ASU+GSV 2026 Summit | Monday, April 13, 2026, 11:15 am-12:00 pm | Sponsored Partner Programming
Speakers
- Aimee Guidera, former VA Sec of Ed
- Deborah Gist
- Dr. Christina Grant, Harvard
- Angélica Infante-Green, RI DoE
Key Takeaways
- This candid panel featured three former state education chiefs -- Aimee Guidera (former Virginia Secretary of Education), Deborah Gist (former chief in DC and Rhode Island), and Dr.
- Christina Grant (former DC State Superintendent, now at Harvard) -- moderated by current Rhode Island Commissioner Angelica Infante-Green.
- The conversation offered rare insider perspectives on what it actually takes to lead system-level change in education.
- All three emphasized that politics is far more dominant than they expected, that the job is fundamentally about creating conditions for others to thrive rather than being the hero, and that you have about 90 days to set your strategic vision before political winds shift.
- A spirited exchange on accountability revealed evolving views: while all agreed that transparency about school performance is essential, they debated whether accountability systems had been over-indexed at the expense of support and capacity building.
- Grant made a powerful case that AI tools could transform who has access to quality education, calling it "a sin and a shame if we don't pull that off." The panel converged on the idea that the state's role should be to set policy conditions, stay out of the way of good work, and partner with external organizations for implementation rather than trying to monitor it directly.
Notable Quotes
"I dramatically think that these AI tools in the right hands of educators could transform who has access to a quality education in this country. And it will be a sin and a shame if we don't pull that off."
— Dr. Christina Grant (Harvard)
"I think it is an actual sin and a shame if you give a child a high school diploma and it's not worth the paper it's printed on. And I was that child. So I believe in accountability aggressively."
— Dr. Christina Grant
"I just really needed the state to not get in our way. Like I just needed them to remove barriers, not get in our way, not make it harder."
— Deborah Gist
"The power of the status quo is unbelievably strong and you cannot be a change agent by yourself."
— Aimee Guidera
"You have 90 days to figure out what you can get done in the time horizon that you get to lead."
— Dr. Christina Grant
Full Transcript
Okay, so you're in store for a treat now. So we're here joined by three women that have done the job that I'm currently doing. And they are going to share with us some information that you will not hear anywhere else. Because they can be candid, and they can speak their minds in ways that the person sitting in the seat cannot.
So let's get started. You've all sat in the chief seat at some point. What do you think you understood, or what do you, yes, what do you think you understood about system change before you were actually in that role? What do you, what did you actually learn once you be, you took that role?
Amy? So, hello, everyone. Sorry. I'm Amy Godera, and I also need to clarify, I was actually never a chief, but I was, I was secretary of education in Virginia, which oversaw education from early childhood through higher ed.
So I believe as change agents, and how do we do systems change? I'm a big believer that there is a science of change management, and for any kind of lasting impact of change to happen, there needs to be an awareness for a need to change. There needs to be a desire by the people being affected by the change to change. And there also needs to be a knowledge of how to do that change.
And that's why I'm a big believer in data, because data is a tool to do that. But what I knew after doing this for four years, you can go in and you can set the table, you can provide all the data you want, you can create the vision, you can build desire and knowledge and awareness, and unfortunately, politics trumps so much of everything, that you can lead everybody to that and understand, but at the end of the day, and this is the sad part, is that, and concerns me right now, and I'd love my colleagues to hear that the politics are so bitter and divisive right now, that even things that people know are the right things to do for students are not happening because of the politics, and it makes me sad to have to say that. Yeah. Yeah, I think when it comes to systems change, I would agree.
There's so much that we know about change management. I would say, if I'm thinking about the question, I would think about, what did I think about being a state chief before, like as I was going into it, and then during and after? And I would say to answer that question, I think it's about the fact that I thought it was like a policy job, and policy is a tool, policy is like a thing that you do to make sure that conditions are right, but it really is about establishing conditions. It's about politics.
