Chicago’s Former Schools CEO on Phones, Power, and the Future of Public Education | Janice K. Jackson

In this episode of the Getting Smart Podcast, host Mason Pashia sits down with Dr. Janice K. Jackson, former CEO of Chicago Public Schools and current Executive Director of the Aspen Institute’s Education and Society Program. Their conversation spans the full arc of what it means to lead in a moment of profound disruption, from the national screen time debate and the ethics of edtech procurement to the structural consequences of governance reform in one of the country’s largest urban school systems. Dr. Jackson brings rare clarity to conversations that often generate more heat than light, grounding every argument in the lived reality of students, families, and the educators who serve them every day.

Listeners will come away with a sharper framework for evaluating classroom technology, a more nuanced understanding of why blanket phone bans can deepen inequity rather than reduce it, and a candid look at what Chicago’s transition away from mayoral control reveals about accountability in large district governance. Dr. Jackson also unpacks the rising tide of alternative school models, the real barriers to competency-based transcripts, and what she believes every superintendent needs to hear right now about enrollment decline and community footprint. She closes by sharing the urgent work underway at the Aspen Institute’s Center for Rising Generations, a new initiative designed to ensure that the systems we are building today are worthy of the young people who will inherit them.

Transcript

Mason Pashia:You’re listening to the Getting Smart podcast. I’m Mason Pashia. Supply is not enough. We see this time and time again with the development of a new program that sits underutilized and invisible, or a new technology or tool that doesn’t fundamentally change anything about the way learning happens.

Providing families with more options doesn’t mean they’ll make the choice that best serves them. That’s because supply without navigation is like a map without roads, and that’s assuming the individual even knows there’s a map. We’re at a time when public education is facing unprecedented changes in enrollment, and therefore funding.

It is critical that leaders think about messaging, access, communication, and removing redundancies more than ever, to make the most of what they have. It’s critical that these leaders embrace the idea of “yes, and”: increasing the rate of adoption of new ideas, but also reducing regulation, reducing the friction of building, and ensuring a sustainable rollout plan.

That’s why I’m so excited to chat with Dr. Janice K. Jackson today. Janice is the former CEO of Chicago Public Schools, where she managed the nation’s third-largest school district. There, she spearheaded initiatives centered on equity, academic growth, and operational accountability. Currently, Dr. Jackson serves as the executive director of the Aspen Institute’s Education and Society program.

Mason Pashia: Dr. Jackson, welcome to the Getting Smart Podcast. Thanks for being here.

Janice K. Jackson: Thanks for having me.

Mason Pashia: Almost all of our topics and themes today are ones we care passionately about, so I’m going to try to keep this somewhat directed, but it may end up being a bit of a grab bag as I chase things that are interesting to me.

A few years ago, we put out a report called “Unfulfilled Promise,” about essentially how 40 years of edtech hasn’t delivered on its promise. It was published by the Hoover Institute, authored by Tom Vander Ark, and I think it set up a really interesting tension: technology’s often viewed as the silver bullet or the enemy, when it’s rarely either. It’s really just a tool, and how you use it is what matters.

We’re going to dig into that, but before we start, I want to ask you a personal question. What is your personal relationship to your phone?

A Personal Relationship with Technology

Janice K. Jackson: Oh, that’s an interesting one. I think, like most Americans, I use my phone daily. It’s a tool for communication with family, friends, and work, but also a place where I receive a lot of information, both for personal reasons and to inform the work I do every day in education.

I’m one of those people who likes to think I’m responsive. I’ve always been responsive, even before we had this kind of technology. It was just a different system: a lot of yellow legal pads and to-do lists that I kept up with. I’d also say I’m not one of those people who’s glued to their phone every single day, because I spend a lot of time engaging with people and doing work that requires me to connect face to face. So I’d say there’s a good balance.

Mason Pashia: Yeah, I think that’s really important.

Janice K. Jackson: It’s probably a little generational too, if I’m being honest.

