Who You Know E-Book

Julia Freeland Fisher

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Bildung
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 308

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

Improve student outcomes with a new approach to relationships and networks Relationships matter. Who You Know explores this simple idea to give teachers and school administrators a fresh perspective on how to break the pattern of inequality in American classrooms. It reveals how schools can invest in the power of relationships to increase social mobility for their students. Discussions about inequality often focus on achievement gaps. But opportunity is about more than just test scores. Opportunity gaps are a function of not just what students know, but who they know. This book explores the central role that relationships play in young people's lives, and provides guidance for a path forward. Schools can: * Integrate student support models that increase access to caring adults in students' lives * Invest in learning models that strengthen teacher-student relationships * Deploy emerging technologies that expand students' networks to experts and mentors from around world Exploring the latest tools, data, and real-world examples, this book provides evidence-based guidance for educators looking to level the playing field and expert analysis on how policymakers and entrepreneurs can help. Networks need no longer be limited by geography or circumstance. By making room for relationships, K-12 schools can transform themselves into hubs of next-generation learning and connecting. Who You Know explains how.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Foreword

Introduction

Why Are We Ignoring Students' Networks?

The Potential to Disrupt Opportunity Gaps

Innovating toward Relationships

The Purpose of This Book

Notes

Chapter One: The Social Side of Opportunity

Meritocracy's Mythical Origins

Opportunity by the Numbers: A Tale of Two Childhoods

Relationship Gaps: Hidden Disparity

How Schools Can Address Relationship Gaps

A Glimpse at the Consequences of Relationship Gaps

Investing in Students' Social Capital

Notes

Chapter Two: Getting by with a Little Help from Our Friends

Cosmic Coincidences

Valuing Relationships

Homophily's Stronghold on Networks

Institutional Designs Can Make—or Break—Our Networks

Integrating Social Capital into the Architecture of School

Why Schools' Modular Architecture Costs Students

Notes

Chapter Three: There's No App for That

Love Leads the Way

Transcending Challenges with Care

City Connects: Constructing an Individualized Network of Care

Relationships at the Core

Covering the Costs of Care

Integrating Forward to Address Opportunity Gaps

Tools Expanding Access to Opportunity

Notes

Chapter Four: Edtech That Connects

Reaching beyond Your Inherited Network

Networks as a Gateway to Opportunity

Is Technology Disrupting Our Social Networks?

New Technologies Disrupting the Limits of Inherited Networks

Charting a Disruptive Path Forward

Improving Quality, Monitoring Safety

Diversifying on the Basis of Similarity

Designing Tools with Homophily in Mind

A New Design for Schools

Notes

Chapter Five: Making Space for Relationships

“How Do I Slot In?”

The Current Architecture Closing Off School

Innovations Reshaping School Architecture

Transitioning away from Batch-Processing Students

Going Online to Get Offline

Awarding Credit for Real-World Experiences

Opening Up to Out-of-School Learning

Can Innovations in Learning and Connecting Work Together?

The Next Phase of Schools: Walled Gardens for Learning and Connecting

Tools to Curate Walled Gardens

Building a Networking and Opportunity Hub

Notes

Chapter Six: If You Build It, Will They Connect?

“Boom, Boom, Boom!”

Getting at the Job to Be Done

A Milkshake Is More Than a Milkshake

Mentors' Various Jobs to Be Done

What Are Students Hiring For?