It's about relationships. It's about implementation, and so if we over-focus on what are the policies that we're putting into place, or how do we get good policy into place, or remove bad policy, or improve policy, then we're kind of missing the rest of the point, and if we don't focus on that implementation part, if we don't focus on how do we bring people along statewide, then the policies might change, but that doesn't mean that there's going to be any real differences that end up happening. Yeah, I think I'd say three quick things. As much as I knew the role was political, I under-appreciated just how political, and in a place like D.C., one would honestly say, duh, but you sit at the intersection of so much, and the district is so different in that most people don't know that all laws in D.C. are passively passed by Congress until they're not, and so it's just you're hyper-aware of politics and your role as the face of that, and so I didn't appreciate that until I was in the role.
The second part is you are making policy decisions, and Penny speaks a lot about this, that we get the policy when, but it's very rare that we actually get to see the arc of implementation, and so you have to have a laser-like focus on the policy because you're passing it down to schools and district leaders where I'm not coaching the principal. I'm not in the classroom, and so I deeply appreciated my experience in practice inside schools as it relates to policy decisions that were going to outlast my tenure, and I think the other kind of aha moment is all of the work we were talking around about change management and building teams. You have a short amount of time to get a lot done, and in many respects, it isn't necessarily even about you. It's about the team of individuals, many of which who were in the department before you got there and will be there when you leave, that you empower, inspire, and push toward the change in your system, and I think a lot of people go into the superintendency thinking it is about them, and you quickly realize that it actually, like, you have to create policy conditions for your leaders to thrive.
That's the job. Yeah. You mentioned something that I think all three of you have mentioned. You know, you really have two or three years before the political winds change, and, Deb, you and I have been in the same seat in the same state.
I have been in the same seat. That's right. It's so interesting. What do you tell someone that's going into this role about their first 90 days?
You think you know, you walk in there, you have this plan, but what is it that people get wrong about that? I think it's this weird combination of that you have to, yes, go slow to go fast, and also you have to just go fast. So it's like how do you do those two things at the same time? Because you have to go slow to go fast in the sense that you do have to focus on relationships.
You have to earn credibility. You have to establish trust. You have to, you know, just all of that, and you have to diagnose. You have to understand.
You can't just go into a place and start to change things that you don't have, you know, the background around or understand how things came to be. And at the same time, if you spend your time doing that, then the next thing you know, two years have gone by, and you haven't gotten anything done. So it's like how do you both do that kind of going slower part, but also move quickly and make sure that you are getting quick wins, identifying things that are standing in the way of educators and families and students every day, remove those barriers, keep building that momentum and get that change to be underway while you're also establishing the conditions. So we went in.
So two answers. Yes to everything that Deb said, and we went in, and we knew one of the biggest things we had to do in the administration was to level set where we were. Everyone knew we went in saying we're going to restore excellence to education, and people all said how dare you? This is Virginia.
Angels sing. And I'm like, and have you looked at your test scores for poor kids? No, they are crying. But we went in, and within 90 days, we produced our commitment to Virginians, which was our 90-day report that said, and again, back to change management, here is the data.
Here is where we are. We're going to put it up there. We're going to document where we are, and we're going to lay out the vision of where we need to go as a state, and then we're going to say how are we going to get there, and we're going to keep everyone updated with a commitment to transparency, and we're going to hold the system accountable for this. So we very quickly went up there.
We said here are our guiding principles. Here are our goals. Here's how we're going to do it, and I worked for a boss who was really simple. He said define what is best in class.
Define where we are. Go find someone who is doing it the best in the nation, and then go figure out how we do it the Virginia way, right, and we did that for every single thing we did in education is, so again, look at data, but look at best practices. Look at evidence, and then continue to be transparent about our actions and the results and where we need to do changes over those four years, and time was a real issue. You know, Virginia is the only state in the nation to have a one-term limit for a governor, and so we were, those days, every single minute counted, so we had to be really strategic.
You were making the case for change. Yes, and we had to. Setting the vision. Yeah.
Christina? I think in the spirit of saying things that current chiefs can't say, you have 90 days to figure out what you can get done in the time horizon that you get to lead, so first you're stepping back. You are meeting everyone, taking all your information, and you have 90 days to set your strategic vision. You have 90 days to identify your research agenda.
