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Jamie Rosenberg, founder and executive chairman of ClassWallet, joins me to explore the evolving landscape of education savings accounts (ESAs) and the broader push toward education choice. Jamie shares the origin story of ClassWallet and discusses how the company is innovating digital wallet solutions that streamline the flow of public funds to families, educators, and nontraditional providers. The conversation sheds light on the challenges families and entrepreneurs face in navigating new ESA programs, the delicate balance between agency and accountability, and how states can design effective policies that empower both families and innovative education providers.Michael HornI’m Michael Horn. You’re joining the show where we’re dedicated to creating a world in which all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their potential and live lives of purpose. And to help us think through that today, delighted to bring Jamie Rosenberg to the show. Jamie is the founder and executive chairman of ClassWallet, which we’re going to hear a lot more about the show. And Jamie and I were in a conversation a few months back with a bunch of others around this growing education savings account space with a bunch of insights that really struck me around the market and how to create a really robust one between demand and supply.So delighted to get into all of that today. Jamie, welcome to the Future of Education. Thank you so much for joining me. I appreciate you being here.Jamie RosenbergIt’s great being here, Michael. I appreciate the invite.Michael HornYeah, no, I’m delighted to learn from you. And before we get into some of the ways that the market is emerging, I, I want to start out with ClassWallet origin story, if you will. You all were founded in 2014, well before education savings accounts was sort of the movement I think that it’s becoming national at the moment. And so I’m just curious, like, what did the company start out as? What was the opportunity that you saw that you felt like ClassWallet can really fill this need in the country’s ecosystem?Jamie RosenbergSure. This is my second company. So to understand the formation of ClassWallet, let me just share with you how I.Michael HornYeah, origin story. Good.Jamie RosenbergYeah, of course. So my personal and professional mission has always been to try to get the dollars as close to children as possible. I started my career as a lawyer, at one point in time was mentoring a student at a nearby school in Miami for mentally and physically delayed pre kindergarten aged children. And during that experience, I really just had a life changing experience and really wanted to understand how I could help children in an educational environment as much as possible. So I started my first company in 1998, which was Adopt a Classroom, which was a crowdfunding platform for teachers as a way of trying to get philanthropic dollars as close to that child and in that learning environment as effectively as possible. So I grew that to be one of the larger education philanthropies in the country. By the time I left, I had raised and distributed about $25 million to teachers in 30% of U.S. public schools.Education Funding for Children’s SuccessJamie RosenbergThe origin of ClassWallet germinates from there because in that journey I had developed a way of getting money in a compliant, impactful way as close to that child, and realized that I could help more children, more students by taking that technology and delivering it to the system, the school systems and state systems. And that was the impetus and catalyst to start ClassWallet in 2014.Michael HornAnd so what were those initial customer relationships like what was the dollar flows funding from to and so forth?Jamie RosenbergYes. So the initial focus and hence the brand name was really helping LEAs and school districts get their funding down to the classroom more effectively. K12 is a trillion dollar budget, yet teachers spend $1,000 out of their own pocket every year. I mean, it’s just a huge disconnect. So we started out selling to school districts and today about 6% of public school teachers in America actually have a ClassWallet account, almost like a teacher savings account, where they get access to a wallet and can purchase the learning goods and resources they need to meet the learning needs of their students. And then in 2017, we evolved to sell ClassWallet into the state agency space, really solving similar problems for education savings accounts. And since then we have become a market leader in school choice, but have also been used in other agencies like early child care, workforce development, and health and human services.Michael HornYeah, I noticed that. And before we get to the ESAs, just, just say a word about those other three areas because I think it’s interesting that you get to serve those as well as sort of this core K12 ESA market.Jamie RosenbergThe underlying theme is that it’s all the same problem. The challenge in trying to get public money to the right people and ensure those people not only use it for the right purpose, but ultimately have the biggest impact for that program lies in a point of intersection where policy intersects with rubber hits the road implementation and compliance. And our innovation has been able to unlock that friction point and maximize that impact of that dollar. And that applies to a dollar reaching a family for ESA equally as it implies reaching a family who might be getting early child care subsidy or an adult learner who has a grant from an agency to further their career journey. So it’s all the same problem. And our innovation has been able to maximize outcomes of programs across various types of programs.Michael HornSay more about that because I think then as we get into the ESA space, sort of the counterfactual right. If ClassWallet hadn’t existed, I imagine would be we have dollars theoretically flowing from state coffers, to families in a private wallet to spend on education providers, both schools, as well as other options, tutoring and so forth. I can imagine that would have been a very bureaucratic application, paper and pencil, sort of heavy set of things like that. Friction would have been really real. How do you all come in there and facilitate and streamline those dollars reaching the families themselves? What’s the innovation there itself look like?Jamie RosenbergSo to talk about our innovation, I’ll give you just a touch upon briefly what existed before our innovation.Michael HornPerfect.Jamie RosenbergSo you can understand the impact. So prior to our introduction of digital wallet technology, states really only had two choices, a debit card or reimbursement.Michael HornYep.ESA Funding SolutionJamie RosenbergSo how does the state get $100 million to, you know, 30,000 families on a debit card? Not only that ensures using it according to the rules, but can get the data it needs. You can imagine how challenging that might be. And reimbursement of course is equally challenging, forcing families to spend their own money and submit receipts. So that was the ESA market prior to ClassWallet. What our innovation does is a digital wallet that gives families immediate access to the funds and allows them to spend those funds within vendors and for goods that the rules of the program are already embedded in the system. So they have agency to get what they need, but also the ease of knowing that what they’re doing and what they’re buying is compliant to program rules.Michael HornSo you’re effectively solving the compliance thing proactively. So it’s hard coded, if you will, into the digital wallet and the set of market options that they’re seeing has already been vetted. And you have solved that sort of question in their mind of if I’m allowed to do this, is that a fair way of saying it?Jamie RosenbergI’m saying that we solve an outcome problem, not a compliance problem. The compliance is the root cause as to why programs don’t get the outcomes they want. But what we’ve been able to do is by solving the compliance problem, we create a two sided marketplace and give families access to the breadth of innovation and all the providers that can support that child’s unique personalized learning needs with an incredible powerful market. If that makes sense.Michael HornYeah, it makes a ton of sense. So then talk about how many states are you supporting today in their ESA policies out there? Just give us a sense of the market that you all are serving at the moment.Jamie RosenbergWe currently serve nine ESA programs and in addition we serve other programs that give money to families but may not necessarily be used for tuition. So they’re not school choice under the classical definition, but they are what I would call education freedom, where families are getting funding from, from state agencies and can self direct how those funds can ultimately improve their children’s outcomes.Michael HornGotcha. And then so you have this fascinating bird’s eye view effectively into these markets that are getting created, the supply side, new school models, tutoring, right, entrepreneurs coming in and so forth. The demand side, families getting comfortable with this option, with using the dollars to get whatever set of services they need for their students. I’d love maybe let’s start on the supply side and thinking about lessons of regulation and policy. And you can go either way, positive or negative. I guess I’m curious what you’ve learned that really facilitates a robust supply side. And then the flip side, what stymies it, what holds it back or gums it up? And as we think about what, what are the right set of policies and regs to really make these marketplaces flourish.Education Market: Innovative ESAsJamie RosenbergSo first, I would appreciate that what the education market is doing with school choice is in my opinion, leading-edge innovation. It really is. When you really look at the entire scope of government programs, very few ultimately get that dollar into the hands of that beneficiary, that citizen, and give them agency in the manner that ESAs are doing today. So first, just understand that it’s incredibly innovative. My view of the market in ESA implementation, the supply side and the demand side is I really slice it into three pieces. There’s the before, before the family gets that dollar and we call that awareness, activation and navigation. How can we get as many people aware of the program, help them navigate the complexity of the program to ultimately meet the demand that the program has? There’s $100 million, how do we give enough families activated to take advantage of the full program? The middle part is using the money and the third part is the data.How did they use the money? And how can we quantify the impact? Your question is on supply. So there’s a lot more emphasis on marketing, a lot more emphasis on helping these families who come from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds, who may not speak English as a first language, who are for the most part taking agency for the very, very first time of their child’s education journey. And I am happy to elaborate on what we and other demands in the market are there, but that’s the dynamics of what sort of creates the demand for the program.Michael HornYeah, that makes sense. And I guess I’m curious if you want to go demand side first. Right. What really facilitates these families to be able to effectively exercise that agency? And where have you seen examples that maybe are hindering or creating more friction than needs to be done, if you will, given the policy set in place?Jamie RosenbergYes. So what’s creating more demand is marketing and grassroots efforts. Data will show that families really trust their places of faith and schools. And so we’re seeing a lot more investment in grassroots advocacy, coalescence and coalition among the non-public school communities and the organizations around them that support that ultimately can reach their families where they are. Okay. In addition, air coverage on top to create brand awareness. So I’ve heard of the ESA program three or four times now. I’m hearing it from my pastor or my rabbi, whoever it might be.And I’m becoming engaged and educated. The second part is navigation. It’s complicated. The policy rules are complicated. So there’s a lot of emphasis on educating those grassroots channels to help those families navigate the complexities and ultimately make the leap. I’m going to apply, I’m going to submit my tax return if I have one. I’m going to submit my individual educator program, my IEP, if I can get access to it. Those are the dynamics that help them get and cross that line and those are sort of the players at a high level and that ultimately accomplish this sort of market demand that we all desire for.Michael HornAnd are there policies in that space or regs that are creating more friction than is necessary in your view? Are there, are there certain states that are doing things that are great, that are actually making it easier to find that IEP and submit it and so forth to provide the evidence to get whatever dollar flows the family may be entitled to?Jamie RosenbergMy opinion is that the policies and the regulations definitely come in many, many different flavors.Michael HornYeah.Jamie RosenbergI would say that the different flavors aren’t necessarily exacerbating friction. You know, at some point in time, if there’s some federated standard, would that ease friction? I think that would be a healthy debate to explore. I think the dynamics of the variation of policies do not necessarily supersede just the quantum leap of taking that decision for the very first time for this family, for this parent, single parent, or two parents in a home, going from a public education, more passive experience, I’m going to, you know, more or less. Sure, right.Michael HornI live where I do and I go, yeah, yeah.Overcoming Barriers to ESA UseJamie RosenbergAnd so if I had to emphasize, you know, what is the, you know, greatest area of friction that I would, you know, really invest in to try to overcome, it’s really creating that, that level of comfort for that family member to, to take that leap. And the variations and the complexities of policies are true, but I believe that they’re surmountable for the most part. And just to finish. For the most part, 70% of families are using the ESA money to send their kid to a private school. It’s not that complicated. Once you get beyond private school tuition, the types of tutors you’re allowed to use, the types of therapists you’re allowed to use, the types of educational goods you’re allowed to buy, that’s where you’re touching upon all those complexities. And I believe that complexity, that friction really happens in the use of funds, but not necessarily serving as a huge barrier to get them to apply for the program, if that makes sense.Michael HornYeah, no, that does make sense. Before we turn to some of those other providers and thinking about some supply side or the innovative space of what’s called today microschools, maybe it won’t be in the future. I’m curious what the role of ClassWallet is in terms of helping families feel more comfortable with the navigation feel that they have the ability to exercise that agency that they’re giving you. Like what’s. I assume it’s evolved over time that you’re probably rolling out different features or changing the look and feel of the product and so forth to help them feel more ability to find the right option for them and use those dollars. What’s that evolution look like?Jamie RosenbergThat’s a great question. It really comes down to data and relationships. So when a family first gets the funds, ClassWallet’s investing heavily in giving them access to data to make the best use of those dollars. Let’s say you have a second grade child who might have some reading deficiencies. What are other families with children with second grade of age who also might have reading challenges and what are they buying? Would be just one very simple example. Second, ClassWallet has relationships now and have integrated every major education e-tailer in the country. I mean 300 plus of the leading companies have all integrated from Amazon to Staples to Scholastic to School, Speciality, the Lakeshore and many, many, many more, all accept ClassWallet as a form of payment.So we work very closely with them on how they can present their catalogs in a way that is an active, engaging experience with parents so that they’re finding items that are more and more closely correlated with their needs more easily than just simply an e-commerce experience. So it’s really about data, relationships and tailoring an experience for that family that they can most easily meet the unique needs of their child within that marketplace dynamic.Michael HornIt’s really cool to think about what that can look like then from the families navigating this and sort of taking away some of the breadth or complexity to help them find the thing that’s maybe most likely to be the fit for their kid. I’m curious on that supply side because you just talked about the integration with a lot of these suppliers and so forth. One of the pieces I’m curious about is the entrepreneur side of this supply side. Right. We’re seeing a lot of educators across the country leave their roles as public school teachers and so forth, saying, I can create a school. Right. That will better serve. And my understanding, in the early years of some of these places, I think, frankly, before you all were in some of these states, they were saying, like, hey, the dollars don’t flow to me right? Until six months later and I’m sitting out there trying to pay staff or whatever it might be.There’s all these cash flow questions, friction around that and so forth. What have you learned about creating a robust supply side that supports entrepreneurs and innovative approaches as they come into this market to meet this new burgeoning demand? Or, or not new burgeoning demand, but burgeoning demand now backed by dollars?Jamie RosenbergThat’s a great question. So I’m going to break your question into two pieces. One, how do you ensure that those stakeholders, the needs of those stakeholders are met so they can actively participate in these programs? And then two, how do we support entrepreneurs? So, for example, there are many important stakeholders. So the schools themselves are incredibly important stakeholders. And so one lesson we learned is not only do they need to get paid quickly and effectively, but they need to get paid in a manner that reconciles with their accounts receivable systems.Michael HornSure.Streamlined Payment System for SchoolsJamie RosenbergSo when we, when we first started, we would ACH them, you know, one payment, you know, every day. We then learn from them that they need to reconcile that payment against 37 different students who each have unique student IDs against their bank accounts. So we altered our payment mechanism. So now every school gets a batch of 37 payments with student IDs so they can quickly reconcile against their accounting systems and their bank accounts. Two, we’ve invested heavily in payments, so we actually process payments every 30 minutes. So every school gets paid literally the next day on ClassWallet. So we’ve eliminated all cash flow and all reconciliation issues for one of the most important stakeholders in the ecosystem. Second, we’re the largest payment system to microschools in the country.Okay. We have facilitated tens of millions of dollars to microschools. As an example of how ClassWallet has facilitated the ease, removed all the barriers and friction for the entrepreneurs in the space who are trying to meet needs on the edges of a traditional school environment, i.e. a traditional private school. So we work with all sorts of those types, whether it be microschools, learning pods, online curriculum that is also learning and tuition. And we have, I would say, facilitated probably well over $150 million of payments just to non traditional private schools, but tuition type programming for families.Michael HornWow. And as you think about that facilitation and so forth, I imagine, but maybe you’ll correct me, the states also have to like have a lot of trust, right, that you have verified the family is in fact eligible, the dollars can flow like there’s a whole bunch of trust or proof, I guess that as you’ve developed for the states that they’re saying, yeah, like, you know, ClassWallet is good to run with this. Just talk about that evolution of the process in working with the states to create that smoothness between demand and supply that you just characterized.Jamie RosenbergSure. So first, the state is the ultimate author of the policy. Right. So for example, a state might say the school must exist for two years, hypothetically. And ClassWallet then can implement that policy and, and in the workflow, capture the information from the school during the onboarding process to ensure that it meets the straight criteria, for example. One state might say microschools are okay. Another state might say microschools maybe are not okay, for example. So we have all the flexibility and all the scale to implement policies in a frictionless, highly efficient, scalable way. So once they establish the groundwork and the framework, ClassWallet then can hit the ground running and then execute.And that’s been one of our core strengths and why we’ve been so successful.Michael HornSo you’re essentially taking whatever the policy’s regs are and basically hard coding it so you can quickly verify and you essentially are the agent, right, of verifying these suppliers as yes, you’re eligible to participate in this market. The state, after they’ve created the rules, is letting you run with that. Is that the right way to think about it?Jamie RosenbergRight. And I think a better example of that, Michael, tutoring. And I’ll just give you the three different flavors of tutoring. And generally across ESAs, about 15% of all funding going to families is spent on tutoring.Michael HornOkay.Jamie RosenbergSo one state might require a tutor, have a valid teacher certificate. Another state might require that the tutor have a valid bachelor’s degree. Another state might require that the tutor be a subject matter expert. Okay.Michael HornOkay.Jamie RosenbergSo ClassWallet in state A will require that the tutor upload their teaching certificate and we will validate that it’s legitimate that it is current, we will monitor it, so if it ever expires, we will either deactivate that tutor or give them the opportunity to update it. In state B we will require that tutor to upload a bachelor’s degree, ensure that that’s valid, et cetera. So that’s what I mean, where the state sets the policy, and then we’ve got the efficiency, the scalability and the workflow to onboard. So, you know, in one state, for example, we onboarded 3,000 tutors across the country across that particular state to meet that particular program’s needs.Empowering End Users with ESAsMichael HornGotcha. Okay, last question as we wrap up here. You talked about one of the big philosophies that you’ve had, you developed is getting the dollar as close as you can to the actual end user and really giving them the agency over it. As you know, one of the, I don’t know if it’s pushbacks, but concerns maybe from critics of ESAs has been, what if they spend it on stuff that doesn’t make sense for their kid? Right. And so forth. How have you thought about those questions? How have you helped reassure states around those worries that they might have and that you have the right protections in place and so forth? How have you thought about that conversation? That I think comes from a different philosophical point of view, from where you’re entering into it, but you are obviously bridging it all the time.So I’d love to hear how you, how you talk about that.Jamie RosenbergI mean, that is our core competency and that, that is our innovation. The digital wallet ensures that the funds get used according to the rules. And what is the ultimate balance is among the policymakers is how to provide maximum agency and impact, but also ensure there’s transparency and compliance. I mean, that’s the ultimate, ultimate tug. And what I’ll say is this. For the most part, there’s been very little fraud. You’re always going to have a bad apple or two. What happens is the families are trying to do the right thing, but may inadvertently purchase something that’s not within the framework and the rules.I’m going to give you a very specific example.Michael HornOkay, great.Jamie RosenbergA family buys a laptop. That’s according to the rules.Michael HornRight.Jamie RosenbergThey buy a second laptop, fourteen months later, the rule says you’re not allowed to buy a laptop more than once every 24 months.Michael HornOkay. Okay.Jamie RosenbergSo oftentimes, and I would say it’s about between 20 to 23%, it’s not fraud. They’re not trying to commit fraud. They’re trying to do the right thing. But because the policy and the rules can be complicated just like that slight nuance, they buy something that is just not according to the rules.Michael HornOkay.Jamie RosenbergSo that’s what ClassWallet does. We take a complex rule set, something as basic as you’re allowed to buy a laptop, but you can’t do it every 24 months. And also something is very black and white. You can’t buy liquor.Michael HornRight, right.Jamie RosenbergAnd everything in between. And we try to help the parent be able to check out with confidence so when they check out, they know, and we can provide them information and data at that point of checkout, knowing that what they’re buying is not only compliant, but also within the rules, so they don’t have to wait for some retroactive reaction. So holistically, it’s been our experience and we’ve processed 1.6 million ESA transactions, we’ve processed close to $3.6 billion of ESA funding since 2017 over the last eight years. And I would just repeat that, for the most part, there’s very little fraud happening beyond what you would intuitively think is the bad apple events happening. But it’s families trying to do the right thing against a complex rule set in which, you know, technology is constantly getting better to help them solve if that makes sense.Michael HornYeah, it makes total sense. And I lied because it brings up one last question, I think, I promise on this one, which is, it seems to me you have gained a ton of experience around what that rule set can look like for a state and to advise and guide new states coming into the ESA world about, hey, like these are the big decisions you’re going to face. Let us help you do this and get it up and running quickly. What, what’s your role in those conversations and what have you learned about that?Jamie RosenbergThat’s a great question. I mean, we very much view ourselves as, as a thought partner and not just a software provider. Yeah. And you have to remember these agencies are doing it for the very, very first time. Like what I said in the beginning of the interview, this is bleeding edge innovative stuff. And often these agencies have no experience doing anything like this in this type of manner. So we can help them think through all the what if scenarios. You know, I always use one example.Navigating Nuances for Public GoodJamie RosenbergOr, you know, sneakers might be allowed. Clothing is allowed. Is that Converse sneakers for $60 or is it Michael Air Jordans for $800? Right. Even the little basic things that you think, of course, would be easy all have various nuances of color. So because we have seen so many different flavors in so many different transactions, we do come in as a thought partner and help them think through all those scenarios and ultimately help them avoid unforced errors. I and everyone we’ve worked with have always seen that everyone is trying to do the right thing. We all align to the same mission is to help children maximize their opportunities and chances of success and we very much enjoy and take a great deal of pleasure in helping agency leaders fulfill their mission which is public good.We believe in that and so we enjoy that aspect of the work we do.Michael HornAmazing. Jamie, huge thanks for joining us. Huge thanks for the work you continue to do and ClassWallet continues to do enabling what I agree with you dollars following to the point where they’re actually spending and educating kids. So really appreciate all that you’re doing.Jamie RosenbergI appreciate the opportunity. Michael, thank you so much.The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.

