The Future of Education (private feed for michael.b.horn@gmail.com)

Having served in a number of roles in education—from the superintendent of public instruction of Ohio to a teacher—Susan Zelman has seen many sides of the American education system. In this conversation, she shares some of the big lessons from her just released book, The Buying and Selling of American Education—and her conclusions about how to move forward to support the success of every single child. As always, you can listen to the podcast, watch this on YouTube, or read the transcript.Michael Horn:    Susan has served in a number of interesting roles across the education ecosystem. She's currently president of the Zelman Education Consulting Group. I'll tell you more about why I'm particularly interested in having her today in a moment. But just to give you a little bit more of her background, before that, she was the executive director of the superintendency at the Ohio Department of Education. She has also served as the senior vice president for education and children's programming at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, where she developed policies and programs to integrate public service media into a national reform education agenda. And prior to that, she was the superintendent for public instruction in Ohio for 10 years. And during her tenure, the state of Ohio went from 29th among states to fifth in the 2009 Education Week quality counts report. But more important for this conversation, she's also the author, or co-author I should say, of a new and very interesting book titled The Buying and Selling of American Education. Susan, welcome. It's great to see you.Susan Zelman:            Oh, thanks. It's great to be here, and thank you for interviewing me.Horn:                Oh, you bet. You bet. So before we get into the conversation around the book and so forth, I've given obviously the thumbnail, if you will, of your bio, but I'm just sort of curious about your own journey through education and education policy and how that journey perhaps has shaped where you've spent your time and your passion within the world of education.Zelman:            Well, I love that question. And actually my, I think education journey started when I was in sixth grade in Mrs. Eisner's class. At that time, we were living in the Marble Hill projects. And on my floor, a family moved in from Harlem. And the boy who was going to PS 122, though it's now not called PS 122, of course it was reconstituted, but was in my class, in my sixth grade class. And I actually tried to befriend him and walked to... We had a long walk to the elementary school together. And he seemed like such a nice, bright guy, and he was quite tall. And he lasted in my sixth grade class for one week, and then he got demoted to the fifth grade. So, I asked my teacher, Mrs. Eisner, "Why?" She said, "Well, he went to school in Harlem and they don't have good schools there."                        And I thought, how unfair. And not only that, but he also got then demoted to the fourth grade. And that really freaked me out because he was so tall and just stood out a sore thumb. And I thought, God, the system has failed poor Ernest Gibbs. And to this day in my old age, I still remember Ernest Gibbs and kind of wonder whatever happened to him. The second thing is that my grandparents were immigrants from Russia, but education was the route to the middle class. I mean, my father was a lawyer, my uncle was a lawyer and a judge, and my uncles went to the city college in the thirties, and it was their way to become middle class. So, education was always very important and a value. Plus, I was kind of a nerdy kid, and I was the type of kid who failed summer camp.                        Nobody wanted me on their volleyball team, but I couldn't wait for school to start. So in some sense, even though I know my father wanted me to be a lawyer, education was my passion, and I felt comfortable at school. And then I could have done college in three years, but I stayed on to get certified. And for one year, I was a high school social studies teacher at Grace Dodge Vocational High School... And I so... I would have to leave the teacher's room because I thought they were so judgmental about their students. They said they couldn't tell the Bronx students from the students at Grace Dodge, and that really me off. So, then I was able to get a full scholarship, a fellowship then to go to that, but I have to say this in... Because I live in Ohio right now, that other university up north, University of Michigan.                        And I was in a doctoral program funded by the US Department of Education to train people who were interested in education, who had an education background, but who would do research planning and evaluation for public schools. And I got to do my dissertation from the Harvard Civil Rights Civil Liberties Law Review. I met my husband that brought me to Boston. And then he put it in our marriage contract, our marriage was no void unless I finished within a year, which I did. And then ironically, through a high school English teacher he had, I got a job teaching at Emmanuel College. And I was an academic for the first 14 years of my career. I also simultaneously held a research appointment at the Harvard Educational Technology Center. Then I got an NSF grant from Columbia Teachers College for women who taught in small liberal arts colleges.                        I was getting kind of bored. Even though my kids were young. And I happened to meet actually Mike Dukakis at our neighbors party who was in his law firm and becoming a judge, and I was recruited to join the caucus administration as an associate commissioner. So, I left my brilliant academic career and joined state government. And not only that, but I really found my passion. I felt that I could help design and improve educational systems and I could make a sort of a greater impact. And I was the associate commissioner for a new division called Educational Personnel, and I lasted there for about six and a half years. And then I had an opportunity to really break the glass ceiling and become the first deputy commissioner in the state of Missouri. Oh my gosh, a far cry if we've ever been. And my two girls were in college at the time, but we took our son to Missouri, and he used to call it the good enough state.                        First of all, he was angry because I denied his birthright of going to Harvard Square every day when he was in high school, but the reality was I realized the variability in the quality of education from state to state. He went to Arlington High. But quite frankly, where he went, which was considered a very good district in Missouri, was not as challenging for him. And that gave me even more passion. And then I was recruited to be a state superintendent in Ohio, and I did that for 10 years. I went to Washington for almost two, came back. I actually also did a short stint in a publishing company, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Yeah, Houghton Mifflin. And then a new governor came in, he wiped me, and I came back as executive director.Horn:                I'm just curious because you have a lot of experience across a lot of states, a lot of context, a lot of personal passion, and anger in some cases, tied into all of this, right? And you're sort of your why. And I'm curious what you wanted to pull into this book and really share with the readers as you wrote it.Zelman:            I had a wonderful experience of seeing how legislation is crafted both at the federal state and policy at the local levels. And one of the things that... What sort of struck me when I started to work in the State Department of Education and not the academic community was that people who engaged in education policymaking really didn't understand American educational history, and yet we were trying to improve and reform the system. And without roots, trees perish. So, I think it's really... First thing is that are very important for us to have a good conceptual model of where our American educational experimental system has been and is currently now over the past 230 years. And so that was one thing that I was going to do. And I also wanted to highlight the sort of what I would call the structural problems in trying to reform an educational system that I saw up close and personal, particularly in the state roles that I performed. That was one of the reasons why I wrote the book.Horn:                No, that's helpful. It gives context. And I'll dig back into the history piece in a moment. But first, let's go to the title because you have this super provocative title, The Buying and Selling of American Education. And I'll give you some context for my question in a moment because I really want to hear how you picked that title, because this isn't really a book about commercial interests in American education or capitalism in American education, nor is it like philanthropists buying American education or even private schools. Frankly, it's not even like a Diane Ravitch type book. It's none of that, so I'm sort of curious why this title, and what does it mean to you?Zelman:            Well, it was very clear to me in my work over the years that our educational system was designed around the needs of adults in the system. And we all, including myself, have vested interest in this system, and it is so hard to change because of our vested interests. So in the intro, not the introduction, I think the prefix of the book, I talk about the seven Ps, the politicians, the parents, the professionals, the publishers, the producers of educational software now, the plutocrats who want to keep the status quo, and the partisans, people from either the left or the right who don't like anything. So, I thought... And I've always tried to be provocative, so I thought The Buying and Selling of American Education: Re-imagining a New System of Schools was a title which I would hope sells books, but who knows?Horn:                We'll find out in that, but hopefully will help a little bit and get people a little bit more interested. And so I want to dig in on the history part of it because this book has a lot on the history of American education,, and frankly it does it from a lot of the perspectives that you just laid out, the professionals, the politicians, et cetera. You sort of go around in a variety of these angles and help us understand how we got to where we are today through the lens of, as you said, the last 230 years. And so, this is a totally unfair question for a cast like this, but I'm curious as you think about the top couple things you hope people take away from that extensive history, what are they in a little bit more detail as sure as we think about informing where we are now and where we go?Zelman:            Absolutely. Well, first of all, education, teaching is not a linear type of thing. I mean, we don't have a curriculum, we teach a kid, and then we expect to measure results. It's really kind... I think teaching and doing school... First of all, doing school is hard work, and teaching and learning is a complex human act, and that we don't do it in a vacuum. I mean, you're a classroom, in some sense, is a social system in a system of a district in a system of a community. And I think that in lots of ways, the school is a microcosm of what's really going on in society, and also relating to other systems, the political system, the economic system, the taxation system, the health system, housing policies, which I talk about in my book, banking policies that create neighborhoods for whatever reason. So, one is that this is really quite complex. And one of the things that I think educators need to do is to immerse themselves. And your book talks about this.                        I think one of the problems we have become a political tool to the Republican party, and the superintendents are leaving, teachers are angry and they're leaving and so forth, is because we really didn't do a good enough job in community engagement. And we need to open up the schoolhouse store. We need to let the community into the school and immerse ourselves and go out into the community like cultural anthropologists, and also develop a sense of empathy for the families and the children we serve. And I think that's really, really important. And I think educators tend to be somewhat judgmental of their students, and that fosters a culture of soft bigotry, of low expectations. And for this book, I interviewed 104 Ohio superintendents, and one of the things that came out, particularly in Appalachia... And I'm spending a lot of my time working with JASON Learning, by the way, I think doing some terrific, incredible work in workforce development in Appalachia.                        One of the things the Appalachian superintendents told me was because of food shortage and difficulties of getting learning materials, they went into the little villages, and they saw the conditions in which their students lived. And that really changed a lot of teachers' attitudes toward the kids and toward the families. So, I think that's really important. And I love your chapter where you talk about that you better, as a superintendent or a principal, understand that schools have different purposes for different families, and you better assess that. And you need to accommodate that, you need to develop trust, you need to listen, you need to take your judgment and work with community-based groups within your community and develop wisdom to solve problems.Horn:                Well, so that's... I mean, it's a terrific set of points there and that piece of empathy, and getting out into the community to understand the progress that there's trying to make and so forth. I think you're right. It could break down a lot of these walls. And as you said, tools are the ponds that schools have become in a lot of these political fights. And so you give this diagnosis of how we got to where we are today and how broken and intractable some of it seems. But then really in this last culminating chapter six, you end with this conclusion of how we can move forward. And it's really... A major conclusion that you have is to embrace a more pluralistic view of American education in schools. And it's frankly, as you sort of implied, it's very similar to where I ended up in my new book, From Reopen to Reinvent, as I sort of worked my way through it.                        And I think we both took different paths to it, but we ended the same place. And so I'm just curious, tell us more about that conclusion and why you see it as the only way forward.Zelman:            Well, first of all, I don't see it as the only way forward. I want you to be provocative and say to people, "Look, you're not going to like my vision, but let's all come together form a multi-sector partnership and rethink." So, let me start off though with why I talked about, accountable pluralism. As state superintendent, first of all, I am the Zelman of the Zelman voucher case, and the Supreme Court is really moving... If you follow the Supreme Court decisions, they're really moving more toward funding private and parochial schools. That's one thing.Horn:                Yes.Zelman:            And that's happening in lots of other states with regard to vouchers, private school scholarships and charter schools. And I had three children, all who are very successful, thank God. I don't want to knock wood or whatever, but they all were very different types of learners. And as a parent, I mean, it was expensive to put all three of your kids in private school, and we didn't have very many choices.                        And today, I think parents, all parents, not only poor, but especially poor parents need better choices. And as state superintendent, I saw how people exploited poor kids by making money off of the charter school movement, and that there is no accountability in these private school scholarships. And I thought in some ways, when you only have one system like the common school, which was never really... It was sort of a myth of the common school anyway. And I think, well, you know what? We're moving toward pluralism, but other democratic countries have done this much better than us because they hold people accountable. So, I always liked the work of Paul Hill. And he wrote this book in 2013 or 15 about democratic constitution for our public schools. And he was, as I was. Very upset about where the school choice movement was going because of its lack of accountability, and that we were not giving poor parents really good quality choices.                        A lots of charter schools only last for five years. Now look, there are wonderful models of charter schools out there. I don't want to bash that, but we need more of it. We need more innovation, we need more experimentation. And we need data, and we need people to understand quality processes and how to measure it. So, that's was really important to me. Plus, if you look at like 26 state policies on school choice, they're all over the place. And it's not a coherent system. They're discreet programs. So, I try to use my imagination and say, look, we have an ailing system. If I were queen of the world, what would I design? And I designed this system, which would be a system of schools. The CEO would be a superintendent type, but they would manage a portfolio of schools. The money, we wouldn't fund schools. We would fund students, and that we would stop the property tax because it pits parents against one another. It's not equitable. But we would have a statewide taxing system with an equalization formula based upon the needs of students and their families.                        And I think with new emerging technologies, we could get a better sense of how to merge educational funding with health and human service funding and get better data. I mean, one of the good things about technology, I think from a research perspective, is that we will have these incredible databases, or we can, and we could understand what works under what conditions and why. And that's what I was sort of a arguing in chapter six. Where is the role of business, philanthropy, state government, the federal government in trying to build a stronger R&D for American education? And bring all people to the table from multiple perspectives and see what would come up. Do an XPRIZE. Rather than go to the moon or Mars. Why don't we do an XPRIZE for different types of educational systems, do some good research, design evaluation, and see what works under what conditions for what types of children and families, and provide better choice and accountable school choice for parents.Horn:                So much to aspire to, I think, in that vision. Susan, thanks for writing the book. Thanks for joining us on The Future of Education, and thanks for continuing to push for quality choices and options for the families who need it the most. Really appreciate it.Zelman:            Thank you. Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.

