Harry Spence has been reinventing government since before the term was, well, invented. Massachusetts’s pre-eminent public sector turnaround specialist, Spence has spent his adult life fixing dysfunctional public institutions. He took one obligatory private-sector turn, but developing suburban hotels just wasn’t the kind of challenge that could get his blood going. Give him a sclerotic government bureaucracy to unclog any day.
Tall, angular, with a slightly patrician air, Lewis Harwood Spence was born in Schenectedy, NY, and raised in New Jersey but came to New England for his education: Groton, Harvard, Harvard Law. It’s been on the job, however, that he has learned the most. Spence had straightened out public-housing authorities in Somerville and Cambridge when then-Superior Court Judge Paul Garritty named him receiver of the Boston Housing Authority in 1980, at age 34. After five years as court-appointed ruler of what was then regarded as the worst housing agency in the country, Spence spent three lackluster-—but lucrative–years as a developer for Hyatt Hotels and the Beacon Cos. and a couple more biding his time as a lecturer at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. In 1991, he went back into action, this time whipping the city of Chelsea into shape. Spence arrived there as deputy to James Carlin, the take-no-prisoners businessman Gov. Weld appointed as receiver of the nearly bankrupt and certifiably corrupt city north of Boston, and stayed on as receiver himself until turning the place over to local rule in 1995.
But even as he honed his turnaround skills in housing authorities and city halls, Spence had his eye on what he considered the ultimate urban management challenge: the public schools. He twice applied for the job of superintendent of the Boston schools, in 1991 and 1995, when he was one of three finalists, losing out to Thomas Payzant. But Spence got his chance later that year, when he was chosen for the number-two job at the New York City Board of Education. As deputy chancellor for operations, Spence spent four years wrestling the country’s largest school bureaucracy–a system so byzantine that the board could not trace budget dollars to individual schools and the chancellor had no authority to appoint district superintendents–to the ground.
Spence left New York last year–shortly after Chancellor Rudy Crew wore out his welcome with Mayor Rudolph Giuliani–but did not give up his focus on school reform. Hired as a consultant to explore ways to expand the national Advanced Placement program beyond its largely suburban base, Spence persuaded the College Board to get involved in education reform more deeply.
“I basically said to them, you obviously can’t think about parachuting AP into schools where there are no kids who have been educated to a level that they’d be prepared to take AP,” says Spence. “For the majority of urban and rural schools, that issue of the pipeline is crucial.”
This has brought Spence back to Boston, and back to the South End home he never gave up, where he lives with his wife, Robin Ely, a visiting professor at the Harvard Business School, and their 5-year-old daughter, Francesca. (Spence also has two grown children from a previous marriage.) Spence is working on a College Board partnership with Achieve, a Cambridge-based nonprofit organization, to develop an integrated program of curriculum, professional development, and assessment for middle-school math.
I sat down with Spence to find out what he’s learned over the years about repairing broken bureaucracies. By the end of our conversation, it seemed clear that, at age 54, Spence can’t wait for the next institutional fix-it job to come along–especially if it involves city schools. Shortly thereafter, he became chairman of the board of City on a Hill Charter School in Boston. But I get the feeling that’s just the beginning.
CommonWealth: The main thing we’re going to talk about today is your history and experience trying to fix public institutions of various sorts. But I have to start off asking one question about a personal practice. The beads you have on your wrist I believe relate to a form of Hindu-based meditation you have adopted as part of your life. Have you come to believe that a bit of eastern equanimity is what you need to be engaged in–
Spence: To do this kind of work?
CommonWealth: Yes, to do this kind of work.
Spence: Well, about 10 years ago, in 1991, through a series of coincidences I was exposed to an eastern meditation practice, a Hindu-based meditation practice. There are lots of people who do all sorts of religions who are in it. There are people who are practicing Christians and practicing Jews and practicing Buddhists and practicing all sorts of things, but they do this particular meditation practice. I certainly have found it over the years enormously supportive and steadying in a world that sometimes feels pretty chaotic. Like all such things, you know, I’m more and less consistent about actually doing it. When I am most consistent, I find it most helpful. I think also that just any spiritual perspective–and it doesn’t matter really what it is–helps to keep you from a lot of illusions and delusions about your ability to control the world…that ultimately not only get in the way of your own ability, but actually also get in the way of accomplishing a task.
