Becky. Hey, I'm Jon, and I'm Becky, and this is the We Are For Good podcast, nonprofits
are faced with more challenges to accomplish their missions, and the growing pressure to do more, raise more and be more for the causes that improve our world. We're
here to learn with you from some of the best in the industry, bringing the most innovative ideas, inspirational stories all to create an Impact Uprising. So
welcome to the good community. We're nonprofit professionals, philanthropists, world changers and rabbit fans who are striving to bring a little more goodness into the world.
So let's get started. Becky, what's happening, my friend, we
have an incredible educator in the house today, an education revolutionary who is coming to us with compassion and ideas I can't wait to hear yesterday.
I mean, his story is one of Legends too. I mean, it's an honor to have Jean Claude brazard with us. He's the president and CEO of digital promise, and, yeah, you got to know about this organization. We're going to have him share a little bit about their work today and how they really lean into cross sector collaborations and creating really systemic change. And as virtue of just listening to this podcast, we know we share a kinship about that, that we don't want to just talk about change. We want to be the change in this generation. And so it's an honor to introduce you to Jean Claude. He has worked in the education space for over 35 years as a teacher, principal, a superintendent, and now you know, he leads the president and CEO of digital promise global, which is a global non pro partisan, non profit organization focused on shaping the future of learning and advancing equitable educational systems by bridging solutions across research, Practice and Technology. Before that, he was the former senior advisor and deputy director over at you may have heard of the Gates Foundation, where he focused on education, and he's led several strategies supporting Washington State's educational system. But growing up, he actually left Haiti as a child, and he found his footing and purpose in a Brooklyn Public School that really led him on this path to want to create similar opportunities for kids like him. And as a high school teacher in Brooklyn, he used tech to transform his physics lab and to get every student excited to learn. That sounds like a story my friend. And later, as a superintendent in Rochester, in Chicago, he helped shape learning experiences for educators and students across the entire district. And now as CEO of a global nonprofit, Jean Claude, mission is to use that same tech and innovation to expand opportunity for every student. And so that hasn't changed, although his mission really has evolved over the years. So we're really excited today to learn about how he applies the lessons that he learned as a teacher, and how he's really translating that into leading a nonprofit today, my friend, it is an honor to have you on the podcast. Thanks so much for spending time with spending time with us today.
Jon Becky, thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. Well, you know,
we love getting to hear people's stories. And you know, I've just barely tipped the iceberg of what your journey looked like. And I wonder if you would take us back to Jean Claude growing up. You know, what was kind of his interest, and what did life look like, and kind of your formative stages of life. Jon,
you know, I spent the first 11 years of my life in Haiti with parents who had to escape a brutal death spot. Duvalier, you may have heard of this dictator in Haiti, my grandfather, my grandfather, who was an orchestra conductor, was jailed in the 60s, so my family was separated for six years, I would argue that was formative experiences for me. I was raised by my maternal grandmother, my my aunt, surrounded by family, lots of kids, running around, very free, and those were formative, frankly, years for me, came to the US, landed in a middle school, junior high school in those days in Brooklyn, New York, and I was taught by an amazing teacher. His name was Shir Aza, in many ways, also was formative in the sense that I wanted to be him. I wanted to emulate this experience that I had. And I thank him, frankly, for showing me, for showing me the way.
I mean, it's just a beautiful beginning where you're sort of raised by this village, this family. I just think that is really what is so beautiful about the education system. It doesn't rely on any one person. It is very much the collective that help moves a child through life, and I'm looking at what you're doing over here at Digital promise, and it is absolutely reimagining the way that we are going through the education process. And so for those of our listeners who may not be familiar, can you kind of dig into your mission for us, tell us the history and get into those programs and those big dreams that we know you have.