Diane and I dove into the impact of AI on schools with our guest Reed Hastings, the founder of Netflix and a dedicated advocate for education reform. Our conversation explored Reed’s pragmatic optimism about AI’s potential to personalize learning, reshape the roles of teachers, and revolutionize assessment practices. Reed shared his belief that while AI will transform many aspects of education, it’s crucial for schools to nurture citizenship, social-emotional skills, and a foundation of knowledge independent of technology. The episode also touched on future models for schools, equity in an AI-driven future, and practical examples of how AI is currently enhancing reading and math instruction.Diane TavennerHey, this is Diane, and I appreciate you joining Michael and I for season seven of Class Disrupted, as we’re doing a deep dive into education in the age of AI. I think you might really enjoy this episode where we got a chance to talk with Reed Hastings, founder and longtime CEO of Netflix and a longtime education supporter. We talked to him about what he’s seeing, hearing, and thinking about AI and education. And I think coming out of the conversation, I would call Reed a pragmatic AI optimist. I think that’s the best description I have for him. So much of our conversation is about what is possible today, as well as where we’re heading in the future and what that might mean for the work we’re all doing and how we’re trying to think about it. I find Reed’s thinking to be both clarifying and provocative at the same time, which makes for a really fun conversation. I really hope you will enjoy it.And please keep sending questions, thoughts, inspirations for where we go as this season unfolds. Thanks so much.Diane TavennerHey, Michael.Michael HornHey, Diane. It is good to see you as always, I’m looking forward to today’s conversation in particular.Diane TavennerI think this one’s going to be really fun. I am prepping for this. I asked Chat to do a little bit of a intro for Reed Hastings and, I know and that’s what I said to myself. I said, you know, I can definitely write this, but it’s out of habit now.And nonetheless, there were some interesting things in there. So, for those of you who don’t know, our guest today is Reed Hastings, and according to Chat, you are a tech entrepreneur, investor, and educator with a long track record of innovation and social impact. That all tracked for me. It went on to basically describe two parallel careers, which also tracks for me on the business side, most notably co-founder, longtime CEO, and most recently, executive chair at Netflix. And on the other side, where I have spent my time with you is deeply involved in education, ranging from chairing the California State Board of Ed, along with a number of education nonprofits, supporting tons of educational entrepreneurs and charter schools and educational efforts. Here was the fun part for me. I think a lot of people don’t know that you started out in the Peace Corps and that you actually taught for two years in Africa. And the pieces that I forgot were you taught math and that your undergrad degrees in math and you have a master’s in computer science.And I forgot that because I know you’re technical, but that’s not where we spend our time, we mostly spend our time on leadership and people development and growth. And so that was kind of a fun reminder. All of that to say as we start this season, really exploring the intersection of AI and education, we knew we had to talk to you, so welcome Reed. We’re grateful to have you here.Reed HastingsHow fun. Michael and Diane. Well, Chat got it mostly right, but actually I taught maths, so.Michael HornThat’s right, because in Africa they would say maths.Reed HastingsYeah, teaching O level. It’s pronounced in the plural. I never did figure out why. And then relevant to this conversation, in the mid-80s, I got a master’s degree from Stanford in AI. And now the AI of the time turned out to not work at all. So it’s a mixed utility, but it certainly has been a long term passion.Michael HornWell, it’s part of that arc, I guess, right, of AI dating back decades and decades or at least the thinking and study and hypothesizing about. And now this moment, moments arriving, really. And so I’d actually love to start there with you. Really big sort of wide angle view on this because you, you know a lot, you do a lot, you talk to a lot of people. What excites you at the moment about this new age of AI in education?AI’s Impact: Exciting and UncertainReed HastingsWell, there’s a lot, I think both to be excited and concerned about, you know, to the degree that the bulldozer, you know, mechanized labor and digging, we’re seeing the potential of AI of doing that for thinking, it doesn’t do it for feeling. So for, you know, our, a lot of what we think of as core humanity, as our, our feelings, but in terms of thinking, you know, it’s on track to be better than us at basically all aspects of thinking. And then there’s a debate about whether that’s two years or 20 years, but you know, that’s sort of in the noise compared to it happening. So we’re living in pretty dramatic times, which is exciting. But, you know, it’s not clear that it will turn out for the benefit of humans. We’ll see.Michael HornYeah, and maybe that’s. That was sort of the second thing on my mind of the worries you pieces of it. And so I maybe just like the quick narrative in your head of what are the signposts you’d be looking for if this is going in the positive direction or the negative direction. Like what are the things that you’re paying attention to to sort of help us understand where this is headed?The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Reed HastingsWell, if you look at industrialization, you know, which brought, you know, mass products and mass wealth. There were a lot of ups and downs. So I’m pretty sure you’re not going to be able to judge it in the near term as to like, which vector did it take? It’ll sort of take both in some senses. There’ll be parts of it that are really good and parts of it that are worrisome. But how it plays out over 100 years is extremely hard to tell. And I don’t think there’s much, you know, because of the global competition. It’s not like slowing it down is really a possibility. So instead we have to lean in and then try to channel it to make it as positive as we can.Diane TavennerAlong those lines, we are most concerned with and care about education. And so, you know, you’ve spent decades working on education from multiple angles. I thought it would be helpful because I think this time calls all of us to rethink. What do we think the purpose of schools is or what are they here to do? And has it or will your vision of that change with AI?Education’s Dual Mission & TechnologyReed HastingsWell, big picture, the vision of schools is to create both great citizens for the society and then give the individual great opportunity. So it’s sort of always had this dual mission. I don’t think that that changes. I think probably what changes is more and more software based teaching that’s individualized and infinitely patient and gracious. And 15 years ago I bought Dreambox Learning and invested a lot of money into helping Dreambox. And the CEO, Jesse Willie Wilson gets most of the credit. But I bring it up just because it’s evidence of sort of being interested in how software could improve learning for a long time. And that’s now one product.But mostly students are going to ChatGPT instead of specialty applications. And so whether that’s Khan Academy, of which I’m a board member of, or others, people are learning that, you know, the AI chat is a very broad and useful tutor. So if you need some help in physics, that’s the first place you go. If you need to plan travel, if you want to ask a boy out, you know, it’s like wide ranging, you know, counseling. I mean, you know, it’s already there for younger people and they’re using it, you know, in huge numbers.Diane TavennerYeah, that’s. It’s interesting because we’ll get more into, I think some specifics there. But how do you, how do you think about it with your other hats on in terms of where our K12 graduates are going, the world they’re entering from, you know, a workforce, career opportunity, perspective. I know. I mean, I’m not sure anyone actually knows what’s going to happen, but there are certain things happening now. And what do you see coming on that front? Does that shift or help us rethink anything we might be doing at the high school level, the college level?Reed HastingsWell, let’s see. I mean, AI has two broad effects. One I’ll call why bother? Which is why are we training kids in biology and in writing an essay? And they’ll like, it’s sort of like slide rule skills or square root skills. So that’s one theory. And then the other is how exciting we’re going to be able to use AI so kids learn twice as much, you know, by age 16 they’re at a college level and you can be incredibly ambitious about what it’s possible to learn. And so, you know, those are the kind of two forces. And you can think about chess a little bit.So computers have been better than all humans at chess for 20 years now. And so you would have thought, well, what’s the point of playing? You can never be better than the computer. And yet the number of chess players and most significantly the quality you know, of, say the average 10 year old, 15 year old, 20 year old playing chess is much higher. And that’s because AI has been training them. So now as a 14 year old, you can play against these great AI chess tutors. And so you get much more scale to the teaching of chess and much more practice. And yet we’re still excited to see two humans compete. It’s like robotics is exciting.But, you know, I think we’re going to watch humans play basketball, not watch robots play basketball, partially because we are human. So think of it as, you know, the good scenario is AI produces such a bounty that our societies become very wealthy, people work less, but that they actually learn more, which is sort of the chess path. And that they know an incredible amount about a wide range of things humans do and they’re learning for the pleasure of it as opposed to the economics. So, you know, there’s no real economics in chess. And so, but again, people are playing more and playing better. So, you know, maybe that’s our future for biology and history and all kinds of other things.Diane TavennerWell, I was thinking so, you know, in my, at least in my experience over the last decades, you’ve, you’ve been more focused, you’ve generally focused on educational policy and governance and new school models, leadership, maybe with Dreambox as one of a notable exception. Less on sort of pedagogy and the practice in schools. But recently I’ve experienced you moving more in that direction. First of all, am I getting that right? And second, you know, what’s driving that? What do you think is most promising and why that seems to me to be kind of sparking your interest in those, how we actually do school.Rethinking Schools and Teachers’ RolesReed HastingsYeah, I would say it’s accurate to say I’ve mostly been a governance person, which is how do we create organizations where teachers can thrive and build the public schools of their dreams? A little more entrepreneurial approach and choice sort of in markets, essentially being the fundamental driver of enabling innovation. Still a big believer in all of that. I think there’s an opportunity for some schools to rethink the schooling model. And we’ve had, you know, for economic reasons, we’ve had 300 years of, you know, 20 to 50 kids in a classroom and a teacher, the sage on a stage, gets up and imparts wisdom. And I think that it’s going to be better to have individualized software, but it’s almost always going to be in a school setting. So, you know, parents are working, homeschooling will be, you know, 3 to 10%. But the vast majority of people want the custodial function also of schools. But in schools, I think the teacher’s role is going to move more towards a social worker focusing on social emotional learning and discussion and you know, the mere imparting of facts, you know, what was the history of the Roman Empire or how to do fractions, those kinds of things will be software.And so for teachers it’s a huge change in their self image which has always included social emotional learning and discussion, but was still based upon sage on a stage. And that’s a pretty deeply embedded paradigm. And so trying to figure out what are the schools of the future where you know, most of the fact base is building. And of course then the software advantage is that it’s one to one and so it’s really focused at the level that the kid is at and from that you get much more learning and engagement. But then recognizing that parents and kids want more out of school than learning the facts. And there’s this incredible role to focus on around social emotional development, how to work with other human beings that I think teachers will be able to focus on. So you know, I would say that’s going to be a multi decade change as the software gets better. And so it’s trying to see, you know, what can some schools do that really pioneer that at the same time, the software has to continue to get better.Michael HornI mean, just. Sorry to cut off there, but it’s interesting because, like, implicit in that is some pretty structural, big structural changes both to schooling operations, teacher identity and roles, processes, things of that nature. You’ve sort of been a student, if you will, of how schools do and don’t work and the systems themselves. I’m curious, like, how you see that change management playing out over the next two, five, ten years. We know schools are often very good at blocking change at the classroom door, if you will. And so I’m sort of curious, do you think this is an entrepreneurial pathway? Do you see change in the schools? Is this a both and? How does this come about, in your view?Reed HastingsYeah, I mean, broadly, from a governance standpoint, we have a set of local monopolies. Public schools that provide services and monopolies can do terrible things. And so to control them, we pass regulations. And the only thing worse than the regulated monopoly that we have would be an unregulated monopoly. But as long as you’ve got that monopoly structure, you need a lot of regulations. And they work in the short term to ensure that kids get opportunity, but they become very rigid. And so it’s extremely hard for the regulated monopoly public school system to adopt significant changes. And thus we see sort of the stability over, you know, 200 years of the model.So it’s going to be quite a change to get the regulated system to be able to open up and allow a lot of change. So hopefully the unregulated side, or less regulated, which is private schools and charter public schools, will have some running room to prove out how much better individualized instruction is for the student and how the teacher’s role really becomes very exciting about kind of talking through things, both in small groups and large groups, leading discussion, and then really getting to know the kids in the social, emotional, learning aspect and help them work well with other human beings. So I think it’s a time of invention. And, you know, most charter schools, so I’m on the board of KIPP and have been for 20 years, are like, let’s do the classic model better. So let’s work hard. Let’s have classes on Saturday. Let’s have longer school day. Okay? And, you know, probably Eva Moskowitz and Success Academy represent the pinnacle of that, which is an unbelievably excellent classic school model.And I think we need to keep those going. And there’ll be another set of entrepreneurs that figure out how to do a school where the effective class size in the student teacher ratio might be higher. So you could basically do 40 to 1, but with a lot of software have the results of like a one to one teacher model and that’s what will make the economics work of paying for the technology. And again, even at 40 to 1, that means the teacher could spend an hour with each kid on social emotional learning. If it was just one hour per kid, you know, it’s probably not divided up that way, but you know, it could be so, but an hour per week of, you know, personal coaching and you know, helping them grow as a, as a human being. So there’s again lots of opportunity. And then of course Alpha school is pioneering a variant of it where the payoff is two hour schooling. And so their fundamental insight is school is a lot more than learning facts and we’ll spend two hours doing that, but then the kids get to do all the school stuff the rest of the day.Whether that’s in some places it’s mostly sports and in some places it’s all kinds of other things. But I’ll call it enriching activity beyond the classic curriculum. And so they’ve taken a very fresh and interesting tack which is about the shortest school day possible from the classic learning standpoint and that’s the prize and incentive they serve a high end demographic. So it’s hard to say what the replication of that will be, but it’s very provocative and interesting as an example of a big picture innovation which is the two hour, you know, classic curriculum learning day and then four more hours of learning public speaking or learning community development or learning how to use AI. So that’s a great sign of sort of the innovation ahead for us in the K12.AI, Learning, and Evolving CareersMichael HornSo just staying on that for a moment because I’m coming back repeatedly in my head to your chess point around AI and sort of how it produced a legion of players who are more intrinsically interested perhaps in pushing themselves right in chess and so forth. And part of that is also an on demand learning piece of the element like I learning just in time almost right as it comes. There’s relevance in my life, maybe on the passion projects I’m pursuing or things of that. And like I have a thirst for more knowledge to up, you know, my skill set or what I’m able to create and do build whatever it might be. And I’m just sort of curious how you see that maybe against the backdrop of how careers might change as well. Sort of how much do you think is you need basic narratives around history and science and human progression, perhaps just so people have like a, and Diane, you probably have a view on this too, frankly, like a progression rooted or stories right around the society we’re in and things of that nature that’s maybe narrow and thin, but an overview and then a lot of sort of on demand as you need it, exploration based on these projects and periods of passion that can actually drive some of the AI knowledge building, if you will. I’m curious, Reed, if you have a take on that.And Diane, you may end up having to as well.Reed HastingsYou see, there’s a lot that’s wrapped in your question about future careers and jobs. And then, you know, let’s take the case that AI gets stronger and stronger to the degree that a given society abandoned schooling and just says waste of time. The danger is that citizens learn everything as they need from AI. And if the AI tells them that the world’s going to end or the AI tells them that, you know, such and such is the best leader, we’re creating, you know, a lot of sheep as human beings in that society that kind of abandoned education. So I think if you think of the historic role of education as one part for citizen and one part for employee or economic actor, the economic actor part will become less relevant because the jobs are different, that kind of thing. But schools creating a human narrative, a narrative of the country, a caring of your fellow citizens and some stable part of fact base so that you’re not, the citizen is not totally reliant on AI for what’s true. It will be very important, I think.So again, the role of creating future citizens I think becomes a more important role relative to history of school. And then the economic actor part is tough because what are we going to do better than the AIs of 20 years from now? You know, it’s really hard to see what those roles are. And we’re in the first wave of AI now, where it’s trapped in the phone and in the laptop. So it can only do some things. It can design you a house and architecture, you know, and it can write a contract. So lawyers are under threat, but there’s a lot of real world activity. But the low cost humanoid Android robots that we’re likely to get is sort of the second wave of AI, you know, and at first they’re really great because they do things around the house for you and it’s sort of a Roomba vacuum on steroids because it walks around and cooks scrambled eggs and cleans the house and, you know, does all those things but then it’s like in the Starbucks and then they’re flying the planes and then, you know, it’s like basically every job. So, you know, again, hard to see how AI in combination with Android robotics become, you know, something other than really replacing our economic functions.And that could make for, well, almost surely will make for a very rich society. How those riches are spread throughout the society is unclear because that’s a political process. And will our political process distribute those amazing gains of this new technology in a way that’s cohesive so we avoid the French Revolution? That’s an open question. Because if the inequality gets too extreme, you know, you get a French Revolution situation. So we’ll have to see on the political processes of distributing the great gains that AI will provide. And they’ll provide gains. You’ll be able to get much better medical care much cheaper, the diagnosis, the intervention, all those things. So just think if the AI doctors are really good and you can get in easily and see we have all these expertises in medicine and specialties because no human brain can be great at brain and foot disease.I mean, you know, podiatry. So, you know, that’s why it’s carved up into all these areas. But an AI will be great at all of them. So when you do your consult with an AI doctor, you won’t have to wait to go see the specialist. You know, just, I mean that alone you’ll save enormous amounts of time and have better outcomes.Diane TavennerOur last conversation was with Tom Lee, who’s the founder of One Medical and Galileo, who’s like doing exactly what you’re talking about.Reed HastingsExactly. So again, AI is such a big factor that its impact on K12 is kind of like 5% of the total picture. Now it’s the 5% that three of us are really going to try to land and do well. But you have to think, I think of AI as a once in a thousand, ten thousand, one hundred thousand year change to society of pioneering this thing. And for the next 50 years we’ll be in the middle of it.Diane TavennerYeah, it’s going to be maybe turbulent, but fun ride for the next 50 years. I think the only thing I would add, Michael, is I keep going back to, I think it’s more important than ever for humans to know themselves and for us to do that work on who we are and what we think and what we care about. And so I see that as the opportunity and the need. Reed, a couple more questions to take this big to something specific you’ve been thinking a lot about assessment and the potential for AI in assessment and how we use assessment in schools. And so I’m curious for you to unpack a little bit. Like, what are the challenges you’ve identified around assessment and the opportunities and how do you,How can you imagine AI or see it right now impacting how we think about it? Assessment is a huge part of education.Reed HastingsYeah, it’s a. I mean, it’s one tactical part of what AI can do. So, you know, there’s a number of problems in current assessment in terms of cost, terms of balancing formative and summative, in terms of building in confidence in the parents and the citizens who don’t take the tests. And the way we do the things is the tests have to stay pretty secure, so then we can’t really share copies and you can’t take them multiple times. And you know, what you’d like to have is something where the AI was interviewing you as a student and assessing your knowledge like a human would of, Okay, let’s talk about historical antecedents to this, or let’s depending on the level.Open Learning Assessment VisionReed HastingsLet’s talk about this biology program and you know, basically probe and clarify things and question and then come up with a ranking which is a little. What happens in chess with, you know, it’s a narrower domain, but you get a chess score and then as you get better and age up your score increases. And you can think of that as, you know, ultimately we’d like to have an assessment system that was open and free and you could go to, you know, what do I know.org okay, and everyone agrees that’s the standard. And what do I know.org it does a broad range of assessment and you could assess yourself every week if you want, and schools would assess you every now and then. Parents could assess themselves and their kid and see the politicians. And it’s all open and free as to what do kids know and maybe even part of it there’s a chess strand and you get your chess score, you know, that’s built into that, which is, you know, how good.You know, you play nine games and you sort of see how good is your chess level. So I think that will really disrupt the current assessment industry. And eventually some states will want to save money and they’ll say, okay, instead of spending all this contract money, what if we just use what do I know.org and you know, and that’ll be a proxy. So I think because of cost savings that will come in and be quite practical. So, you know, there’s I think a whole bunch of companies working on assessment and then the trick for them is is that going to be the winning strategy or do you just wait for Chat GPT7? And in ChatGPT7 you say assess my knowledge on a scale of one to a thousand for math or for overall. And it just does it, you know.You know, you’ve got a couple different approaches to what that’s going to come about. But think of it as computer based assessment will lead to much more understanding and accuracy and guidance and have a big impact on the current testing in terms of parents having more confidence, it being both helpful, ie: formative as well as summative. And so just incredible amounts of positive change in that area paralleling the different approaches for teaching in the software.Michael HornReed, just a couple more questions as we start to wrap up here. And one of them you talked about Dreambox, learning math and so forth. The flip side of this is we’ve seen a lot in recent years a big push toward teaching reading in alignment with the evidence around what’s called the science of reading. And there often seems to be a growing number of folks right now who are using AI in meaningful ways with regards to teaching reading specifically. I’m curious what you’re most excited about on that front and what’s grabbed your imagination or attention.AI Advancing Language and LearningReed HastingsWell, I’m tracking two companies, Amira and Ello in that and what they’re getting good at is phonemic processing. So you know, the four to six year old is a struggling reader and then they the AI listens and is able to process the sounds and then help the student sound out the words and think of it as sound out the words is the science of reading and sort of, you know, grounded in that phonemic translation. But AI will also be used to help people speak English whether they grew up with it or not. So I would say for, you know, for speaking English, ie knowing vocabulary and sentence construction and you know, at the high end in the U.S. people, you know, hire Chinese or Spanish nannies so their kids learn a second language. And so you can think of AI as just like the nanny that will teach you, especially you know, where you learn language so easily biologically because you’ve got an AI tutor helping you with reading, helping you with, well for that matter, math, et cetera. So first phase you’ll see a bunch of AI companies do like reading apps or this app or a math app and then it will just be a learning app, right? And the market will consolidate and parents will say, okay, what do I want to do? And then the open question is, will those app companies continue to add enough value first using Claude or ChatGPT or any of the, or Gemini directly..You may in the future to Gemini be able to say, teach my kid to read or I want to read. And like, you don’t need all these separate apps, right? It’s just like the general thing that it’s one of the 19 things it does. It can also teach you physics and it can teach your kid reading. But right now they’re moving so fast that only a few companies are focused on the particular types of phonemes and the typical reading problems that different kids have. So that I’ll call that a specialized audio processing challenge with specialized training that the big companies are moving so fast they’re not, you know, really trying to focus on that. So I think for, for a while, for five or 10 years, there’s market for independent products and that. So that’ll be very exciting.This episode is sponsored by Diane TavennerMichael and I, along those lines. We all are learners, we’re all lifelong learners, you always have amazing recommendations. Reed, what have you been reading, watching, listening to that we should know about that is capturing your imagination lately?Reed HastingsInteresting. I’m listening to Tony Fauci’s memoir and you know, he’s a very, you know, he’s 80 something years old now, retired, and you know, he’s worked his life in public health and some part of the citizenry reveres him and some part hates him. And you know, he’s become a sort of a test for many things. And so it’s a fascinating life when he’s just was a kid trying to become a doctor, trying to become a health professional, you know, to serve the world as best he could. And yet he was thrust in this amazing stew, both of HIV for a very long time and then of COVID So I think it’s a, I’m only partway through the memoir, so. But I love that kind of very honest because I think he is being honest on his reflections and he reads it in his voice. So that’s always cool.Diane TavennerThat’s awesome. That’s awesome.Michael HornWhat’s on your list, Diane? You got to share now.Diane TavennerWell, I got one this weekend. I’m curious if you guys have listened to this yet. It’s pretty new. It’s a podcast. I listened to the first three episodes called the Last Invention. And it’s the story of basically this kind of 70 year quest to get to this moment where we are in AI and if you want to call it the AI revolution, I think it’s a. It starts with a slightly sensational opening, but I think that’s what you have to do in podcasts these days. But the history is engaging.It feels well told, feels relevant to me and provides a lot of useful context. And as you know, one of my kiddos is deep in this and it’s helping me understand a lot of things that he says and what he’s read in, in a way that a layperson can understand. So I’m enjoying it.Michael HornVery cool. My other takeaway from that is that we need a more sensationalistic hook on our podcast. I’ll go shameless pandering here just because Reed, you’re our guest, but I’ll say K Pop Demon Hunters. We watched it though during the two-day limited theatrical release. So several, you know, weeks before we’ve recorded this. But the reason I bring it up actually is twofold. One, we are still—like it is very present in my kids’ lives every single day, right. And like to the point where Reed, I have twin girls and they’re fighting on, you know, the way to something that I’m driving them on.And my answer now is to turn on a song like Golden like that from K Pop Demon Hunters just to get peace for five minutes in the car. And it’s incredibly effective. But the second reason—so my wife is Korean American and she tells the story that when she was in grade school her teacher said here’s a map, you know, fill out where different countries are. And the teacher mislabeled Korea, you know, had it in completely the wrong place. And my wife had this big argument with her and now sort of the unexpected twists and turns of cultural global influence has Korea squarely in the pop limelight even as it has its own demographic challenges right now. So it’s just a fascinating sort of twist and turn through that’s been that shamelessly pandering here. But it felt like a good one and maybe a little bit more light hearted, Diane from me.Reed HastingsAnd that’s a, that’s a great one of human connection that was minimal AI creation, you know, all humans. And for every great hit we have like that, we have three or four that don’t hit and we’re still not sure why. And it’s great to see K-Pop Demon Hunters crossover. And so, you know, 65-year olds like me can watch it multiple times and kind of get a little more each time out of it. So it’s got a Star Wars or Shrek kind of multi-layered aspect that really make it part of the cultural landscape. And it is amazing that because the Internet is so global, Netflix can be so global. And so we can recruit and develop the best talent, you know, whether that’s in Korea, you know, or Poland or Brazil or Hollywood, you know, or Kansas. So it’s been great of the sort of Internet explosion of creativity that it participates in that.Michael HornIt’s phenomenal and a good way to speak to our feelings, which you lead off with Reed. So huge thanks for joining us on this episode of Class Disrupted. And for all of you joining us, we’ll see you next time. Keep the comments, keep the questions coming. It is driving a lot of our thinking. We know that. And we’ll see you all next time on Class Disrupted.The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.

Cliff Maxwell, Co-founder of Vocation and a former researcher in education, introduces an innovative AI-powered career coach designed to revolutionize career transitions. He shares insights on how Vocation offers a personalized five-step process to identify individual energy drivers and career themes, contrasting it with traditional resume-focused tools. Cliff discusses user success stories, including a prototype that led an entrepreneur to a fulfilling university role, and explains how Vocation adapts as life changes, making it a vital resource during career uncertainties.

