- Support for this program was provided by Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey.

Berkeley College education drives opportunity.

Be inspired.

- Hello, this is John Harbin, founder, president, and CEO of the African American Chamber of Commerce of New Jersey.

And welcome to Pathway to Success.

Today's guest is Mr. Sean Ryan.

He is President McGraw Hill, and many of you know McGraw Hill for his work, providing resources and tools to educate many of the young minds, not only here in New Jersey, but throughout the country and in some cases throughout the world.

So, Sean, welcome to Pathway to Success.

- John, it's great to be here.

I was excited as soon as I got that invitation.

- Well, we're delighted to have you.

Why don't we start with a, a little background on yourself where you're from.

Big family, small family.

- So I grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

I'm a product, a proud product of Milwaukee Public Schools.

I come from a working class family, and you know, school always played a really big role in my life.

I'm really proud of that Milwaukee background and the roots I have there.

And an interesting thing about my family is that my mother, my father, my sister, my cousin, my grandmother all worked for a major school system, most of 'em, Milwaukee Public Schools.

- Where did you go to school and why?

- So I went to Rufuss King, which was an inner city, fully integrated high school.

The cool thing about Milwaukee Public Schools is at the time when I was a student there, there were I think 11 magnet schools.

All the high schools specialized in something, and Rufuss King was the high school for the college bound.

And while I was at Rufuss King, I actually met a woman who was in her last year of teaching.

She was 65 years old and she had greeted the class in five different languages during that freshman assembly.

And one of those languages was Russian.

And I, you know, Milwaukee's a very ethnic town.

You hear Polish, you hear Italian, you hear French, but you don't hear somebody moving with facility from one language to another.

So I wanted to study under Mrs. Lynch.

It turned out she was a military intelligence officer in World War ii.

And that really started to inspire me.

And then the second piece of this is also a teacher, Ms. ic.

So Mrs. Lynch retires, a Serbian immigrant, comes in to teach Spanish at Rufuss King High School, and she knows the family of Lance PS John.

He was the first Medal of Honor winner from the United States Air Force Academy.

And he was a Milwaukee native.

So you put those two experiences, those two contacts together, and that really helped me chart a course.

And then when it came to college, I went to the United States Air Force Academy, another public school, - Soviet studies.

Talk about that a little bit.

- So I, I wanted to do something that I thought was meaningful.

You know, I wanted to be on the right side of history.

And at that point in time there was this thing called the Cold War.

At least that's the way it was portrayed to us as students.

On the one side you had the United States, on the other side you had the USSR, and you know, we were the side of freedom and human rights, and the other side was totalitarianism and autocracy.

And so for me, that was an easy choice.

And then after graduation, my first assignment among several was to actually be an escort officer for Soviet inspectors who were coming to the United States to watch us destroy nuclear ground launch cruise missiles as part of the INF treaty.

So my first action as a military intelligence officer after studying the enemy was to cooperate on disarmament.

And it was an incredible experience for a young 20 something year old.

- So, Sean, tell us a little bit about working abroad.

- And so I've had the chance to work for a year remotely in the Republic of Korea when I was part of the military.

And then I also have worked for about three years in Tokyo, Japan at Yokota Airbase.

And that's where I got into education technology.

And I also spent a significant amount of time going in and out of Latin America in support of the drug war that was happening in the early nineties and mid nineties.

And across all these experiences, I think what you gain in interacting with professionals from other countries who have different backgrounds is a mutual understanding.

You're building bridges, you're cooperating, yes, you're there in support of the drug war.

But now I have an appreciation for Venezuela, for Colombians and their particular circumstances.

The three years in Japan really changed the trajectory of my career because I saw what was happening with technology and it felt like they were just like 10 minutes into the future compared to some of the technologies that we had here, especially when it came to mobile computing.

- When you went into the military, did you envision that you would be traveling abroad at, at the level that you did?

- Well, that was always part of it.

Okay.

You know, the, the old poster from the Navy was join the Navy, see the world.

That was absolutely part of the motivation.

John, - What are some of the other things you did in addition to the military professionally?

- Well, I'll, I'll draw a bridge for you from my military experience to my business experience.

So in 1991, the Soviet Union collapses.

The Communist party of the Soviet Union is actually outlawed by Gorbachev.

And here I was, I had devoted my college years to studying the Soviet Union, and it technically no longer existed.

And so I was thinking about what I wanted to do.

And so my thoughts drifted back to my hometown, Milwaukee.

It was an epicenter of education reform.

There were charter schools and voucher programs at scale there.

