Cyndi Burnett:
What if the biggest barrier to creativity in schools isn’t the classroom, but the policies shaping it from the top down? In this episode, we dive into how national education policy influences what happens in schools and where creativity fits into the conversation.

Matthew Worwood:
Hello, everyone. My name is Dr. Matthew Werwood.

Cyndi Burnett:
And my name is Dr. Cindy Burnett.

Matthew Worwood:
This is the Fueling Creativity in Education podcast.

Cyndi Burnett:
On this podcast, we’ll be talking about various creativity topics and how they relate to the field of education.

Matthew Worwood:
We’ll be talking with scholars, educators, and resident experts about their work, challenges they face, and exploring new perspectives of creativity.

Cyndi Burnett:
All with a goal to help fuel a more rich and informed discussion that provides teachers, administrators, and emerging scholars with the information they need to infuse creativity into teaching and learning.

Matthew Worwood:
So let’s begin. Today we welcome to the show Dr. Henry M. Smith, who is a professor of education policy and leadership at the Johns Hopkins School of Education. He previously served in administrative roles at Tufts and Johns Hopkins universities, as well as the National Labor College. Smith consulted in education marketing and fund development for numerous colleges, universities, and NGOs. Henry’s governmental service included mayor of Denver in New Hampshire, New Hampshire State, Director of Public Transit, and Assistant Secretary of Education in the Clinton administration. I should also add that Henry was an instructor for the first course I took at Johns Hopkins University, which challenged us to think, or rather consider, how we might research problems in education from different disciplinary perspectives, such as history, economics, or psychology.

Matthew Worwood:
And I quite often joke around to Henry that he was the only professor in that program who gave me a B or a B plus. I’ve totally forgotten. Henry, welcome to the podcast.

Dr. Henry M. Smith:
Thank you. Thank you, man. And it’s good to see you guys. I will tell you that my mother was a schoolteacher and, you know, I. She gave me a B once, and on something I was doing, she said, you can always do better. So I, I took that philosophy and I, I know that a student, if I give a student an A, they’re just going to go about their business, give them a B plus, they’re going to get mad and, and look at it. Change your life, man.

Matthew Worwood:
It did. And that’s why I brought it up. We spoken about it. I mean, the B plus, I think was. Was very representative of, I think, the beginning of that experience. And funny enough, I remember you made some comments about some run on sentences in my papers as well. And I know it sounds crazy, but for whatever reason, I hadn’t really thought about my run on sentences. And if I hadn’t got that feedback, I probably wouldn’t have Made efforts to kind of adjust that in my approach to writing and ob.

Matthew Worwood:
You know, it was a doctorate program, so writing was so important. But I remember getting a compliment about my writing toward the end of my time at Johns Hopkins, and I traced it all the way back to you, pointing out some opportunities to improve my writing in that first semester. So, yeah, as I said, won’t take all the credit.

Dr. Henry M. Smith:
But I will say, isn’t it interesting that every one of us to name teachers that had an impact on their lives? And as we all know, sometimes teachers are. Well, they’re always underpaid, and sometimes they’re underappreciated. And, you know, there is obviously as critical as our parents are to what happens. Good ending.

Matthew Worwood:
Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, we. We. I suppose we’ve officially started the interview now, but we have other questions to talk about. But, you know, again, it comes back to the idea that real, meaningful learning can be challenging. And I know sometimes when I’ve had those conversations about teachers, typically it involves a level of disappointment or challenge within the learning experience rather than, you know, an easy class where you get an easy A. I’ve.

Matthew Worwood:
I always try and share that. Those stories with my students. You know, if it’s easy and you’re. You’re kind of like, flying through the experience is probably not offering you much.

Dr. Henry M. Smith:
Right, right, right. Absolutely right.

Cyndi Burnett:
And I just want to build on that, because I think it’s an important piece that we actually haven’t talked about on the show, is that, you know, giving that constructive feedback really pushes students beyond where, you know, what they think they’re capable of. And if you don’t give them that strong feedback, then they’re not really growing, which is the whole point of education. So kudos to you for the B. And good. Good job, Matt, in getting that B.

