Interview transcript (edited for time and clarity):
BYRNE: We previously talked extensively about education funding. But the other topic that Delawareans are clearly very concerned about is student proficiency. For example, the recently released Nations Report Card showed eighth graders' average reading score in Delaware eight points below the national average, and the lowest score in 27 years. Governor Matt Meyer called that a literacy emergency. Based on that, I want to ask, beyond working on what we talked about previously, the funding formula to improve things, are there things the state can do more immediately to bend the trend line in the right direction on student proficiency?
MARTEN: Well, the good news is we do know what to do. The research is out there. The practices are out there.
This is my 36th year in education, and I spent most of my career as a literacy specialist. So work around literacy is not just a personal, but professional passion of mine, and especially how to turn around trends like we're seeing in Delaware. Work needs to be done. Investment needs to be made. But as we talked about in our previous interview, it's not just investment, it's strategic. And how you do the work and who's doing the work matters as much as when it gets done, and a comprehensive plan is what matters here.
I can start with the easy part for me, teaching kids how to read. That's a teacher's job in the classroom, having teachers have the support and the skills that they need to teach every learner how to reach grade level proficiency, grade level at a time. And let's start with our earliest learners, zero to five. We're talking about pre-literacy skills. Do kids have access in a whole of Delaware approach to early literacy and high-quality preschool programs – and making sure that literacy begins at home? Literacy begins with language in the home, the way we talk to our kids, the way we engage in meaningful conversations. Building language at a very early age matters.
Then, you're talking about having a very sturdy bridge to kindergarten. I was a kindergarten teacher. I had kids walking in my door with all levels of preparedness, some whose parents had earphones on their bellies when they were pregnant, listening to Baby Einstein or something - huge literacy investments before they even walked in my door. Then I had kids that walked in my door on the first day of kindergarten, and I handed them the book, and it looked like it was the first time they'd ever held a book before. Not just being able to read the book, but to understand this book holds meaning, it tells a story. You see a little kid sometimes with a book that they don't know how to read yet because they're three or four years old, but have you ever seen them turn the pages and they just talk through it, even if they're not reading the word? They're interacting with meaning and text. Those are all sturdy bridges to kindergarten.
Then, get all of the teachers fully prepared at every grade level to meet each learner when they walk in the door where they are, and if a student is behind, what it takes to catch them up. And there are very important skills and tactics that teachers can have in their tool belt, to help all learners reach grade level proficiency, grade by grade. And when they're behind, we can catch them up. So that's part of the issue. Is just a coherent, systemic approach to preparing the classroom, preparing students when they walk in the door, and preparing the teachers to teach all learners.
But I'm going to put it to you that it's more than that, besides getting it right in the schools. This is a ‘whole of Delaware’ approach. Literacy happens outside of school. Literacy happens in libraries. Literacy happens with independent booksellers having reading Saturdays, where people gather around in the literate environment. Literacy happens when adults share their literate lives with children. I'll ask Delawareans, do people read and talk about the books that they're reading? Are we reading and writing and engaging in math literacy for multiple purposes and audiences? And are we sharing our literate lives with the students around us so that they have models of people who can not only can read, but choose to read and write for multiple purposes and audiences?
I want to see an all-of-Delaware approach to turning, like you said, this trend line around. NAEP scores are fourth and eighth grade every two years, a sample group of Delaware students. It's not every student that even takes it. It's a sampling. And so, that's going to get turned around, with all of Delaware being part of the solution.
BYRNE: Does that type of approach also apply to math and math scores?
MARTEN: I have described the literacy emergency as being wider than just reading and writing, because as a literacy specialist, to me, literacy is making meaning and interpreting code.
Numeracy is understanding how numbers work. Literacy is understanding letters and sounds and reading and writing and math. But there's literacy around numeracy, around reading and writing. There's science literacy, there's AI literacy. How do you engage in meaning and use code, decode and encode, whether it's decoding and encoding physically on the page with reading, but you decode and encode across multiple literacies. So, when you work on literacy, you're working holistically as a meaning maker, a critical thinker. And it absolutely applies to math, it applies to science, it applies to technology. There's even a human literacy. You can some people are better able to read body language. That is another form of language. When you're interacting with somebody who you don't agree with. Are you able to read signs and cues and have a conversation with people that have multiple different perspectives than you? That's human literacy. So, literacy is meaning-making in a human form across multiple coding systems, and all of Delaware can be part of solving that.