I think before most urban school district settings, you know, I was in conversations with members of my family who were resisting some of the change.

And I decided very deliberately that I wanted to operate at that nexus between education, technology, and education reform.

And of course, that has evolved into really wanting to support the whole education establishment so it can be as effective as possible because it's so important to all of us at every level, from individuals to families, to communities, to nations.

And really all of humanity is built on us being successful educators.

You - Know, being successful educators, being a contributor to transforming young people's lives is what I envision the whole teaching process is about.

I don't see the, the readiness or preparedness for kids to come out and, and compete, particularly kids from an urban setting, let's say ye - I can't disagree with those observations, but I will say it's not a monolithic system.

There are pockets of excellence, there are examples of excellence everywhere.

And what is universal, and probably the reason why a lot of educators get into the profession in the first place is we know either explicitly or implicitly that education is essentially wealth and wealth is health and health is happiness.

But education is the pathway to that initial change in socioeconomic status.

Our ability to do that has been confounded by some of these things.

And I'll use a a word that's a little bit of business speak, but complexifies, if it was just about presenting the information to the child and they learn a skill or they acquire knowledge, that would still be a, a relatively significant challenge.

But now you have to think about safety, right?

You have to think about things such as pandemic induced learning loss, right?

You have to think about politicized educational efforts to control curricula, which is something that our company faces.

And I agree with you 100%, Sean.

This is a much more complex environment than it was when I entered it more than 20 years ago.

- So absolutely we're in agreement there.

And you know, as a president of the chamber, we have to deal with that as well.

We talk about workforce readiness and and, and pathways to careers.

How do we get students acclimated to a, a pathway to a better life?

And you mentioned that a kid who has post high school education is gonna make a lot more money over time.

Also, kids that may have selected to go into trades, they're gonna do well.

But a kid who just goes to high school and completes high school does not complete high school is gonna be at a disadvantage in a number of ways, but moreover, they're gonna make less.

And so that said, McGraw Hill was founded to do what?

- Well, the founding and what we are today in our current incarnation, though related, are really kind of worlds apart because we were founded in 1888 when James McGraw purchased a railway publishing magazine.

And then it was combined into McGraw Hill, I think in 1917.

In fact, I have one of our first books, a calculus book from 1917.

This is literally 107 years old.

Kind of feels like it.

It's falling apart in my hands, - But it's still here.

- It's still here.

And calculus is still largely the same.

And we still haven't mastered how to teach it as effectively as we could in all circumstances, because you're absolutely right.

We can predict the future of children based on their level of educational attainment on average.

Wow.

And what we're trying to do is give educators the tools and resources that they need so they can essentially intervene in a child's socioeconomic status and make sure that every child is going to have a fair chance to compete.

And if we don't get that right at inception in K 12 and even beyond with continuous education, which McGraw-Hill also supports post-secondary college education, then we're gonna perpetuate some of these observations that you've already made in this conversation.

John, it's our duty to make sure that teachers are equipped to more effectively deal with these challenges that you've described.

- So, so Sean, let's take a, a kind of a global look at your organization in terms of the number of employees.

It's locations and mission.

- So it's pretty straightforward, John.

We actually produce instructional materials and the training and consulting services that go with those to impact educators from K through life all the way through college as well as professional careers.

And to do that, we have 4,000 employees across the entire globe.

We have more than 30 offices, I think we publish in 60 different languages.

We have authors ranging from Nobel Prize winners writing at the edge of science to those who understand the pedagogical perfect approaches to, to young students actually learning how to acquire facility in the written language.

And so it's a wide ranging mission.

And the reason that I think McGraw-Hill is good at it is because of our values.

And we have three primary values that I like to focus on.

And so number one, it's commitment to the educator.

Number two, it's trust in one another.

And then number three, it's our absolute devotion to the quality of our materials.

Now, those are simple to say, but they can be decomposed.

What does quality mean?

- We'll take a breakdown on Pathway to Success.

The - African Chamber of Commerce of New Jersey is your pathway to success.

We encourage you to visit our website@www.accnj.com or call us at (609) 571-1620.

We are your strategic partner for success.

- Welcome back to The Pathway to Success.

This is John Harmon, founder, president, and CEO of the African American Chamber of Commerce of New Jersey.

And I've definitely been enjoying my conversation with Sean Ryan.

He's president of McGraw Hill.

We have a relationship, a partnership, you know, from your side.

What does that look like?

- Our partnership with the Chamber is essentially to boost literacy scores.

And so we are concluding our first year of a pilot here in Trenton to see what kind of impact our digital personalized learning tools can actually have on individual literacy rates.