Dr. Henry M. Smith:
It was my pleasure.

Matthew Worwood:
All right, so now we’re going to get back into our podcast questions. And, you know, one of the reasons why we. We brought you onto the show, Henry, is we do a lot of conversations about education and, you know, the. The various challenges that exist within the system. So getting, you know, talking a little bit about your experience working in the federal government, particularly under the Clinton administration, it’s probably the first time we’ve had an opportunity to have that type of conversation. So I was wondering if you could just talk a little bit about what that was like and. And some of the challenges that you experienced when it came to implementing change in education from the very top.

Dr. Henry M. Smith:
Well, thanks, Matt. And the first thing I would say about that is, you know, in spite of the times we’re living in, working at the US Department of Education, I always thought of as a second doctorate because there, all the policy from the states and the locals and even international comes together. You see the whole picture and how it all works. And yes, there’s a lot of problems with the federal government, a lot of things we need to do differently. But the one thing that people don’t talk about enough is you learn so much when you’re there. You’re at the nexus of all of it. And we did a lot of visiting schools was part of our engagement. You know, schools and universities in 40 states while I was there.

Dr. Henry M. Smith:
It was tremendously interesting. And then working with Congress back in those days, Democrats and Republicans agreed on the issues of education. You may remember, in the early aughts, governors, whether Republican or Democrat, would run to be the education governor in their states. And. And so we all worked together on matter of fact, the first bill that the Clinton administration passed was the Goals 2000 bill. It was an education bill which got, I don’t know, 80 or 90 votes in the Senate, Democrat and Republicans, because everybody was united on education policy in those days. Now, of course, it’s so much more difficult. So I wouldn’t have missed that from the world, and I learned so much from it.

Cyndi Burnett:
So during your time in the federal government, you worked on some major legislation aimed at developing national standards and increasing accountability. So on the show we often hear this rigid system can stifle creativity in schools. So can you speak to the original goals behind those policies and how, if implemented thoughtfully, the standards and accountability might actually support creativity rather than hinder it?

Dr. Henry M. Smith:
Well, Cindy, I may go in a different direction than you anticipate, but, you know, at the time, in the early 2000s, you had, you know, Clinton did goals 2000, then Bush did no job left Behind. So there was, you know, it went along and we were working on standards and then the common grounds that everybody agreed on in the early 2000s, because some standards seem to be reasonable and necessary. So I know a lot of people find them difficult and challenging. It’s a silly argument for us all to have at this point in time, where we are in 2025, what’s become abundantly clear, I think, to all of us in the last few years between Covid and now this new administration in Washington, right or wrong, what they both showed us, both events showed us, were we have to take a hard look at K12 and universities, be creative and do things like we’ve never Done them before. So you can have all your arguments about standards that you want, but the fact is in the last 30 years American kids achievement on national tests has barely gone up a few blips. Everybody’s complaining about the COVID loss, but what about the gain? It took 30 years to go up five points. Additionally, our percentage of people in the United States who attend and graduate from college has only gone up about 5 point. I think it used to be 35%, now it’s 40%.

Dr. Henry M. Smith:
What Covid and this new policy environment in Washington, as I always tell my students in the leadership courses, crises are also opportunities. And I think we can take a long hard look at K12 and higher ed now and start to do things very differently. I was thinking about this, something we were going to talk and I was thinking, you know, all my years in university world, in and out for 25 years, universities have become so cumbersome. Now they’ve become a fat target for people who want to attack universities. We’re filled with assistant deans who do Lord knows what. It’s time. And then what put this in my head the other day was I, I live in a fancy neighborhood in Chevy Chase, Maryland. What do they used to say at Garrison Keeler where all the children are bright and everybody’s good looking and people call us all the time and we have a very nice house.

Dr. Henry M. Smith:
People call me all the time, they want to buy my house. They say Henry, you ready to sell your house? I have a beautiful house, it’s 50 years old. But we’ve gotten to a point in our environment and that it doesn’t pay for the Realtor financially or to sell something new to redo this beautiful 50 year old house because they have to put in all kinds of new electronics. Air conditioning in D.C. is terribly important. So they’re tearing the houses down, the ninth most expensive houses in the country and building new ones. For a long time I thought that was crazy till I started to think about why don’t we do that with education. Let’s take this opportunity.