CommonWealth: Let’s talk about your most recent and biggest turnaround project, the New York City public schools.
Spence: Not-quite-completed turnaround.
CommonWealth: You took on this task fresh from your candidacy for superintendent of the Boston public schools in 1995. So what have you learned since about what it takes to fix a large, urban school system?
Spence: Well, several things. First of all, I went down to New York for a couple of different reasons. One was, aside from education, I had a general interest in the question of scale: What does scale do, how does it impact your ability to change an institution? My experience in Boston went from the Somerville Housing Authority, which was a small housing authority, to the Boston Housing Authority, which was the largest in the region, to a small situation like Chelsea, where there were only 30,000 people in a small city. My experience was that it was as hard to change small institutions as large, that there was a mistaken notion that it’s harder to fix large institutions. They take a somewhat different set of skills, but the challenges are huge in small institutions and I was really struck by that.
So I thought, well, what happens when you get to mega-scale? Does it really change fundamentally? I’d run an organization, the Boston Housing Authority, of 1,000 people. What happens when you get an organization with 120,000 people? I’d worked in an operation that in the ‘80s had had a $70 million budget, or something like that, annually. What happens when you’re running a $10 billion budget? So, first of all, I think it confirmed what I’d always believed, which is it’s not necessarily harder to fix a large institution. The challenges are huge and they’re different, but it’s not inherently harder. That’s important because one of the problems that New York has is that they say, we’re so big we’re unmanageable. That’s a self-fulfilling prophecy in considerable measure. And I just don’t think it’s true. I don’t think large is more unmanageable than small. They’re both manageable and unmanageable in different ways.
CommonWealth: I once met a New York City activist and organizer who basically threw up her hands, saying this town is just too big to get anything done in. You need to work some place that’s more manageable—you know, like Chicago.
Spence: Right. Exactly. A little town like Chicago. You know, two Bostonians have really demonstrated that New York’s quite manageable. One was Bob Kiley, with the transit authority, and the other was Bill Bratton, with the police. They certainly have made clear that despite scale–and in fact maybe because of scale, because actually I think that’s the case–because of scale, you can accomplish things in those institutions that you couldn’t accomplish in a smaller operation in a number of ways.
CommonWealth: Now, why is that? Why do you think scale helps?
Spence: One of the advantages to scale is you can mobilize enormous resources. In the New York school system, we could develop some highly sophisticated software that was essentially artificial intelligence software for school budgeting. It would allow a group of lay people–parents, teachers, and administrators–to sit at a school, decide what the staffing pattern ought to be and the software would design a funding program out of all the complexity of school finance that was probably 95 percent as good as the best human expert you could get to look at it. Not as good, but pretty close. Now, you could never afford to do that in a small system and yet small systems have the same bewildering financing system that large systems do. So we could assemble that kind of resources and build some wonderful solutions to problems that could only be insoluble to smaller systems.
Secondly, you get huge variability in large systems. The worst of New York’s public schools are as bad as the worst in the nation. But the best of New York public schools are the best in the nation. When I was applying to be superintendent in Boston, I spent a lot of time talking to people in schools of education around the Boston area and they kept saying in urban education, you’ve got to look at what’s happening in New York. You’ve got to look at District 2 in New York, which is the best example of a professional-development-driven effort to raise standards in a school system. You’ve got to look at the small schools movement in New York, which has developed the whole model of small schools, and specifically, in the high school level, but more generally. It really was, in many ways, the template for charter schools. You¹ve got to look at these things. These are the most important innovations going on in urban education in America today, and they are happening in New York. So, if I said to you, in Boston, I think it’s possible for there to be an elementary or a middle school that teaches poor kids of color to the same levels that we traditionally assume middle-class suburban kids can reach, for you and me in Boston, that’s a thought experiment. If I’m a skeptic, I can continue to be a skeptic for a long time. In New York, I can say, you don’t believe me? Come with me. Let’s go to Family Academy on 118th Street or whatever, which is African-American. Or let’s go to Beginning With Children, in Williamsburg, where they’ve got 85 percent, 90 percent Hispanic kids, and I’ll show you schools that are teaching kids right now to very high standards. Just that existence of proof has a huge impact on the argument.
CommonWealth: One of the issues in dealing with such a large system is also the problem that I see inherent in education reform compared to reform of other sorts of public institutions. You’re always working to reform on two levels. You’ve got a system or a district that you’re working with–and in New York City, the school board is pretty far removed from the ground—and you’re trying to turn around individual schools. Does that make it a different sort of reform challenge?