Why Teachers Hire Schools and Tools

Using Jobs to Reach Your Goals

Defining the Metrics of Success

Notes

Chapter Seven: What Gets Measured Gets Done

Pulling Back the Curtain on Network Gaps

The Power of Transparency to Drive Change

Taking Stock: Relationships as Outcomes

How Schools Can Measure Webs of Relationships over Time

Measurement Approaches for System Leaders and Policymakers

Enabling Conditions—Policies That Will Open Up Schools and Ensure Safety

A Relationship-Rich Future

Notes

Conclusion: Designing for a Networked Society, Labor Market, and Life

Zuckerberg Goes Analog

Schools' Role in a Networked Future

Shifting Social Capital to Match Our Needs

Notes

About the Authors

Acknowledgments

Index

End User License Agreement

List of Illustrations

Figure 1.1

Figure 1.2

Figure 1.3

Figure 1.4

Figure 1.5

Figure 2.1

Figure 3.1

Figure 5.1

Figure 5.2

Figure 7.1

Figure 7.2

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Begin Reading

Chapter One

Pages

iii

iv

vii

viii

ix

x

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

42

43

44

45

46

47

48

49

50

51

52

53

54

55

56

57

58

59

60

61

62

63

64

65

66

67

68

69

70

71

72

73

74

75

76

77

78

79

80

81

82

83

84

85

86

87

88

89

90

91

92

93

94

95

96

97

98

99

100

101

102

103

104

105

106

107

108

109

110

111

112

113

114

115

116

117

118

119

120

121

122

123

124

125

126

127

128

129

130

131

132

133

134

135

136

137

138

139

140

141

142

143

144

145

146

147

148

149

150

151

152

153

154

155

156

157

158

159

160

161

162

163

164

165

166

167

168

169

170

171

172

173

174

175

176

177

178

179

180

Who You Know

Unlocking Innovations That Expand Students' Networks

Julia Freeland Fisher

with Daniel Fisher

Foreword by Clayton M. Christensen

Copyright © 2018 Julia Freeland Fisher. All rights reserved.

Published by Jossey-Bass

A Wiley Brand

One Montgomery Street, Suite 1000, San Francisco, CA 94104-4594—www.josseybass.com

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, 978-750-8400, fax [phone], or on the Web at www.copyright.com. Requests to the publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, 201-748-6011, fax [phone], or online at www.wiley.com/go/permissions.

Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional where appropriate. Neither the publisher nor author shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages. Readers should be aware that Internet Web sites offered as citations and/or sources for further information may have changed or disappeared between the time this was written and when it is read.

Jossey-Bass books and products are available through most bookstores. To contact Jossey-Bass directly call our Customer Care Department within the U.S. at 800-956-7739, outside the U.S. at 317-572-3986, or fax [phone].

Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats and by print-on-demand. Some material included with standard print versions of this book may not be included in e-books or in print-on-demand. If this book refers to media such as a CD or DVD that is not included in the version you purchased, you may download this material at http://booksupport.wiley.com. For more information about Wiley products, visit www.wiley.com.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data are available

ISBN 9781119452928 (cloth), 9781119452942 (ebk), 9781119452935 (ebk)

Cover image: © kyoshino/Getty Images

Cover design: Wiley

Foreword

Clayton M. Christensen

Managers and executives in every industry hunger for growth. Growth for their employees, growth for their bottom lines, and growth for their customers as they improve products and services over time. For a school leader the quest is the same, though much more personal. How can we create an environment that helps our students grow and fulfill their unique and enormous potential?

For over twenty years, I have studied the puzzle of growth, trying to understand where it comes from and what happens to it. During that time the theory of disruptive innovation emerged, which asserts that massive growth opportunities are available by developing simple solutions for individuals who have historically not had access to existing offerings. As disruptive innovations improve over time, entire industries and sectors are transformed.

For the past ten years, we have been applying disruptive innovation theory to our schools, and concluded that online and blended learning stand to transform teaching and learning for every single student. And although this transformation serves to disrupt the forces influencing what our students know, Julia insightfully points out that there is perhaps an even more powerful disruptive opportunity in our schools—one that will dramatically impact whom our students know. This next wave of disruption has the potential to provide new and powerful relationships to millions of students who are left behind in our schools simply because of the limits of their surroundings.

For school leaders searching for new growth opportunities for their students, Julia's work is groundbreaking. All the academic interventions and supports in the world do little to change the opportunities contained in a child's inherited network—the collection of individuals in her home and community given to her at birth. Fortunately, tools and services are emerging that can change a child's fate by giving her a chance to interact and build relationships that expand her horizons, alter her perspectives, and generate opportunities. Like all disruptive innovations, these solutions are simple applications targeting simple problems. Over time, however, they stand to upend the ways students can access and capitalize on meaningful relationships.

