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Innovating School Business: Insights from ASBO International’s Innovation Hour
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- [00:02]
John Brucato
You're listening to ASBO International's School Business Insider. I'm your host, John Brucato. Each week on School Business Insider, I sit down with school business officials and industry experts from around the world to share their stories and explore the topics that matter most to you. Find out what it means to be a school business official and get your insider pass on all things school business. Good morning, Nashville. Welcome to a special live recording of School of Business Insider, the official podcast of ASBO International. I'm your host, John Brucato and today we're coming to you from the 2024 ASBO International Annual Conference and Expo Innovation Hour. In this episode, we're exploring the future of innovation in school business and education. As school business officials face new challenges, it's crucial to rethink traditional budgeting methods, embrace the power of artificial intelligence and make data driven decisions. Joining me are two outstanding leaders in the field. Laura Anderson, associate director at Edgenomics Lab, and Dr. Mario Chasson, director of Research Innovations and Change Management at District Scolari Francophone. Soon today we'll discuss how school business officials can lead with innovation, adopt new technologies, and collaborate with educational leaders to drive change and improve outcomes for students and schools. Well, welcome Mario and Laura. So happy to have you. Maybe kicking off you can give our audience a little bit of your background and introduce yourself. Laura, why don't we start with you?
- [01:40]
Laura Anderson
Sure. Laura Anderson and I work at edgenomics Lab. I'm the Associate director. We are a research center affiliated with Georgetown University and we study education finance, how federal, state and local dollars make it their way down to the school and what schools do with those dollars. And really the way we think about innovation and work, both in our networks with state educational agencies and districts and through our training programs, is helping districts think about new ways to spend the dollars that they do have. So how to leverage every dollar to do the most for the students that they have from year to year. So that's the work that we do and I'll bring you some of our observations along the way as we go through our conversation.
- [02:18]
John Brucato
Great. Welcome.
- [02:19]
Dr. Mario Chasson
Very good. Good morning ladies and gentlemen. What a pleasure to be here with you guys again. I was here last year and you know where Christine and I kicked that off with this idea and it was an amazing experience. And from last year to this year now we always like double the size. So it's exciting that you guys going to be participating to this again. So like I said, Dr. Mario Chasson, I'm the director of Research and Innovation and Change Management at the school board in Moncton, New Brunswick. And I'm also an associate professor at University of Moncton. My job is what I did over the years, understanding the mismatch between the evolution of our societies and also the stagnation of the school system. We understand that our society is evolving much faster than the education system as a whole. So the work I've done is understand that's mismatch and try to understand now how to leapfrog the education system at the same speed of our society. It's a lot of fun. So, yeah, so 27 years in the school system, I've been playing many roles, doing a lot now working closely with the Department of Education, the communities, the health system and the post secondary institutions. So we can create this collaborative culture that we're going to talk more in depth as part of the question. But yeah, looking really forward to have those conversations with you.
- [03:36]
John Brucato
Great. Well, happy to have both of you and happy to see such a packed room today. So innovation means a lot of things to a lot of people. But Laura, maybe starting with you specifically, what does it mean in the context of school business and budgeting, and why is it so critical for school business officials to maybe abandon traditional budgeting methods?
- [03:54]
Laura Anderson
Well, I think that for school business officials in the room, they might say the last few years have been anything but traditional. Right. We've been trying to catch up and come back from the pandemic and to recover the learning and thinking through the processes. And part of the work that we've been doing at Edgeonomics Lab is really looking at that critical moment in school board meetings and in budget workshops and looking at how those decisions are made. What are the materials, the data that are brought to those conversations. And one of the things that we observed through the 400 of these videos that we've watched, and my colleague Maggie is here and can attest to it. We actually call the research project Eduflix. It's a very entertaining look at a slice of Americana as you watch these board meetings. But we're realizing that through the process, both in these observations, but also in the training work that we do with districts, is that there's this very traditional budget dance, that's what we've kind of coined it, where the teams bring together a budget and then they bring it to a budget meeting and then there's some conversation, some tweaking that might happen. They go back to the finance office and they're balancing the books, bring back another version, and somewhere in late spring, that version is approved. And then sometime later than that and into the summer, the district's receiving their assessment scores from the state agency. And so we've been thinking about how do we actually break some of that tradition of that budget dance cycle? What are the things that we can do that would help district leaders innovate both in that cycle, but then be able to execute the other innovations that come along? And so some of the things are, can we think about ways to bring data to those conversations in the planning? Can we bring tools that can guide those conversations around data? Are there opportunities once the budget is established and signed to revisit it? And those are not traditional things. So that's kind of the work that we've been doing in helping state educational agencies think about what is the support that they should provide to their LEAs and to help LEAs think about it and even prompt school board members to ask questions we're not seeing them ask. So I think there's a lot of opportunity within there that helps both that innovation of the process, but to actually establish and execute and implement the other ones.
