Brady Smith takes the helm at The Beacon School today under some of the most challenging conditions possible—but where some may see obstacles, he prefers to see opportunities.
“I think one of the pieces that I feel is frustrating sort of existentially about this moment in history is that we are paying so much attention to health and safety, rightfully so, and to the logistics and operations and those things that go with the health and safety,” said Brady.
“But we’re also faced with a moment in history where there’s momentum to talk about transforming our systems, talk about interrogating structures, and trying to make sure that what we come back to when we do come back is something better than what we left.”
Brady was chosen to lead Beacon after a lightning-fast process that started when founding principal Ruth Lacey announced in late June that she would retire August 1, after several months of managing the school during remote learning. When Beacon pivoted to virtual learning in March, so many activities were left in limbo. Sports teams were on the brink of huge victories, the PTA was getting ready for an auction and fundraising gala, families were about to sign up for April parent/advisor conferences, and auditions had been announced for “Twelfth Night.” The school building’s closure also capped an academic year that started with student walkouts over climate change and ended with more walkouts and tough conversations over race and equity at Beacon—conversations that are crucial and must continue, he notes.
As he begins this new role and a new era for the school, Brady says he’s ready to start the important work of balancing the focus on safety and scheduling with envisioning Beacon’s next chapter.
“I’m trying to figure out how to find that balance, that space to engage in the conversations about transformation, around racial equity,” he said. “I don’t want to return to systems that have not worked for everybody. I don’t want to return to systems that have led to oppression. I would like to use this moment and this energy and this momentum to transform our systems so that they are equitable and work for everybody.”
That’s work he wants the faculty to do in partnership with students. “I would challenge young people to engage in transformational work while we are stuck doing remote and hybrid learning,” he said. “We can still think about our future and see a future where we are no longer operating under these constraints. I’m very optimistic that during this really difficult time, not only can we get through it, but we can use this time and this energy in our society to change our systems and make them better, make them work better—not just for young people, for everybody.“
MORE THAN JUST A SUIT AND TIE
Those are big goals from an educator with a long resume of credentials and accolades. But Brady—who says Smith is too generic to use with anyone—is also a man with a warm spirit and varied interests.
“In my spare time, I play music,” he says. “Band practice usually lasts three hours and then I cook dinner for everyone and we hang out and laugh. I like to hike with my dogs. I have an old house that I could spend every weekend fixing.”
He lives with his family in Yonkers now, after many years in the city. But the city is still where they spend much of their time. “I love to spend time with my daughters and my sweetie, ideally having Italian food at Supper in the East Village,” he said. “Our 25th wedding anniversary is next week.”
He’s an English teacher who became an administrator, but doesn’t love suits and ties. He once pursued being a musician, furniture crafter, and construction worker. As he told the Bell Voices podcast: “I mean, clearly I was a screw-up. I got the degree, but if I hadn’t fallen in love and had a kid I might still be playing music and pounding nails.”
He’s looking forward to starting work at Beacon having enjoyed some time off this summer with his family and his other pastime—reading.
“The only time I can find to read fiction is in the summer, and my ideal vacation week is on a beach finishing a book a day. My favorites from this past summer were On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous; There There; and A Burning. My current stack of non-fiction includes Stamped from the Beginning, The Genius of Birds, and The Art of Gathering.”
A NEW BEGINNING
His first task in the days ahead is helping the Beacon community navigate tough choices including whether to come back to the building.
“I have made the decision to be in school five days a week—not just because it’s my professional obligation, but because I’m confident that I can maintain my own personal safety. Infection rates are low, we have safety protocols in place in the Beacon building,” said Brady.
“I’ll be doing a walkthrough, I have an understanding of the different elements involved in the HVAC and ventilation and other concerns around safety. And I’ll ask those hard questions,” he added.
“When I have more information about the building, I’ll feel more qualified in making recommendations. But everything I’ve been told so far leads me to believe that we can create a safe atmosphere. And though it might only be one day a week, that’s one more day of in-person instruction and a different in-person experience than if you are fully remote. That could be a big deal for a young person.”
But the decision to return, he recognizes, is a personal choice. “It’s not just what happens in our school building that is part of that consideration. I do think that there’s no substitute for face-to-face in-person learning. That said, it’s got to look different in this hybrid setting. They’ve got social distancing and masks and no contact and things like that. So I think some of the benefits of the in-person learning is lost in the hybrid model,” he said.
“I want families to choose to send their child to school. But I also recognize the commute, their sense of their child’s individual responsibility of wearing the mask, and following the safety protocols is a piece of that decision.”
