A (2:35)

Yeah, thank you so much. So I'm currently an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley. And before that, I did my joint PhD in sociology and Comparative Human development at the University of Chicago. And one of the things that I remember when I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago was this was during the pandemic. And so I was listening a lot to podcasts and to podcasts such as New books in education or New Books in sociology. And so being able to do this now feels like a full circle moment for me, being able to share about my own work and my own book, Subtle How Local Organizations Shape US Education. Currently I teach courses in organizational theory and education policy and causal inference. And this really marries both of my interests, which is the study of organizations outside schools and also the study of schools as organizations.

C (3:37)

Yeah. Fascinating. And can you also tell us a little bit more about what motivated you to write this specific book?

A (3:45)

Yeah. So what really motivated me were two things. One was a theoretical thing that was interesting for me. The other is a more empirical reason of having access to certain types of data. So on the one hand, I was really interested in what was happening to schools, but from the perspective of those outside it. So researchers, philanthropic organizations, nonprofits, and community based organizations. Now, the thing is, we often study what happens in schools, what students are doing, what teachers are doing, what parents are doing, and what school leaders are doing. But we don't often have a good understanding of all of these organizations outside schools that affect what happens within them. And so that's the thing that I was theoretically interested in. That was the thing that I thought had large consequences for our deeper understanding of the education system. So that's one thing that has led to this book on how local organizations shape U.S. education. The other thing that has led to this book is more empirical. And as I mentioned, I was doing graduate school during the pandemic, and there weren't a lot of access to schools and school districts and so on. And so what opened up for me were all of these research organizations and philanthropic organizations that I reached out to and I said, hey, can I study what you're doing? And so I learned more about these dropout prediction and dropout prevention systems called early warning indicators. And then I became fascinated by the people and the organizations that have created them and that have brought about certain changes in the public school system through these early warning indicators.

C (6:02)

Yeah, thanks. That's. That's very helpful. So just for listeners to know, so the, the book is centered around, like yo said, one educational problem and is around dropout rates. So I'd like to ask you to, to provide us with some, some context and describe this, this educational issue in American schools.

A (6:24)

Yeah. So one of the things we don't get to appreciate as much is how much dropout rates, high school dropout rates. And in the United States has changed. In the 2000s, almost a thousand schools graduated less than half of its freshman class. So in a thousand schools. Think of it this way. In a thousand schools, if you have 100 students who are entering freshman class, only less than 50 of them graduate in senior year. And so these schools are sometimes called dropout factories. In Chicago, they had a 52% graduation rate in 2002. In Philadelphia, they had a 54% graduation rate. But by 2024, even with a global pandemic, we've seen double digit increases in graduation rates such that Chicago had a graduation rate of 86% in 2004 and Philadelphia had an 84% graduation rate. It's not 100%, but it's much, much more improved than what we've had. And so dropping out was a real big problem in the early 2000s. And dropping out of high school was a problem that almost seemed unsolvable because our view is that dropping out is caused by things outside schools, by factors that are beyond the control of teachers, beyond the control of schools, whether that's because of poverty or peer pressure or some sort of motivation, et cetera, et cetera. But what researchers during that period learned was that there were signals that you can see as early as ninth grade. And so those signals were the things that researchers tried to make informed decisions with and support schools. So if, for example, you're exhibiting 90% or less than 90% attendance rate, then that's a signal. And so what can the schools do in order to help you? If you're receiving an F in specific subjects like math, science or reading, what can teachers do to intervene early on at 9th grade to prevent you from dropping out by 12th grade? And so that's really the background of this, that this was happening during a particular point in time and we needed certain tools that can help students during this time.

C (9:25)

Yeah, that's very helpful. So just to clarify for a listener, so those signals are those what you're calling early warning indicators, Right? Ewes that we're going to be referring throughout this conversation, am I correct?

