Interview with Dr. Warren Morgan, Chief Academic Officer for Indianapolis Public Schools
Dr. Warren Morgan is a rising Indianapolis Public Schools (IPS) leader who has worked with a variety of communities during his 15-plus years in education. He started his teaching career in St. Louis, MO, and has held education leadership positions for Chicago Public Schools and Cleveland Metropolitan School District. He currently serves as the Chief Academic Officer for Indianapolis Public Schools.
The interview was completed over the phone in June 2021 and conducted and prepared by John Boumgarden. While not the most thorough or long-ranging of interviews, we are excited to present this snapshot of a dynamic district leader’s thought process as he and his team prepare for a return to school after an unprecedented and chaotic year.
The first question that I wanted to talk about, as a district leader, what is your professional responsibility to schools and communities as you straddle the tension between acceleration and remediation for the greater Indianapolis community?
The New Teacher Project (TNTP) just launched that wonderful piece about acceleration that I have recently been grounding myself in, and several of us in the cabinet have. TNTP is going to be our professional partner, regarding our literary initiative and the professional development (PD) for our teachers coming back.
As the Chief Academic Officer, I am over all instructional programs and now even extracurricular and whole child experiences that impact a school. In IPS, we have a Chief Academic Officer, which is me, and then a Chief Schools Officer, Dr. Nathalie Henderson. My colleague Dr. Henderson supervises all schools, including principal supervisors and principals. They focus more on leadership development and the execution and implementation of the programs that happen in buildings. My team designs the instructional programs that take place in schools. We make sure the academic programs that we have in all of the schools are rigorous, are aligned to standards, and that we have a very high bar to measure/assess our instructional programs. But more importantly, that we are giving the professional development to school leaders and teachers to implement it.
We have also been really focusing on whole child supports as we opened our buildings. We’ve decided for the 2021–22 school year that all students will return to full in-person learning. For families who still want full-time remote learning for their students, that would be run by two of our Innovation partner schools, not the district. That was a hard decision to make, but we really wanted to focus our efforts to maximize in-person instruction and this idea of acceleration.
There are going to be a lot of teachers saying, “You know, my kids pretty much missed all of second grade and now they are third graders and we didn’t do any retention. I need to do weeks and weeks of remediation” or “I need to do weeks and weeks of teaching the kids how to sit down and enter into the classroom.” That mindset shift is mind boggling.
But we also need to shift our community members’ mindset around it. I was leading a town hall on the academic perspective regarding how we are spending our district’s ESSER funds. The majority of what we are requesting from ESSER is either operational in nature or coming from academics. I was explaining all of these programs and the idea of acceleration versus remediation, and I did get a question from someone who asked: “Shouldn’t we be asking our teachers to design these things and giving our teachers the money to design the curriculum since they are the ones that have to own it.” I definitely agree with that frame of thought.
My response: “Given the time constraints that we are under, that is something we wouldn’t be able to do. Given the fact that a lot of our teachers have not internalized the idea of acceleration versus remediation, we need to build that capacity within our teachers before we do a strategy where they are building the curriculum.”
I just don’t think we are currently ready for it. We are building the foundation so that in-time, we will be ready to design and write our own curriculum.
I love that you are able to tease that out and frame it for the community member. There is that big underlying question or assumption: Do our teachers even have that professional capacity and expertise to really dig into the intricacies of what that means? Teaching in itself is challenging. And then to do acceleration is going to be extremely challenging. And the same for remediation. Is there even that professional staffing, capability, and capacity; and if not, that’s probably not the reality that it can be built out or more thoughtfully and rigorously developed over the next month or two.
I agree with your reflections, which is why we include teacher voice in our curriculum adoptions and decisions. We are in the early stages of our strategic plan and we want to ensure we provide alignment, support and professional development. Once we have strategic alignment, internalization and effective ways to monitor progress, we will be in a better place to design our own curriculum.
And, not as a discredit to IPS … I think that would be true for most districts. Is there that professional capacity? I think most districts would not be able to say with good certainty that our teachers can thoughtfully tease that distinction out and look at the implementation side of it.
