Interview with David Miyashiro, Ed.D., Ph.D. - Superintendent of Cajon Valley Union School District on Educational Leadership
About David Miyashiro, Ed.D., Ph.D.: David Miyashiro is the Superintendent of Cajon Valley Union School District, a position that he has held since 2013. During his time as Superintendent, Dr. Miyashiro garnered numerous accolades for his innovative approaches to improving student learning and teacher support. For example, he received the Superintendent of the Year Award from the White House and the U.S. Department of Education, and earned distinction as one of the Top 35 District Leaders in Personalized Learning.
Beginning in 2014, Dr. Miyashiro designed and implemented transformational learning initiatives that used digital technologies to create an interactive, cohesive, and student-centric learning ecosystem for all the schools under his purview. These improvements led to Cajon Valley Union School District’s acceptance into the League of Innovative School Districts, and its designation as a National Model of Excellence and Innovation. His longstanding work to integrate education technologies into the classroom enabled Cajon Valley USD to reopen sooner than any other school district in California during the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition to his development of digital learning environments, Dr. Miyashiro has also expanded the reach of his schools’ services and resources to reach the community and promote student and family wellness, engagement, and support.
Dr. Miyashiro is the California State Board of Education’s Co-Chair of K-12 Computer Science, and serves as a Board Member for the Classroom of the Future Foundation in the greater San Diego Area. Prior to assuming the role of Superintendent at Cajon Valley USD, he was the Assistant Superintendent for Encinitas Union School District, where he also pioneered the use of technology to improve student engagement and learning outcomes. Dr. Miyashiro earned his Doctor of Education in Educational Leadership and Policy and his Ph.D. in Organizational Leadership, both from the University of California, Los Angeles. He received his Master of Arts in Education Technology and Curriculum from Grand Canyon University, and his Bachelor of Arts in Journalism and Broadcasting from California State University, Long Beach.
Educational Leadership Interview Questions
[OnlineEdDPrograms.com] May we have an overview of your role and responsibilities as Superintendent of Cajon Valley Union School District? How do you develop, implement, and oversee programs and initiatives that support the schools, students, and staff under your leadership? Could you elaborate on both your typical short-term responsibilities as well as your long-term goals as Superintendent?
[Dr. David Miyashiro] This is an interesting question, because if you had asked me four years ago, I would have said that my job is primarily the secretary of the governing board for Cajon Valley Union School District–to manage their wishes and policies, and to also serve as the Chief Executive Officer of the district, maintaining all fiscal business personnel and educational responsibilities. I’d also define my role as leading our district into a focus on preparing kids for gainful employment, financial freedom, and health and well-being. Those have been the primary drivers historically.
But over the last several years, especially during the pandemic, I don’t see myself as an educator anymore. I see myself as a public service agent. And just like the military, the police department, fire department, public works, all the things that are funded by taxpayers, we have a service commitment to the community at large—to provide not just education, but also community support infrastructure and high-quality child-care, so that people can work and the economy can run.
My aim now is to develop, maintain, and improve facilities that serve the greater community beyond my students in health and wellness and recreation. School districts have so much real estate within their communities, and it’s so underutilized. Thinking of ourselves as a public service institution allows us to do more things with our resources, including our kitchens, our facilities, our gyms. Rather than keep them closed during non-school hours, we find ways to partner with our local entities to make the community better.
My role primarily is to lead with others in community service. Tomorrow, I’m meeting with the fire chief, and we’re going to talk about issues that he’s seeing in terms of recruitment and retention of first responders, and people interested in going into that type of work right out of high school. My role involves being in touch with the other leaders in the community, to have conversations about problems that we’re all sharing together, and to help each other with shared solutions. You typically wouldn’t see a superintendent being on a homeless task force, or a labor task force, but in the way that we do our work here in Cajon Valley, we’ve really established ourselves as a safety net for the community, and you see city leaders and county leaders collaborating on lots of different projects together.
That doesn’t mean I don’t still walk classrooms and supervise teachers and make sure that our programs are good, but my job is much more broad than just what happens in teaching and learning now.
Cajon Valley Union School District was the only school district in the country that opened at scale during the first three months of the pandemic, because we already had relationships with the other city leaders and first responders and healthcare workers. When everything was shut down after two weeks, when people realized we weren’t coming back from COVID-19 any time soon, we put out a survey to our community saying, “If you are both essential workers who have to report physically to work, we are thinking about providing free childcare and educational support.”
