Justin Bathon

Associate Professor in the Department of Educational Leadership Studies, University of Kentucky
Director of Innovative School Models for the College of Education  
Co-Director of the Next Generation Leadership Academy at the College of Education
Co-director of the UCEA Center for the Advanced Study of Technology Leadership in Education (CASTLE)
Core Leadership Team, STEAM Academy, Fayette County Public Schools, Lexington, Kentucky

For a guy with lots of titles, a PhD and a JD, Justin Bathon is solidly on the ground with American kids. He and Ira go way back, at least to the beginning of Twitter, where they spent night after night thinking together, and challenging others, to look far beyond tinkering at the edges of school change.

“I work across the entire P-20 spectrum here in Kentucky, working in higher ed, spending all my time in P-12 and I think we're in this period of trying to understand the value that's being brought” by our educational institutions, Justin tells us. And it is this level of questioning, of asking so many unasked questions including, what’s the value? that has made him a remarkable leader.

His role in a statewide effort to transform schools by transforming school leadership has made a real difference in the daily lives of hundreds of thousands of Kentucky kids - at least in small ways. For a few they’ve been big changes, but, big or small, Justin is just never satisfied.

We watched him work with schools from Louisville, schools from the Lexington Bluegrass Country, and schools from struggling Appalachian communities - those ravaged by the twin crises of a collapse of an economy that was never healthy anyway, and the opioid disaster following in that wake, and despite the obvious differences, Justin and his team are not only relentlessly positive, they are relentlessly challenging, pushing every school to respond to the real needs of kids in this century.

A Fundamental Equity Rationale

“I can bring a lot of different rationales for change to the table, and I'm a bit of a closeted economist,” Justin Bathon says, generalizing on his work with the schools of Kentucky, “and so on I'm always very open in paying attention to economic rationales, but I think that below all of those there's a more fundamental equity rationale that we as the United States never really fully dealt with.”

“We did not build public school models to let us, as Linda Darling-Hammond says, [give] all kids access to a ‘thinking curriculum,’ it's just never been the model that we've employed. So I think it's a grand American challenge for us to go for, is how do you have a school model that lets all kids have equal access to a ‘thinking curriculum,’ and to those types of career outcomes. I mean that's I think the most passionate [rationale] because if we look out into the future of America and we can't find a nugget where we can come to more equitable places, I think as we sit here in 2019 we can sort of feel [a growing] attention in this country that's driven by inequity in lots of different ways.”

The One Place in Society

“I do believe in our Constitution. I believe in the thoughts that went into that document, those opening words, we are one people and we're all seeking this more perfect union. I think that those things are possible but it's schools that are the one place in society where we have a chance to get to those words in a meaningful way. Most of the country comes together in public schooling, and schools are the place where we can actually try to get to that more perfect union. It’s audacious but it translates into practical things, and you see it as a moral imperative.”

Justin lives and breathes that moral imperative in every one of his roles, which are really just an interlocking set of levers that can drive change in Kentucky’s Pre-K-12 public schools. He believes that radical changes are as possible as they are needed. He believes that his role is to create opportunities for that change.

“We've come very far very fast with public education in America and it's just an unfinished project and it'll be unfinished after my time - and that’s OK. I think every generation has to make a contribution. When I do presentations I look back and look and ask the question, for us in Kentucky, what year can we point to public schools beginning. You can you point to somewhere in the 1870s, 80s, 90s. So how many generations has that been? Well, OK, in seven generations… that's not very many generations to have come from the beginning of the idea that each town should have a common school to our mega institutions of today. I think each generation makes a big contribution. In the 1960s and 70s huge progress was made on civil rights, desegregating schools. Huge, huge steps forward but ultimately the school models that we were employing were still school models that were designed before that period. If we can make some contribution in that area...” he finishes, and that is his target.

A Temporary Little Crack in the System

Justin understands that the opportunities to create change come in many forms. They appear for kids, for teachers, for leaders, for communities, even for a state, and his job is, essentially, to push that help push that “temporary little crack in the system” open just a bit, to hold it open just a bit, so that people might find their way through.