And we all know that there are correlations between literacy and earning.

- And why is it important?

- So it's extremely important.

So I want to echo that.

First of all, you know, we talked about the complexity of educating a child these days.

I mean, who knew it was gonna be a political act, which is one of the things that makes it sometimes confounding for educators.

But I think one of the missing ingredients in some particular circumstances that can help us overcome this complexity is community partnership.

You know, so I think the school district operating alone, the school district operating in partnership with an organization such as McGraw Hill, you're still not getting all the way there.

You have to think about education happening in its local social context.

So I'm exceptionally proud of the partnership we have with the African American Chamber of Commerce here in New Jersey.

I think it could be standard setting for other partnerships.

We would like to grow across the United States, making sure that there's a connection between education and the world of work for those students for whom post-secondary is not their primary option or their desire whatsoever, knowing what's out there.

And then of course, the work that you're doing to continue to empower entrepreneurs, black entrepreneurs in particular, so that they can change their socioeconomic circumstances, takes us back to that virtuous cycle that I was talking about earlier between wealth and health and longevity and happiness.

So we're all part of this web of humanity together, and that's why I think the partnership is so vital.

- So I absolutely agree.

When I look at the 1.2 million blacks in the state of New Jersey, who reside largely on the liability side of the state's balance sheet, given the high poverty, high unemployment net worth of 17,000 versus 322,000 for whites, blacks own approximately the 39 to 40 owned homes, which is the cornerstone to achieving wealth and being able to, to talk to you or partner with you and, and, and work with educators not only K to 12, but also institutions of higher education to understand the respective needs and or the potential value proposition, I think is transformational.

So we're, we are equally excited to know you, to partner with you and want to build on this and ultimately create a model of success.

So let's, let's unpack the literacy a little more and what transformational qualities or abilities that we'll have as as someone matriculates and become more literate.

- Well, language is essentially the operating system of humanity, right?

Isn't that how we all interact and are able to do things collectively and cooperatively?

Because we can share information, we can know the state of mind of other people and allows us to coordinate activities not only across geographies and specialties, but also over time.

We want everyone who wants to to participate in that.

And if you don't have language, if you don't have written language, you are on the sidelines and you are not driving it forward.

So this is not just about charity.

I also think the rest of us suffer as well if we're not taking full advantage of the talents of folks whose only sin was to be born in the wrong socioeconomic strata.

- Elaborate more on the work and the different tools and programming that McGraw Hill has has available to make a greater impact in terms of education, not only in Trenton, in New Jersey, but across the country.

- Well, the innovative thing that we're doing, and it's not that innovative, in fact, it goes back to science that is over a hundred years old.

It's as old as McGraw Hill.

And that's this idea that you can benefit from personalized learning based on your particular state of knowledge at any given point in time.

It's an impossible task for an individual teacher to personalize instruction for the students in a given classroom who are organized solely on one factor, and that's the year of their birth.

That's not a way to organize a classroom.

If you were starting with a blank sheet of paper and trying to design the optimal school, you'd never put everyone on varsity just because they're 17 years old.

I guarantee you, if you're 14 years old and you're six foot five, you're probably gonna get a shot at varsity early.

We sort kids elsewhere, but not in the classroom.

So what we can do with new technologies is we can deliver exactly down to the atomic level what a student is ready to learn next, and not frustrate them with something that is too far beyond their current abilities or bore them with something that is too below their current level of ability.

So our partnership is actually focused on adaptive learning for students to find them where they are.

- Can you talk about some of the other technologies?

- So other things that we're doing will include augmented reality, virtual reality, and partnership with Verizon.

We're also working with a major game platform to gamify learning.

So students lean in are engaged in an environment that feels familiar compared to those that are, when you're talking about students who are frequent gamers.

And then of course, we've all heard about this a lot recently.

It is the flavor of the month, the year, the decade, probably in perpetuity from this point forward, generative ai.

And so we're now starting to think about how can those tools be appropriately put into the hands of teachers so that can augment what they're doing, make their lives easier, and maybe address some of the things that they simply don't have time to get to because of those challenges I described earlier regarding the structure of the modern classroom.

- Yes.

So Sean, if you could talk about how education is executed different from New Jersey.

You referenced the Magna School in in Milwaukee.

Give us some of those kind of examples in in and why - There are a lot of examples from coast to coast.

Now, obviously we've seen some great successes with our partner school districts in Miami-Dade, for example, they refer to the Miami-Dade Miracle.

When you think about how many languages that school district has to support, probably the highest performing large urban school district in the United States.