We put out a survey and 1,000 parents in the first week signed up. We realized that not only do we need to provide school lunches and distance learning, and all the digital programs that we were doing already, but we actually needed to reopen our school buildings, and so we worked with county public health, our local fire and police departments, to identify, “Who are the parents that don’t have an option of supervising home learning, because they both have to go to work? There’s no one to watch the kids.”
We opened one classroom at a time starting in April of 2020, right after the pandemic started, until June of 2020. We had 28 schools open, with 7,000 students in them. The New York Times did a big feature on our District, because in California, labor unions drive a lot, and so to be able to do that work in California, with the California Teachers’ Association, and the governor, who wanted to keep everything shut down, was really hard to do. We were fighting uphill. But it was because we were in weekly Zoom calls with everybody in the community, including our parents, that we really were able to understand what their needs and wants were, and for most parents, their needs and wants were, “Please take care of my children so I can take care of my family and go to work.”
So that’s what we did. Our approach is unique, but I think that because we view ourselves as public service, essential workers, it allows us to do those types of things, as opposed to wait for direction from a governor. We’re serving the community. We serve the families right here that are next door to us in the apartment building. What do they want? That’s our leadership style. It’s collaborative, community-focused, and around public service.
[OnlineEdDPrograms.com] You have received numerous accolades for your development of innovative technological solutions, including a Superintendent of the Year award, and commendation from the White House and U.S. Department of Education for being among the “Top 35 District Leaders in Personalized Learning.” Could you elaborate on the education solutions and programs you have initiated, designed, and implemented across your career, both at Cajon Valley Union School District and elsewhere?
[Dr. David Miyashiro] Our innovations in digital learning were really the impetus for the recognitions that we received, and I have to say that it’s 100 percent on our principals and teachers who led that work. But I think what made it successful is I started doing one-to-one technology as a principal in 2004. In 2004, the internet was early in its inception, and the computers’ capabilities and power were horrible. Our kids were initially using these big, clamshell Apple computers that were multicolored. That was the first iteration of one-to-one learning in a digital environment.
I had the great fortune of working for a very forward-thinking superintendent that asked, “Who wants to be part of this digital transformation?” I raised my hand, and back then, we gave all our students, 1,000 of them, computers for their learning, and got to experiment, and break, fix, and fail.
Then, in my assistant superintendent role at Encinitas Union School District, we launched the first one-to-one iPad program—this was the first generation of iPads, and they didn’t do much either. But again, as we were working with Google and Apple and Microsoft, trying to figure out how we could best leverage digital technology for education, this program gave me lots of time to learn, and grow, and meet with people that were leading this work.
Our efforts caught the attention of the Digital Promise League of Innovative Schools, which is a government organization funded by Congress in a bipartisan measure. Its goal was to find the most innovative school districts in the country, and then connect them with the League of Innovative Schools, so that Congress could fund the scaling of those innovations to other places.
The League of Innovative Schools was funded by Congress I believe in 2007, and it has slowly been expanding the reach of education innovation over time, mostly on the digital side. We were invited to the White House to meet with leadership for the Department of Education, to discuss the President’s strategy for meeting the needs of the future workforce.
At that time, Cajon Valley was recognized as one of the top 35 districts in the nation. That was the year that our California Association of Administrators nominated me, and I won the Superintendent of the Year Award, but really, it’s just that I was the fortunate one who got to receive an award based on all the hard work of our educators and staff. Our teachers, they absolutely went after it. We asked them to come together and to discuss, “What does innovative and effective teaching and learning look like in the future?” And so, our teachers came together every summer and basically worked with a variety of digital tools to learn how to best leverage modern technologies, and what they did were things that we couldn’t have even imagined. They said, “Why don’t we try this?” and then ran with it.
When I started here with our one-to-one implementation, there was lots of learning, and prototypes, and school visits, and trying to figure out, “How do we best leverage technology in the way that healthcare leverages technology?” In healthcare, the technology doesn’t replace the doctor or nurses. All the roles are still the same, but the way they do their work, and the time it takes to do some of the hard stuff, like imaging and radiology, takes seconds now. If we leverage technology in the right way, you have that much more time to spend with patients, and patient care gets better, relationships get better, and you can have more people examining and addressing a medical challenge.
