[00:00:15] Jon M: I’m Jon Moscow.
[00:00:17] Amy H-L: And I’m Amy Halpern-Laff. Welcome to Ethical Schools. Our guests today are Adam Grumbach and Naseem Haamid. Mr. Grumbach is the social studies program coordinator of the New York Performance Standards Consortium and the former principal and co-director of Urban Academy. Mr. Haamid is a law student who attended Fannie Lou Hamer High School, one of the 36 Consortium schools in New York City.
Welcome Adam and Naseem.
[00:00:49] Adam G: Good afternoon. Thank you. Happy to be here.
[00:00:52] Naseem H: Also happy to be here.
[00:00:54] Jon M: Adam, what is the Performance Standards Consortium?
[00:00:58] Adam G: The Consortium is a network of 38 schools across New York State. There’s one in Ithaca and one in Rochester, and the rest, as Amy said, are, the 36 are in the four boroughs of New York City, not including Staten Island. All of the schools in the Consortium have a waiver from the New York State Education Department so that we do not have to give five Regents exams for our students to graduate. Instead, we use a system of performance assessment where the students in our schools complete four what we call performance-based assessment tasks, or , one in each of the four core disciplines: English, social studies, math, and science. We are a group of schools that grew from a small number in 1998, when we realized that with the new requirement that students pass five Regents exams, we were not going to be able to continue in our progressive pedagogy in school because of the amount of content required by the Regents exams. We came together and lobbied New York State and 1) got the waiver, which has been renewed multiple times, and we have added schools ever since, getting up to a total of 38 schools now. That was quite a mouthful. I apologize.
[00:02:04] Amy H-L: The New York State Regents appear to be about to eliminate Regents exams as a graduation requirement statewide. If they do, how might this change the Consortium’s role?
[00:02:16] Adam G: It’s a good question, and there’s a lot that remains to be seen about the recommendation from the Blue Ribbon Commission that the Regents exams should be decoupled as graduation requirements, which is the recommendation right now. It has not actually been adopted by the Regents exams. We are not sure at the Consortium how it will affect our member schools. We suspect that some of the schools in the Consortium may choose to strike out on their own if they are not required to give Regents exams for graduation. However, the Blue Ribbon Commission was clear that right now, even if the Regents are decoupled, schools will be required to give three Regents exams for federal accountability purposes. And our schools right now have a waiver from that particular requirement. Our waiver is good through 2027.
So there still would be some very obvious benefits. But more than that, our network of schools provides a measure of sort of accountability and professional development to each other within the schools. We bring staff together for workshops. We bring staff together for professional development of many sorts. We do what we call “moderation studies,” where we have members of the departments. One representative from each school comes to a meeting and considers a few pieces of student work, and works with other teachers from other Consortium schools to norm the evaluation process and also just to talk about what’s best practice. So there are a number of things the Consortium does that I believe our member schools really appreciate and would continue to be interested in. And we are sort of excited about the possibility that all of the schools that are with us are really there because they are interested in performance assessment and progressive education and not simply there as a function of trying to avoid Regents exams.
[00:03:54] Amy H-L: We’ve talked about assessments, but what does it mean for these Consortium schools to be inquiry-based and literacy-based?
[00:04:05] Adam G: What we mean by inquiry is interpreted widely in the various different schools, but the central element of it is that we expect students to play a role in determining what it is they study, and to find their passion and to follow their passion.
And there is no set curriculum that our schools have. Teachers design and create their own courses. And they do so with an eye to the students who are in the rooms in front of them. And often the opening exercises for the first week or so in class, we’ll try to, we’ll try to determine where student interest lies and what are the richest things that can be explored in a class. Students raise questions and the rest of the course is based on them trying to follow up on those questions and figure out the answers to them. So that is kind of what we mean by by inquiry teaching. Students are exposed to multiple points of view and expected to develop their own ideas and thoughts about the course of study and to develop arguments and support them with evidence. I hope that answers your question. I apologize for being a little bit distracted by some noise in the background.
