Open System for Democracy: Landon Mascareñaz & Doannie Tran
July 27th, 2023
“Reject this doomerism that says that we can't change the institution.”
Landon Mascareñaz and Doannie Tran are co-authors of The Open System: Redesigning Education and Reigniting Democracy. Education is our greatest democracy-building endeavor. We discuss rebuilding trust in public education and marshaling the public will to do something great together.
The democratic act is in the spark of everyday interactions with our community, such as in schools. Families and communities should be an integral part of the way that schools function. We need to practice new ways of making decisions together as a society, and education is a fertile place for this practice. Doannie reminds us that “If people can change, institutions can change, because they're nothing more than the people within them.”
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Credits:
Host: Mila Atmos
Guest: Landon Mascareñez & Doannie Tran
Executive Producer: Mila Atmos
Producers: Zack Travis
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Landon and Doannie Transcript
Mila Atmos: [00:00:00] Thanks to HelloFresh, America's number one meal kit for sponsoring this episode. Go to hellofresh.com/hopeful50 and use code hopeful50 for 50% off, plus free shipping.
Welcome to Future Hindsight, a podcast that takes big ideas about civic life and democracy and turns them into action items for you and me. I'm Mila Atmos.
Public institutions have long been considered to be resilient, no matter the political winds they would endure. Well, we've discovered that institutions are, in fact, vulnerable; and perhaps this is most visibly true with public schools. Public education is under attack because it lies at the heart of a democratic society. Weakening public education results in weakening democracy. The good news is that education continues to be our greatest democracy building endeavor. And the question before us today is: how can education be reimagined to rekindle democracy and build a more just society?
Joining us to unpack this question are Landon Mascareñaz and Doannie Tran, co- authors of The Open System: Redesigning Education and Reigniting Democracy. Doannie was a middle and high school teacher, served as assistant superintendent for academics and professional learning for Boston public schools, and is currently a partner at the Center for Innovation in Education. Welcome, Doannie.
Doannie Tran: [00:01:40] Thanks so much for having me.
Mila Atmos: [00:01:42] Landon is an educator, writer, and democracy builder. He works at the Colorado Education Initiative and is the chair of the Colorado State Board for Community Colleges and Occupational Education. Welcome, Landon.
Landon Mascareñaz: [00:01:57] Thanks for having me.
Mila Atmos: [00:01:58] Thank you both so much for joining us today. So to start, I thought we would establish the lay of the land, especially since you write about the importance of creating a shared understanding of reality in order to find solutions. How
would you describe the state of public education today, and why is systems thinking and systems design the right approach forward?
Landon Mascareñaz: [00:02:24] Well, Mila, thank you for having us on. It's just so exciting. And I love the question. Love your work. Thank you for all that you're doing to lead conversations about the importance of civic engagement and participatory democracy at this critical moment in time. Because we do have to build a shared reality. And the reality is, you said earlier, is that our institutions are under threat, not only under threat from external actors, but they have been for too long, closed off from the communities they served. We are dealing with a significant amount of legacy public systems that have not undergone significant community driven redesign in the past set of decades. These closed systems and this closed off behavior reduces legitimacy in the institution, reduces trust in the institution, and fundamentally reduces outcomes. If we really see that the ownership and the connection that we have as citizens to our public institutions is us knowing that it's working for us, responsive to us and open to a co-creative act and participation from us in designing them. Then for too long our public school systems have been pulled away from the communities they serve, and we believe that we are at an inflection moment in our society where we not only have the opportunity, but an obligation to light that co-creative spark and that through lighting this co-creative spark, we will see a rebirth of democracy at the local level and in fact are seeing this in many places around the country.
Mila Atmos: [00:03:51] Well, so my follow up question here is, in real terms at school, what's the future vision? And how is the open system idea fundamentally different from the reform ideas that we normally hear about, like smaller class sizes, you know, more testing or what have you?