So that’s how we were looking at technology in the classroom, with the view that there are things that the computer can do faster, like grading, assessments, even giving kids feedback on their writing. How do we do that for teachers and students so they can spend more time on conversations and connections about what’s going on inside a child’s mind, or how a child’s feeling that day so we can make sure that they’re best set up for success?
[OnlineEdDPrograms.com] Could you elaborate on the National Personalized Learning Plan that you developed in partnership with the White House and the U.S. Department of Education (DoE)? In addition, how do you continue to partner with the DoE and the White House in supporting schools’ transition into interactive digital learning?
[Dr. David Miyashiro] We helped the current administration develop their COVID relief strategy, because our kids didn’t skip a beat, and that was because of the groundwork we established in 2013 and 2014. We implemented technological innovations back then with the mindset that learning technologies should feel like “More Human, Less Tech.” If tech is done well, then you have more time to focus on relationships with the kids, because teaching and learning assessment gets done by the computer. The teacher has more time to focus on conversations and relationships with the children.
In our first iteration of our technology learning plan at Cajon Valley, we allowed our teachers and kids to have access to a multitude of paid learning technology vendors for language arts, math, science, and computer science. And then slowly over time, with data interoperability, data privacy, and data security, we created a single sign-on so when our kids log into their Chromebook, they’re logged into all their apps. They don’t have to worry about usernames or passwords, or privacy. It’s all taken care of on the backend of our infrastructure, and then they can seamlessly transition from a teacher-centric to a student-centric space, where kids can have robust conversations.
While our kids are engaged with the assessments and the learning, our teachers can focus on interpreting and adapting their teaching to what the data tells them. Technology also gives them the flexibility to bring kids together in small groups, as well as one-on-one, to really maximize their time with the kids.
In 2014, when we launched this, we received accolades locally. That led the way for our modern curriculum. Fast forward six years, when everything shut down, there were just a few districts that had their kids up and learning on March 16, and we were one of them. We told our students, “Boys and girls, we’re going to ask you to stay home for two weeks to make COVID go away. We’ll see you in a couple weeks. Take home your Chromebooks, take home your chargers, and then your teachers are going to connect with you online on Monday so that you won’t miss learning.”
On Monday, March 16, our kids logged on, the teachers logged on, and there was no missed beat, because our students and teachers had been using these tools for the last eight years in the classroom, and our kids took their devices home anyways. We don’t collect them. Once we give a kid a laptop in kindergarten, they don’t turn it in until third grade, when they get a new one, and then they keep that one until middle school, and in sixth grade, they get a new one for middle school. It’s theirs.
The reason we did that was because one, it gives all kids access to ubiquitous learning, but also, what we found is when kids own the device, they take better care of it. The first couple of years when we were collecting them at the end of the day, we had to tell our kids, “Don’t take the keys off our keyboard, don’t put stickers on it.” Now that they own their devices for their entire time at school, “You know what? Put stickers on it. You can pop the keys off, but we’re not going to replace it, that’s yours.” It works.
[OnlineEdDPrograms.com] What is the process of school and education program evaluation at the school, district, and county levels? How is student performance measured within Cajon Valley USD, and how is this data used to improve education programs and opportunities for students? How do these evaluations and assessments help to ensure equality and equity with regards to students’ experiences and learning outcomes in the classroom?
[Dr. David Miyashiro] That’s a great question. For all school districts, there are state accountability systems and performance indicators. For California, it is the California School Dashboard. While performance indicators are helpful, they don’t tell the whole story. In my early years as principal, I was able to improve test scores in low-performing and high poverty schools, but what I saw was that these improved test scores wouldn’t change students’ outcomes. Students would still not graduate, they would still get pregnant in high school. We didn’t change anything, other than teach them how to answer multiple choice questions, and spit it back on a standardized test.
So at Cajon Valley, we started to look at different types of data. Are you familiar with the term Opportunities? Opportunities are kids who are age 16 to 24 that are not working and not in school. That’s a really bad statistic to have lots of. Brookings conducted a national study on millions of people in this category whom education failed. That’s incredibly important data, and it requires that we ask, “What’s happening if the accountability measures have been raised, but kids are still falling through the cracks, and then data on income mobility and economic mobility show that kids are not going to be able to out-earn their parents the way that they used to a generation ago?”
