Scott Goldstein

Executive Director, EmpowerEd

Educator with 10 years’ experience teaching ESL and social studies in charter, private, public, and international schools
Parent of two school-age children
 

Gabrielle DuBose

Teacher, Duke Ellington School of the Arts, and EmpowerEd Member

Educator with 30 years’ experience teaching performing arts, English, and journalism in grades spanning PK3 to 12th grade in charter, private, and public schools
 

Gabrielle DuBose and Scott Goldstein know each other through EmpowerEd, an advocacy organization that seeks to retain and empower educators. They discuss the importance of teaching students self-advocacy, communication, and other nonacademic skills and the factors in and outside of school that affect the development of those skills. Their conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
 

How would you define success for students? In a perfect world, what would you want them to be able to do after high school?

Gabrielle DuBose: I would love to see my students enter the workforce, become entrepreneurs, enter trade school, two-year college, four-year college, a six-year college program, depending on where their interests are. But [I want] to have them enter those spaces with the bridge work that many children of color need.

Oftentimes, children who are furthest from opportunity have holes in their foundation. And so I see myself in the classroom like the octopus, seeing the holes, trying to fill in those gaps while I have them in the classroom.

One of the things that I say to my students is, don’t ever hold your head down about where you’re lacking academically. You need to be aware of what you need, and you need to go after those resources, but understand that there’s a whole reason [that these gaps exist]. For generations, families of color, Black people, have not been on the same education level, if you will, as those who consider themselves white have been.

We need to have supports in place, as a form of reparations. Reparation is not just dollars. It is acknowledging first of all what has happened for centuries to people of color since 1619 and then working aggressively at the state and federal level to provide the resources so that more children of color can successfully enter where they need to be in society.

Scott Goldstein: Gabrielle always gives a sermon, so I’m like, “Do I keep going there?”

Gabrielle DuBose: Yes. Keep going, brother. I’m passing the plate.

Scott Goldstein: I want everyone that I’ve taught to leave school with the confidence to do what it is they want to do. But as Gabrielle talks about all those holes, the thing I was thinking about is having the social-emotional intelligence, having the professional skills, having the communication skills, having the wherewithal to be able to overcome challenges.

I think the most important thing we have to give them before they leave is the confidence that they can learn and that they can make the connections they need to make socially to be able to advance. I think that one of the biggest things that we miss with students is not teaching them how to navigate from where we’re leaving them to where they need to get after that point. We drop them into college, and they don’t have both the physical and mental tools often to figure out, okay, how do I get from here to there in that pathway? And then when they encounter challenges, we haven’t really given them the social-emotional skills and the other soft skills to overcome them.

I think a lot of that happens through experience, which is why I’m a really big believer in experiential learning and vocational and internships and all these other things that we can try to provide them that aren’t just in the classroom.
 

Could you say more about the role of educators, and retaining educators, in supporting student success?

Scott Goldstein: There is all the research in the world that schools can improve, but they don’t improve sustainably unless [they’re] stable. Meaning, if you do not have a stable staff, you are spending an enormous amount of money, but also effort, in continuously recruiting new educators and trying to catch them up. You’re not an expert teacher right away. If we have a model where we say, “It doesn’t matter if we constantly have 25-year-old educators who went through two months of training, and that’s no different than a 20- or 30-year veteran educator,” that is going to constantly undermine student learning.

So turnover is costly in [students’] academic growth, turnover is costly in dollars, it’s costly to school culture and climate, and it disrupts the feeling that it is a community. Schools are fundamentally about human relationships, and you can’t teach a student without a relationship with them. Every time we destroy that relationship, we are destroying connection, and we’re also destroying the learning that the connection is there to further. 
 

What do you wish policymakers and other school leaders knew or cared more about in terms of setting kids up for lifelong success, especially those from economically disadvantaged backgrounds?

Scott Goldstein: We all want students to be really good at reading and math and writing and the fundamentals. We don’t, in my opinion—and I think this is well backed up—get there by only focusing on reading, writing, and math in the traditional sense.

I think we have been driven for a very long time by this intense focus on metrics and then this urgency that our Black students, in particular, are tragically behind in reading and math scores in a way that is completely unacceptable. Just giving them more time in ELA and math, it is not the only way—and it’s probably not the best way—to get them to catch up and be where they need to be in those subjects.

Students need to come to school to succeed in school. And there’s a whole lot of ways to create school environments that students want to be in. I think we have to focus on engagement, on the kind of experiences and opportunities that students get in school to make them feel that school is relevant to their lives.

So my big message to policy people is that there are inputs that get you the outputs. Ten years from now [might] be like, “We had a five-year plan that we were going to increase graduation rates by this amount, and we’re going to increase test scores by this amount. So why didn’t it happen?” It didn’t happen because you didn’t do the inputs you know get you there, [such as] having a well-rounded curriculum, having student attendance increase, engagement increase, parent and family communication contact, stable schools, teacher and principal retention. Those are the inputs.

Gabrielle DuBose: Being culturally responsible from the beginning in terms of the inputs is going to get us closer to what our achieved goal is, which is for all of our students to learn well, to do well, to be well.

I want policymakers to focus on the human side of life with these young people and acknowledge the different backgrounds we come from, and then be responsible to have the necessary players discussing and writing policy, because there’s more than one way to achieve a goal. Everybody is not going to be able to go down that same track because that’s not everyone’s same lived experience.

I see this work—and I would like for policymakers to see it this way—as a huge puzzle with lots of different pieces that need to fit into the puzzle to make it whole. And so that means that not one particular group of people is going to have all the answers because we don’t all share the same lived experience.

Interview edited by Rachel Kenney, with photography by Alyssa Schukar for the Urban Institute. Research and logistical support provided by Karishma Furtado and Victoria Nelson.