You have 90 days to corral your board. I had 90 days to get appointed, so even the context of how you get the role is critically important, but at the end of that 90 days, there's no, even if you aren't transparently saying it, you have to be laser-focused, that I was like, all right, high-impact tutoring, reopening the school systems, pushing on literacy, and I was clear about what I couldn't get done. Like, I'm going to lay the foundation for lots of things, but like, I didn't take on numeracy in my three years. I needed to get the schools open, increase our NAEP scores, invest in literacy, and like, do a lot of healing, because we had been closed for two years, but I think those first 90 days are, it's like a marriage, like in 90 days, they're looking back at you the same way you're looking at them, deciding if we made a good match, and I think some sitting chiefs miss that you don't have a lot of time, because the politics are always moving, even if you feel stable.
Yeah, thank you for saying that, because it is, we have 36 gubernatorial elections this year, so it, you know, if you're thinking of being chief, you should be listening to these ladies, because they've done the job. And it's critical, it's critical that you really lay the foundation. So as we start talking policy tools, you all have done it, have experience around it, but what really, what are the outcomes that you think you can take to scale with policy? If you had to name one lever that you've used, or one decision, one structural change that moved the needle during each of your tenure, what is that?
Amy, do you wanna get started? Shocker, data as a tool of improvement, right? How do you empower people with good information so they can make better decisions? And that commitment to transparency and being honest with people, especially yourself, about what's working, what's not working, and creating urgency.
Yeah, I think the through line to my current life, I run the Center for Education Policy Research at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, that's a mouthful, but my policy tool was the intersection of research and practice. And so we made seismic investments during the time of recovery in all of our academic interventions, and every single one of them was tied to a research partner. And so in very real time, and our research partner was Stanford, let me be clear, but in very real time, I was getting third-party guidance and validation on the investments we were making. And so I pivoted when necessary, we doubled down in certain areas, we strategically abandoned certain things.
And the role that evidence played in my practice was mission-critical as we were trying to recover the district, and I would argue the significant gains we saw both during my tenure that have sustained is directly connected to the role that research played in our day-to-day policy-making decisions. Could you also add, before Deb goes on, a little bit about your school models and your equity work? Oh, yeah, I mean, it's so interesting. In a previous session, we were talking about this word equity, and I really actually think it's your core values aligned with what the expectations are that your community has for its children that I don't know that I ever walked around saying it all the time, but we were really clear about, so DC, fun fact, we have just as much school choice as you would see in New Orleans.
We have a voucher system, we have a charter system, we have a robust private school system, and then we have traditional DCPS children, and across all of those school models, I was very clear that I wanted any student in any of those models to have access to an excellent education, and our question was how do we know? How do we evaluate? How do we make the investments? How, at the state level, do we lean in where we can to push that message forward and then make deep investments along all sides?
And so, with literacy, we didn't just stand up comprehensive literacy investments in DCPS, we stood it across all of our schools. When we made grants available, we made them available to the extent that we could across all of our schools, and so you remain the autonomy at the LEA level to say what are you gonna pick up? What are you gonna put down? But at the state level, we were very, very clear that these options are for all of you to explore, and I think the best example, Friendship Public Charter Schools had as much dramatic gains in literacy as DCPS, and it truly is because both the operators are very competitive, but when we stood up our comprehensive literacy plan, they took heed to all of the state level advice and guidance on how they should structure their instructional program, and I think that's the right role that state commissioners play in that conversation in an environment that has an active school choice community where parents really do vote with their feet, and in DC, parents have a lot of choice.
Yeah. So Deb, tell us about your tenure, and I want you also to talk about accountability because you've done some hard things. That's always a tricky one. Yes.
Well, so my perspective, I think, is gonna be different because I was state chief in DC more than 20 years ago, and I was state chief in Rhode Island more than 10 years ago so I have this distance that feels a little bit different, and so it's harder both because I'm old and I forget, but also because I think back, and you wonder what does last, what does make a difference, what sustains, and so I think about the work that we did on graduation requirements in Rhode Island, and then I wonder, was there a stage that that set for the incredible work that Angelica and her team have led on graduation change in requirements in Rhode Island? I'm not sure. I hope so, but you kind of try to play that long game. There was work that we did in Rhode Island that was started as this tiny bit of work around what we called at the time blended learning.