- [06:10]
John Brucato
And just a follow up to that. So kind of navigating away from the traditional budget dance, where does it start? I mean, you mentioned LEAs, you mentioned state agencies. I mean, are these two groups doing at the same time? Does the state really need to take the reins to really push this change? What do you see in your mind, how this would roll out?
- [06:28]
Laura Anderson
We see a little bit of both. We've actually seen some state educational agencies, and we've got some people here from Oregon today who've actually been taking that initiative to introduce this concept and idea to their LEAs. We also have seen LEAs who come to our training program and they're like, you know what? I am going to bring this data to the next meeting. We've also seen school board members who are really trying to figure out how to execute on the promise that they gave when they ran for election. And so they're coming and asking some of these critical questions, like, what are the data? Are these investments working? How do we know it? Those sorts of things.
- [07:02]
John Brucato
Great. So, Mario, on the academic side, how do you see innovation impacting the broader school ecosystem, particularly when it's integrating business and academic decision making?
- [07:13]
Dr. Mario Chasson
I love this question there. It brings me back. In 2002, I was applying there for a school principal job, and actually that was pretty much the same question, you know, on how do you bring innovation? So my first slide is like the day you'll have no bells, no walls and no Subjects school will be redefined. Yeah, I didn't get the job.
- [07:31]
John Brucato
I was going to say, were you successful or no?
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Dr. Mario Chasson
Yeah, no, I was not successful there. But yeah, that's a question then.
- [07:37]
John Brucato
Right now.
- [07:41]
Dr. Mario Chasson
It'S a powerful question because like, you know, there's a lot of philosophical approach, approach behind that. One thing's for sure is that societies is constantly evolving and they're evolving by innovating. So if the society is innovating, our school needs to innovate. So we have to move our school to innovative schools. That's a totally different mindset. Right on the get go. The role of the students are not listening. The role of the students are innovating. So how does that work pedagogically? How this learning environment will reflect that the student will be creating, validating and reflecting. What's the role of the students? What's the role of the teachers? But most importantly, what's the role in the environment? Our industry has transformed the environment that nurturing collaboration. Nurturing collaboration, communication, but also innovating. If our industry are not innovating, well, you're probably going to give yourself maybe 10 years to survive. Okay. Because you always have constantly the innovative mindset. So you have to transfer that into the pedagogical practices. But you need to have environment that reflects that industry evolution. So how do you do that? So the example of this is that if we want to transform the environment to change the behavior, to do personalized learning from standardized learning, you need to get involved with the corporate services world, which the operations say, look, listen, here's our journey, here's our story. How we can collaborate together on that and redefine this new vision with these new values that's really going to stimulate this relationship within the organization. We're working in silos in how we can move an ecosystem to an ecosystem for this new workplace. So the need to innovate pedagogically, therefore we innovate as a system. So the classroom is an innovative lab. The school is not called a school anymore. It's called an innovative learning community center mindset. Right. So they're completely changing that role. And I think that the school business official and the academic people actually have that brain trust together to design this new vision. And I think it's time to do it.
- [09:53]
John Brucato
And where do you see the role of the school business official really fitting into the implementation and success of these new ecosystems?
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Dr. Mario Chasson
Strongly important. I'll have a story in 2004. I know you guys know Aubrey.
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John Brucato
Yeah, Aubrey. Is Aubrey here?