Dr. Henry M. Smith:
And I think by the way, parenthetically I would add what universities have to understand is they’re not in a financial war with the administration. They’re in a political public relations war. The public relations people, the political people should be up front. That was the mistake the three presidents made that got fired. So I think for example, universities should all. And by the way, tuitions are so high that they’re an easy target. Most Americans agree, yeah, go after Harvard, go after Hopkins, they got all that money, they got 50 billion in endowment. If I were advising the president of one of those universities right now, I would say here’s what you should have, a full blown political and engagement plan.

Dr. Henry M. Smith:
And one of the tenets should be instead of 5% of the donation endowments going to students, from now on, we’re going to do 10 or 15% and we’re going to do another 5% for the community in Hopkins case in the city of Baltimore, and do something for your stakeholders, show them that you’re willing to make some changes. All we’ve done is build up huge bureaucracies that don’t accomplish much more than they did 20 or 30 years ago.

Matthew Worwood:
And just to bridge this connection a little bit more, you know, within that response, you’re, you’re kind of like bouncing between the K through 12s and university systems. Could you talk a little bit about how you see that relationship then between universities and K12 education and that, that connection you.

Dr. Henry M. Smith:
Well, they’re part of the same system and their only solution, and I’ve been part of it for the last 30 years, is more bureaucracy to solve things. The other thing that put this in my head, Matt, was we live in Montgomery County, Maryland, where Chevy Chase is in a Fancy School District, 160,000 kids in a suburban school system. The school budget is $3 billion. And I was going to run for the school board and I was going to say, I tried this out on my daughters who said, dad, please stay in the house. My slogan was going to be $3 billion is enough. I don’t care if you’re educating 160,000 kids or 200,000 kids. If you can’t figure it out and improve test scores when you’ve got $3 billion, giving you more money is not going to change that system. So the through thread there, Matt, is all we do is add more bureaucracies and more money.

Dr. Henry M. Smith:
As you know, I’ve been around this a long time, 50 years as a city councilman. I’ve been dealing with education issues all of this time. I’ve never gone to a school budget hearing where somebody said, you know what? We can do it with this $3 billion. Thank you, County. We don’t need any more money this year. So we have to look inside. We have to look at Covid. We have to look at the times we’re in now and say, this is an opportunity to tear down the house.

Dr. Henry M. Smith:
If you allow me to continue that metaphor, rebuild substantially. Doing things that we just never thought of before. Getting back to K12, we got so overwhelmed with bureaucracy. I know you know, as many cases as I do, I have former students who are principals in Montgomery county school systems. I’m talking to them in real time during COVID I said, why don’t you try this? Why don’t you try that? I would, Henry, but the superintendent hasn’t approved it yet. I said, Covid will be over by the time the superintendent approves it. Just do. The city of Philadelphia would not hold online classes until they’d found every single child in Philadelphia giving them a laptop.

Dr. Henry M. Smith:
So it took them an extra three months before they started courses. The stories like that on Legion, we do these things because it’s the way we’ve always done it. Most of them are done with good intentions, like equity. Everybody should have a laptop. But let’s get going. Another fight I had during COVID was, okay, we can’t have everybody in the school. We have a grandson who’s on the spectrum. Let’s just have the kids who are on the spectrum go to the school.

Dr. Henry M. Smith:
Three days.

Matthew Worwood:
So, Henry, before we kind of move in a little bit on. On the idea of tearing down the house, which is something that we do talk a lot about on the show, I think what you’re highlighting to our listeners in the stories that you’ve shared is the complexity of the education system. And so sometimes for observers, it’s very easy to kind of say, why don’t you do this? And so, you know, full disclosure on our show, it’s like, why don’t we do more stuff around creativity? And we can find ourselves quite often complaining about the standards and, you know, all these accountability measures. But just listening to what you’re saying there, it sounds, to a certain extent, at least, some of the goals of the accountability measures that were. That’s kind of emerged over the last few decades is to try and assist in. Let’s get going. Is that. Is that a fair summary? Not necessarily that it’s been implemented perfectly or the outcome has been as designed, but from that kind of top down, this is how we envisioned it.