I have gained so many marvelous insights from my time working with Julia and watching her lead this important work. A large part of my appreciation has come as I have reflected on the “strong ties” in my own life. Growing up on the wrong side of the tracks in Salt Lake City, I was fortunate to have been born to parents who had both attended college—an outright anomaly in my community. My mother wrote and spoke about politics and important issues in our home, and my father ran for the Utah state legislature despite his simple background as a grocery store manager. Together, my parents and community gave me a vision that I could be someone important in this world and have an impact—which is something every young person deserves, and every school should aim to deliver.

Over the past twenty years as an educator, manager, and father, I've realized that it's not professional accolades that will be the measure of my life. Instead, what will matter most is how I helped individual people become better. This book suggests a structure of school that would allow more individuals—even those that we don't think of as part of our traditional education system—to mentor, support, and inspire young people. In that vein, Julia's research and vision are indispensable to building a world in which individuals—even those from wildly different backgrounds—can help one another.

I'm indebted to Julia for helping me see how disruptive innovation can play a part in providing diverse, meaningful, and enduring relationships for our students. Academic supports may last for a time, but the impact of relationships can bless a student's life forever. How can schools take advantage of this monumental opportunity? Who You Know points the way forward.

Introduction

Who you know matters. We can all think back to a time when a personal connection opened a new door to opportunity—or pushed us over the finish line. And we can all recall instances when somebody else, by virtue of his relationships, came out ahead of us.

Put simply, oftentimes opportunity is social. Social ties inherently shape our man-made systems. Whom you know turns out to matter across all sorts of industries and institutions: it matters if you're an entrepreneur trying to raise capital, an investor choosing among stocks, a patient seeking out health care, or a graduate in search of a job.1 In fact, over half of all job placements result from a personal connection.2

But even with so much success hinging on our connections, one of our most central institutions almost entirely ignores the question of whom we know: our schools.

This is not to say that schools are by any means antisocial environments. Seminal architects of our American education system such as John Dewey imagined modern education as a fundamentally social endeavor. Dewey believed that each school ought to function as an “embryonic community life.” He insisted that schools should train children how to behave in society by inducting them into a “little community” of their peers.

Dewey's vision resonates with much of society's concept of what makes school, school. Today, parents rank acquiring social and communication skills among their top priorities for their children, next to study habits, critical thinking, and college preparation.3

But Dewey envisioned a little—even embryonic—school community. Which is exactly, by and large, what our schools have become. At best, schools today function as highly self-contained communities that may manage—between teaching skills and content and doing their best to ensure that students are safe and cared for—to impart social norms in their students. The implicit hope, then, is that by appropriately socializing children at a young age, schools prepare them to eventually hatch into the real world ready to interact.

As a result, by their very design, schools limit their students' access to people beyond their embryonic community. They are not built to nurture the health of their students' networks or to connect students in predictable and effective ways beyond their immediate constellation of teachers, family, and peers. With an eye toward socialization and establishing a tight-knit community, we have turned schools inside, rather than out.

In turn, many students leave school with a network that resembles the one they inherited at birth. Students who go on to college may buck this trend if they manage to attend an institution that connects them with new peers, professors, and alumni career networks. However, a large proportion of low-income students who could benefit most from these new connections never make it to college, and a large percentage of those who do attend fail to graduate.

Ignoring whom students know should be cause for concern for anyone working to close widening opportunity gaps. Relationships help young people get by and get ahead. Networks offer academic, emotional, and financial supports, as well as critical information and endorsements that open doors to new interests, opportunities, and even careers.

Take the great John Dewey himself: like many of today's millennials, after graduating college Dewey spent the summer wondering what to do next. With few prospects, he wrangled a favor from his cousin, Affia Wilson. Wilson, the principal of the local high school in Oil City, Pennsylvania, hired him to teach. For all the promise he would later realize as a seminal leader, it was a relationship—rather than his innate abilities alone—that landed Dewey his first job in a lifelong career in education.

Why Are We Ignoring Students' Networks?

The tendency of our K–12 education system to ignore students' networks is hardly surprising if we consider just how busy schools are kept trying to accomplish other things. In recent years, schools have come under enormous pressure to demonstrate their ability to drive up test scores—an effort that has proven persistently challenging. When President George W. Bush rolled out his flagship 2001 No Child Left Behind Education Act, his vision was seemingly simple: by measuring student outcomes and requiring that chronically underperforming schools improve, we could successfully close stubborn racial and socioeconomic achievement gaps by 2014.