We all say, “I just want better for my kids than I had for myself.” But the ability for kids to out-earn their parents is diminishing based on the current economy. So, these are the types of data that we’re looking at now. Important data right now that’s currently under debate with our politicians is student loan debt, what should we do with it? What kinds of aid and financial support can we provide?
But the better question, and we’ve been working with the U.S. Department of Education on this, is how do you prevent this from happening, because these are the successful kids. These are the kids who went to high school, graduated, took out a student loan, got into college, which in itself is hard and shows drive and resilience. And now, they can’t pay off their debt, because they’re in low wage jobs, or didn’t find a job associated with their major.
Those are the types of issues and the kinds of data that we are concerned with. So at Cajon Valley, we’re working to build vocational identity into our curricula and extracurricular programming. We’re building hope and aspirations, and we’re measuring things like student engagement to make sure that our kids have hope as they enter middle and high school. Those are not things that the federal and state government are measuring yet. But those are things that we see as important.
Gallup has a student engagement poll, where they use tools that actually measure students’ hope for their future, their career and financial literacy, and their vocational identity. And these are indicators that we’ve added to our local measures in terms of assessment, engagement, involvement, and excitement for school.
[OnlineEdDPrograms.com] Another way in which you have enhanced student engagement and investment in their own academic, professional, and personal development is through Cajon Valley USD’s TED Talks program. Could you elaborate on this program and how it was so powerful?
[Dr. David Miyashiro] Our TEDxKids@ElCajon program has been so powerful, especially as we see our kids grow, develop their voice, and nurture their unique sense of identity. For example, one of our students, Jose, hosted his own TED Talk in first grade, and by the time he was in fourth grade, he was meeting with the President of San Diego State, Dr. Adela de la Torre. We watch over the years as these kids practice, learn and gain confidence in their own voice.
Jose’s talk was about coaching and helping kids improve their performance. Public speaking coaching and improvement is core to the TED organization and their framework. I told Jose, “Jose, I use you in my presentations,” and he said, “That’s okay, Dr. Miyashiro, I use you in mine.” He wasn’t kidding. He actually does. And it is these kinds of interactions that show me how enriching the TEDxKids@ElCajon program is. To see these young students develop the confidence to tell their story and share their convictions with audience members of all ages, from their peers to their teachers, parents, principals, and superintendents.
Our kids can talk about all the things that are important to them. What we’ve seen is that our TED Talk program has also helped to build relationships in the classroom. One of our students, Banaowsha, was a refugee student when she first came to the country. We encouraged her to talk about her experience, and her talk was so illuminating and powerful. And then, as a sophomore in high school, here is the same child talking about her experience with the world of work and the curriculum.
Banaowsha articulates it well in her video “What if Everyone was Given a Chance?” but what she’s describing is our modern curriculum and our vision: “Happy kids, healthy relationships, gainfully employed.” When you look at how do you measure success, is it great test scores in language arts and math? Yeah, that’s important. Is it graduation rate? Yeah, that’s important. But let’s look at how we cultivate happiness and healthy relationships, so kids feel safe and accepted at school, regardless of how they present themselves. And from there, we can look at how to support our kids into gainful employment.
Starting in kindergarten, kids explore the world of work through a curriculum that we built here, to start building a vocational identity by middle school so that their high school years are intentional about career. While we want and encourage our students to explore a wide variety of interests, we also want them to begin thinking about building their financial autonomy by asking themselves, “How am I going to make money as an adult?” This is what our community has said is important, especially in San Diego. Our leaning into that has just really changed the conversations that we’ve had with our parents and our students.
[OnlineEdDPrograms.com] What are Cajon Valley Union School District’s core values, and how have you and your team upheld these values through your management of all schools under your purview, including not only their fiscal and budgetary needs, but also teacher professional development, recruitment, and support? Furthermore, how do you as superintendent serve as liaison to local, state and federal governments, and how much of your work involves implementing, evaluating, and improving education policy at the local level?
[Dr. David Miyashiro] The core values are around our vision: Happy Kids, Healthy Relationships on a Path to Gainful Employment. And we try to make sure everything that we are doing supports those three aspects of our vision. Our other core value is an holistic one—with all the other community organizations, we aim to make our community the best place to live, work, play, and raise a family.
Most districts have this big, jargony statement that’s their mission statement that nobody knows. Ours is very easy to articulate. In 2014, we met Ed Hidalgo. He was a senior director at Qualcomm, and built what was called the World of Work. We turned that into a comprehensive K-12 curriculum that all kids get, starting in kindergarten.