Doannie Tran: [00:04:10] We really take a lot of energy from the principal. I'm just going to share one quick example. The principal at Valverde Elementary, a gentleman named Drew Schutz, and he once said to us that this is not my school. This is the community school and it's their vision and it's just my job to bring it to life, to realize that vision. That is really the dream of the open system, in precise terms. We want to increase the permeability of the school walls. Families and communities should be integral parts of the way that schools function and taking it up one level. Districts should also model that same behavior. The ways in which districts engage with communities
tends to be putting it at arms length. They use mechanisms that don't truly bring communities and their full experience into the system. They use structures and systems like surveys and focus groups which sort of strip away the real vitality and energy that the community could bring and and makes it sort of neutered in ways that actually dampen the kind of energy and participation and co-creation that's possible. And what we've seen is that when districts and schools and even state systems open the doors really, really wide and really bring in families and communities into sustained acts of co- creation, really amazing things are possible. Things can be redesigned in ways that meet family needs so much more effectively and actually really ramp up and increase the trust that families feel about the systems that their children are in.
Mila Atmos: [00:06:04] Well, I'm really interested in this idea of trust. But before we go there on a philosophical level, the very idea of public education is under attack. And Landon mentioned it's not just from external actors. Also from internal actors like parents, you know? So I think one of the questions that people are asking today about education is what's the purpose? Who is it for? It's a community school, you say. But I think people would maybe disagree what it means to be a community school. So how do you envision open systems in places that so deeply distrust public education and the very strong tide of the current and ongoing movement to dismantle public education? And I'm thinking here not just about right wing attacks, vilifying teachers, librarians and books, but also what you call a closed system habit that looks at parent power as a third rail that's too dangerous to touch.
Landon Mascareñaz: [00:07:06] It's a really important question right now, Mila. And let's take it from a broad angle and zoom out for a second, because fundamentally, we have been watching, we would argue, the kind of closed system behavior of public education manifest in all sorts of ways for the past few decades. And included in the book is actually a little bit of an arc, although we don't do it nearly as much justice as we'd like to. But a little bit of the last few decades of education history kind of through an open and closed angle. And whether you're talking about kind of market driven reformers on one side of the political spectrum or you're looking at folks on the left trying to change education from another angle, or folks in this conservative parent power movement, organizing for change in the education system, the thing that they all have in common is they feel like they've all been left out of the design process of a lot of the system itself. And so what we see oftentimes is the closed system building up new
walls. And so I think it's very easy for folks to look at this new parent power movement and say this is the attack on public education, when in fact, I think that actually takes away decades of critiques from parents of color who have enormous questions about the efficacy of a system that has failed to serve their kids. And so we have to kind of zoom out and say that there is something deeper going on here. And the thing that's, we would argue, is deeper going on here is that we have been watching systems that have relied too much on technocracy, on elite expertise. And back to your point earlier, you know, if a parent group works with the school system to say, "hey, we want to see smaller class sizes." That's one thing. That's a cool idea. That's parents working with schools to design the solution that makes sense for their community, for their kid, for what's happening. But too often, each of these scenarios, each of these groups of well- intentioned designers or provocateurs that we talk about, they've come with the solution already in hand. And we're seeing this now in some aspects of the parent power movement as well. Here is the solution. Go do this; versus saying how do we build a public education system that is fundamentally committed to the act of participatory engagement with its community and through that, breaking down those walls so that the energy and connection can emerge of what new ideas are possible.
Doannie Tran: [00:09:25] And I think that we need to reframe the leadership act that in the minds of many school and district leaders, it is, as you said, the sort of parent energy is seen as a third rail. If you touch it, then something terrible is going to happen as opposed to reconceptualizing it as this is a live wire, there's energy and power flowing through it. And if you can connect it into your system and cultivate it and harness it, then it can power any number of incredible innovations. We were lucky enough to work with the superintendent in Burlington, Vermont, to create with the community his strategic plan and one of the most powerful things that he did through this co-creative process was acknowledged that the district had a true problem with following through on its commitments and really circling back to the community. And when he was able to do that and bring families into acknowledging that and looking at the root causes for why that was, they became so much more trusting and invested in the solutions that they were developing. And they ended up centering the idea of belonging in the district, setting a goal around that. And what happened then was there's a young person who was on the same design team and a parent who presented the strategic plan to the board, which then passed unanimously because the board could see the energy that was really driving this strategic plan.
