In January, Brooke Stafford-Brizard was named vice president for innovation and impact at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Since she started her professional life as a middle school teacher in the Bronx, Stafford-Brizard has held a variety of roles in education — both in and out of the classroom. She cofounded a girls’ public charter school in Rochester, New York, was director of data strategy and evaluation at the New York City Department of Education, and earned a Ph.D. in cognitive science in education from Columbia.
Most recently, Stafford-Brizard held a high-profile position in education philanthropy as vice president for research to practice at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI). For a few years, Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan’s philanthropic vehicle was one of the most exciting ed funders around, with deep pockets, a top-notch staff and a culture of innovation. But last summer, CZI slashed its education team and announced that, going forward, its ed funding will focus primarily on education technology tools. The move came as a blow to an education sector that was already reeling, as IP reported earlier this year.
Stafford-Brizard left as part of the upheaval at CZI. But in our recent conversation, she preferred to focus on her new role at Carnegie.
The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching — not to be confused with the Carnegie Corporation of New York — was established by industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie in 1905 as an independent research and policy center. Its mission: “To catalyze transformational change in education so that every student has the opportunity to live a healthy, dignified and fulfilling life.”
Despite its small size (its staff numbers around 50), the organization has a large footprint. It is not an exaggeration to say that since its creation, Carnegie has helped determine the shape of education in the U.S. Its role may not be widely recognized because the innovations the foundation contributed to over the years are now part of the fabric of our education system, and include standards for medical, engineering and law schools, TIAA, the GRE and Pell Grants. The Carnegie Unit, developed in 1906, was a foundational contribution: It measures the amount of time a student studies a specific subject.
Now, educators are rethinking the Carnegie Unit and other assessment tools in an effort to make education more relevant in a rapidly changing world. Under the leadership of its president, Timothy Knowles, the foundation intends to help create a new architecture for education that will move beyond the Carnegie Unit. “In its time, the Carnegie Unit was an incredibly important reform because it standardized an utterly nonstandardized educational sector,” Knowles told The 74. “But it crept into the core DNA of educational practice and didn’t evolve or adapt in the face of a significant amount of empirical knowledge about how human beings actually learn.”
Stafford-Brizard will be designing and advancing Carnegie’s strategy as it takes on this new challenge. We caught up with her recently to ask about that work, why she is optimistic about education and education philanthropy, and more. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Can you talk about what the transition from CZI to Carnegie has been like for you?
It has been energizing and familiar enough that it feels like I’ve been able to sustain a continued thread of impact, which is what you hope for in a career. And there’s so much that I’ve brought with me from that chapter as a funder. The learnings from that were incredible: to sit in that space and learn from the grantees and the portfolios that you’ve built. It wasn’t surprising to me to see a lot of overlap in the partners that we have here at Carnegie, many of whom were grantees at CZI, and so that connection has been very powerful. The learnings, as we think about developing our research agenda, are deeply tied to so much of what we were focused on at CZI. I think it was time for me to get much closer to the work and the partners and being part of creating some of the strategy. It felt like the right transition, and one that I’m thrilled to engage in.
I’ve asked you about this before, but just wondering if you are willing to talk about what happened at CZI and why you left?
Again, I’m just so grateful for all the chapters of my career that I’ve had the privilege to be part of.
I had to ask! OK, a major pivot into the weeds: Can you say a little more about the Carnegie Unit?
The focus on the Carnegie Unit is what drew me to the organization. The Unit essentially created seat time — credit hours in both K-12 and postsecondary education. It created the structure and the framing for how education should work. It’s why we connect hours to learning in high school in particular; it’s why a college degree is 120 credits. As Tim Knowles says, it’s the bedrock of our education economy.
What does the reexamination of the Carnegie Unit entail?
When Tim Knowles came on board almost four years ago, he decided it was time to address the next evolution of the Carnegie Unit. We’ve had this public education system in place for well over a century. Since then, the entire science of human development has emerged, and what we know about how children and adolescents learn and develop has become an entire field of research and science that must inform not just the way learning and instruction happens in a classroom, but the way the entire system is structured to support the growth of students and adults. There is so much that we have learned about how and when and where learning can happen.
Tim recognized that Carnegie established the Unit and it was taken up by the field at a scale where we obviously no longer own it. But we can certainly play a leadership role in revisiting it, and evolving beyond it to support the most powerful learning experiences for students. And we’re starting by focusing on high schools.