What students knew—or didn't know—sat at the core of this vision. When Bush signed the bill, he insisted that schools needed to focus on the basics. “Every school has a job to do,” he said. “And that's to teach the basics and teach them well. If we want to make sure no child is left behind, every child must learn to read. And every child must learn to add and subtract.”4

The federal law, in other words, squarely focused on nailing basic proficiency in literacy and numeracy. Years later, despite modest improvement—and a few pockets of great success—schools are still scrambling to meet this charge, particularly those serving high-poverty and minority populations. Meanwhile, political battles wage over precisely what standards states should aim to meet and the best methods of teaching to get us there. In short, schools and society remain intently focused on what students know.

But this focus suffers from a critical blind spot. With everyone talking about what our students do and don't know, no one is talking about whom students know. Children's networks—their reservoir of social capital and ability to bank on that capital for support, advice, or opportunities down the line—remains largely determined by random luck: the luck of where children are born, whom their parents know, and whom they happen to end up sitting next to in class.

Put simply, the term social capital describes the benefits that people can accrue by virtue of their relationships or membership in social networks or other social structures.5 This book will explore young people's access to relationships that might help them further their potential and their goals, as those goals emerge and shift over time. Of course, students may involve themselves in relationships or social networks that do little to help them advance in a positive direction. The goal of our education system, however, should be to arm all young people with networks that can reliably expand access to support, guidance, new opportunities, and positive life outcomes.

For decades, researchers have studied the basic principle that whom you know—both your strong connections and even your mere acquaintances—can matter quite a bit in lifelong success or failure. The strength of our networks even appears to predict our longevity.6 So why, then, do our schools not heed their importance?

At first glance, it's easy to blame the recent high-stakes nature of accountability and testing focused narrowly on what students know. But other cultural factors dating much further back than No Child Left Behind discourage schools from nurturing students' networks.

The very concepts of childhood and young adulthood can help to explain our aversion to expanding young people's networks. For centuries, we've treated childhood as a sacred period of innocence and fragility during which young people ought to be sheltered and protected, and only gradually exposed to the ways of the world. As Phillip Aries, famed French historian of childhood and family, put it, for much of history children were alternately thought of as “charming toys” or “fragile creatures of God who needed to be safeguarded and reformed.”7 Early on, coddling or reforming children fell to the family. Later, as compulsory schooling spread through Western Europe and North America at the turn of the twentieth century, the responsibility to protect children shifted gradually to educators as well. Society delegated child rearing alternately to families and schools and then shut the door behind them.8

This impulse to protect children is more formalized than ever in our school systems and policies. In the wake of high-profile school shootings and growing reams of computer-based student data, over the past decade federal and state legislators have continued to ratchet up school safety regulations and student privacy laws.

Protecting children, in and of itself, is of course a very good thing. Children are more vulnerable to abuse. Their healthy development depends on ensuring that the adults charged with their care do right by that responsibility. But an outgrowth of these cultural norms is also a willful isolation of children. In the name of safety, we risk cutting off children's chances to expand their horizons and their networks.

This isolation comes at a particularly high cost for those children who lack sufficient support networks at home, or whose networks offer limited inroads to social mobility later on when they enter the labor market. What happens beyond school buildings exacerbates these effects. As income inequality increases, it produces unequal childhoods along a variety of dimensions—for example, access to schools, health care, and extracurricular opportunities. Families from different sides of the tracks are living in increasing isolation from one another. Neighborhoods themselves have regressed back to higher levels of socioeconomic segregation. And exposure to poor neighborhoods also still falls disproportionately along racial lines.9

Trends like these call into question our school system's ability to function as society's great equalizer. If a child's “embryonic community” is itself a reflection of his immediate neighborhood, children's networks are systematically cut off from peers and adults hailing from different socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds and limited to the regions where they live. This leads to stark gaps in both the volume and diversity of young people's networks.

