post-secondary completion.

Speaker 3: 13:19

Every child was proficient, other ones were not proficient and, of course, if you look at it at this one equity lens, the numbers skew toward the bottom, meaning the 8%. It's terrifying, but for us that means looking at what we do in elementary school or early learning. Elementary school, middle school, high school, post-secondary, all the kinds of work we think is important, the transition spaces in between which, as you can imagine, require a set of actors to want to come together and stitch the system together, both in terms of the internal dynamics of school and the external and more macro processes that we need to have to facilitate the kind of transfer. That was a big part of my work at Gates. And one thing clearly we've made much more pronounced a digital promise and we're testing this idea right now in San Diego County. We're going to test it in other parts of the country to see what can we do to support those who are looking for that kind of cross-sector effort to really propel a learner or young person toward the ideas of economic security or mobility, agency in well-being.

Speaker 1: 14:28

I mean love this conversation because it's getting back to like the heart of the issue, and I think you know I said at the top of this that we want to be the generation that does this. We don't want to just build programs for program's sake. We actually want to change the thing that's holding maybe us back and progress back. So, as you look at these cross-sector collaborations that are happening, what have you learned for what makes those successful? Because you're bringing together teams that have different maybe narratives, different beliefs, different approaches. What does it look like to get together and have success? I find that there's shared common language too.

Speaker 3: 15:06

I mean a lot of this is codified in the research and we've seen examples of this. We also gathered quite a sort of new understandings when I was at Gates, and we're gathering even more now. The one thing I would say well, I sort of say a few things. One is that you can only move at the speed of trust. These guys I mean people love to stay within their silos, within their verticals. They're not held accountable for anything outside of that. So people have to trust and trust each other to want to collaborate in a way that actually makes sense. The other, frankly, is there's got to be and Strive Together talks about this. There's got to be a burning platform that really sort of galvanizes a community together. Right, and at Gates, we did these profiles of the communities in which we're working and we found there was always a pivotal moment that galvanized the community.

Speaker 3: 15:59

At the same time, there's this sort of echo cycle of a community and you've got to catch it at the right place to help propel it forward. But fundamentally, you need a coalition of leaders grassroots and grass stops who are willing, frankly, to let go of their own fiefdom and say how can we focus on the young people who are doing this. By the way, when we got to San Diego, a lot of folks, including funders, said to us why would you want to go to San Diego? They're fine I mean lots of money in San Diego. And we pulled a data set to show them that the kids who are educated in the county are not the ones getting access to the economic engine of the county. So if you really want to help a community, you've got to understand that data point. And that said that, some of these places, yes, can import talent, but fundamentally, people who live there, who grew up there, the kids who grew up there, are not the ones partaking in the economic vitality of that community.

Speaker 2: 16:56

The data, don't lie.

Speaker 3: 16:57

y'all the data don't lie, my hips don't lie, so it's just not happening.

Speaker 2: 17:01

And I do think you're making a really strong point about why we should be flexing data to underscore the opportunities that exist and how we're being held back. And I just keep thinking, jean-claude, about just what you're doing and the scale of what you're doing and how, if we could wrap more hearts, minds, voices, activations around it, we could move so much faster. Like when you, when you think about, like this community right here is an activating community of change makers who truly wants to be the change, the positive change, they want to see in the world. How can people like us help your movement? How can we help this education take off, community by community? What would you say?

Speaker 3: 17:53

So I would say, let me just go back first to your point around data. I also have read quite a bit of Jonathan Haidt's work on the rider and the elephant, if you know his book the Righteous Mind, that data never convinces anyone to do anything. Well, it does ultimately. But you got to get to the heart of people first. The elephant can drive the rider if the elephant wants to. So this idea of mindset and heart, I think, is important. You capture someone through storytelling, then you bring on the data to actually convince them all the way and otherwise. But to your question, though, becky, what I would say? To understand who the key protagonists are in the community and to support their effort. If there are a series of nonprofits who are working in a particular community, if you've got the leverage, find a way to help them stitch their work together toward a greater means.