Matthew Worwood:
It was, we’re going to give you money, and, hey, we want to see something for that money, and we want to hold you accountable. And I think sometimes that sometimes gets lost. It’s like there is an effort at the top to improve the system, but this bureaucracy, the system itself seems to be the challenge.

Dr. Henry M. Smith:
Right. And that goes back to the House metaphor. There are so many things that need to be done, Matt, that maybe we should just consider a completely different thing. We used to have a Dean at the School of Education at Hopkins, who used to say to me, henry, you know, if any one of us here at the School of Ed had the secret sauce, we’d all be out of business now. So what we have to do is be more creative about how we’re getting at these things. Now, for example, my friends in the teachers union and my mother was a card carrying member of the teachers union. I’m a big union supporter. But you know, they’re completely against charter schools all the way.

Dr. Henry M. Smith:
You can’t talk in Montgomery County, Maryland. You can’t even have the conversation. They won’t have a conversation with me. There are states like Arizona now where the Republican legislatures have said the money follows the kids no longer goes to the school system. So if you decide to take that money and send your child in Arizona to a parochial school or a private school, that’s fine. You don’t have to send them to a public school. Now there are a lot of problems with that. How do you deal with the equity? How do you deal with everybody’s access? I understand that and we can do that, but I don’t think this is such a crazy idea.

Dr. Henry M. Smith:
Why don’t we open all the schools to getting a share of these $3 billion and now instead of in Maryland, you have 12 school systems, then you would have 150 school systems. Three charter schools here, three charter schools there, parochial school group in this city working on doing education the way they want to do it without spending a third of their time on bureaucratic changes which are like a butterfly in the wind.

Cyndi Burnett:
So do you think that’s the biggest challenge is the bureaucracy and having to deal with all the bureaucracy and how do we work through these systems without having the bureaucracy issues?

Dr. Henry M. Smith:
Well, I guess what I’m saying, Cindy, is the theme of your podcast. You gotta be creative. We gotta think beyond the way we thought about education before. And if it means not doing something, let’s try it on the good side. Arizona’s got a great idea. They do eight week sessions because, you know, the weather’s usually hot there. They do eight week sessions and then two weeks off and eight week sessions at two weeks off. And here and in New England, you know, everybody goes to school September 1st through June 30th.

Dr. Henry M. Smith:
Well, maybe that’s a good idea. It’s completely different. It’s outside the usual bureaucratic thinking. And again, I don’t necessarily fault people. I guess I fault leaders who don’t have the ability or the nerve to do that. But we have to make it possible for people to say, let’s do stuff that we didn’t do before. Parenthetically, one of the things that I was so sad to see is. And this is also happening in this school system, the online high schools that were started by the large public school systems in the country have quickly evaporated since the end of COVID It’s crazy.

Dr. Henry M. Smith:
Juniors and seniors in high school shouldn’t be in the building all the time. They should be like college kids. They show up for classes, but they got a job during the day, they got sports. What do they have to be in the stupid high school building for? And that would create much more space for the middle school children. Oh, no, we can’t do that. I tried that with the local school system. Everybody’s going to be in the building. Now.

Dr. Henry M. Smith:
I have a former student who runs a prep school in Atlanta, and they ended up doing partnerships with private schools around the country. Now has 70 customers who buy online high school courses in Latin from him for their prep school. Why can’t we do that with the public schools?

Cyndi Burnett:
So that’s a really interesting strategy to go and think about, like, restructuring things. And I think it’s such a huge, messy problem. And one of the things that we’ve been talking a lot about on the show is do we need a revolution or an evolution? And when Matt and I started the show, you know, and now we’re into season 11, you know, when we first started the show, it was like, well, we need an evolution. We just need to keep moving and changing and get on with it as. As we were talking about. But now with the onset of artificial intelligence and after Covid happened, I think Matt. Well, I’ll speak for myself. I think I’m leaning more towards revolution, which sounds like what you’re saying, let’s take the whole house down and let’s rebuild the whole thing.