To this day, neighborhoods and schools by and large hold a monopoly on children's networks. Unsurprisingly, this costs poor children the most. On average, children from low-income families have measurably smaller networks along some dimensions and are much less likely to know adults working in high-paying professions.

The Potential to Disrupt Opportunity Gaps

Against this backdrop, however, the education system is undergoing major shifts.

As society grapples with the economic and political harms of growing inequality, the role of schools themselves is changing. With the rapid rise of technology, delivering academic content—once a key value proposition of traditional classrooms—is becoming commoditized. No longer must a teacher stand at the front of a class for students to access content. Students can now access a lecture, project, or assessment from a mobile phone anywhere in their home, neighborhood, or school building.

At the same time, schools are increasingly trying to ensure that they are modernizing their approaches to meet the demands of a changing economy. Many are turning to real-world projects and assessments. These mark an effort to make learning more relevant and engaging while instilling “twenty-first-century skills”—such as collaboration and critical thinking—that employers demand.

And as a college degree becomes a must-have in the modern economy, education reformers are finding that social supports are a critical ingredient to getting students into and through college.

In light of these shifts, schools are now well positioned to prioritize not merely what students know but also whom they know. And as technology improves, schools for the first time have tools that make investing in students' social capital viable on a strict budget. These forces stand to allow schools to begin to further chip away at stark divisions that have hampered schools' ability to deliver on equal opportunity for students rich and poor, white and minority, well-connected and isolated.

One of the critical forces underlying these shifts is disruptive innovation. Disruption is a market phenomenon that expands access to goods and services that are otherwise too expensive, centralized, and out of reach to many. Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen developed the theory of disruptive innovation in the 1980s and 1990s when he began to notice that wildly successful companies and entire industries would suddenly give way to new competitors that were offering seemingly rudimentary products and services. Christensen's research bucked the traditional wisdom that blamed senior management at these struggling firms. Instead, he theorized that new innovations displaced incumbents because they effectively competed on new dimensions such as affordability and accessibility. He coined this phenomenon disruptive innovation.

Decades later, the nonprofit Clayton Christensen Institute, where Julia has worked for over five years, is bringing these theories to bear on the public sector. The Institute's research on innovation shows that improving products and services at a pace that satisfies customers is actually rarely a problem. Most institutions want to keep improving what they do—and generally they are quite good at doing just that.

Our education system is no different.

As Michael Horn, Curtis Johnson, and Clay Christensen pointed out in their groundbreaking work, Disrupting Class, contrary to widespread perception, on average, public schools have a steady record of improving on the metrics by which they are judged, just like the other organizations we've studied. What our studies of innovation show, however, is that disruptive innovations almost always trip up well-managed, improving companies because the definitions and trajectories of improvement change. What were valuable improvements before the disruption now are less relevant, and dimensions of the product that had been unimportant become highly valued.

Today, our education system focuses the majority of its energy on getting better and better at delivering and measuring what students know. The system in turn vastly undervalues children and young adults' access to meaningful networks, which leads to stark gaps in access to mentors, supportive adults, industry experts, and diverse peer groups. As a result, advantageous connections, formal and informal mentors, peer networks, and exposure to professions and professionals reside in exclusive networks that children access by sheer luck of the draw.

It bears noting that schools are not causing these gaps. Rather, by design they do little to resolve them. Children's immediate community—not merely their school—holds a monopoly on their network. Schools, however, institutionalize this monopoly by closing rather than opening their doors to people beyond that embryonic community.

But disruptive innovations are beginning to emerge that will reshape how we connect students to coaches, mentors, experts, and peers. These innovations stand to radically expand students' access to social capital down the line. Online coaching, mentoring, and tutoring programs are beginning to penetrate schools and homes. Online peer networks—sometimes seen merely as social networks for sharing silly photos or vapid life updates—are increasingly used to connect students to additional resources otherwise out of reach.

And inside classrooms themselves, students are starting to interact with real-life experts from a wealth of industries using video chats and social learning platforms. Finally, new human capital management systems— modeled on platforms that align new channels of supply and demand, such as Uber and eBay—are beginning to tap into a latent supply of local experts, community members, and supportive adults who can slot into schools. In light of these innovations, how students connect—to one another, to their teachers, and to new adult mentors, guides, and role models—stands to shift dramatically in the coming decades. These innovations in turn stand to disrupt the limitations ingrained in all students' inherited networks.