BYRNE: How quickly can Delaware improve? I ask this because State Senator Lawson said at DOE’s recent budget hearing he wanted to see progress in a year, which seems somewhat unrealistic. But does that speak to the broader frustration and people wanting to see less talk and more action? Are there benchmarks you want to kind of create for yourself and for the state to show that improvement to people?
MARTEN: Well, look, I always have acted with two competing things at the same time, urgency and patience. When we're talking about kids, nobody wants to be patient. A student only has one year in kindergarten, and we want them to get that to be their best year. And second grade, third grade, every grade needs to be their best year. They need to have the best opportunity to reach grade level standards year by year and never have a gap in their learning. Never have them get more and more behind. So, I'm urgent about it.
I also know for systemic change, you have to be patient. When you do something without the thoughtfulness or a planned approach or a systemic approach to it that's in a holistic manner, it is not sustainable, it's not replicable, and it's not scalable across the state. So, I've always learned to act with urgency and patience. I like to be a systems thinker. How do we put inputs into the system so we get the outputs that we're looking for?
But to your point, the NAEP scores are only going to come out every two years. So, if you want to see something move quickly, you're not going to see that for two more years. But there are leading indicators. A test like the NAEP, or the state test like the SBAC (Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium) - that's the state test that Delaware gives - those in education terms are lagging indicators. It’s an autopsy. It's after the fact. You want to know, uh oh, what happened. And I don't want to wait for a big yearly state test, or every two-year national test, the NAEP scores, to know that we have a problem. You want to know early on. To your point about early indicators. What are early signs of success?
This is the teacher's sweet spot. Teachers use leading indicators. Teachers use leading indicators every day in their classrooms. Teachers differentiate instruction based on what they teach a lesson. The kids learned it, or they didn't learn it. If they didn't learn it, they differentiate, they reteach it until they learn it and get to master the subject or the topic that they're teaching.
School Principals put teachers into learning communities where they look at leading indicator data. Classroom-based assessments. The assessments that are most meaningful for student progress are the assessments for learning, not the assessments of learning. A national standardized test is an assessment of learning. It's after the fact. Teachers use leading indicators assessments for learning to regroup their teaching and differentiate so they can make sure students are learning. Principals can monitor building-level, school-level data. Superintendents can monitor district-level data of some leading indicators. There are multiple forms of leading indicators. Over my 36-year career, I've built multiple leading indicator assessment systems that give me as the school leader when I was a principal, when I was a superintendent, dashboard signals to say, ‘Okay, we're heading in the right direction.’ And when you have an aligned, coherent assessment system with strong teaching practice and professional development, then you know before there's a problem, so you can adjust. Mid-year, midstream and you can make a change.
You also make sure that those leading indicators align to the lagging indicators. If you get every one of the leading indicators that you're tracking in your classroom, in your school, and in your district, all showing green, we're all on track. But, if the SBAC comes out at the end of the year, and the SBAC is red, your leading indicators are wrong. They are not predicting proficiency on that test. If your leading indicators are all green, and then it comes out that the state is still at the bottom of the country, the leading indicators are not giving you enough data to readjust teaching and learning.
So, an aligned, coherent system has a strong assessment correlation across the leading and lagging indicators, and that's how you can make progress. That's how you can actually know before it's too late to do something about it. That doesn’t help Mom at home or Dad at home to know - did we move or not? Because you're not going to get into the teachers’ leading indicators, in their grade book and get into the learning communities. There are other ways that we must be able to report so people know are things moving. I want to be able to report on the kinds of things that we see happening, the investments and the supports that are being made that will lead to these progress reports. And maybe it's school-based report cards or progress monitoring. When teachers sit down with parents and do parent-teacher conferences, they can let them in on the window on these are the things I'm monitoring. This is the growth that I'm looking for, and this is what you can do at home to help growth in the key areas that I've identified for your student.