[00:05:09] Amy H-L: It leaves open the question, though, of who determines what’s going to be included in that curriculum that teachers do create.
[00:05:21] Adam G: That varies from school to school and from teacher to teacher. I think Naseem can talk a little bit about how teachers in his school have chosen to teach certain courses based on student interest.
That was certainly the case in Urban Academy, where I taught for many years and where I was the principal. Depending on our student population, just depending on what students seem to be intrigued by, teachers would offer courses, on the U. S. Mexico border, for example, when the migrant crisis became a really salient topic in American discourse. We’ve added courses on the Dominican Republic as our student population has increasingly been Dominican students. There are some standards that will always be there. We will always have a class on Columbus and first contact, on the American revolution, on the Civil War and Reconstruction, and on the civil rights movement.
And there’s sort of a rotating group of American history courses that are taught. But in addition to that, we add courses every semester, and I believe most Consortium schools have some element of figuring out what students are talking about and thinking about and designing courses that include that kind of content.
[00:06:27] Amy H-L: So within those courses that you do offer every semester, do the students have any say in what they’re going to focus on?
Absolutely. Studying, for example, the U.S. Constitution and the formation of the Constitution. Almost always there are questions about who were the founding fathers, who were the people who wrote the constitutions, what were their interests, and usually enslavement comes up as a topic and where enslavement lives in the U.S. Constitution and how it affected people at the time. But some classes may also be interested in women’s suffrage. Some classes may also be interested in how the Constitution is an economic document. And particularly when certain things are happening in the country around the way the Supreme Court appears to be involved in the U.S. economy or whether inflation is going, you know, I mean, there are ways that students bring their current interests and current thinking and current things they’ve noticed in any number of places that can affect where a teacher takes a course, and all of them are, I would argue, equally valid and equally important, but they may, they are usually not the same from semester to semester.
[00:07:39] Jon M: Naseem, could you describe your experience making a transition from a test oriented charter elementary and middle school to Fannie Lou Hamer High School?
[00:07:51] Naseem H: Yes, I can. My K 12 experience prior to arriving to Fannie Lou, looking back at it, I can call it a traditional form of education. Then I was welcomed to this non-traditional, progressive form of education. Prior to arriving to Fanny Lou, things felt centered around prepping for exams from the time I hit third grade and standardized exams were embedded into the curriculum. My interest and things that I wanted to center my education around greatly shifted up until making it to eighth grade prior to arriving to high school. So I never knew what I was really interested in. I didn’t know what I wanted to do when I grew up. And I just felt like the sole purpose of school wasn’t to explore interests, but rather to do well on exams. And I lived within that system. I prided myself in getting A’s or trying to get A’s, I didn’t get A’s all the time, doing repetition, repetition, repetition of practice problems in preparation for those standardized exams.
Transitioning to Fannie Lou, I had arrived at a school that didn’t center exams. It wasn’t about prepping for the standardized exam to come, even though there were some small requirements that Adam could talk more about, that the Consortium required, which was, I think, the Regents exam, the English exam that we had to take as a requirement. But other than that, it was solely focused on, as Adam stated, student interest, right, things that we wanted to learn. And we were able to bring things that were outside of the classroom, that were happening in our day to day lives, that were happening in the world and in the nation, and use the classroom as a vehicle to learning more about those topics.
As Adam was talking, and we spoke before we went online about the election, right, the election is coming up in November. I remember the election season in 2016. We were having mock presidential debates. I’m a Democrat, but I had to role play as the Green Party candidate and formulate an argument for a position that I didn’t necessarily agree with and write a paper about that and argue, opposed to the other students who were acting like Trump and Hillary Clinton at the time. And it was just a great exercise. And that’s one of the many examples that show tailoring towards that interest. And as someone who went on to become a political science major, you can see why that was a highlight for me.
[00:10:54] Jon M: So looking back at your high school education, what would you say were the most valuable things for you at the school?