Diane and I sit down with Dr. Tom Lee, acclaimed physician and founder of One Medical and Galileo Health, to explore the parallels between healthcare and education in the age of AI. Our conversation dove into how Lee’s mission to radically transform healthcare systems mirrors similar challenges and opportunities in education, especially around the adoption and integration of AI. We discussed shifting from legacy models to more holistic, technology-enabled frameworks that prioritize both personalized service and systemic change.Media Mentioned:GalileoClass Disrupted with Julia Freeland Fisher, “Needed in a World with AI: Real Experiences, Real People”Diane TavennerHey, this is Diane. Welcome to Class Disrupted season seven, where Michael and I are looking at the world of education through the lens of AI and purposely starting really big. In this episode of the podcast, we zoomed way out into an entirely different field, health care. I love doing that because often I find that I can see education so much more clearly when I contrast it with similar fields like healthcare is certainly my number one choice. To this end, we had a fascinating conversation with Dr. Tom Lee, the founder of One Medical and Galileo Health, about the impacts of AI on his world and the potential parallels in education. There were a few things that struck me that I think might interest you. The first is systems.Tom is trying to change the healthcare system, literally, and he thinks in systems. You know, in our conversation, we talked a lot about how AI might be able to accelerate system change for good. And in my experience, most of the conversations around the impact of AI in education is focused on student, teacher, classroom level, which is obviously imperative. And the system itself will have an outsized impact on the individual experience. And so it’s critical for us to be talking about that big system. And I think Tom helps us do that. He’s also an innovator and an entrepreneur, and he’s driven to transform a system he feels isn’t serving people well. And I personally find his story very inspiring and parallel in many ways to the paths that so many great educators have taken, are taking or may want to take.And I think they’ll find Tom an inspiring character in that. And then finally, I’m drawn to the connection between healthcare and education. I mean, let’s be honest, as educators, we can’t be effective if people aren’t healthy. And we have a ton of evidence that people are more healthy when they’re educated. And I just found our conversation to be a bit of an invitation to think about how we hold a holistic view of what it means to have the privilege and responsibility of developing and caring for humans, especially in this age of AI. So with that, I hope you enjoy it.Hey, Michael.Michael HornHey, Diane. It is good to see you. And I’m excited for today’s conversation because actually I’ll out ourselves, Jeff Salingo on my Future U podcast. He and I, a few years back we had some healthcare folks come on the higher education because we thought M & A, healthcare. There’s been a lot of it. Maybe there’s something we can learn about in colleges and universities because there needs to be a lot more M & A, frankly. And we’re like, they’re analogous sectors. And then we, by the end of the conversation we’re like, wow, that’s why colleges and universities have like no M & A.They’re completely not analogous in the way we thought that they were. So I love conversations where we get to stretch our bounds and learn more. And I think today’s might do just that for us.Diane TavennerWell, that is my hope and my thinking and my personal experience. So I’m really excited today, Michael, to have Tom Lee joining us. And I will out myself and say that the conversations I have with Tom really do illuminate things in education for me. And so I’m so grateful when he agreed to come on the podcast. He’s not our typical guest because he’s actually a physician and an entrepreneur who has built multiple ventures that sit at the intersection of tech, care delivery and system redesign. He co-founded Epocrates, one of the earliest and most widely used mobile reference tools for clinicians. He then founded One Medical, which is a tech enabled primary care network. And he’s currently the founder and leader of Galileo, which is a value oriented technology powered multi specialty care model.And it’s designed to improve quality, lower costs and expand access across populations. We’re going to get into all of that. I will also say that Tom is quite an amazing consumer of education. He’s got a BA from Yale and MD from University of Washington, an MBA from Stanford, and completed his training to become board certified as an internist at Harvard’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital. And while all of that is super impressive, what I love about Tom is how he thinks about healthcare, the clarity of his vision and the mission that I, I think he lives his life by. And so every time we talk, I learn something. Tom, I’m really excited to learn more today. Thank you for joining us.Tom LeeYeah, no, it’s great to be on and great to connect here together. I feel like we always have great conversations and it’s exciting to share them with a broader audience and see where the worlds meet. I was exactly thinking that as you’re reading my bio. I’m unrelated to the industry per se, but I’m a very avid consumer. Unintentionally, my parents would say over, over educated. But, yes, I am happy to be here. So thank you.Diane TavennerTom, I found this quote that’s attributed to you that really resonated with me, and I thought we’d start here. And the quote is, as a young physician in training, I was like, I don’t want to practice in any of these broken models. I had worked in almost every environment, but the care model just didn’t make any sense. And when I read that, it literally is how I felt as a young teacher. And so maybe let’s just start there. How would you describe the problem when you were at that point, and what did you perceive as broken? And we’ll get into how that then creates your journey forward.The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Humanity, Systems, and Individual CareTom LeeYeah, it’s interesting. As I think about it, I’ve always felt like education and healthcare have these kind of parallel paths because, you know, at some level, they’re so important to humanity and society that we go into it with this belief and vision that we want to serve other humans. And I think as practitioners, that’s what you do. As a young clinician, you want to help other people. So you enter this process, and then as you get closer to the tail end of the process, you’re like, wow, I don’t really get to shape much of this process. I am really just a cog in the machinery doing whatever I’m supposed to be doing. And to me, it was the antithesis of delivering personalized, individualized care. As a clinician, the way I wanted to do it in the personality style that I thought my patients would want.And so I think I just started to realize that there is some other force driving this that’s beyond. You know, I grew up as an academic clinician. I didn’t really understand how the world worked. But as I started to peel the layers away, I’m like, oh, that’s why we have this system and why it doesn’t work for patients and providers. So it’s similar.Diane TavennerYeah, yeah. Literally what I would do as a teacher, I think, oh, why are we doing this this way? This doesn’t seem to be good for kids or teachers. Maybe we just don’t know a better way. I was very naive back then.Tom LeeIt started to build my early thinking on critical thinking. Before, I was just a good student. I was just jumping through hoops that people said I had to jump through, and I was just good at jumping through hoops. And then as I started to ask senior leaders and people who I thought knew the answers, why are we doing it this way? Nobody could answer. Then I’m like, oh man, I think we’re just going to have to start to discover on our own. And that for me has been the unlock and the joy that I have through entrepreneurship is you’re actually learning what’s actually happening and how to reshape it differently. So to me it’s the extension of the clinical process, but at a more macro level.Diane TavennerInteresting. So tell us about a little bit about the journey and these three big sort of entrepreneurial ventures. You start with Epocrates, which is not a full system changer. But what were you trying to do there and how was that the beginning and kind of your first foray into rethinking?Tom LeeYeah, I mean I’m not the classic entrepreneur business person. Right. I was mission-first in entrepreneurship was a means to the mission. And so for me, you know, I was naive to the economics of healthcare, the organization of healthcare, the policy frameworks. And so to me, you know, going to business school was really just the beginning step to understand how the other world thought. And you know, I really imagined myself invading the enemy camp to go to business school. And then I realized, oh man, they’re not, overly focused on, they’re not all predatory. They actually do have heart and soul and you know, some have missions that are similar to mine.So I was pleasantly surprised. And then once I started to understand that I needed to just do the work, you know, there was a well known professor at Stanford who said you just got to do it. Like there’s no real book you can read about startups, you just kind of have to do it. And so through happenstance, a couple friends and I, you know, out of business school, started Epocrates, that was really just a starter company. Up until prior work, I had delivered pizzas and worked in a lab. So I just didn’t really have a credible managerial experience set. And so Epocrates was my training wheels on, you know, do I have what it takes to actually build a company? And then once I saw how the world worked, I’m like, oh, this is common sense, it’s math, it’s humans, it’s structures. And that gave me the confidence to start what I ultimately went to business school for, which is One Medical and Galileo is the extension of that.So it’s kind of the redesign of services that has been my primary arc. And Epocrates was kind of a fun company. With a couple friends just to validate that I could be credible in the business world.Diane TavennerYeah, that’s awesome. That’s awesome. Let’s talk about One Medical because in my mind, I don’t know, maybe this is oversimplification, but it almost feels to me like it’s like the charter school of the medical world, right? Like in K12 we have these incumbent school districts and systems and everything is sort of in one system. And then charter schools come in and they say, well we can do this differently and you know, hold us accountable to outcomes, but let us do it differently. It feels like that’s kind of what One Medical was, tell us about it.Tom LeeAbout like so I haven’t really thought about it in that analog sense, but you’re right in the sense that you know, as quote unquote innovative as One Medical was perceived. It really was the basic chassis but with a nice, a nicer front end, a nicer experience, a more modern experience and some better elements. But it was still working on the general chassis of healthcare, which is an office based visit, a one on one exam room with a provider and a lot of human elements with a lot of front end experience. So we took a lot from restaurant and hospitality, kind of merged that into a hospitality oriented model. But the clinical care model was pretty much the same. It was just, you know, human to human. And, and so I think that’s a great analog because it wasn’t, you know, quote unquote, as transformative as could have been. But it was a first start because to me the biggest, you know, challenge to One Medical and in general any innovation in these spaces is because they’re so constrained, right.There are certain regs and rules, there’s certain payment architectures predefined. It’s not really a free market enterprise. And so you’re really trying to optimize things that aren’t optimized in the system. The system design is actually quite contrary to what patients want, what providers want. And so you kind of have to innovate within those constraints. And so the challenge is economic innovation and experiential innovation to make that all work. And so that’s what the first innovation was at One Medical is validating that you could even build something higher touch within the economic constraints of healthcare.Diane TavennerYeah, yeah. And it seems that like your use of technology there was more sort of basic infrastructure. Right. I think you started with video appointments, which I think feel kind of common now to people, but certainly weren’t when you were doing them, you know, but, but beyond that. Am I missing something? Was there a technological component there that you felt like?Tom LeeThere was, but it was a first gen thing partly because of what was available then. You know, back when I started One Medical, you know, it was like quote unquote Web 2. Oh, the fact that I could buy something online, you know, was a novelty. The fact that, you know, I was starting to get an iPhone. Right. Like the smartphones weren’t really a thing at the time. And so it was really web first, not mobile first as the environment back then. And it was certainly what I call, you know, first gen tech.So a lot of the tech that we built was supportive on the back end. So our administrative personnel, our clinical partners, professionals, used our backend systems, but they weren’t the most robust backend systems because they would just do the work, but easier and better. And you know, we were one of the first companies as a service business to do our own electronic health record, which at that time seemed crazy, but the tech was getting good enough that we could do it reasonably well and it allowed us to do the basic stuff. But obviously the tech has changed so much over the last 10 plus years that, you know, now the platform is completely different.Diane TavennerYeah. And so that takes us to Galileo that you’re working on now. So tell us a little bit about how that’s different. I don’t think it’s the standard chassis. Maybe I’m getting that wrong. And where’s, you know, I think you’re doing significantly more with technology now.Galileo: AI-Driven Healthcare ModelTom LeeYeah, that’s right. You know, the front end is still nice and easy to use and modern and all the things that people would expect from One Medical experience. The key difference is the work itself is now different. So the tech stack is much more sophisticated. We use data throughout, meaning when we started Galileo, we could see where data and intelligence was going to be. And we wanted to design the operational infrastructure to support data intelligence, AI into the care itself. And so rather than layering it on a traditional model or One Medical model, we wanted to build, bake it into the Galileo model from the beginning. And so a lot of our process architectures, a lot of our data hierarchies and thoughts around truth were being formed there so that we could then leverage how data intelligence and AI would then augment what humans could do.We always felt like humans and tech should be in the loop in a still to be discovered frontier on what should be delivered to patients because you still have this Hippocratic oath and this commitment to the Human as a person to person. But you have all this amazing technology that either augments and replaces some human elements of care. And so the real question is, how do you bring that into the fold naturally and somehow maintain the integrity of what’s actually being delivered? Because unbridled, who’s to judge? Right. And we see this already today. Right. And so the whole framework was around clinical re engineering. How do we bake that in and then put it into a structure that’s harnessed so we can take advantage of it but not be what I’ll call subject to it?Diane TavennerYeah, yeah. Can you give us like one just concrete example of how this plays out in actual care or in the clinic or among, you know, doctor and patient?Tom LeeWell, there’s a spectrum from basic to more sophisticated elements that we do on our care platform. So to a patient it feels seamless. I’m getting best in class, whatever care, we think of primary care as any knowledge based situation that can be addressed virtually. But we also do some home based care as well. But whatever that first level of care is, make sure that it’s excellent. And so there’s a range from simple to complex, you know, what I call unidimensional to multidimensional type of dimensions to decision making. And so what we’ve got are some basic algorithms that collect information that suggest treatment plans that are based on human based editorial processes that allow us to have conviction that everything is delivered at a minimum standard of care. And then we have different layers of intelligence all the way up into classic LLMs and AI that start to then really augment the intelligence of what a human clinician could do.And so what we’re trying to do is figure out which tooling in what scenarios should we be using different elements to then augment what happens to the individual with a human experience. Like that’s the other thing that we’re trying to do is, you know, you can talk all you want about the fidelity of the knowledge being the most accurate, but unless there’s trust in the content, in the person who’s telling me this, still, you know, when people talk about AI, there still is human to human friction on what actually happens in society. And so how that gets translated is really critical as well. So we kind of look at all of those dimensions to kind of bake it into a unified care experience.AI’s Role in Healthcare TransformationMichael HornSo Tom, there’s several things there that you’ve said that are interesting that I think we’re going to want to dig into. One of them is also like the categorization of a simple. I assume that means like an acute problem that can be solved, point of care versus a complex one that maybe requires behavior changes and all sorts of other parts of lifestyle. But before we go there and before we dig into the AI piece specifically, I suspect our audience is like, why’d you bring him on? Well, because AI is a huge part of this story. The other analog, though, that shapes how AI is used that you mentioned is the regulatory framework in terms of dictating what is and isn’t possible. The reimbursement model continues to focus around what many have called sick care, treating symptoms as opposed to incentivizing health and wellness. How do you think about sort of finding areas and business models that can go around and transform that system? And what are the broader lessons like, you know, education can be thinking about if you extract from that as you create these new models?Tom LeeYeah, I think there’s no question the way we look at it is AI is again, a means to an end. And so you have to think about what are you trying to accomplish here. And so if your goal, you know, again, I’m not saying this is our goal, but your goal is to improve well being and lifestyle and preventive health. As just an example, as you know, the current healthcare system tends to not really reward and reimburse preventive health and wellness, then you can design a care model that can leverage AI to do more of that. Partly because, you know, to be frank, it doesn’t pay for itself. And so you need to find more efficient frameworks there, and AI can provide those more efficient frameworks. The real question there then is what is the content and how clear and validated is the content.Or what is the tooling needed to do that? So in any quote, unquote goal, you can use different elements to then augment and change the experience, the content and the economics all holistically. For us, we do that. Plus, you know, what we call urgent care, primary care, longitudinal care, multispecialty care. When you think about the kind of quote, unquote, service that people want from the medical system, it’s actually not just one thing, it’s a lot of little things. And you ideally would like a provider or an organization to handle most of those situations, especially one that has a trust authority. And so what we do is we try to think about the broad set of use cases, including wellness and prevention, but bake it into a unified economic framework. So we’re looking at all the different goals and trying to put it into what we call our kind of North Star, which is really long term population health.Diane TavennerThis is where the parallels to education are so similar, right? I mean we both, yours is a little bit more life and death than ours. But honestly, education feels life or death and we feel like we’re raising whole humans for their life. There’s the privacy considerations, there’s the regulatory frameworks and constraints. You know, there’s so many things that are parallel and, and what I, as you’re talking, I’m mapping it on to what we do in schools where there’s a lot of goals and purposes that we have in schools that they’re not actually funded or paid for or the thing that technically we’re accountable for, but we know are good for young people and we want to do them, but how do we squeeze them in? And so I’m listening and learning from you about how to think.Michael HornYeah, because it sounds like one of the things though, Tom, that using AI allows you to do is break some of these trade offs, maybe that had existed before. And so I’d love you to like sort of walk through how maybe like the trade off, some of that it breaks and what it allows you to build that maybe, you know, isn’t getting directly funded but can be done now, if I’m understanding you correctly.Tom LeeTotally and this is kind of, you know, pre AI, the same mindset which is, you know, most of the world, you know, particularly from a managerial perspective, kind of view things as zero sum or on what people call a quality cost frontier. I can have higher quality at higher cost or lower quality at lower cost. And it’s just binary. I can either titrate it up or down, but that’s it. And the beauty about entrepreneurship and innovation mindset in general is you can actually get higher quality at lower cost if you’re creative. And so that’s process redesign, that’s people and training and skills, and it’s also tech and automation and AI. So AI is just another tool to push the quality cost frontier out, which allows you to have higher quality at lower cost. And so you can name whatever your output is.Optimizing Systems Within ConstraintsTom LeeIf it’s, you know, educational goals of a variety of sets, you can do more for less. And so one thing that people would always ask us about when One Medical was in the same thing with Galileo is, you know, how are you able to transform the industry when you’re working within a broken industry? And our answer is we’re working within the current broken system, but optimizing what you can do against that, and again, it depends on what kind of constraints there are. But if you can achieve better results more effectively and efficiently. And again, you know, healthcare has some analogs. There’s some forced staffing roles and forced ratios which sometimes create that arbitrary negative constraint which basically, it doesn’t allow you to innovate. But outside of those areas, if you’re able to optimize, you can have happier workers, better outputs and lower cost infrastructure to really enable your goals. And then what we do is we take that extra savings and apply into areas of mission that are important to do from a quality perspective that likely won’t get paid. As an example, chronic condition management is a quality property.It takes time and energy to better manage chronic conditions. It’s not really well reimbursed in the current economic architecture. And so you just kind of have to do it. But if you do it effectively, efficiently, then you can actually get the results done and not hope that you get paid more for it per se. And so there are a lot of these little trade offs you’re making by getting core efficiencies there through process automation and re-engineering. You can take some of those savings and reapply that to a mission where it’s unlikely to be reimbursed outside of a big policy framework shift.Michael HornThere’s another point you made in there as well, which is sort of about breaking these trade offs between, you know, low money, low quality, high money, high quality. In higher ed, for example, they often call it the iron triangle. Quality, cost, access. You can play with two, but not all three. But I love your the way you said it, entrepreneurs exist to change those trade offs and what you create as you build solutions. I’m curious how you see AI as a result, like helping existing models of care that have been around for, you know, the hospitals and doctor’s offices that have been around for years versus the creation of new models with AI sort of centering. Right. And breaking some of these trade offs.Like how should we expect incremental versus transformational applications of AI in each of those settings?Tom LeeYeah, I think it’s an interesting time right now. We don’t know what’s really going to transcend over the next several years. What we see in the healthcare ecosystem are some of the more savvy larger institutions, so the entrenched and more, heavy iron type of hospital systems, but those with enlightened leadership leaning into AI, taking advantage and harnessing that and transforming their organizational operations. Now it’s still not dramatic, but it’s certainly quite significant. And we’re seeing some organizations that are starting to do that. And whether that innovation will be durable and completely transformative I think is to be seen. And my bias is I think there’s going to be probably a ceiling on what even the most savvy large institutions can do because of the habits and norms of these large institutions and frankly, the breadth and complexity of the large institutions. When you look at de novo innovators, they almost have the opposite challenge and problem, which is there’s no structure.And so how do you build something out of nothing? And in today’s AI first models, there are AI first clinicians out there today. But the problem there is there’s not really a great economic architecture to monetize. There’s not a great organizational infrastructure, there’s not a great trust infrastructure. And so because of that, it’s hard to say whether anything is going to truly take hold from almost an ether perspective, an AI first framework, who knows, right? That’ll all just be dependent on what’s been built. Our bias is there’s some probably middle ground where there’s some kind of lightly structured organization that’s already available that can harness some of the tooling of AI and everything else that’ll find that good middle ground to really harness and scale quickly. But, you know, who knows, right? But, I think that the question right now is not really over the next year or two. I think everybody’s going to take advantage at some incremental level over the next year or two.The real issue is what thing becomes transformative from an experience outcomes and cost basis.Diane TavennerYeah, so fascinating. I’m just going to keep narrating some of the parallels that I’m noticing a little bit here. Like, I think those big, and we’ve seen big, large school districts jump in and they have resources and they’re building tools and they’re embracing AI. We’ve seen incumbent big publishers in the curriculum space, you know, like really. And then we’ve got these little, you know, entrepreneur startups who are truly trying to like redesign the model of school. And so it’s just an interesting parallel. I also appreciate we’ve had a really hard time getting people to really think systemically in the way that you do around change. And so this has been super exciting and enlightening.And where most people in education are talking is like literally down at the student level. And I know you have, you go, you run that whole entire ladder. And so we had such a fascinating conversation where I was asking you, well, like, what does it look like with a patient and like what are you running into? And maybe you can tell the story, but I think people should know like you’re a classically trained doctor and you’ll describe it better. Like you, you were trained to actually like physically examine people to understand what’s going on. And that’s like an art in a way that many teachers are trained in the art of teaching and maybe we shouldn’t really be doing that very often anymore. And so can you kind of talk about that tension and how that plays out and what people.Analog to Digital Shift in MedicineTom LeeYeah, yeah, it’s probably just luck in terms of when I was born, right. But I was born between the analog and digital transformation. And similarly in healthcare, the dying art of the physical exam into what we call the digital exam increasingly so. But you know, when I did my medical training in Seattle, you know, I trained with some of the best in the best, you know, like people who had learned the art and they could, you know, smell you from half the room away and know what your diagnosis was or they would go into your garbage and know exactly if you were compliant with your, you know, dietary intake and they could measure the size of your spleen, you know, as good as an ultrasound does today. So these are really master craftsmen at their work. And, I just did my medical school with them and I got halfway good, but nowhere near their level of expertise. And so, the reality when you start to step back from that, because that was the dogma, is you would never see a patient without having physically examined them. Listen to the lungs and you can’t even listen to the lungs through the shirt.You have to take the shirt off completely if you really want to listen to the lungs. So that was the type of training I had. And then the further down you go, you realize that the data and the operating characteristics are so much more variable that when you really step back at it, unfortunately, and I think most clinicians would agree today, even some of the die hard physical tactile folks would say, yeah, it’s a lost art, meaning it’s hard to really get the training to that level. The science is just not supportive of it at a level that warrants its practice. And today technology and lower cost tests and non-invasive tests are becoming so cheap and available that it’s really flipped the script on what should be the standard of care for examination. And so, you know, very enlightened doctors who don’t, again, if you come to see me, it’s kind of like, well, you’re not examining me. It’s like kind of a weird thing. But that’s kind of the pressure lot of clinicians have.But the reality is that it’s just not the standard of care increasingly so and so it’s just these habits need to change and the whole practice of medicine hasn’t fully evolved to that just yet.Diane TavennerYeah, it feels so parallel to teaching to me. You know, I was with some incredible mastercraft teachers this past weekend and they truly are extraordinary. You know, the way they orchestrate a classroom and move young people along and all of that. And there’s not that many of them and training them, developing them is so expensive and long and the tech, we have other ways of measuring and understanding where everything a student is. And so. But I think the same thing happens for you where patients are like, but wait, I want to see my doctor in person. I like seeing my doctor in person. Don’t take that away from me.And you know, it sounds like you might have that a little bit on the doctor side as well. How do you think about that sort of human change management process?Tom LeeWell, part of it is you have to be intentional, right? Same thing. What are you trying to accomplish here? And if human contact is important for either side for different reasons, then you have to bake that in, but you just have to knowingly bake it in, not just blindly bake it in. And so when you think about physical experience, instead of saying, I have to do it every time for this situation, instead saying, when is a physical interaction valuable? When is a face to face interaction valuable? And how do I layer that into the journey so that when I’m doing it, it’s deeper, more meaningful, impactful, and then everything else can be done by automation, everything else. And so it’s really just starting to kind of break out the experience into the components and then being more intentional about it.Michael HornYeah, I mean, that segmentation you keep doing, that I think we don’t do nearly enough of with precision in education, keeps striking me over and over again as you think about not only modularizing the experience, but then creating a better integrated experience, frankly as well. I’m curious. Part of that also is maybe who the first users or patients. Right. Like is there a right first profile, if you will, for a new system? Like who should you serve first? If that makes sense. And I’m curious because it’s something we grapple a lot with in education of, you know, whether it’s income strata, whether it’s race, whether it’s geography, like it’s a question, you know, type of learner. We have all these questions of responsibly speaking, who is the right learner, but also who’s the learner that’s ready for maybe this radically new way of doing things.How do you think about that when it comes to healthcare?Tom LeeIt’s a great question and another great analog between the industries. You know, both industries serve. The intent is to serve all in a fair way. Right. And that’s kind of where we ended up with these cornerstone and so with One Medical was mostly an urban commercial solution.And there was a bit of a premium to it. So it wasn’t designed for everybody, but it was designed to validate the first gen model of what could be offered to people that I was familiar with, you know, for the most part, which is my peers. Galileo was designed to be for all populations. And so that exercise of designing Galileo has been much more challenging. And because of that we needed to think more as a platform against all life types. And so unlike One Medical, Galileo focuses on complex debilitated seniors, low income, complex behavioral health populations, as well as the, millennial and or the high flying exec. So all of these populations we need to be more intentional about. And so when you’re trying to serve the population it’s 10x more difficult.Customized Engagement for Diverse AudiencesTom LeeSo I wouldn’t recommend starting there, but it can be done. And the way to do that is to break it down into the types of people that need X types of interactions first and then Y type of interaction second and you break it down into problems. As an example, we are not expecting seniors to text us their mobile number to install their app and start communicating with our providers on day one. And so we have phone numbers and we have traditional offices and ways to gauge seniors first in a way that they’re familiar with. That being said, a percent of seniors then get comfortable with the team and then might be curious about doing a web based video visit with the team. And so we graduate people along a spectrum of comfort based on where they start. And so we often just kind of break down the populations based on, who they are, what their mindset is and then bringing them on a journey and being able to accommodate all of those under a common chassis, which is the key. And so you still have to organize your work in a very general way, but think about the interfaces to those individuals in a very kind of customized way.Diane TavennerI want to shift into a little bit of what’s inspiring you right now, Tom. Like what, where are you seeing the application of, of technology and the advancements in AI and like what, what can we be hopeful about? What’s actually like real and hopeful that you’re seeing?Tom LeeI know this is against being an entrepreneur, but I’m just like, you know, I’m the more cynical person and I must say there are very few glimmers of hope that I see in general in the media world. Right. Because it’s just so hard to cut through the noise of what you see out there today. And so part of me is so, somewhat dejected or saddened by just, you know, kind of the degenerate world that we’re falling into as everything gets micronized and fractionated and digested and commoditized. And so to me there’s that natural force of, you know, the singularity that’s kind of breaking us all apart that to me is hard to ignore. It’s just such a pervasive force, you know, and it’s not necessarily malicious. It’s just kind of evolution at scale here for us. And so that’s kind of the, I think the disheartening theme or overtone for most of my psyche as I just go through life and then especially over the last few years.But I think the positive side are the human to human interactions. Like, you know, we don’t talk about politics, we don’t get into all this, you know, crazy stuff. It’s like we can have a normal conversation about a football game or fruit or whatever. And to me, like, I just wish we could somehow tune out this, noisy ecosystem and just go back to human to human. So I’m hopeful that we’re all just going to eventually get sick of sugar and you know, it’s like the same thing. You have too much sugar. Maybe I’m just going to go back to veggies at some point, but at some point I’m hopeful that we’ll just go into physical human experience and just kind of turn off the tube.Diane TavennerAre you seeing places where, I mean, you sort of alluded to this, where maybe the use of AI makes it structurally and financially viable to have better human to human contact in care settings. And, what does that look like? Yeah, and I’m also just thinking, I feel like you told me a story about how if I remember correctly, you’re starting to use AI to do the follow up calls. So like, if someone’s had a procedure like this happens all the time where, you know, I have a procedure and the next day my doctor calls me to check on me. Those are not really good experiences. Right. Like the doctor’s having to call at night, I’m busy. Like it’s kind of weird and forced and it’s like, “okay, yeah, I’m good. Okay, bye.” You know, and I think you might be using AI for that and getting some real positive results. Yeah.Tom LeeI mean, it’s part of what we talked about, right? Just stitching together an experience with intent and everybody benefits. And so there’s, you know, let’s take the concept of a follow up call. There’s three ways to do it in theory. One is the provider physically calls you, which is not reliable, and scalable. It’s nice if it happens, but it’s just not likely to happen given the cost of it. The second is to have an AI chatbot pretend to be the doctor and over time it’s just going to feel artificial in saccharin and you’re just not going to feel like, wow, that was really fine. And another is to create an experience that is much more intentional. That said, hey, you know, Dr. Blah asked me to check in. I’m an AI agent, I’m here to answer any questions that you might have. And then should it need to be escalated, I’m happy to bring in Dr. Blah.So, you know, there’s lots of ways to stitch these together so that they’re much more human, but you know, what you’re interacting with and it’s transparent and the intent by the human still gets expressed through that, which is, you know, it’s not a robot, it’s not automatic every single time, but it’s triggered by somebody’s intention. And so those little nuances, I think, help express the humanity behind the tech. And hopefully, you know, you know, we’ll still reward that in society somehow, but, you know, who knows? Yeah, that’s the hope.Michael HornIt’s interesting hearing you say that also because it strikes me as one of the concerns we’ve had in the education world, and we had a guest last season, Julia Freeland Fisher, who’s thought a lot about companionship, Right. And AI sort of disrupting companionship and maybe taking humans out of our lives. But the vision you just painted would be the AI doing the stuff that humans don’t really want to be doing right now. It’s not actually a very human interaction and then being super transparent about what it is to create the opportunity or free up more time for when the human really is valuable, if I’m understanding how you’re thinking about that.Trust Matters in AI OversightTom LeeA little bit exactly. You know, let me take that example, which is a great analog here. You know, AI has the potential, as we’ve seen, to be an intimate advisor, therapist, counselor, whatever. Would you rather have the supervisor of that person or AI agent be, you know, a social media company or a therapist? And so, you know, behind the technology is what matters. And so increasingly, I think the trust authority that humans can provide helps provide that confidence of how you’re interacting with the AI agent. That’s kind of my hope is, rather than just using some random generic corporate thing, is that, trusted authorities facilitate that, oversee it, put their stamp on it. And now, yes, you can still get the same experience, but it’s, you can have some conviction that it’s guardrailed and a bit more, you know, intentional.Michael HornIt strikes me, that might be a nice way to do a regulatory guardrail that doesn’t stamp out the innovation and sort of the productivity gains that you’re talking about, but also allows us to not lose some of the things that are important, whether from quality of care or humanity, frankly, as we interact with each other.Diane, where do you want to go?Diane TavennerWell, I mean, I feel like we could go on forever, but I actually think that that’s a really, maybe that’s a really interesting place to close for the moment in that what it says to me is like, we, you know, those of us who are on a mission, who are expert in our work, have a huge role to play, and it’s almost a responsibility of ours to understand and engage with the technology so that we can be those trusted sources, as you just said, around like the counseling. I mean, this is completely present right now with young people and who’s behind it, who is really, really critical and maybe the place we should be looking as opposed to just to technology writ large. And so I love that. Yeah.So before we let you go, Tom, we want to pick your brain for something you’ve been listening to, watching, you know, reading lately that is interesting and that you’d like to share with our audience.Tom LeeI mean, in my life these days, the easy default is my kids, who are now 5 and 3. So I find them just fascinating just as humans. And it’s fun, you know, as a clinician, to see biology, you know, right before your eyes grow. But no, I mean, outside of my kids, which garner most of my attention you know, the book that comes to mind that I’ve been reading is, again, it’s completely random. It’s just a moment in time that happened to be reading Unbroken. But it’s, you know, about this Olympian, you guys might know this story, but, you know, out on a raft for, you know, umpteen 40 plus days or something. And part of the reason why I find that book just so helpful today is, you know, we think we have it tough.You know, people complain about society and life, and I’m like, yeah, we don’t really have it that tough. And, you know, if anything, it’s like, we should be thankful for all the people that have had really tough journeys on our behalf. And so for me, it’s like, it’s inspiring to be able to kind of, you know, continue to work hard and try to impact society for the positive.Michael HornYeah, I love that one, Diane, maybe I’ll go next and let you close out this episode, switched around just because I know you have a really interesting one. Mine has been lighthearted. I’ve been listening to a book called the Warrior Rafael: Nadal and His Kingdom of Clay by Christopher Clary, who’s the former New York Times tennis beat reporter. He wrote a biography of Federer that I confess I enjoyed a little bit more, even though I’m more of a Rafa guy as a lefty. But it’s been a great dual thing, both the biography, but also a biography of Roland Garros and the French Open, which has been sort of an interesting dual structure to a book, and I’ve been enjoying that. What about you?Diane TavennerWell, good job going outside of the day to day.Michael HornI’ve been escaping. I’m escaping.Diane TavennerSo I watched the interview between Ross Douthat and May Mailman. And for those who don’t know, May was, until very recently, the White House Senior Advisor for Special projects. And in her role in that role, she was the architect for the Trump administration’s crackdown on higher ed, and, in her words, the effort to, quote, end the culture of victimhood on college campuses. And so anyone who listens to our podcast should know that I’m very interested in conversations that get to the nuance of differing viewpoints in respectful ways where you can actually hear what people are saying because they aren’t yelling at each other or talking over each other. And I just found the conversation really informative, provocative, and important, given the work that I, you know, Michael, we do in higher ed. And so, yeah, recommend.Michael HornI’m adding it to my list. So I appreciate you calling it to my attention because I didn’t know about it. So thank you.Tom, huge thanks again for joining us. We’re going to link to Galileo for folks to check it out. And we just really appreciate your insights today. And for all of you listening, as always, keep the comments and questions coming. It does shape what we have on tap for this season and, and Diane and my evolving thinking. So just huge thanks as always. And we’ll see you next time on Class Disrupted.The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.