Becky, we certainly are a unicorn in the sector. So very quickly we were we are an innovation that came out of the US government. I can say that the organization was created by an act of Congress in 20. Eight as a National Center for Research in advanced information technologies that was done under George W Bush, and it was launched by Obama in 2011 which is what we call ourselves, non partisan or bipartisan, because our board initially was appointed by both sides of the aisle, both members of Congress. The organization leans quite a bit on what we often refer to as the Golden Triangle, which is learning sciences, research, technology, innovation and practice. We center our practitioners. We don't go off in the corner and build a new version of a mobile phone and say, go ahead and buy it. We actually have teachers and principals and superintendents as part of the design process, which I think makes us unique. We've got a powerful set of learning scientists, a powerful set of technologists who basically work together. Give you one specific project that we just launched, called the you gain project was funded by the Institute for Education Sciences. We're taking the science of reading, which you should be hearing quite a bit about in artificial intelligence. In working with six school districts, five in Pennsylvania, Washington, DC public schools, in iterating with a product developer. In changing up an existing product and integrate AI into the science you really but this is being done by technologists and by teachers. So when we are done, you will see something that really has been built by educators, by teachers in the classroom, for the service, particularly of our entire country.
I mean, Jean Claude, you're preaching to some folks that love to hear this. Let me just say, because we talk a lot about the power of building with community instead of for and that's what you're doing, like you're censoring the actual people that understand and know and have the solutions. They just need some wrap around, with some funding or some tech to make it, to bring it to life. So I want to connect some threads of your story, because I'd mentioned, you know, during your time being a teacher in Brooklyn, we heard that technology like transform this physics lab, what happened, you know, in that experience, and how does that still a thread in your work today?
Jon, it really is. It's an example I use. If I just used it at a conference I was keynoting. If you remember your high school science classroom or science laboratories, we often refer to it as the cookbook lab, where you go through do this, do this, and do this and do that, and at the end, he's like, I have no idea what I just accomplished. Becky, have a degree in chemistry. And I tell people I learned chemistry as a graduate student. That's an undergraduate High School. But what I did in this vocational high school was to leverage the verniers, a set of probes and and tools using I'm gonna date myself here, Macintosh computers, all funded by by DC University of New York, and we changed the whole process, where the experimentation lasted 30 seconds or a minute, and a discussion and explanation lasted 20 minutes or half an hour. So we flipped the whole paradigm. And these young people would do an experiment around, sort of looking at time and distance, and they would engage in conversation about, what did you just just see? And so that in itself, flipped the whole thing around and this vocational high school with vocational kids, we had 90 to 100% of those kids passing the New York City exam with physics every single year, because they conceptually begin to really understand what they were doing. And it was an extension of the classroom discussion and conversation. So for me, it really demonstrated the power that technology can have in really moving teaching and learning, not a replacement, but a way of really enhancing what we do in the classroom every single day.
Okay, I got to share some of my childhood in there, because my father was also a chemist, and when it came time for science experiment like the science fair. That was the worst time of the year for this writer and feeler, because it was all about controlling variables. And I was missing the conversation. I was missing the what is it? I mean, I know I've done the steps, but I don't. I didn't connect. And PS, I won almost every science fair. Y'all it is the great joke of our family, because I know less about science than anyone. And then I got my first job at the Science Museum of Oklahoma. So it's all irony here, but I do want to pull in the fact that I think paradigm shift when you give someone the agency to say, this is what I'm seeing. This is why I'm confused. This is what I observe. This is how I wonder if this will work next, and then the evolution of education and understanding and Curiosity continues to unpack so I can see. This, I wish you were in the 80s with me in Oklahoma schools, because I could have used you. But I do think that just this level of re imagination is going to help kids find their lane so much better. It's going to help us as individuals find what lights us up, and something else that we've noticed about your incredible organization is this commitment you have to cross sector collaborations and just how they create systems of change. So we talk a lot on this podcast about mindsets, especially when we have a chance to visit with incredible leaders like yourself. So please talk to us about your mindsets, your approach to your work, and how these collaborations are really lifting the work that you are discovering and learning as you go Becky
