Last week, TNTP CEO Tequilla Brownie appeared on “EduCatered,” a new podcast from Getting Smart. She discussed the power of high expectations for students, the importance of connecting education to economic mobility, why teacher diversity should be a top priority as school systems deal with teacher shortages, and more.
“We’re doing a major disservice to students when we don’t help them connect to what their K-12 experience means after K-12,” Tequilla said during the interview. “And one of the opportunities there is to make a more explicit connection between education and economic mobility. We have this lofty ideal that kids will be motivated by education for education’s sake. But that was not my lived experience, and that frankly is not the experience of a lot of students I encounter. I grew up in really extreme poverty. My own motivations—it wasn’t some lofty ‘Oh, I’m just so passionate about education.’ It was that I knew, and my grandparents knew, education was a means to an end—meaning an end to poverty in my life.”
