扎克伯格妻子普莉希拉·陈谈教育：“学霸”不厉害，能学以致用才是真优秀！（附专访视频&对话稿）
脸书创始人扎克伯格的华裔妻子普莉希拉·陈(Priscilla Chan)，从小就是学霸，这一点她自己也从不否认。但她说，自己擅长的那种“坐在教室认真听讲、做笔记复习”的学习模式，在如今称不上“学霸”。
在2018年布什中心的领导论坛(Bush Center's Forum on Leadership)上，普莉希拉曾谈到成为一个“终身学习者”(lifelong learner)意味着什么。她表示，真正的学习要从单纯的接受教育转变为一种生活方式，一种观念。“能够独立解决问题，活学活用，将所学知识应用到现实中，即使遇到问题，也懂得如何寻求帮助和得到有效资源。”这样，才是真的优秀。
anne: hi, everyone. wow. daniel tee'd us up for a really rich and robust conversation this afternoon. once upon a time, a young person could graduate with their business degree in hand and embark on a 30 plus year career potentially in accounting or marketing. no longer. today, we can only reasonably predict 50% of the jobs that are likely to exist in 25 years. things will fade away so things like cashiers, loan officers, paralegals. companies are starting to pay attention to this. at&t earlier this year announced a $1 billion effort to retool half of the pretty massive workforce to upgrade their skills for the future. how can our education system grapple with this kind of uncertainty and change? what kind of structure makes -- what kind of instruction, curriculum, or school structure makes sense? stem, arts, project-based. how do we know what is the right direction to go?
i think a lot about the hundreds of thousands of kids and young americans today that are attending low performing schools. daniel described his experience. those students are typically children of color. they are living near or below the poverty line. and far too often, those of the -- those are the same people that end up in low-wage low -- low-wage low skill jobs , because of their subpar education and the fact that they don't have real choices for their future. so what does this mean? it brings of these great big questions. when there are low-wage and low skill jobs starting to fade that , is the first group that will be disproportionately impacted by the change. what does this mean for america's widening gap between the has and the have-nots. my colleagues and i were talking about this. what does it mean for america's competitiveness globally? we don't think of this as a republican issue or a democratic issue. it is an important american issue. for the bush institute, we think that schools that prepare all their kids typically have two things in common. first, they have a strong principal. a strong leader. second, they embrace accountability. think about the very best boss you ever had.
you have them in mind? that person likely challenged you and also supported you. they invested in success and had your back. that is exactly what a great school principal does. they hire and retain and set a -- and retain great teachers and set a positive school culture for the kids and their family. early in my career, i taught eighth-grade social studies. it was equal parts awesome and incredibly difficult. i was working really hard. most days i was kind of flying blind. i really needed some expert help. i'm not ashamed to say that.
ultimately, i am not really sure if my kids got what they needed from me. i think i saw my principal maybe once my classroom that year. and i and that taking an opportunity outside the classroom over the summer even though there was a lot i really loved about teaching. it still makes me a little sad. i think what could've been different for me, but most importantly, for my students? if i had had the mentorship of a strong structure of a principal. that is why our work is designed to support school districts to retain those highly effective school principals in every school in their district that do all those things for student success.
first, you set high standards for what students should know and understand. second, measure their progress to those standards. and third, use that data to meaningfully design and implement interventions to support student success. we think this matters so intensely because it reflects the belief that all kids , regardless of race, ethnicity, economic status, angiography -- geography deserves access to , a great school. sadly, that is not the case.
we went to visit struggling schools this afternoon and you likely see things like, well, some kids are just never going to do that well. and it is really hard to catch some of these kids up. president bush very memorably described the phenomenon of assigning different expectations to certain kids as the soft bigotry of low expectations. it was a powerful phrase then, it is powerful now, and it dies -- it guides the bulk of our work. we seek to support city and state leaders understand and -- leaders to understand and embrace accountability of the education practice and policy that all kids in their communities have access to a great school and more importantly, have genuine choices. we think about how we should redesign education.
no matter what kind of school, you have to have a strong principal. and no matter what kind of job the child has eventually, they're going to need to read, write, and do problem-solving. we will measure those areas to make sure they are on track. we also know that there is a lot to discover about how kids learn and how we should meaningfully measure their success.
