The View From Outside the Building
For most of my career, my understanding of education came from inside the building.
The classroom. The hallway. The staff meeting that should have been an email. The sixth grader crying in the corner. The teacher quietly buying snacks because somebody came to school hungry again. If you know, you know.
Then, unexpectedly, I stepped outside the building.
In the years since leaving the classroom, I’ve had the privilege of working in educational communications, school culture, AI policy conversations, and most recently with the Center for Outcomes Based Contracting, where districts and providers partner around one deceptively simple idea: if we are spending money to help students, we should know whether students are actually benefiting.
And whew. The view from outside the building is different.
What I have seen has made me both more hopeful and more compassionate.
Schools are carrying a lot right now.
Teachers are navigating classrooms full of students whose lives, identities, worries, and needs often look very different from our own. Leaders are balancing shrinking patience, stretched budgets, and communities that sometimes feel divided by politics, conflict, fear, and uncertainty. Somewhere in the middle of all of this, schools are also trying to make sense of artificial intelligence, student data privacy, third-party sharing agreements, screen monitoring tools, and what good teaching even looks like in a world where information is no longer scarce.
Honestly? It is a lot.
But here is the thing stepping outside the building taught me: most educators are trying really hard to do right by kids.
In district conversations around AI, I watched leaders wrestle with important questions. How do we protect students without over-policing them? How do we guard against misuse without turning schools into surveillance spaces? How do we move beyond “gotcha” tools and instead help students think critically, ask better questions, and demonstrate learning in richer ways?
Interestingly enough, none of this feels entirely new.
People once worried that airplanes were impossible, calculators would ruin math, Google would destroy thinking, and Wikipedia would singlehandedly collapse civilization as we know it. Yet here we are.
Maybe the question is not whether change is coming. It always does.
Maybe the better question is: How do we stay human while we navigate it together?
For me, that question is part of why I shifted from music into educational technology years ago. I saw both the struggle and the possibility.
And after stepping outside the building for a while, I find myself more convinced than ever that the heart of this work has never really changed.
Kids still need good humans.
Educators still matter.
And schools are still one of the most hopeful places we have.
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After Hawaii, one would think the DFW winter a bit pale in comparison but not with several student performances to prepare for. Check the education page and send an e-mail to enroll your child in an M&A fine arts class near you. M&A kids are singing, acting, or dancing all while learning theory and cool fine arts facts, making friends and building self-esteem. Spring/Summer registration are underway and this month is open house so drop by and join in on all the fun.