BYRNE: I want to move on to something that was in the transition team's report to Governor Meyer, and a topic that's come up over the years, consolidating the state's 19 school districts. This has been looked at on multiple occasions over the years, but never really gained traction. Is this likely to be a priority for the Meyer administration, and any sense of what direction you might take on the idea of consolidating districts?
MARTEN: The main priority of the Meyer administration is making sure that we're making progress with our schools. Changing boundaries is changing boundaries. You can move the lines. Change them here, change them there. Open a district, close a district. Move things around. If changing boundaries can improve outcomes for students, it should be considered.
The state of Hawaii is one district. They just they only have one LEA -Local Education Agency. It's all under one district. In San Diego County, there were 42 school districts. My district was the big, giant inner-city district with 100,000 kids. But there were some rural districts in San Diego, up in the mountains, with 200 kids. So, there are all kinds of ways you can draw district boundaries.
I'm not going to take a crayon and start redrawing boundaries just to redraw boundaries. There has to be a theory of action, and it has to be based on an expected outcome. If we do this, this is what we think would happen. And there's to be a theory, theory of action to approach, if that's something that's going to be looked at.
BYRNE: But, certainly, your experience has been that you can do more with less districts, or you don't need to have 19 districts for 140,000 students. In practice, you dealt with something that was quite the opposite of that.
MARTEN: Yes, I sure did. I had a very large district, and we did improve NAEP scores. But this is not a San Diego solution being brought to Delaware. Delaware has its own unique attributes and things that matter. The district boundary lines could be changed, but there needs to be a reason why -not just to do it. To do it, there has to be a concrete theory of action, and what are we hoping to accomplish. I'm usually against tinkering around the edges. We could spend a lot of time on that, redo budgets, redo lines, redo boards… then you open up with the new lines, and you still have the same results.
BYRNE: Part of the reason I bring it up is because there is a process in progress already within Wilmington, the Redding Consortium has started developing a plan to take the Christina School District out of the city. Ultimately, just have two districts serving the city. That's kind of gone hand in hand with former Governor Carney's effort to address city schools with the Wilmington Learning Collaborative. With that in mind, what do you see as the State Department of Education's role in addressing Wilmington schools and working with these various things that are in progress right now?
MARTEN: Well, I think it's important that I, as Secretary of Education, understand what's coming from the consortium. I'm just digging into all that they've done. I've had some briefings. I've had some meetings about it, so I can begin to understand these are deeply entrenched, complex, thorny issues that a lot of good people have put a lot of thought into. And I want to be able to add to it, add my own background and experience to the conversation, but I also need to start with where are they in the process, and how can I add value to that process in a way that's going to move the ball forward for the students in Wilmington.
It's clear what my experience is. I have experience running large inner-city schools. I was a principal at an inner-city school. There's a lot of concerns about concentrated poverty, and people are concerned that when you put concentrated poverty in one place, that it's hard to get results. I have done that. It is possible to do that, but every context is different.
So, I want to hear the recommendations. I want to help design the path forward. I want to understand the legalities of it. I want to understand the implications of it. You’ve got to understand the desegregation orders that were in place that created a lot of this from the beginning. Where do we stand on all of that now, and can we build a better approach for Delaware? Because many would argue what's happening now is not working. Many will argue there is a clear path forward. A lot of people agree on what should happen, but then when it's time to do it, they're not quite sure because there's implications. The decisions have consequences, and we want those consequences to be the right outcomes for our students and the educators. There's a teacher voice that matters in this. There's a student voice. There's a parent voice, and then there's a passion that Gov. Meyer and I share for improving Delaware schools. If we keep doing what we've been doing, we're going to keep getting the results we've been getting. So, change needs to happen, thoughtful, intentional change that's based on experience and research, that's informed by a community who cares, is where you get the best recipe for success.
BYRNE: I have one other district-related question for you, and it goes back to our discussion of funding, because when districts look to address funding needs. Operating or capital, they face the often difficult task in Delaware, getting tax referendums approved. There have been efforts in the past to give school boards some more power to raise taxes for operating costs slightly without a referendum. Is that something this administration would support revisiting, or some other kind of referendum reform to take that kind of fraught process and make it a little bit easier on districts and boards?