that is why i am so delighted and honored to introduce you to our special guest, dr. priscilla chan. she is herself a physician and an educator. she is the real deal. in 2015, she cofounded an initiative with her husband, mark zuckerberg, the founder of facebook. priscilla and mark have committed to pledging the bulk of their personal wealth to giving it away during their lifetime. that includes several investments in education that we will talk about today. please join me in welcoming dr. priscilla chan to the stage.
priscilla, welcome to dallas. dr. chan: thank you for having me. it's an honor to be here at the bush center. i want to knowledge that in our work in education, we stand on the shoulders of the work barbara bush did. she will be missed. she was an incredible role model in her work on literacy.
anne: we are so glad to have you here and hear about your work you are doing. why don't we start with telling everybody what is the chan-zuckerberg initiative?
dr. chan: it is a philanthropy that mark and i founded two years ago. we always knew we would give back and we thought it would be later. we got pregnant with our daughter max and we had that extremely human experience of, oh god, the future is now. she is coming and if we want her to live in this incredible world that is beyond her wildest dreams, we needed to start doing our part and helping build that world. we did it. we launched in 2015 with the goal of building a philanthropy that engineers change at scale. and what we do is we have worked in three areas. education, science, and a group called justice and opportunity.
one thing we are incredibly aware of is that while we may have significant resources, we are small. we need to be very careful about how we leverage the opportunity. when you think about scale of resources, in science, our annual budget is less than $300 million a year. so what can we do to actually create change in science with our work? we really took a step back and thought, beyond resources, how can we make this work? we -- work? we thought about the day job of who we are. for me, that's being a schoolteacher and a pediatrician. having been on the front lines with families and children, realizing the need to be there on the front lines to understand what the real barriers and problems are.
and that incredibly innovative solutions exist. they are often one-off's that don't have the opportunity to scale and reach many. i am lucky enough in many ways to be partnered with mark and he brings the lynch -- the lens of a technologist. we took those lenses together and get to a couple of core values. we want to stay close to the problem, we have the luxury and patience to invest in the long term and we also know that collaboration across sectors will be key to our success.
anne: when i was in your office, i was struck by two things. everyone i spoke to, we had a sense of the work you all are doing. they have a boldness of purpose and a total humility in their approach. can you tell us about how you
define success?
dr. chan: we set incredibly long-term goals for our work. that means in 50 to 100 years, every student is empowered to learn and be prepared for a changing world. in science, we want to be part of building justice that allow all individuals to contribute to the community. that's really long-term. what a reaction going to do? i painted a beautiful picture.
anne: think you for asking yourself that question.
dr. chan: it is part of whether or not the experiments and thinking about philanthropy in a different way, in 10 or 15 years, it will have refined that. at cci, we don't just do traditional grantmaking, we do for-profit profit investing, we do advocacy work. we want to build a big movement that's bigger than us. and most unique, and we build technology. half of the organization is technology. we build tools. justice and opportunity work. for them, that means we learned and we understand how the model works and we have problems to apply that toolkit two. -- toolkit to.
we are really in a world where teachers are demanding better tools for their work. and they are able to better serve their students where they are every day. in science, we should be ceiling -- be seeing those early breakthroughs in investments and infrastructure that we are building today. in justice and opportunity, we're taking the lessons learned in the hotspot communities that we are supporting. they are doing great work in scaling those to really be able to reach more communities in
need.
anne: that brings me to the second thing i observed in our offices. it is a bullpen of engineers working on dual screens. it reminded me of the start of i -- start up i worked in after college. it is completely distinct, that you have so many engineers on the staff. how do they execute the strategy?
dr. chan: they work closely with the initiative teams. in science, they work side-by-side. engineers are building the data infrastructure for something that is the next generation of the human genome project. the engineers are building that infrastructure. they are not building it in a box by themselves. what they are doing is working closely with the science staff, doing work in the field to figure out what the needs are, building and iterating alongside them.