Mila Atmos: [00:10:56] Well, in a way, I feel like what you're saying in your book is that we need more democracy to fix democracy and that our most lucrative opportunity right now in this moment is in education. Your book reads like a blueprint on how to practice democracy in the context of educational institutions. And the example that you just shared is a good point. I'm curious, though, about who ultimately makes the decisions in open systems. And you mentioned the people who were at the table in Vermont, but in general, who gets a seat at the table? What is the role of experts? How do you create what you call a breakthrough democratic space?
Landon Mascareñaz: [00:11:40] This is a central dilemma, and I love that you said that it reads as a blueprint for how to practice democracy in education, because that's what we were going for! And that's really exciting because we really want community leaders and system leaders inside education to start using the same language. In our experience, we saw so many well intentioned values aligned leaders on two different sides of the table, to use your table metaphor, using different language, and became ships passing in the night for the same opportunity to open something up to create a breakthrough space in their community. One of the things that we fundamentally believe is that the way that we do task forces and decision making in education is broken, and it's been broken for a long time. I worked in Denver public schools and oftentimes I felt like it was Groundhog Day. Every time that we built a task force or a committee. And one of the things that Doannie and I put our heads together and worked with lots of people from around the country as we actually co-created, the principles and practices that are in this book was really unpacking what was wrong with the task force. Well, first and foremost, we see a lot of leaders who want to go around the board. People are frustrated with boards. And in fact, you see this actually in a lot of cases where people say, "oh, like the board is the problem." And we don't discount that there are dysfunctional boards out there. But if we're in the business of practicing democracy to save democracy, we can't actually run around democracy and democratic representative structures in that process. So we have to understand the context of the politics of local boards and structures like that. We have to understand the task forces and committees that would come before a board or become for a superintendent have to withstand intense political scrutiny and pressure.
Landon Mascareñaz: [00:13:15] And so one of the things that we do is say we have to unbundle the way that we thought about the task force and that there are three types of stakeholders, essential stakeholders. These are the people in the community that have to be involved in any process. They have enormous social capital, relational capital, interested stakeholders. These are the people that will apply for any sort of process. Sometimes they're called the same 30 people in every community. But the disruption that we offer that we've actually now seen in reading from folks around the globe is the idea of sortition and random selection. And then if you blend together a process in a school system that brings together essential stakeholders that school districts and school boards know have to be involved, that you have an application for anyone who's interested and blend it with a sortition method. Like a jury, you can create a dynamic, disruptive table that can withstand enormous political scrutiny. And now we've seen that deployed to take on enormous challenging problems like school discipline in Boulder, assessment and redesign of learning in Kentucky and in a variety of political contexts. And so a part of the manual is saying we have to reimagine how we build and establish these structures so that decision makers can have understanding of who is at the table, how the decision was made. One of the things we talk about in the book is also we don't think 50 plus one is always the best strategy for these things. And we really talk about a modified consensus protocol that we've seen, again in diverse political contexts, rural, suburban and urban lead to some really incredible decision making. And I think your point about expertise is an important one to discuss because we're not actually saying that traditionally acknowledged forms of expertise don't have a role to play. It's really about rightsizing that expertise relative to other forms of expertise. Families have a lived experience with the system, as do young people, as do business owners in the community. By bringing them in and actually facilitating that very carefully, we can bring their points of view into conversation with one another. And one of the most important things that we do in that kind of space is acknowledge that everybody's expertise is pretty important and that we all have something to learn from one another. And so creating a sustained space for shared learning is really, really critical. And that's why these very shallow task forces where people are just coming in and spouting their random opinion isn't really sustainable. It doesn't have the same power as a place where people are over an extended period of time, really learning together and learning from one another, learning to respect each other's opinion. And that's a dynamic that really needs to be facilitated.