Parents are increasingly voting with their feet and making novel schooling choices for their children. What's behind the moves and their desires? Adam Newman and Christian Lehr of Tyton Partners joined me to talk about the vast research they have done in this space to learn about why parents are making choices—or even where they aren't choosing something different, what their preferences are. In this conversation they detail their research and what we're learning about parent choice, student-centered learning, and the future of education. You can listen to the conversation above, watch it below, or, with a paid subscription, read the full transcript below.Michael Horn:   We have a great topic lined up for you all today. It involves choice, student-centered learning, enrollment trends, innovation and more, all in K-12 schooling. To help us unpack that, we have two terrific guests, Adam Newman, the founding and managing partner at Tyton Partners, as well as Christian Lehr, senior principal at Tyton Partners. They are the authors of a series of research reports that are just fantastic, Choose to Learn and School Disrupted. I like it not just because it has the name disrupted in it, but they have really unpacked these trends around choice, some of these enrollment trends we're seeing in K-12 school districts, parents' desires and for what they want for their kids. I'm just excited to unpack a lot of this.First, Adam, Christian, thanks for being here.Adam Newman: Hey. Great. Great to be here with you, Michael. Thanks for including us.Christian Lehr:  Yeah. Thanks, Michael.Horn:                Yeah, you bet, so a lot of interesting findings in these reports that you've published. I've actually written about some of your findings, but I'm excited to hear about it directly from you guys. I think one of the most interesting things that you found frankly is that the momentum behind the enrollment declines that we saw early on in the pandemic from school districts is not abating at least as of spring of 2022, and so I'm just curious. That finding seems to have gotten more attention over the last several weeks, but why is that from what your research is showing?Newman:          Yeah. No. Absolutely. It's a great question. Listen, honestly, we were surprised ourselves really to see the magnitude of the transition out of public district schools and into other options. A couple important factors, our enrollment numbers are through the lens of parents. Our work is based on a large, nationally representative survey of parents of children in K-12. It is not the official data that states capture. It's the parent perspective, and it's really focused on what they believe they are doing or want to do for their kids, which we think is incredibly important. Parents are a voice that we don't often hear from regularly in this debate. Really, we saw two things that were primarily driving the dis-enrollment in public district schools from the spring '21 through spring 2022.                        The first was academic quality and perceptions of academic quality, which we could spend the whole hour talking about. I mean, I think, for different parents, that meant different things. Certainly, within the context of the pandemic, it meant the quality of the experience, the educational experience their students were getting based on the type of school model and format that they were participating in. The second dynamic was actually an interesting one to us and a little bit counterintuitive, which was school safety, but, interestingly, it was not focused per se on health, health-oriented safety issues related to COVID, but some of the more, unfortunately, age-old issues of bullying and violence in our schools that are really independent of the pandemic and those effects, but certainly as we see unfortunately in the news on an all-too-frequent basis continue to be really prominent.                        Those are really two of the drivers, and I think the third one that I think underpins that is the pandemic. You've written about this, Michael, in a lot of your work, too. Parents had a front row seat into what their educational experience was like for their students as a result of the pandemic, and they realized it was not what they wanted it to be or what it could be, and so this idea of parent agency married with a proliferation of choices and alternatives that started to emerge in response to the pandemic we think are what were many of the drivers that we saw in that fairly significant 10% dis-enrollment from the district public schools from the perspective of parents.Horn:                One of the most interesting pieces of that data point that you just said, the 10%, was that your sense was only 10% of that if I recall was due to the demographic declines or dropouts or delayed entry into K-12, which we heard a lot about the redshirting phenomenon in the wake of this, but the academic concerns, the bullying which frankly, if you talk to educators, they say that the school violence issues that they were dealing with were a lot worse coming out of the pandemic in the return to school as well. That adds up I guess, but I guess I'm just curious in terms of what you found that parents are choosing instead. What are they turning to when they make that choice to leave that district school? You mentioned that there's a lot more options. They feel like they have a sense of agency. What are you learning about in terms of the actual choices that they're making in a proactive way? Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.

Anu Malipatil is the founding team member of the Overdeck Family Foundation, one of the most significant forces in education philanthropy over the last several years. In this conversation, we talked about Overdeck's philosophy around creating transformation in the field of education, what kinds of projects Overdeck funds and why, and what innovations and efforts in education has Anu particularly excited at the moment, as well as the role of research in education innovation. As always, you can listen to the conversation above (or in your favorite podcast player), watch it below, or read the transcript.Michael Horn:   I am very excited about today's guest because it's someone I've known and gotten to work with in the education field for many years now. Back to when I helped start the Robin Hood Learning and Tech Fund, and then have remained as an advisor to it. One of my favorite people in the world of education, Anu Malipatil. She is the founding team member of the Overdeck Family Foundation. We're going to get into what Overdeck does and much more, but first Anu, it's really good to see you.Anu Malipatil:   Yeah, so great to see you too. Thanks for having me.Michael:           Yeah, you bet. Before we get into the professional side and what you're excited about right now as you're helping to shape the future of education, I guess where I want to start is you have an interesting personal story and journey through education into philanthropy. I suspect that people checking this out will be curious. How does someone start in education then end up in this place where you get to invest dollars into promising ideas and help shape innovation and research in the field? So I'd just love you to share your own personal story in this world.Anu:                 Yeah, thanks for that question. Well, my personal story really starts with my dad. My dad grew up in a small rural farming village in South India, and education was the key that unlocked his ability to pursue college. It was also the key that gained him entry into the US on a student visa. This concept of unlocking potential for every child, which is the vision of Overdeck Family Foundation, is very personal for me. This connects to my own story because I knew that working with kids to help them unlock their potential would be the way that I would shape my life purpose. In fact, in fourth grade we had an assignment to write an autobiography, which was quite funny as a nine-year-old. But on the last page, the assignment asked us to write about our life ambitions. At that age, at age nine, I knew that my life ambition was to be a teacher. When I finished college, I joined Teach For America. I taught seventh grade math and science at PS/MS 95 in the Bronx and it was the beginning of really living my life on purpose.                        And the second part of my story they don't talk about as often, but I think gets at this question of how I got into philanthropy, my life has been really guided by a strong cultural principle, which is called work as worship. It's this concept that you put your full heart into your work and that your work should be something that makes your community better. And so I really apply this principle to solving challenges in my current context and then also trying to create better conditions for those who were to come after me.                        I started in my first chapter of my career as a teacher as I mentioned, I felt wholly unprepared to step into the classroom, so I committed the next chapter to really coach and develop and prepare teachers to be more effective in their roles. And then as I started supporting teachers all over schools in the Bronx, I really saw this common challenge of them not having enough access to high quality instructional materials or common assessments. So the next chapter of my career, I devoted to really building and architecting the first open source high quality curriculum, which is called Engage New York, which certainly played an important role in shaping the curriculum market today.                        Then as I saw that and was involved in that work, I saw the role that philanthropy played in getting EdReports off the ground. I was there at that very first meeting. And EdReports, for those of you who don't know, is a really important market shaping mechanism for high quality instructional materials. And so it was that meeting that I decided that philanthropy would be the next place that I wanted to have my contribution and impact and to really think about how to lead in different areas in education. So here I am at the Overdeck Family Foundation, as you mentioned, as the founding team member, but almost over nine years into the role investing in innovation, evidence building and growth to do just that.Michael:           Wow! I love these conversations because I get to learn something. I hadn't heard the work as worship piece before either from you. But I want to get into the Overdeck then philosophy on philanthropy in the education sector and your theory of change. You mentioned it there around helping build evidence and innovate. I'd love you to elaborate on that and what that looks like on the ground. What are the sorts of investments and the girding philosophy that's guiding those?Anu:                 Yeah, of course. Our mission at the foundation is to open doors for every child by measurably enhancing education both inside and outside the classroom. We really see our role as grant makers focused on scaling cost effective, sustainable solutions that we think can improve both academic and socio-emotional outcomes for kids. But based on my background and my professional experience. I think we're smart enough to know that scaling programs isn't enough and so we also invest in the ecosystem to build favorable conditions for these impactful solutions to scale.                        We do this by investing in research, program evaluations and various policy-making building efforts. Through all of this, we really try to help our grantees unlock innovation, evidence building and growth. I think one of the underlying philosophies that you asked about that I that might want to touch on here is that we really try to do what we know the government struggles to do, that we know the Department of Ed spends less than one 10th of 1% of its budget on R&D, a step that I know you know quite well, Michael. So we invest in innovation because we know that philanthropy can take risks.                        We invest in evidence building because we know that while there are grant programs like IES and NSF, those are often slow and burdensome for organizations to be able to apply to. So we aim to provide evidence building support that is timely and helps meet grantees where they are. We care both about proving and improving program effectiveness, which is oftentimes harder for the government to be able to support. Then lastly, we invest in growth. We support organizations on their growth journey and we advise them in building key capabilities that we know are required for sustainable scale. Really helping to position them for sustainability and public funding down the road.Michael:           So I want to get back into that research and innovation in a moment, but let's just stay on the growth trajectory. Can you give us some examples of some of the organizations that you've funded along that growth trajectory that have really helped, I guess launch them into escape velocity toward the sustainability trajectory, if you will, that you get really excited about when you think about widespread impact on kids?Anu:                 Yeah, of course. I would say a handful. There's so many organizations that we're so excited about, but a handful that really stand out to me, ParentCorps, which is an organization that works to prepare parents for their little ones joining school in a more formal way. That organization, when we first started supporting them, they were operating in a handful of schools in New York City. They had a strong evidence base behind them but didn't have yet the scale. And so we supported them through a really important growth trajectory where they became eligible for New York City funding. And we actually helped them unlock the public funding to be able to be provide their program in most pre-K and K programs across the city.                        Another example is LENA, which most folks know them as the organization that creates or provides the pedometer that goes into sort of children's vests to help count the words that an adult might articulate or communicate to a little one. We call that sort of conversational turns and word count. And so that organization, when we first started funding them many years ago, they were operating in a handful of regions. Today, we've supported their growth at least 3x over the last five years. Reaching over 18,000 students and young ones across dozens of regions. And then of course we support organizations like Springboard Collaborative and TalkingPoints, both of which have had immense growth over the last several years. And we've been with Zearn for many years of their journey as well.Michael:           And that's obviously an incredible scale story there. We could deep dive in all of those organizations for a while. But I want to come back to this conversation you had around you're investing in areas where the government struggles, I would say tragically struggles in the case of the research piece because in other sectors the government does pretty well in terms of funding research and so forth. But in education, as you noted, it's scant, it's barely scratching the surface. But there's a lot of folks, as you know that will say, "Well, research on what works is at odds with innovation where you just need to be trying things." Or I'm not quite sure what the narrative is, but they sort of have this at odds sense of it. I certainly haven't seen it that way. I know you don't either. How do you think about these things as working in concert with each other, and why should we not see them as opposite ends of the spectrum, if you will?Anu:                 Yeah, it's such a great question and I agree with you that I think oftentimes folks will tend to pit these two against one another. And I think as you mentioned, they can really work in concert with one another. And so we, at Overdeck Family Foundation, we don't see this as a tension. We think both really matter. And I think we know, and I think we'll admit that the current way that kids are learning, the way that teaching and school is organized is not really working. And we've seen that of course with the decades of plateaued NAPE scores and the most recent decline in both math and ELA in fourth and eighth grade. And so I think we really think innovation is critical to look at these challenges in new ways. And we believe that understanding that those innovations work is equally as important. So we support organizations on their evidence building journey so that we're not just testing and trying and tinkering, but that we're also understanding if we're tinkering and trying and innovating, that we're supporting those innovations to be as impactful as possible.                        And so just to give an example of what this might look like, I think we know that teacher professional development, the research is fairly conclusive that one and done PD doesn't work. And we have early signals that PD aligned with high quality instructional materials can actually result in better outcomes for kids. But the thing that we're really interested in innovating around is a delivery model. Can it work in a hybrid model? Can it work in a virtual model? If so, which components are best suited for virtual delivery? And does the dosage matter? It does it need to be different in virtual versus hybrid versus in person? And so our support of an organization and a collective called the Research Practice Partnership for Professional Learning, also known as RPPL, is structured to do just that, sort of understand these innovations and understand the impact of them over time.Michael:           And is that your practice in general, every time you're making an investment in an early stage, either organization or new spin on something that they've done, that you're also coming in alongside and saying, "Great, we're going to invest in your program capability, your development, your growth, whatever it is, but we're also going to make sure that we're building a research base." Or are those things decoupled in some instances?Anu:                 Yeah, they're mostly coupled together. I would say we do think about research both as sort of little r research and big R research so that we're sort of really meeting grantees where they are, as I mentioned before, that if we're really testing a brand new innovation and it's built off of existing an existing evidence base, then maybe a pre-post is appropriate for the first round or an AB test is appropriate. And then the innovation builds, we have some evidence that can build or data of signals in the right direction. We can start to move towards more rigorous research like a QED and in very few cases. But I think critical cases, we do think about RCTs when organization is ready and where RCT would be meaningful for the organization and their journey.                        And we certainly think that there are different stages of that journey. And as much as we can be supportive to meet organizations where they are is I think the best we can do. So we invest both. We have support organizations both in gaining key capabilities, whether that's personnel. We partner with the Harvard Strategic Data Project to place fellows in our early stage organizations where they oftentimes don't yet have data teams to help them of think through a theory of change in a logic model, and then in later stages actually support by partnering organizations with a third party research provider who is best suited to help them. So kind of all of the above.Michael:           No, but that makes sense. And then I guess just staying on this, because you talked actually in the beginning of your career realizing you wanted to go into philanthropy, influence of ED reports on in that and the way it made the market bringing forth what's actually aligned to the standards and so forth and thinking about materials through that light. You're doing all this research building now and so forth. One of the biggest struggles, and people joke about it often, they say, "Well, how do you know if you know the curriculum or the ed tech or whatever it is that you're going to adopt works or not?" And people will jokingly say, "Oh, well I'll go to the website of the company and look at the 10 studies that they list." And most of them are pretty poorly done and so forth. So how do you make sure that these good studies that can actually inform adoption and so forth sort of lifts the evidence base, if you will, of the field and is distinctive or distinguished maybe from all the other stuff that is out there? Because companies realize they have to have something with the word research in it.Anu:                 Yeah. I will say that the non-profit versus for-profit curriculum providers are definitely different, have a different, let's call it spirit around research. And I would say we partner mostly with the non-profit organizations that provide curriculum. And so what I would say is that we oftentimes partner or incentivize organizations to do the sort of the right size, right stage evidence building. But the truth is that buy in important on both sides of the sort of table. So the organization needs to understand what having better research will do for them, both from selling to customers, but also for their end user, the student or teacher and student. And for us, I think we see it as one of our unique value propositions in the philanthropic sector. I think there are many foundations who would like to see evidence behind programs before they would fund, but are not as interested in actually putting the dollars to invest in building the evidence.                        