I believe our teachers are capable of doing this. However, our teachers have been balancing so much and we want to ensure our teachers feel highly supported and have a voice in the decisions that impact teaching and learning. As we continue to build the systems that give teachers training on curriculum design and implementation, we will be in a better place to create our own curriculum and assessments. This takes training and time to do this effectively!
You mention a little bit about the whole child measures, and I’m jumping ahead a little bit. What are those holistic child measures that IPS is thinking of for SY21–22? And to what extent are you leaning into the community and listening to their perspectives versus thinking about this in terms of one measure that we often think about or value at a district level.
So, a couple of things. I’ll start by saying what our district’s strategic priorities are. We have four strategic priorities:
· Increase access to rigorous curriculum and instruction.
· Promote racial equity.
· Foster authentic engagement.
· Operate and fund strategically.
So when you think about it, there are three other priorities that are not related to instruction. And when you think about instruction, there are nine initiatives under that first one. There are two initiatives that are not necessarily related to instruction fully, and that one is SEL. We have an initiative to make sure that we are supporting schools with getting kids back in school and finding those kids who were not engaged. We are partnering with organizations like Attendance Works that can help some of our schools who were Tier Three with attendance for the 20–21school year and really give them the support that they need.
We also are building a new SEL framework that is aligned with all of our schools. And in some of our highest needs schools, we are partnering with CT3, who does the real-time teacher coaching and the no-nonsense nurture approach. We are doing a lot of work under academics related to the whole child experience.
At IPS, athletics has also moved to academics. So now I’m supervising the athletics department and we are about to build out a whole extracurricular department. That will allow us to really think about the whole child experience and all the different things that kids come to school for. A byproduct of coming to school is that you get a really strong literacy curriculum. But kids aren’t coming to school like, “Hey, I get a really strong literacy curriculum.” They are choosing to go to school because they are going to have these extra programs that are fulfilling their social and emotional learning needs. We must not sacrifice those due to instruction. There has to be a both and.
Are you excited about your new addition of athletics to your management?
I am. I’m a huge sports guy myself, so I think this will be a lot of fun. I’ve already started doing check-ins with our IPS Director of Athletics, Darren Thomas, and he’s really excited because he’s been in Operations before. When you’re in Operations, there is less focus on the development of a student and more emphasis on ensuring logistics run smoothly. With the shift of Athletics to Academics, we will be able to focus on the whole child and what is happening with students instructionally. We’ll also make sure that we are holding students accountable to their academics so that they can play athletics.
That’s great — that’s very cool. My last question for you, as we think about the theme of acceleration versus remediation, to what extent can and should the district respond to the local needs of the community (of what they want and value)? I think you started to talk about this a little bit earlier with the town hall example and where students and families can enroll in a virtual option. Versus responding to what the academic and theoretical practitioners are going to say?
Case in point, we have this conversation happening right now around acceleration versus remediation. Is that really what the community wants or desires right now? And how do you navigate that tension given all the stakeholders that you have to please?
That is a great question. You know, like anything, everyone has an opinion and everyone’s opinion is valid. That’s one thing that I’m constantly learning and balancing. We do get a lot of community feedback whether it’s through our board meetings or through our town halls. And we solicit that input and feedback but we also try to ground people in the reality of now. I also think, and this may be true of a lot of districts, but I see this across the board … whether you are a community member, a teacher, or even some of our central office folks.
A great example is a team member recently presented an idea that would be great for our schools, but it was very aspirational. In order to make sure something is implemented well it takes collaboration, stakeholder engagement, and a well-articulated implementation plan.
I can go back to that example from earlier when someone said, “Let’s pay our teachers to write our curriculum.” And I start to think How do we effectively implement that? And I think our shift for our community and for our district is to think about what our students need and think about an effective, realistic and strategic implementation plan. A big part of my job is making sure we have a plan, true collaboration for all stakeholders involved, and execute an instructional program that will truly make an impact for our students.
That’s great, Warren. I appreciate your thoughtfulness and time through all of this to respond to these questions.