These developments are truly remarkable if we consider how unimaginable they were only a few decades ago. Historically, limited communications and transportation infrastructure made it difficult—if not logistically impossible—for schools to function as networking hubs, rather than as Dewey's embryonic communities. As a result, students' access to networks has remained strictly bound by time and space.

Tight-knit school communities were not the only ones subject to these strict limitations. For decades, large-scale mentoring efforts like Big Brothers Big Sisters have required specific time commitments when mentors can meet in person with mentees—a requirement that on the one hand vastly limits its ability to recruit volunteers and on the other makes mentorship a strictly local phenomenon. This poses challenges to quality and scale—quality because the costs of recruiting and retaining first-rate nonteacher volunteers are high, and scale because geographic and time limitations cap the number of feasible relationships and interactions at the programs' disposal. As a result, one in three children will grow up without a mentor.

Innovating toward Relationships

With the rise of technology, however, new tools and networking models stand to break these limitations. Technology can dramatically expand young people's access to and ability to maintain relationships with new and diverse adults and peers. Online communication tools can reach beyond geographic boundaries to forge new connections, as well as strengthen and better coordinate existing networks in their immediate communities.

All sorts of familiar tools have been steadily improving over the past decades, such as email, texting, and video chatting. Even newer technologies such as matching algorithms, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence have emerged. As a result, students will be able to connect and form relationships more often and with more supportive adults and peers than ever before.

In case this sounds like a bleak future mediated by screens, fear not. These opportunities will also emerge through new school designs that facilitate in-person relationships more deliberately and frequently. Disruptive innovations, in other words, will not just digitize students' social lives. Rather, innovations are starting to orchestrate a whole new choreography of care and opportunity across school communities, both face-to-face and online.

This networked model of education will not come about merely from the use of existing social networking tools. Popular platforms, such as Facebook and LinkedIn, tend to simply amplify users' offline networks and tendencies, rather than forging new, different, or expanded networks. Instead, new tools that connect students are being curated and designed in an effort to expand student networks to new corners of their communities and the globe. These new relationships and networks can in turn make valuable headway in evening the playing field of students' opportunities and expanding their sense of what is possible.

For example, consider Zachary, a Jamaican-born teen, who moved to the US with his family when he was sixteen years old. His high school in New York matched students with mentors using iMentor, an organization that provides a platform and curriculum that blends virtual and face-to-face mentoring. Zachary was paired with Eric, a senior lawyer with the General Counsel Division of Credit Suisse. The two collaborated on the iMentor curriculum through weekly email exchanges and in-person meetings. Eric helped Zachary not only to study for the SAT but also to build his resume, seek out summer enrichment experiences, and research college opportunities beyond his radar. In spring 2013, Zachary was accepted to his top-choice school, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.10

We all have heard inspiring stories like these. What's unique about Zachary's story is not that a helpful adult could get him one step closer to college or that mentorship programs could successfully forge relationships across class and race lines. Crucially, it's the model that underlies this relationship that marks important innovation: the iMentor model leverages technology to make relationships like Zachary and Eric's far more tenable and scalable in terms of both cost and geography. The two could keep in touch with far more regularity between in-person meetings, and Eric could track Zachary's progress against his goals in a more reliable way.

At the same time, innovations are starting to expand students' connections long before the college application gauntlet. In her elementary school classroom in the small rural town of Royse City, Texas, teacher Kelly Margot decided to break out of the four walls of her science class. She used a tool called Nepris, which offers access to industry experts over video. Margot ported a neurologist into her classroom during a lesson on the human brain. For some students, the brief connection fueled new academic interests. “[The next day] a student came in fired up about his next research idea over cures for neurological issues. The expert told the kids what happens in the brain that causes autism. This kid wants to know what is being done to fix it,” Margot said. For other students, Margot witnessed a different spark ignite. Her students who had not traveled beyond the Texas border were thrilled by the chance to see the New York City skyline outside the neurologist's office.11

The power of technology tools, in other words, is not to merely digitize existing relationships between young people and adults. Instead, these tools stand to bust through the ceiling that geography and time have long held over networks. In turn, new tools are beginning to both strengthen students' connections and broaden their horizons.