Speaker 3: 18:46

Often there is this kind of anchor organization within every community who can help drive the conversation. In Buffalo, new York, for example, it is the Community Foundation of Buffalo. If you go to Dallas, texas, it is the Commit Partnership C-O-M-M-I-T, the Commit Partnership with Todd William, who basically was a poor kid who grew up in Dallas, did well, built a family foundation and to a day that began to shame leaders in the community to do the right thing right. I've got to check that out. He was demonstrating that you're not doing for this community but then ultimately rallied these folks together to a particular platform of putting 100,000 more kids on the path to economic security in the county. Kids were educated in Dallas County and Commit is doing an amazing job of stitching together both the macro and the micro in moving that. So Todd is an anchor in our community.

Speaker 3: 19:44

I would argue every community has an organization or someone. My push to you is that if you can find those individuals, push them to create that kind of coalition and it shows up in different ways. Right In Tacoma, washington, there was 350 nonprofits that came together with the school system and said we're going to change a narrative about our city. But the case of Dallas, frankly, it may have been one guy who built a coalition, so it changes. But finding that protagonist set of protagonists and getting to them, I think, is an amazing way of supporting the effort.

Speaker 1: 20:18

It's something over the years we've kind of tagged with the phrase that we lock arms for impact and I can't help but think of that as you describe this that it's the only way forward to solve any of these systemic pieces is really getting folks together. So love those examples that you've lifted. I mean, Jean-Claude, your career alone has taken you on such a winding path and journey and now leading this nonprofit that has supporters and researchers and all these different folks pouring into it, I wonder if there's a moment of philanthropy that has stuck out to you. We love story. We feel like it teaches us things. What is the moment of philanthropy that has really stuck with you in your path?

Speaker 3: 20:59

So I mean there's been quite a few moments, but perhaps I'll pick one. It's when, again, I spent four years at the Gates Foundation, almost four years there, and what I found that was a pivotal moment was when you begin to understand even a multilateral funder like the Gates Foundation, doing work across the world, by itself cannot solve the fundamental challenge and problem right. I learned a lot about the discipline required in philanthropy when I worked at the Gates Foundation, but ultimately, what I discovered to be a powerful, powerful lever was when different funders can come together and again it goes back to this idea of cross-sector right Rallying together on a particular idea. Because very often what I find is that nonprofits have to manage funders, because they're coming at you in multiple directions with their projects and things they want you to do and you're becoming general contractor and trying to figure out how do I manage all these folks? Yes, but when you find that the funders sometimes come to you, like I'm having a meeting with a group in Anaheim, California, at the end of February about how do we think about artificial intelligence in moving teaching and learning. I was in the architect of the meeting with two funders who were bringing 12 others together and we're going to study this challenge together.

Speaker 3: 22:19

That I find to be really an important point in place where these funders are interested in doing that. By the way, I find that most of them want to, but they need that kind of catalyst or burning platform to get them organized to do this kind of work. And we did a project recently which was also amazing. It was a combination of government and philanthropy, so it was the National Science Foundation with Gates Foundation with Walton. It was amazing to see how they came together to work with government making things happen, because we all know that ultimately, government has to scale. You know, no foundation, no matter how powerful they are, can scale anything, because they don't have the resources to do that. The government, the US government, is the one that actually has the resources to make those things happen.

Speaker 2: 23:08

I just think you're incredibly wise and what you're saying is really bringing me back to a conversation we have with Dr Tim Lampkin, who's the founder and CEO of Higher Purpose Co. And he's talking about how do we become the truth tellers, not just the storytellers, how do we speak to our funders in a language of story, where the narrative is true, where it's baked in the voices of people who are affected, and how do we own the true narrative? And I really love what you're saying about these collaborations and the need that we had to elevate how we show up to those with truth, with data, with solutions, and so I just think what a beacon you are to the world right now, in a time when education feels like it's so much in flux and the way of education is shifting the focus on attention state by state. I can tell you in Oklahoma, it's something that's very concerning to me, and I just want to commend you and tell you and your team to keep going. This work is so pivotal.

Speaker 2: 24:18

We got to round up this conversation, jean-claude, with a one good thing. This is something we ended all of our podcasts with. It could be a quote, maybe a life hack or some words of advice. What's bubbling up for you as your one good thing today?

Speaker 3: 24:33

Oh my God, you know it was a mentor. Maybe there's several, I'm going to pick this one, a former mentor of mine who passed away a few years ago. I studied with her in becoming a school superintendent and when I was about to go to Rochester, new York, to my first superintendency, we sat at her office at Columbia University and mapped out the strategy and toward the end she said one thing to me. She goes listen to me, you will be negotiating a lot of things over the next few years on that job. Never negotiate your core values. No job is worth that. Nothing is worth that. This is who you are and don't negotiate that for anything, for anyone, otherwise you lose your way.