MARTEN I can't remember now when we talked last week if I brought this up, but we're talking about the funding formula. A holistic approach to changing the student funding formula involves exactly what you're talking about here. The holistic approach is not just come up with a new formula and plop that onto an old system. A holistic approach to effectively funding the schools in Delaware will need to include referendum reform.
There's a property tax reassessment study that's going underway right now. What's learned by that property tax assessment is also going to impact a new student funding formula. Opportunity Funding, some of the other funding measures that have been put in place for literacy support, there are multiple equities around the third of the state’s budget that’s being spent on education in an approach to make things better, that needs to be looked at holistically and comprehensively. The governor has been clear, referendum reform needs to be a part of it. But it's not just let's do referendum reform over here, do funding formula over here, look at opportunity funding… it's a holistic package. If you don't look at the equalization committee, the referendum, the property tax, the weighted student formula, or the unit count formula... if you don't look at that altogether, you're once again solving in silos, and you're putting a band-aid on top of a band-aid on top of a band-aid. You never actually got to the root cause.
BYRNE: As you talk about looking at things holistically, I'm curious, where do you see charter schools fitting into not just the funding thing, but just education as a whole?
MARTEN: In Delaware, it's always important that every student has a kind of education that is worthy of their own excellence and brilliance. I want every student to have access to the education that their parents care about, that they care about. Learning conditions for students need to be the most exquisite learning conditions that unlocks the brilliance and genius of every student. And charter schools, private schools, traditional schools, all of those need to be the highest quality of students.
I'm agnostic to the learning setting. I want all students to have the highest quality education. And there are multiple settings in which that can happen, including home school, private school, charter school, traditional many, multiple learning settings. Are those all the highest quality, and our students getting what I call is equity, what they need, when they need it, in the way that they need it? Different students need different learning settings. And so, as long as you're creating a setting for a student that allows us to unlock their genius and their potential, then that's a setting worthy of our students.
BYRNE: There are those who have argued against charters using an equity rationale, arguing that they have started to, at least in Delaware, almost resegregate, maybe not racially, but socio-economically. Is that something that you have any concerns about looking at the way charters operate in Delaware?
MARTEN: I'm just starting to unpack that and learn what that means in Delaware. I've heard some people say something like that before, but I don't understand it first-hand in terms of what those implications could be. There can be risks. I can talk about in San Diego, I was principal at a traditional elementary school and charter schools would open up in the neighborhood and make a lot of really great promises to parents, and then the kids would come back to my school five years later. The setting didn't work for everybody. I just want the setting to work for everybody, and I want people to work together.
If your neighborhood school isn't what you want your neighborhood school to be for your student, I would want there to be an investment in time and treasure and to make sure that every neighborhood school that a student goes to, that's closest to their house, is a high-quality neighborhood school, and if they make a different choice to go to a different school, it's not because their neighborhood school wasn't the best for their students, but because they made a different choice.
BYRNE: One other area the state's been trying to address, the school climate. The General Assembly School Behavior and School Climate Task Force issued a report in November with more than 50 recommendations, including improved data collection, strengthened support programs, increased parental community engagement, and so on. The state has invested in boosting the number of mental health professionals and services in public schools in recent years. Is the focus on mental health staff and programs the top priority to address? Or do you feel there are other things in terms of school climate, school behavior that that need to be at the top of the priority list?
MARTEN: School climate and school behavior is also something that requires a comprehensive, holistic approach. Some of the factors that impact school climate have to do with the supports that are in place for students outside of school as well as in the classroom. Many times, the reasons why students are disruptive in the classroom has to do with unmet needs, and these could be physical needs or social emotional needs or mental health needs, and some of those needs that our students have are well beyond the training of a teacher.
Teachers go to college and are certified to teach students and to teach all learners, and sometimes the reasons why students are not prepared to learn in the classroom go beyond what a teacher has the training to do. So, how do we build in place-based supports for students so that they can stay in their learning. To remove a student from their learning environment because they have something that makes it difficult for them to learn means the system has not yet built in the supports that that student needs to stay in their classroom and learning.