Mila Atmos: [00:15:58] Well, on the subject of task forces, I will say that I have been involved in some task forces myself. And I think an overwhelming feeling when you sit in these meetings is not only that people spout their own opinions, but also that you have no power, that really nobody is actually really listening to you. Like, you might have a really good opinion. You might in fact have expertise, but it doesn't matter because whatever you might recommend, whoever is the leader of the institution can just throw it away, you know, and just be like, "Yeah, well actually I know better." So like, this is a habit of a closed system, you would say.
Landon Mascareñaz: [00:16:35] Thanks, but no thanks. Mila Atmos: [00:16:36] Yeah, exactly, exactly.
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And now let's return to my conversation with Landon Mascarenhas and Doannie Tran.
Mila Atmos: [00:17:57] So, you know, I asked that question about who's at the table because it makes me think about whether the new institutions, the new idea of school going forward, this community school will really be considered as legitimate. Trust in public education, as you have mentioned, has now eroded over many years. And while I know that it won't be rebuilt overnight, I have a feeling that it needs to happen fast enough so that people want to buy in. Tell me about how an open system rebuilds trust and how we can move quickly enough, because one thing you write about and that you just also mentioned is consensus driven decision making, which is quite deliberate.
Doannie Tran: [00:18:40] Well, one thing that actually precedes the creation of the breakthrough space is thoughtfully identifying the open moment that you have, because you're absolutely right, Mila. If you try to deliberate around something where there is no space, where there is no commitment on the part of the executive leader, whoever that is, the principal, the superintendent, the state chief, then that's a trust-eroding experience. And so a point of clarity that we really try to get to is where is the openness to community co-creation on the part of the executive and on the part of the governance board, whoever that is, right at the school level, at the district level or at the state level, when there's an intersection between that openness on the part of the board and the part of the executive, that's the opportunity that you bring to the community. And because you're saying I'm open to you deliberating on this and creating a solution that really works for you, and that then is the fuel and the clarity needed for that group to really do the work and to use the consensus driven decision making and shared learning experiences that then will create something that has true legitimacy because it's created by the community. And then it's offered up. And I think when executives and board leaders really see that and understand the process, then their buy-in and commitment is really enhanced. The success of that initiative is then a trust building exercise because then everybody has been through this loop where the ideas of the community have been realized and accepted by the system. And that has really opened up in places like Kentucky where we had that commitment from the commissioner and the board chair to reimagine and reexamine the way in which we assess young people, the way we hold schools accountable to that. Their openness to that has created a tremendous amount of trust because they have seen communities then take that mantle and start to drive a new system design, and they have put themselves in a learning position relative to that and the community can feel it. They can really feel it. And we've seen that over and over again across the state and across other contexts.
Landon Mascareñaz: [00:21:01] Jumping off from that, just a couple of quick thoughts is that I'm imagining also in the task forces that you participated in is that they meet once a month and they go forever. And you're never sure. They're almost interminable. And one of the reasons we also wrote the book is we want to actually take on some of these tropes and some of these patterns, closed system patterns, that we see in things like that. And we say, "Look, there's no stone tablet written somewhere that says that task forces have to meet once a month, that they actually have to be these slow
processes." We've worked with people and leaders who have done incredible work generating enormous energy and team building and connection in a process like this to then move very quickly to decision making. And it's true, I do also think there is this idea of deliberative decision making and consensus driven decision making that has to take forever. But we've also seen it deployed very rapidly over a couple of meetings on very complex topics. And just to kind of name that, I think we have to take these on as questions and we talk about this in our modeling creative democracy. We have to practice new ways of making decisions together as a community, as a society, if we're going to move forward on some of these pieces.
Mila Atmos: [00:22:10] Right, Right. As you said, you wrote a whole chapter on modeling creative democracy, and you call on us to practice creative democracy and show it to other people. I was quite taken by the example in Boulder, Colorado, where the Equity Council assessed what to do about school resource officers in the wake of George Floyd's murder in 2020. And I was really also taken by the leadership that was shown there. In fact, all the leaders that you showcase, I'd love for you to talk about the process in Boulder, just to show us how they did it and sort of think through what modeling creative democracy looks like in action.