[00:11:05] Naseem H: The ability to problem-solve, to be resourceful, to think critically. We had something at Fannie Lou called the Habits of Mind, and though I don’t remember every habit of mind off the top because I’ve been away from high school for a little bit, it’s things that I still do in law school. The ability to issue-spot, to see what the issue is, to analyze that issue and then come to a conclusion throughout the topics. I did that in high school in every subject; math, science, history, and literature. It was about identifying the issues, being able to connect it to an issue that was outside of the curriculum, to make that issue that was embedded in the curriculum more interesting, analyze that issue, draw those parallels, and conclude and make that argument at the end of the semester. And I think that those skills were very important. You can’t put a price on those. Those are gonna show up all throughout your life, no matter your career, no matter what you pursue. So those are things that I still hold to this day.
[00:12:13] Amy H-L: And what was it like to transition from the project-based learning at Fannie Lou to more traditional classrooms at college and then at law school?
[00:12:23] Naseem H: As I stated, I lean heavily on my resourcefulness. I told a story to Adam about my history teacher pushing me and giving me college-level reading before I arrived at GW, and how that was a foundation for me to build upon. And it was tied to me receiving my final mastery to graduate. I had to write a paper. I had to argue my stance on that paper. And the last thing that my history teacher required me to do was to add an additional supplement to that project. And I think that that’s unique to the Consortium model. You can’t do that when you’re prepping for an exam. You’re worried about, hey, do these practice problems. In this case, I was able to add something that bolstered that last project that I had to do before I graduated. And it was to read Thomas Jefferson’s argument on why slavery was needed in the founding of America. And I wrote a paper about it and stayed after school, going back and forth with Adam as to why Thomas Jefferson was arguing in favor of slavery. And then I arrived at GW, and I was welcomed with similar literature that I had to read in preparation for midterms and finals. I wasn’t surprised because I had done it in high school. And I was able to say, I can read this, I can analyze this text, and I can take those steps to prepare for writing a paper or taking the exam.
Now, there was a bit of a curve of having to teach myself to take exams again because I had to separate, but I leaned on my problem-solving skills, on being able to advocate for myself, embedded in the Consortium model. So being able to argue and say, hey, I need help and identify what the problem is in your learning, and find the resources to help you make those transitions.
[00:14:31] Jon M: Adam, how do the performance-based assessment tasks work at Consortium schools? And what other kinds of assessments do some of the schools use?
[00:14:42] Adam G: Sure. So, first of all, we are schools. And, and most of the schools have testing in some form or other. Just not standardized testing. So math teachers develop tests to assess whether their students have learned the material they’ve been taught in that math class. I used to give essay exams in my social studies classes.
The performance-based assessment tests, the PBATs, are supposed to be the culmination and the highest level of that. Different schools call them different things. I think Fannie Lou calls them masteries. Some schools call them capstones. Urban Academy used to call them proficiencies. So kids talk about things differently, but they’re all talking about PBATs. Essentially, they come out of a class that the student is taking in their junior or senior year. Some schools have classes devoted exclusively to PBATs, where every student is writing a PBAT. Some schools have three or four classes that kids are taking in their junior and senior year, all of which will have a paper or two, and kids can turn that paper into a PBAT. That’s in history and science and math as well. And literature, I should say. The student writes the paper. Often there’s sort of an independent component to it where they’re expected to sort of make the paper much larger than it would have been had it just been a classroom paper. And it gets evaluated by the classroom teacher, and then by one other person who is not the classroom teacher, which we call an external evaluator. Once the student has, has achieved, has passed, on that level on the written part, there is an oral defense that is scheduled, and that consists of at least two external evaluators, so not the teacher of the class. Sitting down with a student, and the student usually does a five or ten minute presentation of their paper and what they wrote in it. And then there’s usually a 20 to 25 to 30 minute question and answer session where the student is expected to defend their work. The model is kind of a graduate dissertation. It’s obviously not quite as extensive or in depth as a graduate dissertation. But I think to most students, it feels like something really challenging. It makes them very nervous. But I think almost all of them come out of the experience feeling exhilarated and amazed at their ability to handle that type of interaction. And I think it sends them off to college with a real sense that they are able to talk to people outside of their zone of comfort in some ways, but that they can explain the work that they’ve done and they can even make connections and take it a little bit further as part of that conversation. And then those evaluators, there’s a rubric that has been developed by Consortium teachers, both for evaluating the paper and for evaluating the presentation. The evaluators fill out that rubric and the student gets a score.