Mason Pashia: Totally, but at the same time, that doesn’t mean it’s wrong, and it might be modeling well for other generations. We hear a lot about screen time debates and technology adoption, and I think that rides on the shoulders of research from people like Jonathan Haidt, who talk about young people’s access to technology and what it’s doing to them.

Where do you think that conversation has it right, and where do you think it’s misconstruing what’s actually going on?

Janice K. Jackson: I think the first place I’d start is that we live in a land of hyperbole. Whenever you see these doomsday scenarios or blanket statements about how young people engage with phones or screen time, I think we should be cautious. In the most innocent way, it kind of harkens back to when rock and roll or any other new technology emerged, and people ran around with their hair on fire asking, “What is this all about?”

But if I’m being serious, because we’re talking about kids and learning, I do think it’s important to wave a flag, ask people to slow down, and demand research to make sure something actually works. I’m just a little afraid that sometimes, in the interest of getting clicks or eyeballs, we put out the worst-case scenario, and it misleads people from paying attention to what I believe is the most important thing as an educator: the quality of instruction in front of students every single day.

The tools, the curriculum, the books, the materials, all those things matter, and we can get into that. But when we focus on those things instead of the quality of instruction and what happens in classrooms every day, we end up missing the mark.

Mason Pashia: I don’t know if this is a popular or unpopular opinion, but I think when Mark Zuckerberg set out to make something like Facebook, he was actually trying to connect the world. I think his intentions were good, and yet that’s not necessarily where the tool ended up.

So we put a lot of trust in these tools somewhat blindly, without understanding how they’re built or how they’ll optimize themselves over time, or how they make money. I think that’s really important to consider when school districts are evaluating technology, whether that’s a one-to-one device approach or a phone ban. What should they be looking for, and how should they be evaluating it?

Janice K. Jackson: A couple of things. One, from a purely procurement standpoint, which I think is what you’re alluding to, I’d say the debate happening right now is a good thing, because it’s calling into question the quality and efficacy of tools, and encouraging district leaders and boards to be more diligent about what they purchase and to ask for evidence of efficacy. I completely agree with that, whether we’re talking about print curriculum, media, or anything else students are consuming. So that part, I think, we get right.

Where I worry a little is when we conflate screen time with being bad across the board, because you and I both know most of us spend a lot of time on screens, but it varies what we actually do. I’d argue that if you’re on a screen all day, it depends what you’re looking at. I’m always trying to get my daughter off YouTube, but she’s also a reader, so she spends time reading. Every time she’s on her phone, it’s not like she’s not being productive.

So I think when we conflate screen time with being unproductive, we miss the mark. And the students I’m most concerned about, when we do that, are low-income students, or students who don’t have as much access to technology and these tools, because if you don’t understand how to use these tools to be efficient and effective as an adult, you have fewer skills that make you employable.

That’s why blanket bans worry me. Instead of spending the time to do careful research and figure out the right approach and the right amount of time for kids, we go to what’s easiest, which is to control them versus challenge them, which is what I think we should always be doing as educators.

The other thing I’d say is, when I think about cell phones specifically, I think students shouldn’t be on their cell phones in school. They can access technology and the internet through computers and other devices that teachers can control. As a parent, you’re not going to hear me arguing that kids should be able to use their cell phones when they might be on social media or doing something else that distracts them from learning. But that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t have access to technology and shouldn’t be using it productively in a school building.

The last thing I’ll say, and this is probably a controversial take, so I may ask you to take it out later, no, I’m just joking, but I think the biggest opportunity is how we engage parents on this. In places where bans happened more swiftly, a lot of it was led by parents rightfully asking questions about how their children are using their time in school. But I think it’s a larger conversation, whether students are using screens at home too, because some of the concerns about what’s happening in school are really about it not being controlled at home, where kids are using it for a number of hours in the evening.

You want to make sure schools are controlling it, and I think that’s why this needs to be a conversation where parents, teachers, principals, and policymakers are all at the table. I think we, as adults, have a collective responsibility to figure out how, when, and how much time our children should spend in front of screens.

