Breakthrough with Matt Hammer of Innovate Public Schools

Innovate Public Schools, a New Profit grantee-partner from 2015-2020, builds the leadership and collective power of parents in communities across California and trains schools and organizations across the country to do grassroots community organizing to advance the systemic transformation of our education system.

New Profit has been honored to partner with Innovate Public Schools over the last four years, during which we have supported the organization in scaling its impact at an outstanding rate:

• Through parent organizing and their World-class Schools Fellowship for school leaders, Innovate has supported parent and school leaders to create new schools and redesign struggling schools – impacting over 9,000 students across 18 public schools.
• The number of active core parent leaders grew from 67 at the year of investment to 500+ in 2020 with Innovate expanding from one local parent organization in the Bay Area to four statewide in Los Angeles, San Jose, San Francisco and the Peninsula (Redwood City and East Palo Alto). Over 2k parents were active in the network 2020 vs. 1k in 2015.
• Since launching its national training programs in 2015, Innovate has trained over 100 staff from 45 organizations and 1,000 parents.

These are just a few of the breakthrough strides that Innovate Public Schools has made and continues to make towards their vision of a world where all students—especially those from low-income backgrounds and students of color—receive a world-class public education that prepares them for success in college, careers and beyond. We caught up with Matt Hammer, the CEO and Founder of Innovate Public Schools to talk about how his organization is adapting and rising to address the pandemic, racial equity, and what is next.

What problem led you to create Innovate Public Schools?

Our public education system was not designed to serve all children equitably — racism and classism are built into its foundation and structure. Solving that is a political problem, a power problem. The reality is that low-income kids of color aren’t going to get the excellent education they deserve until their parents and communities have the organized power they need to demand it and win it. We organize for systems that educate and liberate all children, particularly those who have been marginalized.

Now more than ever, we need organizations elevating the voices of families and building their power. However, few education advocacy organizations, community groups or schools currently have the capacity or expertise to develop and support parents as leaders to build community power long-term.

When public systems are only responsive to the priorities of certain groups – like unions and the wealthy and white people — those systems become wildly skewed, dysfunctional, and racist. That’s the fundamental problem with our public education system; a huge part of the population that it is supposed to be getting served has little if any organized power to hold the system accountable. So it shouldn’t surprise us that public schools are largely failing our low-income communities. Until parents have their own political organizations focused on building power to hold the system accountable to their needs, little is going to change. That’s just how it works in our country, like it or not. We work to undermine that power imbalance in the system. Building the power of parents is the only way to achieve lasting change.

When we started this work in 2013, it was hard to find any parent-led organizing groups focused on disrupting the status quo and pushing for education justice and great public schools for Black and Latinx children. Outside of the Bay Area and a couple other places where we’d been organizing, the only well-organized constituencies around public education were teachers unions and wealthy families. Because of our work and the work of many others, that has now begun to change — parent organizing has begun to take root in communities across the country. Change is coming.

Through our national training programs, we train schools and community groups that share our mission of advancing education equity by building parent power through grassroots organizing. To date, we’ve trained over 100 staff from 45 organizations through our Community Organizing Training Program and 1,000 parents through our National Parent Leader Institute. Our alumni are leading the future of parent organizing across the country.

Here in California, we work with over 500 active parent leaders who engage thousands of other parents and voters each year and dozens of elected officials through our four local parent organizations – in Los Angeles, San Jose, San Francisco and the Peninsula (East Palo Alto and Redwood City). We also develop the capacity and leadership of public school educators to lead for equity through our World-class Schools Fellowship. Our research team publishes reports to help parent and educator advocates push for change and point to solutions that will deliver on results for children. Our perspective and expertise is deeply grounded in the lived experiences of families and the wisdom and experience of educators, all informed by the latest science, research and data. Students, parents and equity-driven educators are on the same side. We just need more power for our side.

How have you pivoted to address both COVID-19 and the broader racial equity issues that are front and center in America right now?

The pandemic has acutely revealed the reality of deep, historic inequity and injustice in our country and our public schools. It has also revealed the ways that leadership comes often not from the top, but from many different people and organizations. Our parent leaders have never been more fired up. We’ve never had more organizations coming to us who want to learn how to do grassroots community organizing.