just, I would just say quickly that your experience in the Science Museum, I think, in many ways, should have showcase what science teaching should look like, because this is where The funny maker, yes, and I'm not a unicorn in this by any stretch. I know amazing science teachers really want to do that kind of work. But to your point, though, around the cross sector collaboration, I would say two different ways. One, it goes back to this idea of the Golden Triangle, where we really want to get different groups of people working together, including higher education, K 12 and early learning in terms of looking at what we do in the classroom, what we do in schools, but we also obsess with the idea of redefining success, which is that math and reading proficiency, since NCLB has become a No Child Left Behind has become the North Star for so many places. And many of us argue that's important, but it's a means to an end. The greater end, frankly, is lifelong. Success is economic mobilities. Well being is personal agency. So the question and then, how do you actually get there? And for us, it means really understanding the challenges we have in our systems that causes young people to disengage from education. If you were to look at data sets, and I developed some of those when I was at the Gates Foundation, when you look at the journey of a child through the system, you see massive attrition of young people. For example, in one state, if you take every child who's proficient in reading and math, you get anywhere from an 8% to a 25% post secondary completion, every child was proficient, otherwise, a lot proficient. And of course, if you look at it at this one equity lens, the numbers skew toward the bottom, meaning the 8% it's terrifying. But for us, that means looking at what we do in elementary school or early learning, elementary school, middle school, high school, post secondary, all the to the kind of work we think is important, the transition spaces in between which, as you can imagine, require a set of actors to want to come to that, to come together and stitch the system together, both In terms of the internal dynamics of school and the external and more macro processes that we need to have to facilitate that kind of transfer. That was a big part of my work at gates, and wonderfully, we've made much more pronounced at Digital promise, and we're testing this idea right now in San Diego County. We're going to test in other parts of the country to see, what can we do to support those who are looking for that kind of cross sector effort to really propel a learner or young person toward the ideas of economic security or mobility agency and well being?
I mean, love this world conversation because it's getting back to, like, the heart of the issue. And I think, you know, I said at the top of this that we want to be the generation that does this. We don't want to just build programs for program sake. We actually want to change the thing that's holding maybe us back in progress, back. So as you look at these cross sector collaborations that are happening, what have you learned for what makes those successful? Because you're bringing together teams that have different maybe narratives, different beliefs, different approaches. What does it look like to get together and have success find that those shared common language too?
I mean, a lot of this is codified in the research, and we've seen examples of this. We also gathered quite sort of new understandings. When I was a gate, we gathering even more. Now the one thing I would say, Well, I say a few things. One is that you can only move at the speed of trust. These kinds people love to stay within their silos, within their verticals. They're not held accountable for anything outside of that. So people have to trust and trust each other, to want to collaborate in a way that actually makes sense. The other frankly, is there's got to be and strife together talks about this. There's got to be a burning platform that really sort of galvanizes a community together, right? And at gates, we did these profiles. Of the communities in which we're working, and we found there was always a pivotal moment that galvanized the community. At the same time, there's this sort of echo cycle of a community, and you've got to catch it at the right place to help propel it forward. But fundamentally, you need a coalition of leaders, grassroots and grass stops, who are willing, frankly, to let go of their own victim and say, How can we focus on the young people or doing this? By the way, when we got to San Diego, a lot of folks, including funders, said to us, why would you want to go to San Diego? They're fine. I mean, lots of money in San Diego, and we pull the data set to show them that the kids who are educated in the county are not the ones getting access to the economic agent of the county. So if you really want to help a community, you've got to understand that data point, and that said that some of these places, yes, can input talent, but fundamentally, people who live there, who grew up there, the kids who grew up there, are not the ones partaking in the economic vitality of that community,
the data don't lie. Y'all. The data don't lie. My hips don't lie. So it's just not happening. And I think, I do think you're making a really strong point about why we should be flexing data to underscore the opportunities that exist, and how we're being held back. And I just, I just keep thinking Jean Claude about just what you're doing, and the scale of what you're doing, and how if we could wrap more hearts, minds, voices, activations around it, we could move so much faster, like when you when you think about like this community right here is an activating community of change makers who truly wants to be the change, the positive change they want to see in the world. How can people like us help your movement? How can we help this education take off, community by community? What would you say?
