Be curious. Be humble. Be useful.
I was invited to give the annual Taub Lecture for graduating Public Policy students at the University of Chicago, my alma mater and the department from which I graduated. This is what I came up with.
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I am incredibly grateful and honored to be here tonight. The Public Policy program literally changed my life.
My name is Ben Samuels-Kalow, my pronouns are he/him/his. I’m a 2012 Public Policy graduate, and I will permit myself one “back in my day” comment: When I was a student here, the “Taub Lecture” were actual lectures given by Professor Taub in our Implementation class. I’ve spent the last nine years teaching in the South Bronx. For the past two years, I have served as Head of School at Creo College Prep, a public charter school that opened in 2019.
I was asked tonight to tell you a bit about my journey, and the work that I do. My objection to doing this is that there is basically nothing less interesting than listening to a white man tell you how he got somewhere, so I'll keep it brief. I grew up in New York City and went to a public high school that turned out Justice Elena Kagan, Chris Hayes, Lin-Manuel Miranda, among many others…none of whom were available tonight.
We, on this Zoom, all have one thing in common — we have been very, very close to graduating from the University of Chicago. I have never sat quite where you sit. I didn’t graduate into a pandemic. But the truth is that everyone graduates into a crisis. The periods of relative ease, the so-called “ends of history”, even the end of this pandemic, are really matters of forced perspective. This crisis isn’t over. Periods of relative peace and stability paper over chasms of structural inequality.
You went to college with the people who will write the books and go on the talk shows and coin the phrases to describe our times. You could write that book. You could go into consulting and spend six weeks at a time helping a company figure out how to maximize profits from their Trademark Chasm Expanding Products.
You could also run into the chasm.
What is the chasm?
It is the distance between potential and opportunity. It is a University on the South Side of Chicago with a student body that is 10% Black and 15% Latinx, with a faculty that is 65% white.
It is eight Black students being admitted to a top high school in New York City...in a class of 749.
What is the chasm?
The chasm is that in our neighborhood in The Bronx, where I’m standing right now, 1 in 4 students can read a book on their grade level, and only 1 in 10 will ever sit in a college class.
It is maternal mortality and COVID survival rates. The chasm is generational wealth and payday loans.
It is systemic racism and misogyny.
It is the case for activism and reparations.
In my job, the chasm is the distance between the creativity, brilliance, and wit that my students possess, and the opportunities the schools in our neighborhood provide.
In the zip code in which I grew up in New York City, the median income is $122,169. In the zip code where I have spent every day working since I graduated from UChicago, the median income is $30,349. The school where I went to 7th grade and this school where next year we will have our first 7th grade are only a 15 minute drive apart.
In my first quarter at UChicago, I joined the Neighborhood Schools Program, and immediately fell in love with working in schools. I joined NSP because a friend told me how interesting she found the work. I’d done some tutoring in high school, and had taught karate since I was 15. I applied, was accepted, and worked at Hyde Park Academy on 62nd and Stony Island in a variety of capacities from 2008 to 2012.
At the time, Hyde Park Academy had one of very few International Baccalaureate programs on the South Side, and every spring, parents would line up out the door of the school to try to get their rising 9th grader in. I worked with an incredible mentor teacher and successive classes of high school seniors whose wit, creativity, and skill would've been at home in the seminars and dorm discussions we all have participated in three blocks north of their high school.
In my work at Hyde Park Academy, I learned the first lesson of three lessons that have shaped my career as a teacher. Be curious. I had been told in Orientation that there were “borders” to the UChicago experience, lines we should not cross. I am forever grateful to the people who told me to ignore that BS. Our entire department is a testimony to ignoring that BS. We ask questions like, why did parents line up for hours to get into what was considered a “failing” high school? Why had no one asked my kids to write poetry before? Why are they more creative and better at writing than most of the kids I went to high school with, but there is only one IB class and families have to literally compete to get in? I learned as much from my job three blocks south of the University as I did in my classes at the University...which is to say, I was learning a LOT, but I had a lot more to learn.
I knew I wanted to be a teacher from my first quarter here. I did my research. The Boston Teacher Residency was the top program in the country, so I applied there. I was a 21 year old white man interested in education, so...I applied to Teach for America. In the early 2010’s, I looked like the default avatar on a Teach for America profile. It was my backup option. I was all in on Boston, and was sure, with four years working in urban schools, a stint at the Urban Education Institute, and, at the time, seven years of karate teaching under my belt, I was a shoe in.
I was rejected from both programs. Which brings me to my second lesson. Be humble. We are destined for and entitled to nothing. There is an aphorism I learned from one of my favorite podcasts, Another Round: "carry yourself with the confidence of a mediocre white man." If you are a mediocre white man, like me, do as much as you can not to be. If you look like me, you live life on the "lowest difficulty setting." This means I need to question my gifts, contextualize my successes, and actively work against systems of oppression that perpetuate inequity.
Over the last two years, I have interviewed over 300 people to work at this school. There are a series of questions that I ask folks with backgrounds like myself:
Have you ever lived in a neighborhood that was majority people of color?