So that sort feels like a really clear place where I think we can add value and fill a gap in the field. But look, I think it's a really tricky thing. I think a lot of times curriculum providers are very quick to put a stamp on the front of their book to say it's curriculum, it's standards aligned or it's efficacious and these ways. And the truth is, it's important for us. I think we think we can be a clear leader and sort of help to shift the behavior towards rigorous research, especially when we're talking about curriculum getting in front of millions of kids across the country.Michael:           Yeah. And obviously the folks you fund are literally doing that. We're talking about millions and millions of kids. So yeah. I want to shift then to the innovation side of this and the innovation specifically that you and Overdeck are most excited or interested in right now at this critical time in American education. What are you looking at and why is it interesting to you?Anu:                 Yeah, wow, there is so much here. There's really four big areas that I'm excited to talk with you about, Michael. Four areas that I know you're deeply interested in as well. So I'll sort of name these four top level and then I'm happy to go into a little bit more detail wherever the conversation takes us. But the first is using technology to help kids and families. The second is re-envisioning out of school time to create more connection between after school, summer and in school time. So these things are less siloed. The third is re-imagining healthcare as a channel to support not only physical milestones, but also academic ones. And then last but not least, redesigning the educator workforce to better meet the needs of students, which is, I know is a topic that we are both very interested in. So I can start by talking about what we're excited about in technology to help kids and families.Michael:           Yeah that’d be great.Anu:                 There's a couple areas that I think we see really great promise. The first is in family engagement. I think for decades we've known that family engagement is critical to a child's success, but reaching parents is oftentimes difficult and expensive. And so technology shows us that it can be done at scale. We support an organization called TalkingPoints, which is a two-way multilingual family engagement platform that uses text messages. They have found that 98% of teachers were able to reach families they had never reached before through their platform. And 100% of non-English speaking families were more engaged with their child's schooling after using TalkingPoints. And so we know that a child's first teacher and often supporter is their family and parents. And so it's critical that we continue to find ways to make this engagement really easy and effective.                        A second area we think technology has a lot of promise is an assessment. On the assessment front. We know that technology can allow teachers to understand student progress and gaps, let's say both the pluses and the minuses more frequently and informally. So platforms like quill.org and CenterPoint offer realtime insight through diagnostics and non-graded quizzes and worksheets. And then we know that research suggests that oftentimes when these types of assessments are paired with high quality curriculum, they can also save teachers time by providing actionable data and kids can get more timely support. And then two areas that are close to your heart, personalized learning and tutoring. We're seeing lots of promising evidence that's starting to build on both of these areas.Michael:           That's awesome. Let's go then to the... All these are really freaking fascinating to be totally honest. Yeah, totally. I'm super interested in the connecting of silos, the re-imagining the healthcare side of this, because I think the health and wellness conversation, I know there's a lot of schools that say we want to stick to our knitting, but the reality is given the conditions that students are arriving to them at, if they don't think about their health and wellness, good luck doing the teaching and learning itself. So maybe let's do a beat on that and then let's talk a little bit about redesigning the educator role and what you're seeing there and excited about.Anu:                 Cool. So on the healthcare side, I would say actually we're thinking about healthcare as a sort of delivery channel. We know that almost every child has a well visit, sees a doctor with a parent or a caregiver. And we really think that this is critical in the earliest years between birth and age three, where we know that about 80% of a child's brain is formed. So organizations Reach Out and Read, actually think about integrating, reading into the pediatric visit, advising families about the importance of reading and sharing books that actually support healthy childhood development. So I think what you're touching on too though, Michael, is that there's sort of the mental health and wellness, even in the K-9 school experience. I think there is a lot of work to be done there. We think that there's a lot of action also currently in that space. And so we've chosen to focus our energy in the zero to three space for now.Michael:           Man it makes a ton of sense. I love that. And all it is also ultimately closing the gap that for all the early childhood education efforts have been unable to do, which is to get before age three in this country when honestly a lot of this development really occurs to your point. Let's go though to the human capital piece of this and redesigning the educator role, something as you noted, I'm incredibly interested in as well. What are you excited about in this area? What are you trying to accomplish? Who's doing interesting things in your view?Anu:                 Yeah, so I know you've written about this extensively, Michael, but I think, I'm not going to tell you anything you don't already know, but I think the thing that we've just been struggling with or grappling with for quite some time now is that this traditional model of teaching has one teacher to 25, 30 kids, it just, it's not working. It hasn't worked for quite some time. I think back to the days when I was teaching middle school science, I was teaching seventh grade, five classes of 30 kids. There was no way that I could understand even the needs of kids in the classroom adapt and modify my lesson plans to meet each of their needs. So I think knowing that the gap for students has widened, knowing that the needs are more diverse today, a redesign model is just so critical. And it starts with understanding the needs of students in each classroom, but also assessing the strengths of the adults in the school and designing solutions that really optimize for both in service of student outcomes.                        And I would say that largely the conversation has not been focused there. It oftentimes is solving for staffing shortages or solving for a very acute problem versus this more kind of macro challenge that we're navigating. So I think this could look like a lot of things, and this could look like having your strongest seventh grade math teacher teach to a class larger than 30 kids or having expert teachers taking on coaching and mentoring for other teachers, more novice teachers. You could have teachers that are maybe less great at classroom management, actually do more of small group tutoring or sort one on one type coaching for kids. And then you could also think about how to better amplify kids who are doing great work and allow for greater near peer mentoring options. We know there's a strong evidence space behind it. It's an opportunity to allow kids more agency and leadership and to learn from one another.                        And then of course, we think that technology could be leveraged in ways to really help a teacher be able to better meet the needs in their classroom. And so there are a couple organizations that we think are doing this really well already, just to answer this sort of question of who's doing it really well. Public Impact Opportunity Culture has done a really nice job of creating or defining different roles for adults, giving them various career opportunities and compensating them differently based on the roles that they play in a school. And this works really well, especially in places, districts and states that have light and thin teacher contracts. It doesn't work in all places, but I think we're seeing lots of positive impact in places where they are currently working.                        And then I think on the more, I would say early side of things, but I think very promising is ASU's Next Education Workforce efforts. They really focus on building workforce teams of educators with distributed expertise. And so really envision these as dynamic teams of educators who share a common larger roster of kids, but these teachers can work together to deliver better outcomes for learners while also making the job more rewarding and sustainable. We've heard teacher testimonies around not being siloed and having to work alone, but getting to work with a team both really lifts joy and satisfaction with the work while also making them more effective in the job.Michael:           Super interesting. Okay, so as we're running out of time here, and last question, because we've heard about all the things you're excited about, these four areas. Putting you on the spot here, aren't you excited about? What wouldn't you invest in right now? Because that's actually part of the really important job of an effective philanthropist is to help be clear about what you won't do. And so I'm sort of curious what, what's out there that either you're not excited about, the foundation's not excited about, or maybe it's over hyped or maybe it's just crowded and you feel like that's not your area.Anu:                 Yeah, so I think it's a really great question and it is a strategy question we always ask every time we sort of do a revisit of strategy. What are we going to do and what are we not going to do? And just to your point is just equally as important. One area that I think there is a fair amount of field energy around, but I think we've just decided is not for us is technology as the sole driver of educational outcomes for kids or technology being the sole contributor. I think we know what the research says about how important it is for kids to have a caring relationship or one on one relationship with an adult. And so we look for organizations and models that actually really blend a caring adult with a technology component. So that's one, I would say we tend to veer away from technology only solutions.                        We also have sort of steered away from socio-emotional learning solutions that are standalone for the reason that oftentimes we think that socio-emotional learning can be embedded in academics for where it can have the greatest impact. It's not meant to be a separate time or a separate period of the day where you just focus on grit and persistence. In happens in class. It happens throughout the day. And we have historically supported Valor's Compass model, which we do think very highly of. It's hard to scale those types of models because they really rely on a deep amount of educator expertise, let's call it on socio-emotional learning. And so as they started to scale, I think we felt like, "Okay, actually let's figure out how we can integrate these types of practices more into the school day versus a separate call out period."Michael:           No, it makes a ton of sense and I think it's consistent to your point with the research base, which says that these sorts of skills like executive function, agency, grit, whatever it is, much better when it's woven into the actual academics and we're showing kids that this matters as opposed to just having a standalone period and telling them that it matters. But then maybe the rest of the day doesn't in fact reflect that, which is the irony of today's education system in many ways.Anu:                 I know. Totally. Yeah. Couldn't agree more.Michael:           So last thoughts from you wrapping up. As you think about where Overdeck is going to make the biggest impact, what's the one thing that you haven't said to us yet that you're like, "Okay, that's going to be the thing that in a couple years from now we're going to be all talking about", that maybe you didn't see coming or that we're doing early research on and you're particularly peaked or intrigued about?Anu:                 Okay. Well there's two things that I, we are thinking about a lot that we are seeing coming but have not yet figured out what to do about it. So maybe I'll speak about those too. One of those is I think to really envision and redesign the educator role, we really have to figure out how to break down this barrier of union contracts specifically around key policies like the seed time waiver and the number of prep periods and teacher compensation. I think without being able to move and flex those contracts we're really going to struggle with that redesign sort of vision that we have. And then I think we're looking really clearly at what an Essor funding cliff about two years time. We're looking at a declining school population, as you've noted in one of your recent articles. And so we're expecting drastic, I think school budget reductions. We know that personnel is the largest cost for schools, so we're expecting teacher layoffs in two to three years time. And so the thing that we're thinking about or grappling with is what would it take or what do we need to have in place now to be able to navigate what will feel like a really tough set of conditions in 2024, 2025?Michael:           Super interesting. And it's interesting how through all of the work you're doing, human capital considerations and the people that are working with kids pervades every single one of those and it comes out loud and clear.Anu:                 Yeah, 100%. It's true in every sector, I think, right?Michael:           Yeah. The people matter. And so Anu thank you for joining us in the Future of Education. Keep up the great work at the Overdeck Family Foundation and really appreciate all the contributions you're making.Anu:                 Thanks Michael. Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.

Homeschooling, charter schools, boarding schools, traditional schools, private schools, and more are all familiar modes of schooling. But the fastest growing segment of K–12 education is also one of the newest and least familiar: microschools. What's behind the microschooling movement? What might it enable? What should we watch out for as it emerges? Don Soifer, the CEO of the National Microschooling Center, joined me to share more. Don has been advocating for microschools well before the pandemic, and prior to his role in that movement served on the DC Public Charter School Board from 2008 to 2018. As always, you can listen to the conversation above (or in your favorite podcast player), watch it on YouTube below, or read the transcript.Michael Horn:   Don, it is good to see you. Thanks for joining.Don Soifer:       Great to talk, Michael. Always a pleasure and I've learned so much from your work and our work together. This is the most exciting opportunity to put it to good work, I've had to enjoy and in my career hopefully innovating.Horn:                Well, that says a lot because you've been in a lot of movements at the forefront of education innovation. You see things early, you get on them, you do things with them. I want to start there by framing the conversation for folks.                        Let's just do it around your entry point right now. What is the National Microschooling Center itself, and why are you excited about this microschooling movement that is burgeoning?Soifer:              The National Microschooling Center is an empowering hub for pioneering small learning environments. In the course of doing this, and we've launched the center over the summer. We have both met and gotten to know some people that have been doing incredible microschooling work for a long time. We've gotten to feel like we've inspired some fantastic educators and leaders to do new and innovative things, and just as likely to do some old and innovative things. Microschooling is to me, in so many ways, the most exciting storyline we've come across in American education in a long time.                        I think that way because the incredibly transformative potential that we see, it's all about designing learning and teaching learning around the needs of the particular learning that you're serving, and the relationship that you've built with those. There's just so much need and space for that everywhere we look in education, everywhere we've been in education. It's just exciting everywhere we look and the people doing it are the reason why.Horn:                When you say you're helping all these entrepreneurs, all these microschools that are popping up, empowering them, what does that support look like on the ground?Soifer:              Well, we've got one of the fastest growing movements and storylines in education. The researchers say there's between 1.1 and 2.1 million learners, who are relying on microschooling as their primary and first source of teaching and learning. It looks so different in so many different ways, in so many different types of settings, and in just about every different jurisdiction in the country. Depending on those jurisdictions, the National Microschooling Center loves to provide resources and learning tools.                        Sometimes we do bulk purchase of learning tool licenses, so that we can take learning tools that we like working with and make them available to our microschooling leaders, along with some training and some background, and some help tracking them. In some cases, it's helping them navigate the often complex framework for operating that they're working in. In the school choice friendly states, that can be as simple as connecting in a seamless fashion with the school choice vehicle in their states.                        Where there's other states that we have those incredibly life-changing educators that we're fortunate enough to have maybe one of in our lives, who are basically running microschools in some outlaw ethos. Because these are early adopters and the government and the regulators haven't quite caught up with what microschooling is, and how to work within in their setting and everything in between. Sometimes we help them connect with each other, sometimes we help them learn from each other.                        