Kim Dow, executive director of the Khan Lab School and Khan Schools Network, and Elizabeth Dean, head of learning design at the Village School, joined me for this conversation. Together we explored the evolution of the Khan Lab School, as well as the Village School. We talked about how these schools are designing forward-thinking, mastery-based, and self-directed learning environments, the impact of AI on education, and why collaboration and knowledge-sharing across the network are vital for supporting new educational models. I was interested to hear about the Village School’s goals for expanding into high school and Elizabeth’s view on the importance of fostering authentic experiences and character development for students in the age of AI.Michael HornWelcome to the Future of Education. I’m Michael Horn. You’re joining the show where we’re dedicated to creating a world in which all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their potential, and live lives of purpose. And to help us think through that today, I’m really excited for our two guests. We have Kim Dow. She’s the executive director of the Khan Lab School and the Khan Schools Network. So first, Kim, great to see you.Kim DowThanks for having us on your podcast.Michael HornYou bet. And then we’ve got Elizabeth Dean. She’s the head of learning design at the Village School and the first Kahn School Network partner on the east coast, which we’re going to hear more about today. But first, Elizabeth, thank you so much for joining as well.Elizabeth DeanThanks for having us.Khan Lab School’s Growth JourneyMichael HornYeah, you bet. So, Kim, let me start with you. Just Khan Lab School, I’ve been there probably a handful of times over the years, but if I’m being honest, it’s probably been like seven or eight years since I was last there. I was trying to do the math this morning as I was preparing for you to come on. And of course, Sal’s been on the show a few times, but still, I think the audience would love an update. Sort of like just Khan Lab School. We’ll get to the network in a moment. But just like, you know, the current state of it, how many locations do you have? How has it evolved over time? What’s the student body look like? Day in the life students, just give us a little bit of the color.Kim DowKhan lab School is actually going into its 12th year this year, and I’ve been here for about eight years and it’s been quite a journey. And the school, as you know, is a Mastery based school. One of the earlier Mastery based schools, we’re located in Mountain View and we’ve also just expanded to Palo Alto. And so the school has grown over the past decade or so. And so now we have a campus for our lower school folks, and then we have a campus for our middle and our upper school students, which is based in Mountain View. In fact, our middle school this summer we just did some rehab and just moved into the old Khan Academy space. So we have moved from about, which the students love, and so the program has grown from the early days of about, you know, 20 students.I like to say it’s achieved escape velocity and we now have just tipped over 300 students, which is super exciting. So we often say that we have evolved from being scrappy to established, but not too established. And so we’ve really tried to retain those kind of startup, innovative roots and everything that, everything that we do. But it’s been, it’s been amazing to grow to, you know, a larger school.Michael HornI love it. One more question, Kim, before I bring Elizabeth in. Just—300 students. I’ve always thought of Khan Lab School as a microschool. Do you, do you all still consider yourself as such at that size or like, how do you think? I mean, some of these classifications are sort of silly in some sense, right? It’s more about the educational experience. But I’m just sort of curious how you think about that.Kim DowI think that we have evolved away from being a traditional microschool just partly because of the number of years that we have been around. And I think that moving into kind of being more of a grown up school based on, you know, the number of years that we’ve been around. Some of the things that, you know, are part of our operational elements, I would say are part of being, you know, a larger school. It’s interesting, you know, most recently about three years ago, we also decided to expand the program and we can get into this in a little bit later, but we expanded the model to open a school in Wichita. So we are now three campuses. One in Mountain View, one in Palo Alto, where Lower School is, and a new campus in Wichita, Kansas.Michael HornAll right, we’re gonna have to get more into all of this in a moment. But Elizabeth, I want to bring you in because before the partnership, the Village School was alive and well, and has a good history. So tell us a little bit about the Village School, its roots, who it serves, you know, what a student experience is like and so forth.Elizabeth DeanYes, thank you. So similar to Kimberly, we started eight years ago. So this is theVillage School’s eighth year with 12 learners, preschool through elementary school age. And now we have close to 80 learners and we’re pre K through 8th grade. And we’re hoping to launch a high school in the future, which is where our partnership with Khan comes in, hopefully helping us with that, with all of their wisdom and launching a school and growing it to 300 learners. Our school is really built, we have our roots in a self directed learning model and we have a really entrepreneurial founding community. Some of those founding families are still here, really active and have just kind of pushed us to continue to expand and explore.We’re really focused on self directed learning, of course, as that’s, you know, really where our roots are. But focused on project based and mastery based learning and really wanting to make a school model and a learning experience that is really the future of education. Focusing on those, you know, human skills that are going to be really important as we continue down this road of AI and all things that come with that.Michael HornAnd tell us a little bit about, like, that founding story with those founding families. You’re all in Northern Virginia, right? So just a little bit about, like, what was the why the rallying cry, if you will, that said, hey, we gotta. We have to put something different together.Elizabeth DeanYes. So I can speak to that as I was one of those founding families before I worked here. So I was a member before I was an employee or I think there’s a famous line about that. But I might be dating myself with that. But you all get it. I see you laughing.Michael HornYes.Elizabeth DeanFamilies come from really, you know, I wouldn’t. It’s hard to describe. It’s not like they come from one particular background, really, just families that were looking at their current young, you know, their children’s school experience and just wanting it to be more than just fine. And I think something that all families, especially that founding group, really has in common and something we hear every time we take our new families out to a coffee is that, you know, they played the game of school and they either played it really well or they didn’t play it well at all. They figured it out either way, but they wanted something different for their kids. And so it’s really that just knowing that they’re just really wanting something else, which is like what I like to call them, entrepreneurial.Right. They’re really seeing that disconnect or seeing something that could be better and wanting to figure that out. So that’s really what I feel like brought us together. And we are, we’re located in Arlington, Virginia, right outside Washington, D.C. and we really take advantage of our close location to all things in the District of Columbia that are, you know, take the kids on really great field trips and have access to a lot of really wonderful professionals who are willing to come in and share what they do with our learners. So we’re really. We try to take advantage of our location for sure.Michael HornVery cool. Very cool. All right, Kim, let me go back to the Khan Lab school because that’s also part of your title, Khan Schools Network. Right. You guys started to expand, I think, a few years back, if I’m not mistaken, and it’s global, in fact, at this point. So sort of tell us about that evolution of Khan Lab School into thinking about it as more of a network, if you will. How many partners at the moment? Where are they? What do they look like? And why partner as opposed to, like, just build lots of Khan Lab schools yourself?Kim DowVery early on, I would say. And it’s actually a separate entity from Khan Lab school. And so. But I would say, you know, one of the things that, like, innovative schools in the Bay area and all over the country, everybody gets requests to come and visit their school, especially like Elizabeth, if you’re in a large metropolitan area. And what we were finding is, in fact, we’ve got a visit this morning. I’ve got another visit later in the week. You know, one of the schools is from India, and one of them is from France. This happens to everybody who is in this space.Building Collaborative School PartnershipsKim DowAnd one of the things that I found was these conversations were so rich and that we, you know, folks would come, they would spend an entire day at the school, but then, you know, we would sort of drift away. We would stay in touch. You know, we would email each other every now and then, but we really weren’t continuing that relationship and those opportunities to learn from one another. And I would say probably about two years ago, we started thinking that we had gotten some things together about our model. And we have, like everybody else, made tons of mistakes along the way, but I felt that we had learned enough that maybe we were ready to have some things that we could share with other schools. And so we tapped into some of those schools that had come to visit us, and we decided to create. And about the same time, we were creating the Wichita program, Kahn Schools network, and not as a way to franchise Khan Lab school, but a way to really create something a little more organic where we could create partnerships through these relationships with other schools. Not that we wouldn’t create another one or two Khan lab schools in the future, but they have.Michael HornThe Wichita one is a Khan Lab school, right?Kim DowIt is a Khan Lab school, Right.But what we really wanted to do was to help facilitate, because we were finding this from folks who were visiting us as well. How can we learn from each other? And one of the things we like to say is be in the lab with us. Right. Because the learning really goes in both directions. And so even though we have, you know, materials that we have shared and that we have codified and we have put up on our Khanschoolsnetwork.org website, you know, we’re really putting them in good shape and then hoping that that will serve as a model for Elizabeth and others then to share some of their best resources. As well.Michael HornSo it’s really almost conceptualized like, this. This isn’t like a series of copycat schools. It’s more literally a network where you’re both. You’re all learning from each other as a network would. Is that the right way to think about it?Kim Dow100%.Michael HornSuper. Interesting. All right, let me ask one more question before Elizabeth. I want to hear your sort of turn on this. I suspect a lot of folks would love to be a partner with Khan Lab School in some meaningful way. How do you decide, you know, who gets to be a partner? Are there criteria around that? Why did the Village School feel like, yeah, that’s a, you know, that’s someone we want to partner with, be. Have they been in the network?Kim DowWell, you know, it’s interesting, we find that folks who are approaching us come with a very specific request. It’s not help us build a school right. And in the relationship and partnership with Elizabeth, it was, we have a K8 program. We’re aligned philosophically around how we.How our schools, you know, run.They’re independent entities. But you have built a high school before, right? And help us think about how to build a high school. And so what we found is that folks will have a very specific request, like, help us write a charter application for a mastery based charter school. Help us think about what progress reports and transcripts look like for students who are headed to college. And in Elizabeth’s case, it was, you know, how do we really engage with our community and with our board and all of our other stakeholders and kind of frame, you know, building and expanding our existing program to include a high school? What are some of the things that you maybe did right or did wrong that you could share with us? They’re in the driver’s seat. We’re really just a I would say a consultant.But the wonderful thing that happens is that as a result of this partnership, I know that Elizabeth and her team are doing wonderful work around curriculum mapping. And so an offshoot of that is we will take something back from that relationship as well. And it’s only by deepening these relationships that I think that these innovative schools, you know, continue to stay regionally, you know, important and distinct. But we’re connected by these kind of core principles of, you know, self directed learning and mastery based learning.Michael HornTerrific. Elizabeth, let me turn it to you. Like, what were you looking for when, you know, why did you say, gosh, this is an important partnership for the growth of Village School as you started thinking about high school?Elizabeth DeanYes. So I think just what Kimberly shared about just collaborating those really important core pieces of our program that we are so aligned on. Right. Like we might not share a governing structure, but we believe in project based, mastery based self directed learning and are trying to build something different. I think we as our school really was excited at the opportunity, especially given our entrepreneurial spirit, to get in on the early end and be an early partner and try to kind of help shape the network as much as we get from it right we could also give.Rethinking Education Beyond Status QuoElizabeth DeanAnd really, I think being an independent school that is trying to create a different vision for education and a different experience. Right. We’re not built and we’re not designed as a school to do what most schools are built and designed to do. We’re trying to really be intentional about having a different outcome. And anytime you’re trying to do something different and kind of push back against status quo, it’s really great to be in good company and have cheerleaders even if they’re across the country, you know, thankful that technology can connect us and just having somebody that has gone through it, especially in building a high school, you know, around, we’ve, in our experience, we’ve learned that, you know, people are willing to take a perceived risk on their kids, Pre K through 8 experience. But high school comes with its own challenges and people are afraid to take the risk because the stakes are so high. And so we really, we really want to get it right. And, you know, we’re looking for help and support and cheerleading to get it right and serve the community well.Our community really wants it and so we want to do right by them. So just looking for a partner in that. And this seemed like a really great, you know, marriage of purpose and values and, you know, just ability to get it done and to help us along the way.Michael HornIt’s interesting because that sense of partnership and sort of, you know, we’re in this together with the network. If I’m not mistaken, you all have like, basically, I think India, now the Village School, you’ve got Ohio right in the Heights Academy, and then there’s a proposed charter, I think in Georgia. So, like, what will the work of the network look like? Like, do you have a sense of cadence of how the interactions will go? What’s the sharing of information look like between schools? Because I imagine it’s not just like one way traffic, Chan lab, school hub and spoke. Right. It’s probably also getting to connect with others in the network too?Kim DowYeah. And I would say it’s definitely early days. But one of the things that’s interesting is that even though there are some public partners, over this past year we have been approached by maybe about 30 different schools that are interested in being partners. And, you know, we are, you know, currently a very small team. And so we have tried to be really thoughtful about taking the time, you know, to meet with each one of them individually to really listen to what people are saying in this space that they need. Most of these schools, I would say, are, you know, either a couple of years old or like Elizabeth’s, they’ve been around for a little bit, but most of them are less than a decade old. But they really have.I would say they are sustainable in their own community. And I think one of the things that’s interesting to me is that I expected all of them to be small, but they’re not all small. We are partners with another school in Florida which created an innovative mastery based school within an existing school district. And so that was one of the surprises to me, that charter schools, public schools, small schools, international schools. I was surprised by the fact that about a third of the schools who are reaching out to us are in fact international schools. So about 10 international 20 that are around the country. We didn’t even have a website for the first half of the year. So we figured if people were contacting us, they must really want to be part of the network.Michael HornThe best marketing is inbound when you’re not asking right?Kim DowSo it’s been fun. But I really want to emphasize that we’re not trying to get a lot of publicity, be a flash in the pan, be super fast. We are, I would say, slow and methodical and listening to our partners, trying to be here for the long term. We don’t charge anybody. And so it’s more about, you know, the right relationship and the fact that there is a willingness, I would say, as Elizabeth said earlier, to share back within the network that again, we’re not creating a product, we are codifying things and trying to put them in good shape. So they are generic templates that other people can use and try to connect folks, you know, with, with one another.Michael HornSo that reciprocity you just mentioned in high school in particular, because, Elizabeth, I share the same observation. Right. There’s like a lot of parents who are willing to do different things for elementary and middle school for a variety of reasons. Right. And then there’s sort of like, it seems like a gravitational pull of a few things that happens in high school. One is college, but the other is nostalgia. Right around prom, Friday Night Lights, whatever it is, it’s sort of pulls people out.I just love mastery based learning being such an important part of both of your, you know, school philosophies, designs, etc. I guess I’m sort of curious, like, in the age of AI, right? Like, how does mastery based learning intersect with AI? Is that maybe a bigger rallying cry where people are realizing, hey, since AI can probably do most of the work by itself that is being assigned in today’s high schools, maybe we actually are looking for something different. Just like talk us through that dynamic and maybe. Elizabeth, you start and then. Kim, I’d love your reflections on the same question.Prioritizing Humanity Over AI SkillsElizabeth DeanYes, yes to all of the above. I really hope that AI is kind of a rallying cry, if you will, because I think at least for us in our conversations, it’s really having us double down on the human part of what we’re doing here, which is like, you know, we always say, one of the things we say in our school community is we care more about who our learners are than what they know. Because we care more about who our learners are than what they know. Especially now that, you know, AI could pretty much ace any test that they’re giving or any of the tests that I certainly took when I was going to school. And I know some of the tests that are still given in my neighborhood, high school, school. So students, you know, my neighbors come asking me for help. I think that, you know, we think that the future really belongs to those who can do what technology can’t. And one of those things that technology can’t do is really teach me about my, like, know myself and my own experience.They can’t reflect for me on that thing that just happened and so really just doubled, like I said, doubling down on the human aspects of our learning design. And that’s really what mastery based learning is all about. You can’t. I think mastery based learning is really all about those authentic assessments, like assessing to discover, not assessing to demonstrate. So we have really been energized as a team to dive more, even more deeply into mastery based learning. One with, because of our partnership with Khan, but also just because of what we’ve seen and what we’ve experimented with in terms of AI and how it’s impacting what we actually, what do we care about? You know, what’s important here? What’s worth assessing?Michael HornKim, I’d love your thoughts on this as well. I have a number of questions off of what Elizabeth just shared, but first, I want to give you a chance to jump in.Kim DowI mean, I would say one of the interesting things for us is obviously, it’s a quickly shifting landscape, and the AI that students use today is probably the worst AI that they’ll ever encounter in their academic careers. And so I think it’s worth keeping all of those things in mind. The other thing that I think is really at the forefront for us is that as a K12 school, AI is pervasive not just with our high school students, but down to our youngest students as well. And so what does the ethical use of AI look like? And there is also so much focus, I would say, in school environments about how does AI support teachers, and what can students do and not do, and what should we train students to do or not do, and how important is critical thinking and all of those things that continue to need to be important. I think one of the things that we have also tried to focus on is that what does AI mean for the rest of the school? What does it mean for the administrative team? What does it mean for the operations of the school? There’s a lot of AI Ed. In fact, we’re doing our own summit in a couple of weeks about AI in Ed for teachers. But one of the things we’re trying to make sure also doesn’t happen is that in admissions and in marketing and in our finance department department, that we’re also upskilling everybody on those teams as well. So it becomes more of a community embracing and having thoughtful conversations about, you know, appropriate use.The last thing I would say is that as a school, we are kind of in this unique situation as being a sister organization to Khan Academy. And so when there are changes in KA or there’s a rollout of, you know, Khanmigo, which is a tool that a number of schools will use, is that our students have kind of this early look, and they are used to kind of trying these things out in collaboration with kind of a software nonprofit. And so I think that we have so many students who are in the driver’s seat of being really early adopters as a result of this kind of synergistic relationship with a software entity. And so I think that has made us look at the kind of school use pretty early on and to think about what’s changing and what isn’t going to change for students and for teachers.Michael HornWell, so let’s dig in on a couple of those things. On the student side in particular, Elizabeth, you mentioned, like, knowing yourself being critical, but obviously, like, you have to have knowledge around the world and sort of like you have to know something to also know yourself relative to others. Like, how do you parse that? What’s your current philosophy? Or where do you think? Like, what will the high school look like as you guys build this? I’m guessing it’s not going to be atomized subjects and sort of 45 minute bells. So, like, what will a day in the life do you think look like for students navigating these questions that you posed?Elizabeth DeanYes. So, I mean, I think it’ll look similar to how especially our middle school runs, except which I’ll share. I think the goal for high school would be that they are, you know, off campus a lot more than our middle schoolers are. They’re off campus quite a bit. But we really want, the vision really is to put young people in the world and have real experiences, not artificial ones. Right, Real experiences. And I’d say,The balance is always tricky right, is of like, I think a great example would be the project our middle schoolers just finished a couple weeks ago, which was the first project of the year, which was just really all about, like, AI. They wrote a handbook for other middle schoolers on how to use AI. And in order to write that handbook, they had to use it. They had to talk about how they felt after they used it. They used it for all math, writing, reading, you know, civics assignments.Thoughtful AI ExplorationElizabeth DeanThey worked in collaboration. They used it on, on their own. Just really like diving in and then taking the time to process that experience. Like, how did I feel using it? Which did I learn? Did I learn more by using it or not by using it or by collaborating with it? Like, really posing those. I feel like those questions were all like, I’m asking about my own life and using AI, so just slowing down a little bit and, you know, not gatekeeping or not, not making it a forbidden fruit, if you will, and just inviting young people to the table to have the conversation about this, this new tool that’s everywhere and impacting all of our lives and being really thoughtful about how we want it to impact our life and knowing that we have agency in that decision.Michael HornQuick, quick question. When they’re interacting with AI, is it Khanmigo? Is it other apps? Is it the large language models themselves? What does that look like?Elizabeth DeanI would say it’s all of the above. Some of them, we have experimented with Khanmigo and some of the learners have really great success with that.. And then with some of the large language models as well. So really, they made their own AI chat bots as a part of this.So just they consulted with some people in the, you know, experts in the real world who work with AI policy. We have a lot of policy experts around us here. Right.Michael HornIt turns out one of the things DC does well or poorly, depending on your perspective.Elizabeth DeanYeah, yes. Yeah, yeah. They had some hard questions for those AI policies. They and they got some great feedback on their handbook. And then also just other, you know, young people who have just graduated for college that are using AI in their work, in their daily life, whether it be like using AI, the large language models, or using AI and some type of, you know, backdrop to their career path that they had not thought of, because when they were in high school and college, I wasn’t, you know, really fully developed. So just really connecting them with those experts and, and focusing on that, the processes.Right. And so it’s not just like the tool, but the whole, the, the experience that goes along with it. So, and that’s, I think we take that kind of approach in all of our learning design, and that’s really the approach that we’ll take with the high school, too, is going out, having experiences, coming back to this, to campus or wherever, to kind of reflect and talk through that so that you really are understanding more about yourself. An experience I often wish I had as a young person in school. But yes, I think somebody I was talking to recently said that in the future, our competitive advantage will be to really know yourself. And I think that that’s, that’s what we’re going for.That’s what we’re trying to design for.Michael HornYeah. And it is sort of amazing that there’s no opportunities really for reflection in the traditional high school experience for students and they sort of graduate, not having a keen sense of who they are and where their energy drives from and so forth. Kimberly, let me maybe ask you this last question as we start to wrap up here, which is you mentioned that AI is impacting even the youngest learners that you serve. I think you said kindergarteners. How do you think? And your point is right. Like, this is the worst AI any of them will ever see in their lives. Right. So I’m just sort of curious.Like, you know, obviously there’s the know yourself. You can build in reflection and sense of metacognition. And so forth throughout the experience. right of schooling. But how do you think about AI preparedness there, especially as the youngest learners are perhaps working with these tools in some cases.?Kim DowYou know, it’s interesting, I. And it really goes hand in hand with, I would say, what the teachers are learning at the same time. And I was in a third grade classroom the other day where they were writing short essays, and it was fascinating to me to see how the teacher was really weaving it into, I would say, traditional things, not a traditional approach, but teaching students how to write. But then she would pivot and have them use AI to look things up and then to integrate it back into their writing. And so it was very much a light approach and not now we are shifting to use AI, but it was just integrating it into the fabric of what she was already doing. And I thought that that was really powerful. And so I wouldn’t say we’re all the way down to kindergarten, but I would say that students as young as third grade, you know, are using AI in the classroom pretty regularly.Michael HornAnd it sounds like the guiding philosophy there is to figure out how do we cooperate with it as opposed to outsourcing cognitive, you know, work to it completely. Is that the right way to think about it?Kim DowStudents are not sitting in front of an AI tool, you know, for a half an hour independently and doing work that is really teaching students, you know, the skills, I would say, of how to use AI, as a tool and to be naturally curious about it. And it’s, you know, it’s the same old learning how to learn, which we both do in all of our schools. Right. And really teaching students to build that mindset into their use of AI because it will evolve for them.Curiosity Enhances UnderstandingMichael HornWell, and I guess that’s the same thing undergirding the project that you just outlined. Right. Elizabeth, is like if you. In order to write a handbook, I’m sure many schools are writing handbooks without this curiosity. But to have the curiosity of how does it actually work, what is the impact on me? Right. And others in the community as we use it, allows you to write a much more robust, I would imagine, output, but then have a much deeper sense of understanding underlying that, which is maybe the more important part, I would think.Elizabeth DeanYes. And I think it speaks to the mastery based piece. Right. Mastery based learning there’s a big part of that is character development and work habits and deliberate practice. And, you know, that’s a really important part of the experience. Right. So whether you’re writing a handbook on AI or, you know, learning algebra.Character development is an important part. And I think in this age of AI, it’s really the. It’s what we focused on eight starting, you know, eight years ago was our main focus. And I think just even more highlighting that it’s even more important to us now because of AI.Michael HornSuper. All right. Well, I feel like I have scratched the surface of like a million questions I want to dig into with you both, but for time’s sake, I’m going to let you go. This is a super interesting conversation. Exciting to see this network evolve, exciting to see the village school be part of this group. And frankly, Kim, as this evolves over the years, it’ll be exciting to see how big the network grows. What are the learnings that you start to all get out of it in the years ahead.So huge thank you to you both for joining us and for all you joining us, we’ll see you next time on the Future of Education.The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.