Landon Mascareñaz: [00:22:48] There's a really interesting and incredible process to be a part of. After the murder of George Floyd, the Boulder School District came to the Colorado Education Initiative and said that they wanted help responding to a request from their local NAACP chapter around removing school resource officers was something that was happening in some schools in Colorado and around the country. And Rob Anderson, who I think you rightly credit as a pretty thoughtful and inspiring leader, and I think he's done incredible work in Boulder over this time, has really said, "you know, I don't want to just have a knee jerk reaction to this. I really want to have a well-designed, focused conversation with our community." So we supported him to build something called an equity Council and pitched him on the idea of the kind of three part task force that we talked about earlier. One part, him and his board coming together to design a set of stakeholders like the NAACP, like the Boulder High School principal. Some really other important community members that had to be on an application to the broader community to open up to see who wanted to be a part of it, which had over 900 applications. It was the highest application they've ever received in Boulder for anything, which tells you something about aligning with the community and governance. That
clearly was an open moment for Boulder, this question of equity in school discipline. And then the third thing was a random selection and we worked with their data team to build out a panel and a pool of candidates using a random selection model in education. And then we invited those folks to be a part of the process. And over the course of a few months, again, very quickly, very different than the traditional education task force that would say, let's meet once a month for an hour, barely get started, build no community and not have really any cadence for movement, Rob said: "We have to move quickly to get these recommendations in front of the board in November." So we spent time building a shared reality with this group of very highly diverse individuals from across the community. What's the current situation with school resource officers? What's the data telling us both nationally and locally? Let's hear from school resource officers. Let's hear from police officers. Let's look at the job descriptions. One thing that we talk a lot about also, and we see this in a lot of our processes Superintendent Anderson helped us a lot with getting to radical clarity around the charge of the group to we were taking on the question of school resource officers in Boulder, and now that can intersect with school discipline after school program, teacher hiring recruitment. But we've discovered in our work with other leaders that co-creation thrives in the depth and actually withers in the breadth. When you actually focus a group or a community task force or a process really deeply on one particular subject, the depth of co-creation is really incredible. And so at the end, we got to over a dozen community co-created recommendations around what to do moving forward and the kind of balance of factors and voices in that group really helped us many times, and especially as we strove for pretty much over 90% agreement on all the recommendations and achieved it when the group brought their recommendations to the board to essentially eliminate the current role of school resource officer, but reimagine it with something that was really inspiring, that actually took on questions of, well, we still going to have to call the police and we're still going to have to work with local police forces and we're still going to have to do restorative justice. And they have something called a school safety advocate, which is also, I think, really powerful to watch a community build a third way here between people who you see this in national debates, "Oh, school resource officer or no school resource officer." And actually the community worked alongside Boulder to build something and not only delivered it back to the board, the board then approved, but came back with that 90% recommendation. And I think that shows you the power of getting really clear on a question. Building a politically diverse group of folks that represented the community overall, building that shared reality, breaking through that closed space, and then
modeling that creative democracy that held the decision making apparatus together to imagine something new.
Mila Atmos: [00:26:56] Well, can you tell us a little bit more about the consensus building here? Because you said 90% and you illustrate that really well, the process on how to get there in the book. And I would love for you to share it for the sake of the listener.
Landon Mascareñaz: [00:27:08] So this was actually a protocol in graduate school. It's called Fist to Five. And it's actually a really simple way to practice getting to a modified consensus in a group. You have a proposal like, "I'd like to listen to more Future Hindsight episodes because honestly, like I'm really pumped." I say, okay, Doannie, how do you feel about doing that? I'm going to say five. I put up five fingers. Doannie puts up five fingers. If Doannie was a blocker, I was a block, we would do a fist. And then if I was a one, I would say, "well, I'm not a block, but I'd like to tell you why I'm in strong disagreement with doing this particular action." Although clearly we're both five, so we're moving forward pretty quickly. There is so much unspoken decision making we do in groups or conversations, and we often have failed to learn how to practice talking to each other in small groups. And we see this over and over again is that by practicing this protocol and aspiring to again, 80-90% agreement in a group, it allows people to actually hear a proposal and respond to it. And we find that oftentimes our community members and ourselves, we aren't really trained to do that, to listen, intake a proposal, and then come back with a recommendation, and also to reject the binary of a yes or a no. And the fist to five allows us to say I'm a three, so I'm not in love with it, but I'm not against it. And you watch a group start to incorporate all these different ideas. And again, in diverse political contexts, I think a lot of people who find themselves maybe thinking they might be opposed to a proposal by watching other people in the group listen to them, adjust to them, adapt to them, find inspiration and trust in the process. Doannie, what's on your mind there?