Spence: There’s one huge difference and this was where I did experience a difference in scale… In New York, you’d take an action in central [office] and it would kind of go off into the fog. You would just–you didn’t know. It’s not that it didn’t have an impact; it did. But there were 1,200 schools. If I visited three schools a week, how long would it take me to see them all? Well, if I visited three schools a week, I’m up to 150 schools a year. In about eight years, I’d get to all the schools and then I could start again. So you just cannot keep track of impact in that way. But guess what? We have these extraordinary data systems that give us an ability to keep track of large-scale enterprises, down to great detail. You’ve got to build systems that can track, and the systems have to hold an understanding of what’s going on. So, central to the strategy we took in New York was, one, get out of the way. Don’t try and tell schools what to do because it won’t work.
I had a wonderful experience when I started. About 10 days into my arrival, I get a report from an inspector general. It says we have examined the implementation of Chancellor’s Circular Number 222, or something, in the schools of New York. We’ve sampled 50 schools. Implementation has been irregular or non-existent in almost every single school. Recommendation: Reissue Chancellor’s Circular Number 222. Well, it was early evidence of the despair you’d hit if you tried to sustain the notion of centralized command and control…
“We don’t know how to educate poor kids of color to high standards.”
So we knew two things: One, you can’t regulate this system alive; you’ll regulate it to death. Get out of that business. Two, you’ve got to get control of the critical, actual delivery system in the field. The chancellor has to [have the authority to] appoint superintendents. And then what you try to build is an output measure, where you say to schools, do whatever you want as long as you get to this standard. We’ll support you in any move that holds reasonable credibility that it will produce these outcomes, raise kids’ achievement to these levels. And we’ll stop telling you what to do about how to get there. And that was the system, what we called a “performance driven system,” that we tried to build, and I think made a great deal of progress in building it. In fact, that’s basically the model the system’s now operating off of. We did make a huge transition in that. Now the question is, can that system innovate and learn from its innovation quickly enough to be able to actually know what works? And that’s the test, I think, under the current chancellor or future chancellors…
There were people who used to say in the New York system, we know how to do this, we just have to have the political will to do it. I don’t think that’s true. I don’t think we know how to educate poor kids, particularly poor kids of color, to high standards. I think we have pieces of that knowledge and we’re beginning to learn fast because we can see examples where it’s happening in particular areas. But we don’t have a consistent and comprehensive answer to that question yet. There’s a huge amount of learning that has to go on about the instruction of all kids, in truth, but particularly for poor kids of color…
CommonWealth: What was your biggest frustration or disappointment in terms of trying to reform the New York City schools?
Spence: Well, first of all, let me say we actually got more done than we expected. Rudy, himself, led the charge on restructuring the governance system of New York. It had been in place for 30-some years. People said it would never change. When we went into that fight, every political pundit said, forget it, you’ll never win it. And we won it. That was Rudy Crew’s personal triumph. We also introduced standards at a time when the standards movement was flagging. The people who have been the leading flag-bearers for the standards movement said Crew’s decision to adopt standards was crucial in reviving the standards movement in the United States. [And] we made our finances absolutely transparent. The system purposely obfuscated. For reasons that are understandable, they said if the politicians really knew how we’re spending this money, they’ll take it away from us. That had been a reasonable strategy at one point in time. It was a strategy that had outworn its welcome. It was clear we were going to have to explain to the public what we did with every penny…
The frustrations were, I would say, basically, that the politics of New York are so fractious and bitter and so driven by conflict and anger that it’s terribly hard to build a sustained consensus. It’s impossible to build a sustained consensus about anything. For all that we complain about Massachusetts politics, there are permanent alliances [here], long-term, permanent alliances. New York is just one huge free-for-all fight all the time…
CommonWealth: I’m wondering what you think about the recent voting down of the proposed Edison Schools takeovers of five failing schools in New York City. That certainly seems like a classic case of New York factionalism at work.