To make all of this more concrete, as we think about this transformation, we’re thinking about creating a broader definition of what students need, along with what is included in the traditional diploma. We know from the research that the workforce is asking for a broader set of skills and competencies that are critical for thriving both in the workforce and in life. Collaboration, for example, is a skill that is in demand across the entire workforce. There is tremendous science behind how to design learning environments to support the development of collaboration, which includes active listening and leaning into healthy conflict and finding ways for compromise and approaching trade-offs. We’re focusing on a broader set of goals in addition to learning mathematics and literature, centering these types of competencies and skills for the future.
We’ll be doing this work through partnerships. We are partnering with districts and systems and schools out there that are well underway with this type of work. Innovation is already happening, and I think our role is to identify, within this broader set of partners, the themes that we’re seeing for how change sustains and scales, and how we can share those learnings with the field.
You’ve promoted whole child education across all of your work, including at CZI. It sounds like that is also a focus at Carnegie.
I’ve focused on holistic education throughout my career, connecting that to the science of human development. And given that the transformation of education is our North Star as an organization, that is what drew me here, the focus on the Carnegie Unit and evolution beyond that as a metric of change to truly ground education in what students need and deserve. It is completely organically connected to the work that I’ve done in holistic education and development.
I mean, it is hardly new, right? For decades upon decades, we’ve had guidance from leaders in education, philosophers and psychologists that learning is a deeply social process. And we continue to learn from neuroscience and other fields of science that we are most activated and primed for learning when we feel safe, both physically and emotionally — that is when our brains are most strongly activated to learn. We’re not deviating away from academic rigor and the importance of learning, we’re just reinforcing how it happens.
This is true in the workplace, as well. Adults continue to learn and grow throughout their lives. The role that connection and relationships and community plays in that is something that is not restricted to educational environments. And as we continue to learn from the science of human development and think about skills for the future, we recognize the key role that our identities and the assets and strengths that we bring from our cultures and our families also play.
Is education equity a priority for Carnegie? Doesn’t poverty, including the fact that some schools are much better resourced than others, play a major role in why our education system works better for some kids than for others?
Ensuring that every individual has access to social and economic mobility through the powerful tool of education is at the core of what we’re doing. But systems change goes well beyond education in terms of what’s needed. And when we think about how education can be a contributor to social and economic mobility, we recognize that it intersects with poverty, with housing, with health. So wherever those learnings can inform how we think about the transformation of the high school and how we think about higher education, they’re critical inputs. And part of a much bigger, complex picture of change that we all need to be behind.
When I talked to you earlier this year, you were optimistic about the direction of education in general and education philanthropy in particular. What drives your optimism?
I think that right now, there is more coherence around the demand for change. The pandemic created a window and the demand within our communities of parents and caregivers and students — you hear it from teachers, too — that we can’t go back to the way things were. I think there’s inspiration and excitement for change and a feeling like we can do it now. We definitely see that in our partners.
Philanthropy and education philanthropies continue to be committed to find ways to work together. Our hope is that we can offer resources, like this research agenda, that can help us all work from the same questions to drive change. Through the enormous efforts over the last several years in the science of learning and development and innovations connected to that, I think we have language and a lexicon to work from that allows for that coherence. And again, the appetite and excitement for folks to connect and collaborate is very much there.
Philanthropy is a place where we can be more nimble and more creative with our resources to show what can work. One of the end goals always has to be informing how our public dollars are used to ensure that there’s longer-term transformational change. Real innovation has been happening, and we’re thinking about how we can identify it and understand how to move it to system-level change. Ideally, philanthropy can continue to invest in service of those learnings so they can become more connected to policy, to public dollars and to long-term change.
You worked as a middle school teacher, and you have four children, including boys aged eight, 12 and 14, and a 23-year-old daughter. Which do you think is more difficult, teaching middle school or being a parent?
I think they’re both difficult in different ways. Raising my three boys and my stepdaughter, I’m humbled every day at how hard it is. It’s hard to be a teacher, and it’s hard to be a parent. And it’s a privilege, too.
When you have some spare time, what do you like to do?
I enjoy working on adult LEGO projects. I find that it’s a nice contemplative practice, so sometimes, my downtime is following the directions in the LEGO manual. And I love to cook. And I love spending time and learning from my kiddos.