Mason Pashia: I totally agree. I personally don’t think that’s a very controversial take, so I have no idea how our audience is going to respond. Using an example from your own experience, how do you move beyond just tokenizing parent involvement? How do you actually include them in a way they receive, rather than sending out a flyer and saying they saw it? What does that actually look like?

Involving Parents Authentically

Janice K. Jackson: Since I’ve worked as a principal, a superintendent, and a district leader, I have a lot of experience engaging parents. I do think there are things you do to try to capture everyone. You have to put out information so everybody knows what’s going on.

But there are also things we can do to take it a step further. You can host round tables to hear from different parents. The thing I’d say about that is you sometimes get the same parents who are already very involved, so maybe you have to be more creative, and do surveys so that it’s an easier lift for parents who can’t take time away to attend.

There are also a lot of parent groups focused on this work who know a lot about it. I have a personal friend who’s an attorney by day, but he cares about this and leads it in his own school community. There are different personas of parents who get involved with this work, but I think when we make swift decisions one way or the other without involving parents, that’s where districts or schools become more vulnerable to the kind of debates and pushback we see playing out today, because the decision-makers are left to make decisions quickly, without having engaged a broader group of stakeholders.

Mason Pashia: Those are great approaches. It’s something I’m personally obsessed with: how do you get community input, and how do you move forward once you’ve collected that information? Because usually it’s the naysayers or the yaysayers who show up.

Janice K. Jackson: What I’ve learned is you have to engage them, and you have to start with the coalition of the willing, even if they’re people who are against what you believe. But then there’s a continuous cycle. I think what people sometimes miss is that when you do it just to check a box, it’s always going to feel like it’s not authentic, and it won’t feel like a full cycle.

I think having constant conversations, almost like running a campaign, but also sharing new ideas as you hear them back, matters. For example, when I was a superintendent, it was important to me that if I got something wrong, I’d say so, or if I learned something from talking to a group of teachers or parents that changed my mind, I think that’s okay to say.

One lesson for all of us, especially in this day and age where you have to plant a stake in the ground and stay there, is that we need to be okay with changing our minds. We need to be okay with learning, evolving, and speaking to how we change our minds once we get more information. I think this debate around edtech tools in schools, or the use of AI, should force us to do that, because quite honestly, we don’t know enough about some of this stuff yet. We have to be curious about it. We have to look for the research, look for the anecdotal stories, and let that inform what we’re thinking.

Mason Pashia: I was reading a reflection from Rebecca Winthrop at the Brookings Institution earlier today, and she was discussing recent Illinois state guidance policy work. She noted they transitioned, after much deliberation, from “responsible use” to “informed use,” because they realized we don’t even know what responsible use looks like yet.

Janice K. Jackson: Yep. I really appreciate that level of clarity.

Governance: Mayoral Control and the Chicago School Board

Mason Pashia: I want to shift a little into a conversation about governance, because you were CEO of Chicago Public Schools, which is structurally different from a superintendent role.

Janice K. Jackson: Yes.

Mason Pashia: There was a piece that came out recently from Denver’s former mayor, Federico Peña, about reinstituting mayoral control in Denver, while Chicago is on its way out of that structure. I’m curious about your relationship to that structure. How would it have changed your experience as CEO or superintendent to be operating under one or the other?

Janice K. Jackson: Let me take it this way. One, because I want to be transparent and answer your question, and I also think it’s more instructive to talk about what’s happening now and what people should be paying attention to moving forward, especially with an election coming up this fall in Chicago.

To start, I worked under mayoral control, which I personally think is the best approach. I’ve said that and continue to say it, even as we’ve gone through our first cycle with a hybrid board here in Chicago. That’s my personal opinion. That said, I’ve seen a lot of the local polling, and I know that having a fully elected school board was incredibly popular among voters, in the upper 80s or low 90s percent, if I recall the polling correctly. That’s a pretty popular policy; I’ve seen plenty of policies where you’re thrilled to get 60% agreement. So point number one: people generally respect democracy and value it.