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Dr. Mario Chasson
Yeah. This guy is like, you know, he courted me one day and we're starting chatting. We have established that relationship and, you know, whatever he's saying, like, you know, yeah, yeah, you're a business official. Okay. This. But over time, we establish relationship and trust and understand that, you know, the common denominator of innovating. Okay. I'll say that just as recorded. Right.
- [10:32]
John Brucato
We will edit, though.
- [10:34]
Dr. Mario Chasson
The school business official are the foundation of that system transformation. So we need to have a system transformation mindset. And when you have this mindset and you establish relationship with academic people, you have a wonderful opportunity to innovate. But we have to innovate together. Academic people cannot innovate alone. Okay. Is that a political way to say it?
- [11:00]
John Brucato
I think that's going to come across great on the audience.
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Dr. Mario Chasson
So, yeah, school business official people are fundamental. They are the catalyst of system transformation. Great.
- [11:10]
John Brucato
Well, I don't think we can talk about innovation without at least broaching the subject of artificial intelligence. There are a lot of artificial intelligence specific sessions at ASPO International this year, and rightfully so, it being such a hot topic. Maybe. Laura, we can start with you. How can AI be adopted effectively in schools? And what are some of those immediate areas that SBO should really be paying attention to when it relates to AI?
- [11:34]
Laura Anderson
Sure. So really not an area that we've done a lot of work in, but one of the things is when a system is looking to integrate a new service, and particularly if it's AI we were actually having this conversation earlier, it might more likely mean at the business office level, replacing a person. And that's not something that education does really well. Right. We are a very human driven industry. And so I think that if those are the sorts of things that a district is looking to, they're going to need to think about that and how. How those sorts of decisions of using that as a tool within the business office affects the system in that way and for the hiring.
- [12:13]
Dr. Mario Chasson
Great.
- [12:14]
John Brucato
And Mario, what are you seeing as some common challenges that schools are facing when attempting to implement AI and what are some of those barriers that are kind of precluding them from maybe being successful in some kind of artificial intelligence implementation, whether it's academically or in the business office, otherwise?
- [12:30]
Dr. Mario Chasson
Yeah, it's such a powerful question, and right now there's a lot of questions, but we don't have a lot of answer of adopting it. I'm noticing that AI is my cup of tea. But in 2000, the province of Brownsville made a commitment that we're going to go into this project called Information My Way. So we deployed 8,600. Well, it's not big, not a big province, but 8,600 to all the teachers in our school business. So we had this. Now this digital framework or platform we want to. We had success, but we had a lot of challenges too about the level of adoption. Because the mindset was that if we were planning a digital roadmap, we would completely redesign the evaluation process by automation. So basically you go in a classroom, there's no assessment physically, but the assessment automatically of this and create a lot of turbulence. I think we're dealing the same thing. All right, okay. So the information age to the intelligence age. The information age was a tool, the intelligent age. We're not sure it's a tool because now they're thinking. AI is thinking for us. AI is creating for us. So creating a lot of dispellation there, you know, on how that we want to craft this new roadmap. We're seeing AI, we're going to move to AI agents who's going to be assistant, chat, GPT, and name it, you know, those are all AI assistants. But there's three types of AI. There's AI that you're doing work for you, there's AI for interacting with you, and after that there's AI for autonomation. So we're moving to automate automation, to autonomous technology. So autonomous learning, autonomous teaching, autonomous assessing. Right. So we're going through this virtue of how we want to be able to redesign and redefine school system as a whole.
- [14:18]
John Brucato
Are you seeing any kind of resistance or pushback from academics and maybe school business officials too, with the implementation of AI, it's very much an uncharted territory for a lot of us. How are districts, how are teachers reacting to maybe district leaders wanting to implement artificial intelligence in some capacity?
- [14:36]
Dr. Mario Chasson
That's a good question. I did a couple of keynote the last two weeks about, you know, the adoption of AI and when. When people come in and say, hey, we got a guru, they were all ecstatic. It was all fun. But at the end of the day, they were. People were anxiety and scared because they didn't know how to adopt the morale of how that this adoption of AI will be. So, yeah, it created a lot of resistance in terms of, well, I think is that going to replace our jobs? And it will, unfortunately, there's some aspect. So AI won't replace job, but people using AI skills will surpass people that don't use AI skills.