Have you ever worked on a team that was majority people of color?
Have you ever worked for a boss/supervisor/leader who was a person of color?
The vast majority of white folks, myself at 21 included, could not answer “yes” to these three questions. This is disappointing, but I've also lived and worked in two of the most segregated cities on this continent, so it is not surprising. By the time I sat where you’re sitting now, I had learned a lot about education policy and sociology. I'd taken every class that Chad offered at the time. I'd worked at UEI, I'd worked in a South Side high school for four years, and I still thought I was entitled to something. Unlearning doesn't usually happen in a moment, and I certainly didn't realize it at the time, but these rejections were the best thing that has happened to me in my growth as a human.
I moved back home to New York, was accepted to my last-choice teaching program, and started teaching at MS 223: The Laboratory School of Finance & Technology. I ended up teaching there for 5 years. I had incredible mentors, met some of my best friends, started a Computer Science program that’s used as a model at hundreds of schools across New York City…and most importantly, while making copies for Summer School in July of 2015, I met my wife.
All this to say — if you aren’t 100% convinced that what you’re doing next year is Your Thing, keep an open mind…and make frequent stops in the copy room.
I learned that teaching was My Thing. I didn't want to do ed policy research. I got to set education policy, conduct case studies, key informant interviews, run statistical analysis…with 12 year olds. This was the thing I couldn’t stop talking about, reading about, learning about. I really and truly did not care about the “UChicago voices” of my parents and my friends who kept asking what I was going to do next. My answer: teach.
If you look like me, and you teach Computer Science, there are opportunities that come flying your way. I was offered jobs with more prestige, jobs with more pay, jobs far away from the South Bronx. I was offered jobs I would have loved. But I’d learned a third lesson: be useful. If you have a degree from this place, people will always ask you what the next promotion or job is. They will ask "what's next for you" and they will mean it with respect and admiration.
Here’s the thing: teaching was what’s next. “But don’t you want to work in policy?” Teaching is a political act. It is hands-on activism, it is community organizing, it is high-tech optimistic problem-solving and low-tech relationship building. It is the reason we have the privilege of choosing a career, and it is a career worth choosing.
I had internalized what I like to call the Dumbledore Principle: “I had learned that I was not to be trusted with power.” This meant unlearning the very UChicago idea that if you were smart and if you think and talk like we are trained to think and talk at this place, you should be in charge. The best things in my life have come from unlearning that. Learning from mentors to never speak the way I was praised for in a seminar. Learning from veteran teachers how to be a warm demander who was my authentic best self...and more importantly brought out the authentic best self in my students. Being useful isn't the same thing as being in charge…and that is ok.
I believe this deeply. Which is why, when I was offered the opportunity to design and open a school, my first thought was absolutely the hell no. I said to my wife: “I’m a teacher. Dumbledore Principle — we’re supposed to teach, make our classrooms safe and wonderful for our kids.”
I also knew that teaching kids to code wasn’t worth a damn if they couldn’t read and write with conviction, so I started looking for schools that did both — treated kids like brilliant creatives who should learn to create the future AND met them where they were with rigorous coursework that closed opportunity gaps. In our neighborhood, there were schools that did the latter, that got incredible results for kids. Then there was my school, where kids learned eight programming languages before they graduated, but at which only 40% of our kids could read.
We were lauded for this, by the way. 40% was twice the average in our district. We were praised for the Computer Science — the mayor of New York and the CEO of Microsoft visited and met with my students. It felt great. I wasn’t convinced it was useful.
Kids in the neighborhood where I grew up didn’t have to choose between a school that was interesting and a school that equipped them with the knowledge and skills to pursue their own interests in college and beyond. Why did our students have to choose? I delivered this stressed-out existential monologue to my wife that boiled down to this: every kid deserves a school where they were always safe, and never bored. We weren’t working at a school like that. I was being offered a chance to design one. But…Dumbledore principle.
My wife took it all in, looked at me, and said: “You idiot. Dumbledore RAN a school.”
Friends, you deserve a partner like this.
The road to opening Creo College Prep, and the last two years of leading our school as we opened, closed, opened online, finished our first year, moved buildings, opened online again, opened in-person (kind of) and now head into our third year, has reinforced my lessons from teaching — be curious, be humble, be useful. These lessons are about both learning and unlearning. A white guy doing Teach for America at 21 is a stereotype. A white guy starting a charter school is a stereotype with significant capital, wading into complicated political and pedagogical waters. The lessons I learn opening a school and the unlearning I must do to be worthy of the work are not destinations, they are journeys.
Be curious
I didn’t just open a school. Schools are communities, they are institutions, and they are bureaucracies. If you work very, very hard, and with the right people, they become engines that turn coffee and human potential into joy and intellectual thriving capable of altering the trajectory of a child’s life.
First you have to find the right people. I joined a school design fellowship, spent a year visiting 50 high-performing schools across the country, recruited a founding board of smart, committed people who hold me accountable, and spent time in my community learning from families what they wanted in a school. There is studying public policy, and then there is attending Community Board meetings and Community Education Council Meetings, and standing outside of the Parkchester Macy's handing out flyers and getting petition signatures at Christmastime next to the mall Santa.