Spence: Absolutely. I think that’s right. And you know, it’s interesting because Crew was the initial author of that idea. He went to the mayor and he said, look, you keep wanting privatization. Let’s set up a controlled experiment. I’m willing to go head to head against Edison. Give them a bunch of low-performing schools, give us a bunch of low-performing schools. As long as the resources are equal–he said if Edison can come in with twice as much private money, that’s not fair. But if the resources are equal, I’m willing to go head to head with them and I think I can beat them. By this time we’d had three years of experience in turning around low-performing schools. Another huge achievement during that period was we were running about a 60 percent to 70 percent success rate in turning around low-performing schools. That’s a very high success rate. It wasn’t across the board–basically it failed where we couldn’t get the right leadership. But we were having a good success rate and we really believed we could beat Edison. Couldn’t even get to the point of conducting that experiment in New York, because the factionalism and the fights and the wars and so on continued.
CommonWealth: It’s always struck me that the structural difficulty in reforming schools is that there’s no clear set of customers you have to satisfy. In a housing authority, tenants are really your principal customers.
Spence: Well, tenants and the elected officials that oversee the system and provide the dollars. Those are the two.
CommonWealth: Right. Now in schools, you have, again, politicians who provide the dollars and can hold you accountable, but exactly who is the customer you have to satisfy? It’s not quite the kids, because they’re not the customers that are making choices. They’re the object of the school’s efforts, but not the judges. And it’s not quite the parents, because the idea is to help the kids, not the parents. And sometimes parents know best and sometimes they don’t.
Spence: Right. And we have lots of tragic cases of feel-good schools, where schools satisfy the parents because they’re lovely, cozy, warm places, but they don’t teach the kids anything. This has been a particular tragedy in communities of color…
CommonWealth: So, in New York as in Massachusetts, we get around that problem by instituting a set of universal standards and holding schools, and kids as well, accountable for reaching those standards by means of tests. Does that do the job?
Spence: No. I think there’s a lot more that has to be done… This is why this problem of consensus is so crucial to public education. If public education is being jerked in six different directions by its six different constituencies and there isn’t any fundamental agreement about what we’re looking for, then schools will always get distracted from the core task of teaching and learning. Teaching, when it’s done right, is one of the hardest things in the world to do. But you can get away without doing it [right] for a long time without anybody noticing because it’s also hard to know, hard to measure, etc. Because it’s so hard to do, there’s a natural human temptation to get distracted by anything that gets us away from this incredibly hard task of teaching. So we can preoccupy ourselves with fights about AIDS education, we can preoccupy ourselves with fights about high school athletics, we can preoccupy ourselves with fights about rainbow curriculum. Anything that will distract us from this incredibly challenging, difficult task of really educating kids we’ll grab hold of. What we tried to do was to at least build a core constituency of consensus among parents, teachers, and administrators…
I think, broadly, the standards movement is an effort to similarly say, we can all agree, this is the target, right? Now, as in Massachusetts today, we fight endlessly about the measures of whether we’re achieving the target–and, I think appropriately in Massachusetts, fight about whether there’s serious effort to assist the schools in achieving the target. One of the things that distresses me deeply about the MCAS [student achievement and graduation tests] is, I think this state needs desperately to undertake an intensive training of math teachers, across the board. I can assure you
that in Massachusetts, as across the nation, the great majority of middle- and high-school teachers have simply never been given enough training in mathematics to teach the mathematics on the MCAS. We’ve got at some point to come to grips with that and deal with that… Nobody was asking them to teach this mathematics before. We were asking them to teach dumbed-down mathematics. Now we’re surprised that they don’t know how to teach high-order math. Well, guess what? You’ve got to train them.
This was something the teachers union said to us endlessly in New York. You can set the outcome targets, but this isn’t a problem of incentives entirely. It’s partly that; I believe deeply there was an incentive issue. But even with all the incentives in the world, the teachers have never been taught how to do this. The literacy training that people get in most schools of education is not based on any current research on what we know about reading. We’ve learned a huge amount. The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development had done extraordinary, large-scale experiments,…so we know what effective reading teaching is. It’s not taught. It’s basically not taught in any ed[ucation]school in the country. It’s taught as one of a number of approaches. But we, in fact, know it works dramatically better. But we treat education in this country as though it were a mystery, a mysterious–not even a science–a mysterious art and you can’t really judge it. We still are stuck arguing as though it were an ideological question about how we should teach kids. We’re only just beginning to say we can actually figure out what works and then apply it.