A (9:37)

Yes. So these are what you call early warning indicators, these dropout prediction systems. And these early warning indicators, or EWIs, really use attendance, behavior and course performance or grades to predict who are at risk of dropping out. Think of them as dashboards with students names and data flags that identify which students are in the red, which students are in the yellow, and which students are in the green in terms of whether they are off track or on track to graduating. So you might have a sense of, oh, if someone keeps on failing their quizzes and so on, we have a way of identifying, oh, this person is at risk of dropping out. And because we're able to identify these individuals who are at risk of dropping out, we can provide certain interventions, we can provide certain supports for these students who have been flagged to be off track. And you might think of it as, oh, teachers already know who's at risk. But actually that's not the case. Because one of the things that's different with going into high school is that you have a lot more teachers who only see a part of you during the day. It's not like in elementary school where you have one teacher the whole day. Think of Ms. Barbara, right in Abbott elementary, and she has the kids, the same kids, the whole day. That's not the case in high school. In high school, you have a teacher for at most an hour and you don't get a full picture of the student by just having that one hour with them. And so these early warning indicators at ninth grade at the start of high school was really helpful in preventing students from falling off track.

C (11:44)

Yeah, thanks, that's very helpful. And so before we discuss more about your main findings in the book, I just wanted to ask one more context question. Any light of the fact that a lot of our listeners are researchers, I wanted to give you the chance to talk a little bit more about the methods and the data behind your book. And you conducted several interviews and analysis of thousands of documents in Chicago, Philadelphia and New York City. I wonder if you could tell us a little bit more about that.

A (12:15)

Yeah, for sure. And it's really a 25 year history that I tried to map out from 2000 to 2025, understanding how early warning indicators developed and change in three urban school districts, Chicago, Philadelphia and New York. And how did I do this 25 year history? I tried reaching out to different organizations and different individuals. So I've interviewed almost 100 individuals across these three cities who are working on these early warning indicators. And on top of that, I've also compiled more than 3,000 pages of documents to understand how these early warning indicators have been changing through time. Whether these are documents from the researchers, whether these are documents from the school district and the guidelines that they produced, et cetera, et cetera. And so bringing together oral history, if you will, and also thousands of pages of documents to understand the fuller arc and the hidden actors. The Subtle Webs, as this book is entitled, is really for me, a fascinating way of understanding education and education policies.

C (13:49)

So you start the book in the first two chapters by telling the story of how actors inside and outside of schools make sense of dropout data. Right. So you start by describing how EWIs are used in practice, showing that some users go beyond prevention and are adapted in the context by context basis. So could you give us some examples of how such EWIs are used in different ways in practice?

A (14:24)