Sometimes with the incredible leaders that we have, we're able to share insights and innovations in a real community way, and it's got a feeling to it. Maybe we saw in those early days of the charter school movement, when these brilliant educators were meeting together in church basements trying to navigate how to bring this to the learners in their lives. It's got a feeling a lot like that, but in so many ways, microschooling is just such a different movement than those were.Horn:                I want to get into the compare and contrast in a little bit but first, I want to stay one more beat on this because you founded this center in 2022. But my recollection, is you got interested in microschooling well before that and frankly, well before the pandemic. It was something that I was certainly writing about before the pandemic.                        But my sense and my recollection at least, is that several years before it maybe, you said this could be a really important set of innovations or enabling innovations in the education sector. Tell me, is my recollection correct? Why was it that it sparked it for you, even before it became part of the popular lexicon?Soifer:              Yeah. I really fell in love with the ideas of microschooling around the time, Michael, that your co-author, Heather Staker, was getting involved with building the first acting academy in Austin, Texas. Really understanding the ways that knowing a learner and their individual needs, can make this whole process better. I come from the charter school world and school choice broadly, but particularly within the whole charter school world, lots has been written.                        Lots of really smart people have observed that it's increasingly difficult for charter school authorizers, to be able to approve and work with truly innovative learning environments that really live up to their potential. A lot of that has to do with the whole charter school approach has become about compliance and standardization. Even the best authorizers and some really, really smart people working in that space, find it really difficult to be nimble enough that they can bring in and attract, and support the diversified.                        Everything that microschools need to be, to really live up to their best potential. I lost a fight I felt early on in my involvement in charter schooling, where the idea of school specific and mission specific measures. So that if you've got a charter school with an approach that's maybe tied to social and emotional learning or performance art. That the charter schools could be evaluated on what's most important to the learners and the families that choose those charter schools.                        Whereas as the charter school world is turned into one of looking for a model and replicating it, and evaluating it based strictly on performance on standardized testing. Microschooling is such a diversified movement that brings together educators. As many hard left educators, as hard right, that really bring to this diversified approaches that we don't see very much of in the charter sector. It's an exciting movement.                        I think that the nature of permissionless education. In microschooling, the only permission that you really need is the permission of the learners and the families that you serve. That raises some really exciting potential and it makes this a space that has an excitement to it that we haven't seen in American education very often in a long time.Horn:                I want to double-click on a bunch of these things. This is where I want to spend the bulk of our conversation because I think these tensions are really interesting and you're calling it out. I've thought of it similarly. You ought to say the intent of the school in the public domain, is to produce these outcomes. Let's measure it in a way reflective of the school mission itself.                        As you noted, it just hasn't gone that way. What has that taught you, I guess, about when you start to take public dollars and you're asking for innovation at the same time, and maybe the tension there in it? Is this an inevitable thing that happened in the charter movement? Or do you think there's more nuance or subtlety there that it could have been done differently?Soifer:              Charter sector, and there are some brilliant educators working in the space, and some really exciting charter schools doing some really life-changing work. But the charter sector, in particularly the way that charter authorizers have evolved, has become increasingly compliance-based and standardized in a lot of ways. That it's just difficult for a charter school authorizer operating within the legal frameworks, in which they have to work. Charter school authorizing isn't easy, but it's relatively simple.                        A charter authorizer enforces the law by working with its community and with the schools that it serves, to satisfy the laws and the requirements, and the regulations that govern charter schooling. In ways that often put the most forward leaning and the most inspiring and inspirational charter school authorizers in a bit of a box, where they need to have a compliance mindset.                        Where a charter school needs to have a full-time staff person dedicated to nothing else but complying with the rules and requirements of the charter authorizer. It just becomes more and more difficult to do something truly innovative in it.Horn:                Stay on that for a moment, Don, just because is that the inevitable rise or creep? Because the ethos of charters originally, was free us up from the inputs because that's like the burdensome of the traditional district schools. We account for every single minute, how they use staff, all that stuff. It constrains innovation. The original ethos was free us up on the input side, and hold us to account on the outcome side. It sounds like charters in your view, have drifted considerably away from that in terms of how they operate.                        That's consistent with what I've heard from a lot of folks in the field as well. Is that the inevitable result of like, "Hey, we've got public dollars here"? More and more regulation is just going to creep in and mandate how we do the work, not just what the work itself is. Is that inevitable or could there have been another turn in the charter movement in your judgment?Soifer:              Well, I think that there's still plenty of opportunity for charter school leaders to be more nimble and to find ways to be truly innovative. It's not just the charter sector. I think that's something that we've seen broadly within the American school choice experiment. That when it comes to the use of public dollars, the deals that have to get made to bring people on board to the plan, or to bring an accountability regime.                        Because so many stewards of the taxpayer dollars and of students during the day, are rightfully so focused on making sure that they can police and protect against the bad actors in the space. But we've gone so far in that direction, that as innovative a charter school as you want to put forward, and there are absolutely some innovative charter schools out there. They're pretty much all at this point in every state that I can think of, measured really strictly on their performance on the state test.                        While I have always been an evangelist when it comes to the longitudinal growth of individual learners over time being the most important measure of accountability in a public education space. We have microschooling leaders that sit and that work with families, and the families themselves choose them because maybe they care more about the social and emotional growth of a child. Or because they simply have considered and reject their state's academic content standards, as being relevant to their child's future.                        Or just don't ever want to subject their kid, their children to norm referenced or criterion referenced assessments. There's space for them in the microschooling movement, so that you have microschools that really wouldn't have a space in the charter school sector. Or even in other school choice programs that get locked into certain ways of doing things. That truly hybrid approaches can't even operate in some of the more innovative education savings accounts models that we have, that are often held up as the state of the art in school choice today.Horn:                Well, so that's where I want to go next actually, which is you're seeing right now a growing movement across the country around education savings accounts, other forms of financing school choice. A lot of choice advocates are super bullish about this because they talk about the equity piece of this. That more and more families are going to be able to afford these innovative schooling options that are emerging. Which we should note, are generally lower cost than a traditional, independent or private school, but they still cost something.                        We're seeing more and more ESA programs start to give families the dollars themselves, so that they can choose these microschool options in many cases or other school options as well. I guess I'm just curious from your perspective, are you nervous about that movement because the public financing could lead us down the same road that you've seen with charters? Or is there something different here with the microschools? Once they start getting paid for from ESA money specifically or micro grants, whatever it might be, that makes them in your judgment, more immune to these pressures?Soifer:              I just don't know if I can confidently say I understand what the future of public school accountability is in this country. Everywhere you look, you see more and more hesitation to accept standardized testing regimes. And public education systems where you need to be so focused on compliance and adherence, and see time requirements, and 30 square feet per kid, and 180 days in a school year. Lawmakers that just can't resist getting involved in the academic content that we're teaching our kids.                        There have been really smart people, John Bailey comes to mind, who have really been advocates of the education savings account approach. Because it really allows for a more learned everywhere way of thinking about our schooling, so that a family and a learner can be savvy consumers and draw their learning from multiple, diversified sources. In this environment, they can choose to get their math learning from this space, or they can get their career training from this exciting internship or apprenticeship.                        That they can be truly hybrid in the ways that they pull together their education. The reality of this though, is that the reasons that education savings accounts are supposed to be better than school vouchers. Is that you should be able to use an approach where you're drawing your learning from a learn everywhere universe of different ways of learning. So often, our private schools and there are some really talented educators, who are really doing inspiring things in non-public education.                        But so often, private schools are so heavily regulated. They're so heavily reliant on systems like the accreditation system, that in some places it can work quite well. But when we are relying on these sorts of structures all in the name of protecting our learners against bad actors, it really limits the transformational opportunity to give learners what they feel in this day and age, in this economy. At first, I think microschooling was largely jump-started by the pandemic and the pandemic circumstances.                        I think since then, it's moved to a place where it's more motivated by the new economy. I think families at the more fragile ends of the income spectrum, are more likely to be willing to look critically and thoughtfully at the education system and think, "Is this where I want the learner that's important to me in my life to get all of their preparation to succeed in this new economy, or can we do better?" I think all of those reasons are contributing to an environment where families are just reconsidering their historic relationships with the institutions that they've relied upon to meet their education needs.                        And looking to be much more active consumers of their learning. When you have an active learner, Michael, as you know from all of the incredible work that you've done exploring the personalized learning models that are really making the biggest difference in this country. When you can shift from a passive to an active learner paradigm, the sky's the limit on the growth that you can witness, and the potential to really make an impactful difference. I think that's what's driving microschooling as much as anything else right now.Horn:                Super interesting on a number of levels there. I agree, by the way, that the shift from passive to active is maybe the most important part of this equation in my judgment as well. I've increasingly come to believe that. I want to stay on this outcomes or conversation just for one more beat. Which is there's some sense in the argument that I suspect some people will hear, which is pitting, if you will, private progress versus a public accountability or a public minimum progress. I don't know exactly the right way to frame it.                        I guess I'm just curious to hear, I'm not going to make you education secretary. But if you were education czar for a school year, how would you think about that tension between the private goals of individuals and families making those choices for themselves versus the public interest? When there's public dollars at stake of some let's even just say minimum accountability, how do you think about those trade-offs? Or do you think it's a false trade-off in your view?Soifer:              That's a great question on any number of levels, Michael. First of all, microschooling is about what you can create, not what you're leaving. When we look at establishing microschools in an environment like many states and many communities that I've worked in. Where for instance, more than half of Black boys are scoring at below basic skills in math in eighth grade, to cite one example. It's hard for me to look at the monopolist approach and think that this is a fail safe way to ensure that we're delivering a quality set of opportunities to the learners that we're being entrusted to serve.                        That said, this should be about what we're creating and not about what we're leaving, because that's really where the potential for microschooling lies. When the pandemic started and you would read in particularly the New York press about pandemic pods. To me, those stories raised more questions than they answered about are these things effective? Are these things equitable? That's why when we launched our own microschooling, we wanted to make sure that what we were doing is measurable and is equitable. In doing that, we were focused on pandemic learning loss. Certainly, there are microschools that do a terrific job measuring the academic growth of kids over time, because that's the way that you set them up.                        Microschools don't have to be set up with those goals in mind. One of the important areas that, I think, we've made good progress in the last three years, is that if you really want to show academic growth in a meaningful way, that we no longer are in a place where you need to rely upon the state standardized testing regime to do that. We did a fantastic case study with the Rand Corporation that validated the opportunity that if you want to use learning tools that are able to use their embedded assessments to measure the academic growth over time. And it can be aligned with state academic content standards or common core, or there's lots of choices that you can choose.                        That these are also ways that hold validity when they're done with integrity. And are able to be used in a meaningful way to help families stay informed about the learning progress that their child is making. That you really can use tools that everybody has access to that are not incredibly expensive. That if you do them in the right and thoughtful way, that you can use these to measure the academic growth of kids over time. Which has always to me, been the most important measure of being a good steward of the taxpayer's dollar and the child's time. Because growth over time, it tells you more about the value added that you're bringing to this as a provider.                        And less about the household that the child woke up in the morning, which is what proficiency ratings to me are so often about. That there's lots of ways to get this done. And that education technology, this is the golden age of digital content in so many ways. That what this creates is a flat earth environment where everybody has access to these incredible tools, that in the past only large government monopoly providers were able to access. That's a game changer to me in so many ways. And to bring this back to your question, it provides an opportunity that we just haven't had before that's enabled by technology, by everything we know about teaching and learning.                        Some microschools or Montessori microschools that don't even rely on technology very much at all. But everything that we've learned about everything that has to go into how we learn. And how teaching and learning can really live up to its potential, has a real place in microschooling that it's really hard to find in a much more traditional, institutional government school space.Horn:                So many good insights there, Don. I like it just because these are the questions that, I think, are so important to be wrestling with and asking right now, so I appreciate your insights and wisdom. As we wrap up here, I'll just offer a reflection of my side and then a question for you. Which is, I think, one of the mitigating things that should make people less concerned goes to what you were saying, which is that these point in time assessments that while you're learning they don't distract from learning, can show me the growth of my child.                        Are incredibly powerful and they answer the question that almost all parents I talk to ultimately want to know, when they choose these options or any school. They want to know, "How's my kid doing?" They want the answers themselves and they can see that sadly, the existing system or whatever it is, is often not working. You alluded to it there, which is that you have a microschool in Las Vegas as well, that you're part of that community. I'm curious, what have you learned from the parents through all this, that maybe you didn't expect when you got started down this path, as we wrap up here?Soifer:              Families that really experience a rich microschooling environment never want to go back. Something that really got jump-started during the pandemic, is now much more about what's possible in schooling. If a family within a robust, diversified, dynamic microschooling ecosystem wants to move from one microschool to another for a period of time, they can absolutely do that. They can have a microschool that fits their schedule, so that they can see their kids more often if they work shifts.                        Or they can really adopt a learning model that works well for their learner, and change that model in December rather than wait until the end of the school year to make those changes. When families understand what's truly possible and that they really can build an education around their own learner's needs, they don't ever want to go back to a system where they give that up. There are some families that might be happy in a large public school, where they can play football or play tuba.                        Maybe that's the best choice for them, and that's often the case. But as microschooling is gaining a bigger and bigger and more diversified market share, we're really seeing the innovative ways that it can live up to its potential. I think it's exciting.Horn:                Incredibly exciting. I love the work that you're doing, Don. I'm hoping when I'm out in Vegas, that I get to see you and see some of the work that you're doing.                        Just really appreciate you shining a light on this working to support so many educators, as they trailblaze this path. Then in turn, the parents and the students who are taking advantage of it. Appreciate your leadership so much.Soifer:              Thanks, Michael. Likewise. Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.

