In this episode, you will hear from Akil Bello. Akil is an educator, entrepreneur, and advocate who has worked in admissions testing and educational access for almost three decades. A nationally recognized authority on educational access, admissions, standardized testing, and admissions testing, Akil was a founding partner and CEO of Bell Curves, a test preparation company that helped schools and non-profit organizations understand standardized tests and admissions and develop affordable solutions for underserved students. Akil has also served as the Director of Equity and Access for The Princeton Review.

Currently, Akil serves as Senior Director of Advocacy and Advancement and he works to build resources and tools to guide policy and ensure that large-scale assessment tests are used responsibly and transparently to benefit students. Akil attended an HBCU and ultimately earned a bachelor’s degree from a university in Brooklyn.

0:00 – Introduction
1:13 – What’s something you tried that didn’t work?
2:19 – How Akil brings new ideas into his work
2:54 – Twitter as a brainstorming tool
4:22 – Making the internal case to move test-optional or test-blind
10:18 – Reconciling student/parent/counselor beliefs with desired behavior around testing and grades
13:50 – The false objectivity of testing
15:58 – ACT, SAT, CLT and flawder (a new term) metrics
18:10 – Be honest advocates for change
23:23 – Want to understand the barriers? “Do the thing yourself.”
26:50 – Predictive validity and Miss Cleoing decisions
29:17 – Graduation and retention rates are inputs
30:01 – Moving the needle on what parents and students see as important metrics
33:15 – Incremental change vs restarting from scratch
36:06 – What is the capacity of colleges?
39:23 – What is the purpose of college?
40:44 – Input metrics and the lack of measurements for what actually occurs at college
42:34 – Do we need campus visits as much as we think?
45:10 – A challenge: Post your standardized test scores online. Have faculty do the same. Then see how important they are.

Show notes are available on the Enrollment Insights Blog at niche.bz/podcast.

In the Enrollment Insights Podcast, you'll hear about novel solutions to problems, ways to make processes better for students, and the questions that spark internal reflection and end up changing entire processes.

Enrollment Insights Podcast

#32 - Akil Bello and Removing Meaningless Hoops (Including Standardized Tests)

In this episode, you'll hear from Jan Abernathy, Chief Communications Officer at The Browning School, a K-12 boys' school in New York City. Formerly the director of marketing and communications at The Elisabeth Morrow School in Englewood, NJ, she has presented at conferences sponsored by the National Association of Independent Schools, the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education, the New Jersey Association of Independent Schools, and the New York State Association of Independent Schools. At Browning, she is a member of the Health &amp; Safety Team, responsible for managing COVID response, and co-chaired the school’s successful search for its new director of equitable practice and social impact. At EMS, she also chaired the Equity and Justice Task Force, managed the school’s participation in the NAIS’ Assessment of Inclusivity and Multiculturalism Survey, and led the school’s NJAIS reaccreditation. 

She is president of New York City Independent Schools Communications Professionals, a professional association of over 100 members from schools throughout the tri-state area, and the co-founder of Black Advancement Networking Group, which works to gain further representation and greater professional growth of Black professionals in advancement roles in independent schools. Jan is chair of CASE-NAIS 2022, the most prominent international advancement conference in the independent school sector. A journalist by training, she has written for NAIS’ Independent School Magazine on crisis communications (Winter 2019) and the "Black at" movement (Winter 2021). 

She is a trustee of Grace Church School, a JK-12 school in New York City, and was on the board of Stevens Cooperative School in Hoboken, NJ, for 13 years, spending six years as chair. Her consulting firm, Jan Abernathy Strategic Communications, provides communications and DEI counsel for educational institutions and non-profits.

3:10 - What didn't work for Jan? Podcasting!
4:38 - "If you're going to bite off more than you can chew, make sure you've thought about the workflows."
6:20 - The importance of looking outside your market (and industry) to brainstorm ideas
9:30 - What diversity is and what it isn't
12:14 - Diversity is a nuanced discussion
13:19 - "You can't sleep on it"
14:10 - Navigating the challenge of communicating DEI work
15:15 - You may have to catch up before you can communicate
16:09 - Aspirations and pitfalls
16:35 - There is no elevator pitch for DEI work
17:57 - Partnering with your school's DEI practitioner
21:35 - When you see something, say something
23:15 - What your students understand about diversity
26:05 - What Niche data is saying about how parents value student and teacher diversity
27:25 - Your loudest families may not be representative of how your community feels about diversity work
29:17 - How Millennials and Gen Xers differ on diversity
30:55 - "Sometimes a question is just a question."
31:22 - What to do when a crisis hits
35:44 - The communications director as a calming presence during a crisis
37:45 - You can't be all business when something goes wrong
39:25 - Have a plan and empower your communications leaders to take action
40:15 - The right way to partner with a crisis communications firm
41:16 - Effective school communicators must know how to navigate a crisis
45:04 - Tips for school leaders who are new to DEI work
48:00 - "If you don't understand the discipline, it's that much harder to communicate about it."

Show notes are available on the Enrollment Insights Blog at niche.bz/podcast.

In the Enrollment Insights Podcast, you'll hear about novel solutions to problems, ways to make processes better for students, and the questions that spark internal reflection and end up changing entire processes.

#40 - Jan Abernathy and the Intersection of Communications and DEI

The Enrollment Insights podcast is a 20-40 minute conversation released twice monthly. Most enrollment management and marketing podcasts interview leaders and we hear about what they’ve done. I’m more interested with novel solutions to problems, or ways to make processes better for students. I’m curious about the questions that spark internal reflection and end up changing entire processes. Conversations will include those in and out of enrollment management and marketing as well as with those outside of education entirely. 

To summarize: I want to talk about the tangents: ideas that  seem outside of current feasibility and spark new ways of looking at data and strategy development.

All episodes and resources are available at niche.bz/podcast

#32 - Akil Bello and Removing Meaningless Hoops (Including Standardized Tests)

Niche Enrollment Insights Podcast

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