The educational component of school reopening is more certain, he adds. “Beacon will be able to provide Beacon teachers for Beacon students, whether they’re fully remote or hybrid. That’s an important piece of the decision as well. “
While his daughters are in their 20s, Brady says he relates to the tough decisions parents are making. If his own daughters had been faced with that choice, he believes one would have returned and the other might not have.
“My older daughter graduated from Frank Sinatra High School. She was a violinist and is still a musician. I think she would have chosen to attend school if violin and band and orchestra were offered,” he guessed. His other daughter is “much more comfortable with remote learning. And I know some young people have excelled in remote learning. And so I think she might have been one of those.”
THE RETURN TO LEARNING
His immediate goal is figuring out how to best simultaneously teach the students who return to the building and those who don’t. Beacon teachers and administrators have been working on reopening plans for months. The final reopening plan was just approved by the DOE last week, even as the Chancellor issued new guidance about how schools should implement their plans. The UFT is also considering strike action. If school buildings do reopen, Beacon will be offering one day a week of in-school instruction for most students with just 9 students per classroom, with mandatory mask-wearing and social distancing rules. The rest of blended students’ time will be spent learning remotely.
“I don’t think anyone is completely happy with the school reopening plans. If you feel your school and child are safe, you want more time in school than most models allow. If you are concerned about your child’s health and safety, you might choose to learn fully remote but staying home is not the best approach for many students,” he said.
“I appreciate that parents are given some choice, but it’s very hard to know what is best with all the variables and moving parts. I think a key will be optimizing remote learning—making it more engaging, being really thoughtful about how to teach remotely. And then I hope that we are able to be safe and keep infection rates down and return to full in-person learning as soon as possible.”
Brady plans to meet with every Beacon constituency right away to get input on school reopening and introduce himself. Brady says Beacon has greater parent engagement than previous schools he’s led, so he plans to send weekly emails to staff, students and parents and contribute to the PTA weekly newsletter. “Streamlining communication is important. If there is a way for us to work together to share information, that would be my preference,” he said.
Brady will also bring his own leadership philosophy to the reopening. “It’s my style to play to people’s strengths, to identify what people are good at, and support them in doing that well,” he said. “It’ll take me some time to figure out what people’s strengths are on the teacher level. I know that there’s a lot of autonomy and teacher agency, and I think that’s a good thing when you have teachers that are as dedicated as they are at Beacon.”
“But I also know,” he added, “that there are some calls for more consistency, for more vertical alignment, for conversations to occur within and between departments, to make sure that the student experience is rich for everybody.”
“And so I think that that’s part of how I would approach the work is to preserve the teacher autonomy, the curriculum design that you can do in a PBA school to encourage the project-based learning, but really to try and help create an experience for students academically that is consistent throughout their years at Beacon. I’m relatively hands-off. I trust and verify. I like to be a thought partner and help people work through their dilemmas. But I do have a clear decision-making structure that I will share with staff about how as a leader I intend to make decisions. And to the greatest extent possible, those decisions will involve input from others.”
RACE AND EQUITY AT BEACON
One area where Brady plans to be proactive is in addressing concerns about diversity, equity, and inclusion. “There’s work that every school and every organization needs to do, in my opinion, to address issues of racial equity in our society,” said Brady, whose last high school was given a “Respect for All” distinction by the DOE, as a school that successfully taught tolerance and respect among its students.
“This is a conversation that is not unique to Beacon. It’s happening all over in not just the US, but all over the world. It needs to happen at Beacon as well. My responsibility as a school leader is to create the space and the structures for those conversations to happen, both with students and with staff. So I absolutely commit to that. And that’s work I’ve done before, at Baldwin and other schools. It’s work I engage in outside of my professional life. I have a deep belief in engaging in that work and bring that deep belief to my work.”
Brady is aware of conversations with the Beacon United Unions and other student leaders about how to establish a framework and implement goals for diversity, equity, and inclusion. And recognizes those concerns have not gone away because of the pandemic.
“I’m a white male and I know who I am,” he said when asked about whether parents or students might raise questions about the lack of diversity in the school administration. “I have a sense of what that means to people. I also have been in schools for 30 years and I’ve been engaging in this work, knowing my identity, learning from my experience. In so many ways, it’s been the center of my professional work to address issues of racial equity that my identity is something I can’t change. But all the other pieces that I think make me a transformational school leader in that regard are part of who I am. And so I am a white male, but I’m a white male who believes in racial equity.”
BRADY’S BACKGROUND
Brady joins Beacon from his previous role as principal and co-director at the James Baldwin School, a transfer school where about half the students go on to college. Baldwin is an NYC Outward Bound School which, like Beacon, assesses its students through Performance-Based Assessment Tasks (PBAs) instead of NY State Regents exams (except English Regents, which they are still required to take).