As readers of my newsletter know, I've long seen assessments as one of the biggest barriers to moving toward a future in which all individuals can build their passions and fulfill their potential in a positive-sum, mastery-based education system. Arthur Vanderveen is CEO of New Meridian, which is helping to redefine assessments that are valid and reliable, bite-sized and can be taken as students learn, and can be aligned to the content on which they're actually working so that they are helpful to students, teachers, and policymakers. As always, you can listen above, watch below, or read the transcript.Michael Horn:                In my mind, assessment is single-handedly both one of the significant barriers that is holding the education system back but it's also one of the biggest opportunities for innovation that can propel it forward, the learner-centered education system that our students need, our society needs, and so forth.                        And I would just say as a bit of prelude before I introduce my guest on today's episode, the problem with today's assessments in brief are that they really are a reification, if you will, of today's time-based learning system. In today's system, we offer learning experiences, we test and assess, students make progress to the next unit, the next subject, the next grade level, whatever it might be, and only afterwards do they get the results with very little ability to do anything with that feedback.                        Or maybe, it's a formative assessment that they get in the context of their learning, but it's not something that really helps with their transparency around their learning. It's often not a high quality assessment of any sort, so they don't really get credit for those sorts of learning experiences in any meaningful way.                        What's interesting is as a result, assessment often becomes synonymous with an autopsy in our education system. It's just basically a view of what the student did, but not an opportunity to improve their learning, which frankly is a shame. Because in a mastery-based learning model, we would offer learning experiences to students, we'd still do testing and assessment, but that testing and assessment would essentially be almost real time or interactive to inform what a student did next, and only when they truly demonstrated mastery would they move on. It's a very different model for assessments, and it requires a very different model of thinking about validity and reliability and so forth.                        In that model, assessments could be shorter, they could be more frequent, and they could be both for and of learning. So break this trade-off between that formative and summative by performing both. Our guest today, Arthur Vanderveen, the CEO of New Meridian, knows a heck of a lot more about all of this than do I. He's in my mind helping create these innovations in assessment to really propel the system forward toward this much more learner-centered vision that I have outlined. Arthur, first, welcome to the Future of Education. It is great to see you. I'm excited for you to talk to us, teach us, and correct everything I just messed up about the future of assessments, but thanks so much for being here.Arthur Vanderveen:     Michael, it's great to see you and a real pleasure to be here with you.Horn:                So let's just dive right in. Tell us a little bit about your own background, and what is New Meridian?Vanderveen:     So I've been 25 years working to improve K-12 education in the US, both in the for-profit, non-profit, public sector, private sector, and a few things have animated me over those 25 years. I developed my expertise with assessment when I was at the College Board, and when I led assessments for the New York City Department of Education, where I also had the opportunity to help launch and run the Innovation Zone under then-Chancellor Joel Klein, an interesting intersection because the I Zone was all about how can we develop and support schools in developing more student-centered, personalized learning models? Doing that work while also running all of the assessment programs for New York City Department of Education.                        So you just hit the nexus of my career passions about how can we make assessments better support innovative, new, more personalized, student-centric learning models?Horn:                So it's a fascinating background. Again, to my mind, it's maybe the most important topic in education, to think about how we actually move meaningfully forward. I'm curious, just to start with a little bit more history which is No Child Left Behind ushers in the mind of the public at least these high stakes assessments. Arguably, they'd been going on for a decade at least before No Child Left Behind in the States and so forth. Then there's the Common Core, there's SmarterBalanced, PARCC, all these innovations on top of those summative assessments.                        And then people start to say, "Well, gee, maybe we want a little bit more innovation in this space," but they restrict it to grade level assessments and things like that. I'm just curious where in your mind is the state of state assessments at the moment as you look at the landscape?The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Vanderveen:     Starting from the end and working backwards perhaps, I mean, we've all just experienced perhaps the biggest disruptive shock to our education systems in the pandemic over the last two, two and a half years, which I think put in question many of the assumptions around the NCLD era accountability models.                        We as a county just had a crash course in hybrid and blended learning, where the locus of education instruction moved from school-based standardized central education instruction into our dining rooms and our dining room tables. And that has been... I think will have a lasting disruption. Technology enabled, more personalized learning models have been anchored into not only our schools, but our parents' and our families' expectations. So I think it's opened up space for real innovation.                        NCLB did tremendous things. It's part of the original 1965 ESEA, which was commitment to civil rights. We need to know that every school is serving all of our students equitably and fairly. NCLB helped us move along that path tremendously. But there's room for improvement, to be sure in our state level assessment and accountability models. And they are a constraint on innovation as we try to get to more student-centered learning and assessments supporting those models.Horn:                So I'd love you to just dive in, and then in a moment, I want to get into what you all are doing at New Meridian to break that down, but just stay there with us for a beat on that, which is how are the current assessments still holding us back from these personalized models that you've advocated and tried to push the Innovation Zone, and elsewhere in your career, how are the current assessments holding us back from that specifically in your mind?Vanderveen:     I think it's the power of the accountability regimen that we operate under. So we currently have a single end of year snapshot of student learning, which reduces a student essentially to a single score, and that's not in the spirit of student growth and learning.                        And yet our states, our districts, our schools, they are so constrained in order to meet the technical requirements to ensure that those scores are valid and reliable and comparable, all the things they need to be, but wouldn't it be great if we could develop a model that is more instructionally valuable, more closely aligned to what's taught in the classroom, deliver more data and information to teachers and students and families along the way, and then in aggregate, try to build that technically valid summative score from those multiple assessments that provide a more holistic view of student learning throughout the year. That's the vision that we're working on here at New Meridian.Horn:                So let's go right there, which is New Meridian is trying to build these valid, reliable pictures of student learning it sounds like much more frequent throughout the year. What's the actual work look like? What's the product look like? Who do you work with? Is that at the state level, district level, and so forth.Vanderveen:     We're piloting what we call instructionally aligned assessment system right now in Montana and Louisiana. Both states, each won a Competitive Grant for State Assessments grant, CGSA grant, to help fund that work. And philanthropy has been also helping us fund the design and development of this early pilot. The challenge if you can imagine of aligning assessments to what's taught throughout the year from a state's perspective, they can't impose a single curriculum on districts. There's too strong a commitment in this country to local control.                        So it's always been the challenge of how do you align with what's been taught, when you're trying to get that summative score, that's why we do end of year assessments, because at least we know based on the standards, students should've mastered this by the end of the year. Once you start to press into what's taught when, then you start to get challenges. So the way we've tackled that is we take grade level standards and from an instructional perspective and curriculum perspective, how can we create mini-assessments? A collection of maybe 18 to 20 mini-assessments, micro-assessments that can be flexibly selected, sequenced, stacked, and administered throughout the year.                        So irrespective of what curriculum you're using, maybe it's high quality instructional materials, a green rated curriculum, or maybe it's something that's put together locally at the district, you can create a configuration of assessments throughout the year that cover the standards and support that end of year summative score.Horn:                So let me just make sure I understand. So basically, you have a body or almost a library of assessment modules, if you will. And based on the curriculum and what a student is working through, and I guess if I've chosen to go a certain content approach, another district or state has gone a different content/curriculum approach, we can pull off in modular fashion almost different assessments, or packages of assessments it sounds like, that have been vetted, they're valid, they're reliable, and deploy them alongside the learning so that we can get that instant feedback, it sounds like, about how the students are learning. Am I starting to get that right?Vanderveen:     Absolutely. In Louisiana and in Montana, we're working with selected districts for this first year who are using different curricula, because we want to show that each district can select in sequence according to their instructional plan, and we want to do the research and development then to validate the cumulative score and see that it serves for those summative purposes.Horn:                So that's super interesting, because now I guess that's the other question I have, which is what are the role of the traditional end of year in this version? Is it something that they're sampling against to just say, "Hey, did the score that New Meridian put together for the student predict accurately and in line with, and so we don't need this end of year summative assessment?" Are you expecting maybe more precision? What's the benchmark and the role of those old assessments if you will as you move into this new model?Vanderveen:     For a transitional phase, we will use them as a benchmark. It's part of the validity research. We want to see how we categorize a student in terms of mastery of grade level standards versus how they do on the end of year state summative, and we'll do those analyses to see how reliably both approaches determine whether that level of mastery... Ultimately, the ideal is that we don't need that end of year summative, because we've proven out that this approach both provides that real time instructional value back to the teacher and student and provides that comparable, reliable level of grade level mastery by the end of the year.                        And there's some other advantages of doing multiple measures throughout the year. Of course as you started to describe earlier, in a mastery based learning model, you want the feedback. You need the feedback, because it informs how you correct and adjust, where you go next, what precursor standards or understandings a student doesn't have, you want that real time information in a mastery model to move the student along.                        So that's the value of doing this throughout the course of the year, and then building that cumulative measure as well will dramatically reduce overall testing time, and that's a real goal for this whole design, is we want to have a single, coherent system of assessments that both support instruction throughout the year and provide that summative score?Horn:                My head's going a number of different directions, because there's some exciting features here. I'm just curious in terms of the day to day work of New Meridian, are you all building the actual assessment items and checking them for bias and all those things to make sure that they're valid and reliable, or are you taking assessment items from others?                        What do these assessment items look like? One of the criticisms obviously of No Child Left Behind, your state assessments was that they tend to be "low level, multiple choice, not performance-based." So there's a bunch of questions in there, but I'm just curious what the work is and what the output of those assessment items looks like?Vanderveen:     We're designing and developing the items ourselves entirely, so New Meridian, founded in 2016, and since 2017, we've been supporting the former PARCC states with their assessment design and development for their state level summatives. One of the reasons I founded New Meridian, because early when I was in New York City, was close to the design of the PARCC assessment, it really did push forward, advance the field in terms of the quality of assessments, focusing on critical thinking, problem solving, deep engagement with content, and strong emphasis on writing.                        And it's because I believe the PARCC assessment was such high quality, I wanted to start New Meridian to ensure that legacy continued. So we bring that history, that commitment to deep engagement with content and more authentic tasks to all the work that we do. There are some new challenges here when you start to try to give more timely information through the course of the year. You do need machine scorable items. The field there too has advanced dramatically over the last eight to 10 years in terms of technology-enhanced items that create a more authentic or deeply engaging task, but provide an immediate score.                        And then in our design, we'll still have open-ended tasks that require scoring. We'll do those at certain periods within the year, because we think it's important. Not only in writing, but also in mathematical modeling, in showing your reason, in solving open-ended problems quantitatively. Those are important performance tasks, and we will be using AI scoring to support the quick turnaround of those scores as well.Horn:                Super interesting. It sounds like you're going to address what your former boss Joel Klein always complained about, which was he used to always tell the story that it was December 1st, and he liked to joke that he probably went to you actually in the story and said, "Hey, Arthur, how we doing this year?" And you'd say, "Well, when the assessments come out next year in December, I'll tell you how we were doing at this point last year." And it always frustrated the heck out of him.Vanderveen:     And he's not alone. We've got to get scores closer to the point of instruction, if they're going to have any real value. Politically, I think families, state education agency leaders, chiefs, they recognize that. So I think there's more momentum now to get more utility out of state level assessments than there ever has been in the past.Horn:                Two other buckets of questions that I'm curious about, because you alluded to the fact that how you can design these assessments for different curriculum or content choices to yield to the local control desires of districts. Obviously, Louisiana has said, "We're going to be super centralized in terms of the content," as I understand it, and make sure the assessments are aligned around that.                        As a result of that, it sounds like you're trying to transcend the challenge that interim assessments have played in this world of accountability, which is to say interim assessments that are relatively content-agnostic have propped up to try to predict how a student is going to do on the end of year summative assessments, and give the school a lot more information, but instructionally not super helpful because they haven't been content aligned. It sounds like you're trying to disintermediate, or get rid of that system as well, if I'm understanding correctly. Is that an accurate portrayal?Vanderveen:     Not super helpful is I'd say an understatement. I would say actually quite problematic in terms of the impacts that interims have on curriculum and instruction. They primarily support a growth measure and prediction to the end of year state assessment. The way they do that is they essentially measure the same end of year blueprint three times a year, even at the beginning of the year.                        That creates a rather artificial measurement of growth, because they're measuring stuff the student hasn't seen yet. They haven't had the opportunity to learn that content. That's frustrating for the student. The other impact that interims have on instruction is too often, it tempts teachers to focus and drill on the skills that are tested by the interim assessment, which pulls them out of a coherent instructional plan.                        We want rather to let the dog wag the tail by creating these modular micro-assessments that can be flexibly aligned to what's being taught. All high quality curricula are aligned to standards. You can look at the standards in instructionally coherent clusters, and you can align to 80 to 90% of a district's scope and sequence, or an adopted curriculum, if you have enough of these micro-assessments to support that kind of flexible alignment. That's the approach we're taking.Horn:                It's incredibly exciting, frankly. Doing away to your point with the deviation from coherent scopes and sequence of curriculum for low level drill and kill that doesn't actually have much value in frankly boosting learning or test scores ultimately, as I read it, would be a welcome departure. I'm curious. You're not just doing this in the ELA and math areas. You're also doing innovative things with science assessment, as I understand it. Can you tell us a little bit about that work?Vanderveen:     Yeah. Two years ago, we launched the science exchange, driven by the fact generally, it's ridiculous how much money states spend on customized end of year assessments that are all essentially measuring the same standards, yet every state creates their own custom assessment. Underlying our model in all subjects is states should be able to share assessment items and realize those efficiencies by licensing content and using that in their state.                        That's especially true of science assessments, for states that are aligned to the next generation science standards, really deep set of standards. Multi-dimensional, cross-cutting, and to create high quality NGSS science assessments is very expensive. So some states are farther ahead than others.                        We wanted to set up a mechanism by which states could share those NGSS aligned content. We handle the licensing, the liability, the risk, all of that to let states help states. So we've been using that approach. We have a handful of states who are doing that now, some contributing, some licensing, some doing both, as they can refresh their science assessments using other states, high quality and we do a quality review and give them feedback on that.                        We're also now looking at high quality interim or a more testlets based system for science that has its own challenges, but we think the same things apply in science as they do in math and ELA. If we can get more instructionally valuable information back to the classroom, we're going to help learning outcomes.Horn:                It's incredibly exciting. Last question as we wrap up here, which is you suggested a problem with the growth scores, if you will, that the current state of interim assessments is something I had never thought about frankly. I had always thought about the problem with some of those growth scores is that they're norm referenced, so if you're in the fifth percentile of learners, it's comparing you against the fifth percentile learners, and if you grew "a grade level," well, that's actually compared to the others at the 5%, so it's building in lowered expectations. Huge problems there in my mind.                        But I think the growth question is still an interesting one, in the sense of gee, if I'm really working at a second grade math level even though I'm in the fourth grade, I actually would love to know, am I starting to master those standards over time? And am I growing to a point where I'll be on grade level, so I can keep up? Particularly in math, it's a cumulative subject.                        I'm curious how you think about that in the system, because I know right now, the federal requirements say you can only assess on grade level. But it seems to me that what you've built could be much more adaptable to whatever each individual student is in fact learning, and be assessing that to give a much more robust picture of what they have mastered, and what they have not yet mastered, perhaps. Maybe it's not a growth score, but a more transparent reflection of what each learner knows he can do. Am I reading that right, or what's wrong with that picture?Vanderveen:     No, I think you're reading it right. There's a lot in what you just said.Horn:                Sure.Vanderveen:     Especially on the math side, we're designing around the learning progressions developed by student achievement partners which extend across grades, and there is a, I would say strong emphasis coming out of the pandemic to focus on learning acceleration rather than remediation.                        And that means focus on grade level content, identify where students are struggling, and look at the precursor standards from prior grade or even before and how can you build those knowledge and skills, to help them be successful with the grade level content? That's strongly the model emerging out of the pandemic to accelerate the recovery.                        So since we're building on those cross-grade progressions, we can support the identification of those prior foundational skills, but we want to keep educators focused in the on-grade curriculum. We think that's essential. Too often, students get identified below grade level and they get locked into this cycle of remediation, and they never catch up. So we've been designing for a model that focuses on grade level, helps identify precursor skills when needed, and supports educators with those.Horn:                Super interesting. Arthur, final thoughts as we wrap up here on where this future could go with assessments and what sorts of learning models we might see in the future as a result?Vanderveen:     I do think we're walking through a door where the movement from standardized instruction and assessment is giving way to more student-centered, competency based learning models. The more we can have micro-assessments that are supporting, giving feedback to what students are learning on their own pace, the more we can move to that student driven, student-centered learning model.                        And we right now are designing for the district and school level to configure, but imagine we see the next iteration of this where the teacher and then the student can say, "I'm ready for that assessment now. I'm ready to demonstrate my mastery of that competency. Let me take it." And then build and level up through the course of the year on a true student-centered competency based model. And if we can do that and meet federal accountability requirements from that system, then I think we've really found the Holy Grail.Horn:                Now, that gets exciting. Arthur Vanderveen of New Meridian. Thank you for joining me on the Future of Education, and for the work you are doing. I appreciate it.Vanderveen:     Thank you, Michael, great to be here. Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.