One of the things that I think is important is how superintendents and leaders get continuing help and mentorship after they leave their programs of education, because you don’t learn most of it until you’re in the role.
With that very much in mind, we hired Horst Schulze, who is the founder and former CEO of the Ritz Carlton Company, to be our management consultant. He took this on because of the work we did during the pandemic. Mr. Schulze helped us look at our classrooms as rooms in the Ritz Carlton. If you go to a Ritz Carlton in India or Mexico or California, you can expect that every room is going to be impeccable. Everything’s going to be where it’s supposed to be, and the service behind it will be impeccable, as well.
When you walk into any of our 28 schools, into any classroom, can you expect the same level of impeccability from your child’s teachers across the board, systemically? And if that is not the case already, how do you create something like that? This was our approach: thinking about service standards, high expectations, and impeccability. That is the kind of work we’re looking at now, in terms of how we’re serving our kids and parents.
Imagine if every child and parent, when they walked onto their school campus, felt like a guest at the Ritz Carlton? “How are you today, it’s so good to see you.” That’s not the typical school experience. But that’s what we hope the school experience will be here in Cajon Valley. We want to create an experience where parents can’t wait to get to campus. Where they feel, “People know me, they make me feel valued. They take care of everything that I want.”
In his book Excellence Wins: A No-Nonsense Guide to Becoming the Best in a World of Compromise, Horst Schulze talks about how he worked in the hotel industry, and labor unions in that industry are tough. But he would say that over time, the relationships he built with his employees were so strong that they didn’t feel like they had to do it; they wanted to do it. How do you make your employees feel like the first customers, that they’re so well-treated and well-respected that they want to do the work?
He also describes the front of the house and the heart of the house. Front of the house are people who engage with the customers, the front office, the bellman, the valet, the restaurant server, and then the heart of the house, the cooks, the kitchen, the cleaning, the housekeeping, all the things that happen behind the scenes. How do you create that relationship where everyone wants to do the best thing for the company?
And that’s what we’re trying to do here at Cajon Valley. In his book, Schulze has 20 service standards. One of them is if a guest walks within six feet of you, you stop what you’re doing, and you look them in the eyes, and say, “Good morning, ma’am, good morning, sir, how are you today?” And if they say anything that’s less than amazing, then you lean into that and you fix their problem.
“I’m so sorry you didn’t enjoy the meal. Let me take care of your dinner for you.” And he gives the employees permission to spend up to $2,000.00 to solve any problem for any guest at the Ritz Carlton that is unhappy. Translating this same philosophy to a school district, and it’s about creating rules where teachers and office staff actually have discretion to solve problems without getting permission from a principal or a superintendent. Those are the things that systemically and structurally we’re working on right now.
Academic Interview Questions
[OnlineEdDPrograms.com] What key insights and skills did you gain during your enrollment in your Ed.D. in Educational Leadership and Policy at UCLA? What was the topic of your dissertation, and did your research on this topic inform your future career goals and achievements? For current Ed.D. students who are considering their dissertation topic or working on their dissertation, what advice do you have for them in terms of getting the most out of this intensive research experience?
[Dr. David Miyashiro] I was a school principal during my years as a doctoral student at UCLA. And during the No Child Left Behind era, everything was focused on test scores, and so I was labeled a turnaround principal. As mentioned previously, I could take a low-performing school and improve test scores in less than three years. That’s just what I did early on. And watching our kids continue not to succeed as adults, even though we improved their test scores, really just rocked my world.
Completing my Ed.D. at UCLA was an advantage, I believe, because half of our doctoral work was done in the Anderson School of Business, and half of the work was done in the School of Education and Information Studies. We learned not just education leadership, but also how to run a business.
We studied authors like Jim Collins and systems thinkers like Peter Senge. And learning how to run a business and thinking of my role as running a business, not running a district, thinking of myself as a CEO and not a superintendent, really helped me think about improving education through systems changes and disruptive technology. It motivated me to utilize the best technology and machine learning to improve learning outcomes. It also helped me lean into my community and use data and relationship building to identify how and why all these efforts to improve test scores were not leading to gainful employment for our kids.
The kids that start in poverty were staying in poverty, and how do we change that? That was my professional and academic progression, and I credit UCLA for that, because of the professors I had mostly in the business and law school. I think that this business focus makes that program unique, and I would recommend it for others.