So I would just go back first to your point around data. I also have read quite a bit of Jonathan haidt's work on the rider and the elephant. If you know his book The righteous mind, that data never convinces anyone to do anything. Well, it does. It does ultimately, but you got to get to the heart of people first that the elephant can drive the rider if the elephant wants to. So this idea of mindset and heart, I think, is important. You capture someone through storytelling, then you bring on the data to actually convince them all the way and otherwise. But to your question, though, Becky, what I would say, to understand who the key protagonists are in the community and to support their effort, they are a series of nonprofits who are working to working in a particular community. If you've got the leverage, find a way to help them stitch their work together toward a greater means. Often, there is this kind of anchor organization within every community who can help drive the conversation. In Buffalo, New York, for example, it is the Community Foundation of Buffalo. You go to Tacoma, again, it's the Community Foundation. If you go to Dallas, Texas, it is the commit partnership, CEO M MIT, the commit partnership with Todd William, who basically was a pro kid who grew up in Dallas, did well, built a Family Foundation and to a day that begin to shame leaders in the community to do the right thing, right? He was demonstrating that you are not doing for this community. But then ultimately rallied these folks together to a particular platform of putting 100,000 more kids on the path to economic security in the county. Kids who are educated in Dallas County and committee is doing an amazing job of stitching together both the macro and the micro in moving that So Todd is an anchor in that community. I would argue every community has an organization or someone. My push to you is that if you can find those individuals, push them to create a kind of coalition. And he shows up in different ways. Right in Tacoma, Washington was 350 non profits that came together with the school system and said, We're going to change a narrative about our city. But the case of Dallas, frankly, maybe the one guy who built a coalition. So it changes. But finding that that protagonist would set of protagonists, and getting to them, I think, is an amazing way of supporting the
effort. It's something over the years we've kind of tagged with the phrase that we lock arms for impact. And I can't help but think of that as you describe this, that it's the only way forward to solve any of these systemic pieces is really getting folks together. So love those examples that you've lifted. I mean, Jean Claude, your career alone has taken you on such a winding path and journey, and now leading this nonprofit that has supporters and researchers and all these different folks pouring into it, if there's a moment of philanthropy that has stuck out to you, we love story. We feel like it teaches. US things. What is the moment of philanthropy that has really stuck with you, in your in your path?
Jon, I mean, there's been, there's been quite a few moments, but perhaps I'll pick one is when, again, I spent four years at the Gates Foundation, almost four years there, and what I found that was a pivotal moment, was you begin to understand even a multilateral funder like the Gates Foundation, doing work across the world by itself, cannot solve the fundamental, challenging problem. Right? I learned a lot about the discipline required in philanthropy when I worked at the Gates Foundation, but ultimately, what I discovered to be a powerful, powerful lever was when different funders can come together, and again, it goes back inside the core sector, right rallying together at a particular idea. Because very often what I find is that nonprofits have to manage funders because they're coming at you in multiple directions with their projects and things they want you to do, and you becoming general contractor and trying to figure out, how do I manage all these folks? Yes, but when you when you find that the funders sometimes come to you like, I'm having a meeting with a group in Anaheim, California at the end of February around how do we think about artificial intelligence in moving, teaching and learning? I wasn't the architect of the meeting with two funders who bring 12 others together, and we're going to study this, decide this, this challenge together, that I find to be really an important point in place where these funders are interested in doing that. By the way, I find that most of them want to, but they need that kind of catalyst or burning platform to get them organized to do this kind of work. And we did a project recently which was also amazing. It was a combination of government and philanthropy. So it was the National Science Foundation with gates foundation with Walton. It was amazing to see how they came together to work with government, making things happen. Because we all know that ultimately, government has a skill, you know, no foundation, no matter how powerful they are, can scale anything, because they don't have the resources to do that. The government, the US government, is the one that really has the resources to make those things happen.