Diane Tavenner and I sat down with Neerav Kingsland, a longtime education leader who is now at Anthropic, to explore the evolving intersection of artificial intelligence and education. Neerav shares his journey from working in New Orleans’ public school reform to his current role at one of the leading AI companies. Our conversation covers the promise of AI tutors and teacher support tools, the key role of application “wrappers” for safe and effective student interaction with AI, and the need for humility and caution, especially with young learners. The episode also delves into the broader societal impacts of AI, the future evolution of schools, and the increasing importance of experimentation and risk-taking for students navigating an uncertain, tech-driven landscape.Linked References:“Machines of Loving Grace,” Dario Amodei, October 2024Michael HornHi, it’s Michael. What you’re about to hear is a conversation that Diane Tavenner and I had with Neerav Kingsland, longtime person in the education world who’s now at Anthropic, one of the major companies behind the large language models—of course Claude being theirs. And I had several takeaways from this conversation, but I just wanted to highlight a few for you. First was Neerav’s humility in constantly saying we don’t know the answer to the full impact of AI on education, let alone society, and just how honest that felt. Second, I was struck by how much he sees AI tutors as being a major use case for the technology, and he referenced things like Amira or Ello as perhaps examples of where this could be going. Third, teacher support was something he named, whether it be for efficiency gains or to help with facilitation and the like. Fourth, I was struck by how he repeatedly emphasized the importance for caution when it comes to young children interacting directly with AI, particularly the large language models themselves, and his belief as a result that wrappers, essentially applications, if you will, application layers, will be a critical part of how young people interact with AI, both to build in more content, expertise, more scaffolding, but also the protection from AI perhaps itself.And then finally, the last thing I’ll leave you with was when we asked him what perhaps would be most valued in the years ahead for schools, he said something that is perhaps undervalued today and that is radio risk taking. And that’s something that certainly landed for me. So I hope you enjoyed this conversation with Neerav Kingsland, and we’ll talk to you soon on Class Disrupted.AI’s Role in Education TrendsDiane TavennerHey, Michael.Michael HornHey, Diane. It is good to see you and excited to get into this conversation that we’ve been teasing our audience with in the opening episode around AI. And then we had a few weeks to get our guests lined up. And I think, as today’s conversation will show, it has been well worth the wait, I suspect. But there are a lot of developments, obviously, AI to large companies, constantly making some exciting updates, rolling out new applications and features and the like. And so you and I have been constantly updating our own thinking, emailing back and forth a lot, and I think today is going to be really exciting to continue to update our thinking.Diane TavennerYeah, I agree. I have conversations regularly with people who listen, who say, you know, this is the dialogue we want to have about AI and education. And honestly, I can’t think of a better person I’d like to be talking about this topic with. Our guest today is Neerav Kingsland. And Neerav is someone Michael and I have both known for many, many years. And the reason why is he’s worked in New Orleans in post Katrina days helping to build the nation’s first public school system there, where over 80%, 90% of the students attend charter schools. He served as the CEO of New Schools for New Orleans and then in a variety of philanthropic roles with the Arnold foundation and Reed Hastings and a managing partner at the City Fund. And then Neerav made this big jump a few years ago and joined Anthropic, which is of course one of the handful of leading foundational AI companies known for its large language model Claude, and he leads strategy there. So with education and AI sort of covered, Neerav, it was hard for us to imagine someone better positioned to come and open this season and talk to us about the big picture of AI and education. And so welcome. We’re really happy to have you here.Neerav KingslandSo thrilled to be here. Thanks, Diane.Michael HornNo, well, so, Neerav, I want to start with this because I’d love to just understand your pathway from education to Anthropic. And I’ll say up front, Diane may already know some of this, but I don’t. On your LinkedIn, it looks like you effectively left education and moved hook, line and sinker, if you will, into one of the leaders in AI. So I would love to just understand what is, you know, what led to the move. What does your day job look like these days? Is education still present in it?Just help us understand the pathway.Neerav KingslandYeah, totally. So I had been following and reading about AI since my time in New Orleans. The book that really hooked me was The Singularity is Near, the Ray Kurzweil book, which is 25 years old now, but pretty prescient. I think he predicted AGI in like 2033 or something. And here we are. And so I think that opened my eyes to the possibility I wasn’t technical enough to know how right he might be, but kind of big if true. After you, you know, you read a book like that and then, you know, as a layperson, just kept on reading, listening to podcasts, blogs and so forth. And then it was really when GPT2 came out, so kind of, you know, maybe 15.Michael HornYou were earlier than us.Neerav KingslandYeah, only because I was like, trying to write poetry with it and I was like, oh, my gosh, like, this is pretty good. Like, we might be knocking on the door. And so, you know, I just started thinking like this, you know, these ideas and this technology could be the biggest thing to ever happen to humanity. And we might be getting pretty close. And so I started thinking very seriously about a career change there, and the transition was a little more gradual. I reached out to Open Philanthropies. I knew the leader, a guy named Holden there who ran that foundation, that’s Dustin Moskovitz foundation, and just asked if there was anything I can do. I knew they did a lot of AI safety work, and in a cool way, they had a lot of young founders, and I, at that point, was a little older, so it scaled nonprofit and philanthropic work.So I became an executive coach, just kind of an advisor to some AI safety founders, and did that on the side for about a year and a half. So I got to know the field, got to know a lot of amazing people, and eventually paths crossed with the Anthropic folks. And, I was wowed by their mission and the team, and so joined about three years ago now. It was before ChatGPT, so it was really a small research org when I joined. And then, you know, the rest is history.Michael HornIt’s such an interesting trajectory. It’s such a cool example, frankly, of putting yourself in the middle of something. Right. To make that sort of a switch. How does it connect? Like, does it feel like you’re leaving education in some ways, or does this feel like some other way of framing it in terms of, you know, your own purpose, life, work, the arc of the things that you’ve done in terms of impact on humanity? I just love to get that insight.Neerav KingslandYeah, I’m still very involved in education. I’m on the board at City Fund. There’s a new leader there, Marlon Marshall, who’s absolutely fantastic, but so stay connected through that. And then my first couple years at Anthropic, we were mostly just trying to stay alive. And I didn’t have much to contribute on research, so I was doing business, sales, BD fundraising, and did that for about two and a half years. So I went from an education nonprofit to, like, SaaS salesperson for two or three years, which is great. I learned a lot, and, you know, very important, obviously, for a company to succeed. And then about a year ago, our CEO, Dario, wrote this piece called Machines of Loving Grace, which I’d highly recommend, and set forth kind of a positive vision for AI and society.And at that point, we were a little more stable on revenue, and so I and a couple others kind of raised our hands to go create an org within Anthropic our unit called Mission Labs. And so that’s actually where I sit now, where we incubate projects that can help AI do good in the world. And so I’ve done some education work, helped get our life sciences kind of drug discovery work going. I’m working on cyber defense now. I can go into more details on many of that. But through that I just feel insanely fortunate to sit in both at Anthropic and then a part of the org that’s mission is to incubate projects to do good with AI.Michael HornThat’s fascinating. That’s really neat and great of Anthropic to create a division that’s focused on all those questions as it emerges. And we’ll make sure to link also to that letter in the show notes because I think that’s an important one for the audience to have the context. Just one more question before Diane, you can jump in there. But I like, I’m curious. We’re getting all these hot takes right now that AI is going to radically transform education. AI is going to be the worst thing to ever hit education or maybe incremental at best to, you know, it actually obliterates the purpose of education itself in some pretty significant ways.Give us sort of your headline of where you sit on that continuum and you can provide the nuance I just gave you the headlines to navigate.The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Neerav KingslandYeah, maybe fortunately, unfortunately, any of those headlines could end up being true. And you know, we can see what we can do to get to the good outcomes. I think maybe let me start more at the micro of education as it exists today, then we can zoom out a bit. In most ways this is the most optimistic I’ve been about education, in the 15 to 20 years I’ve been working in the field. The two things that I am really, really thrilled about are AI tutors.I have a four year old and a six year old. I experiment on them all the time and I’ve just been wowed. My time in New Orleans was early days in the edtech space and the products were pretty nascent. It wasn’t a huge part of our strategy. But now I couldn’t imagine running a school where that wasn’t a pretty key part of what you were thinking about. And the AI tutors, specifically teaching kids to read programs like Amira and Ello I think are very strong for elementary math. I have my daughter in a program called Super Teacher, which I think is wonderful. And then as you get up, I think there’s just more and more in the high school college, there’s a group called Study Fetch that builds on top of us that we’re thrilled by.AI Tutors and Teacher SupportNeerav KingslandSo it just feels like the AI tutors are going to happen. They’ll likely be very impactful and we’ll get fairly close to the dream of scaling a high quality, one on one instruction for at least an hour or two a day for every kid. The other thing I’m super excited about is AI teacher support, both in the efficiency sense of lesson planning, but more in classroom facilitation. So you guys might have seen Course Mojo, which Eric and Dacia founded, where you basically combine AI giving live feedback in a classroom, that information going back to the teacher, the teacher then being able to modify their instruction and how they’re facilitating the class. And that all just seems pretty magical to me. And so very excited about that as well. The things I’m worried about are: you can cheat with AI. Obviously we’ve seen that happen.So it can make you dumber. You know, Anthropic intentionally doesn’t. I think it’s actually against our terms of policy to be a child and use our product. And so we really want there to be an app layer on top of us that is shaping the experience for a kid so we can push it in the right direction. And then zooming out, like, where is this all heading? You know, I think the greatest opportunity is that we have a chance to flourish. We can choose the jobs we want, the education paths we want, and you can imagine a much better world than the grind a lot of the world has to be in today. I do think there’s a real threat. There’s a phrase like intellectual pieces coming out on gradual disempowerment, which I’d encourage your readers to get familiar with. It’s basically the idea of the more you hand off to the AI, the more you might hand off of your intellectual and emotional maturity and humans could get disempowered.And so I think staying on the good side of that is obviously very, very important. So all that’s to say, I agree with all the headlines and the future is, you know, up to us in some way.Diane TavennerThat was awesome. Super helpful and I’m. There’s like 10 different directions we could go with that right now. I think one of the things that Michael and I have noticed is that it feels like that across the board, education gets used as sort of a use case and a case study for how AI will be applied far more than it normally does, you know, in technology and we’re not used to this. We’re not used to sort of being at the center of the conversation and what’s happening. And so that’s been a really interesting idea for us to grapple with. One of the things you said there, Neerav was like, and I think this might be helpful to dig in for people, is that you don’t expect young people kind of under 18, K12 to be engaging directly with Claude. You expect there to be sort of this app layer on top of it and you named a variety of different programs.And so I’d love to unpack that a little bit more because I don’t think most people think about that. I think they think AI is literally this, this dialogue box. And it’s just you go back and forth, back and forth. And we’re really trying to uncover, you know, what does it actually, you know, when you put that app layer on top, how does that, how do people engage with that and what is, what does that do? Especially for young people who don’t have skills yet and don’t have experience and don’t have knowledge. It’s very different when the three of us are using a dialogue box than with someone who hasn’t really built their, you know, whatever they might be, analytical skills, argumentative skills, their, their expertise. And so let’s dig in a little bit. Like, talk to us about like, who builds on top of you and how does that happen and what does that look like?Neerav KingslandYeah, I mean, just to start from a values perspective. We need to be careful with kids. Yeah. As we’ve seen with social media, gaming, whatever, whenever there’s new technology, you don’t know how it’ll affect kids and this technology, particularly when they’re basically talking to a human-like figure that is increasingly more and more intelligent. Yeah. Our brains weren’t hardwired for that and kids need to be supported in how they use AI. So I think that’s just like our starting point. It’s early days.Let’s not make dumb mistakes that we’ll look back on and regret. At the same time, let’s figure out ways to give kids access to this technology so they can benefit from it. So, to start, maybe at the extreme example, if you talk to Claude or you talk to ChatGPT or Gemini and you’re four years old, you’re not going to learn how to read. Like it’s not gonna happen. But if you use Ello or Amira, like, you know, with my daughter, when she was about 6 I started using Ello with her and I was like, pretty convinced that if she just did that for 20 minutes a day, she would learn how to read, which was like, just spectacular that I really didn’t think she needed much human tutoring to learn how to read, given that app. And you can imagine how many grids across the world that would just be game changing for. The only piece that was interesting, I think, gets into the future of schooling is there was no way she was going to do 20 minutes of that app without me sitting beside her. So I think historically, when I think back on my times in New Orleans, very often tech was used as a kind of a babysitter to allow the teacher to do small group instruction. And so a big curiosity for me, and I know, Diane, you’re a pioneer here, is how to get these tools into the school in a way where the teacher feels accountable for what’s happening and that the culture of the school is motivating the kid to get through that.Transforming Education with Tech InnovationNeerav KingslandAnd I know groups like Alpha School are thinking a lot about the cultural piece now, but yeah, just the idea that if school was set up to really maximize the interaction here with the app layer, we could have, you know, amazing gains, I really do think. But yeah, that’s the short of it is I, I don’t think typing into a box for maybe, you know, kids under 18 is just great pedagogy. It’s so much more you can do and we’re thrilled to be doing it. So maybe one last thing on the app layer, when I took over this role in the Mission labs, because I knew education was a place I thought we could start. So I just did a sprint and probably over two months met with 40 or 50 ed tech companies, philanthropists, VCs, to see what was out there. And then kind of informally, we just started working with 10 or 15 of them and giving them the same technical support we’d give to like the Fortune 500, but, you know, more out of a mission perspective. And so through that, we’ve got to start building with a lot of the app layer companies that have just been wild.Diane TavennerThat’s pretty awesome. What does that look like when you build or work with them? I mean, I, again, I think people have no idea what this would even be.Michael HornYou know, well, and just to stand that right, Diana? I think a lot of people say, well, like, why doesn’t Anthropic just do it all? Like, why does, why do we even need the apps that are from third party companies? Right?Neerav KingslandTotally. You know, Michael, to your question. I think most domains right now to really understand like the person on the other end, in this case children and their needs, like you need domain expertise. You know, maybe one day like Claude out of the box will know everything but it doesn’t right now it doesn’t know how to be a great teacher the way you know, educators building apps would. And so we don’t feel it’s ready to do it all, particularly in education and then in what we do it’s kind of like forward deployed engineering. So we take a technical person in our team who’s an expert at building on top of Claude and we just, you know, we’ll do an intake meeting where we try to understand their overall mission of the org we’re working with and then their product roadmap, what they want AI to be able to do and where they’re struggling. Then we just dig in with them very tactically. It might be like a shared Slack channel, a weekly meeting and we try to get whatever they’re building out to launch. We’ll stick with them until that happens.Diane TavennerThat’s awesome. Let’s shift to older young people if you will. I think, you know, I’m now really focused on the successful launch of young people post high school into whatever their post secondary pathway is and into their first foothold job and careers and life. And I think that your CEO has been one of the first and few people to be really honest about maybe the short sort of medium-ish term impacts potentially on careers, especially for young people. And I think we’re seeing some data and statistics that suggest that, you know, recent college graduates are struggling to find first jobs and AI might be an impact there. And clearly there’s complicating factors around the economy and whatnot. But I think if we look back in history it’s logical to assume with such a seismic transformation that we will see, you know, many jobs go away and new jobs will be created. But there might be some, you know, gaps and timeline where that’s, that’s going to be a little bit rough.Like how do you think about that? How do you think we should be thinking about that? How does that influence what you think maybe we should be focused on in high school and post secondary as we, for those of us serving, you know, directly serving kids.Neerav KingslandYeah, you know, I think at Anthropic we just try to be open and honest about what we’re seeing and where the text going and you know, ultimately we’re not policymakers and so we want to inform the people who, both citizens and government who are making this maybe to like zoom out a little bit to your point. And we’ve been through these transitions before. We have. And you know, I think exactly to what you said, they can be painful while they’re happening, even if you end up in a better place on the other side. But the last big one we went through was farming to the Industrial revolution. And then, you know, coinciding with that was basically the falling of the monarchies across Europe. And then we went on 150 year exploration to kind of get to capitalistic welfare, democratic systems at least in Europe and the U.S.and you know, a couple world wars in between. And so it was extremely, you know, a tumultuous time. And you know, whatever happens in this transition, I hope it happens much more peacefully. And I think, you know, we have the lessons of history now and maybe a way we didn’t back then. And so all that’s to say, I think just setting the stage, you’re absolutely right. And big changes are likely afoot. In terms of what that means right now, I find that to be a very confusing question that I personally don’t feel like I have good answers to. And you know, I find that I live kind of in two worlds.One, when I show up at Anthropic every day and then I go home and like teach my kids to read or whatever. And I don’t quite know how to put those two worlds together sometimes. So I think the short answer is I really don’t know. Like if I was a kid in college or you know, what would I do differently? It’s very hard to know. I’ll give like a take because I’m on a podcast, but this is low confidence. I think things that I’ve been thinking about, you know, for my own kids on some level is experimentation and risk taking. I think we’re probably already undervalued in school relative to just like grinding and taking a test and so forth. And so I think that’ll be even more important during a time of transition because the paths will be less structured and we’ll just know less and so trying failing.You know, the more you can do that, the earlier in life probably the better. Then another thing I’ve been curious about is the ability to manage AIs as basically small teams could be a very important thing to, you know, managing teams is a very important skill, obviously as we all grow through. And you know, when you look at business schools now, they’ve really restructured around doing work in teams. And so I have been curious about what does it mean to have a team of AIs working for you and how should that affect, like, high school, college, grad school and early employment?Diane TavennerIt was just so fascinating to me as someone who has been pretty fanatical about leadership development and management development and tried to move, when we’re thinking about humans in that regard, to a much more sort of collaborative approach to leadership and management. Now I think about AIs, I’m like, well, I think we might be going back the other direction. I’m not sure you take that collaborative human approach right?I think you take a more sort of classic management approach. So maybe what’s old will be new again.Neerav KingslandI always say please when I’m asking Claude for things. Err on the side of seeing the good side.Navigating AI in EducationMichael HornBut I appreciate your honesty, Neerav, and like, sort of. There’s a lot we don’t know right now around this. I want to stay on the question of maybe the here and now with the older side of the young people, as Diane phrased it, just because you’re seeing a lot of professors, you mentioned cheating, for example. You’re seeing a lot of professors return to the blue book, oral exams, things of that nature and stuff like that. And I guess on the one hand I get it, and on the other hand it feels to me like maybe we’re not asking people to do the right things. Like we need an update on the purpose of what they’re actually doing in the work so we can see how do they use AI with the knowledge and skills that they’re building to do something more than they could have before. And I’m sort of doing like, I, I just love you to sort of think through that puzzle out loud with us about how you’re framing those sort of two dichotomies of approaches.Neerav KingslandYeah, I mean, I was talking to a couple education philanthropists or was over email, I think. And I said there’s never been a greater time and a more exciting time to be an educational entrepreneur and to go create a school. I think for these reasons, whether that’s a higher ed, high school or whatever, like what an amazing time to go build a school. And so for all your listeners, I hope there’s people out there who are doing some of the best work in the world that you can do. So generally, and this is what kind of the ethos of New Orleans is a lot of trial and error and trying to figure out what works and what doesn’t. Just needs to happen broadly across the country right now. And so I think my short answer to that is I hope a lot of people try things and we learn. That being said, we obviously have existing institutions.I wouldn’t want that to be like all my exams, but I do think having kids writing classes, you know, in this transition is probably a pretty good thing to do. I also think it raises a bunch of questions about, like, how well are we doing on education if all these kids are just cheating?I think I’m pretty sympathetic to the bluebook thing. I think that’s probably what I would do for like a certain type of. I wouldn’t want that to be all my exams, but I do think having kids write in class in this transition is probably a pretty good thing to do. I also think it raises a bunch of questions about how well are we doing on education if all these kids are just cheating?Michael HornDo we have the incentive structure toward encouraging risk taking?Neerav KingslandYeah.Michael HornYeah.Neerav KingslandOr like, I mean, you know, they’re kids and so, you know, 18’s not totally kids. But it worries me that for whatever reason, not necessarily the kid’s fault, they don’t value the learning in of themselves. And that could be because they’re getting taught the wrong thing because it’s hard and we’re all lazy or whatever. But cheating is also a sign of people not valuing the work. And so that does raise larger questions.Diane TavennerYeah. Two things coming up for me in what you’re sharing, Neerav. The first is we’ve both spent a lot of our career in the space of empowering families and parents to have choice and options and opportunities for their children. And you’re, you’re talking about teaching your own children to read and math. And so, I mean, I think it’s, it seems obvious that this is going to give more options, create more opportunity, more autonomy. But, you know, especially intersecting with a lot of the policy changes that are happening. How, how are you thinking about that? What do you think about possible? You just said never been a better time to create a school. But how do you think about from the family perspective, the sort of consumer, if you will, perspective what’s possible?Neerav KingslandYeah. And the thing, one of the things that’s really exciting to me, I a couple months ago had the chance to go to Rwanda and visit schools. There’s a great organization called Rising Academies that we’ve been there. Yeah. Truly spectacular. And hopefully we’ll be doing more in Rwanda and others countries in Africa and then also in India over the coming years. But AI relative to most historical education innovations I think will decrease inequality because it’s basically a cheap way to scale upgrade teaching and you know, if you have to rely on an individual human there’s obviously limits to what you can scale and there’s scarcity in that in a way there isn’t with AI. So I think big picture on the family consumer, you know, people in under-resourced schools.This should be a boon if we can get it right. That just all makes me pretty optimistic. Yeah. And I feel way more empowered as a parent to be able to have these tools to use my kid if they were to falling behind or anything. So I think broadly it should just be if you can again get it right, avoid the cheating, get the app layer right and parents get involved. I think it should be amazing for families.Diane TavennerYeah. It makes me wonder what if people are going to start looking to schools for different things and maybe they’re already looking to schools for different things because they, they do tell us they care about the activities and the sports and the social interaction and the engagement and you know, if you’re learning to read at home and you’re, you know, do it, you have your personalized math tutor and whatnot. You know, it does sort of beg the question of what does school look like. And I think one other place we haven’t touched yet is we, I think people’s minds go to, you know, the AI being really direct to student. How is it teaching them or tutoring them or. But I think sometimes the unsexy stuff might be some of the most powerful stuff like how is it actually helping us to transform the master schedule, literally, you know, I mean which is the, how the, the bus schedule which used to dictate schools. And so do you see anything in that space, sort of the structural aspects of running big schools and systems and, and what might be possible there and how might we see that, feel that you know, in the field?Balanced Learning with AI TutorsNeerav KingslandI definitely remember the pain of bus routes for launching schools in new Orleans post Katrina. That was a gnarly bus route environment. You know, I’ll just riff a little bit, but again, I think great school entrepreneurs will build the future here. But so, you know, my daughter goes, she’s in first grade, she goes to the local public elementary school, which is wonderful, very happy with it. And I don’t begrudge them for not, you know, a year into the AI revolution or whatever, having restructured the school. But I think what I wish my daughter’s school looked like right now would be that she’d go to school. She’s six. And so maybe 60 to 90 minutes a day on screen is probably the max I’d want with AI tutors that were doing reading and math.And like I said, with the teacher highly involved in her progression and human tutoring, augmenting it as the data’s coming out and where she’s struggling or not, and a culture that incentivizes completion, my guess is like she would be moving much faster in obviously a more individualized way, if that was structured. You could get a lot of the core content there. And then I think for the rest of the day it would be supplementing that. And then there’s some things you want whole group discussion around the book or things like that. And so I think there’d still be a lot of room for teachers to guide learning and discussion based formats and then to the experimentation and risk taking, which is the projects, whatever they might be doing things with other kids. So some version of that where core content’s delivered in an hour or two or day, then it’s supplemented with teacher instruction and then you have more time for exploration.Diane TavennerYeah.Michael HornNeerav, I’m struck by, like you’ve said it several times now, the AI tutor, the power of that. Right. And the responsiveness to an individual, particularly if you build it in with the experience and insight. Right. That good educators in learning science bring to the table to create a good scaffolded experience. I’d love to get your take on this because I feel like a lot of the skeptics of like AI tutor seems to be one of the flashpoints where you get a lot of skeptics coming out that’ll say the results aren’t nearly as good as you think. That you talked about engagement, you can solve that with the teacher, but that they sort of feel like it’s very procedural, I think would be the word that they would say, and maybe not getting at the depth of the learning. And so I’d love your take on like, what are they missing that you’re seeing about how these work fundamentally right now and where they can go?Neerav KingslandYeah. Well, to be clear, they might be right. So again, I think we just, I love your humility and all.Michael HornRefreshing, by the way.Neerav KingslandYeah, well, to be clear, they might be right. So again, I think we just.Michael HornI love your humility in all this, it’s so refreshing, by the way.Neerav KingslandYeah. Which more just any vision I’m putting out, I think needs to be subject to reality based experimentation. So a lot to figure out though. I think we’ll head in this direction. Maybe another way to say it, while I think there’s never been a better time to be a school entrepreneur, plausibly my hope would be there’s never been a better time to be a teacher over the coming years. So I don’t want these tools to be dehumanizing school teaching kids. You know, my wife was a high school math teacher in New Orleans and so I’ve been not as front and center as she was, but fairly close to front and center of how hard it is to be a teacher and obviously worked with hundreds of teachers in New Orleans during my time there. And it’s extremely demanding and grueling job.And I think most teachers would tell you they’re not spending their time the way they want to be spending their time. And so Diane’s point, if we can get more efficiency in and then if we can get some of the more routinized part of teaching, offload it to AI, I think the teacher’s job can be a lot more creative and wonderful as well. And maybe that’s where some of the depth that plausibly could be missing right now could come from. So we got a lot of arrows in our quiver. AI is one of them. But the teacher is just going to be absolutely necessary. Obviously I would not want to send my 6 year old to a school where she’s on a screen for 10 hours a day. I’m excited to see the role of the teacher evolve as well.And I imagine a lot of depth will come from that.Future Potential of AI ModelsMichael HornI am struck how you are in this very moderate position though. Right. Because we’re seeing tons of legislation right now starting to move toward getting rid of all digital screen time. And then there’s the flip side of not wanting it to be sort of the zombie apocalypse, if you will. So maybe as we wrap up, let me ask this sort of broader question. Zoom back out away from education and just the larger set of tools. Right. That you’re working on and applications.You’re seeing all sorts of different things that Anthropic, Claude, not just you, all the other LLM foundational models. Right. Are starting to tackle and sort of, I’m curious, like what folks maybe like me and Diane, others in education are sort of discounting or don’t understand that these models are capable of doing today or is right around the corner that we may be discounting and not seeing?Neerav KingslandSeeing. Yeah, it is hard. Like things are moving exponentially and our brains don’t think exponentially. One thing to do is like go play with GPT2. Like I think that was four years ago now, three years ago now. And then like go talk to, you know, GPT5 or Claude or whatever. I think visceral ways to feel how fast things are moving help you understand where we might be five years from now. Because if we make the jump like we did then for another five years.And so I think again, Anthropic’s just trying to be vocal that we as the people who are closest to the technology do think things are happening very, very fast and there’s opportunity there, but there’s also a bunch of risk. In terms of where the models are heading. One way to think about it is an AI safety group called Meter and one of the charts they put out that I think is great is how long can a model do autonomous work, in this case encoding at like 60% accuracy, I think is their bar or something. And you know, a couple years ago it was like 30 seconds or something and I think the latest was like four to eight hours. Yeah. And so I think AI being able to do knowledge work in 24 to 48 to maybe week-long chunks over the coming years might be one way to wrap your head around it. Like I think that’s coming and that’ll be a pretty big job in technology.Reflecting Growth Over TimeDiane TavennerI love this suggestion of going to play with GPT2. I don’t know if you remember, but I had the good luck of, we were in a conversation right before the big models were announced and you showed me, I guess what the early version of.Neerav KingslandI remember that. Yeah, Claude in Slack was, I mean, and.Diane TavennerI was like, I must admit, like I really didn’t get it. I was like, wait, is this like, am I just googling something? Like I don’t really understand exactly what’s happening. You certainly saw much more than I did at that moment. It took me a little bit to wrap my head around it. But I think about that moment which I remember so clearly having with you and totally not getting it and quite frankly not being terribly impressed. And now and what a. I mean it’s just so dramatic, you know, my learning curve and my arc and I’m a novice and a layperson and. And so I love this idea of can we sort of, you know, sort of set markers for ourselves where we kind of document or record what we thought or believed in that moment or how we experienced it, and then look back and reflect on those as kind of this as things progress? Because it is.I mean, I almost feel out of breath some days. Like it goes so fast.Neerav KingslandWell, you shouldn’t feel too bad as somebody who was a part of leading our series C six months later, maybe dozens of investors also were not too impressed with Anthropic at the time, but here we are.Diane TavennerWell, by then I was, so maybe.Neerav KingslandThere you go.Diane TavennerThis has been awesome. Thank you so much for joining us. Before we let you go, Michael and I have a tradition of we just like to share with each other something we’ve been reading, listening to, watching. We really try to keep it outside of our day jobs, but we fail at that quite often. And so we’d love to invite you to join in that tradition. Anything, anything fun to share. Intriguing. Interesting that you.You’ve been consuming.Neerav KingslandYeah. Two things for you. One maybe too like a little window into our world over here. The podcast everyone listens to at all the AI labs is Dwarkesh Patel. And so if you want to go deep, I’d recommend listening to that. A lot of our CEOs have been on that and a lot of the researchers, and I always learn a ton there. And then the book I’ve been reading lately is a really a wild one. It’s called Blitzed, the history of drug use in the Third Reich, which might be the best title for a book ever.And you know, it was kind of. It’s probably fairly obvious what the book is about, but like, there was a lot of speed going on, particularly in the later years of the war. And not that that was monocausal of like the fall of the Third Reich, but it played a role. And so, you know, it’s just like an interesting aha. Of like, why did historians miss that? And like what might be going on in our own time that is non obvious. That is pushing history in one direction or another, whether it be drugs or something else. But that’s a fun read. Yeah.Diane TavennerYeah, that one’s.Michael HornI was gonna say it sounds like you knew that one, Diane.Diane TavennerIt’s on our shelf as well. The title and the cover are very fitting, for sure.Michael HornDan, what about you? What’s been on your, what’s been on your playlist or. Or bedside table recently?Diane TavennerWell, I’ve gotten pretty obsessed with a lot of what Scott Galloway is talking about, and he is on a lot of podcasts, so he talks about it all over the place. I’vw really been listening to the Lost Boys podcast series, which is focused on sort of bringing light to what he would describe as a crisis among our young men in America. And there are a number of stats that suggest that these young folks are in crisis. And for me, I think I went down this path as a mom of two, sort of young, young men. And what I find is when I talk about some of the challenges or worries I have, I. There are lots of moms who come to me sort of quietly, in sort of whispered tones, and they’re feeling the same thing, experiencing the same thing, worried about the same thing. And so I do.I think that it’s interesting and important, and I don’t know exactly what to do about it yet, but I feel compelled. So that’s where I’m spending some time.How about you?Michael HornThat’s good.Yeah. We had Richard Reeves on our Future you podcast last year around this and which was great conversation. And Jeff Salingo is obsessed with Scott Galloway. I think it’s okay that I say that here. So those books both resonate as well. Mine, I. I finished Scott Anthony, who was an early collaborator with Clay Christensen, he wrote a book called Epic Disruptions, which is like disruptive innovation throughout history, some of which. I don’t know if I qualified them all as disruptive innovations myself, but they were all moments that changed things in pretty significant ways and sort of the establishment’s reaction or. Or struggle, if you will, to get their heads around what was coming and what.How that would change things. And so it’s. It’s some pretty interesting flashpoints told in entertaining ways. So that’s been on my list, but we’ll wrap it there. Neerav, just huge thank you. This has been a great conversation and stretched, I think, both of our thinking. And so just thank you and for all of you listening, please, please, please keep writing in with comments, questions, lines of inquiry you want us to follow.It’s been a real inspiration to me and Diane and directing us as we thought about the season. And so we look forward to more and we’ll see you next time on Class Disrupted.The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.