We're partnering with LA Unified School District in their turnaround schools to bring an intervention curriculum that can target specifically students who have low socioeconomic status and have been disproportionately impacted by learning loss due to Covid.

Mm.

So that has been a big factor as well.

And then we have innovative school districts that are trying to actually take advantage of the analytics that our platforms are generating and actually have students take some agency in their own learning, pursue things that are known not only interesting age appropriate, but also appropriate for their level of cognitive development.

So more personalization and more customization for the delivery of the educational solution I think is going to be key for greater success going forward.

- This whole learning loss as a result of Covid and the pandemic, can you kind of quantify that?

- I don't have the statistics at the ready, but whatever the levels of proficiency were, they have reversed tremendously during the pandemic.

And of course now we have to go through that hard work of reestablishing those proficiency levels.

- Partnerships.

Can you speak to that?

- Some of the others that we're especially proud of include Alas, which is the Association of Latino Administrators and superintendents working with their partner school districts.

And we're also very proud of AAA's superintendent's academies.

And that Superintendent's Academy is actually focused specifically on rising senior leaders.

And we're also very proud of the work that we're doing with the Andrew Young Scholarship Foundation.

So we offer a global civil rights curriculum based on the nonviolent teachings of Dr. Martin Luther King.

And so a portion of that revenue is used to actually fund scholarships for students to attend the historically black college or university of their choice.

And so we had our first cohort actually receive their scholarships in Atlanta this past January, which was a joy to participate in.

- So next five years, where's McGraw Hill looking to go?

- Well, first of all, we're confident that we're gonna be here in five years.

When you're forging a partnership, you wanna know that it's gonna be as long lasting as possible.

As proud of the work of McGraw Hill that I am, I also know that we can continue to get better.

We must get better, we must improve.

And this is not just a business imperative, this goes deeper than that.

We want to make sure that equity and inclusion is part of everything that we produce.

We wanna know that the diverse student body that we serve, or that are served by the teachers that we work directly with, can actually see themselves in the materials that we produce, can they hear their own voices?

And that multiple vantage points are presented when thinking about issues and historical accuracy that's going to be paramount for us going forward.

So one of the ways you can think about that is what we build, but it's not enough to just take into consideration what we build.

We also have to take into consideration who we are.

And that's not enough either.

You also have to take into consideration where we are and who we operate with.

So it's not only what we build who we are, we have to become more diverse as an organization in order to serve, in order to serve a diverse student population.

But we also have to recognize the greater social context in which we operate.

It's also important that we make technology and the rush of these technologies, which can be confusing, can be fear inducing, are something that teachers are able to thoughtfully actually deploy in the classroom in ways that respect the teacher's centrality to that learning moment.

If the teacher can leverage technology thoughtfully, there's actually a greater need for that teacher because the impact is going to be that much greater.

So that is going to be important.

And then making sure that all the solutions that we offer, to the extent that it makes sense to help teachers have an easier time and more impactful time in the classroom, work well together.

This interoperability concept is going to be vitally important to our future as well.

So that I think is important in the evolution of McGraw Hill in the next five years and beyond it.

- So Sean, I really have enjoyed our conversation here today, and just thank you for being on a pathway to success today.

- My pleasure, John.

- Until the next time on Pathway to Success, this is John Harmon, founder, president, and CEO of the African American of Commerce of New Jersey.

Thank you for tuning in today.

Today's message is navigating the paradox.

And from that, Tyler, you can draw a lot of conclusions, but what inspired me today was my conversation with Sean Rime and he talked about some of the core values of trust and commitment.

And so I reflect back on black people's existence in America 1619.

We came here involuntarily as slaves 1863 to 1865 when blacks were ultimately released as per the Emancipation Proclamation.

And then they slowly tried to assimilate into the US economy and at every turn they were up against some forces that would not let them coexist in an equitable way.

And so we fast forward to 2024 and we see the courts striking down de and I and striking down affirmative action.

And you had these black women who stood up this fearless fund, and in essence, a private enterprise raising money to help black women kind of pick themselves up with their own bootstraps, if you will, to use that as an example.

And so every time we try to work and adopt some of the, the, the strategies of the US enterprise system and we make gains, there's some folks looking to pull us back.

So we're not gonna stop, we're gonna continue to extend our hand to build bridges that make us a more United States, a more connected New Jersey, leveraging the diversity that exists in our state that make it one of the best states in the union.

Let's keep going.

Let's keep pressing because we're better together.

Thank you.

- Support for this program was provided by Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey, Berkeley College education drives opportunity.

Be inspired.