The foundation of community organizing is one-to-one conversations. When the pandemic hit, our organizers called all of our parent leaders. We got people connected to resources, to emergency funds, to tech and the internet, to each other. Within a month, we were having parent meetings on Zoom, then meetings with elected officials. Our schools team offered workshops and support for families on how to support their children’s learning at home.

In June, over 100 Innovate parent leaders from across the state joined forces to tell state and local leaders what parents needed to improve distance learning, winning some new requirements at the state level. Then parents kept the heat on local districts to dramatically improve distance learning for the fall with three online action events in the Bay Area with 200+ parents each.

The plans in Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) were especially egregious due to an abysmal side letter agreement with the teachers union. Our parent leaders advocated throughout the summer with car rallies and petitions to bring those negotiations into the public and give parents a voice in the plan. In response to LAUSD’s terrible plan for fall, in September, we partnered with Parent Revolution, and nine parents filed a lawsuit against LAUSD for denying its 500,000+ students the state constitutional guarantee of a quality public education.

Many alumni of our Community Organizing Training Program(COTP) have also stepped up in creative and powerful ways during the pandemic. This recent brief by the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) highlights COTP alumni Kids First Chicago and PAVE in DC, as well as our work in partnership with Parent Revolution in LA. In many places, these groups are the only organized voice for the needs of families and children, providing a counterbalance to powerful teachers unions.

It’s becoming less likely that public schools will reopen at all this school year, and distance learning has generally been a disaster for low-income children. Think about the significance of that: For children already struggling in math, if this was their year to learn algebra, it’s not going to happen. Or kindergartners and first graders who are building their foundation for literacy. Or what about all the English learners for whom this was their year to get “reclassified” to being English proficient so they could take high school classes that would count toward college admission? It goes on and on.

Most school districts, understandably focused on the crisis in front of them, haven’t even begun planning for what’s next.

2020 has been about organizing to meet families’ basic needs and make remote learning as good as possible. 2021 will be about pushing for a long-term plan and investment in recovery and reconstructing our education system to meet the needs of our children on the other side of this pandemic.

In the crushing reality of this pandemic, individuals have been asked to be heroes. Parents and educators have been asked to individually shoulder the burden of massive systemic problems, and it’s just so rough on everybody right now. My wife is a high school teacher, and I see her working so hard every day to keep her students on a path to college — young people who will be the first in their families to get there. And my own children, both in high school, are doing their best to stay engaged, doing school on a screen in their bedrooms. But so much has been lost. We have to start thinking creatively, now, about how we should respond to address this, before we lose a generation of low-income children to having few opportunities for higher education and jobs that will get them into the middle class.

How do you think this crisis will change schooling?

I’m going to talk about how I hope this crisis will transform schools and what we’re organizing to achieve. First of all, let’s not forget where we were before schools shut down in March. Back to the status quo is not acceptable.

I’ll cite statistics from California, but the picture doesn’t look very different nationwide. In 2018-19, only 4 out of 10 students were doing math at grade-level– and even fewer Black and Latinx students with only 2 out of 10 Black students and 3 out of 10 Latinx students on grade level in math. Just 4 out of 10 Latinx students and 3 out of 10 Black students who graduated high school were eligible to go to a four-year university. And despite the fact that 80% of students with special needs can achieve at grade level with the right support, by 8th grade, only 8% were prepared to do math at grade level and only 66% made it to graduation. Remember these statistics represent millions of children — precious children, our most beloved daughters and sons and grandchildren — who the system is failing to prepare to be able to have the opportunities they deserve in an increasingly competitive economy.

We don’t want to go back to the status quo. We must go forward.

This is an unprecedented crisis for children. The solutions needed will require an unprecedented level of investment from the federal and state governments, partnership between families and schools, and coordination between government agencies, the private, philanthropic and community sectors.

Some of the clear, research-backed solutions to support students and fill the gaps in their learning include increased instructional time (which can include an extended school day or year, Saturday or summer school), diagnostic testing, individualized instruction plans, and tutoring. We need all of it.