Deborah Gist, a seasoned education leader and superintendent-in-residence, and Victoria Andrews, a partner at Getting Smart focused on professional learning, discuss their groundbreaking Public Microschool Playbook. They dive into the barriers public school districts face, like funding and community engagement, while emphasizing tailored microschool designs for diverse student needs. Their experiences showcase the power of starting small with successful pilot programs and highlight how microschools can elevate student engagement and foster system-wide improvement.

Ethan Pollack from Jobs for the Future and Kevin Mumford, an economics professor at Purdue University, joined me to dive into Purdue’s innovative “Back a Boiler” Income Share Agreement (ISA) program. They defined what ISAs are, talked about how Purdue’s model aimed to make higher education more affordable and accessible, and discussed the findings from new research analyzing the program’s outcomes. Our conversation covered the program’s origins, regulatory challenges, its eventual pause, and what the data reveal about student outcomes, particularly regarding fairness, completion rates, and financial impacts for students from different backgrounds.One of my takeaways? Based on the outcomes, it’s a shame that the initial momentum behind ISAs in the mid-2010s has stalled. But maybe there’s some hope now on the horizon with better guardrails in place for a resurgence behind ISAs.Research Referenced:* Distribution of Returns to a College Income Share Agreement: Evidence from Administrative Data* Promising New Insights from Purdue University’s ISA ProgramMichael HornWelcome to the Future of Education. I’m Michael Horn. And you’re joining the show where we’re dedicated to creating a world in which all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their potential and live lives of purpose. And part of that equation is thinking about how we pay for and afford what’s become a more and more costly higher education over time. So to help us learn about and think through some new research about what was a very interesting program to make higher education not just more affordable and accessible, but also focused on real value, in my view, our two individuals that we get to welcome today. First we have Ethan Pollack. He’s the senior director in the policy and advocacy practice at Jobs for the Future, or JFF as it’s commonly known, where he leads the Financing the Future initiative, which explores these new approaches to financing post secondary education. So, Ethan, great to see you.Ethan PollackGreat to be here.Michael HornYeah, you bet. And Kevin, we have Kevin Mumford, who’s an economics professor at Purdue University, also the director of the Research Center in Economics at Purdue. Kevin, great to see you and thanks for being here.Kevin MumfordYeah, thank you. Happy to be here.Michael HornYeah. So we’re going to get into a bunch of things in a moment, but I wanted to sort of level set us start with the basics because we’re going to talk a lot about income share agreements today, ISAs, as they’re known, and we’re going to talk specifically about a program that was in effect at Purdue, the Back a Boiler ISA program, and a working paper that you published, Kevin, recently. But before we get into all that, I just want to make sure our audience is level set. We’re all on the same page. We know what we’re talking about. I know how I describe an ISA, and I see it as a pretty compelling alternative to a loan, at least on paper for a given individual. But Ethan, you’ve thought about this much more than I have. You probably have a much more concise answer.So in brief, tell us, what is an ISA?The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Income-Based Student Loan AlternativeEthan PollackSure. So an ISA is, I think, best defined in contrast to, to what is more the standard, in particular, the standard in the private loan space, where in that latter space you really have fixed payment loans. Right. You have, you know, much more kind of like a mortgage. You’re paying a fixed dollar amount over a period of time. You have to pay back at the end of the, the, the loan you need to pay back the principal and then the interest. And ISA is different in a number of respects, but the main respect is that it is income based. You are paying on the basis of how much you earn.So students are only making monthly payments if they earn at least a certain income threshold. They’re also making payments that are a percentage of their earnings. So if they earn above that threshold, they may pay a certain percentage. It can be anywhere from a couple percentage points. Some of the short term boot camps were charging pretty high income shares up to 17 percentage points. Purdue’s are much lower. And then the last feature of an income share agreement that’s unique is that it expires after a period of time. So it’s really de emphasizing this idea that you’ve borrowed a certain amount of money and you need to repay it with principal and interest and actually operates almost a little more like an equity investment where you’re paying on the basis of how well you do. And the person that, you know there, the, the entity that gave you that kind of, you know, financing that ISA is going to be, you know, receive a lot more revenue if you do well after graduation, and they’re going to then receive a lot less and they may receive nothing at all if you never earn above that earnings threshold.Michael HornSo a couple key things that stand out about that, right? It changes it from paying based on the cost or the expense to paying on the value, if you will, of it. And then there’s some more risk, obviously on the part of the institution as a part of that, it seems. Kevin, then, you know, ISA programs, they look different in different places. Ethan just alluded to that. They have different incentives and so forth. Tell us a little bit about the origins of Purdue’s spin on this through the backup boiler program and its specific mechanics as well.Purdue’s Income Share Agreement OriginsKevin MumfordSure. It, you know, it came about because of the president we had at Purdue at the time, Mitch Daniels. He had been asked in the spring of 2015 to testify before a House subcommittee. And in that testimony he had kind of a throwaway line about, you know, wouldn’t it be great if the university was doing something with income share agreements? And he got so much sort of press inquiry after that that he started thinking to himself a few weeks later, maybe, maybe we should really do this. There’s so much interest in it. So there was this funny episode where he calls in the head of the foundation and the chief legal officer for the chief lawyer for the university and says, let’s start an income share agreement. And they both were like, yeah, let’s do that. And they left the office, then turned to each other and said, what is an income share agreement? And they Googled it on their phone and the university just kind of, you know, he started the apparatus.Twelve months later they started accepting applications and they launched the thing. You know, the idea was they’re going to allow it to be available to all majors. And in some majors people earn a lot more and in some majors they earn a lot less.So they tried to price it according to what they thought the earnings would be in that major. They put all the majors into seven different bins and said if you’re in this kind of high earning bin, then we’re going to charge a lower income share rate. And if you’re in a lower income bin, we’re going to charge a higher rate. And the idea is to try to make it so that it would compete well with a Parent PLUS loan. They weren’t going to try to compete with the subsidized federal loan or the unsubsidized federal, the direct federal loans, but they were going to try to compete with the Parent PLUS because it has a higher interest rate. And the difference here would be, is that a Parent PLUS loan, the parents are the borrowers. Here it’s the student who is taking on this repayment obligation. And you know, there are some protections, like Ethan said, there’s a lower threshold, there’s an upper bound.Nobody could pay more than originally it was 2.5 times the funding amount. Then it went to 2.3 times the funding amount. So that’s kind of the basic idea though, price it so that people would be paying back about what they would under a Parent PLUS.Michael HornI didn’t realize. I actually did not know that. Yeah, that’s hysterical. I did not know that piece of it even. And then put it in context of like, you know, when this launched. Right. Why was it such a big deal at the time? How did it fit in? Right. With the larger movement? ISAs were gaining a lot of currency as an idea that might be this alternative to loans.Give us a sense of why this was such an important program.Ethan PollackYeah, it was a really interesting time. So I was at the Aspen Institute at the time and I remember hearing about income share agreements and both thinking like, wow, these are like, this could be really exciting. This could totally kind of rewire how we do higher ed finance and workforce as well outside of the Title IV system. And also is like, this could also be kind of dangerous too.Right.We don’t have guardrails that are uniquely designed for income share agreements too. And there’s A lot of uncertainty as to which laws actually applied to ISAs. And so I was kind of in this middle camp of being really excited about the potential but also then having a bit of concern. But there was at this time, you know, when it was launched in 2016, there was this real interest in ISAs, you know, not just in higher education, but in particular, you know, this was also the rise of, kind of the time of the, of coding boot camps. And you know, with coding boot camps there, there, you know, a lot of the tech companies were feeling, look, you don’t need a college degree, we can, we can just teach you to code. And we know that you don’t believe us. So instead we’re going to take on the risk and attend my coding bootcamp. And if you don’t make above a certain, you know, amount, then you just don’t pay anything back.Excitement and BacklashEthan PollackSo I think that there was, that was happening in tandem then with the Purdue program. And but overall there was this really, especially when Purdue launched, there was this kind of real kind of boom lit and media excitement around income share agreements. But then there was also this backlash, right. And the backlash had a couple different facets which happy to get into, but I’ll gloss over it right now is just to say that, you know, there was some concerns around consumer protection and there’s some concerns around that this, you know, like any type of financing product could be used in predatory ways. I think that there, that most of the, you know, the actors in the space at that time like were trying to do the right thing. And I worked with, with many of those and in thinking about kind of where good best practices. But there were some bad actors too, right? I mean, you know, whenever you’re kind of, you know, introducing kind of a new product, there’s going to be either bad actors or people who just like, you know, are not fully understanding how this tool can be used. And so it, you know, I think that there was a real push towards using income condition financing, but it was done very quickly.And, and I think that, and then as you know, what I lament is that the energy was really towards income share agreements for a while and then a few years later kind of was like, oh, I guess that didn’t work. And so it was, it was, it kind of like flamed out very quickly. And you know, this was kind of the origin of, of, you know, my partnership with Kevin was this feeling of like, you know, I don’t think we ever fully like studied this to see whether it actually worked or not. And everyone else just kind of moved on to the next shiny thing. And here we were saying, like, oh, we got a lot of data. We should actually, like, look at whether.Michael HornWell, so I want to get to that in a moment. And you mentioned the controversy. We’ll come back to that in a moment as well, but sort of tangentially related. I think a lot of people think that the program ended because of a lot of the concerns around ISAs and so forth. Kevin and then Ethan, both of you chime in on this one, like, why did Back a Boiler—why did the program pause? What led to that? Kevin, why don’t you jump in first?Kevin MumfordWell, I mean, the most basic reason is that the university set this up very quickly by going with the service provider. So the service provider had been the one originating all the contracts. And in 2022, the service provider shut down and, and sold the existing contracts to another provider, but one that wasn’t, wasn’t able to or, you know, doesn’t have a business of issuing new contracts. So the university was in a situation where they said, well, we’re not sure how to issue new contracts, but we’ll continue to service the contracts we have. And I, I think that happening, like, right at the same time as when the president of the university was stepping down. The new president wasn’t opposed to this, but this was also not a champion of an income share agreement. And so the university would have had to, you know, find some other provider or, or set up the, the ability to do it on their own. And, they just haven’t put in the effort to do that.I mean, I think part of it also was kind of because of the pandemic, and it’s because the university received a large amount of federal funding and to provide directly to students and the students that we’ve been advertising, or I guess you can’t advertise, but been offering this, this income share agreement to. They were the students who had already maxed out their federal borrowing, and that’s exactly who they decided to subsidize with the federal funds from the pandemic relief. And so there wasn’t a lot of demand for it right at that moment as well. And it kind of just contributed to saying, maybe let’s not issue new contracts, although if they were to revisit the decision today, that might be different. I also think a factor is the regulatory environment. There’s still just been an uncertain regulatory environment, which makes entering difficult.Michael HornEthan, what would you add in there? Yeah, I was gonna say, Ethan, what would you add to that last point? Because you’re much, you’re very deep into this regulatory questions around the status and the legality of ISAs and how they’re governed.Ethan PollackYeah. So ironically, the same year that Purdue paused was also the year that CFPB signed a consent order with Better Future Forward, which is a nonprofit ISA provider, mainly works with college access programs. And the consent order is they fined Better Future Forward $0 and thanked them for working with them. It took them BFF and CFPB a full year to figure out what is the disclosure for the Truth In Lending Act. It’s just focused on TILA. And so actually right around the time that Purdue paused was the same time that BFF published this, you know, this, this disclosure template that they said like anyone can use this but, but the, you know, the bureau has actually signed off on this as like a way to, to, to comply with TILA. So there actually that was a moment when there was starting to become more clarity. Since then, also California, Colorado had issued, have done rulemaking for the, on their own state basis to improve the regulatory clarity.And then Illinois, actually just a few weeks ago, Governor Pritzker, signed legislation to kind of improve the regulatory clarity. But the main issue here is that, and what Purdue was really facing was that, you know, the rules governing these credit products were largely designed with fixed payment structures in mind. So you think of something like the Truth In Lending Act, you need to disclose the, you know, the APR, the annual percentage rate, you know, when you are, you know, presenting the loan or the credit product to the student with an income share agreement or even with something like an outcomes based loan. Because these can be structured still within a loan framework. You know, the federal IDR program is a really good example of kind of an outcomes based loan. Right. It’s a loan, but at the same time you’re going to be paying on the basis of your earnings. But if you have a product like that, what is the APR? Well, it depends on how much you earn after graduation.So it’s really hard to know that when you’re first presenting this to a student, to a borrower. So that’s just one of the many ways in which the existing regulatory framework was really kind of poorly suited and created a lot of uncertainty. I think that in this uncertainty there was then also some criticism. So a lot of ISA providers were basically recognizing that it’s like, look, we’re not sure how to like disclose APR. We’re getting no guidance. We also feel like there’s a legal, you know, there’s. There’s some legal basis for us saying that, like, we’re just not subject to the Truth In Lending Act because we’re not credit. We’re more like equity.You know, we don’t have principal, we don’t have interest. We’re just structured in a very different way that I think a lot of the consumer protection advocates got really freaked out by that because they, the precedent that there was a, what they saw as a credit product that was financing education that, you know, somehow you could kind of avoid complying with the, you know, all of the existing kind of consumer protection laws. Not all of them, but many of them specifically designed for, you know, student loans. They thought that as just like I saw that as a real threat, and I understand why they felt that way, but it really was just this regulatory uncertainty that was the underlying problem. They also had some concerns around things like what you might call kind of differential pricing or the underwriting. And so basically, if you are charging lower income shares in the contract to either fields of study, their majors, or graduate programs that have higher earnings, you could create some disparate impact.There was a concern around that too. Again, this was all just theoretical. And, and then, you know, there was also, you know, then once Purdue had started, there were some examples of students that ended up paying more than they otherwise would have under Parent PLUS. Now we can guess why that was the case because they were earning a lot more than the average student. But nonetheless, there was a lot of stories and kind of newspaper and coverage around these specific students who really felt like. I felt like I overpaid. And so I think with that, that was also kind of part of, you know, as.As Purdue was pausing, I think that that was the broader kind of, I would say, media context in which, in which kind of that decision was made. I can’t speak to, you know, exactly to what extent that was taken into account, but it certainly was something that was prevalent and, and certainly didn’t help the case for trying to really kind of continue this program.Michael HornWell, so I want to dig into the research in just a moment, but quickly, Ethan, just on that because. Well, Kevin, essentially what you’re describing again is consistent with what you said up front, which is it’s really a last dollar program, if you will, of financial aid. Right. It’s not the first dollar competing against federal subsidized loans. And so that had something to do with the crowding out, if you will, from the federal funds that came in at the time. The second thing, though, Ethan, you talked about the regulatory uncertainty at the time. You talked about how it’s starting to resolve a little bit. Give us the, to the extent you’re able, give us sort of the quick snapshot of where do these vehicles, if they were to sort of make a comeback in the limelight, where would they live at the moment? Because this sort of lending classification has always felt kind of weird around this.ISAs: Unique Loan ClassificationEthan PollackYeah, yeah. So there’s a movement towards, I, I would say momentum towards resolving the question of are ISAs loans? To resolving it in the direction of they are loans, but they’re a unique type of loan. And so, and that, that kind of like solves everyone’s problem where, you know, there’s no claim that this is, you know, something that’s separate, but at the same time that you. So like the, a good example is the, you know, the Bureau’s consent agreement with Better Future Forward where, or the compliance plan where they said you’re a loan. But also they developed a very unique compliance plan for Better Future Forward, taking into account that it didn’t have any interest. And in fact there are certain boxes in the, in the temp, the TILA template that says the interest can range from,you know, in those two boxes from X to Y. And, and the Bureau ordered BFF to just put in NA into both of those boxes.Michael HornOh, interesting.Ethan PollackWhich, you know, if you’re a normal lender, you can’t do. But they, but it was a recognition that it’s like you’re not a normal lender. This is a unique type of product. California and Colorado when they did their rulemaking also reflected these are loans, but these are unique type of loans that deserve some, a specific type of treatment. And then the Illinois legislation that just very recently passed also treats these as loans, but unique types of loans. So I think that’s kind of the regulatory direction that we’re going on.Michael HornGotcha. Gotcha. Well, I can’t decide if NA is better than zero to zero.Kevin MumfordIt’s using students, right?Michael HornExactly. So, okay, so now you have this research paper, Kevin, that comes out. We’ll link to it in the show notes. The working paper title is “Distribution of Returns to a College Income Share Agreement: Evidence from Administrative Data.” So this is actual evidence of the outcomes. First give us the origin story. How did the paper come about and what’s JFF’s connection to it? Kevin, why don’t you lead us off? And then, Ethan, supplement anything that should be supplemented?Kevin MumfordSure. Well, I was actually away on a sabbatical when this program launched. I was focused on other research. When I’d gotten back, I read about it and thought, this seems interesting. So I contacted the group at the university working on it and just said, who’s doing your internal evaluation? I’m really interested to see. And they said, man, we set this up so quickly, we didn’t even think about that.Nobody’s studying it at all. And so I said, well, could I see the data? And they said, sure. And they just sent it over to me. And so I thought, hey, this is great. And in 2022, I had a paper that was about selection into the program. What kind of a student is selecting in versus not. And it’s, again, it’s aimed at a small number of students.There’s not very many that qualify because very few produce. Students actually hit the federal borrowing limits for those subsidized and unsubsidized direct federal loans. So there’s not very many students who even could consider. But I got data for all the students who were shown the terms that they saw this is what the income share rate would be for me, and then saw which ones decided to take it up on and which ones didn’t, and then looked at why some are doing it and some are not. That paper, I don’t know it, you know, 2022 is right at the time when nobody’s interested in income share agreements anymore. And so it’s. It’s still under review, but it hasn’t been one of these things that everybody seemed super interested in.Renewed Interest in ISA DataKevin MumfordAnd so Ethan contacted me recently and said, I think maybe there’s a moment, you know, maybe. Maybe people are interested in ISAs again. And don’t you still have all that data? And, yeah, I mean, there’s still a lot of data, particularly in that first paper there was nothing on who was paying back, what kinds of payments were we receiving? And he just said, I really think people would be interested to see how did this program do financially? I mean, did the university make a ton of money off of these students, or did they lose a lot of money on these students? And, you know, were there students paying back way more or way less than what you would anticipate from a, you know, private loan or a federal loan? And just. He just thought that people would be interested now. And so I’m always interested in doing research that people are interested in reading.And he kind of convinced me it was worth putting in some effort for a bit on this project as opposed to all the other projects I could have been working on.Michael HornEthan, what would you add? Or, and, and perhaps also with an eye toward why the research is relevant now in your view?Ethan PollackYeah, yeah. Well, I’ll start off with that. That, you know, it’s, I mean there’s so many things happening that I think make this research relevant. Not just this research, but the Purdue ISA program. You know, if we had, if it hadn’t launched 10 years ago, I think people would be thinking now, man, we should, we should try to do something like this. Yeah. So the reason is I think a few fold. So, one, your institutions are facing demographic cliffs, right? So you have the, the number of traditional aid college students can be declining about 10% over the next two decades.They’re going to have a huge drop off in international students too. You know, that can really put institutions in a tough spot. I know you’ve covered a lot of this in your podcast with Jeff, so listeners of both won’t be surprised by any of this. And then of course from the Big Beautiful Bill, a lot of the borrowing limits are going to have really big impact. So I published an analysis last week on GFS website. It found 1 in 10 students are going to be impacted by the caps and they’re going to be forced to either forgo education entirely or go to the private lending market. We know the private lending market has some really, you can get some cheap credit but oftentimes for many students it’s going to be more expensive. More importantly, it’s going to, you know, 95% of private loans require co-signers.They all do credit checks, require certain credit score. And then in addition to that, it doesn’t have any type of the low wage borrower flexibility that, that the federal IDR program has or that ISA programs have, which is that, you know, if you become unemployed or you just, you, you end up having a lot lower income that you thought that you’re going to, you know, that you’ll pay less and you might pay nothing. Right. But with private loans, with some very rare exceptions, nearly all private loans you gotta pay regardless of what’s going on with you. Right. And they may do the per, you know, some, some deferments that you know, on a case by case basis, but that’s not really kind of like baked into the contract. Right. So it’s not a really firm protection.And so, you know, we’re at this moment where it’s like, wow, we’re going to have so many students that are going into the private lending market. What types of products are they going to get? Don’t we want them to have types of products that are like kind of like ISAs that are kind of like actually the federal IDR program that have these types of low wage protections and in particular are also more accessible too because we know there’s going to be a lot of students that may just not qualify for private loans because they don’t have a cosigner, because they have bad credit. And ISAs are in particular forward looking as opposed to backwards looking. Right. They care less about the, you know, where you’ve been and more about where you’re going. What’s the program you’re enrolled in, what are the outcomes? And so the Purdue program, for example, it didn’t require a co-signer that was like really important to the model. Right. So for students that were not, that could not access Parent PLUS, then they could access something like this.Right. So you know, I, I thought like this is such an important moment and like we also, instead of setting up a pilot and then studying it and it taking 10 years, like we just kind of, like we just kind of took a time machine, created the program that’s most relevant to today and then now we’ve got all the data, which is kind of a researcher’s dream. And so, you know, I you know, Kevin and I had talked before, but I kind of was like, we’ve got to get some data out here. Like this is, you know, this. Yeah, I think that people would be really interested in this. And it feels like the Purdue ISA program is now more relevant than ever, you know, both for policymakers, for institutions, for philanthropy, and then for researchers such as myself. And in particular it had gotten, you know, for the criticism. I was really interested to test the criticism because a lot of the criticism and a lot of the claims too, it was all based on speculation, right.We didn’t actually have the research and I don’t like kind of making claims without a lot of your rigorous research. And so now we had enough data and I wanted to see like, was there any disparate impact? Maybe there was, like this would be really good to know, like how affordable was it compared to Parent PLUS? And so these were the types of things that Kevin and I were then able to, you know, figure out. So I think that Kevin was very much, you know, the primary researcher, and I was the one that was kind of enmeshed in the broader discourse, unknowing, kind of like this is what people would be interested in. You know, this is how it could, you know, your research kind of connect back to, kind of like, you know, to. Yeah. To actually be relevant.Michael HornAnd so, Kevin, I want to start to get into what you found. Then in the report itself, it occurs to me it’s like an interesting sample of time because you both have some really hard economic times with a lot of job switching in those sample years. You have some boom times in there. So it’s like, it’s a very interesting set of years that I suspect you’re following these students. But talk a little bit about what you were looking for, the methodology, and then the findings itself.Comparing Student Loan Repayment OptionsKevin MumfordWell, the basic methodology is to look at the stream of payments coming in from those students that are participating in this program to see how much are they paying back. And then you need something to compare it to. So, you know, what I do is I take a traditional student loan and I peg the interest rate to be the same as the Parent PLUS loan. And say, what would a student have paid back had they been paying back a traditional student loan at that interest rate? And just do the comparison to see are they paying back a lot more, a lot less than they would have otherwise? And I think the time period you bring up is relevant because. Because there’s job switching, job loss, there’s uncertainty. The thing about the income share agreement is that when your income goes down, your payments go down, and when your income goes up, your payments go up. I mean, it’s adjusting to the economic conditions automatically and adjusting to your specific characteristics. Because if you lose your job and you’re unemployed for a period of time because of the pandemic or because of any reason, then the payments stop until you start working again.And that’s just sort of built in, already. So some of the results might be colored by that. I mean, if this was sort of the best booming economic times ever, payments probably would have been higher than what we’ve actually observed. But what we observed is what happened. And there is, you know, there’s some movement up and down in people’s careers. The data comes in and, and I, I actually do it two ways because there’s a lot of ways to pause payments in this income share agreement. Again, if you’re unemployed, you’re not making payments. And, there are protections in student loans.They’re maybe not as generous as an income share agreement, but. So one way I do it is I assume on the student loan that you just make every single payment as scheduled all the way through. And the other assumption is that anytime you pause your income share agreement, you would have also paused your student loan. And the truth is probably somewhere in between. And I compare the amount each student is paid and then the amount the university has received. And the amount the university has received is right around that same amount that they would have gotten if it was a Parent PLUS it’s a little bit less than that, which suggests that maybe they’re getting a sort of a less than a 6% internal return. On the other hand, income share agreement payments grow over time because they increase as the student’s income increases, and it naturally goes up over time.So probably the university’s best payment years are still to come, and they’re not these initial beginning years. So it may be that the internal rate of return is a little bit higher by the time it’s all done, but it doesn’t look like the university made a lot of money. If anything, they probably would have done better just investing in the market. On the other hand, for individual students, the average student paid less in the income share agreement than they would have if they had gotten the traditional student loan at the Parent PLUS rate. But there are a handful of students at the top that paid back much more. So some students hit the cap. That’s they, they pay back 2.3 or 2.5 times the bar the amount that was originally funded. So some students are paying back a lot more, and that’s because those students have very good jobs and are earning really high incomes.There’s a lot of students that are paying back a lot less, much, much less than they would have. And that must be because they, you know, decided to stay at home for a while. They’ve decided to do, you know, they’re stopping out of the workforce for whatever reason, and then you just don’t make payments while that’s happening. The average student, you know, is paying a little bit less than they would have under the Parent PLUS they’re doing a little bit better. And that reflects sort of the slightly lower rate of return that the university is getting on a whole.Michael HornSuper interesting. Ethan, before you jump in with some of your takes, one other question that I’m just curious about, Kevin, what was the impact on Black and Hispanic students and underrepresented students, because that was a big question that a lot of the consumer protection advocates were raising. And maybe you pull in some of your 2022 research on this too. Because if, if I’m recalling correctly, one of the speculations also was that some of these students, you know what Ethan just said, that it’s forward looking, not backward looking. True in theory, but maybe you would select out certain students that come from lesser advantage or less academically prepared or whatever it might be. And so perhaps they wouldn’t actually get to benefit from the protections that an ISA brings to the table. What have you found on all that?Kevin MumfordWell, I think we’re right to be concerned because it turns out this program has disproportionate numbers of Black and Hispanic students in it. And that’s, that’s probably because those are the students who are maxing out their federal borrowing. And, and, and so it is serving more minority students than the traditional student loan program is serving at Purdue. That said, in terms of the ISA repayment, those students tend to be getting a better deal, not a worse deal. That is just as we look at the stream of payments coming in, they seem to be paying back even, even more or less. Right? Like even less than they would have under the Parent PLUS program in comparison to the, the white student that is a participant. And so I think that, I think that we should be concerned about it because these programs are serving more minority students, but at the same time it seems to be give, offering them a better option, a better deal on average than, than it is for the, the equivalent white student. And that’s really not because there’s anything special that’s, that’s, you know, race or ethnicity focused about the program.It just has to do with what the earnings look like afterwards. And because the earnings for the black and Hispanic students are a little bit lower than those of the traditional white student in the same program. That’s why they’re, they’re paying back less in this.Michael HornSuper interesting. Okay, Ethan, I’m curious your takes.Disparate Impact in Income AgreementsEthan PollackYeah, yeah, I was just going to add to that. I mean this was always a concern, as Kevin said, I think really well, the concern around disparate impact was very valid. Whether it’s an income share agreement or even if it was just a loan that like any type of financing product, you know, this is why we have the Equal Credit Opportunity act, right. You know, is to make sure we know the history of your redlining and reverse redlining and that, you know, with an income share agreement it creates new potential opportunities to, you know, be violating, you know, fair lending laws and to be exacerbating, you know, you know, racial gaps. It is also the case that income share agreements can do the opposite and can actually, if designed well, can be more affordable. And so it was always this, this thing that, you know, when the Purdue program was being criticized for this, I felt like a lot of the critics had, you were voicing valid concerns, but they were drastically overstating their confidence in it where they were saying that the Purdue program is discriminating or the, the Purdue program or the ISAs.I remember hearing from some consumer advocates that ISAs are inherently discriminatory. And again, it was all theory based. Right. And so, you know, this, you know, I, I kind of responded to that in 2022, published some research that we got the proprietary data from Leaf, which is a no longer, but was a servicer mainly of tech boot camps. And we did a disparate impact analysis that used the same methodology that CFDB uses when they’re figuring out disparate impact. And we found that there’s no evidence that there was any type of disparate impact here on racial or gender lines, but even still, like, it, it’s the, the frustration is kind of like, yeah, you should be concerned, but like, we don’t know until we actually crunch the numbers. And a lot of the critics just weren’t doing, you know, they didn’t.And partly they just didn’t have the internal data right, but it should have been voiced as a concern rather than a conclusion. And so this is why kind of on the one hand, whenever we have concerns, we should voice that we should recognize the information we don’t have. Right. And recognize that, you know, we can have a concern without saying that this is bad. We need to wait for the research to come in, but then also we need to make sure that research is actually funded and, you know, it is prioritized and then do the research and then you kind of update your priors. And so, like, it’s really exciting that now we have enough data to be able to say, at least for now, it doesn’t seem like there was any type of, you know, of disparate impact at all, in fact, certainly for Hispanic students, Hispanic students, you know, we’re far more likely than white students to be in the having paid less than having paid more than Parent.Plus, you know, this comes on the heels also of Kevin’s 2022 research which found that, you know, it looked at the impact of, of the ISA program on completion rates and found that overall completion rates were boosted by about 3 percentage points. But that was. Yeah, it was yeah, 6 percentage points for black students and 17 percentage points for Hispanic students. I think that the black student one may not have been statistically significant. Kevin, you might remember that better, but the Hispanic one was definitely, 17 percentage points is huge. So, you know, like this is a program that also is, you know, clearly benefiting students, you know, in terms of the completion is also more affordable and in particular more affordable for Eurasial minorities and then also is more acceptable accessible too. And we know in particular for black and Hispanic students, they’re going to be less likely to have either a good credit score or have available frontiers either.Kevin MumfordI just want to jump in because when you say that 17 percentage points, it makes it sound like it’s unbelievably large. But you got to remember that these students are the most at risk at dropping out. So these are students who, this isn’t about access to the university. This is, you know, they’re a junior or a senior who has now run out of borrowing ability. They can no longer get federal loans. They’ve come to the financial aid office saying, I’m