It was sort of the early beginning of how do we use technology to more personalize learning for kids, and it was this sort of side thing that we started. It wasn't a big policy effort. It wasn't a huge, it wasn't about accountability. It was about opportunity.
It was about kind of tapping into the entrepreneurial spirit of teachers and leaders, superintendents, and principals in the state, and it took off like crazy, and I think in so many ways, I don't, and again, Angelica, I don't know what has stayed, but at the time, it elevated Rhode Island to being a place that was a leader in that kind of work, and it wasn't because we said everyone has to do this or here's the policy and now you have this much time or anything. It was because we gave some incentives. We set the conditions. We gave some opportunity, and people got excited and rose to that level, so with the benefit of distance, decades and a decade, I think about it a lot differently.
My guess is that if we had a bottle of wine here that Amy and I could have a lot of conversations about accountability, because I think we have some of the same but a lot of different thoughts about that, because I think that the era of accountability, which is when I was a chief, when we were really heavy accountability and believing that that was such a huge lever that I still believe it's incredibly necessary to have accurate information about where we are because the point that you described from a broad scale level, we all need to know where we are so we can figure out where we're going, but also I think individual children and families need to know where they are as well, so I think there are a lot of reasons, but I also think that we very much at that time were very much over-indexing on what we thought that accountability systems would get people to do and under-indexing on the supports and opportunities and incentives that I saw make a much bigger difference in the same amount of time. So let's get that bottle of wine. Yeah, I was gonna say, I wanna watch this conversation. So part of being in these positions and why it's so frustrating to have them be such short tenure so many times is that you have to be, education should be a learning enterprise in and of itself, right?
Why conferences like this matter is so that you can reflect and think, so I agree with what you just said and so in Virginia, what we changed when we redid our accountability system is that we don't call it an accountability system, we call it a school performance and support framework for exactly that piece is that there was so much that was right during the No Child Left Behind era, in fact, it is the only time that we've had 20 years of constant rising of all student achievement for every cohort. We have not seen that again and we have now just erased in the last seven years, nine years, all of that progress, which is a travesty and so why we went back and doubled down on standards assessment accountability is it works and we know that we didn't do all the things right in terms of actually using data not as a hammer but as a flashlight and so how we designed our quote unquote accountability system, which we do not call it that, was that the purpose of that data was to identify how well every school was serving every student so that we could prioritize the resources of time, energy, and money and things that worked, evidence, Christina, to the schools that needed the most help, the students who needed the most help, the teachers who needed the most help so that every single school and student could be on track. So I think, again, how do we learn from things that maybe didn't work the whole way and that's the beauty of why we need to go back and learn from predecessors and what happened is that we need to get continuously smart and be thoughtful. Yes, but let's get that wine.
So I'm gonna add, and I'll take a glass since I'm still on the job. But I will say that, yeah. That accountability that you did lay the groundwork, I want you guys to know that it still does matter. That's what I was gonna say.
It still does matter. I'll give you a very clear example. In Rhode Island, we have this school that's high achieving statewide and they could not get a five star because their multilingual learners were not doing well. The whole state was gonna come after me to change the accountability system and do this and tweak that.
And I was like, well, no, I think the accountability system is doing exactly what it's supposed to do, right? And guess what happened this year? They're five stars because they had to.
pay attention to these students. So I think that, you know, I think it's really important for us to, I think there has to be a balance, right?
But I do think that it does work. I can tell you that those kids are no longer being ignored in that school. They are really, they are pushing the envelope with the things that they've had to learn and do. So I wanna thank you for that.
And I don't, we cannot allow ourselves to go off into this fictitious world where we wanna give everyone a trophy. I think it is an actual sin and a shame if you give a child a high school diploma and it's not worth the paper it's printed on. And I was that child. So I believe in accountability aggressively because parents need to know, and you have to believe there is not one parent in this room that cannot process the difference between my child going to a one-star school and a five-star school.
So we can call it stars, clovers, happy face, sad face. Parents deserve to know what their child is learning, the rate with which they are learning. And in a conference like this, the role that AI, innovation, and accountability in the future of our education system, there's no more moment than now that we could actually normalize these conversations. And I think that is one of the biggest learnings that we did a lot of things to systems as opposed to doing things with systems.
