Education’s Conference Problem With Mark Baxter, Plus New WonkyFolk

Jed and I talk AI, education politics, Virginia, and Target boycotts on a New WonkyFolk. Is Liz Cohen right that we need a need a Dry January for ed tech? That and more. You can listen where you get podcasts, here, or watch below:

ICYMI – Marisa Mission and I talked with Ben Kornell on EdTech Insiders. Is OBC about to jump the shark? Did education politics get there first?

This month I’m in Colorado, Indianapolis, and Seattle if you’d like to connect.

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Are ed conferences broken? Let’s talk about why.

Here’s a guestpost from my colleague, Bellwether partner Mark Baxter, on conferences. Mark brings experience as a grantmaker, grant receiver, and in the public and non-profit sectors to this question:

Every time I travel for work, I pick up a small souvenir for my kids at the airport — usually a shot glass from whatever city or state I’ve landed in (maybe not my finest parenting choice, but they love it). At this point they’ve amassed enough to be the envy of their future college roommates, which is my roundabout way of saying I’m on the road a lot — for everything from mega-conferences to small, invite-only workshops. And on the whole, I get real energy out of these trips: reconnecting with friends and colleagues I’ve built relationships with over twenty years in this work, hearing about exciting new programs just getting off the ground, and forming partnerships with people doing great work for kids.

But the love/hate relationship with conferences is real. And the frustration often runs downstream from who is paying and who is in the room. The power dynamic with funders often leads to programming that focuses on showcase rather than struggle and performative agreements rather than engaging to understand the hard nuances of our work. The power to convene is also a power to distort, and right now, many of our gatherings distort toward safe, surface-level theater. 

This leads to the problem of the convening itself becoming an afterthought. Most of the connection and learning takes place outside of the programmed time, in hallways, during receptions, and at the bar after dinner. (Though my colleague Andy Rotherham hosts a popular convening that explicitly flips this dynamic on its head by making the days about active outdoor activity together and networking while the evenings are about more formal work.)

With the expertise and brainpower in these rooms, we should consistently be organizing gatherings to find new ways to tackle our knottiest problems and build partnerships that extend beyond hotel ballrooms. These events are a real investment of philanthropic dollars given the direct cost, and the time of people in the room. And, perhaps more of these meetings should be out in communities rather than luxury hotel ballrooms to begin with.

I’m not advocating that we start asking “did we learn something?” at the last conference; instead, we should be asking “did we leave that convening more aligned and clear on how we can collectively accomplish better outcomes for kids than when we arrived?” Or at least, with a clearer understanding of the places we’re not aligned.

By that bar, too many convenings miss the mark. 

So why do we all keep showing up? The real answer is to see friends and colleagues and to be seen by funders. Those are legitimate needs. As a former funder, conferences were the perfect time to see many (sometimes all of) my grantees at once. It saved me a lot of travel. But the format, as it usually is now, pretends it is about content and problem-solving. When, in fact, it is built around hallway conversations and drinks at the bar. We need to build gatherings that prioritize and create space for both to occur (and then ensure sober people aren’t left at the margins).

What does a more impactful and lasting convening look like? 

Design for the people in the room

Funders and organizers need to design around who will be in the room. Know and understand their roles, their pain points, and what they need to know and be equipped with to make real progress when they get home. Set explicit objectives and targeted questions that the time together will allow teams to actually address. We would (rightly) raise an eyebrow at a teacher who tried to cram a month of objectives into a single lesson. So let’s stop doing it to ourselves.

By centering the knowledge and expertise of attendees when designing the agenda, we can build meetings around data, disagreements, and experiences that will make the work better. Let’s be realistic—we won’t fully solve the problems in one meeting, but through intentional connection and productive struggle, we can create a new type of meeting that allows the conversations and dialogue to live beyond the hotel ballroom and move back into the field. 

In practice, this could look like one or two participants presenting a set of competing ideas grounded in data and evidence, followed by a structured discussion among all attendees to wrestle with the various perspectives and what they mean for the work moving forward. 

Engineer productive friction

We do not need to go full The Real World, where everyone stops being nice and starts being real. But a little realness would go a long way. Let’s design panels and sessions around genuine disagreement that honor the hard problems we are working to solve. Stop admiring the problem — I think we have achieved universal consensus that scaling work-based learning is hard, and that retraining teachers on the science of reading is hard — and start using the collective brain power in the room to dig into the true root cause of what makes it hard and help individuals and organizations uncover solutions that will work in their local context.

At the same time, let’s not minimize the importance of human connection and networking. Treat it as a core feature of the time together by building real, structured time for the relationship, people-building we are already (covertly) there to do. By taking this action, we can make it clear that the real work is happening outside of these rooms and create spaces that allow the connections to carry over into those contexts.

Do less, on purpose.

These problems are hard. We can’t solve all of them at once — or even one of them in a day. So stop trying. Pick one meaty, genuinely difficult question and build the space to actually wrestle with it. Consider the full suite of large, national conferences, regional or state conferences, and local meetings that people are pulled into. Calendars and capacity can only allow for so much while still doing the hard work of changing outcomes for kids. 

As an example, let’s stop having conferences about how to scale career pathways, which face a real math problem. It’s starting to feel a little like holding a conference to discuss scaling student learning. Important goal, but a little too broad and vague at this point and can lead to admiring the problem rather than solving it. As much as we wish we could solve all of the problems in the next year, it just isn’t going to happen. So let’s lean into the achievable aspect of goal setting. This action will make it clearer and manageable for attendees on how best they can lean in, and it moves us from admiring issues to the hard work of solving issues. 

What can funders do to improve convenings? 

The easiest answer is to be more judicious about how and where you use your limited resources when planning or sponsoring convenings. Do not greenlight a convening that doesn’t have a clear answer on purpose and audience. Ask the hard questions to ensure that the structure and agenda will push attendees to wrestle with topics and how they connect to the challenges they face. Funders know their grantees’ pain points better than anyone, so make sure the tables you are setting are worth their time.  

To do this effectively, funders have to do more than quietly acknowledge the power and distortion their presence creates. They need to signal that the work and disagreements are real by intentionally surfacing those issues and not just showcasing the polish. These signals could include the simple step of leaving the room to the hard step of naming and lifting up the difficult truths of our work, then sitting in the struggle with people. 

We know what good looks like, because we’ve been in spaces where it happens. But we need more of these spaces and more coordination between them. The test isn’t what people felt in the room; it’s what the field does in all the months no one is in the same room — whether organizations working on the same problem leave loosely coordinated instead of just individually inspired. That’s the real measure: minimize the talking-to, maximize the talking-with. The field’s hardest challenges deserve rooms built to move them, and the funders who build those rooms hold both the power and the responsibility to demand it.

Mark Baxter is a partner at Bellwether

Read past Eduwonk guestposts here.

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