not sure what to do here. And you think, you know, a student might come in and say, I’m thinking of a Parent PLUS, I’m thinking of this ISA. I’m trying to make the decision.But what about the student that says, I don’t have a parent co-signer, I don’t have a parent that’ll do the Parent PLUS, you know, the private market, the private student lending market, they want parent co-signers as well. I don’t have anyone backing me. So it’s either drop out and go get a job for a semester and then try to come back, or it’s do this ISA. And it turns out the ISA is really, really effective at helping students stay in school. And so even though the university is not making money, I mean, I guess you could say they’re kind of losing money on this program because they’re not making what they would make by just putting the money on your market.Michael HornSure.Kevin MumfordI mean, but they’re getting a huge return in terms of students completing, students graduating. And that’s where the pressure is. I think if this is as a really cheap way to help marginal students complete, you know, universities should be thinking of this not as an innovative finance thing or getting or we’re going to make a lot of money off this. The Purdue experience suggests universities are not going to make a lot of money off ISAs. But if the university gets into it, the advantage is you’re helping a marginal student stay in school as opposed to dropping out to try to get some funding to pay their tuition.Ethan PollackAnd even with the federal loans, you know with this kind of these new borrowing caps that are now in place, that’s going to be even a bigger problem for institutions.Michael HornWell, I was going to say it probably becomes more important, right. To have these alternative vehicles out there in certain cases. Otherwise completion rates could plummet at the sort of the last mile, if you will, as you’re rounding the corner. As we start to wrap up here, I want to think about or hear your big lessons and takeaways and sort of where we go from here with this research out there. One of them that occurs to me is the importance of the design of these programs and maybe even, like, who is backing the finance. Right. Like the fact, Kevin, that you kept saying these are Purdue’s dollars, it seems like that are part of the program as opposed to an investor perhaps could be an important component as well. But I’d love your, like, wave the magic wand. What would you see done based on this research? What are the big highlights, takeaways, lessons that we should be thinking about?University Funding via Philanthropic InvestorsKevin MumfordI just want to say something. I’ll let Ethan take the big picture, but one thing is the university dispersed $20.8 million to these undergraduate ISA participants. And some of that money did come from some investors, but the investors tend to be sort of philanthropically motivated. These were foundations that were trying to see this thing started. They were also not expecting a big return on their money. That, you know, in terms of investors getting involved, I have a hard time seeing that there’s a huge play for this Purdue type of program because the return on investment at this price point was just not very large. What I see is universities putting their own resources into it seems to make a ton of sense because they could be putting it into sort of, you know, scholarship programs or expensive programs to try to keep kids in school. And instead you could, you could just provide this type of funding and they’re going to get their money back.That’s the idea. I mean, I would love to see more universities try this.Michael HornWell, it seems like a great way to, like an evergreen, if you will, fund that replenishes, even if it isn’t, to your point, as much as you could be earning, if you at least, you know, make back inflation or something like that, that might be worth it. Right. At the end of the day,Kevin Mumfordyeah, that’s exactly right but, you know, in terms of big vision, maybe Ethan’s got more of a big vision.Michael HornWell, so Ethan, what last word as we wrap up here? Big lessons, takeaways, magic wand you would like to wave and see done with this. Other questions we should be asking.Impact Investment in Education ProgramsEthan PollackYeah, so, I mean, first, to add to what Kevin said, I do think that, you know, not only institutions, you know, could put their own money behind it, but I do think that this can be a real good philanthropic play as well. So for, you know, for philanthropies in particular, impact investors who may be able to take less than market rate returns, I think the ROI , if you’re talking about a, you know, kind of a social impact ROI, which they’re going to be much more attenuated to, like, that can be really huge because, you know, this is something that can be an evergreen fund. And so they’re able to kind of get their money back, but at the same time they’re able to drive real impacts for students. And that’s something that I think that, you know, in particular, impact investors are always looking for those types of opportunities. And this seems like this is a perfect one for that. You know, more broadly, I think, you know, one of my lessons is that, and, and I don’t mean this as a criticism of, of Purdue at all, but I really love Kevin’s, you know, you know, Kevin talking about how he started getting involved in this is that the, you know, the, the research wasn’t baked in from the beginning. And I think that that’s something that’s not super, super unique. I think that I’ve seen so many either ISA or outcomes based loan programs that are all trying to do this type of kind of pay it forward model.Oftentimes the research is not at the forefront, or maybe they start the program and then they’re like, okay, maybe now we’ll find a researcher. And I know as Kevin has talked about, if he had been tapped in from day one, he could have designed some more natural experiments to really get some really cool quasi experimental design. And he does do some quasi experimental design, but it was a little more happenstance. And to be able to kind of bake that into the beginning and do some randomization can lead to some really interesting results. And you know, if, if, you know, I think that oftentimes there’s a lot of people have really cool ideas that are really trying to, to build something new and they get really excited about starting to build. But I think what they forget is that if they’re really trying to drive impact, they need to recognize that the way you drive impact is by doing the thing and then having some really rigorous research that shows that it worked or that shows the ways in which it didn’t work so that the next person who wants to build something is able to learn from what you did. And otherwise, what we have is all of these, you know, people that are inspired doing kind of cool stuff, but it all kind of just like dissipates because they do it and then they know that they did it, but it wasn’t able to really scale up. And so it.It’s really just like a plea for more research from, you know, on the front end. And then for us, you know, Kevin and I would also like to do more research on the Purdue program. There’s so many more research questions that we want to get into too, as well. So, you know, also there’s any philanthropic funders who are out there that want the third piece of artwork. We are available and happy to talk about all of the additional questions. We have this huge data set, you know, we already, they already did the work, and all we need to do is you just. We just want, you know, you know, we can spend some more time to really answer some really interesting questions there.Michael HornTerrific. I love that you guys have invested in that side. It feels like it’s a lesson, and I’m going to call it a lesson in evergreen iteration, because sometimes out of research, we want the headline, did it work or did it not work? As opposed to, okay, what are the lessons learned? How do we keep improving right from there so that the impact over time is actually there? It’s not always convenient, I suppose, for the headlines, but it’s perhaps better for students. So, Kevin, Ethan, huge thanks for coming on here, talking about it. Huge thanks for doing the research, writing it up. You can also check out, Ethan, you had a blog, I believe, on the topic, headlined “Promising New Insights from Purdue University’s ISA Program.” So check that out as well. We’ll also link to it and for all you tuning in, we’ll be back next time on the Future of Education.The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Thank you for subscribing. 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In this episode, Danny Curtis interviewed Jonah Schenker, superintendent of Ulster BOCES in New York, to explore the launch of a groundbreaking new center for career and technical education at iPark87. The conversation dove into the innovative programming and community partnerships at the new center, the challenges of moving beyond traditional, industrial models of schooling, and the vital role of collaboration between educators, industry, and local organizations. Schenker also shed light on broader statewide reforms in New York around redefining student competencies, the importance of starting transformation with empathy and stakeholder input, and how these changes create new opportunities to equip students as designers of a better future.Danny CurtisWelcome to the Future of Education. I’m Danny Curtis and you’re joining the show where we are dedicated to creating a world in which all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their potential and live lives of purpose. And today to help us think through that, we welcome Dr. Jonah Schenker, superintendent of Ulster BOCES, which is a regional education services district in New York. And I’m really excited to have Jonah on today because he’s going to tell us about the innovative work that he is doing with his partner districts in New York, including the opening of a very new and very big center for career and technical education that’s playing an important role in a larger shift happening in New York towards rethinking student competencies. And so Jonah, thank you so much for joining us today.Dr. Jonah SchenkerAwesome. I’m super glad to be here and actually recording from the new site as we were just chatting about. So I’m happy to be in space with you.Danny CurtisSo cool. And we especially appreciate you carving out the time right now at time of recording. We are just leading into a new school year. So I’m sure this is a busy time for you.Dr. Jonah SchenkerIt’s always a busy time for schools as we think about opening but, but especially busy when you know, a new 140,000 square foot facility is, you know, just on, on the agenda as something to get opened as well.Danny CurtisSo yeah, the big agenda item right there. Yeah, absolutely. Awesome. Well, I want to dig into that center in a second, but just to start, I’d love to hear about your journey to this work. What brought you to Ulster BOCES?Dr. Jonah SchenkerYeah, so you know, kind of the one minute overview, you know, I started my journey in school and I describe it as I was good at school, I knew how to do school. I don’t really recall, you know, what I was really getting at or, or absorbing. I recognize amazing teachers throughout that, but the learning style, the approach that that was always didn’t, didn’t feel right. And so I found myself gravitating towards shop class. I found myself gravitating towards clubs and extracurricular. But again I knew how to play the game. And so I got good grades, went off to college and did about two years and, and then left and spent my second two years of undergrad traveling around the world in an independent study.Finished my undergrad that way and that was really where kind of the aperture opened up that there are more than, there’s more than one way to kind of get at this thing we call learning in school. Fast forwarding. Started my career at a new school startup in Brooklyn. Spent about five years there teaching. Taught for another three or four years after I left the city in Dutchess County, New York and then began my journey at Ulster BOCES 16 years ago as an administrator, assistant principal, teacher, coach and have worked through the progression of leadership all here at Ulster BOCES. So building principal and director and interim directors of portions of our entity that handle tech and professional learning. Had the opportunity to become the deputy superintendent here and then our superintendent at the time retired and that was the moment at which I had the opportunity to become the district superintendent.And the district superintendent is an interesting role in a BOCES. One portion of the role is the CEO of the BOCES. So really handling like all the programming that we’re doing and then the other portion is a direct report for the commissioner through the New York State Education Department. And that’s the kind of two way conduit that offers or where we support districts in initiative that is coming out of the state education department and equally as important bringing up voice from the ground floor to help inform the Education department around decision making, policy and things like that. So it’s a different role. I’m very, very fortunate, wonderful board who supports innovation and about 10 years ago in one of my principalships I got the opportunity to start a school, a P Tech school, Pathways and Technology Early College High School. It’s a six-year program and, and that was really where I really began to become passionate around economic and workforce development, around the interconnectedness or the lack of interconnectedness of the entities that need to pull in the same direction on behalf of students if we’re going to really do this work. And that was done in kind of this micro school where we built out that model.But tremendous amount of gains and I’m sitting here today in a center that represents the scalability of that same vision. And so I know we’re going to get to talk a little bit more about that, but I’ll pause there for you.Danny CurtisYeah, yeah. That connects a lot of dots in the lead up to the present day. That day being just less than a week out from the opening of the new career and technical patterns at iPark87 as it’s called. Could you tell me more about the center and its services and give us a view into the story behind its development?Dr. Jonah SchenkerSure. So we run a ton of different types of programming that are student facing. We have a whole other, many other divisions that are non-student facing, workbook but focusing on the student facing career and technical education. So for the most part, students come to us in their junior and senior year as part of their journey through nine through 12 in our district, so in our county, our BOCES works with eight component districts. Those are the districts in our BOCES region. And so many of those students are progressing through the 22 credits and five Regents exams as part of the graduation requirements, which I know we’re going to get to later because that’s shifting as well. And they come up to us for either AM or PM and they’re engaged in career and technical education, automotive, culinary.Revamping Vocational-Technical EducationDr. Jonah SchenkerYou know, we have, you know, all of the health occupations, a technology class, electrical, HVAC and go down the list, welding and, and they’re getting the technical skills. But also students are progressing through integrated academics as well. So they may be getting some math credits and science credits and English credits, et cetera and career in tech or as some, you’ll hear some people talk about VoTech or vocational tech is in the same kind of dilemma as our traditional education system where we are still very much for the most part operating in this kind of industrial model of schooling. And so we’ve been pushing on that for a decade across all of our programs. What should schools really be? What can schools be? And how do we move out of this industrial model of teaching and learning into something that’s more relevant for the students in order to prepare them for whatever next is. And so kind of going to the site here. The iPARK site is the former IBM site in Kingston, New York. So the story of that IBM, you know, headquarters, last I heard in, in this area of the facility, 6700 employees like you don’t go anywhere in Ulster county and have a conversation with somebody who didn’t move here, have an uncle or a cousin who were like worked here at the facility.Revitalizing New York’s Industrial CommunitiesDr. Jonah SchenkerAnd again my, you know, like many communities in New York, especially those with those kind of single massive industries that out-migrated, they left and it bottoms out a community, an economy, hope and really has been this for decades this legacy of failure where there had been several attempts to kind of think about how to revitalize this campus. The campus was turned over and purchased to National Resources who really did an amazing job at the cleanup from an ecological standpoint and making the site safe and working through that in partnership with many entities, county government and Environmental Protection Agency, etc and about eight years ago some conversations about like let’s take a look at this and, and some early conversations and some dialogues and again the ground is not always ripe for things to grow. And so that kind of fell short and then we took a break through that little period of time known as Covid and and I had the opportunity to step into this position and rekindle those conversations and kind of went at it with a little bit of a different strategy than prior and began to get steam on this concept. Right. And a lot of that I think is about preparation, meeting, opportunity, but also really the amount of groundwork to engage with our eight districts to see the why and the what and the how through transparent conversations rooted in what’s right for students, what’s right for kids. And so you know that, that took hold and we have become what will be the anchor, you know, for this campus.The career and technical school that will be here is amazing. I was saying for a while like it’s going to be amazing but I keep reminding myself actually that today about an hour before this conversation our, we had gotten our co from the town some time back but, but our sign off from the New York Education Department and the commissioner came through so, so it’s no longer like when it happens, it’s here and happening and the school is amazing. But, the campus represents so much, is so much larger. Right. It is an ecosystem that brings together county government, industry, two-year and four-year colleges. And really this messaging that I’ve been talking about has been a metaphor. Now we have a physical representation of the commitment of what it takes to really do economic and workforce development which is in turn, that is, skills and workforce gap work.It is community revitalization work, it’s economic mobility work. So plans here for millions of square feet for other industries to be site-based housing. We know housing and employer and, and future employees are two critical pieces. So let’s not talk about how to solve them, let’s build that. And so this is the beginning, too, a multi-phase project to again do that work. Really, really exciting. And I could talk a little bit about when you feel it’s right about again what’s the next phase in terms of that larger conversation or larger impact because the school is going to be magnificent and it’s going to do wonderful things. But I’m really thinking about how this becomes a model to replicate out because we are not the only community and geography that is facing economic and workforce development conversations as well as this type of revitalization from out migrationDanny CurtisYeah, yeah. I’m excited to get there. Before we do, I want to stay with one point you brought up around the opportunities that being in this space, this larger campus with all of these different organizations around, opens up for partnerships. Because obviously with blended career technical education initiatives, partnership is such a critical component, but also a huge sticking point for lots of places, districts that are trying to start these initiatives. Yeah. So I’d be curious to hear, how are you, first of all, what are you leveraging, what types of programming are you leveraging these partnerships to create? And how are you navigating some of those challenges, different schedules, norms, policies between these types of organizations to create productive collaboration?Dr. Jonah SchenkerYeah. And, and I’m, I’m really excited that you kind of asking that question because that is at the heart of either the solution or the dilemma that has been workforce and economic development because it requires efficiency and collaboration. Right. And I always make it a point to kind of do the disclaimer that the problem doesn’t lie with that. We don’t have really amazing people in all of these entities working really hard. The problem is in the coordinated efforts to actually get the work done. So that’s one piece. The other piece is how we define where this work and at what age this work needs to happen.Before I go into that, because I think that’s really the segue into the model for that is kind of this site and what, what you were talking about, rather like the design principles of this site are based on, you know, height and space and light and inter and intraoperability. So, when industry partners come in here, they’re going to see their hopes and their feedback, their expertise in what the future of work needs to look like. Right. Like, we can’t. I think so often educators are charged with the job of producing students who are equipped to do whatever next is. But we don’t ask those people who are in the realm of next, what do you really need to see? Like, what do you really need to see when this student crosses the threshold to interview with you into a workforce, into a college classroom, into a military experience, into an internship or whatever the list is. We prepare them with a body of school things. And there’s not always an alignment between like what we teach and what is needed.Which is why we hear we’re not getting employees or students coming to us that are prepared to do X. And it’s very simple. We just got to ask them the question. The piece that you surfaced, which is the private sector, community based sector, isn’t staffed or equipped to navigate the complex system of K12. And the schools aren’t equipped to navigate the outside world. And so all of this work historically is relational. I’m Jonah, I’m the guidance counselor. I have a great relationship with these two businesses.Building Systematic School-Industry PartnershipsDr. Jonah SchenkerIt’s thriving. I’m getting some students experience, I get another job, I leave, it’s gone. And so our work and our model is about systems and structures, cadence and rituals and routines that are systematic, that move from the relational level down to the way a community acts and performs and behaves as part of their DNA, not in a one off meeting for a task, but how they consistently come together, bringing these entities who have historically had difficulty working together and making it really easy. Right? Like schools need to make it really easy for industries to participate and industries don’t want to do school things because that’s not what they do and schools don’t want to do that. So what’s the complementary relationship that needs to happen? And you know, I would suggest that, you know, as part of that and inherent in who we are is the single point entry for all of this work to happen. Right.So we are suggesting, and every community and state has entities that they may not be titled the same but, but act as these intermediaries. So BOCES Board of Cooperative Educational Services is designed to get multiple entities to cooperate on behalf of whatever that service is. And so what we’re positioning again is that single point entry. Any child in Ulster county, regardless of whether they’re in our program or not, who needs an internship or a work experience. The industry and community field knows all I have to say is I’m looking for X. We are the conduit to K12 in the schools, the schools don’t have to worry about that. They just say, hey, we have 15 kids who need and we do the facilitation so that entities don’t have to be talking to.Because an industry that wants to tap into schools here has to navigate eight superintendents, eight school districts, eight boards of education, each with their local context rather than the knowing just being like, hey, we need that partnership is the clearinghouse for all that to happen. And, I would suggest that the same model is true for mental health and the disconnect and access of services. It’s coordination, all right? It’s not, it’s not quality of service. So here we’ll begin to do that work. We’re also thinking about the model. Right there is this age-old stigma of career and technical education. We have those who can do school and are college bound and for those who can’t, we’ve got these other things.Right. And I would argue that what we need to be moving towards is one skill set and many different opportunities to be able to engage in pathways to get there. Right. And the reason why we define that is because our school system, the industrial model, is built on a single academic pathway. Right. Like that’s the valued pathway. And then if you can’t do that, like we have all of these other options rather than saying all kids can. And here’s 15 different ways to, to connect a passion with a ken, with a pathway that are all going to be yielding a common skill set that we know is going to be critical whether you’re going to college, two year, four year, certification, into the workforce, that same list that we begin to surface.Integration and Equity in EducationDr. Jonah SchenkerSo that’s exciting work on the ground floor. And you’ll see that we’re no longer going to have the students who are just in the H Vac bubble. We had an industry partner here yesterday and we got a little snippet video from him and he said, yeah, we don’t need just students who, you know, students in H Vac need to know welding and electric. And so you’ll see the proximity of classrooms that used to be siloed, opened up and, and it’s that again, that ability to work cross lines that isn’t, we’re not just saying that it’s present in schedules, it’s valued in space usage and it will be driven by kind of this next iteration and instructional model in this venue, career and technical education. And not that we’re, but it’s no different in our programs that are special education. The model of teaching and learning is different there. The canvas and the experience is just different than career and technical education. But, all of my programs are based on a very explicit driver of how we think about relationships, how we think about teaching and learning and all of that resting on access and belonging and equity and diversity.Danny CurtisA lot of really great stuff to unpack there. But especially appreciate this overarching point that these new resources are going to be accompanied by an innovation on the model. Because I think so often schools acquire new resources, bring in new innovations, but, but try to work it into the existing industrial model, as you said, and are disappointed when they aren’t able to produce the results that they’re looking for with these new resources in the old model. And so excited to hear that it’s accompanying a larger rethink. And I know that the center fits into a larger shift happening in New York where the state is rethinking the competencies that they want their students to develop. And I’m wondering if you could tell us about the role that Ulster Boces is playing in supporting his district and working towards that, that rethink of competencies and the timeline of that over the next few years.Dr. Jonah SchenkerYeah, so you are absolutely right. You know, New York. Let me kind of go, go back to a little bit of the timeline. We’ve been at this conversation and work and other systems in New York and beyond as well. But, we’ve been at this for about a decade. And again, in 2019, the Board of Regents, you know, put together what they call the Blue Ribbon Commission, a diverse group of stakeholders to rethink what it means to be a graduate here in New York. And in that, 12 recommendations surfaced, the board of Regents looked at those recommendations and charged the New York State Education Department with thinking about what this means. And in between, a little bit of a setback with again, that same Covid period and, and, and they refueled and regained.But it’s a beautiful document, the process and the product. And so the New York State Education Department took those recommendations and, and and developed what they call New York Inspires, which is a framework that we are currently in that has kind of a planning phase and then three phases after that are based around how those 12 recommendations were distilled down to kind of these four transformations. One of those transformations is the adoption of the portrait of a grad. The portrait of a grad, those competencies you talked about students being academically prepared, creative innovators, critical thinkers, effective communicators, global citizens and reflective and future focus with, with adopted definitions. And that portrait was adopted just, just recently by the Board of Regents. Secondly, redefining learning and credits, learning experiences and credits.Thirdly, moving to the decoupling of Regents assessments from graduation requirements and moving to a single transcript. So that’s kind of the body of work. And you know, just to, just to take a step back to where you started because it resonates really deeply with me and, and often, always where I start when I, whenever I have the chance to talk with school leaders or school people, which is, I don’t believe that we have an educator or teacher problem in this country. We have fine educators and teachers. We have a container issue that is the container in which we ask them to do their job is tragically outdated and flawed. And I would go as far as to say actually designed to not promote access and equity. Right. And so when you talk about those initiatives, any initiative or ideas or innovation, they are a veneer laid on top of our current foundation which is flawed.And so none of, none of those initiatives or change work is going to take place when the foundation of school is based on numerical grading, which is designed to rank and sort students, which is an academic school year between September and June, depending on where you are in the country, that’s where it is here. Some start in August where 9, 10, 11, 12 grades stack on that, with requirements at the end of the year. So we’ve defined learning, success, passing and failure between September and June. And if you don’t do it, then you fail. Right? Like, and we can go down through all of these like systems that like school did to us that if we were able to navigate, we did okay. And if not and, and, and you can identify, I can walk into any third grade classroom in the country and identify a child within an hour that’s probably going to be able to navigate the system or not. Right? Because sitting still compliance, is, I mean you look down the drop down menus at that teachers have to give to students on report cards, right? Like you has difficulty paying attention in class, you know, can’t sit still. No, no.Like the student who has difficulty paying attention in class just needs to move. Like when did we decide that movement was bad? Like so, I mean all of those, all of those things. So the New York Inspire is a game changer for changing that foundation. I believe I love all of the components of it. To me, out of all of the transformations, if we don’t get in transformation to Redefining Learning Experiences, right then we’re going to be looking at the application of all the stuff on how we’ve defined what a learning experience should be based on the model. So we’ve really done our work around thinking about those shifts that need to happen in classes where students are moving from just compliance to working on really meaningful project work to be of service to the community world, changing the audience. And I’m not discounting that content knowledge or literacy or math isn’t important. I’m just saying we need to value how we think about learning experiences as a mechanism to get there.Empathy-Driven Educational Transformation PlanDr. Jonah SchenkerSo in this rollout kind of getting around to kind of your final question as a BOCES, we’re charged with supporting districts in thinking about how do you do this work, whatever it might be. And I saw an opportunity in the rollout and what’s needed on the ground floor and before actually what we need to see teachers doing. We need to ensure that our leaders understand how to lead transformational work. And so we have had a long standing partnership with the Stanford D School design thinking, human centric design work, and began to put together not a prescription, but a playbook that outlined a process, a set of tools, questions that are anchored in this human centric design work. So that prior to schools just wanting to do the checklist of what we need to do for this New York inspires thing, they really engage in the needed work up front. That’s the driver to transformation, which is empathy. If we’re going to redesign a system or we’re going to design a system, then we need to talk to the people who we’re designing it for first to make sure that our design is answering the right question. And so it’s this beautiful document that aligns with the phases of New York that again, I kind of, I would attribute to kind of a choose your own adventure.I don’t want it to be my way or my team’s way or our way. But what has to happen, where there can’t be flexibility is, we have to talk to people now. Here’s a selection of questions that you might ask.Here’s a number of tools that you might consider. Take pieces of them, invent your own. But like, this is step one. And as we think about redesign a school, if we’re really going to do this work that’s going to be transformational, there’s students, there’s boards of education, there’s community members. There are community members who went through school who have a perception of school based on a single experience in a cafeteria or science class from when they went there. We need to engage them in the process. We have to ask them what went wrong, what didn’t work, right? Like, let’s not just ask the folks who school works for, but more importantly, let’s ask the folks who it’s not working for, what does it need? Because I’m a huge, a huge advocate in the design thinking for when we do design work. We need to design for those furthest from opportunity.We have an epidemic of average in this country, right? Like everything’s designed around economics of doing the most amount of good for the most amount of people in the middle. And then we need to create all of these, like either enrichments or Interventions to get people back to middle. And it turns out actually if we just consider the design from those furthest from opportunity or what we call the extreme users, right? Like everybody benefits. It’s not a zero sum game. And there’s all those examples of that are used to highlight that, right? Like the curb cut design for mobility, you know, wheelchairs, et cetera. But, it turns out that the delivery person can roll their dolly up there. It turns out the someone who’s wheeling a bicycle, a parent or guardian or mother with a stroller.Collaborative Education in New YorkDr. Jonah SchenkerI mean, we can go down the list like nobody lost out because we made those. We actually just thought more about making it accessible. And the same is true in all of those examples. So if we take the opportunity to engage all those voices in redefining what school could be, our work is to not come up again with one recipe, but engage with our eight districts, allow them each in their local context to do this work and kind of co-author the story of their community. But equally as critical is bringing those folks back together to share and stretch and tune and reflect together. And as they’re co authoring their individual stories and we’re bringing together, we’re beginning to sew a story together of Ulster County. And if all of the areas in New York are doing this kind of same thing, not necessarily using again, our playbook isn’t the only tool, but it’s a tool. And, and if we’re all beginning to do this work, then Ulster county and Dutchess county and Sullivan county and Westchester county, and we can go down the list, then the story of New York State begins to weave together.And the fidelity of the initiative as it relates to its intentionality of actually transformation doesn’t come from here’s what you need to do, but it comes through the consistency of how we hold space, how we use process, the questions we ask, tools we use, and most importantly, leaning on that kind of first stage of empathy, moving into ideation and design and prototyping and then scalability, of course.Danny CurtisYeah, I love this vision that you’ve set out, sort of starting with the human at the center and extending out to create a statewide change. And so to tie these two pieces together to round out our conversation here, I’m wondering how, as the state changes the container and the districts continue to do this work to reimagine learning in a more human centered way, how does it change the work that you’re able to do at the center at iPark 87 and what new opportunities does that unlock for you all.Community Mobility and Economic DevelopmentDr. Jonah SchenkerYeah. So again, kind of going back to talking about and having kind of fractals of this work, this becomes a hub for people to convene, to take a look at what’s possible. And the playbook that I talked about in, in terms of the transformation of, of school will be accompanied by another playbook that I hope to launch in January around economic and workforce development, around community revitalization, around economic mobility. And, and, and I believe that is the intersection of both of those where a, a new definition of what’s possible lies. When we begin to center here in Ulster county, the 20,000 students. Not, not the adult conversation, but the 20,000 students as the future of this county from an economy standpoint, from a work and economic standpoint, from a hope standpoint, and have school systems that foster and drive that. It is a new model for community mobility.And so my, my hope and vision. Right. Like I continue to talk to the folks that touch all of this. The work that you’re doing is beautiful, but you’re trying to grow a tree that’s 30, 000 ft up in the air, and you, you haven’t tended to the roots, and the roots are our children. And, and so it’s that. I think it’s that merging that kind of goes into where I’m currently sitting. When we even talk about skills of the future, the skills and competencies and the conversation is like, what are the skills that we need to prepare students to be equipped to, you know, enter and enter this unknown future or the future of work or whatever it is. And, and I’m not talking about it like that in the moment.Dr. Jonah SchenkerI’m talking about it as what are the skills that we ought to be preparing students to be the designers of a new future? Because I’m not sure that we’ve done our due diligence in taking care of what they’re entering, not entering a political conversation, but the world isn’t well, and so I don’t want to prepare students for this. I want to prepare students to make it better. And they can. And, but let’s get intentional about what those skills are. Let’s value them in space, let’s value them in schedules, let’s value them in time. And again, I believe it’s that intersection of these two playbooks that provides not a prescription, but a roadmap for what’s possible.Danny CurtisWell, I think that’s a really good call to action to leave this on. Jonah, thank you so much for sharing about this new model. I’m looking forward to watching it as this new center takes flight and continuing to follow these new reforms as they’re put into place. So, yeah. And good luck on the first day of school. I know it’s coming.Dr. Jonah SchenkerYes. Thank you. I’m going to jump out of here and we’ll keep setting up classrooms and get it ready. But I really appreciate the time, the questions and the opportunity. Thanks so much.The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.