And so if we dramatically rethought the way we talked about school performance at every level to every stakeholder, I think we would have maybe lemonade instead of wine as we talk about the performance of our children. Because some children in this country are getting access to an excellent education and far too many more are not. And it's our job to bridge that gap. And I actually am really excited about the role that AI can play in that conversation.
From cognitive-based assessments to the future that it could play in learning management systems, literally to the future it can play in lesson planning. There's just so many different ways the tools could produce better outcomes for children that's grounded in accountability. So I wanna ask you guys a question because I think we all know that we have these policy ideas, we put them in place. But the most difficult thing is implementation.
It is really difficult. Like we are now in the process in Rhode Island, we've passed a law on everybody has to be certified in the science of reading. We also have high quality curriculum. But implementation is so hard.
We have just created a tool in Rhode Island for implementation of high quality curriculum and the science of reading. So but what happens is that once you have these policy, the state is a place where a lot of these policies go to die, right? How did you fight against that? Like how did you keep alive what you knew was the right thing for your individual states or roles?
Do you wanna start, Deb? We'll go this way. So I spent the last, well minus the last two, but for eight and a half years was a district superintendent after I was state chief in DC and Rhode Island. And so my thinking about state policy and these systems and it shifted when all of a sudden I was just so focused every day on what we needed to do for kids in our system.
And I just really needed the state to not get in our way. Like I just needed them to like remove barriers, not get in our way, not make it harder. And yes, to the extent that there were tools and systems and resources and things that they could do, great. And so when I think about implementation, I think about it with my district superintendent hat on.
And I think about the hat that my principals wore every day and the hat that the teachers wore every day. It's so much more, they're not thinking about policy every day. Policy has to set the conditions. Policy has to smooth the path.
Policy has to raise expectations. And policy has to be clear about what needs to happen. But otherwise, we just need to let the folks then implement and support their implementation. So it really changed my view about being a state chief after I was out of that for another 10 years.
I'd say in hopefully 60 seconds, it's also just clarifying what the role of the state chief is. So your role literally is to create the policy conditions for your LEAs to thrive. For us in D.C., I can tell you, I mean we made seismic investments in high impact tutoring. But I knew firsthand, oh you know who should not monitor implementation?
The state. So while we were standing up grants for our districts, we also stood up grants for non-profit organizations to receive funds to manage implementation. So I can tell you that City Tutor did the design sprints. City Tutor could tell me which schools had which dosage at which rates.
Because that's not the work. Well let me, some would argue that is the work of the state. I've not seen many states do it well because states are not staffed and funded in ways that districts are funded. So you've gotta know enough to know what part am I gonna keep super, super close at the state.
That is the policy process. That's the legislative process. That's fighting for money. That's being the last stop when children make really, really poor decisions.
Or parents do. But I think we have to dramatically change the role that people perceive the state in playing in implementation. And so for us, we had transparent dashboards on our spending. We had transparent dashboards on the progress that we were making.
We had a really clear strategic plan. But when it was time for implementation, I was really mindful of which partners the state needed to partner with to ensure that implementation was done well. That's right. We've got two quick examples.
Thank you. Two quick examples. One, the state role is to set out what students are gonna learn to provide that transparency and accountability system so that everyone knows how well every school's doing it. And then third, the one that we have failed consistently on is then supporting and building the capacity to do that.
And so one of the things that we did is we rebuilt our entire agency to be a learning enterprise itself. And to give a very tangible example, in our old system, you would identify schools that weren't ready, and we would label them. And then we'd make them do stupid things like show up in meetings on Saturday morning and basically have detention. And no one got any smarter.
Everybody hated it. Nothing changed. And instead, what we said is, well, what would be useful? We don't understand why the data.
So we are now changed everything. Every single person in the agency has a new description that describes how they impact student learning and what they do. So we've changed. We also, I think, are the second state to get EdFlex flexibility from the US Department of Education and we are rethinking how we're deploying money in a way that is supporting and building the capacity and doing coaching and letting the local level do what it's supposed to do, which is the how.
