This interview with Diane Tavenner was recorded on September 27, 2019. The transcript for the audio excerpt can be found below and the full show audio recording can be heard here.
Highlights from the Interview:
Audio Transcript:
Larry O’Connor: I do want to pause here and tell you about a new book. It’s called Prepared: What Kids Need for a Fulfilled Life. It’s by Diane Tavenner. And listen, when Bill Gates, one of the most successful businessmen and billionaires, put this at the top of his list of his four books that you should read right now, that tells you something about this book. Diana [sic], I hope I pronounced your last name right, thank you for joining us.
Diane Tavenner: Thank you, Larry. It is great to be here with you today.
Larry O’Connor: You bet. You know, I do a lot of topics here with our listeners about being a parent and being frustrated with public schools, and we feel like our kids aren’t getting the education that is really going to help them in the real world. When I saw your book, it’s like, ‘Oh, yes! Exactly! This is the problem.’ So, to talk about your book I think we first need to learn about Summit Public Schools. What is Summit Public Schools?
Dianne Tavenner: Great, well, Summit Public Schools is a network of schools in California and Washington state. We are public schools – we’re charter public schools – and we serve middle and high school students. We have been around since 2003 and are known for a number of things–but probably most importantly, we prepare every single one of our students for success in college and life. So, 100% of our kids qualify for a four-year college, and 98% of them go on. And at the same time, we prepare them to be good people, contributing members of society, happy human beings. It is the combination of those two things that I think makes us unique.
Larry O’Connor: Well and isn’t it sad to think that that’s unique because you would think…
Diane Tavenner: It is.
Larry O’Connor:…that in public schools that should be pretty much what we are doing: we are helping form children. You know, parents, I think, I’ve been a homeschool parent. I’ve been a parent with kids in parochial schools. And I am a parent of kids in public schools. And it is very interesting interacting with those different parent groups because for some reason the parents who send their kids to public schools think ‘Oh, they got it all – they’ll take care of everything. We drop our kid off at school and everything is handled for us.’ And it is the opposite for parents who send their kids to parochial schools or, obviously, homeschools because they’re very much involved in teaching their kids. Is that part of the problem here? That we rely on the public schools way more than they were designed to do?
Diane Tavenner: I think there’s definitely an issue with schools being designed for a different era and to do something different than what we need as a society and families today. So that’s certainly part of the issue, and one of the things we’ve done at Summit is bring our schools into this century. To really think about: What do employers want and need in terms of skills? It seems very different today than it was in the 1950’s or the early part of that century. What do people need to be successful in this day and age? And we’ve organized our schools around those outcomes–and that’s not the case, that’s not the original design of schools, so that’s part of it. But I think the other part of it is that there are more demands on parents that ever before in our society, and I think parents are really caught between. They don’t want to be helicopter parents and tiger moms, but they also don’t want to be free rangers. They want to have something in between.
Larry O’Connor: Right.
Diane Tavenner: Prepared – the Prepared parenting philosophy – is sort of that middle space. How do you help your children, prepare them and equip them for a good life, but do it in a way you’re enabling them and supporting them and empowering them as people, and not doing it for them?
Larry O’Connor: The college acceptance rates that you have been able to achieve at the Summit Public Schools is phenomenal, but what I like most about your book is that your focus is not that everything you need to do to get in to college, it’s about actually succeeding in college, and more importantly, the real-world skills you’re going to need after college. In fact, college isn’t necessarily the answer for a lot of kids, right?
Diane Tavenner: Both of those things are true, and you bring up such an important point: most people don’t realize that what you have to do to get accepted for college is not actually what you have to do to be successful in college. You would think that those two things match up, but they just don’t. And so we’re really focused on, of course, yes, you need to get accepted, but really what we need to do is prepare you to be successful there. And so that is the thrust of our…everything that we do at Summit is really about helping kids discover who they are, what they care about, their strengths and to take charge of their own lives and their own learning.
Larry O’Connor: So obviously not everybody can send their kid to a Summit Public School, so in your book, Prepared – the book is called Prepared: What Kids Need for a Fulfilled Life – What can parents do in their homes right now to sort of stop coddling their kids and actually getting them to a place where they’re ready to succeed and actually be a part of the real world?
Diane Tavenner: This is exactly why I wrote the book, and really we start with three basic ideas that every parent can engage in their home and with their kids. The first is this idea of “look back,” and so with your kids, looking back on the day, the week, the month and just reflecting on: What were your goals? What did you want to achieve? What did you want today to look like? And how did it actually play out? And then the next step is “think ahead.” Well given what just happened, what do you want tomorrow to look like? Or the next hour to look like? Or the next month to look like? And how can we actually set some goals and make some plans for that? And then the first part of it is to seek purpose in all of that we always want to be asking ourselves, ‘What is it that is meaningful to us? What matters to us? What are our values? What do we care about? And how do we create a life that is consistent with who we are and what is meaningful to us?’ And I think one of the most, the easiest and most, useful tweaks we can make as parents. Along that line, I’m sure you know, Larry, is the most common question kids get is “What do you want to be when you grow up?”
Larry O’Connor: *Laughs* Right, yeah.
Diane Tavenner: It’s really the wrong question. What should be – because what happens is that kids then just come up with something, and they answer it and they sort of stick with that, and it might not actually tell them anything about where they want to go or what they want to be. So we like to do what we call the “ing’s” – the i-n-g’s – and we ask our kids anytime they’re doing something, ‘What is, what part of that is something that works for you, that resonates for you, that you like doing?’ So, do you like entertaining? Do you like analyzing? Do you like exploring? And the more kids can have experiences where they’re discovering their “ing’s” that will add up to a future that makes sense to them and you can put all of those together into a field or study or potentially a job someday, but it really is better equipping them to a future that is pretty unknown in our world right now.
Larry O’Connor: Yeah, and whether your kid wants to be a pilot or a nuclear scientist or a concert musician or a car mechanic, they need all of these skills either way…
Diane Tavenner: Exactly.
Larry O’Connor:…because it’s about life. Well, listen. I love the book, I really do, and I am using the things that I am learning in the book for my kid who is starting her second year at UCLA and for my son who is just starting high school, and I would’ve used it when they were in elementary school. It is something that is not specific to any age group, you can use these for your kids to get them going. To Diane Tavenner, thanks for joining us and for telling us about it. I really do appreciate it.