Class Disrupted is back for season 7! In this kickoff episode, Diane Tavenner and Michael Horn reconnected after the summer to reflect on how artificial intelligence is shaping the education landscape. They discussed lingering skepticism about AI’s current use in schools and shared their evolving feelings about the technology. The hosts described their plans for the new season, which starts with a broad look at AI’s development both inside and beyond education, before narrowing in on entrepreneurs and real-world applications that could reinvent learning.Diane TavennerHey, Michael.Michael HornHey, Diane. It's good to see you.Diane TavennerIt's really good to see you. It's been, it's been a summer that it's funny to not spend as much time with you in the summer. So it's fun to be back. And I guess that's one of the bright spots of returning to the fall in addition to fall, which is, as you know, my favorite fall.Michael HornIt is its own magic right here in New England. This is like our best season, Diane. This is when, you know, apples, peaches, like we're, we're actually enjoying, you know, the, the limited harvest season compared to you people in California.Diane TavennerYes, we have, I will say we do have quite an abundant market right now, and we've been spending Sundays there. And I made a very delicious fig jam yesterday with the sort of end of the season figs. So it's been a quick, fun summer and now we're back this fall with a new season. Michael I can't believe it's season seven.Michael HornYeah, that's wild in itself. I guess we crammed a couple seasons in those first year and a half or something like that because it sort of whipped by during the pandemic and no one was counting years. But we are back by popular demand to focus on AI of all things, Diane and, you know, same thing theme of this podcast, right? We're not just interested in AI and education for its own sake, but really as a mechanism for rethinking what we have always viewed as a system built for its time, did amazing things in its time, but was never built to optimize each student's learning and chances of really owning their future, particularly in this era. There's a lot of change in this era right now in general in the external environment. So I think, you know, people have been saying we want more about this, follow your curiosity, and we have a lot of questions as well, right?Diane TavennerWe do. You know, we thought, I don't know what we were thinking in that miniseries, that we would just sort of figure it out and move on last season, but we did not. I think we just opened more and more curiosity. And so here we are again. And, you know, I think that we have a pretty exciting lineup of guests at least. I'm pretty excited to talk with them this year, and I think they're going to shed a lot of light on a bunch of the questions we have. But we also just want to keep having input from our listeners. So what is on your mind? Who do you want to hear from? What do you want us to talk about?Please send those ideas our way. I hope this season, many of you who wrote in last season are going to find that we took some of your questions, suggestions, ideas, and we're going to try to bring those into the dialogue and conversation. And so we're super open to that. And, and we're thinking about this season a little bit. I guess we're going to start more broadly, Michael. So open the aperture a little bit, if you will, a little bit wider. We want to, you know, we always focus on K12 education. I think a couple of things about that this year.One, we're going to be really specific when we're talking about younger people, middle school, high school, because those things seem to be playing out very differently.Michael HornYeah. And I think some pretty profound differences in last year we were pretty focused on that middle, high school segment. And yeah, I think that's just it. Right. Like the AI that's in your adaptive module to build additional skills very different from how you might use it in high school. Right. And so recognizing those differences, but also recognizing that higher ed and workforce have some pretty big implications on the system as well. And so we're not going to leave those out.Diane TavennerNo, not at all. And from my perspective, it's because I want to take more and more the position of what is the journey of the young person. And the young person's journey doesn't sort of have these stark lines between K12 and higher ed.Michael HornThose are adult systems, those are not kids systems.Exploring AI's Broader LandscapeDiane TavennerExactly. And so, we'll be bringing all of those in when they make sense as we think about the journey of young people. And then, so we're going to start that, I think, with I guess, a little bit of a what's the landscape out there of AI? And you know, I think last season we talked about, we specifically sought out kind of cheerleaders and skeptics and we wanted to hear from those various perspectives. I think this year we're going to look, we're going to at least kick off the season looking at just the big picture in the landscape, like talking to some of the people who are working on the frontier models. We're going to actually turn outside of education for an episode to look at healthcare, which is this very interesting sort of parallel universe to education, and see what we can learn from that lens and ask some big questions about, like, what is happening across the board. And we think that as a result, we, you know, a little bit of forewarning here, we might be talking to people who are a little bit more on the optimistic side as a result. But we will of course keep, you know, a critical eye on the conversations that we're having.Michael Horn100% and on the note of optimism. So just so folks can start to envision the arc, we're not going to tell you every guest right now up front because, you know, there could be some changes. But if we're starting broad, we're starting with people who actually work at some of the companies that do the large language models, healthcare, as Diane said, folks that have sort of this 20,000-foot view of where AI is going more broadly. And then we're going to start to home in on the education use cases and we're going to go to entrepreneurs. So they're going to certainly be optimistic as well. That's in their nature. They see problems, they want to solve them by building something which is great and they will bring their lens. I will say, Diane, when I moved out to Silicon Valley in, What was that, 2008, 9 or something, and it feels a little bit like it did then, right when you were building the new Summit model in 2010, I guess it was.And it feels a little bit like that. A lot of excitement, energy around edtech startups, potentially, I would say a little bit more skepticism or caution maybe is the right word from the investor class because they feel like they've been through this a little bit. But we're curious to talk to a bunch of entrepreneurs and find out what are they doing with AI, what are they excited about? Is this tinkering toward utopia, as someone might have said in a book, or is this like really reinventing education in the ways that we've talked about? And so I think that'll be pretty interesting as well. I'm excited to talk to all those entrepreneurs.Setting the Season's BaselineDiane TavennerI am, too. And so what we wanted to do today, before we hop into those conversations in these next episodes is just sort of lay down our baseline foundation of where we are right now. You and I are always on a learning journey and so we always like to reflect back on like, where did we start these conversations? Where did we end? What's changed? What's different? And so we sort of asked ourselves these questions leading into this episode of, you know, based on where we left off three months ago, which is sort of a long time and sort of not a long time at all,you know, what's kind of stayed the same? What do we, what do we feel like? Oh, we thought that three months ago and we kind of still think that, you know today what's changed in our thinking, if anything, and what's blowing our minds. Hopefully, you know, maybe something, given what you just said about the moment in time we're in. So we thought we'd just ask each other those questions, get a level set baseline of where we're starting the season, and then. And then we'll get into it.Michael HornThat sounds good. Let's. Let's dive in that first category. I want to hear from you. We're coming back three months later. We put a lot of our priors on before. We also talked about our own evolution in the end of the last two episodes of last season. If people want to go back and see how we have remained true to our roots of trying to be malleable and keep learning, I'm curious what stayed the same in your mind that has not changed from where we left off?The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Diane TavennerYeah, it's funny because we decided on these questions, and then as I started thinking about them, I was like, oh, maybe I want to shift them to what is still.Michael HornAll right, go where you want to go.Diane TavennerStill disappointing me a little bit, but it's stayed the same. So that's where the disappointment comes from. I think that, I feel like I spend a lot of time really, like, digging and poking to understand what's underneath all the, in some cases, hyperbole around AI and, like, what's actually happening and what's really going on in there. And so, despite all sort of the energy and the talk and the, you know, everything that's happening, I find when I'm digging that mostly AI still in education, not still, it is currently being used kind of at the individual level, if you will, whether it be the individual teacher or maybe sort of a little bit of an interface with the students. And I would contrast that to it being used, you know, more broadly around the system or how we actually do schools. And I think a lot of that usage is still in the efficiency category. So how can we gain more efficiency in things we're doing? And there still seems to be a very significant focus on chatbots.And I have been a skeptic of the ultimate utility of chatbots since the very beginning. As you know, I don't think that they're the manifestation of AI that I'm excited about and hopeful for and whatnot. And so I guess that's a little bit of my, that's definitely stayed the same. I haven't changed. My opinion hasn't changed.Michael HornAnd just to make sure people understand what you're saying when you say at the level of the individual, you mean interactions within the existing models to make them a little bit more efficient, but not actually fundamentally change what those interactions or assumptions or baseline processes are in the system? Is that what you're saying?Diane TavennerYeah, it's kind of like we're using AI to maybe do things we've always done, maybe just a little bit faster, a little bit easier, a little bit better, you know, with fewer humans potentially. And so, I mean, I look at and we'll get in and we'll talk with folks from these places, but I think about, you know, the big announcements over the summer from, you know, Gemini and OpenAI about study mode and, and the variety of products from, from Google, DeepMind, Gemini, and they still feel to me like, yeah, that's kind of the way we've always done it in school. It's just like, are we making it a little bit fancier, personalized, easier, better?EdTech's Need for ReinventionMichael HornYeah, I think I'm in the same place, Diane. Actually, we, and just the audience knows we didn't talk about our answers in advance because we were trying to surprise each other, but we may have failed on the first one anyway, so I wrote a piece over the summer saying, like AI, EdTech, it's going to continue to disappoint as long as we're layering it over existing models as opposed to reinventing the model itself. It's frankly the central premise of disrupting class that I think, frankly, the majority of ed tech entrepreneurs got wrong in the 2010s. I think because I was in it a little bit, I was trying to learn and be curious at that time. I kind of feel like I'm just going to be a little bit more blunt this time and say if you think you're serving the existing system and the existing classrooms in the existing schools, you're not going to reinvent and you're not going to get us to where we need to go. Full stop. Full stop. And so I think the new models, yeah, I know I'm a little bit more annoyed at this point.Right. But like the new models, I think the entrepreneurial energy from outside of the system, truly, I think is even more important than it's, than it's been. So I think I've stayed the same on that and maybe even gotten a little bit more passionate about it. But let's shift to where our minds have changed, next, what is different in your mind?Diane TavennerWell, it's interesting. I think I'm going to build on where you're going because the thing that was coming to me was how I'm feeling is shifting. And, you know, I live in Silicon Valley, so, you know, I'm very sort of shape. It is. It is the dominant conversation here. It's everywhere you go.The AI Gold RushDiane TavennerIt's what everyone's thinking about. It's just in the culture and the water. And it feels like over the summer it's shifting from sort of this amazement and awe and wonder and curiosity of like this new incredible thing to a little bit of like a gold rush. Like people have realized, not that they didn't before, but really realized there's so much money to be made in AI. If you're tracking at all the valuations of companies and the funding, you know, the venture funding going to startups and things like that, not necessarily in education, but in other sectors, there's so much money. And that just sort of adds an element that is far less about curiosity, wonder, awe, possibility and much more about, I just feel like the sharp elbows start to come out and there's a level of aggressiveness.There's people who hop into it who I don't think or care very much about transforming systems for the better, but it's really about who's going to dominate, who's going to be in power, who's going to make money, who's going to, you know, and there's just the, it just feels a little. It's inevitable and it just doesn't feel as kind of, I don't know,Michael HornNoble. Yeah. Is that what it came up?Diane TavennerNo, I think that. That's right. It's fascinating.Michael HornWell, maybe the caveat I could say is like, there's nothing wrong with people making money off of it. We just, I think we both believe that the bigger opportunities for good are not where the money is at the moment, at least in education. Right. Like, the dominant spend is still in the existing system, which is why. I get it. It's why people sell into the existing system. I just think we just really shortchange the longer transformation opportunities, as well.Diane TavennerI think that's exactly right. It feels like there's two totally different dialogues going on and, you know, neither is aware of each other a little bit. And so, yeah, it's just, it's interesting. It's an interesting cultural time. There's a big, you know, sort of gathering next week of the, you know, AI enterprise stack gathering. And so we're just going to start to see a whole bunch of, yeah, that kind of focus, I think.Michael HornYeah, that's interesting. I will say the sums of money and I'm not talking about education at the moment, I'm talking more generally that these startups are raising. It feels very .com era. Right. It's been staggering from my perspective to, to watch it and I'm, I'm very removed from the Silicon Valley, you know, I'm a decade or whatever out from having been in those waters. But it feels a lot like those times. It always reminds me, Clay always said, you know, like when you're truly disrupting, you're going after non consumption. And by.By definition that means there's no market at the beginning. So like it's really hard to chase nothing and pitch that. So I think some of that is also going on. I, I'll say for me, I don't know if it's a letdown is the right word because I'll contradict myself, like, I think in our next question, but like, I've become less impressed with the power of these models professionally. And yeah, I, and I don't know. And I think a large part of it is like they are prediction machines at the end of the day. Like they are not logical. Right.Like at the end of the day, they're not people. They're, they are absorbing a fraction of the senses we use to think about them, and perceive the world. Right. Largely language and, you know, some image. Right. But it's basically eyesight and prediction machines. Yes. Like, you know, some of the thinking that you can do by having it recurse on itself, it's pretty cool.And I just, it feels like for an, like when you're an expert in the field, the things that it does for you just feel sort of generic to me, Diane and maybe it's how I'm using it, but I, because of that lack of logic, I've, I've become a little bit more or tempered. I think maybe that's the right word about some of these models. So it could be me.Diane TavennerBut no, let me double click on that because I feel like I might be having a similar experience. So tell me if this rings true for you. I find myself, I think I've gotten a lot better at prompts, prompting, and to get what I want pretty darn quickly. And so I actually really use it as an assistant kind of all day, every day, you know, quite efficiently, much more efficiently than in the beginning, and I think in a much more kind of fluid way. And to your point, it feels very much like, like an assistant, you know, again, like not a lot of like this is kind of magical anymore. Is that what you're talking about or.Michael HornI think that is exactly what it is. Right. And sometimes I conclude just like I would with a research assistant. Oh man, the.amount of times we're gonna have to go back and forth in this, it's not worth it. I'm just gonna do it myself. And so I'm. I find myself making that calculation much more.Personal Learning and InquiryMichael HornMaybe this will go to the blowing your mind, which is I will say in my personal life, I actually find it the utility to have gone up tremendously because I'm not an expert in a lot of those questions that I bring to bear. And it allows me to ask the naive question that I'm not always great at finding the person I should ask to. And the chat mode with GPT5 like and, showing a video and, and like having conversations about stuff. I find it incredible for personal learning and just sort of general questions there. I find it incredibly valuable at bringing up like a couple hunches or, or disproving things that I might be thinking and so forth and just like, okay, I'm coming in with a much higher baseline now than I was before that I found really, really compelling on the personal side.The professional side may be a little bit less so. What about you?Diane TavennerThat's interesting. Well, that feels very, very true to me. I mean, I'm using it for everything from like, how to care for my plants to how to curate a playlist for our family dinner nights in the summer and you know, talk to my kids and they'll tell you how much of a fail or success that was. But you know, it is, it is like I don't feel ashamed to ask it dumb questions. And I. Every time we watch a movie, I'm like, I feel like I'm having an, you know, an analysis with it afterward. I chalk that all up too.It is significantly better than search, I think. Like it's this big leap forward better than search. Let's see. For me, I'm super interested in and curious about these what feel like, I'm sure they're not, but feel like sort of overnight upending of practices in other sectors and fields that I'm aware of. And it does feel like there's some structural change happening in other fields, which is. Makes me a little bit envious, I'm wanting that in education.And I'll just give you a couple of examples. Like one just as simple as like online retail. I mean so many people I know in this space, you know, it is fundamentally changing the space because you don't need to have. This sounds silly but like you don't need to have models trying on clothes or modeling your, you know, your wares that you're selling because literally you can just do that using AI. So you take pictures and like consumers can do that now literally I can go try things on myself, self online, you know, and see what it will look like on me now. Again, that sounds trite, but it does feel like it's going to revolutionize this kind of industry in many, many ways and then kind of on the more serious end and this is why I'm excited to have a healthcare conversation. There's just such phenomenal opportunities that I see happening in healthcare that are really profound and I think are going to fundamentally change the system.I'm, I feel like it's, well, it's.Michael HornGoing to be the same analogy I think though in education, right. Because I see a ton of AI that is improving the exist, sustaining the existing system and making it better, more efficacious, efficient. And then I see some AI outside the system, right. Like more direct to patient, very different value network. And that stuff depending on, you know, if we let it,Diane Tavennerit's really interesting, so I think those are the places where I feel like myself saying wow. Like wow. And a little bit of mind blowing.Michael HornWell, I'm excited to learn a lot more in the season. As we said, it's going to be a really interesting group of guests. We're, and like you said at the beginning, you know, last time we purposefully had optimists and pessimists up there. So we could really put the different arguments against each other and think about this. We'll take a very different line of inquiry. It's safe to say with each guest we have based on how they're coming in and what we're hoping to learn from them. I cannot wait. But before we close out this welcome back primer if you will, of an episode, let's go to our segment that some people keep track of, which is the what are you reading, watching, listening, etc.Outside of work stuff ideally, although sometimes we fail and slip into work. But what is on yours?Diane TavennerI might be sort of failing right out of the gate, but. So I read this book recently. I think it's been around for a bit, so it might not be new for a bunch of people. It's called How Big Things Get Big Done and taglines very long, surprising factors that determine the fate of every project, from home renovations to space exploration and everything in between. That's by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner. And first of all, I will be honest, it stressed me out to read this book because like every t feels like every big project is fraught. There's so many potential. The likelihood you're going to be successful is really slim.So it did give me a little bit of stress, especially as I thought about projects that I'm currently working on and was evaluating through their framework. But one of the things I loved about it was how data driven it is. And it really looks at these big data sets to take a critical lens at how we do projects and how we could do them better. And I think this might be a theme that comes up a lot this season is the power and importance of data. I think that that doesn't get talked about nearly enough and really might be the most important thing that we're grappling with here. So if you do any sort of projects.Michael HornI should read this. You're telling me. All right, all right, now you're scaring me up. But I remember when the book came out, I have not read.Diane TavennerYeah, they'll look back on your home renovation and be like.Michael HornI was about to say, is this gonna make me, like, feel really dumb on a bunch of things. Okay, yes. The answer is yes. So, yeah, so. But I'll learn. All right. Well, mine is gonna be work based as well, by the way. It's interesting.Like, we haven't seen each other in three months, so we've watched and read a lot of things. So we're sort of picking. Right. I was, I had all these TV series that I actually watched. I was gonna be like, hey, look what I did, Diane. But, I think I should give a shout out to my other co host of a podcast. Jeff Salingo's new book, Dream School: Finding the College that's Right for you came out September 9th.So the day before we're recording this, but it'll be a few weeks out by the time this comes out. And it's a fun book that tries to get people away from thinking that you just have to go to the selectives and take a wider aperture and give you some criteria to do so as you go through that journey. So we'll see. We'll see. But I enjoyed reading it and I'll put that on my list.Diane TavennerAwesome. Well, I'm excited for that one I think, you know, with my new project Future we are attempting to do that as well. And when we.Michael HornYeah, I saw that in the feature set you have, you have that little part where like it depending on your pathway. Once you pick, if you go in the four year college pathway, it starts to suggest some schools that might be better fits based on both outcomes, if I understood it. But also based on the things that you seem to be gravitating towards.Diane TavennerYeah. And not the usual suspect schools, but schools that based on data are performing are better access and better outcomes for young people. So I look forward to it.Michael HornCheck out the, check out the appendix. He built a cool little, I think he put in the appendix because he didn't want another list out there. But there's a list. But it's. What's more interesting is the criteria that he chose to come up with schools that you might want to look at. So it's interesting. That's the plug. But we're excited to dive into this season.I think we're going to learn a lot. Can't wait to be on the journey with you. And as Diane said up front, tell us what you want to hear. Tell us what you want to ask people. We will try to start teasing some guests ahead of time perhaps so you can be ready to ask us or tell us what you want us to ask. And we can't wait to get into it with you all on season seven of Class Disrupted. We'll see you next time.The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.