[00:17:21] Jon M: For people who aren’t used to working with rubrics, could you very briefly describe what that is?
[00:17:26] Adam G: Sure. It looks like a grid. There are usually five or six criteria for what the teachers have said should be in a student presentation or a student paper in this discipline area. And then each criteria has four levels. The highest is outstanding, then there’s good, then there’s competent, and then there’s what we call “needs revision.” Competent or better is a passing paper, project, or presentation. If the student gets need revision on any criteria, then they have to go back and actually revise the work and re-present if necessary. But the rubric works by having language that describes the work at the highest level in the outstanding box, and each box as you head across the rubric becomes a little bit less , proficient. So an outstanding paper analyzes something in depth and sophistication. The next level down, we’ll say it analyzes the topic in depth. The next level down would say, you analyze this topic adequately. The next level down will say, fails to analyze the topic adequately. And it’s mostly a guide to evaluators to figure out how they rate the student based on what they heard. But really, it’s mostly a holistic process. You read a paper, you can sort of say to yourself, that was a fantastic paper or that was an okay paper. The rubric helps you precisely identified the levels. That’s how the rubric works. And you can see examples of the rubric at our website, performanceassessment.org. There’s a little drop down menu that includes rubrics.
All of our work is public. The rubrics get revised every three to four years depending on how teachers feel about the rubric. If they feel like the rubric isn’t really helping them help students reach the highest possible work, they say this part of the rubric seems to be pulling people away. Let’s go back and revise it. And we do that. We just revised the social studies rubric last year. It took us a year to do it. There were 12 teachers who volunteered to help. We met, I don’t know, eight or 10 times and just went through a lot of student work and looked at the old rubric and figured out where we wanted to make changes.
[00:19:26] Amy H-L: Are the PBATs eventually graded?
[00:19:30] Adam G: Yes, so there are four ratings on each PBAT. Outstanding, Good, Competent, or Needs Revision. Some schools call that 4 3 2 1. The student gets a PBAT score, but most of the, the students also get a grade in the course from which the PBAT emerged, and they will sometimes get a separate grade for the paper. So even a student who was only able to write a competent paper based on the rubric, depending on the class and the teacher and how hard the teacher feels the student worked and how far they pushed themselves and how much progress they made may get a higher grade in the course. You could still get an A in a course, even if you only got a competent on the rubric.
[00:20:09] Amy H-L: The assessments at Fannie Lou were called portfolios, is that correct? Could you tell us about one or two of the ones you participated in?
[00:20:22] Naseem H: Yeah, so, so we had the portfolio model and in Division 1, which was 9th and 10th grade, you had the red tag and in Division 12th grade, you had the blue tag. One of the highlights for me is the one that I mentioned earlier, my social issues mastery. I focused on Bronx local politics, and the power of community organizing and advocacy. And I was able to connect my work as a community organizer in the Bronx to the American Revolution that I was learning in history class and my social issues and internship course during that time. I was able to merge all these three classes together and write a paper, a mastery on the power of organizing and the advocacy, and breaking down the New York State legislature and the assembly members and New York state senators and had argued and spoken about where is the true power in the legislature is the power within the people and the organizers, or is the power within the legislators and their ability to craft a bill? Prior to this conversation, I was looking through that slideshow and the essential question that I put together in the presentation that Adam kind of spoke about where you write the paper. You go through that exercise and then you create a presentation to make your argument. And my argument was that the power was with the people, and the power is in community organizing. And I connected it directly to projects that were happening right outside of the walls of Fannie Lou from the Sheridan Expressway or parks that had been built due to grassroots advocacy and access to green space. Also, another highlight in Division 1 was the ability to go in science class and go to the local park, Concrete Plant Park, and take samples out of the Bronx River, connect that in the paper at the end of the semester to environmental injustice and the things that the Bronx had experienced through the years and connect it to the quality and the experiment that we had to conduct in science class continuously throughout my time at Fannie Lou. My portfolios, as you can tell, as someone who is a political science major in undergrad and is in law school, I was able, even in science to connect it to some sort of civic engagement organizing component and not only do that in history and literature.