The challenge in a large district like Chicago that I worry about, and continue to talk about as a civic leader here, comes down to a few things. One is making sure the board is representative, that real parents, the people voters actually had in mind when they valued this policy, are the ones serving in these seats, and that it isn’t controlled by any single group, whether that’s the union, business interests, or some other group with a reason to want control.

The other concern I have with our current structure is the sheer size of it. We have 21 board members, and anybody who has ever managed or run anything knows that the easiest way to make sure nobody knows what’s going on is to put a lot of people in charge and leave everyone unsure who to go to.

Under mayoral control, the mayor has a lot of power. There are benefits and drawbacks to that, but one of the best benefits is that when things don’t go well, there’s one person to hold accountable, and we get to do that every four years. In our current structure, with 21 people, plus a mayor and a CEO, if kids fail, who exactly are we holding accountable? People can point fingers in different directions.

The other thing I’m concerned about with our current structure is that there are no guardrails around campaign financing and some of the other things I think should have been put in place proactively. Some of that is working itself out through the process, but because we changed something so dramatically in this city, in how we govern the largest school system and the second-biggest employer in the city, I wish more time had been given to make sure the structure made sense and that we’d thought through all the potential pitfalls.

The last thing I’ll say, and I’m going to say this even after telling you to stay out of the land of hyperbole, is that the current board of education has not spent much time talking about student performance. If you read our headlines here in Chicago, or look at what the board is actually discussing, what makes the news, it’s the fight with the CEO, when that was a problem, challenges around the budget, all these political issues. My concern is: who is responsible for sharing how students are performing, how teachers and principals are performing, how well our schools are doing, and who will be held accountable when those things don’t go the way they’re supposed to?

That’s inevitable in a large urban system, in a large bureaucracy. I have real concerns that because we’re so focused on governance and everything else happening, our students are actually losing out. So whenever I have the chance to talk about that, I bring it up.

That’s also why I’ve made it clear I won’t support anyone being the chair of our board who isn’t an educator, because I feel that’s going to be the most powerful position, and I want somebody who actually values education. If we’re going to have a democratically elected board, I want an educator, somebody who’s managed this process before and will speak to student outcomes and performance, and put together a real plan so our children can thrive.

Mason Pashia: I think a lot of that is super smart. Thank you for going there.

Janice K. Jackson: We’ll see. It’s still an election in Chicago, so we’ll see how it goes.

Navigating Choice, Competency-Based Learning, and Alternative Models

Mason Pashia: It’s a super interesting time, specifically for public education. This might be one of the first times in a long time where public schools are going to have to market themselves, and in many states, compete. There’s a scarcity mindset going around right now, both for dollars and for students, but there’s also this really radical abundance mindset, where students have more options than ever. There are new ways of transcripting, big shifts toward competency-based learning, all these things that make everything an option, which is really hard if you’re a parent, because navigation is rarely thought about as a key feature of options, but it’s a huge part of it.

In some ways, I think about this, and mayoral control, as part of this abundance agenda: reduced bureaucracy, increased choice. I’m curious, what would your advice be for someone leading a public school system right now, regardless of governance structure? How can they navigate this unique moment?

Janice K. Jackson: That’s a great question, and it really teases up the work I’m doing at the Aspen Institute. We just launched a group called the Rising Generation Strategy Group. It’s essentially an education strategy group, but we wanted to make it broader than just education.

We’re really talking about how we prepare this rising generation, how we make sure they inherit a world and an economy better than the one we were able to get, because we know from the research that this is the first generation actually worse off financially than the generations before them. I think we have a responsibility to reset, and education is a big part of that.

With the Rising Generation Strategy Group, we’re not trying to boil the ocean or solve every challenge in education. We’ve been intentional about identifying four places where we see the greatest pressure on the system, and where solutions and policy are mismatched.