and the strategy between technology and the programmatic work, there is one strategy. and we collaborate. everyone has the lens of where we are actually leveraged to be able to take advantage of the full tools kit. a very similar situation is in education. our partners are in the field. we partner with a group, several groups. but most prominently, the summit public schools where we are learning from their pedagogical approach and what they need for teachers to succeed in the classroom. and building the tools and technologies to help them do their work better. and also share their approach with other schools that are interested.
anne: let's turn to education and talk little bit about that. i know your own personal experience growing up has really informed the strategic path you have taken. tell everybody a little bit about your story.
dr. chan: anne said nice things about me before i came out. this is something that is core to who i am and why i do this work. it is incredible that i'm here today and that is the second half of the story. the first half of the story is more important. my family were chinese-vietnamese refugees to this country. my grandmother was illiterate. she supporting a family as her employment. and my parents showed up as both people and refugees with very little.
i was lucky enough to be in a great public school system where a couple of teachers really saw potential in me and supported that. thanks to a couple people that took the extra time, and if you -- time, i was able to show up at harvard that first day, and if you froze my life on that day, i would have lived a full version of the american dream. i realized that i owed everything to a few folks that showed me what was possible. and there were many folks like me and daniel that shared his incredible story that don't have that opportunity and did not get lucky. in college, i grew up very close to harvard.
i decided to run an afterschool program that is in the next community over from the housing project i grew up in. and helping kids with their homework there. i was 18, super idealistic and wanting to help kids do better. but what i saw was there is an incredible number of barriers that prevent kids from even getting to the classroom. forget their homework. they were unsafe, involved in gang violence, lived in unclean housing conditions, and had a number of medical issues that needed tending to. there is a little girl that i remember. that then compelled me to become a physician. she had missed some days of school and her counselor came by looking for her. i said sure, i will help you find her.
i walked up to the playground and i found her almost immediately. and i was upset with her. when i asked why she missed school and had not been today the afterschool program, she started talking and her front two teeth were broken. i was so crushed and had so many questions about where i had failed in not doing my part to prevent her from getting hurt. i was 22 and the solution to that was to go to medical school. [laughter]
dr. chan: so i spent a decade training to be a pediatrician in san francisco safety net hospital. i became a doctor taking care of the same kids that i had been working with in college except that this time i was a physician and making diagnoses. there were no prescriptions for what was going on in keeping my patients from being successful. and so i saw the flip side of the same problem. that is what prompted me to try to step up from that front line and think about how we should be doing work differently to make sure that these great public systems are actually doing their job. [applause]
anne: so part of your experience was to keep learning. that has been such an important driver for you. part of our topic today is the importance of that sensibility for kids. what it means to become a lifelong learner. tell us a little bit about what skills or what is most important for kids today looking forward.
dr. chan: this is not going to sound humble and i also think it is true of all of you in this room. i was a really good student. what that means is i am really good at sitting in a lecture hall just like this, listening to someone share information, write it down, and then tell it back to someone later.
i'm still really good at it and if i were in your state, i would -- in your seat i would be , having a good time. i'm having a good time up here, too. but when i actually went to work with families that both the -- families, build the primary school, build see the acai, -- build czi, no one prepared me for that. i asked my friends that had mba's, did they teach you this? even if we are wildly successful, they did not do what -- did not to just what we need to do in the workplace.
what my hope is, we can think about how we change that and how we educate our students in a way that prepares them for the real-life workplace. and where i have seen it most successfully in k-12 education and where i get a lot of my inspiration from is actually a school visit that i did to a group called summit public schools. i walked into the small school network in the bay area and i did not recognize where i was. i saw middle schoolers and high schoolers working in all different types of configurations.
there were groups of kids problem-solving together. teaching each other about solving a problem the teacher had posted to them. i saw a kid working by themselves on a project that i did not even recognize is something you could do it -- in school. he was working on a web media project. my question was, what is this? -- in school. where am i? this is where i see them doing in the workplace. -- this is what i see folks actually doing in the workplace.
problem-solving on their own. applying what they are doing to what is meaningful in their real world. they know how to actually ask for help and get the right resources. what i learned is that this group had been able to turn what the classroom looks like historically to what would be preparing kids for success in the future. and we have been so proud to be supporting and sharing their work with even more schools doing what someone has been doing.