So that was, that was the power of the Consortium and the portfolio that I developed during my time at Fanny Lou.
[00:23:12] Adam G: Can I jump in for one sec? Listening to Naseem talk, it brings home to me how effective the Consortium is at making it possible for students to follow their passions and their interests in school. And when you hear Consortium kids, and Naseem graduated, I believe, in 2017, we’re seven years out now. But he’s able to talk about his, his PBAT or mastery. It feels to me like he did it yesterday.
Frequently people ask about our curriculum and, and notice that we don’t cover anywhere near the scope and sequence of the New York State Standards. And they say, but your kids will never learn about the formation of the National Bank. And my response is always, you know, talk to someone who took the Regents two weeks ago and see what they remember about their American History class. Sometimes I ask them, like, you graduated from a New York City high school. What do you remember about this? What the level of interest in the level of recall for the things that you have played a role in, in determining for your course of study, is obviously much higher and much more meaningful. And that’s why the Consortium emphasizes depth over coverage and student interest as the guiding star for what to study. It doesn’t mean that students are like, I want to study, you know, Instagram today. It doesn’t work that way. The teacher has an important role to play in determining what the rich areas of study are. But it is guided by student interest, and the PBATs become the projects that the students really take on themselves.
[00:24:45] Jon M: Naseem, what was college and or career planning like at Fannie Lou?
[00:24:52] Naseem H: Oh, that was my favorite part. I just want to briefly touch upon how I started, right? I started in ninth grade transitioning from a charter school that was very exam-intensive. So I thought that Fannie Lou was going to be very similar where I had to just go in, do very well on the portfolios, get the highest grade, and go home. I quickly realized that there was much more to this model and I was just scratching the surface. So after my ninth grade year, 10th grade, yeah, I fully submerged myself into what this portfolio model was and really felt like I was in the driver’s seat as it related to my education because I was able to lean into this model and to bring external internships and extracurriculars that I was doing at the time into my education. This only continued to grow in 11th and 12th grade organically, for lack of a better term, where I felt like I had more control over my education in my 11th and 12th grade years, because of the time that I had to complete my projects and my blue tags during that time, and I was able to even lean into my interests even more.
I had identified early that I was passionate about community organizing, so I ensured that that that was embedded in every part of my learning, or I tried to incorporate it. Whether it was history or literature, I was constantly writing papers when we were reading fences, connecting it. We had red fences in 11th grade, connecting that to social issues and movements. And learning about the American Revolution and connecting that to community organizing movements in New York City, from the Young Lords and the Black Panthers, and how people were able to pass policy and legislation in New York City. So I was able to quickly identify that I was interested in the law, policy, government, and organizing. And if you look at my resume, up until I graduated from high school, every experience that I’ve had has been centered on law, policy, government, and organizing. And I credit that to Fannie Lou, where they really allowed me to explore all my interests, see what I like, see what I didn’t like, and quickly identify that policy and the law is really what I’m passionate about, and I was able to explore it in science, math, literature, and history and social studies. I identified quickly that that was gonna be my major in undergrad, graduated from Fannie Lou, and knew that I was gonna go to law school. I credit that to the internships that I got while I was at Fannie Lou, the extracurriculars, the curriculum, and the Consortium, and giving me the autonomy and really putting me in the driver’s seat, because I was able to say, Hey, it’s election season. Could we talk about this? Could this be our essential question in class? And my history teacher, Adam, was like, Hey, yeah, let’s talk about this, but we have to connect it to what’s already slated for us to teach about today or that he was going to teach about for the day. And it just kept me intrigued every step of the way.