For a kid, that can open a huge range of opportunities that can be their part of changing the world. He points to a student at Lexington’s STEAM Academy as an example, given a life that showed her multiple nations and continents, poverty abroad and in the US, and how opportunity is limited, she broke through. Not a good student before that crack opened, in both her opinion and that of her schools, she leaves 12th grade perhaps being one of the city’s most accomplished graduates.

The STEAM Academy itself is another clear example, and an example that he loves, and that seems to demonstrate what the future of public learning might be. “We have big local university-sized city [Lexington],” he says, “we can easily compare ourselves to Columbus, Ohio [which had some good, innovative efforts in changing some schools], and you just put all those ingredients together, and the local school district saw that and said, ‘We want one.’” He adds that “the Assistant Superintendent certainly had a broader vision, but not all of that was filtering all the way to the school level. So the University [of Kentucky] and the [Fayette County Public Schools] both publicly committed in the newspaper to build a school, and then rapidly got it off the ground. A principal got hired and the core team started to come together, and then I jumped onto the core team.”

It wasn’t perfect, but the crack had widened. “Getting out of the gate the school stumbled out because it didn't have a lot in place already, about what was the core vision. It was given the name STEAM Academy, but no real sense of how to do that thing and how do you do that thing in a random lottery school where half the kids want to be artists, they don't want to be engineers. So we need to have a school model that is true to them as much as it's true to the kid who in middle school actually does know they want to be an engineer so chooses to come.”

Not perfect at the beginning, not even ‘fully baked,’ but exploiting the crack created by school leaders who saw a success happening elsewhere, allowed a brilliant new school model to be discovered.

Structural Inequities

“It's a constant,” he says, “there's still a lot, a lot, that's inequitable, and I wish we knew what to do.” He pauses, “You do, you just gotta keep, you just got to keep trying to undo those [inequities] system by system by system, and work your way back out.”

“So it struck me that these kids all were talking about something that we say that we want for this nation, to have people that are truly entrepreneurial, and they're thinking socially, focusing on social good, how do we make life better for other people? How do we really come to being able to take skill sets and use them in really powerful ways as adults? And it strikes me that what these kids were building is their world. And what matters, what’s a key point, is they aren't all kids that were picked and plucked out of their schools because they're ‘too gifted,’ you know, and I don't know where these kids that were [ranked in a traditional way] but I would say every one of these kids felt gifted to me.”

A big part of equity to Justin is giving every kid the very best opportunities. As a former “tech guy” he says it was hard, but as they created the STEAM Academy they took a hard line on online courses, in opposition to district policies at the time. Students disconnected from each other at computer screens banking high school credits, “just didn’t seem right.”

He also is willing to go through the really difficult stuff that’s often avoided, “We said, ‘What does it mean to have internships for all kids?”’ including the most difficult cohorts. But if everyone doesn’t have that opportunity, two status classes of kids are created.

And it is this that turns an experimental school into a true pilot that can lead the way. “We’re a public school,” he says, “and we do what public schools do,” including all the state tests and regulations. Which allows the ideas to truly spread, and when other schools like STEAM open, as one is on the Kentucky side of the Ohio River, across from Cincinnati, “we feel some ownership.”

Getting Here

“I wasn’t brilliant in high school,” Justin says, “I was as restless then as I am now.” His childhood wasn’t focused on school, it was focused on work. Not being great at school helps him, he thinks, he can see a school from more perspectives, perhaps, than many educational leaders.

And though he became a far more successful student in college, that restlessness has remained. He describes realizing, just as he was completing law school, that his heart lay back in education. And maybe his heart lay in helping schools take the risks needed to help all kids. “Those early days [practicing law] let me take more chances than maybe my peers were taking,” and, in what he calls “Universityland,” he relishes the freedom he has to take risks, to push, to bring his passions to the issues confronting Kentucky’s next generations.

Now Justin sees himself as driving an absolute innovation focus through his various roles. “We’re the research and development school for the state,” he says of the University of Kentucky, “it’s our job to be always setting the bar.”