At Baldwin, Brady became a strong citywide voice denouncing the use of suspensions. His students, who came from unhappy experiences at other schools, entered a world without metal detectors, with smaller classes and teachers who used their first names, the freedom to go out for lunch, no uniforms or homework. The school provided lots of counseling.
That year, 2014, Black students, who comprise less than a third of the New York City student population, served more than half of the suspensions citywide. At Baldwin, Brady encouraged restorative justice over punishment.
He also pushed staff to teach courses that engaged students in social justice issues, areas he felt would appeal to students for whom school had not worked out in the past. Some of those classes were “The Origin of Racial Slavery,” “Dracula and Gender Identity,” and “Islamic Art and Mathematics.” The school taught an entire class focusing on Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, which was part of Beacon’s summer homework.
Before that, he spent two years at NYU’s Abu Dhabi campus preparing local high school graduates for admission to international liberal arts universities. His move to Abu Dhabi followed 5 years as principal of the Validus Preparatory Academy in the Bronx, another NYC Outward Bound school that he founded. His background also includes time as an ELA teacher at Adlai Stevenson High School and Parkrose High School.
“Most of the students that I’ve worked with have been students from marginalized communities. District 9 in the Bronx is one of the poorest congressional districts in the US. And at Baldwin, we serve students who are, you know, sort of disenfranchised. It’s a transfer school, they’ve chosen to leave the school they’ve been attached to,” he said. “My work in New York has focused typically on populations that feel marginalized.”
His career in education began in the Pacific Northwest, where he grew up, including teaching for six years at a school in Portland, Oregon. That was a similar demographic to Beacon, racially and socioeconomically, and we worked very hard to create high expectations for all. And they weren’t necessarily present when I started that school.”
His educational background also includes graduate coursework toward the SDL license at City College; a Masters in the Art of Teaching at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon; and a Bachelor of Arts from Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington.
Brady has been a UFT representative in New York and an SLT chair. He’s also proud of his work with restorative justice, particularly at the James Baldwin school, and has been a mentor, worked on equity issues, and taught other future educational leaders.
ALL IN THE FAMILY
Brady came by his love of schools and learning from his mother, who was a secretary at the Bush School, a private school in Seattle that he attended through 8th Grade. He spent most of his time growing up in and around schools, not just during the day but sometimes accompanying his mother before and after school in her work. “It is the family business, a little bit,” he said.
He went to a high school in Seattle, Roosevelt High School, which he called very segregated but more diverse than the private school he had come from. He then spent a year at University of Washington while working full time at a restaurant. About half-way through the second term, he dropped out, overwhelmed by the huge class sizes and juggling so many priorities. He finished at Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA, where they have no grades, interdisciplinary coursework, and smaller classes.
His choices for places to teach were a big, predominantly white suburban school or an inner city high school that was 95% Black. He chose the school in the inner city and has largely stayed with that population ever since. But first, he dropped out of teaching altogether and went to work in construction for seven years, working his way up to being a carpenter. He worked as a substitute teacher occasionally, but mostly his devotion outside work was to his band. That changed when he met his wife and had his first child. She lured him back to teaching, at first working with troubled kids. Eventually, he chose to teach English and became completely devoted to education.
His wife, Julie Avina (picture with Brady above; he prefers the term “sweetheart” to “wife”) was the reason they relocated to New York in 2001 with their daughters, so she could study at NYC’s Teachers’ College. Later, Julie received a job offer in Abu Dhabi that moved them across the globe. She’s now an associate dean at NYU’s School of Global Public Health. He’s also proud of his daughters; one works with Beacon students on the Youth Climate Task Force and the other is a musician, like him, and a music teacher.
MESSAGE TO STUDENTS
Brady is eager to engage students before the school year begins, including at the ninth grade virtual bridge program on Sept. 3rd. He prefers to be called “Mr. Brady,” noting that “Mr.” sends an important message about how he is perceived.
“I can tell jokes and have fun and come across as lighthearted,” he says, but he also wants students to know he takes his work seriously.
“I believe in this work deeply. I’ve been doing it my entire life and in a way that has meaning, not just to get a paycheck. And so I want to be careful that I’m not seen as somebody who is treating things lightly, but as someone who tries to find joy while engaging in the really hard work of making change in our schools.”
His overarching message to Beacon students and families as he embarks on this important chapter in the school’s history:
“It’s important that we acknowledge that this is a really difficult time for young people in particular, that we acknowledge it’s a unique time in history. This is not something that any of us have experience trying to address and move through,” he says.
“But what we do know is that there are things that we can still do well. We can still connect. We can still support, still provide quality education. We can still take care of each other.”