[00:28:25] Jon M: Adam, you mentioned the important role of the teacher and Naseem’s been talking about the incredible ability and flexibility that he had to determine what he wanted to do, which is, I suspect, something that a lot of teachers aren’t prepared for coming out of either teacher education programs or experiences in more test-oriented and traditional schools. How do Consortium schools generally select their teachers or are they self-selected? And what kinds of support does the Consortium give and individual schools give to help teachers to really feel comfortable, in this kind of environment?
[00:29:12] Adam G: So increasingly we’ve been, we’ve been urging schools, with a lot of success, actually, to hire their graduates as teachers. There are, I don’t know, maybe 50 to 60 teachers in Consortium schools now who graduated either from those schools or from other Consortium schools. And I will tell you as a principal, there’s nothing like having a graduate come work for you because you don’t have to like teach them the culture, right. They are preset for that, that experience.
For other teachers, I’ve always felt like the younger you could get them, the better. And they need a real mentoring process to really learn how to teach inquiry well. So varies from school to school, how they do the mentoring, but it’s best if, you know, you can have as much attention from a veteran teacher as possible. The Consortium, as I said, runs lots of workshops over the summer. We run them during the school year. We do provide some coaching for teachers. We have retired teachers who are able to go into schools and work with with with new teachers. We don’t have enough staff to do that as much as we would like to.
But there are there are also experiences, as I mentioned before, that are really professional development experiences. We we label them different things. The moderation study. I always encourage principals to send their youngest teachers to the moderation studies because they’re sitting in a room with each other, but also with veteran teachers who are facilitating the groups and talking about best practices and talking about work and luring them to go see each other. We run exchanges in all the disciplines where teachers visit each other’s classrooms. And in some disciplines we’ve arranged exchanges that are much more in depth, where teachers develop curriculum together, teach it as a unit in their own schools, and then bring students together to to continue the discussion with, you know, 3 or 4 other schools at a time. So these are some of the ways that we take teacher training very seriously. I would say that the most challenging thing is when you’ve got a teacher who’s a veteran in a more traditional curriculum coming into your school. Helping them break out of that mold can be can be tough.
[00:31:24] Naseem H: Could I add something really quickly? Adam spoke about the Consortium encouraging graduates of the schools to come back and work for the schools. In Fannie Lou’s case, my advisor graduated from Fannie Lou, and she was my teacher for internship, my 12th grade year, and my advisor before I graduated from Fannie Lou. I think it’s so powerful for someone who’s graduated because I remember her pushing me so much before I graduated. Because as I said, I thought I was done. I thought I had reached the mountaintop. I was about to graduate from high school. No one was going to tell me anything, but Luz was like, you’re not done yet. You’re not done yet, and she was pushing me just as much as I don’t know, pushing me to do this extra work before I would get my blue tie. She would review my papers and tell me, nope, you gotta fix this before you get the blue tie and before you prep for your presentation. You’re not done yet. And I think that there’s power in that as someone who has graduated from a Consortium school, has gone to college, knows what that transition is like, and is able to really prepare students as they are getting ready to embark on that, on that next step of their journey. And, you know, I just wanted to shout out Luz because I think that’s just a story that adds on to what Adam was talking about in the power of hiring teachers who have gone through the school themselves.
[00:32:56] Amy H-L: Adam, are there lessons from the Consortium that are useful for high school teachers around the country?