Doannie Tran: [00:28:47] I just want to underscore that there are real instincts in a group like this to try to push something through quickly. And to actually not allow for the kind of deliberation that's required and that people just want to go along to get along. And the first time that a group disagrees on something is an incredibly powerful moment. But leaders need to hold themselves open to that experience. When we were
in Kentucky recently, we had a proposal about how to move something forward, and you could see rippling through the room fives. You know, like, okay, it feels fine. And then one person blocked. And when she had the opportunity, and in some sense the obligation, to share why she put that block up, it catalyzed something in the room. Everybody was like, "Oh, right, that's true. And we can disagree and we can disagree respectfully." And the block is not a attention grabbing act. It's a hold. It's a pause. It is a initiation of a different conversation. But to his credit, you know, the commissioner and the team that was facilitating allowed themselves to hear it. And even though we often go with 90 plus one, we actually said we're going to actually take this as a moment to reconsider and to spend more time deliberating. But that's a leadership act that that people have to be ready for.
Mila Atmos: [00:30:23] Tell us about the open leaders, because this was also its own chapter. And I was really struck about how you describe them. And I think we we don't really encounter leaders like that or we don't think of leaders in this way. Tell us more.
Doannie Tran: [00:30:38] Well, I think we have certain archetypes of leadership that we have to question. We have these archetypes of leaders have answers. Leaders make decisions and they push things through. And in this moment, when there are the issues and the problems that we're dealing with are so complex that no one person can really hold all of the perspectives necessary in order to come up with the most powerful solutions. We have to reconsider the act of leadership. And that's really what we're trying to provoke in the space right now that we have come from a real long history in education of outside reforms. You know, a technocratic approach expert driven from outside of your community comes in with answers. And the role of the leader is to just execute on that. And that's not going to meet the moment that we're in. We need leaders who can create a space where multiple perspectives can be surfaced that can hold that kind of container long enough for truly thoughtful solutions to emerge. And there's a humility to that that I think we're calling forth from the world, that they have to acknowledge that their role is not to have all the answers and is not to push things through. It is to create space for people to bring their expertise into the problem solving.
Landon Mascareñaz: [00:32:10] There's a couple of things that I think are really interesting about the open leader that the leaders that we've had the chance to look at and observe and to work alongside for these past few years, because we started writing
this book right before the pandemic and then got to really dive into it. And then now on this other phase of our society and this opportunity, I think John and I are very aligned on, is we're in a moment to build in our society and to reimagine and to kind of think in very much the spirit of this podcast. The open leader has to do a couple of things. They have to do what we talked about earlier. They have to triangulate the politics of their local community exceptionally well. They have to know where their community's at, where their board's at and where they're at. They have to reject those authoritative archetypes that Doannie talked about, and they have to, and we bring in a lot of thinking from Brian Danoff here at Miami University, say, you know what, the current structure of our school system is not where it needs to be, but we can make it better. And we think that simple act of being able to name the Democratic dilemma, to name the dilemma in a community, but then call people to work on it together, we think that pivot point is something we don't see enough. We see a lot of folks, I would say, in our nonprofit industrial complex who are really interested in calling out the problem. But fundamentally, Doannie and I believe that it's progress, not perfection, that the leaders who can name it, see it, and call a community to existence in solving it are the ones that are going to move us to the next phase of what we need, where we need to go in our society.
Mila Atmos: [00:33:43] Mm hmm. Well, so thinking about that, you know, you argue that democracy and education are joined together at the foundation, and I agree. And if you're trying to establish habits of democracy across our society and have space also, I think for open leaders, because I think some people don't think people like that are leaders necessarily, and that might delegitimize the process... we need to prioritize teaching those habits in schools. What are, in your mind, the most important habits we should be promoting and cultivating in this moment, the year 2023?