Yeah. So this is really great because one of the things I started so that the first chapter of the book is really a chapter called Preventing Dropouts, where I looked at how six Chicago schools use these early warning indicators. And one of the things that I thought was really surprising was that early warning indicators was not just one thing, it was many things. And it also changed throughout time. So let me give you maybe three examples here of how these early warning indicators were used. One of the first uses of early warning indicators was as an accountability metric. So it's a yearly accountability metric such that if 90% of students are on track, then you get certain number of points. You get five points in the high school accountability metric. This is for the school itself. And if you only have from 80% to 90% on track, then you get four points, et cetera, etcetera. And one of the things that people were scared about was if you have this metric where you're being judged for the number of students you have on track, it could easily be done that you finagle with your numbers and say, I'm just going to let all my students pass so that it's easier for us to get the required points that we need for the students who are on track. And in as much as this was a fear that people had, and many people actually had this fear, what was really interesting was that it wasn't so much leading teachers to unscrupulously pass students as it was, and we discovered this, that teachers were being prevented from unscrupulously failing students. There's a difference there a bit. When before it was easy for you to dole out a failing mark and say, hey, you didn't do anything. You deserve an F with the early warning indicators. They were like asking the teachers, have you exhausted all, all possibilities in order to support this kid? Because now we know that if you performed really badly in ninth grade, that your odds, your probability of graduating in four years is greatly reduced. And so it really helped in some schools prevent teachers from unscrupulously failing from. It led teachers to do all sorts of interventions to help them support students in the best ways they can. So that's one aspect of it. The next is that these early warning indicators were used as a just in time data system. It's a just in time system to identify students who are at risk. And so they have all of these different things that they had. One was called the freshman watch list. And what the freshman watch list was was it was a list of students and their GPAs from 8th grade as they enter into 9th grade in the high schools that they were in. And the students or the students are labeled in terms of who are potentially at risk or potentially off track of graduating. And it gave teachers a sense of who should we be focusing on? Who are the people who may need a lot more supports and interventions. And on top of that, they also have a five week dashboard of students who are with their data on grades like the quizzes that they've taken at a particular marking period, they can identify. Oh, here's Johnny, who I thought was performing really well in my class and I'm teaching social studies, but I didn't realize he was really having difficulties in math and science. And that's the thing that made him off track. And so what can I do to Johnny to support him because he's off track currently? And so it's this just in time system of identifying students who are falling off track and catching them early on at ninth grade so that you can prevent further slippage of students. Now the last thing is one thing that they've realized is in certain schools you have more than 20% of students who are off track. And if you have a school with 1,000 students, 20% of 1,000 is like 200 students. And so in those instances, it's not just about identifying which students need support, it's identify what can we do as a school to improve. And so I'll give the example of one school in Chicago where they saw that a lot of students were absent during their first session and they were wondering, why are there so many students who are absent during the first session? And what they realized was that the first mission was P.E. physical education. And when they interviewed the students, why are you not attending PE? They realized that the students, some students had some difficulties in terms of getting to a laundry facility and that they didn't want to change clothes. It was that simple. It wasn't because they, they didn't like school or anything. It was a simple reason of they didn't want to change clothes because they didn't have any, they had some trouble with finances, etc. Etc. And so being able to understand that and try to create systems to address that instead of just addressing individual problems of students, I think is what the EWIs have amounted to.

C (21:40)

Now I wanted to shift to the perspective from out of school players. Right. So chapter two of the book is quite fascinating to me. So it provides a history of how these out of school organizations have shaped the development of EWEs. And I wanted to ask you, who are those out of school players you have identified and how have they shaped the development of ewis?

A (22:09)

Yeah, so really fascinating story of these civic organizations, these research school support and philanthropic organizations that tried to affect what happens in schools. Now these organizations, though, we have to remember, came up during a particular moment in time. So I'll bring US back to 1987 in Chicago. So the US education secretary then, William Bennett, said, the Chicago Public Schools is the worst school district in the country. If it's not the worst, I don't know what else is bad. And then someone from the mayor's office came to the secretary, William Bennett, and said, we're not the worst school district. Detroit is the worst school district. And so it's really this race to the bottom, as I mentioned in the book. And these organizations thought that we need to support the school district. And why did these organizations think of it as like large philanthropic organizations, as research organizations and school support or these intermediary organizations? Why did they want to support what was happening in these school districts? It was really about pride of place. We don't want to be the worst school district in the country, Chicago said. And so what they did is to create all of these different studies to understand how can we improve the system. And so this is really the start of what are called place based research practice partnerships. This was around the early 90s to the 2000s when these types of organizations were being created. And then you have these school support or intermediary organizations that provide data coaches and data strategists and supports to different schools to help them create new programs to prevent students from dropping out. And then you have philanthropies that are trying to provide funding that are giving all sorts of grants to these places. And what I show is that there are certain epicenters for change. And I studied Chicago, Philadelphia and New York City. And these places in particular was important because they had these University partners, they have researchers, they have large enough student populations that help with getting people interested in supporting the students there, and that there are great needs that need to be addressed in those different places. And so understanding how you have these organizations that were creating the research, who are starting the technologies, who are working with the schools and providing additional funding to the school district are really things that are happening during that particular point in time. And these early warning indicators is just one example of how these organizations are supporting initiatives in education.

C (25:44)

You talked about your contexts of study, Chicago, Philadelphia and New York. Did you notice anything interesting, any interesting differences across those contexts that you wanted to highlight today?