CommonWealth: Let’s talk a little bit about incentives and the flip side of incentives, which is sanctions. When you get into serious discussions about why schools aren’t succeeding, you get into a great deal of finger-pointing back and forth, particularly between teachers and administrators. The teachers say we know how to do it but the administrators won’t let us. They won’t give us the support we need; they keep telling us to do stupid things that we know aren’t going to work; they keep imposing requirements that eat up our time. Administrators turn around and say, well, I’ve got a handful of teachers who could teach any kid that walked in the door, but the rest of them couldn’t teach their way out of a paper bag. I’m stuck with them and I can’t get them to change. So you have this endless trading of blame. How do you move past that?
Spence: First of all, I am a deep believer that the problem isn’t teachers, it’s teaching. That’s actually the focus of a really fine book, The Teaching Gap, by James Stigler and James Hiebert. We make the mistake of believing that it’s like putting together a baseball team. If only we had the right mix of natural athletes, we’d have a winning team. I don’t think that’s true. That’s a path of despair because there are never going to be enough naturally spectacular teachers to teach the millions of children [in our schools]. You know, there are only so many Babe Ruths and Willie Mayses…The issue is, can ordinary people with ordinary resources in ordinary circumstances accomplish this outcome? And that’s the question for schools.
One of the great contributions of the recent look at international comparisons among education systems is that it helps you suddenly realize that the things you’ve taken for granted about teaching are actually just cultural assumptions about American teaching. And guess what? The Japanese teach math in all the ways that we think would be American. That is, they teach math by encouraging classroom discussion among kids, etc. And the Americans teach math in the way that we thought the Japanese would do it, which is by rote. Surprise, surprise. It doesn’t have to be that way. Our teachers could relearn their teaching methods. But the teachers are absolutely right. We have to give them far more time, as the Japanese do, for the fundamental work of constant professional development.
We think teachers come out of a school of education ready to teach. But we don’t think lawyers come out of law school ready to practice law. We know they have to go into apprenticeship for years and they have to do continuing legal education constantly. And they have to be examining their practice in an apprenticeship role with a senior lawyer who constantly examines their practice and teaches them. And after 15 years, they might be pretty good lawyers. And then their fellow partners, in a good law firm, keep them on their toes and keep them learning and learning and learning. We believe in lifelong learning for lawyers, for example, but we don’t believe in lifelong learning for teachers. We think they’re supposed to be able to do it when they come out of school because we think, after all, if you’re teaching second-grade math, what’s so hard, right? It’s second-grade math. The truth is, it’s immensely hard… You can’t learn better teaching without learning deeper content. That’s one of the mistakes we’ve made in this country–oh, separate pedagogy and content. Now you know enough content, we’ll just focus on pedagogy. There’s no such thing. You can’t teach better without a deeper appreciation of the content that you’re teaching.
CommonWealth: And when the finger pointing gets going, it isn’t long before we get a finger pointed at the teachers unions. How much of that finger pointing is legit?
Spence: When we arrived in New York, I think frankly the teachers union was ahead of the system. They had clearer ideas about reform than the system was able to achieve. As we moved through issues like governance and standards and accountability systems and finance and the like, and resources and the use of resources, we reached the point where we caught up. And then we were hitting some hard issues for the union. And there’s no question that it’s going to be tough for unions if we’re to make the real changes we want to make. I don’t think it’s impossible to conceive of ways of getting through that. For example, we said to the principals union, we want to get rid of principal tenure because we think the question of the leadership of a school affects every single kid in that school forever… We convinced the mayor–and this was something I worked hard on–convinced the mayor to go back to the union and say, we’re going to offer you a 40 percent increase in salary, and in return, we want you to give up tenure.
“Ideally, we’ll pay teachers more,
but they’ve got to work in a very different way.”
Teachers in this country are seriously underpaid, particularly urban schoolteachers. Desperately underpaid. I think it’s not unreasonable to say, look, we’re prepared to pay you a lot more and then you’ve got to give on a bunch of issues. In many ways, the unions have been working on the old socialist adage, they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work. The New York City teachers union would rightly say, you want us not to use these rigid work rules that diminish our workload, but you want to pay us less than any suburban school system by 30 percent or 40 percent. You can’t have it both ways. That’s a reasonable response. My response, as management, would be, ideally, okay–and this is why additional resources are so crucial–okay, we’ll pay you more, dramatically more, but boy, then we’ve got to work in a very different way. Until we do that, urban systems, I think, are stuck. They can’t win that battle with the unions. The unions, in the end, they’re democratic organizations that are driven by the most anxious and insecure, as is always true–not always, but often true. And those anxieties and insecurities and resentments will drive the agenda until some of those deep grievances about pay are cured.