[00:33:04] Adam G: Sure, I hope so. The one thing that leaps to mind is that the more teachers can be intellectuals in their schools and continue their practice as intellectuals, the happier they will be and the longer they will remain in teaching. Consortium schools have higher teacher retention than, I think, any other collection of schools in the city. And a large part of that is one that I think our schools are very functional places and students are typically quite engaged in them and happy to be there. I’m not suggesting kids don’t have moments where they’d rather be other places, but I think kids are really feel involved in a sense of ownership about their education. And that’s just a pleasant place to teach. But also, because teachers are expected to develop their own curriculum, they are acting as scholars at some level, and they’re practitioner-scholars. They’re not PhD people doing literature reviews, but they are thinking about their disciplines and how best to help young people become interested in that. And that is really the essence of inquiry teaching helping students develop a life of the mind in your discipline. Not filling a pail, but rather lighting a fire. I think in terms of the work of Consortium teachers, but I think all teachers everywhere should have a chance to work in a school where they are taken seriously as people who are expected to really build the education and not just deliver the content.
[00:34:37] Naseem H: I have to add one more thing. Adam is just driving the points home here. As someone who went to a Consortium school, I felt like I was always a partner with my teachers. I didn’t feel as if I was being told to do something. I felt like I was walking hand in hand with my teachers to reach the answers to the questions that were being posed as opposed to a more traditional setting where teachers are speaking at you, in a Consortium school, you’re conversing, right? it’s a partnership, it’s a dialogue, and you’re pushing toward getting to the destination. Teachers within the Consortium do it in a very unique way. And every teacher has a different style, but the model allows them to just speak, be creative in how they help students get to where they need to go.
[00:35:35] Jon M: Is there anything that either of you would like to add that we haven’t talked about?
[00:35:40] Adam G: Naseem, anything from you?
[00:35:44] Naseem H: I think that this model of education is preparing young people the way that the education system should be as opposed to the way the education system currently is. And I’ll just leave everyone who’s listening to this to think about that, think about what that means to you, whether you’re an educator, whether you’re a student, whether you’re an activist, whatever your title may be, think about what progressive education looks like to you. And I would encourage you to visit a Consortium school and see it in action. Adam and I could speak about it for days, for hours, for minutes, but I think that the best way for you to see the impact that this model has on young people is by visiting and being there with the teachers and being there with the young people and seeing it in action.
[00:36:31] Adam G: So you, you asked Naseem about post-secondary preparation and guidance. The Consortium, I think, has changed quite a bit as has the landscape of what that means. We always viewed ourselves as college prep programs. And over the last, I’d say, 10 or a little more years, there’s been an emphasis nationwide and in the City on career training as as equally as important. And a number of our schools have career and technical education programs within them. They offer one or two career tracks. We have a school out in Queens, Internet High School for Health Professions at Cambria Heights that, that prepares a lot of medical professionals. But I think what makes things different in Consortium schools is that to the extent there are a lot of internships and there’s a lot of exposure to different careers. We are not trying to train people for those professions. We are trying to expose students to those professions and let them make choices about whether that’s what they want. And there are a number of students who start in one career on a technical education track and then decide that that’s not for them and they move to another. And I think that’s what we’re really trying to do. We’re trying to help students realize themselves and develop a life of the mind.
And in terms of what I think education can and should do, it is to produce people who are intellectuals and take themselves seriously as intellectuals and think of their ability to talk to each other and their peers as an important skill that they will bring to the world and to the, civic entity, that is the society that we live in. And I think that’s what Consortium schools do an amazing job of.
[00:38:15] Amy H-L: Thank you, Adam Grumbach of the New York Performance Standards Consortium and Naseem Haamid, alumnus of Fannie Lou Hamer High School.
[00:38:24] Adam G: Thank you both. This was a lot of fun.
[00:38:26] Naseem H: Yeah. Thank you. It was an honor and pleasure to be here.
[00:38:30] Jon M: And thank you, listeners. Check out our almost 200 podcasts on our website, ethicalschools.org, our articles and our new video series, What Would YOU Do? If you found this podcast worthwhile, please share it with a friend or five, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and give us a rating or a review. This helps others to find the show. We post annotated transcripts of our interviews to make them easy to use in workshops and classes. Contact us at hosts@ethicalschools.org. We’re on Facebook, Instagram, and Thread. Our editor and social media manager is Amanda Denti. Until next week!