- [15:14]
John Brucato
Right. And just in my own experience in my district, when we think about ChatGPT, a lot of the concern from the teaching staff was plagiarism and things like that. But it was really relieving to see that one of our department chairs for ELA really kind of embraced AI as a tool because he knows his students. Right. So he knows their voice. And maybe some students did use ChatGPT to write an assignment, but they're probably not using that vocabulary in everyday writing. So I think that just speaks to the importance of the teachers. You can embrace this. Just like cell phones made their way into schools and computers made their ways into schools, it's like, how are you going to kind of react to that? But I want to talk a little bit more about data driven decision making. Laura, you're talking a lot about what edgenomics Lab is doing because data is becoming more essential in decision making. How should school business officials collect, analyze and use data to inform their budgets and resource allocations? Kind of what you were speaking to a little bit earlier about that budget dance.
- [16:15]
Laura Anderson
Sure. In the budget dance, when we're looking at it and thinking about what are those opportunities. And one thing we've done is we worked with the US Department of Ed. We had a two year pilot program to look at what sort of data displays when you talk about spending across schools and spending compared to outcomes drive productive conversations between different communities within the school. So in talking with school leaders, in talking with parents, in talking with school boards. And that pilot was really made possible because we now collect at the state report card level, schools spending by school. First time that kind of rolled out in 19. I see Stephen Korman here. He's been a good partner in all of that work. And so we now have that data. It's public and it's available. And so what we did during this pilot is figured out, how do you marry that data so that you can make productive decisions and have these conversations that lead toward that? So you can look at resource equity across schools, you can look at spending versus outcomes. And so we really think that these data are really important to the budget process. What we bought last year, what were the academic results and did it work or not? And when we bring these displays in our trainings, there are a lot of good conversations that come of it because we're marrying the spending and the outcomes. There's not necessarily that I need more money because school leaders can see themselves compared to their peers and in some cases they see that they have the resources that they would have been asking for had we not Shown that to them. So that is one way that they can use data. Also playing on this idea of how do you start to integrate new purchases and to innovate is really thinking during the budget season about what are the trade offs for particular dollar amounts. I worked with the Alabama State Department of Ed to build an online version of this. It's what we called the grid. It's not a very fancy name, but it's a way for people during the budget process, whether it's school board members or even school leaders, to list all the options in order to achieve a particular goal for their students. Then they look at that cost per student, they look at all the available funding sources. Then they measure out what are the outcomes we want for kids? How are we going to measure that? And then a really important step is they list all the risks. Right? There is a great opportunity in one on one tutoring, but at the end of the day, if the student doesn't show up and absenteeism is a really big problem right now, then that investment is lost. It is spent without any gain. And so they're actually articulating ahead of time what are those risks. And then it has a column where you can come back and periodically check. So we also think if these data can come to each and every single board meeting along with a financial report like a balance sheet that says, and you know what, it's working or it's not. And then oftentimes people are like, we don't have the assessment data, we don't have anything that we can bring. And you do. Like, if you invest in counselors because you want to make sure that student mental health is being cared for, then one, the counselors need to know. That was their task. But also check with them, what are the attendance data? Are kids coming to school? Are there fewer referrals because there are fewer problems in the classroom? What is it that you can do? It's even just calling the principal. Is it working? We invested in school counselors at every school. Is it working? So I think there's a lot of different pieces you can gather and ask along the way that I just think those conversations might happen at the school level. Are they percolating up to the district? I don't know. But what we're seeing and observing in the meetings is, is not necessarily true. And again, like we've all talked about, education is a tremendously human endeavor. And so we need to be thinking about how we can tap that humanness in our processes.
- [20:01]
John Brucato
That's great. And earlier to your Point. Mario, you were saying, the school business official does play a critical role in implementing a lot of these innovative strategies. And I think the success of any organization requires some level of collaboration. Working in a silo really isn't going to get us anywhere. But in your mind, how is the school of business official able to strengthen the collaboration with principals and educational leaders? We're very much focused on the finances and the budgeting and capital improvements. But there still is that huge piece of collaborating with educational leaders. How is that done successfully?