A (25:59)

Yeah. So Chicago, because it was starting up, and Chicago and Philadelphia in some sense because it was really starting up and they were learning things as they were discovering things about early warning indicators. And so in that sense, a lot of organizations are a lot more emergent. They were coming up almost ad hoc with certain programs, with certain ideas, with certain things they want to test. And I'd contrast that with New York, where they had a template. The New York research organization, which is called the Research alliance for New York City Schools, was really patterned after the Chicago Consortium on School Research because they have a template from Chicago. They were a lot more intentional about how they were going to bring about research or in what sorts of research have the potential for the most impact. And so that's where you can see some difference between these cities in terms of how intentional, how systematic, and how strategic they are. Sometimes it's a function of just the timing because certain organizations are there earlier, and so they needed that time to understand and to test out and so on. And some organizations have certain templates that they can work from that changes, and that supports them with strategically moving forward with the initiatives that they have.

C (27:50)

You also spend some time reflecting on the advantages and risks or of having those outside organizations shaping school practices. I wanted to also give you the chance to speak about that a little bit now.

A (28:06)

Yeah. So when we think of these outside research philanthropic and nonprofit organizations, we might think of them as being just all net good. You have a lot more capacities because of research, you have a lot more expertise, you have a lot more financial resources, etc. Etc. But these organizations also have certain risks, and we need to be realistic about those risks. One would be the inequitable distribution of these organizations. If you have districts that have these research organizations, philanthropies and so on, and you have the next district that doesn't have these organizations supporting their work, then that can lead to inequitable distribution of the resources that are there. Another way you can think about it is that these organizations are able to create new innovations, that they're able to provide some sort of stability with the initiatives that are being created because they have the resources to do it. But on the other end, they can be institutional challengers, that they challenge public education institutions. And in that sense, they're less about stabilizing what's happening in the public school system and more destabilizing it by becoming these institutional challengers that change how we view and how people work in these places. And so it's really this almost like two sides of the same coin. On one hand you have expertise and support and resources, but on the other hand that can lead to inequitable distribution. On one hand you have innovation and changes and supports. But those same innovations, supports, and changes can as well destabilize how public education is being run. And so what I think is necessary here is an honest understanding of the possibilities of these organizations and also an assessment of the risk so that we can prevent these risks from overtaking the good that can come from the support that these organizations are able to give.

C (30:42)

Yeah, now I wanted to shift to the second part of the book. So there you provide some theories to make sense of these stories that you described in the first part. So that is, you're asking the question, what are the processes through which outside organizations really shape school practices? And one of the first process that you emphasize is how they influence this concept of institutional logics. So what do you mean by institutional logics, this sociology concept that some of our listeners might be familiar with? And can you give us some example of how those outside of out of school organizations have influenced the creation of those institutional logics about EWIs?

A (31:32)

Yeah. So an institutional logic is really the way we see a problem or frame an issue. Let's be concrete here, and I'll give the example of dropping out. The problem of dropping out can be considered a bureaucratic problem. That's a logic by which you can think of dropping out. Is the problem of dropping out a bureaucratic organizational problem? And because it is a bureaucratic organizational problem, then what can we do about it is to have more accountability, we have more teachers who are accountable to the system, etc. Etc. But another way of viewing dropping out or the problem of dropping out is as a community problem. If the problem of dropping out is a community problem, then the solution is not just creating all sorts of systems of accountability as if they were check marks of things. We need to do, but rather improving the relationships within that community. And so outside organizations are able to shape how we frame an issue, how we see a problem. And there are certain ways that this happens. You have an organization, for example, like a research organization, that says, hey, we haven't been looking at the problem of dropping out. We don't even realize that this is a problem that we need to solve because we think that I don't have any tools to solve the problem of dropping up. Another way of thinking about this is the logic before of dropping out is we don't have anything we can do about it. But researchers were able to say, hey, let's change the way we frame it as from we don't have anything we can do about it to there are signals as early as ninth grade and we can do something about that. And so these organizations, like research organizations, like organizations working within schools, are able to affect how teachers, how school leaders are framing the problem of dropping out in such a way that you can create new solutions, whether it's an organizational solution or a community solution that can support students be prevented from dropping out.