I was disappointed that the City of Boston didn’t take that opportunity in the last [teachers contract] negotiation. Boston’s doing really well. I assume its tax revenues are up like everybody else’s. Wasn’t it the right time to say, okay, give on seniority and we’ll give you a dramatic [pay] increase? That was the tragedy for me. There was all this pushing, but in the end, there wasn’t a willingness to put real money on the table to make the change… If you’re willing to give up critical pieces of seniority that are destructive to the needs of kids in low-performing schools, we’ll talk about more money. That’s the place, I think, the dialogue has to go.
CommonWealth: I want to talk about some of your past experiences and your broader role as a turnaround guy for dysfunctional institutions. As receiver, first for the Boston Housing Authority and then for the City of Chelsea, you were thrown into what were the most categorically dysfunctional of public institutions. How much worse were they than typical government agencies, which are seen by many as pretty dysfunctional themselves? And how close did you get to fixing any of them?
Spence: I think they were pretty dramatically worse. You have to understand the Boston Housing Authority in 1980 had a 30-percent vacancy rate and accelerating rapidly. It was the worst housing authority in the country,…you look at the national data and it was the worst in the country. Chelsea–part of what I think was difficult for the people of Chelsea is they really believed that having a mob run city government was the way the rest of the world worked. It’s a very parochial community and people had a hard time understanding. I mean, sure, there’s some corruption in the City of Boston or in Cambridge, perhaps–I don’t know. I know there’s corruption in New York. No question. But it doesn’t dominate the system. It’s the exception. That was just not the case [in Chelsea]. The Chelsea city government was deeply infiltrated by corruption driven by organized crime. That was an exceptional and extraordinary and scary circumstance. So they were much worse.
I think what the public rightly feels is, in a lot of ways, the standards have risen. Corporate America has learned how to, not entirely–witness my own personal fights with the phone company–but, they’ve learned how better to run large-scale organizations, large-scale bureaucracies, that also are able to customize and show a high level of customer responsiveness in many areas. Public organizations haven’t figured out how to rise to that new standard… What we’ve got to figure out in the next 20 years in government is, what’s an equivalently sophisticated public organization look like? And I think that’s a complicated question…
One of the interesting things is, of all people, it was the police, the uniformed services, who made the first real attempt to try and redefine that with some considerable success. Community policing and problem-solving policing represent fundamentally new ways of thinking about delivering the service. And it’s worked in Boston, to the extent that you can reduce crime. Unlike New York, 80 percent of people in minority communities, as I understand it, in polls say they support the police in Boston, whereas it was about 20 percent in New York. You don’t have to do it rudely. You could do it with sensitivity and intelligence. That’s a sign that you can do this with public organizations.
I think public education is at the same point right now that public safety was at about 15 years ago. We’re beginning to figure out the elements of a new strategy. They’re not there yet. They’re not there. And it’s a tougher task, frankly, and I know public safety is immensely hard, but nothing’s as hard as public education. And I’ve worked in both. But I think we’re on the verge…
CommonWealth: You’re busy now working with the College Board on its K-to-12 educational strategies. Do you see that as a long-term involvement or do you see yourself at some point getting another public institution to turn around?
Spence: Well, I certainly don’t say to myself that I’ve retired from the work that has always been enormously fascinating to me, which is this work of helping to move public institutions. And I think, frankly, probably in the education field. I came to education in part because I thought to myself, well, you know, even if you were able to, which you can’t, fix all the housing, all the police services, all the fire services, etc., the public education system’s failing. It’s all written on water. In the end, public education is the core task. It’s the one that defines what the future looks like for us. It turned out to be even richer, more fascinating, more demanding, more frustrating, more all those things, than any public work or any work I’ve ever done…
Right now, I’m learning a lot about instruction, deeply about ways in which we can improve instruction, what we know right now about how to improve instruction. This work is fascinating work and I expect I’ll likely stay with it for a time. But I certainly haven’t sworn off of trying to find ways to actually apply that learning, in settings with other people who are committed to doing the day-to-day work of making an institution work. I haven’t sworn that off at all. Look forward to doing it again in the future.