Name: Inside Priscilla Chan's and Mark Zuckerberg’s School
Uploaded: 2016-10-18
Duration: 5 min 20 s
Description: It provides education and healthcare

[ MUSIC ] You took somebody's really experiences and this year you're open up a school. Mm- hm. And it's follow up so, and the school has really unusual goal which is not trying to provide just education but you're trying to provide health care. And that clearly comes right from the experience you're talking about. Talk to us about what the school is doing? What it's goals are and are you trying to do both is important. Yeah, the school is really a continuation of my work as a pediatrician. I went to medical school and practiced as a primary physician at our county safety net hospital for the past five year. And when I began my practice I said I. I am gonna be a pediatrician that really thinks about and understands a child's educational trajectory and how to set them up for success from the health standpoint, so that they can be present and ready to learn. And, I was diligent, I asked the questions, I wrote down the answers, To my questions. And a couple years in, I encountered a patient where I can tell you, I utterly failed. I was taking care of a second grader who was coming to me with two problems, really struggling in school. And a seizure disorder. And the story didn't really quite fit so I spent many visits over the course of a year helping unpack what was going on. And what I realized after that year is that this child did not have a seizure disorder. This child has had been exposed to extreme trauma at home. And what manifested was behavioral problems that made it so that the school and the mom excused his participation in school under the guise of seizure disorder. So this child missed 150 days of school, nearly a year because of the lack of communication between school and health providers And also lack of empowerment of the mother to make sure that the kid really had what she needed to allow the kid to succeed. I missed that as a pediatrician who prides herself in really thinking about health and education through the same lens. And so the primary school's goal is to really bring together these really incredibly important systems. Health and education to work together to improve the lives of the kids who need these systems to work the most. And we're nine weeks old. So there's a lot to learn. But that's our vision of what we can hopefully accomplish in the next decades to come. You've been a teacher, you've been a doctor, you're now running a school, Mark's the technologist. Yeah. And when you launch CZI you've laid out your priorities. I'd love for you to share with the audience what those priorities were and how your experiences as a teacher and doctor marked as a technologist have informed those priorities. [ INAUDIBLE ] School is not enough. That's just one of the things she does. What we've learned so far is that Mark and I can make the biggest impact when we, not only invest our resources, but we also bring our expertise and passion to the table to solve the problems, as well. And, like you said, Mark's a computer engineer and, so, he's got, along with you, a lot of experience really building tools and scaling them. That would be mostly him, not you, but [ LAUGH ] Thank you. It's a partnership. [ LAUGH ] He's always really generous. [ LAUGH ] For me, I have the experience of bringing the lens of being a pediatrician and an educator to really understand the different problems that we're tackling. And that together really has enriched both our understanding of the problems that we're trying to solve and the additional insight and being part of building the solution that Mark and I can really participate in. And I'll give you an example. We're building a tool for personalized learning and so Mark has really been engaged in thinking about how can we build the best tool possible to allow these students to have an incredible resource to really drive and own their education. And the kids are very critical. They give feedback on how the tool isn't working. [ LAUGH ] And that's really- he and the team are working hard on it. But for me, I think about how is this tool going to engage students? How is this tool going to engage families? How is this tool going to empower teachers to Do even better at their work. And so that's how we bring ourselves, as practitioners, to the work. And that work grounds us in helping us understand keep laser focused on what's the most important thing in what we do. it's great [ SOUND ] [ BLANK_AUDIO ]