While microschools and more make the news, how students get to their place of education—be those their core school or after-school learning opportunities—is a significant issue for many students and families. HopSkipDrive is changing that by creating a model in which caregivers can drive students with the result being a more flexible, safer, and affordable system of transportation to complement the big yellow bus. In this interview, HopSkipDrive founder Joanna McFarland shared more about the story behind HopSkipDrive, its current growth, and how to help regulators allow educators to embrace its benefits.As always, you can listen to the post above, watch it below, or read the transcript.Michael Horn:  Welcome to The Future of Education. I'm Michael Horn and I am extremely excited by today's conversation because we're living in this world, right now, where we're seeing a flourishing of more flexible schooling options for kids in a variety of formats, from a variety of actors that really transcend the one-size-fits-all history, if you will, of how schooling has always been done and the sense that it has to fit in a specific box with particular hours at a limited of flexibility and so forth.                        And yet against that world of innovation, that I think is incredibly exciting, there's some real questions around how do we make sure that this is accessible and equitable to all individuals? And a big piece of that, I've come to learn, is simply transportation. How do we make sure that kids can get to these different schooling options, this array of learning opportunities, not just frankly in the school building, but throughout their day to open up these pathways and opportunities for them? And my guest today, Joanna McFarland, who's the co-founder and CEO of HopSkipDrive, is literally reinventing how kids access transportation and really creating an on-demand ride service for kids. She's probably going to give a much better explanation than that, but Joanna, first, welcome to The Future of Education. Thanks so much for being here.Joanna McFarland: Thank you so much for having me.Horn:                Yeah, so you can hear my enthusiasm because I think you're really reinventing one of these structures that we just assumed like everyone gets on the school bus or maybe they're lucky enough to walk and the hours are fixed and that's we don't think about it past then, but I'm seeing in lots of communities a lot of desire for more flexibility or maybe people want different start times or different schooling options, an array of things, and transportation becomes the major sticking point in the way of those innovation efforts. So I guess, I'm curious though, what caused you to start HopSkipDrive? What was the main motivation instead of use cases that you saw we need a different set of options for transportation?McFarland:       So originally when we started HopSkipDrive, it actually had nothing to do with school transportation. It really had to do with creating options for full-time working moms and families, like mine, who were really struggling to just make the logistics of running a family work. I was trying to figure out how to get my son to karate on Thursday at three o'clock, and I came together with two other women. We are all moms, we have eight kids between us and we were just dying, and those eight kids went to five different schools. And so we were all just really struggling with how to get them to school, how to get them to after-school activities, how to maintain our jobs, how not to run out of work at three o'clock to make this all happen. And really designed it from the ground up with that idea in mind, with creating flexibility, with creating optionality while also laying a foundation for safety.                        We asked ourselves from the beginning, what does this need to look like for me to put Jackson or Sam in a HopSkipDrive? What do I want to see as a parent? And how do you devise and design a system and a technology that is designed around the idea that the person in the vehicle is not the person who arrange the ride, may or may not have a phone, and is a little bit more vulnerable. And that's really where it came from. We started as a consumer business. We pretty quickly realized that there was this world of school transportation and that it was a very large world and that it was really broken, even before COVID, that it was not efficient and that there were... We started with some of the hardest to serve students, students experiencing homelessness, students in the foster system, and students with special needs whose IEP included transportation to a different school.                        So these are kids who don't fit neatly on a school bus route or kids who are highly mobile and moving frequently. If you are a child in the foster system who moves placements at 10:30 at night, you can't reroute a school bus to get that child to school, and yet HopSkipDrive can get them to school the next day with no change in schooling. And we know that every time a child moves, and the average child in foster care might move three to five times a year, that might mean switching schools. Credits don't transfer. It can take several weeks to change schools. What one district teaches in fourth grade, another district teaches in fifth grade. And so that's one of the leading reasons that you see that the graduation rates for these more vulnerable populations being so much lower than the general population.                        We have federal mandates to fix that, but transportation is one of the biggest barriers. And a service like HopSkipDrive really helps districts provide transportation for those hardest to serve students in a really flexible, in a way that gives districts tools to solve all of these challenges. What we have seen post-COVID with greater, much more exacerbated bus driver shortages, is districts are struggling with all of their transportation and so they're cutting routes or they're consolidating routes, which means kids are on the bus for hours because that's the only way that they can make it work. And that's because we're using a one, we're trying to use a one-size-fits-all solution for transportation. And as you mentioned, it's not one-size-fits-all. So we need to redesign that and think about it more from the same way we're thinking about personalized learning and customized learning, we need to think about personalized transportation as well.Horn:                Gosh, I love so much of this and it fits so neatly into the pattern of disruptive innovation, as you're describing it, because it's starting in these non-consumption or maybe over-served by the 50 seat, or whatever it is, school bus but we just really need the point solution for that kid that doesn't have access to that school option that they need for their IEP, as you said, in the foster system or whatever it might be. It maps elegantly on. So let's talk about the solution then that you built for that because you really are motivating and allowing, I guess, caregivers as these drivers for children. It kind of looks a little bit like Uber, but much more vetted for the use cases as I understand it. So help us understand what the actual solution is that you've devised.McFarland:       Yes. So we think about it a lot more as caregivers on wheels as opposed to Uber. But what we have designed is a rideshare model, so we are using technology to match very highly vetted drivers, that we call care drivers, with school districts, with families, with child welfare agencies who need to get kids to and from school in a very safe and dependable way. We call them care drivers because care drivers have to have five years of caregiving experience. So they are parents, they are nannies, they are former school lunch aides or former teachers. We have a lot of retired bus drivers. We have nurses. These are people who live in their community who want to earn a little extra money doing that in a way that is flexible for them. They don't want to drive late at night, they don't want to drive drunk people.                        But what we find is they really want to give back to their community. They're often driving in the same districts where their own kids went to school and they feel very tied to the mission because rides are pre-arranged and pre-scheduled in advance and because, by definition, these rides tend to be, they change a little bit, but they're recurring. Maybe you're driving the same child, they start to develop relationships and they start to... They talk about, oh, Sophie is my Tuesday morning ride and I'm so excited to hear how she did on her history test. They provide a little bit more empathy than maybe a taxi driver. And the dirty secret of the school transportation industry is we're using a lot of cabs today for some of our most vulnerable populations. And so we're bringing caregiving and empathy and providing flexible income opportunities to the community to help solve the district's challenges and the community's challenges of making sure kids can get to school.                        On the other side, we're providing school districts with technology that allows them in a very easy way to see, they understand who the drive, they know who the care drivers are in advance. They can book rides, edit rides, manage rides. They can see those rides live in real time. Parents can use the app and so parents can see where kids are live in real time. You know, you order a pizza, you can literally watch that pizza get made and delivered to your house and you know where it is at all times, we should know where our kids are too.                        And so with HopSkipDrive, you can do that. What we see is that it also cuts down on the phone calls and the emails that a district is getting from transportation on up to the superintendent, where is my car? Where is the driver? Is my kid going to get to school on time? Is the bus going to show up today? With HopSkipDrive you can see all of that. And so it really gives peace of mind to parents, to the district transportation operators, and frankly, to the superintendent whose phone stops ringing.Horn:                Wow. So I'm learning so much. I love these conversations. So if I'm a district, I suspect a lot of districts are saying we need these more flexible options. They're probably coming to you in some cases. Where are you seeing the most traction right now? Is it at a state level? Is it the district level? What kind of districts? Give us a picture of where the usage is, right?McFarland:       Yeah, our partnerships are usually at the district level. So we are seeing a lot of outreach from districts. We're also seeing a lot of outreach from child welfare agencies and from nonprofits who are tied to the district in some way, shape or form, providing, as we talk about, extended learning opportunities and real world opportunities and things outside of school, CTE, right? A lot of those opportunities have a big transportation component and often kids are going in multiple directions. Think about a great internship program that a school designs. You've got 20 kids you've got to get to different internships, you can't use a school bus for that.                        Or you think about a district who's trying to figure out how to offer AP, maybe they can't offer an AP class in every single high school, but one high school can have it. Well, how are you going to get 10 kids from different high schools to that one at the same time for an AP class? That's where services like this create a lot of flexibility and allow districts to achieve some of their learning goals through infrastructure and through transportation, which you don't always think about as being central to meeting those goals. So we're getting a lot of outreach from districts and we're seeing a lot of innovation in this space and we're seeing people really start to realize that they have to think differently to solve some of these problems.Horn:                So one other question, just to follow up on that, which is are you seeing districts, they still have their contracts with the school buses, those are probably smaller than they used to be because of the challenges with the shortages and so forth, and then they're also taking a contract with HopSkipDrive to fill in these point solution, flexible, et cetera, use cases that really round out, or are they going all-in on HopSkipDrive? What's the range of models and how are they paying for that?McFarland:       Yeah, we very much compliment the yellow bus. We are not replacing the yellow bus, that's not our intention. And it's interesting, two-thirds of districts actually own and operate their yellow bus fleet. So a lot of our customers own and operate their own fleet as opposed to contract out. Many of our customers also contract out, but they're using us as a compliment to that. And some of our more innovative districts are really starting to think in a much more holistic way and we are helping them really think about what does your fleet size need to look like? How many buses do you need? How many drivers do you need? Because we're operating in this world of shortages, but when you think about it as a utilization problem, maybe the number of bus drivers that we have is actually sufficient. Maybe we can think about this a little bit differently.                        Save money and use that money to increase bus driver salary and retain them, retain the ones that we have. If we just think about this in a slightly different way, as you think about a world of electrification and a world of sustainability, knowing what kind of fleet size you need is actually really important because districts probably need a smaller fleet than what they have today and they need different size fleets. When you compliment with smaller vehicles and when you create a multimodal approach to this, that can really also help, not just your operating costs on an annual basis but your CapEx investments and electrification and can maybe help some districts accelerate that path because they actually need a smaller fleet and a different size fleet than what they have today.Horn:                Love it. Leaner and greener. And it starts to transform, frankly, strategy across the district as well 'cause now you can think about all your options and concert in a variety of ways and start to manage differently. It seems like the opportunities are limitless. I'm curious, where are the barriers to this growing? And I'll just say, I'm in Massachusetts. My district right now are having a fight over school start times for elementary schools and I was like, why don't you have flexible schools start times? Micro-schools within the schools, and you could use a service like HopSkipDrive for those families that wanted to opt-in to say the later start time. Because I get it, the buses are challenged. That's not going to be the solution that scales. Where are you seeing the barriers though? Why can't my school district contract with you?McFarland:       Yes. No, I think that's such a great example. Bell times, I think, are one of the bigger challenges that districts are trying to figure out. And you have all this research saying that starting high school later is better for kids. And the reason that we're not do... We're letting infrastructure drive our decision-making when we should be thinking about what is best for kids and now how do we solve this? And I think that one of the barriers is that people have thought about transportation the same way for 50+ years and they have thought about the school bus as the only way to get kids to school for 50+ years. And so when you look at regulations at a state level or policy, it's really designed with a 12 ton yellow school bus vehicle and a driver who is trained to drive that vehicle.                        And Massachusetts is a great example. I remember last year when school reopened, Massachusetts had to call in the National Guard to drive vans to get kids to school because they had such a driver shortage. Massachusetts has regulations that say that only a type, I think it's called a 7D vehicle, can drive kids to school. So what that means is a vehicle that has the school bus signage on top of the vehicle, the driver has to have a certain endorsement on their license that is not quite a commercial driver's license, but pretty close to a commercial driver's license, and has a lot of rules that were originally designed for safety in mind when driving a school bus but don't necessarily make sense given technologies available today and options available today. We talked about care drivers want flexibility. They want to find income opportunities in and around their regularly scheduled lives.                        They're not going to put a massive school bus sign and lights on top of a Prius, they're just not. But with all of the safety features that we have and all of the technology that we have underpinning safety, we have shown that they are very capable of getting kids to school in an incredibly safe way. In over 20 million miles, we have had zero critical safety incidents and we like to approach safety from a position we are relentless, we are innovative, and we are proactive when it comes to safety. We like to think about what are the concerns we have around safety, how do we approach those concerns using technology? We talk about the GPS tracking and the transparency and visibility. We have a safe ride team that is monitoring all rides live in real time with a series of proprietary alerts and technology that we have built.                        We have telematics who is in the app detecting driver behavior, so we can actually see erratic driving or using your phone, which the largest reason for accidents and injuries is distracted driving and device usage. So how do we use tools available today to innovate on safety, not just checking the box to rules that were written maybe several years ago with different vehicles and different drivers in mind and not asking... We like to ask why are those rules there? What are they trying to solve? How can we solve those rules with a model that works and gives districts the optionality and the flexibility that they need?Horn:                I love it. It's a shift from thinking about the inputs for their own sake, not forgetting the reason that they were put in place in the beginning to, a real shift to focus on the outcomes that we want to see, in this case, safe transportation to the place of destination on time and flexible, in this case, for each individual. So I'm just curious to drill into this and I'll use an analogy which may or may not fit here, but Southwest Airlines, when they disrupted the airline traditional carriers back in the day, they started by just flying point-to-point routes, basically, within Texas where the regulations did not touch because they were within a state.                        And then they built up their safety track record and, frankly, their consumer power as well and dollars. And then we're able to go to the federal government and do the deregulation and re-regulation, effectively, of the airline industry. But they did it, I guess, essentially by going around the regulation, so that's one pathway to transforming. It seems like maybe you have an avenue to do that on the direct-to-consumer, but I imagine once you start contracting with districts that gets a lot harder, I would think. So what are the sorts of changes or places in the regulation are you sort of working on to get started in states?McFarland:       Yeah, I think it is a great analogy. We're not doing interstate transportation, so it's a little bit different, but I think we start in states where we can operate our model within the regulations. We've always taken a very collaborative approach with policy makers and regulators. Again, with the approach of thinking about what are we trying to solve? Here's a way we can solve it that works with our model and addresses these concerns. It looks a little different, but here's how we do it. And by the way, we hold ourselves very accountable. We are the only ones in the student transportation space that publish our safety data. Every single year we put out a safety report. So we really, we're putting our money where our mouth is. We actually think everybody should do that because that's how you actually improve on safety, and then you can start to get apples to apples' data.                        So we do things like that. We do things by going above and beyond and publishing our data. We also do things by starting in states where we can do this so that we can create track records and then we work with states on a state by state basis. We work from a legislative standpoint, from a policy standpoint, and we work with districts to try to help us go to Departments of Ed and say this is what I need, this isn't working for me and this is what I need. And I'll give you another crazy example. I was just talking to a state director of transportation and they're not used to this kind of model. Everybody has their own school bus or they contract with somebody who's driving just for them. And so in their state, each school district has to do a background check on anybody who is driving for that district.                        And so what that would mean is if we were to go into a city in that state and, let's say, there's 10 districts in that state, a care driver would have to undergo 10 of the exact same background checks in order to be able to be on our platform to do rides in that city because they might be working with different school districts. Whereas we do background checks, we do fingerprinting, we do all of those checks on our own and have a clearing house, but because of the way that the rules were written long ago, that's what that state would require.                        