Cyndi Burnett:
The question is, how do we do that when what we’re putting at risk is our future generation and their knowledge? So how do we. How do we test these things out? How do we create the policies that we could implement so that schools can try things out without so much structure and then report back what works?

Dr. Henry M. Smith:
Well, it’s difficult. People have to have courage, and sometimes it can come from the most interesting places. In the state of Maryland, which we were just talking about, which is very strong Democratic and teacher unions. The parents in the Baltimore city schools, which are some of the worst in America, went to the Democratic legislature and said, we can’t wait for the Baltimore city schools. To be fixed. Our. Our children. To your point, Cindy, our children are going to be lost.

Dr. Henry M. Smith:
We want charter schools. So the only charter schools in the state of Maryland. Well, there is one other place, but one of the only places is Baltimore City because the parents said, in effect, we don’t want this house, we want to build a new one because you guys just aren’t cutting it. So people have to have the ability, the support and the leadership capability to create that vision. Here we go, Matt, to something that you studied with me. You got to get back to entrepreneurial leadership. Create this vision that you can have a better place. It’s going to take a while to get there, but I deal because of my autistic grandson.

Dr. Henry M. Smith:
We deal with issues all the day. And I can tell you that IEPs, which are for neurodiverse children, you have to fight to get them taken care of. You have to fight to make them work. Half of the schools don’t fulfill their federal obligation in doing those things. So we have to admit that some things just don’t work. And instead of pushing up against this house again and again and throwing more to now move into the higher ed space, more assistant deans at it is silly. Let’s be creative enough to try new things. And that’s why I love your podcast.

Dr. Henry M. Smith:
We just got to get out of the box. Because direct answer to your Cynthia, Cindy, is, you know, we’ll just. We’ll just all, you know, it’s a nice job I’ve been in, as you were kind enough to list my sordid career. I’ve been in a lot of institutions in 50 years. It’s a nice job with nice people. And we’re passing paper back and forth all the time for 50 years. And I don’t know, we changed a single life. And I’d like to think that maybe we did, but, you know, it can be endlessly frustrating.

Dr. Henry M. Smith:
We realize all you’re doing is shipping paper. The other thing I wanted to mention you about AI in the Clinton administration in the 1990s, when the Internet came in. Okay, day one of the Internet, whether you believe Al Gore invented it or not, that’s beside the point. And we gave speeches for the first five years of the 1990s. The Internet now makes it possible for the first time in history for every child in America to have equal access and opportunity in schools. And that was what we thought of the Internet. And now we know the social media disaster that was the other side of it. So that’s the warning I pass forward to all of you folks living in the 2000s, beware of what you wish for.

Dr. Henry M. Smith:
It’s got a bad side, too.

Matthew Worwood:
It’s interesting that, just bringing that up and me bringing everything together. One, I’m hearing that the system itself lacks creativity and probably to a certain extent, I’m not going to go and deviate, but there are other kind of social systems in my home country of the uk, the nhs. I sometimes feels like it’s just lacking creativity. And so I’ve never thought about it, Cindy, but all these conversations we have about how difficult it is to change and how you kind of get stuck in your ways and we’re looking at it at an individual level, but here we are having a conversation about it at that macro level. The fact that we’re at the top of the top, we’re all suffering from the same thing. And it does feel like an incredibly overwhelming task to try and take all of this on. But at the same time, what I am hearing a little bit, and you’re slightly tweaking my thinking around, you know, the money following the child, is that Cindy and I know that we’ve had guests on this show who have established schools and we, in essence, Cindy, you and I, come away from those conversations saying, wow, these are incredible schools. This is what all education should be like.

Matthew Worwood:
And, oh, wow, this is great for cultivating creativity and developing all the skills that we think future, future citizens in our country require. But of course, they’re always a select few. That’s one of the things we always say. They’re not available to everyone. And so part of that revolution, if it goes down that road, is that it provides that stopgap, potentially, as we’re working towards. I mean, that’s ultimately the argument, right, is if we provide that choice, maybe there’s an opportunity for public schools to, over 10, 20 years, catch up. But at the same time, it provides access to more students to get what we think is an alternative way of schooling. The challenge, of course, as we know I’m saying it, is why it’s complicated.