anne: your chance to visit the summit charter school, take it. they are fantastic. you have made some investments in personalized learning. we have a video clip that will help folks explain your approach. we will take a look at that. and we will talk a little bit more.
the average kid with a one-on-one tutor, now i know this is not about the kids. it's about can i create the kind of learning experiences that help any kid get the kind of benefit you get with a one-to-one tutor?
how to we learn how kids learn? can we make how kids learn portable to be adapted and personalized?
imagine you are a teacher and you have one student in front of you. what does the student know? what don't they know? what are they interested in? how motivated are they to stay? can the students to the board? those things have a huge impact on how you think about, how you teach.
imagine the same teacher, 35 kids in front of you. you're talking about a middle or high school teacher. you still have all of those same questions that you need to resolve. it is extraordinarily difficult for any given teacher to keep that in her head. and i think by recognizing that you try to empower people, they will hopefully create things that let us make dramatic progress. the big question becomes can you do that in a way that makes accessible to every single teacher everywhere? you can ultimately take it to scale. that is what we are uniquely qualified to do.
anne: you mentioned summit. tell us a little bit about that investment and what you are learning so far.
dr. chan: jim talks about a bit about personalized learning in this video. it is a term a lot of folks in education are using. i want to anchor this that it is not anything new. it is just great teaching. it is being able to give a student that's in front of you what she needs at the right moment.
like jim talked about, it's incredibly hard to do. we need to make that easier so that all teachers can practice in a way that is best for student outcomes. and what we've done is work closely with summit to think about their pedagogical approach. what they think they have done to achieve the outsized outcomes they have at their school. we take that and we have helped them build with our engineering team, a tool called summit learning.
we have helped embed a lot of tools that help them achieve their pedagogical school motto -- model and paired it with professional development tools for their teachers. with that tool, we've been able to spread their approach for schools and by schools. we now support over 300 schools nationwide. and over 50,000 students.
and i will give a shout out to one of our star districts, pasadena in texas that has really done a fantastic job. we are excited about their work and they are excited to help us improve. the core of it is a couple of pieces. we help build project face learning. we build time and space for one-on-one mentoring. and we allow individualized pathways to understand where each student is. and what the next step they need to take to advance and what the best modality might be for that's didn't. -- that student. it is really a partnership with the school to figure out what needs to happen for students, and us building the tools to allow many more schools to be able to access that.
anne: a great strategy to commend the something in texas while you are in texas. well done. i want to unpack a little did of -- a little bit of what you described. talk about technology, teachers, students. sometimes, people get nervous when they hear about technology or screens and classrooms. are you talking about a kid sitting in front of a laptop? is that something different?
dr. chan: that is the worst. as a parent, i totally understand the concerns and i agree with the concerns. you don't want your kid sitting in front of a computer all day. that is not what we are aiming to do. i had a conversation with the superintendent of pasadena, texas, school districts. we hate it when these that stock photo of the kids behind a computer all day.
that's not what we're trying to achieve. technology is not the centerpiece here. it is about empowering the teacher and giving the right tools to the student. we are talking about using technology to make it the job of the teacher easier and really able to highlight those individual relationships that need to happen to make great teaching happen. i want that for all children and i know that is what put me on the path to being able to be successful.
anne: you talked about teaching there. what is the teacher's experience with personalized learning? are they needing to learn a new way to operate? what are they telling you about what they like or don't like?
dr. chan: the teachers are really excited about all the learning that needs to happen. and so it is not something that you can sort of open out of a box and do it one day. it is not a singular tool. it is an approach and we have invested a lot in building summer training and professional development for teachers in school districts, to be able to understand what they need to do to be part of this new school motto.
and so it is time intensive. we have seen incredible commitment from school districts and teachers that want to do this. and what i've heard that is the most rewarding is it opens up the window to not teach to 30 different kids and maybe hit the mark with a few students. they have been able to develop these one-on-one relationships and a deep understanding of what each one of their student needs.
that is the meat of it. that is the heart of personalized learning. we are trying to do a lot more to make sure that that happens. that is a partnership and not something we can just build into the technology platform. it requires the school really rethinking the way school works.
