I recently had a conversation with Julian Vasquez Heilig, the dean of the College of Education at the University of Kentucky.
Dr. Heilig discusses his own background, a trajectory that took him from Michigan to Stanford, then to Texas, California, and now Kentucky. He is a scholar and an activist who now seeks to lead a new conversation about education in a Kentucky, bringing the community into close connection with the schools.
I have known Julian since 2012, when he became a founding member of the board of the Network for Public Education.
His blog, “Cloaking Inequity,” is one of the liveliest on the web. He has a passion for equity and inclusion that shines through his scholarship, his blog, and his activism.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I think I understand the appeal of Kentucky to a teacher educator like Vasquez Heilig. Unlike his previous posts in states where privatization has been embraced “full throttle,” he sees an opportunity to have a significant impact in Kentucky which is largely untainted by market based opportunism. While the state has a significant poor population, the poverty includes both white and black people that are struggling. Kentucky has tremendous potential to invest in community schools. If Vasquez Heilig can convince state leaders to make this investment, he has the potential to replicate what appears to be a winning approach to help students that live in poverty. I would love to see Kentucky turn into America’s Finland that could serve as a model for other states to emulate, although the state includes a lot more poverty than Finland has.
We need to stop measuring poor students by standardized testing which has no real value in the real world. We need to look at projects in terms of long term outcomes. Are students productive in the real world? Is substance abuse on a downward trend? Are fewer students involved with the juvenile justice system? If we can help students with wrap around services, we can help students and families lead better lives with more lasting impact than yearly test scores. We need to help the whole child, social-emotional as well as cognitive.
I hope Julian will travel to Cincinnati and see some community based learning centers here, established by the school board. All have wrap around services that serve students and adults. I think he will find ideas likely to fit some communities in Kentucky. The first school here included students who were from Appalachian communities in Kentucky. They had gravitated toward a predominately black and desperately poor and environmentally hazardous area of Cincinnati. I am not able to be a tour guide, but I could put Julian in touch with an able person, a social worker who is also well informed about the politics and economics of this and other efforts. Like most school districts in Ohio, Cincinnati is also under continuous risk of failure from asinine state policies. These include value-added measures of teachers, A-F report cards, and a legislature determined to undermine public education…aided by people at the Ohio branch of the Fordham Institute. If Julian can shape a state-wide model of community schooling supported by legislators, that could be a break-the-mold move for other states. In any case, I wish him well.