But adding on isn’t enough without addressing the core. Because that says to kids: What happened during the pandemic is now your problem. Go to school all day and instead of electives, you’ve got double periods of English and math, plus tutoring after school and Saturday school. And now that you’ve made it to college, you have to take all these remedial classes at your own cost and time.

We have to be clear that before the pandemic, our public schools weren’t working for most kids. The good news is that we know a lot about what is needed thanks to both the wisdom of generations of educators and recent research and science on learning. Learning happens in relationships. We need incredible teachers with high expectations for all who are getting excellent, relevant, engaging and challenging content in front of every student. Our schools need to create individual support structures and school systems that center the needs of students and their families, and that are explicit about being actively, deliberately anti-racist.

There’s both what we do and how we do it. A fundamental principle of community organizing is that the people closest to the problem have the best solutions. That is parents and educators. School districts and charter schools cannot adapt to the pandemic through remote and hybrid learning and address learning loss without working in deep partnership with parents as co-educators and giving them a seat at the table where the most important decisions are made. “And not a folding chair,” as our VP for the Peninsula, Marchelle Moten, puts it.

How do schools and systems need to shift their relationship with parents?

We cannot dismantle systemic racism and shift the power dynamics and structures around race and class without changing the way advocates, educators, and funders advance this work together with families and communities of color at the center and leading the work. Alex Cortez of New Profit, one of our long-time board members, makes this case powerfully in his recent essay. He really took the time to listen and connect deeply with our parent leaders and parent organizing groups like ours across the country.

We’re starting to see what’s possible when districts truly engage parents as co-educators and leaders through our work with the Ravenswood School District in East Palo Alto. Last year, when Ravenswood needed to close schools due to declining enrollment, Innovate helped the district proactively reach out to families and engage them to participate meaningfully in the decision about how to merge schools. As a result, the district developed a strong plan that avoided the massive disruption and divisiveness that usually accompany school closures. Since then, the district has systematically included parents as partners in decision-making. Parents serve on the Reopening Schools Task Force, making sure the plans for distance learning and reopening reflect parent needs and priorities. Ravenswood Superintendent Gina Sudaria hosts monthly open Q&A sessions with families, in addition to monthly parent district advisory council meetings. The English Learner Advisory Council has grown from a handful of attendees to more than 40 each month thanks to active outreach from Innovate organizers and the way the district has made that a meaningful forum for two-way communication.

Who and what is inspiring you to keep pushing in your work and the broader movement for social justice?

Ms. Ella Josephine Baker continues to be my guiding light. Our work grows out of the organizing principles and values that she developed and led during her incredible, long career beginning in the 1930s and through the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. I first learned organizing in Mississippi from veterans of the movement who had learned organizing from Ms. Baker, and that tradition has shaped our approach to this work. Ms. Baker was the common thread, a critical leader — sometimes out front, but more often behind the scenes — for all those years in many of the most important civil rights organizations that were driving our country to get real about racial justice and freedom. Ms. Baker was always a critic of movements built around a few charismatic men – she said “strong people don’t need strong leaders.” Her work teaches us that we need movements built around the leadership, capacity, and gifts of many, many “regular” people who must be supported to become effective leaders with other people.

I believe Ms. Baker would be proud of the work that’s growing out of that organizing tradition now in so many parts of the country, led by powerful Black and Latinx moms and dads and grandmas and grandpas, building the power of parents to demand and win great public schools for their precious children. I imagine she’d love the work of Jamilah Prince-Stewart with FaithActs for Education in Connecticut, Maya Martin Cadogan of PAVE in Washington, D.C., Dalia Contreras with City Education Partners, Spark Bookhart with Urban Engagement Solutions in Kansas City, Families in Action for Quality Education in Oakland and Nicholas Martinez and Ariel Smith with Transform Education Now in Denver. These extraordinary leaders, and so many others now, are showing what’s possible when we invest in communities to build power and hold systems accountable to their needs. During this pandemic, in these difficult days at the end of this horrific Trump Administration, those leaders and so many others give me hope that we can do this — we can build a public education that liberates and creates opportunity for all children.