And I tried to point, in conversation the director admitted to me is, he's like, "It doesn't make any sense. It actually creates way more burden on the districts and on us in the Department of Ed." And I said, "So how do we change it?" And he just kind of looked at me because he didn't know the answer to that. So we've got to get people thinking differently and trying to work together to change these things to give school options. 'Cause I asked him, "How are the driver shortages in your state?" He said, "They're pretty bad. We've got homeless kids who aren't getting to school because we don't have a way to get them there." So we're getting in our own way.Horn:                Where are you seeing the receptivity? Is it, because some of this is under Department of Education, some of this is maybe under Department of Transportation, each state is probably different. Where are you seeing the receptivity? Are there patterns starting to emerge, ways that you're going into a state and saying, let us help you get this regulation to a commonsensical ground so we can make progress?McFarland:       We are seeing that. Most of this is at the state level because the Federal Department of Ed and the Federal Department of Transportation don't really regulate this at the federal level. It really is all state by state. And so we try to work very collaboratively with each state. We try to identify where do we want to go and then, well in advance of going there, start to work with folks both on the legislative side and the policy side to get those changes made to allow us to go. And we get transportation directors from existing markets to speak on our behalf, to talk about the difference that we've made in their district. We have school board members who have talked about the difference that we have made in their district and how much they've seen things change. And so we try to show by example and show districts that you can do these things, again, if you're willing to think a little bit differently.Horn:                So last question as we start to wrap up, which is in certain states there's education savings accounts starting to boom and micro-grant programs and we're seeing micro-schools and all these very small, flexible, irregular, if you will, options start to abound for a lot of kids. I imagine transportation is a major question to those being able to grow and serve a variety of students. In those sorts of states, are you seeing traction there? Where's the point of contract when you're doing those sorts of arrangements? And what's your sense of where all this goes in this world where we're seeing this fragmentation and a lot more choices for families right now?McFarland:       Yes, it's a great question because choice isn't choice if you don't have a way to get there. And we see over and over and over again, parents would choose a particular school for their kids, but they don't enroll in that school because it's across town or it requires two hours on a public bus or they just can't get their kids there. And we've seen a lot of innovation in this. Arizona has been doing a lot of really innovative things and they have a $20 million transportation innovation grant program. They actually just launched the second one of those. So they allocated, at the state level, $40 million of innovative grants that school districts could apply for, charter schools could apply for. At Phoenix itself is very... Over 50% of the kids in Phoenix, I think, go to a school that is not their home school. And so these grants are designed, they've recognized, Hey, we need to do something about transportation.                        And they've seen a lot of really exciting things come from those grants. Some school districts are solving the problem themselves or creating carpooling apps for parents. Several districts are working with us. We're creating a really great hub and spoke model. So it's a way of working with the bus, getting a bunch of kids from disparate areas to a bus stop to fill up that bus on its way to school. We're working with Tolleson Union District in Phoenix on that. We're working with a number of districts there on helping them try to think about their driver shortage. So there are states and there are areas that are being incredibly innovative and trying to realize or trying to think through how do you solve these things in a slightly more real time way, but really how do you just get more efficient, more flexible?                        Because what that means is you're going to reduce time in transit, you're going to get kids to school on time and ready to learn, and you're going to open up so many more opportunities for kids. Just think about after-school programs. How many kids don't participate in after-school programs because there's no late bus to get them home, right? Or the late bus is at three, but football practice ends at four. And you think about you might have a bus that is full in the morning but in the afternoon is empty because kids are doing different activities. So when you start to think about that, you can open up so many opportunities both inside and outside the classroom. Just thinking a little bit more holistically and a little bit more creatively.Horn:                Gosh, I'm learning a ton here. I'm loving this. Last question as we wrap up, which is just an open-ended one, which is what else should we know about this burgeoning space that you all are creating, in essence? And what should I have asked?McFarland:       I think we will continue to see a lot of change coming as districts are really being forced to address this because they're really starting to bump up against, we just can't solve this with our current way of thinking. And so I think one of the questions is how can we bring this to our state? How can we bring this to our school? And we would love to talk with you about how we can do that, how we can help you look a little bit more holistically and think about your transportation, not just from the bus, but from a more holistic way to help districts achieve their goals and then help states rethink, potentially, the way that they think about this. Because we're only going to see this continue, we're moving towards electrification, we're moving towards more choice, we're moving towards more personalized options for education. We like to say at HopSkipDrive, the difference between struggle and success can sometimes be as simple as the ability to show up. We need to make sure we are giving kids the ability to show up so that they have the opportunity to succeed.Horn:                Love it. Thank you so much for the innovation that you're doing, for sharing the story. For those tuning in, HopSkipDrive, check it out. And you heard the call, if you don't have it in your district, reach out so that you can get it there, work with the state to make sure that it's permissible and getting kids to where they need to be so that they can learn and be opened up to a lot of opportunities. Joanna, thank you so much for joining us.McFarland:       Thank you so much for having me.Horn:                And for all those tuning in, we'll be back next time on The Future of Education. Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.

As CEO and the founder of ModernTeacher, Ann Chavez helps school districts transition from the traditional classroom to modern learning environments. “Change readiness and setting conditions for change are pieces that sometimes we just don’t stop and breath and take the time to do,” she told me in this conversation that centered on ModernTeacher's theory of change and desire for impact in school districts. The conversation was illuminating to me—from how Chavez defines “modern pedagogy” and “modern learning” to get out of the various buzzwords that compete for airtime in education to the notion of a network of districts working together to transform. As always, you can listen to the conversation here or wherever you listen to your podcasts, watch it below, or read the transcript.The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Michael Horn:   Ann, welcome to The Future of Education. Thank you so much for being here with us today.Ann Chavez:      Hey, Michael. Great to be here. Super excited for this conversation.Horn:                Yeah. Well, let's ground people in the conversation a little bit before we get to geek out in the places we're really passionate about how you're transforming teaching and learning in actual schools out in the world. But first, what is Modern Teacher itself?Chavez:            Yeah. So Modern Teacher, we are a network of forward thinking districts who want to shift the student experience, think differently about how we deliver school. We are public school districts who say we can make a difference and they are providing and creating amazing programs and options for students across the country.Horn:                That's awesome. So tell us the story of how you decided to create this with your co-founders. What was the problem that you saw or the opportunity with districts that you said we got to really go seize this and start to change that practice.Chavez:            Absolutely. So two co-founders, we had been working in some systems together, a couple of different systems across the US, big and small. And at the time we were working in a very large, the third largest system in the nation in Chicago public schools, and we had a leader there that really empowered area superintendents to have some autonomy to go create an option. We had very high transparency, very high management to goals and long as you were moving in that direction and able to shift and adjust and be able to understand and tell that story, you were able to have the autonomy and the resources to go create what your area needed. Districts are diverse, communities all over our country are diverse and we had that experience and realize that some of the things that really hold us back in systems are the system itself. We can't get out of our own way to be able to go and really put into place and help teachers and leaders grow to be able to do their best work.                        And we said how can we take and replicate this because it's pretty unique. The leader at the time didn't come from education and was running this large school system and we thought every district should be able to experience this and we can create things for every student. We can build these options but our system doesn't help itself. So what could we do to help that and how could we create some things to make school districts more systems thinking and sometimes think outside the box or run different than a traditional school district. And that's where Modern Teacher was born and we started to learn and listen and we got some really nice investors at the time that also wanted to understand this better.                        And we traveled the country and we visited and talked with districts that were really making shift but shift at scale, not shift of a couple of classrooms or a pilot program or an initiative or we're going to try something. They led through a big vision and how was that coming to life. And we said, what are the leaders doing? Superintendents, assistant superintendents, leaders of professional development and curriculum and teaching and learning. What were teachers doing? What were principals doing? What was happening in communities where they were getting movement? And we started to codify those shifts that were happening. And over about a three year time period, we built what we call today our digital convergence framework. And it's the framework we use today that helps districts navigate the path forward to bring their vision of modern learning to life.Horn:                So I actually want to dig in right there around that framework itself that you've created and that you help take districts through this sense of empowerment for teachers and school leaders on the ground and really fragmenting out the system if you will that you did in Chicago. What does this framework actually look like as you've constructed it and the journey if you will maybe of a district when they start to work with you and become part of the network?Chavez:            Yeah, absolutely. So change readiness and setting conditions for change are some pieces that sometimes we just don't stop and breathe and take the time to do. And that's one of the pieces that's really built into our process. And so our framework is built around six drivers of our work, very familiar to every school system, and seven stages. And it's embedded with change management and just really good common sense leadership. Just things that we get really a skewing kind of fragmented in districts because we're working with people and we're managing a lot of change and we're managing constantly from day to day. And that common language and framework, kind of why we use frameworks, really helps guide folks. But what we've done is really interwoven across the drivers on what moves need to happen and where are you giving your energies and your resources to really move a system at scale.                        And so just to give some context to that, our drivers in education and that we've defined our leadership, instructional models, modern curriculum, the digital ecosystem, professional learning and development, all levels and then community and how those work together in your system helps you move. But what's really different I think about the approach because I think there's a lot of frameworks and ways in which districts seek to move their system. We think of it in a really holistic transformational way and it's really comprehensive because I think you'll find a lot of options and solutions around very specific pieces because often it's where a district can hone in and try to get something done right?Horn:                Yeah, there's quick wins.Chavez:            There's amazing work happening, but how do we take that and actually approach it in a way that's going to move things for all classrooms and all kids? And so that's our approach. And districts start by identifying a vision for modern learning and they lead through a big vision of outcomes for kids. And it sounds crazy, we all do that. But how intentional you are about that and then how you align your moves to do that really varies. And so if we lead through that versus a program or a curriculum or a thing, we're all going to go one to one. We're all going to...Horn:                80% passage rate on this test or whatever it is, something narrow.Chavez:            We all got our board goals and we've got this nice little list. Modern Teacher takes that strategy to the next level because you can also come in and have a lot of folks support you to help assess what's going on. We see this, you need to do this, we'd like to see more of this. Then you get this nice strategic plan however you got there in different ways, but then you got to go do it and it's the doing it and what are all the structures and resources and pieces to start moving your system and how do you keep them connected. And so it's the strategy work around that that we got really interested in. And we really started Modern Teacher focused on how do we support principals to be instructional leaders and really know enough to move their buildings because we felt like it happens at the sites.                        To us, nothing matters more than the teacher and the student, that relationship and what's happening at that level. So we started there and then we got into the strategy conversations and that's what led us down this path. And we also realized along the way, myself and my two colleagues, Garrett Seaman and Shawn Smith, we said, we can keep doing this work. It's great work. We're loving it. We feel like we have impact. It's a different way to support public education and society's ask of public ed, but what if we want to do our work at scale and how are we going to have an impact on the national conversation in public education? And so to scale that we knew we had to create a technology to help drive that.Horn:                Interesting. So say more about what that technology is then.Chavez:            So we built a technology, a platform or a system, that takes and brings to life the framework and it connects all the moving pieces and then it connects the resources and the people. And so inside of our platform, our network of districts and leaders and teachers can connect with each other, they can share resources. And if I'm building my theory of action to really kick off a transformation, I can go in and see theories of action from coast to coast of different districts who are also thinking deeply about shifting the student experience. And so the way in which we've brought that together in our technology really powers what's happening across our network in a little bit of a different way.Horn:                It's interesting. It sounds like what you're doing is, A, you're not playing small ball if you will. You're playing in the big leagues to do this system transformation and think systematically about how you bring it about. It sounds like to me that the biggest complainer challenge that I'm hearing on the ground right now from a lot of districts is, "Oh my god, where's the capacity to do this reinvention work? We know it's important but we're just trying to reopen, get the doors going, get trains moving again in terms of NAEP," or whatever their immediate goal is, as well as all the food fights that are happening in school board meetings and so forth. It sounds like you're helping to create that capacity through a process with a software that organizes it and then a much larger network that helps them get outside of their immediate scope. Is there also personnel support that you are providing for these districts to... Because that force multiplier of where do the people come from to actually do this change management work, how does that work for these districts?Chavez:            Yeah. And you hit on just such important pieces. When we talk with districts, we want to do that work, we know we need to be out here but we're so stuck here. The framework and the network of Modern Teacher allows them to step back for a second and it's connective tissue across everything they're doing helps really focus and then empowers across these drivers a way to organize their teams to really, really be more effective because it's one of our biggest challenges. We are complex systems and schools are complex, people are complex. What we're trying to build is some infrastructure for the change process for a district because we will have to continue to iterate... As our districts get to stages six and seven, they've got to keep that movement going and what we build is this runway and this way of working that allows that to continue to happen.                        We have a lot of places where change and shift not only at the teacher level but at the leader level across districts right now is incredible. And over the last several years that shift when a Modern Teacher district gets a new superintendent or whatever shifts happen across their system, they can know exactly where the district's at the work that's been identified as important, what their next steps are, they can see at scale how many of my teachers, my workforce, I'm a superintendent, how many of my teachers have proficiency in whatever our professional learning goals are? How many of them have proficiency in personalized and blended learning? How many of them have proficiency in rigor and relevance? How many of them have proficiency in whatever systems they're trying to move?                        And it really gives them a view that we don't typically have. And it really shifts from a compliance driven model of professional development across the system, leaders, teachers, communities, parents to a proficiency based for everybody that's really driven around just relevant movement and options. And we do have personnel type to the process. And so each system has a strategy officer, they have the platform and they have the community of the network. And those three things come together and bring to life their journey to convergence. And for us, convergence is when your systems are working together to get to those big outcomes for kids that you've identified. And we love the term modern learning. We've got personalized, we've got blended, we've got-Horn:                All the phrases, all the terms.Chavez:            All the words that can mean a lot of different things depending on where you are in the country. So we stick with modern.Horn:                I want to come back to that in a moment. I just want to make an observation first, which is I love this focus on convergence or coherence also because it's my own observation we talk a lot about the importance say of teaching kids about growth mindset or grit and perseverance and so forth. But if your pedagogy and the way all of your classes work does not reinforce that and in fact it undermines it. I as a teacher can talk till I'm blue in the face about the importance of growth mindset. If at the end of the day, you still get a letter grade with no ability to improve that, what have we just done? We've just showed you actually, no, we're labeling you, you don't have growth mindset. We were just kidding. So I love that focus.Chavez:            Those mixed messages are everywhere.Horn:                They're everywhere in the system, right?Chavez:            Our poor teachers across the country who are trying to do their best, we've created systems that just derail so much of that.Horn:                I 100 percent agree. And so it gets to the question I guess I want to go toward, which is you said modern learning. I'm curious about the name Modern Teacher because your work is with the district's, you want to change the learning environments. What's the Modern Teacher part of it?Chavez:            So we really felt the difference in the focus has to be at the classroom level. And I use the word classroom just to talk about the kids' teachers and the content, the instructional board's happening.Horn:                It might be a very different learning environment, but the point is.Chavez:            I'm talking about walls and school buildings and all of that. But that's where the magic happens and we wanted the focus to stay there. And our goal, even though we do a lot of support at the leadership level, we feel like teachers can't do their best work if they're in a system that's scattered in messaging, doesn't have a clear focus, doesn't have the infrastructure to support them, they're out there. To me, they hunker down and do their best and there's magic happening, literal magic happening in classrooms all over the country. But we've got to do that at scale because it's got to be for all kids and it can't be all people dependent and you know the culture of an organization, if it is a growth mindset, learning organization, forward thinking, the feeling of that. And some have never experienced it in their entire career as a leader or a teacher.                        