I observed in schools while writing my BA, and as a teacher, but it was in this fellowship that I learned to “thin slice,” a term we borrowed from psychology that refers to observing a small interaction and finding patterns about the emotions and values of people. In a school, it means observing small but crucial moments — how does arrival work, how are students called on, how do they ask for help in a classroom, how do they enter and leave spaces, how do they move through the hallways, where and how do teachers get their work done — and gleaning what a school values, and how that translates into impact for kids. Here’s how I look at schools:
Does every adult have an unwavering belief that students can, must, and will learn at the highest level?
Do they have realistic and urgent plans for getting every kid there? Are these beliefs and plans clear and held by kids?
Are all teachers strategic, valorizing planning and intellectual nerdery over control or power?
Is the curriculum worthy of the kids?
Can kids explain why the school does things they way they do? Can staff? Can the leader?
If I'm in the middle of teaching and I need a pen or a marker, what do I do? Is that clear?
What’s the attendance rate? How do we follow up on kids who aren’t here?
How organized and thoughtful are the physical and digital spaces?
Are kids seen by their teachers? Are their names pronounced correctly? Do their teachers look like them? Do they make them laugh, think, and revise their answers?
Would I want to work here? Would I send my own kids here?
Be humble
I learned that there are really two distinct organizations that we call “school.” One is an accumulation of talent (student and staff) that happens to be in the same place at the same time, operating on largely the same schedule.
These were the schools I attended. These are schools you got to go to if you got lucky and you were born in a zip code with high income and high opportunity. These are schools where you had teachers who were intellectually curious, and classmates whose learning deficits could be papered over by social capital…and sometimes, straight up capital.
“Accumulation of talent” also describes the schools I worked at. These were schools where if you got lucky and you were extraordinary in your intelligence, determination, support network, and teachers who’d decided to believe in you, you became one of the stories we told. “She got into Cornell.” “That whole English class got into four year colleges.”
Most schools in this country, it turns out, are run like this. I knew all about local control and the limits of federal standards on education and the battles over teacher evaluations and so much other helpful and important context I learned in my PBPL classes. But when thin-slicing a kindergarten classroom in Nashville on my first school visit of the Fellowship, I saw a whole other possibility of what “school” can be.
School can be a special place organized towards a single purpose. One team, one mission. Where the work kids do in one class directly connects to the next, and builds on the prior year. Where kids are treated like the important people they are and the important people they will be, where students and staff hold each other to a high bar, where there is rigor and joy. A place where staff train together so that instead of separate classrooms telling separate stories about how to achieve, there is one coherent language that gives kids the thing they crave and deserve above all else: consistency.
We get up every morning to build a school like that. It’s why my team starts staff training a month before the first day of school. It’s why we practice teaching our lessons so that we don’t waste a moment of our kids’ time. It’s why everyone at our school has a coach, including me, so we can be a better teacher tomorrow than we were today. It’s why we plan engaging, culturally responsive, relevant lessons. It’s how we keep a simple, crucial promise to every family: at this school, you will always be safe, and you will never be bored.
Be useful
Statistically speaking, it is not out of the realm of possibility that several of you will one day be in a position to make big sweeping policy changes. You will have the power to not only write position papers, but to Make Big Plans. I will be rooting for you, but I hope that you won’t pursue Big Plans for the sake of Big Plans.
The architect who designed the Midway reportedly said "make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men's blood." I had that quoted to me in several lectures at this school, and you know what?
It’s bullshit.
I am asking you not to care about scale. Good policy isn’t about scale, it’s about implementation, and implementation requires the right people on the ground. Implementation can scale. The right people cannot. We can Make Big Plans, but every 6th grade math class still needs an excellent math teacher. That's a job worth doing. I could dream about starting 20 schools, but every school needs a leader. That’s a job worth doing. Places like UChicago teach us to ask "what's next" for our own advancement, to do this now so we can get to that later. I learned to ask "what's next" to be as useful as possible to as many kids as I have in front of me.
I hold these two thoughts in my mind:
The educational realities of the South Bronx have a lot more to do with where highways were built in our neighborhood than with No Child Left Behind or charter schools, and require comprehensive policy change that address not only educational inequity, but environmental justice, and systemic racism.
The most useful policy changes I can make right now are to finalize the schedule for our staff work days that start on June 21, get feedback on next year’s calendar from families, and finish hiring the teachers our kids deserve.
I will follow the policy debates of #1 with great interest, but I know where I can be useful, and I’ll wake up tomorrow excited to make another draft of the calendar. I hope you get to work on making your Small Plans, and I will leave you with the secret — or at least the way that worked for me:
Find yourself people who are smarter than you and who disagree with you. Find problems you cannot shut up or stop thinking about. Do what you can’t shut up about with intellect and kindness. Use the privilege and opportunity that we have because we went to this school to make sure that opportunity for others does not require privilege. Run into the chasm.
Be curious, be humble, be useful.
Thank you.