Matthew Worwood:
There’s no way you can transition everyone over to those schools. So, you know, it’s difficult, but it sounds like you’re feeling, or the system feels that there are alternative methods out there that already exist. So it’s almost like, Henry, you don’t have to knock down your house because the brand new house is next door to you. So you just need to head over to the brand new house and enjoy the construction of your old house being rebuilt. And then 10 years from now, you can choose which one you like.

Dr. Henry M. Smith:
I think you. That’s a good summary of it, Matt. Absolutely. So you get back to the bureaucracy which prevents so many children from having that experience. You know, there are a lot of children in charter schools, and, you know, it gets complex here. As you know, some charter schools are part of the school system, some are not. But at this point in time, only about 10% of all American children go to what Foucault would call non government schools. They go to private schools, they go to charter schools.

Dr. Henry M. Smith:
So that’s still a small percentage. And wouldn’t it be nice if some of the kids in these big bureaucracies would have a chance to. And some do. There are school systems where, you know, there are special schools where they could try these things out. But it’s so hard to force to make that happen and make that change when. During COVID I remember talking to some friends in New Hampshire. In New Hampshire, every. Every city in town is a school district.

Dr. Henry M. Smith:
So, for example, the city of Dover, New Hampshire, was a school district where I was mayor. We had one high school and six school buildings. And I remember talking to people there during COVID Well, they had everybody online the next afternoon. Covid hit on March 1st. By March 2nd, everybody was online. So maybe, you know, if you don’t have a giant bureaucracy, if, you know, if you can picture New York, and I know that in New York, they do have a deputy superintendent who’s in charge of one tenth of the whole place, but it’s still not the same thing as being completely independent and doing their own thing.

Cyndi Burnett:
I want to go back to this house metaphor, because as I’m sitting here thinking about, you know, the house being torn down, I’m also thinking about modeling. So if I were going to build a house again, I would want to see a model of what has. What I would want for the future. So I can just replicate that, because that’s much easier than trying to figure out all the patterns of the house and the house configuration. So have you in your work seen a model of education that is effective?

Dr. Henry M. Smith:
Well, I’ve seen a lot of them. And, you know, Matt’s point kind of stymied my thinking because, you know, now that I think back on them, okay, so they got to 10 schools. You know, there was a charter group that did this or did that. We just have to figure out a way to look at those new models. And maybe that’s the way to go, Cindy, is to put all these new models in front of every school system and Say, hey, you could also do this and do that. That might be a good role for the federal government. It. Remember the Department of Education, our role was research.

Dr. Henry M. Smith:
It was funding grants and it was education policy. So we were the center of education research. And that might be a new model if anybody gets around to doing it. And we tried to do that. Again, this was before Internet, getting people this information on. There are other models. But then as I think about it, you get back to, okay, how does a big city school system adopt that? You know, and I know LA does this. They have recovery schools.

Dr. Henry M. Smith:
They’re talking to someone in Seattle the other day. They have. I forget what they call it now, but. But they, they have some schools where they have been unsuccessful and they hire a separate management group. They’re still part of the public school system, but they are managed by an outside manager. So that’s an example too, of doing things outside of the box. So there are lots around there. So you’re probably right that there’s a, a lot of good stuff going on.

Dr. Henry M. Smith:
And we got to figure out some way that more school systems need to know about it and be aware of them.

Matthew Worwood:
Just before we kind of close, just curious to get your perspective. You know, we are the Creativity and Education podcast. We want to promote and advocate more of creativity and education. Do you ever see or perhaps have heard of some sense of priority within the system for that, or does it always kind of just focus on those standards that have already been identified?

Dr. Henry M. Smith:
You know, the system, the school system watching here they have. They’ve had three superintendents in the last five years. And it always seems to me that old phrase, it’s like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. They’ll change something here, they’ll change something there. It’s very hard to see those things taking place in the big systems. As a matter of fact, one of my jobs when I was assistant Secretary of Education was managing our relations with big city school superintendents. And I used, I. I rode around with the LA super, the Chicago super, the New York super.