My dissertation was concerned with creating settings to improve teaching and learning–basically, how do you create the conditions that are required to initiate change and positive growth? And if you think about it, that is exactly what Horst Schulze did. How do you create the conditions where the employees want to do the work, where you don’t have to make them do it?
In the traditional school setting, there are the test scores, and there are the punishments if you don’t reach the test scores. It’s all these incentive-based strategies, but the best business leaders don’t employ them. The best leaders understand their stakeholders, they build community, and they lead change.
Laszlo Bock did it well at Google. To some degree, Steve Jobs did it well at Apple, and Starbucks is a prime example where they say, “We’re not in the coffee business, selling to people. We at Starbucks are in the people business, selling coffee, and by doing that, we allow our employees to have health care, and paths to post-secondary learning. We give them fun and creativity as part of their work day.” That environment is driven by a culture and creating settings, and that’s what I studied in my dissertation: How do you create the settings in which things can actually change at a system level?
I think that it essentially comes down to caring about people. Everything is focused on relationships, and not seeing different, special interest groups as barriers but more as partners. Some people will say that the reason that we can’t change is because of the unions and school boards. I would say the reason we can change is because of the unions and school boards. They’re great partners, if you value them, and treat them well, and honor what they want for their groups. You get a lot done.
[OnlineEdDPrograms.com] Having worked in the public school arena for over 20 years and held leadership roles in public education for more than 15 years, how have you seen public education at the primary, secondary, and post-secondary levels evolve? What challenges do you see new education leaders facing in today’s rapidly changing education landscape? How do you advise these leaders best prepare for and meet these challenges?
[Dr. David Miyashiro] One of the things that we’ve all seen over the last several years is the increased role of parents and politics in public education. Parents having a voice, coming to school board meetings with demands and strong opinions. And politicians saying, “You should teach that in school, but you shouldn’t teach that in school.” There are all these divisive ideologies now, but I think that the heightened awareness of public education, if we leverage it, can actually improve the whole system.
I think it’s going to take systems leaders and people that can draw a line in the middle of the politics. If you think of red, and blue, in this Venn diagram, there’s this green area, where we can find inclusive language and policies that honor every person in the system. I think that education can be a pathway to show the country how unifying our different political and special interest groups can actually happen. We can do it in a school environment because it’s kid-focused, and we have lots of control over the local policies and practices. I think schools can be the beacon of how our country escapes this red and blue world where nobody can find a middle ground.
I don’t think that I would have had the credibility to have this conversation if I didn’t work here, because we have over 50 languages spoken in a small, 65-square mile district. We have the largest Middle Eastern refugee population in the country, and because of that, we have people coming from war in the Middle East. Christian and Muslim individuals who were at war are now living in the same community.
That’s challenging. When movements like Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility (DEIA) and Black Lives Matter come in and say, “What are you doing to show that you value Black Lives Matter? What are you doing to increase accessibility in your schools?” We have to ask ourselves accordingly, “When we have so much diversity right here in front of us, how do we honor every individual’s needs and desires equally?”
Our DEIA strategy is person-specific. Know every person, know every person’s story through a TED framework, and have every person tell their story on a stage, and celebrate it. Every person’s included, every person’s celebrated, and every person is understood. And however our kids present themselves, whatever pronouns they use, it’s accepted. And that’s how you find that green area in the middle.
We’re not saying that we’re forcing these liberal or conservative issues, and we’re not saying that we’re going to eliminate such conversations from in our schools. We’re saying both political groups, Democrat and Republican, want a better economy, want a better country, want income mobility. There are Democrats in poverty, and there are Republicans in poverty. These are issues that we’re struggling with together, and the middle ground is how we can solve them together.
That’s been how I’ve been trying to lead our district, and I think we’ve garnered some national recognition because of that. We haven’t yet had to deal with some of the political firestorms, because we try to stay here, in the green area. Do we have employees and community members angry that we’re not doing more in the name of specific groups? Yes. But if we cave in to that and move out of the middle then we’re going to upset somebody else. We have to stay true to our core values, and stay committed to compromise, saying we understand everybody, and we’re going to include everybody, and we’re going to show you how to get along.
Thank you, Dr. David Miyashiro, for your excellent insight into the role that digital technologies can play in revolutionizing classroom learning, and for your discussion of how a uniquely public service-oriented approach to educational leadership can dramatically improve learning outcomes!