The first one, we’ve already talked about: edtech and AI. The second is this notion of state governance versus federal governance. We know that shift has happened; some things are still the same, but there’s a new normal we have to look at. Third is career-connected learning, making that more real. But the final piece is what you just brought up: alternative school models.

This takes the debate around choice beyond district versus charter, or district, charter, and private school, which is how I think of school choice coming out of the last thirty years of reform. Today there are so many additional options. Microschooling has spiked since the pandemic, and one of the things I’ve found fascinating is the number of African American families across the economic spectrum signing up for microschooling options. I haven’t read all the research on this, and I’d encourage people to look into it, but I think some of it is that families have always looked for alternatives, they just didn’t always exist, or weren’t affordable. Now there are options that are much more accessible.

You have virtual schools, microschooling, flexible school scheduling, and people are taking advantage of that. On one hand, I’m okay with that. I think there’s more than one way to get an education, and we should be looking seriously at competency-based instruction. That’s another place where we have to bring parents along, and I’d say higher ed too, because when I was at CPS and we started implementing competency-based approaches, the biggest pushback came from parents who’d say, “I don’t know what this report card means,” because it was explaining more nuance than an A, B, or C ever could. Or from universities and employers who didn’t understand or see value in some of those measures, so we’d end up converting it back to the old transcript format, which hasn’t changed in 120 years. Those challenges still persist, but I think the system is pushing faster and forcing us to change.

If I were leading a district right now, and I talk to superintendents all the time through the work we do, I’d say a few things. One, you may look at declining enrollment and try to manage against it and its impact on your budget, but we should expect these enrollment trends to continue. There isn’t a recruitment plan or a spike in birth rates that’s going to reverse this. People think about how they work, go to school, and earn in completely different ways now. There’s a new economic structure, and schools need to be organized to take advantage of that.

One example is what CPS has done: they built a virtual school, trying to be responsive so they don’t lose students from the system entirely, and can instead offer families an option that might work better for them. Districts across the country are doing similar things. But we have to listen to parents on this, because they have more options now, and they’re voting with their feet, in some cases moving a lot faster than districts are.

Mason Pashia: Definitely true. We’ve done a lot of coverage of microschools, specifically microschools operating within public school systems as a kind of R&D lab. I’m curious how you think about this rise in microschools and homeschools, since it sounds like you have some complicated feelings about it, but also that it could go either way, especially given what you said earlier about instruction being the thing that actually matters. I think one thing we risk losing is accountability and training, since it becomes kind of invisible to us. How do you think about that?

Janice K. Jackson: That’s the thing I care most about. I think parents should have the right to make that choice for their children, but a few things matter. One, accountability should be there: making sure students are taking assessments regularly, so we know how they’re performing, and making sure they’re getting the services they need. Sometimes a student may need access to specialized services that can’t be provided in these alternative structures, and the public school has to step in.

I’d also say there needs to be tighter regulation, and this is where it gets more complicated and less popular, depending on where you sit on this continuum. I think governing regions have a responsibility to make sure students aren’t moving in and out of the public school system in ways that complicate the work for public schools. What I’ve seen in some places is a rise, or a large recruitment push into microschools, or people taking advantage of vouchers, which again, I think parents have a right to do, but then they find out it doesn’t work for them, and they fall back on the public school system, when the public school system is really the thing that undergirds our democracy and our communities and should be treated as such.

So I think accountability, making sure students are doing well, and transparency around that, is critically important, especially if a program receives public funding. And second, I think there need to be guardrails that protect the public school system, which serves all students and already has a complicated job, from being made more complicated by students moving in and out at the whim of parents or programs that spring up and then don’t end up working.

Repurposing School Buildings and Community Use

Mason Pashia: I keep thinking about this through the lens of how a public school can expand its audience. If you have under-enrollment, you suddenly have a community that could use the gym, use the fields, rent out the theater, offer community college classes, offer nursing classes. Did you see opportunities like that, expanding who the school serves as a way to bring in different forms of revenue? Is that a viable path forward?