Dr. Henry M. Smith:
And each one of them said to me, henry, I’ve got three years to do what I want to do here, because in three years to politics, someone will catch up to me and I won’t be super tenant anymore. And you know what? They were all right, you had three or four years, which is not a lot of time to change up a whole big city school system. So I guess that in our conversation about bureaucracy has made me think. And again, you see a lot of this in the critical Theory conversations that more local control, more involvement. I had a conversation with some folks your age today and I had, as I mentioned, conversation with my grandchildren this last week. There has to be much more stakeholder engagement. What do your kids need out of what, you know, how, how are they going to respond to it? And I think that might be another way to get at this is have the stakeholders a part of this, have young people a part of it. I mean, just think back, is there anybody even your age, and you guys are generation younger than me.

Dr. Henry M. Smith:
Did anybody? Is there anybody who can’t tell stories of how stupid high school was and what a waste of time? And I, I was telling my grandchildren the other day that I was a musician. You mentioned Sydney, that you had a musician. I was a musician in those days, was going to go to music college. So whenever I wanted to get out of a class, I’d say, you know, we have to go and rehearse for the spring concert. Even if it was fall. The teacher never really caught onto it. And I was in a 4,000 person public high school in Worcester, Mass. My friends and I would take off and we’d go smoke somewhere for the rest of the day and you know, or have our garage band.

Dr. Henry M. Smith:
So all of those things have to be accommodated for young people because they think spending an eight hour day in a building is a waste of their time. They have to be part of this conversation as well as their parents. And now of course you have the parents, which is also so different from my day when both parents are working all the time. What are the kids going to be doing? That could be education time.

Cyndi Burnett:
Well, Henry, I’ve really enjoyed this conversation and there, I have to say there’s probably 500 other questions I’d love to ask you, but we are getting short on time. So I just wanted to end with the question we ask all of our guests, which is, can you share with us a creative educational experience you’ve had in your own lifetime, either formal or informal, and what impact it had on you?

Dr. Henry M. Smith:
Well, let me think. I’m going to go back when we were talking about mat’s B or B plus grade. I was giving a speech as assistant secretary to the Massachusetts Teachers Union and my mother was in a nursing home at the time and my sister brought her to hear my speech. When I finished my remarks, being the big shot who came from Washington, the master of ceremonies knew my mother was in the audience. He said, henry’s mother’s in the audience and he’s a retired teacher. Mrs. Smith, how did Henry do? She stood up at 85 years old and she said, B plus. He could always do better.

Dr. Henry M. Smith:
And so that was obviously one of the seminal moments in my life. But I’ve also had the privilege of seeing, when I was assistant secretary, the good news is, going into these schools, I saw, as I was telling you before, I. I went with one superintendent. We went to schools in the mountains of New Mexico where none of the children spoke English. They spoke Native American dialects or Spanish. And. And. But in every place you went, there was a teacher so dedicated to the children, and Matt knows this, that, you know, I.

Dr. Henry M. Smith:
I have to. When I have teachers like that, you know, working on their edd, I have to say, okay, now to help the children, here’s the stuff you gotta. But, you know, but they always come back to the children first. The children, the most important thing. So thank goodness we have those kinds of people in teaching today and always have.

Matthew Worwood:
Well, Henry, thank you so much for joining us on this episode of the Fueling Creativity in Education podcast. It was. It was great to reconnect and have this conversation. Probably one of the first conversations we’ve had of this type on the show. And if you enjoyed listening to this episode, we do encourage you to share it with a friend or colleague who you think might be interested in the conversation that we had. And don’t forget, if you haven’t already subscribed to our podcast on YouTube and all your favorite podcasting platform, then please do so. My name is Dr. Matthew Werwood.

Cyndi Burnett:
And my name is Dr. Cindy Burnett. This episode was produced by Cindy Burnett and Matthew Warwood. Our podcast assistant is Ann Fernando, and our editor is Sheikh Ahmed.

Dr. Henry M. Smith:
It.