C (34:25)

And you also discuss how different network structures of those out of school organizations are shaped differently, the practices inside schools. Could you walk us through some of those differences? Right. This is also the chapter where you kind of explain why you call the book subtle webs. So what is it subtle about those webs that made you call them bad? Yeah.

A (34:55)

So when we think of networks, right, we think of organizations and individuals that are connected to each other. And we seem to. We might think that they're all random, but one of the things that I've realized from looking at these different organizations is that individuals are pretty intentional about the network templates that they create. And so there are two big network templates that are created. One is called the hub and spoke network, or what I call the orb web. And the hub and spoke network is where you have an organization that provides to the different partner organizations the things that they need, Whether this is some sort of technology tool, some sort of dashboard, some sort of professional development opportunity. So you have a hub and you are able to provide services, tools, et cetera, to the spokes of that network. The other way of thinking about hub and spokes is that these organizations aren't so much giving as it is receiving. And one example I give of that are these organizations that are able to receive and integrate data from the different data sources in order to create harmonized data that provide you with better insights on how students are performing. So that's one model. The other model is what I called a tangled web where different individuals crisscross each other in order to become more embedded with each other. And so in this crisscrossing of lines, you have a lot of layers being created such that these layers help schools understand that there are many resources at their disposal that can support them. So I'll give the example of Chicago where you have a school that is supported not just by other researchers, schools supported by nonprofits, but also schools themselves being supported by other high schools with them. And so this crisscrossing, this tanglement, this embeddedness with each other are able to individuals are able to gain access to more resources. Now, you asked me about why is it a subtle web? What makes the web so subtle? When I was interviewing some of the teachers, one of the things that I thought was really interesting was that not a lot of them would talk about the influence of these research organizations or these school support organizations. It was as if they came up with the idea on their own. And that's the subtlety of this web that you have these organizations that are working within schools and school districts and people are almost unaware of them, that they're almost like hidden actors in this system. And so that's what is so subtle about it. And in the same way, that's the thing that's so powerful about them, that they're able to support what happens in schools and school districts while keeping a low profile, while doing it in very systematic and also discrete ways. They're not ones to have this whole revolutionary shift as policies often are created. These are more or less individuals who are there day in and day out. It's a more gradual sense of change rather than a more abrupt sense. And that's what makes this web so subtle. And I argue what makes them quite successful.

C (39:34)

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A (39:50)

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C (39:51)

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A (40:32)

Yeah. So one of the things that really happens in schools is that whenever you introduce something new, there's often resistance to it. And one of the things we say is important is that we need to get people's buy in when there's resistance to an initiative. Now in as much as getting people's buy in is important. One of the quotes that really stuck with me from one of the people I interviewed who was a director of this school support organization was this. She said, I have to work on teachers actions to change their beliefs. Often we think, oh, we need to change people's beliefs first and then their actions will follow soon. Here it's actually the other way around. She said that I have to work on their actions to change their beliefs. And that's what these organizations were able to do. They were able to introduce these new practices, these new routines. One example of a new routine was that teachers in the same grade level were now meeting with each other to talk about the students that they had together. Now what was happening from before? From before, you often met with teachers of the same subject matter. So the math teacher in 9th grade, 10th grade, 11th grade, and 12th grade met with each other to discuss math together. What didn't really happen before was this idea of grade level meeting to discuss students that you share with each other. But what was being introduced by these organizations were these grade level meetings with each other so that teachers can talk about the students that might be off track. And by introducing these new routines of identifying students, of grouping students who are at risk and trying to identify what can we do about them by saying, hey, let's just try this out, that you are able to address some of the resistance and that when people see that there are progress or there is some form of progress that they see and some form of change in how the students are reacting, that that can sustain this belief that there's something here worth doing. And so you have routines that are being introduced that try to address this resistance and in the process change people's belief of what's possible to make a difference.

C (43:43)

Even though you're talking about the local level, talking about Chicago, Philadelphia and New York City, you also spend some time connecting those dynamics to the federal level, showing how those local organizations can shape federal policy as well. So could you tell us a little bit more about this as well?