I just think you're incredibly wise, and what you're saying is really bringing me back to a conversation we have with Dr Tim Lampkin, who's the founder and CEO of higher purpose CO and he's talking about, how do we become the truth tellers, not just the storytellers? How do we speak to our funders in a language of story, where the narrative is true, where it's baked in the voices of people who are affected, and how do we own the true narrative? And I really love what you're saying about these collaborations and the need that we had to elevate how we show up to those with truth, with data, with solutions. And so I just think what a beacon you are to the world right now, in a time when education feels like it's so much in flux, and the way of education is shifting the the focus on attention state by state, I can tell you, in Oklahoma, it's something that's very concerning to me, and I just want to commend you and tell You and your team to keep going. This work is so pivotal. We got to round out this conversation Jean Claude with a one good thing. This is something we ended all of our podcasts with. It could be a quote, maybe a life hack, or some words of advice. What's bubbling up for you as your one good thing today? Oh, my God,
you know it's it was a mentor. Maybe there's several. I'm gonna pick this one. I'm a former mentor of mine who passed away a few years ago. I studied with her becoming a school superintendent, and when I was about to go to Rochester, New York to my first superintendency, we sat at our office at Columbia University and mapped out the strategy. And toward the end, she said one thing to me. She goes, Listen to me, you will be negotiating a lot of things over the next few years on that job. Never negotiate your core values. No job is worth that. Nothing is worth that. This is who you are, and don't negotiate that for anything, for anyone, otherwise you lose, you lose your way. And I've held on to that frankly, throughout my career. In fact, I left Chicago because I felt as if I was in a place where I had to begin to negotiate those I said, You know what, nothing is worth. Is worth this. You lose your soul. You lose who you are, and that needs to guide a lot of us. It is an advice I give to a lot of colleagues who want to become superintendents, who want to become leaders in big organizations. I said you will negotiate, but don't negotiate those things at all. Otherwise you lose. You lose your North Star. Dang.
What a beautiful mantra. And it resonates from you, my friend, just the care that you have and the way that you've moved through this world, it's it's a beacon that shines from you. So I would have just curious, where do you hang out online? Where does digital promise hang out online? Because anyone listening is going to want to connect with you in this amazing mission. So point us to all the things.
Yeah. So we have a presence on Instagram, etc, but frankly, where we hang out mostly is LinkedIn. You know, it seems to be the new town hall for educators. We we post, we post a lot of things there at the same time, we also hang out, you know, in Woody, certain kind of similar conferences that would speak to us, and I tried to do a bit of meandering to make sure that we're addressing our audiences. I just did a keynote at the Ed spaces conference. Ed spaces, imagine 1200 architects school designers, and I was trying to connect for them the design of school buildings and classrooms to learning science to emotional well being. I said, space matters. And I had one slide. I had a full deck. I couldn't find it that compared prisons to schools, and looking from the outside NASA and dead people to guess which one was a prison which one was, I said. And I begged them, no matter how much you push. Please, don't build any more boxes. Build these innovative centers for young people who want to belong to a particular space. So it was very much a pictorial presentation with learning science. If let me give you one example. I visited a school in the Pittsburgh metro area, and I had a picture then and asked, What do you see? The adults and the young six year olds were eye to eye getting lunch. How is it possible that a 4050,
chairs? Yes,
no, the what the adults stood some several inches lower to allow for face to face, eye to eye contact. And of course, they don't understand why. So it's like, why did you do this? Again, belonging. It's respect. It's one of the reasons why. If you've seen elementary school teachers get on the carpet, they get on the ground to talk to children. It was the same philosophy, but to see that allows the adults to understand the folks who are designing that's why I'm doing this. That's why it's important. So we did a lot of things to demonstrate why physical space is important. I'm doing another keynote in February in Pennsylvania, at Hershey, Pennsylvania, and they're expecting two or 3000 teachers, and my job is to get them really excited about the potential for artificial intelligence and education. So I'm doing a bunch of things to actually get folks excited. Lots of videos, slides, get excited. Yes, we have things we need to worry about, but let's get excited about the potential for transforming teaching and learning.
This is what I want to hear I want to get excited about education. I think what you're saying to us has gotten us excited. And I mean, we didn't even communicate that your first teaching job was in a prison on Rikers Island. So this is very, very personal to you. And I just think of this community that you've created. I think about this team, these believers that are behind you. We are absolutely rooting for you, my friend. JCB, is that your nickname? Because I really want it to be your nickname.
JC, my friends in New York called me. JC, JC, and I was asking, was, do you mind that name? I said, What did powerful initials? How could I possibly
we only give nick names to our favorite people and we just feel so connected to you, I want to thank you for coming in and just really opening our eyes to the way that we can reimagine everything you all and when it comes to doing it authentically, with a sense of belonging, with a sense of equity, and really up skilling us. I can't imagine anything better for the world. So rooting for you all, and please keep us posted.
It will and thank you so much for having me here.
It was our it was our joy. Come back. Yes. Thank you. Thank you.