Speaker 3: 25:18

And I've held on to that frankly, throughout my career. In fact, I left Chicago because I felt as if I was in a place where I had to begin to negotiate those. I said you know what? Nothing is worth this. You lose your soul, you lose who you are, and that needs to guide a lot of us, and it's an advice I give to a lot of colleagues who want to become superintendents, who want to become leaders in big organizations. I said you will negotiate, but don't negotiate those things at all, otherwise you lose.

Speaker 1: 25:49

You lose your north star Dang. What a beautiful mantra, and it resonates from you, my friend. Just the care that you have and the way that you've moved through this world, it's a beacon that shines from you. So I was just curious where do you hang out online? Where does Digital Promise hang out online? Because anyone listening is going to want to connect with you in this amazing mission. So point us to all the things.

Speaker 3: 26:13

Yeah, so we have a presence on Instagram et cetera, but, frankly, where we hang out mostly is LinkedIn, you know, it seems to be the new town hall for educators. Yeah, yeah, good, I agree, we post a lot of things there. At the same time, we also hang out, you know, in really certain kind of seminal conferences that really speak to us and I try to do a bit of meandering to make sure that we're addressing our audiences. I just did a keynote at the EdSpaces conference. You say what is EdSpaces?

Speaker 3: 26:45

Imagine 1,200 architects, school designers, and I was trying to connect for them the design of school buildings and classrooms to learning science, to emotional well-being. Yes, I said space matters. And I had one slide I had a full deck, I couldn't find it that compared prisons to schools and looking from the outside, and I asked dead people to guess which one was a prison, which one was a school, and I begged them. No matter how much you push, please don't build any more boxes. Build these innovative centers for young people who want to belong to a particular space. So it was very much a pictorial presentation with learning science. If I may give you one example, I visited a school in the Pittsburgh metro area and I had a picture there and I asked what do you see? The adults and the young six-year-olds were eye-to-eye getting lunch. How is it possible that a 40, 50-year-old how tall are those?

Speaker 2: 27:44

chairs? Yes, and how low are those chairs?

Speaker 3: 27:48

No, when the adults stood, sunk several inches lower to allow for face-to-face, eye-to-eye contact, and of course, they don't understand why it's like. Why did you do this? Again, belonging, it's respect. It's one of the reasons why, if you've seen elementary school teachers get on the carpet, they get on the ground to talk to children. It was the same philosophy. But to see that allows the adults to understand the folks who are designing. That's why I'm doing this. That's why it's important. So we did a lot of things to demonstrate why physical space is important. I'm doing another keynote in February in Pennsylvania, at Hershey Pennsylvania, and they're expecting 2,000 or 3,000 teachers and my job is to get them really excited about the potential for artificial intelligence in education. So I'm doing a bunch of things to actually get folks excited. Lots of videos, slides Get excited. Yes, we have things we need to worry about, but let's get excited about the potential for transforming teaching and learning.

Speaker 2: 28:52

This is what I want to hear. I want to get excited about education. I think what you're saying to us has gotten us excited, and I mean, we didn't even communicate that your first teaching job was in a prison on Rikers Island. So this is very, very personal to you, and I just think of this community that you've created. I think about this team, these believers that are behind you. We are absolutely rooting for you.

Speaker 1: 29:20

My friend, thank you.

Speaker 2: 29:21

JCB Is that your nickname? Because I really want it to be your nickname.

Speaker 3: 29:24

Do you get that all the time? Jc. My friends in New York call me JC.

Speaker 2: 29:28

JC, there you go, yes, and.

Speaker 3: 29:29

I was asked do you mind that name? I said well, they're powerful initials. How could I possibly mind?

Speaker 2: 29:34

Indeed, we only give nicknames to our favorite people and we just feel so connected to you. I want to thank you for coming in and just really opening our eyes to the way that we can reimagine everything y'all. And when it comes to doing it authentically, with a sense of belonging, with a sense of equity, and really upskilling us, I can't imagine anything better for the world. So, rooting for you all and please keep us posted.

Speaker 3: 30:06

I will, and thank you so much for having me here. It's been fun. It was our joy to come back. Yes, thank you, thank you.