- [20:34]
Dr. Mario Chasson
It's a powerful question because when you asked that question two weeks ago, I still don't have the answer and this. But here's my take on it. We have to make sure that we need to have a data architecture that we can categorize in four major elements. The data needs to transform pedagogy to passive pedagogy to active pedagogy to personalized pedagogy to deep learning. So we need to have data that's capable that when a principal sat down or DFA sat down with a superintendent, say, look pedagogically. Okay, here's the story of our practices. Okay, that's the first element. The second type of data we definitely need is data about leadership. As every revolution of the industry, we had an evolution of leadership. And right now, the culture of our system there is very, very dictatorship. They call that directive leadership. Our system behavior works like in the 30s and the 40s, we're in a dynamic collaboration culture, stimulates by AI and the digital industry. We need to have a responsive system leadership. So we need to have data on that. So instead to be centralized behavior to a distributed behavior, shared value. How does that work in terms, you need data to transform that to stimulate innovation. The third one is the culture, the culture of ego or the culture of eco. And eco is everybody's connected. It's not about the title. It's about human talking another human to make a difference. The example talking with Aubrey and I, he's a dfa. I'm the doctor when I'm stepping in his office. I'm not a doctor. He's not dfa. We're two human people. All right? Okay. This. That's the nurture of a culture. We need data to stimulate that. And most importantly, I do believe is we're part of a community. So therefore, what is the role of the school within the community from a career point of view? And let's make sure that our students respond to the local economy from skills. So that's kind of the holistic view about that. So the challenge that we have is how that we can aggregate all our data and have that utilize AI to tell us what to do.
- [22:50]
Laura Anderson
I'll also chime in really quick. One of the studies we did was about communications, like what words work to build trust. And so if you're thinking about as a school business officer, we were often hired to work with our balance sheets and Excel. And that was us too at edgenomics and thinking about it that we've learned a lot about words, what words work to have conversations with different community members, whether it's the school leaders or parents. And so I'll just put a little plug for my session tomorrow at 4:00, right before happy hour, just on communications. It is such an important part of this process.
- [23:23]
Dr. Mario Chasson
Great.
- [23:24]
John Brucato
Well, believe it or not, we're running up on time to transition over to our roundtable discussions. But just wrapping up here, Laura, starting with you, what's really the single most important piece of advice you can give to school business officials looking to kind of innovate their role?
- [23:37]
Laura Anderson
I would say to not be afraid. I think that oftentimes we kind of soft pedal bad news or we hold back. And I think there's such an opportunity to capture the kind of chaos of what has been the last few years and to think more nimbly and to think about what we want for our students first and then back into the processes that are going to lead to the answers and lead to the funding that's going to drive the outcomes.
- [24:02]
John Brucato
Yeah, Mario.
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Dr. Mario Chasson
Yeah, Very good. Is Sylvie Dallaire here today? And David Des. Can you guys stand up? Okay. These guys are the most phenomenal people. Okay, this because I can't. No, you got to stand up. Okay. Dfa. The dfa. Okay. I call it my piggy bank. But don't tell everyone. Okay. And if you want to see, like how a system transformation, Tomorrow morning at 8:00, Sylvia Deleuze is going to talk about the important role about HR in a district that wants to be an innovative district because the system behavior company changed. You got to listen to her tomorrow morning. And truth to be told is these guys, these guys, okay, these are my wings people. All right? I'm maybe academic. I'm just part half of the story. So we are the yin and the yangs. We're having a lot of fun together for this and kudos to them that they opened their mind to establish one relationship trust and co design together and co implement together. But the most important thing is co innovate and co reflect. So thank you.
- [25:07]
John Brucato
Well, Laura and Mario, thank you so much for joining me on School of Business Insider in this first segment of Innovation Hour.
- [25:12]
Dr. Mario Chasson
Thank you, thank you.
- [25:24]
John Brucato
Thank you for tuning in to School Business Insider. Make sure to check back each week for your favorite topic and school business.