In light of these possibilities, we are witnessing an emerging market of technology-enabled platforms and school models designed to connect students in new ways. These tools have the potential to fundamentally disrupt our traditional school models that close off, rather than open up, students' networks. And if these innovations grow in the right way, we will not only manage to scale critical supports that can transform students' short-term accomplishments. We will also scale students' access to an array of relationships that can lend valuable perspective, supports, and opportunities in the longer term.

Many in education may hear this as yet another job being piled on top of already cash-strapped and busy schools. Given persistent academic achievement gaps, mightn't it be prudent to just heed Bush's vision and go back to basics? Ought schools really aim to do even more,when nailing basic literacy and numeracy remains insurmountable for so many?

Yes, they should. Growing students' networks, it turns out, could prove instrumental in solving chronic challenges that our education system has struggled with in the past. For example, we know that poverty erects barriers to learning from a young age. But we don't invest in the very social supports that could predictably combat those detrimental effects of poverty on children's healthy development. We often lament the human capital crisis in K–12 education by citing shortages of high-quality teachers. In reality, however, the world offers an abundance of human capital across all sorts of industries and neighborhoods. We just haven't designed a school system or the right tools to tap into that huge reserve. Similarly, we focus relentlessly on closing the achievement gap to enhance social mobility, yet we systematically ignore gaps in poor and minority students' access to power and relationships that could engender such mobility. We consider the importance of “real-world” relevance in education, but fail to pursue instructional models that could authentically connect what happens inside classrooms with the wide range of industries in the real world.

These structural impediments threaten schools' ability to address achievement and opportunity gaps alike. We can start to overcome these perennial obstacles by investing in relationships. From there, we can reimagine school as a networking hub, rather than as an embryonic community.

The Purpose of This Book

Charting human relationships is a vast and, at times, mysterious endeavor. Given the complexity of this topic and the various paths this book could have taken, we want to clarify what this book is—and what it is not.

This book is primarily about the structures, tools, and institutional designs that could start to double down on relationships inside school and take the chance out of students' chance encounters beyond school. We consider how relationships could become embedded in every aspect of a student's K–12 experience not only to enrich learning but also to nurture connecting. These connections range from students' strongest-tie relationships with caretakers to their diverse weak-tie networks beyond their immediate community.

This is not a book about higher education. Oftentimes when we talk about this topic, people think of the “network” that college students enjoy. Many readers may picture college as a pivotal moment when, by design, students fly the proverbial nest and expand their relationships beyond the network and neighborhood they inherited at birth.

Treating college as the gateway to new networks, however, leaves too many students out of the opportunity equation. By the time a student reaches eighteen, her network has already determined all sorts of aspects of her educational trajectory—from her identity to her career ambitions, from her access to extracurricular activities to her understanding of the knowledge economy and the steps it takes to make it to and through postsecondary education. Not to mention that those students who might benefit most from deeper, stronger, and more diverse relationships are often those least likely to make it to, much less through, college. Therefore, part of the premise of this book is that we can't rely solely on colleges to function as the primary institutions responsible for expanding student networks. Instead, we believe that efforts to nurture students' networks must begin far earlier, as a key component of our K–12 schools' design. That said, we will discuss how some schools are continuing to invest in students' networks into and through college in an effort to address persistent opportunity gaps.

This is also not a book about relationship science or the politics of networks. Although we borrow heavily from sociology and psychology research, we do not claim to be experts in the science of how relationships or identities form and change over time. Nor do we endeavor to be experts in the transmission of culture through relationships, how racial or ethnic discrimination and bias affect and limit networks, or the ways in which political dynamics have over time shaped neighborhoods and networks. These topics are critically important in their own right. They all merit deeper, further research beyond this book. Throughout, we suggest a number of researchers who delve into the interpersonal, cultural, and political facets of relationships.

We focus most on how new structures of schools and tools could begin to free up time, space, and resources to invest more heavily in students'