Additional supports have multiple forms that they can be provided in. There are some great examples of how to do this and do this well. And in the last four years as Deputy Secretary of Education at the US Department of Ed, I traveled the country looking at really good models for school climate and school culture. It's solved in a holistic way with community partners and community schools bringing in the kinds of partners and supports that got to know your students by name and by strength and by need.
I think it's important that students can stay in their learning environment. As a school principal in an inner city for 10 years, I had incredibly complex cases, students whose families were documented gang members, students whose families were incarcerated or deported, because San Diego was a border town, or families that work three jobs. (We had) students who witnessed a gang shooting the night before and came into class the next day, and guess what? They were acting out. Okay, does that student need to be kicked out of their classroom because they were acting out because they had just witnessed a murder the night before that? Is that going to serve that student? Or does support need to come in so that student has a way to process what they just witnessed, How do you keep them in their learning, but also recognize the severity and the overall, holistic needs of that student has, and that the teacher knows? Wait a minute, we got a problem. I know who to call. There's somebody in the building that can come in my classroom right now that can be part of this learning community.
We had a family who both parents had something tragic happen to them, and the student came to class the next day. It was a second-grade classroom, I think. There was no learning that was going to happen because many kids in the class had witnessed what had happened. So, we had to gather up in the classroom that morning with a support professional, the teacher could not run that group that morning, and have the right mental health supports. We couldn't also just go on with our learning. The supports had to come in the classroom. I was part of the circle as the principal, the mental health professionals, and we were able to reset that day, have the right conversation, get the supports in place, and we can also continue with our learning, not just ignore it and say you're in school, you need to learn now. There are really good examples of how to do it, and I really believe it's important that with the right supports that school climate and culture can improve.
BYRNE: We talked earlier about a lot about key proficiencies-reading, math, science and such - but over the last 10-15, years, we've also seen various administrations and lawmakers add other things to the education ecosystem -career pathways, language immersion, requirements for black history education, media literacy education. How important are these initiatives to be continued and developed? Or do some of these things have to be - I don't want to say set aside - maybe deemphasized, while the schools work on those core proficiencies?
No, you can have a well-rounded education with a high level of rigor that gets math and literacy outcomes, while you have a holistic, broad, and challenging curriculum for the students. Back to my inner-city school experience, we invested in an arts program. We invested in comprehensive arts and science as a way to improve reading and math scores. You improve reading and math when you have a holistic, well-rounded education. You don't have less instruction. You have more instruction, holistic instruction.
You can look at piling on and piling on and piling on and now add 25 more things to the program. It needs to be led by a school leader, the principal, and the superintendent to make sure what gets put out, if more gets added to the plate, that doesn't mean the teacher just goes and gets a platter. The plate is only so big, so how much are you putting on the plate? But you can weave together a holistic, comprehensive, broad, and challenging curriculum that includes all of the multiple forms of literacy. And like I said, arts and science are all important, financial literacy can get fed into math literacy, for example, but it shouldn't just be adding on, adding on, adding on
BYRNE: I want to finish with a broader question because there's always that tug between what the State Department of Education can and should do and local control of schools. So I guess the question is, do you see the Department of Education more as a service agency supporting districts and schools locally, or a leader or regulator that that is moving the agenda forward?
MARTEN: I don't see it as an either/or. My answer to that question is, yes. I think it can be both.
I was a superintendent for a long time, and the state chief in California is a good friend of mine, Tony Thurman. The state chief can either be a superintendent's best buddy, worst enemy, or kind of have no consequence. You sort of just ignore them and run your district. I don't think any of those are exactly right. I actually think that as a good state agency, and this is what Tony believed and we also had a county superintendent who believed the same thing, that we can be a high-level support agency. Where support is needed, we can provide support. There is accountability. Support comes with accountability. So, if you're all support and no accountability, you will fail. If you're all accountability and no support, you will fail.
We do have regulations. We have things that we have to enforce. We have funding streams. There are things that we statutorily need to do. And we will be that regulating body. We will be that oversight body. That is part of the role of the State Department of Education. But it comes from an educator who's done the work for 36 years. So, in my relationship with the superintendents, I want them to understand I am here to provide guidance, support, inspiration, technical assistance, and accountability as needed. And they understand that, and I think people welcome accountability when it comes with appropriate support.