How do you personalize learning? How do you address where there are things? How do you keep doing what's working well? And the state's role is to, one, stay out of the way of the good things happening and when things are not working well, to say, how do we help you?
What do you need? And so we've also doing a whole training of coaching on how do you interpret the data so you can say, so what does this data tell us? And now what are we gonna do differently at the local level? And it's a different mindset.
And my second thing I'll just say, part of what I loved about being Secretary of Education is that it was about silo busting. And so much about implementation is that in government, everything is siloed by money streams. And I would find that we were trying to do all this pathways work. And I said, this is ridiculous.
We're pulling together a weekly meeting with all the agency heads that I call the talent leads, like all the people that were about investing in people, from the economic development team to the early childhood team. And it would only be the agency heads talking. And I said, the only agenda here is, what are you working on that everybody at this table needs to know about so that we can start doing it? The second hour of that weekly meeting was with our teams.
And what I realized is the most valuable thing that we actually got done is that we exchanged names, emails, and phone numbers. Because people did not actually know who was on the other end of dual enrollment. Guess what? You can't have a really effective dual enrollment program if you don't actually know the people that are responsible for it at the community college system when you're doing it from K-12.
So that's about thinking about, what are we all trying to do? What are those big, hairy, audacious goals? And how do we do it together? Thank you, Amy.
So I'm going to ask you guys a very quick question. And then I'm going into a lightning round. So for everyone in this room, philanthropists, policy makers, district leaders, what's one thing that you would like them to understand about educational leadership at the state level? What would that be?
One thing. That's so hard. Goodness. It's not just like a bureaucratic sinkhole.
There's a lot of innovation. Actually, I'll reframe my answer. There's a tremendous amount of power and possibility at the state level. We really have a lot of access to things that can move the needle for children.
Great. I'm so excited about the work that I see state leaders doing right now on Helica, the work that you all are doing in Rhode Island. Dr. Jenner is here, the work that's happening in Indiana.
And what I see that's different that I think is so powerful that is one thing I think.
about right now is the way that the work that you all are leading is all, it's like the whole system and not just a project on teacher quality and a thing about standards and a thing about this, but it's like how does the portrait of a graduate and the accountability system and the high school graduation requirements, how do they all fit together? Okay, so I'm going to move us to the lightning round, sorry Amy. So here's the question and you guys are going to answer it very quickly. The thing that you wish someone had told you before you took this job?
Very quick, one sentence answer. So I'll start and this will be my last answer too. The power of the status quo is unbelievably strong and you cannot be a change agent by yourself and if you believe that change needs to happen, it is about bringing everyone together. I'll go super quick.
For as much as I got done, I should have gotten even more done. Like I should have pushed a thousand times harder because when I look back, I'm like I could have gotten, I could have put way more points on the board for kids and I think I did really well. That it is really, really difficult, but also the best work in the world and really, really important and hang in there. Alright, what is one thing that even though it's popular in education right now you're a little skeptical about?
Teachers degrees for educators. The data says they don't add value. I'll say accountability for all instructional models. You guys read into that.
I think anything receiving public dollars should be evaluated and we should transparently know if it works or doesn't work for kids. Do with that what you will. I think we have to move to a new generation of accountability and assessment and transcend Who I'm here representing is about to release a new paper on that and that paper I think is going to be important in the field. And the future of assessment.
There you go. And you said that with a lot of enthusiasm. The last question, very quickly, lightning round. The thing that you're most hopeful about in the next five years for our students.
Oh, this. The power of fusion. I dramatically think that these AI tools in the right hands of educators could transform who has access to a quality education in this country. And it will be a sin and a shame if we don't pull that off.
I think I'm excited about that, too. And what I'm excited about are the parts of it that allow us to get the administrative stuff and let the human interaction part rise more to the top. I'm excited about the fact that we have a growing amount of proof points of showing that when we break up the one size fits all system, awesome results do. And so we're going to have more and more systems giving themselves permission to color outside the lines and that will help kids.
All right. So join me in thanking these ladies for being here today.
This transcript was put together by our friend Philippos Savvides from Arizona State University. The original transcript and additional summit resources are available on GitHub. Licensed under CC BY 4.0.