Janice K. Jackson: I think everyone who’s dealt with school closings or repurposing schools has gone through those exercises, and some people have been more successful than others.

Mason Pashia: For sure.

Janice K. Jackson: We’ve undergone a lot of school closings in Chicago, no secret there, and we were actually among the first, so folks who came after us had a bit of a playbook of what to do, or what not to do, depending on how you look at it. But what I’ll say is it really requires a much more comprehensive city plan than people think.

I always give this example: I live in a community called Bronzeville in Chicago. It actually experienced the largest number of school closings during that period. It’s since been regentrified, but it’s still a very mixed community, and there are still vacant buildings in it. People say to me all the time, “We should do this,” or “We should do that,” and I don’t think they understand how prohibitive the cost of operating those facilities can be for a nonprofit trying to run them.

It really requires a government solution, a whole-city, whole-community plan. So the short answer is yes, we can absolutely do those things, but it requires a lot of commitment, a lot of revenue and capital. Sometimes buildings get repurposed into apartments, or other uses we’ve talked about, but in order for a building to be repurposed for public use, which I think we’d all agree is the best-case scenario, it requires real commitment, and that usually has to come from local city government.

Mason Pashia: Right, and it’s at a really challenging time, where we’re asking school walls to be more porous in service of learners, and more firm in service of security. There’s a real tension: you want kids out in the community, you want the community back in the school, but you also have to funnel that through a security bottleneck at the front of the building, which is genuinely tricky.

Janice K. Jackson: This is me living in the past a little bit, which I said I wasn’t going to do, but I remember right before the pandemic struck, we created plans for neighborhoods to do exactly what you and I are talking about. It was actually moving in the right direction, because, number one, we were going slowly. We were providing the same level of information and insight that senior leaders and people in city hall would get, to help decide where to close or consolidate a school. Parents and community members were excited about what was possible. They understood some of the trade-offs and were ready to engage. And then the pandemic happened.

I always think about that: if we’d had more time, would we have been able to build more of those kinds of models? I think that would have been good for CPS, and good for the country, since many districts are experiencing lower enrollment for all the reasons we’ve talked about today, including lower birth rates and lower immigration rates. There isn’t, like I said earlier, a recruitment plan that solves for this. Every city, community, and municipality has to start seriously thinking about footprint, how we use the resources we have, and where we’re willing to invest so students and communities get what they need.

Mason Pashia: And I think this brings us kind of full circle to where we started, which is that the obvious answer to a lot of this is to start replacing people with technology. That’s a good way to save money, and it’s a bad strategy.

Janice K. Jackson: A bad strategy.

Mason Pashia: That is not the recommendation of this podcast.

Janice K. Jackson: No, I do not agree with that at all.

Mason Pashia: Yeah, no, absolutely.

Closing: What’s Next at Aspen

Mason Pashia: I’m going to bring us to a close with one last question, just about what you’ve mentioned you’re working on at Aspen. How can the audience stay in the loop on what you’re doing there? What are some things coming up that we should keep an eye out for?

Janice K. Jackson: A couple of things. One, I’d encourage them to follow our work on social media. The Ed and Society program has a LinkedIn page and a webpage. We also have a new center at the Aspen Institute, only two years old, called the Center for Rising Generations, and we have a Substack as a way to stay connected. What’s important about that center is that it’s focused on young people, on making sure that leadership opportunities for young people are a predictable part of their education experience, and I know that’s something you care about, I’ve seen some of the pieces you’ve done before.

If that’s something that excites you, we have some really good programming coming down the pipeline. We want to talk to young people more, engage them more, and help them be part of creating the policies and structures they’ll inherit in a few years. Anybody interested in that kind of work, or in the question of what school is for and what the future of schooling looks like, should follow what we’re doing at Ed and Society and the Center for Rising Generations.

Mason Pashia: I hope we can get some of them on the podcast in the future. That’d be awesome.

Links

• Face the Nation Interview
• The Education Equation Podcast/Interview
• Aspen Institute Education & Society Program Website