Doannie Tran: [00:34:20] Such a salient question for me. I have a nine and 11 year old who I'm rapidly trying to teach them how to be democratic leaders in this way. You know, it's never too early to be an open system leader, I think. But we often hear principals and district leaders say, "well, I hate the politics. You know, I don't deal with the politics." And we think that it's unrealistic to not see yourself as a public leader. And it comes from a very narrow and sort of bankrupt view of the act of politics. We think that politics is really the marshaling of public will to do something great. To do something that you can't do alone. And so we think acknowledging that there is a public
leadership aspect to being an education leader is one of the most fundamental mindset shifts. And then all of the practices sort of flow from that. The idea of being unusually inclusive in your creation of problem solving groups, be they a task force or be they whatever sort of system you're creating. So including an unusual group of people and creating that breakthrough space, identifying the politics and the open moment is a critical task and then creating the kind of learning deliberative space that is, I think, the cradle of of how we think about the democratic act is another key activity that you can teach people how to do. The idea of modeling that kind of shared reality creation through empathy driven processes and then deliberating and being thoughtful about potential solutions and then coming to a consensus around the most promising ones. These are skills that can certainly be taught and that we've seen happen again and again with really powerful open leaders across the country.
Landon Mascareñaz: [00:36:17] The thing that really comes to my mind is how do we start to see democracy as abundance and how do we start to really understand that so much more is possible when we work together and to really start to build some consciousness around how much scarcity is socialized into our students, into our teachers, into our public education leaders. Doanni and I've worked in public education for 15 plus years now. You know, our whole professional career, and I can't tell you how often this fear of scarcity, this worry that there won't be enough, that we can't have more people involved in the decision. And what will happen if they have an opportunity to be a part of the budget process and how will we share? How will we go? And that the greatest breakthroughs we see are when people move beyond that scarcity, when they interrupt it with clarity and they say, "well, what is the real fear here? What is the real worry about sharing? What is the real concern we have about more people being involved?" And that there's so much of a default assumption around scarcity and budgets, ideas and beliefs, and that if we move to a world of abundance in our thinking and our democratic act and in the infrastructure, we try to build that I just think that if we can work with our students at a young age in that space, we can start to have really different types of conversations about the future we can build.
Mila Atmos: [00:37:39] Mm hmm. Well, this discussion wouldn't be complete without asking the broader question about the role of institutions in our society. And you mentioned that now is the time to rebuild them and reinvest. And I agree. But why? Why focus on rebuilding, fortifying institutions such as public education?
Landon Mascareñaz: [00:37:59] You know, there's a lot of folks out there, Mila, that actually would say that we should build new institutions, we should build new structures. And to those folks, we say Godspeed. We should build new institutions. We should build new structures. And yet we cannot, and we must not, we ought not forget about the students, families, and communities that are currently being served in the institutions that are presently around right now. The legacy institutions of our health care system, of our education system. This is where the tens of millions of kids are. This is where the billions of dollars of taxpayer money is. And if we just, for the sake of intellectual curiosity and creativity, move to other institutions and leave them behind, then we have failed. And we believe that deeply. And we have seen that we can reject this doomerism that says that you can't change the institution. We've seen progress move forward in different places. And so we think that we are living in a moment of perturbation in our society right now, a moment of change, a moment of reimagining. And that reimagining must be how do we wield the awesome power of these giant legacy systems and reimagine them and reforge them for our modern society? And that if we don't do that with our families, communities and students at the table, then we are going to recreate the same patterns we've seen before. And that in fact the long arc is to build societal institutions that understand that their very vitality and lifeblood comes from the participation of those families, communities and students.
Doannie Tran: [00:39:29] And, you know, if you believe that brains are plastic. Then fundamentally believe that people can change, and if people can change, institutions can change because they are nothing more than the people within them and the habits that those people hold in their work. And what we've seen is that if you bring in voices from outside of the system. Then there's a shared creative act that can come to the fore. And if you believe all of that, then you have to believe in the possibility that institutions can really become the systems that we need to create greater equity.