anne: what do the students tell you? do they like it? is it harder or easier?
dr. chan: what i have seen is students are most excited about the project-based learning. they spend a lot of the day asking why i'm doing this. and sometimes there really isn't a good reason if you don't try to think about it. do it just because. that's awful. with the projects, they see why.
there is one student we are talking with. and she was working on some of the writing and literacy skills. and that was ok. she got to a journalism project and started writing blogs and doing a podcast. she got so excited about what she was learning. she went back to figure out what skills she needed to do better. to push deeper to the meat of what we want, all students should be learning. and also building incredible confidence about what she was able to do. and then asking the question, is this what i want to do when i grow up? maybe, maybe not. but really having that spark of, wow, i can do this. it's a thing that inspires me.
anne: inspires anyone that knows a kid when they see the spark. part of the work we do is districts, there is a lot of power. i know that's part of your model. tell us a little bit about how you are connecting educators.
dr. chan: we've had a number of meetings around the country where we bring together school leaders at all levels to really get a sense of what they are interested in and what their barriers are. this is not something static that someone is sharing. it is something that is really built based on feedback and collaboration about what needs to get done to make it easy for teachers. we're trying to make it better every day. we really appreciate and value the community where we can learn from those practicing.
anne: let's make a shift to the primary school. the school you helped found. it sits in east powell outflow -- it sits in east palo alto. that area has somewhat of a notorious history. i think we had a photo of a student at work. this is an integrated education and health model. tell us how it came to be and what the model looks like in action.
dr. chan: primary schools are a separate organization. in a fit of finishing residency, i thought i could do everything. i watched philanthropy and the school at the same time. and the school is really built upon the experiences that i shared with you, really feeling like i failed as an afterschool teacher and failed as a pediatrician.
i was not able to help the kids succeed beyond productive track in the way that i want to be. my realization is that, in primary care, we have a lot of information but none of the treatment arm to make the changes we want to see. we are not able to do the preventative work that we want to do. on the education side, school teachers are not able to actually educate their students often. it they are coming in with so -- they are coming in with so many barriers and challenges that they are not ready to learn. there is a lot more going on there. what we aim to do with the primary school is actually rethink the way that these systems work.
really putting the kids and parents at the center of it. to have the systems be greater than the sum of their parts. we are working at rethinking the way primary care works in the way education work. we think about childcare and what each student needs to succeed. we have an asthma program. asthmatics miss a lot of schools, especially in the winter. when you look at k-12, they are behind their peers. a large part of that is because of their health issues. at primary school, we do regular health screenings and we look at the asthma control. when it is not well controlled, we send a note to the pediatrician that can tuneup baseline control to keep the kid in school more days.
we also look at issues like homelessness. we have parent coaches that help the parents understand what they need to do together to help you be successful. it ranges and issues from homelessness to food security, to looking for employment. one thing that was most surprising to me the first year we opened the primary school was that the students we knew were marginally housed, we couldn't wake up from their nap very easily. they would nap all afternoon.
we were kind of stuck they are saying, do we wake her up for math or do we just let her sleep? that is an awful trade-off to have to make. we are seeing the real-life consequences of the challenging circumstances. so we work closely with parents to help improve their housing situation. and also the pediatricians are really thinking about the sleep hygiene. how can they build those better habits? and so we are working and redefining what the factors are for success. and also building systems to help with a parent center and weaving together a public system so that our students can be successful.
anne: when i was meeting with your staff, i was really struck by how they are grappling with incredibly challenging questions. nothing is simple in this work. he started talking about scale. is your plan to open lots of primary schools? how are you thinking about scaling the impact of how you are learning in east palo alto?
dr. chan: we are confident that we conserve all the children -- we can serve all the children that need more support. and we have to think about what we can do in a replicable and sustainable way. we don't want to be one special school that gets great results. because of all the unique opportunities our students might have.
we have about 150 students and we have two folks dedicated to thinking about data, what kind of outcomes we want to be tracking, and how we can think about what we can do as portable programs to share with other schools. we don't want to be in the business of building other schools. it is exhausting and not the most effective. how can we share our best practices to other schools who are interested in doing more and learning from our experiences?