A (44:03)

Yeah. So the Main argument of the book I make is that in a decentralized system like US public education, things change less through top down policy mandates or bottom up teacher social movements, but more outside in as organizations outside schools affect what happens in schools and school districts. And these organizations are themselves connected to each other. And so it's this web of organizations across various local school districts that are in conversation that are making an impact on each other that becomes a critical way by which innovations and by which initiatives are able to spread. And so you have one example of that through these organizations that are mushrooming across places, whether these are research, practice, partnerships or intermediary organizations. Another way that this becomes important is as the districts that have these outside organizations become a proof of concept for other districts to follow. And so if you have a school district like Chicago, Philadelphia or New York with 50% graduation rate in the early 2000s, and then now you have 86% graduation rates, people take notice of that. One of the informants I had said, if we had done this in a wealthy suburb, it would have been a lot less interesting. And it's that sense of us, these large school districts that experience a lot of problems are able to change and sustain those changes that they become a national poster child or a proof of concept for others to follow. And then finally, there's also this new infrastructure that can support these local initiatives, whether these are national philanthropic organizations like the Gates foundation, or national systems, or national agencies like the Institute for Educational Sciences. And both of these organizations have provided supports and funding to early warning indicator work across different local areas as well. And so it's not necessarily a large national policy that gets created as it is these various local initiatives that are able to come about and are able to create coherent changes across disparate areas.

C (47:01)

Yeah, this is very helpful. And yeah, so as it should be clear to listeners by now, the book is very rich and there's a lot of lessons to unpack. So I wanted to ask for your help in helping us unpacking some of those lessons. Specifically, what would you want educators and policymakers to take from the book?

A (47:25)

A couple of things I want them to take. First of all, I want people to take a new way of thinking about change in a decentralized system. When we think of change in a decentralized system, we really limit ourselves to thinking about top down and bottom up perspectives. Here I show the importance of thinking of the outsider and how these organizations that are often outside schools, that are often marginal and that often don't have as much in terms of funding and so on, can create an infrastructure, an invisible infrastructure to support what happens in schools, school districts. And this is particularly important in a context like the United States where this decentralized system can lead to a lot of districts doing their own thing. And in as much as you want local participation, you also want some sort of coherence across the larger education system in the US and so trying to understand the impact of these organizations is one the other lesson. Here is a lesson for researchers to highlight, to study, and to give a better sense and accounting of what these organizations are actually doing, what researchers, what nonprofits, what philanthropic organizations are doing to make an impact in schools and school systems. And then finally, I want to highlight that in as much as these organizations have opened up these possibilities for support and change, they are not without potential risks. And the book documents those potential risks that come about with it. And so we need to be understanding both in terms of policymakers, organizational leaders, and school educators. We need to understand how there can be this balance influence of these organizations on public education, that these organizations are able to support democratic schooling, that these organizations are partners rather than challengers to public institutions, and that these organizations provide a space for innovation without leading to inequities in the system.

C (50:05)

So we've taken up a lot of your time already. So to wrap up a final question, what are some projects and research questions you're now interested in exploring?

A (50:17)

So right now, coming from this historical study, I'm really looking at quantitatively, what are the consequences of having these types of organizations? And so I'm using IRS nonprofit tax data to see the impact of the density of education nonprofits and the specific types of education nonprofits on the student test score outcomes per district. And so looking at that across the United States, what we've been doing right now is we've been geocoding these IRS nonprofit tax data, trying to relate that to the district that it belongs to. So using the longitude and latitude or using the zip code, and then trying to relate that in this panel data set that we have of student test scores and trying to understand what is it or what types of organizations can have an impact on student test scores and if these organizations themselves even have an impact in the first place. And so that's the next big project, and I'm really excited to be digging more into that, and you'll probably see some of that in the future.

C (51:37)

Yos, thank you for being on the podcast today. I very much enjoyed our conversation. We have been talking about the book set of webs, how Local Organizations Shape Us Education by Professor IO Srinidad and published in 2025 by Oxford University Press. Thank you for listening. And until next.