Mila Atmos: [00:40:16] Oh, I love that. So what are two things an everyday person can do to advance open systems to revamp public education in their communities?
Doannie Tran: [00:40:28] I really love this question because we've been talking a lot about open leaders and open systems as if that's something that happens over there and only some people get to do it. But the fact is, is that we if we believe that systems
are permeable, and they should be more permeable, then I think that a person listening to this podcast right now could think about their education system and think about a person within that system that might be curious about their point of view and might be willing to engage in a dialogue about creative opportunities to design something together. It often starts with fairly modest projects, but once that person sees the power of being open to the external flows of information and insights, then they start to think about where else they might be able to do that. Then they start thinking about task forces differently, and then they start thinking about projects and co-creation very differently.
Landon Mascareñaz: [00:41:30] Very similar to Doannie. And this is one of the reasons we're so inspired by Hélène Landemore's work and open democracy is that we have to move beyond the idea of democracy just being about elections. And every citizen should really take to heart that the democratic act is in the spark of their day to day interactions with other people in the way they make decisions at work, in the way that they help their school, think differently about the way communities and families are involved, the way we participate in local budget meetings. It is a broader conception that I think every citizen can take on.
Mila Atmos: [00:42:07] Excellent. So looking into the future, what makes you hopeful? Landon, go first.
Landon Mascareñaz: [00:42:14] I'm an enormously hopeful person and I get teased about it sometimes, but I'm a deeply hopeful person because I've seen systems change, you know? And honestly, I think this is an important thing for me to share. I know you're New York based. I do a lot of work in rural communities, Mila, and I can't tell you how hopeful I am about the future of rural America. And I know it's a trope and a pattern to talk about how bad off our rural communities are. But some of the most exciting education innovation, the most exciting abundance infrastructure I'm watching being developed from an open systems lens, is happening in rural America right now. And that gets me very hopeful because I actually think we're going to be at a point here in the next ten, 20 years where rural America is going to be showing a lot of our metro cities how to be open and how to be responsive and how to come together in the face of some of these global challenges.
Doannie Tran: [00:43:01] And so similar to that, I live in Georgia, and I do a lot of work in places that we would consider quite red states. And the openness that I see emerging among leaders in these contexts that we think of as very sort of closed is really inspiring when they intersect with their communities. I think that the empathy that they feel for one another in their communities is really driving a lot of powerful questions about who we are, what are we here for, what are we hoping to do in ways that transcend what we would consider traditional partisan boundaries? I don't see a future where the people closing themselves off as much as we may imagine.
Mila Atmos: [00:43:49] That's really tremendous. Hopefulness from unexpected places. Thank you both for being on the show. I really enjoyed your book. I hope everybody reads it. Thank you for joining me on Future Hindsight.
Landon Mascareñaz: [00:44:02] Thank you, Mila.
Doannie Tran: [00:44:03] It's a pleasure. Yeah, it's a pleasure to be here.
Mila Atmos: [00:44:06] Landon Mascareñaz and Doannie Tran are coauthors of the Open System: Redesigning Education and Reigniting Democracy.
Next week on Future Hindsight, we're joined by Norman Chen, the CEO of the Asian American Foundation. We discuss racism against Asians and the pursuit of belonging.
Norman Chen: [00:44:31] Having that perspective and that pride in your identity is foundational, and that's what we're trying to build within our community more of an appreciation of who we are, to have that sense of belonging so that we can then move on and really, really prosper. It's like the hierarchy of needs, right? You don't have safety, you don't have belonging, you can't thrive, you can't be self-actualized. And that's really part of our mission.
Mila Atmos: [00:44:53] That's next time on Future Hindsight.
And before I go, first of all, thanks for listening. You must really like the show if you're still here. We have an ask of you. Could you rate us or leave a review on Apple Podcasts? It seems like a small thing, but it can make a huge difference for an
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This episode was produced by Zack Travis and me.
Until next time, stay engaged!
The Democracy Group: [00:45:36] This podcast is part of the Democracy Group.