Public education needs leaders with moral courage, a vision for change, and a passion for serving all students, said Natasha Trivers.
The Broad Center at the Yale School of Management named Trivers as its next director April 2, a role she will assume in July. The center, established at Yale in 2019, grew out of The Broad Residency in Urban Education, has attracted both praise and skepticism for its emphasis on using bold strategies inspired by the business world to transform school systems.
The departing CEO of Democracy Prep Public Schools—a charter management organization that prioritizes civic education in New York, Nevada, and Texas—Trivers will be the second leader of the leadership development program since it moved to Yale. At Yale, the program has continued its long-running focus on educational leadership through 10-month, tuition-free fellowship program for senior public education leaders of districts and charter schools. It also created a master’s program in public education management in 2022.
Trivers, a 2023 Broad fellow, spoke with Education Week about how she views the organization’s role at a challenging time for school and district leaders.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
In the announcement of your new role at the Broad Center, you called this a pivotal moment for education. What makes it pivotal?
It’s a really challenging moment in public education in our country. You still have a declining teacher workforce that we need to reinvigorate. You have declining enrollment in some of our major cities and major school districts across the country. You have funding sources drying up, whether it’s federal dollars or whether it’s philanthropic sources that have deprioritized education recently.
So it’s a really challenging time to be an education systems leader, but I believe leaders are the lever to make impactful change in school systems for children, so they need all the support in the world, especially right now.
How will that influence your work at Broad? And what do you plan to emphasize in the program?
First, there’s some secret, magic sauce in the recruitment and selection process for the Broad fellowship and master’s programs, and how that team puts groups of people together and supports them in forming bonds. I hope to learn more about that and reinforce that.
Once leaders are in we have to continue to provide state-of-the-art leader-training programs. I think being housed in Yale’s School of Management is just a really smart choice, because there are some phenomenal professors in the School of Management. Pairing with the original DNA and street cred of the programs with some of the best professors in the business school sector, will give education systems leaders every tool that they can use to run transformational school systems for kids.
I also think the conditions that leaders are leading in have to be improved. So I’m excited to dig into the research components and also think about policy and advocacy work. How do all of those sectors speak to each other in support of young people, especially from historically underserved communities?
The Broad Center emphasizes equity, but that word has become really misunderstood and even weaponized in some places. Some district leaders even fear losing federal funding as a result. How do you address that tension of wanting good for all students, while some of the language educators use to describe that goal has become politicized?
It’s a complex situation, and there’s real ramifications to addressing it the wrong way, including getting resources stripped away that are critical for kids and school systems that need them.
Equity is a pretty straightforward term, right? It means fairness, and most of these programs and most of Yale’s orientation toward equity work is all about fairness and providing every young person in the country—regardless of ZIP code, regardless of socioeconomic status—opportunity to access the often elusive American dream.
We will always work with public education leaders around how they can determine, for every population in their school—students with learning exceptionalities, students of all racial backgrounds, all income levels—what are the ways that we can really be fair to them and provide the right access points so that they can be successful and go after every dream that they have?
It’s a shame that it’s become a divisive term, because it’s pretty straightforward.
You’re coming out of a charter network that really emphasizes civics education. What is the role for that at this moment? And what’s the role for educational leaders?
I think the most important role for any of us is to make sure that civics is at the center of what we do.
It’s all about cultivating informed voters and making sure that all of our young people and all the communities that we serve understand the power of the everyday, average American citizen to impact their local community and to impact policy being set at the state level or the national level. It’s all about being informed and well-educated.
First and foremost, we have to run great school systems that are improving proficiency rates for children, making sure that they are college- or career-ready once they graduate. And then secondly, it’s about not being afraid of talking about our political systems and how our democracy works.
That should be something that everyone wants every student to have: a real understanding of American government, how we can make change, and how we work together in a democracy to have the world that we want to live in.
District leaders say the role can be pretty lonely and isolating. How do you plan to address that?
That, to me, is the most beautiful thing about my Broad experience. I did the fellowship in the 2022-23 school year, and I was about three-and-a-half years into my tenure as CEO of the charter network that I’m currently running.
It was the most beautiful thing, this network with leaders from states across the country, some in traditional public school systems, some in charter systems, but we shared some of the exact same aspirations for young people, and some of the exact same challenges.
Being in the fellowship with each other gave us this level of camaraderie and a network we could be vulnerable with. It was critical to revitalizing every one of us and getting us recommitted to go back to lead our systems.
We still have a [chat messaging app] group. We say “happy birthday” to each other and each other’s children. We send each other care packages when someone’s sick; we send each other flowers when someone gets a promotion.
Superintendents say it’s not possible to make everyone happy right now, at least initially. Things are divisive that didn’t used to be divisive. How can you help participants navigate that?
We need to take the time to lead them through learning opportunities that ask them to articulate their values, interrogate their values, think about when their values are actually in tension with each other, [and interrogate]: What do you do about that?
You can never make everyone happy as a public education leader. Often, if you’re not causing any kind of disruption, you’re not doing the work right, in my opinion.