anne: czi works in a number of areas. i saw some interesting posts recently about your work in criminal justice reform. there are no side roads the between the topics you're working on. tell us what is happening in the criminal justice reform work?
dr. chan: our criminal justice reform work is related in justice and opportunity. we want to make sure that we are helping build just, fair, and forgiving systems. in order to build strong communities, we need to make sure that every individual has the opportunity to contribute.
and if they have committed a crime that is adjudicated fairly, there is an opportunity for forgiveness and rehabilitation. we have been working closely in learning about the space. there are a couple of properties that are really interesting to us. it is something that folks on all parties are excited about. that's unique. our hope is that we can actually be part of a nonpartisan way to improve the way our criminal justice system works. the other thing that's exciting is it is work at the local level. it is state and county-based work.
it means we can learn quickly. when it's a problem that can be solved by different folks in different circumstances, there's not one decision-maker or one chance to actually try to solve the problem. we can learn from folks -- there is recently great work in louisiana. they are passing commonsense measures. we can take those learnings and share them with folks that are doing work and oklahoma. -- work in oklahoma. and so many more opportunities to be part of a greater movement that can get better over time. and try different tactics.
anne: i know part of that initiative is on the opportunity side. our next panel is talking about economic opportunity. what are you excited about learning in that space?
dr. chan: economic mobility is our most nascent work. right now we are in the exploration phase. we want to learn about the best practices out there. i learned a lot from folks here today about work where we can help especially young people build the skills that they need to be successful in the workplace and in the changing economy.
the world is changing quickly. we need our workforce to be able to change quickly and adapt as well. we recently launched a couple of grants. one called the community drive challenge. we are just asking a question. tell us what you are doing that is changing outcome for young folks. allowing them to be on a pathway to success. hopefully that will put us in touch individuals doing great work in local communities, learning from them, and trying to figure out how to help the scale and reach and impact people's lives.
anne: there are experts on the next panel that might be helpful. perfectly timed. as you see, leadership is pretty serious business around the bush center. you describe your own personal journey from the kid growing up next to harvard to cofounding and leading this incredible initiative with decades of impact in front of you. tell us a little bit about your own personal leadership journey and how you view your own leadership now.
dr. chan: i have learned that it is a process. it is a journey. there is not one answer that you can look up somewhere in a book. it is really about being patient. it is about realizing that when you don't get things exactly right the first time, that's ok. i would not call it a failure.
you just haven't gotten it right yet. try again. a value that i try to live every day. and also the values that i talked about at the beginning. knowing that you're trying to solve the right problem is important. but it also means that you're but it also means that you're close to the work and the inspiration that keeps your energy and enthusiasm for the work, it keeps the spark alive. knowing collaboration is the tool.
i don't know everything and that is ok. i get to partner and work with folks that are experts in their field and together, we can be greater than the sum of our parts. this work takes a long time. this is going to be a lifetime of work. all that really matters is that we continue to improve and learn along the way.
anne: that's great. we have covered a lot of ground and there are a lot more directions we can go but we don't have all afternoon. the stakes are high for us. the stakes are high in many areas. what is your vision of what is possible and what can the world look like with all of us working in education? why does that matter so much?
dr. chan: this is a really good question. i think each one of you probably has someone or an experience that is why you do this work. sorry. i told you.
anne: it's ok. we need the tissues.
dr. chan: actually. there is someone in each one of your hearts and spirits of why you do this work. for me, it's the student i told you about in the beginning where i was helpless. she was not in a good place. i didn't have any tools to help her. you know, my hope and our hope at czi is that we need to build modern solutions.
that help us actually not be helpless in that moment and to be able to better observe that person, that kid, that adult, that family member in your life that drives you to actually want to do this work and do better. so, what i keep thinking about, every time i get excited about something we are doing, is this is helping someone be able to serve and do their work better in the future. that leaves fewer people behind. [applause]
anne: president bush talks about my charge to keep, his charge to keep. thank you so much for sharing your charge to keep with us. and with everyone here, i am really grateful for your time and you sharing your experience and we are grateful for the leadership of you and mark in the work you are doing. please join me in thanking dr. chan. [applause] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2017] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible.
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