And so how they get there, it takes a lot of little intentional steps. It really does. And when you can help a leader connect those steps and know that it's not going to be overnight and help them down a journey, magic happens. I see it every day in our districts and others. And so how do we make that an option for everybody? And our focus has really been public ed and not that we wouldn't have others join our network, but we feel like it should really be for every student, every child in America deserves that opportunity. And so how do we take this system that's ingrained in some practices that really haven't shifted? With evolution here, how do we help that? And that's really been our mission and we are chipping away district by district. But the examples and the models that we now have 10 years into this journey. We started Modern teacher, it'll be 11 years coming up here in January.Horn:                Congratulations.Chavez:            This is our 10 years this year. We now have models across stages one through seven in our framework. And we didn't start that way because when we built this and said let's go do it, we didn't even have the whole end figured out because we had to get there with these innovative leaders. And so we now have folks in all places across that and it's pretty darn cool. And I think sometimes we get in our own way in education because we want to have it all figured out. We have to know-Horn:                Rather than just take that next-Chavez:            And I need all these things and I got to know exactly what's going to happen and I need all the lists and I need all the stuff and I need every teacher and I got to think about who's going to have this issue or that issue. Sometimes you have to just let it go a little. And leaders have to learn how to... We want teachers to let go a little in their classrooms, give more autonomy to students, facilitate-Horn:                Same to the teachers.Chavez:            Right. Leaders have to do the same and it's giving them a way to do that that feels structured and there's some natural amazing leaders doing this work right out there. But whether they're seasoned or whether they're brand new into leadership, the framework and quite honestly sometimes we just have to get out of the way because it's the connection in the community that our network has built, that's what's amazing and they've built relationships and can pick up the phone and call multiple folks in similar roles across the country to talk about their challenges and share their wins. We celebrate a lot too and that's really important in our network is celebrating this movement and transformation.Horn:                So I want to get into those success stories in a couple minutes, but before we go there, I have two other burning questions. One, just give us a sense of the scope, like how many districts are interested in this reinvention work in the network, however you define the sense of scope, you just talked about how you got districts in level seven, you've got some in level one, all the levels. And so it's a much bigger journey in portfolio now. I bet a lot of people are wondering, okay, how many are really interested in this sort of comprehensive reinvention work toward modern learning?Chavez:            Yeah. So our network ebbs and flows and it has grown over the years. We're currently just over a hundred districts across the US and we talk to districts weekly because I think everybody's interested in how do they get to this space and they're figuring out how do I free up both resources to have this type of support? Because they feel like, "Isn't that why I have this person and this person and this person on my staff?" They need to go bring that to life. But it's hard to do and our-Horn:                It's hard work.Chavez:            It's really hard work and sometimes we laugh a lot in Modern Teacher because we say we're really selling change management and how do you get people on board with that.Horn:                Well, but I think it is the thing and that's why I wanted to... And it's not easy to your point. I see a lot of districts, they get caught up with the... To your point, they have to have the perfect plan. And so they have paralysis as opposed to Frozen two is in my head right now of just do the next right thing or the reverse is true where they just tackle too many things at once and they can't execute correctly on anything.Chavez:            They have so many forces of what needs to be important and everything's important, right?Horn:                Yeah. And it views everything's important, nothing's important.Chavez:            You can't execute on anything really well. And one of the beauties of the framework is it helps bring all of that together. And the magic happens when you get a couple months into the work and we've the case studies across 10 years of this work as you move through the stages and where your thinking shifts, your momentum shifts, we can see it physically in the framework and the way in which the analytics bring it to life. It's fascinating, but what districts also get to a space that they... They don't know how to sort it all out to get that focus moving. Not sure if I'm-Horn:                No, no, it makes sense. I mean I see it all the time with what do you prioritize? What is the next most important move? And something I talk a lot about is how do you make those choices so that you're intentionally moving forward toward your goal as opposed to getting diverted. Everyone has a strategic plan, but your strategic plan is actually what you're doing. It's not what the words are.Chavez:            The movement when it starts to lead itself, you've hit this tipping point and we see that and we know right at what stage about that hits. And across our framework there's success indicators that everybody works through. And the beauty of it is that you set goal cycles, it's very customizable. I'm going to go out to districts here in the Philadelphia area today and spend time with leaders and teachers and what it takes for a district here to do SI 18 and develop their instructional model, the input that's going to get them to this output for kids, they might go about it a little differently. What best practices have they done to date? How does it live in their system currently? What's the context of their community? And context matters deeply. And so what it then might take for a district, I spent Monday with really passionate leaders up in Northern Nevada.                        And what it takes for them to get there will be a little different. But that they all need to get there and need these key pieces to move their system that we found really, really strong across the framework. And so it also gives you permission and for some leaders a way to show their movement and say, "Hey, we need to stop doing this." Because one of the things we do in education is we don't know when to stop something on how to remove it because we've got so many pieces going. And if we simplify it and make it easier for teachers, please, please, please, if that isn't our message these days, make it easier.Horn:                Amen.Chavez:            I don't mean that word in relation to rigor and content and-Horn:                No, no, but just a manageable job.Chavez:            Hate to say that word. We have got to make this manageable. Exactly.Horn:                Yeah. No, 100 percent. So last couple questions as we wrap up here. The first one I want to go to is just unpack a little bit more this notion of modern learning or modern pedagogy. You said there's all the buzz words out there, right? There's blended, there's personalized, there's competency, mastery, whatever it is. Help us understand what are the districts that are working with you and what's your north star? What are they driving toward?Chavez:            My big point of view lately is that transparency of learning is really the path to freedom. And one of the things that both learners need in their journey, teachers need in their journey, and it really mirrors each other. And we would really define and our district is moving, our districts, to competency based systems. And that's another big word of what does that mean?                        But really helping districts define and understand where students going, why are they learning something, and that students and teachers can identify where they are to where they want to go. And it sounds very simple, but how we move a system from traditional grading, we have a 92% and you get an A minus. I have no idea what that means as a parent or a student. I have no idea what it says I can do. It probably means I've learned how to do school and understand how to work the system, but I don't know if it's tied to how I learn best or my passions or interests or the path that we're creating for students as they come to us wherever they do in their journey and then exit us as graduates.                        And the plethora of options at that point for students today. It's so different and changing rapidly. So for us it's about competency based, personalized, and blended. And those are words that have been around for a long, long, long time, but how you bring that to life and actually make it manageable for teachers to move there. Moving from grading to standard space grading to full proficiency scales as a system is big work. It's big work, but it's very doable work if you have a path to get there. And one of the things that our systems often do is we do pieces of it and if we're not successful, we shift or if it gets hard or if we just don't know how to move the entire system, we'll get great pockets of innovation and how do we grow that. So for us it's about proficiency students having individual pathways, understanding how students learn best and giving them opportunities, varied pathways about how I can experience school.                        And the last two years really opened that up. And students experienced different opportunities and certainly not in the way we ever wanted to do it, but there are some learnings in there and as we move forward, let's not lose those. And what's interesting to me is there are lots of alternative programs and if you're a student or a parent that has that capacity to go find them, they're going to find them.                        But our mission is that every school district to be a modern school district needs to have a variety of pathways and whether you call it hybrid or blended options for students. So in some days they're at school, in some days they're not at school. And then a full traditional program that might look very different when they come to campus. That's okay because society's need for public education and where students go every day, that will never go away probably. So let's figure out how to do that different. And then all virtual options or just varied models, every district can offer that. And if we have at least three different pathways for students, we would say that's a modern school district. And that's one of the things we help districts move towards when they're ready.Horn:                Love it. As we wrap up here, leave us with some inspiration, some of the success stories that you get excited about and that you carry forward into the work with you.Chavez:            Yeah. I think, and I was in classrooms, so I'll use this example, Northern Nevada walking classrooms. And when I bend down to ask a student, "What are you working on? Why are you doing this? What does this mean to you?" Yesterday in classrooms, I had students in chemistry labs all the way down to kindergarten able to tell me, "Well, I'm working on this and this is why. And oh, do you want to see where I am?" And they can walk me over to wherever and however they do it, whether it's digital or physical, and we need both. None of this is about all digital. And they show me, "I'm right here in my progression, I'm here in my learning." Those are the words kids use. "But I want to go here." And I'd say, "Well, what's next? What's next? How are you going to do that?"                        Well, I don't know. I got some options, right?" And they're going to show me their choices. And when a first grader, second grader can tell you that, and then it comes out a little different and a little less animated from a high school student, "Yeah, I know what I'm doing. Yeah, I'm going here." But it all comes back to motivation. And it also comes back to why did we all go into education and this mission to produce graduates?                        And to me it's about a fulfilling happy life. So our mission is to get students to a place that they can build a fulfilling life. And that path will be varied, as varied can be, but if we haven't given them that opportunity and to understand and experience tons of success in order to know what they do well and how to manage some of the things they don't do well, because we all have that, right? I know all of my strategies for the things I don't do well or like to do. If we haven't created that for students and we've created a system that checks off if you don't fit in the box right, that's what I want to see shift. I want every student to have that path, understand themselves and start to move towards... It really is about self-actualization and I know that's a big word we've built-Horn:                No, but it's the purpose.Chavez:            Growth targets in Modern Teacher. And we talk about in the taxonomy of thinking and rigor and relevance, self-actualization is a space. And obviously across time we all have those moments in different ways. But for students, I feel our system beats them up and I feel like it beats up our teachers a bit and everybody goes in with good intentions and is every sends their child to school and every teacher and leader walks in everyday wanting to do good things for kids. So how do we start breaking down the system that doesn't help us do our best work?Horn:                And love that as a way to leave us in a note of optimism about what's possible as we change the system and unleash the potential of students and teachers in it. Thank you so much for the work you're doing at Modern Teacher. Thanks for joining us today in The Future of Education. And for all of you listening, you can check out more on the web for Modern Teacher, learn more about what they're doing, the districts that they're working with, the methodology and so forth. And thank you all again for joining us on this episode of The Future of Education. Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.

In May of 2022, the U.S. Department of Labor approved the launch of four Registered Apprenticeship Programs (RAPs) by OpenClassrooms, a French-Based education-to-employment platform. These four programs (Data Analyst, Digital Marketer, Help Desk Technician, and Application (Software) Developer) aim to provide increased opportunities for individuals seeking to advance their careers and help employers fill crucial roles within their organizations. To learn about how OpenClassrooms has positioned itself as a major disrupter in the business education space, Pierre Dubuc, Co-founder and CEO of OpenClassrooms joined me to share more. As always, you can listen to the conversation here or wherever you listen to your podcasts, watch it online below, or read the transcript.The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Michael Horn:   Open Classrooms is, in my mind at least, one of the few education companies that has clearly positioned itself as a disruptive innovation in the market. It's a French-based company and it offers everything from free- to degree-based online courses in job areas, really direct to students to help them advance in their lives, but also a range of programs that they offer directly to employers themselves to help them with all of their education and up skilling needs. All of these programs are also low cost. In many cases they're also, as I said up-front, free and they also have a healthy dosage of good instructional design to boot in them. This isn't just stuff that's been created by faculty who perhaps don't know the latest research behind teaching and learning. They have done a really good job of being thoughtful about the education side of this and the business model side of it and CEO and co-founder Pierre Dubuc has been at this since he was, I believe, a university student some 15 years ago or so. And today he joins us on the future of education. Pierre, welcome. It's been a while, I think, since we were last in person together walking and talking on the streets of New York City.Pierre Dubuc:    Hi, Michael. I would love to do that again. It's been a while indeed and it was a very good introduction. Thanks for explaining what Open Classrooms is about. It's about 15 years. I started this business with my co-founder, Mathieu, when we were in school creating free courses to have some friends learn coding. So this is how we got started.Horn:                You got started with the coding, but in your words, how do you describe what Open Classrooms is now? Take away the Michael Horn version of it. When you meet someone else on the streets of New York City, what do you say you do and you've created?Dubuc:             I have to say it was a really good version though, so I would definitely reuse it. But what I say is, first of all, that Open Classrooms is what we call a mission driven company. It's a B Corp organization and the mission of open Classrooms is to make education accessible and especially education leading to jobs. So the social impact that we're tracking and reporting on is the number of what we call carrier outcomes, otherwise known as job placement. Basically, it's like the number of students we place in the workforce, either for first job, for a new job, switching careers, getting promoted, training your own business, but it's a really significant carrier impact. This is what we're trying to build. And it can be in the form of a free course. It can be in the form of a degree program, much longer and a partnership up scaling or rescaling. So it can take various forms at different ages, but overall the outcome would be career impact.Horn:                It's interesting, you, Guild Education, a few other companies like you all are basically redefining what is the measurement of success. It's not just completing a degree program, it's not just learning a few concepts. It's really being able to use that and get ahead in the career marketplace. Just give us a sense of the scope of size and success you've had when you look at it. How many learners you serve and how many placements are you having into careers?Dubuc:             Yeah, totally. So this year we were probably placed between 40 to 50,000 students in the workforce. Last year it was about 15,000. The year before it was 4,000. So it gives you kind of a sense of also all growth trajectory at Open Classrooms. Then the way we do it can be through free courses or certificate programs or the degree programs or apprenticeship programs. And we are... You might have said it, we are a non-traditional college ourselves, which is kind of a unique positioning because we do have our own degree awarding powers in Europe. So we have our own faculty, non-traditional faculty, let's say, industry practitioners building the content, learning designer, the platform and all of that. So we really recreated the whole college experience in a way that is more modern and more aligned to employers needs and career needs. So we built all of this and in on degree programs we have about 10,000 students. On non-degree programs like pre courses or certificate programs we train about 300,000 students per month.Horn:                Wow, so that's a lot of size. Incredible placement. That 40 to 50,000 number. I'm curious and you said an important thing that you're accredited, which really stands out apart from a lot of the players in this space. I'm curious, from your perspective looking back at when you started the business in 2007, what were the couple big insights in your mind that really allowed you to have the success that you've had and the scale that you've had and be able to offer degrees in this low cost way but also all the way to these free programs of 300,000 learners now. What were those couple big insights in your mind that really unlocked this?Dubuc:             At first, we created online courses, the courses we wish we had in school and Mike Thunder, Mathieu, is really talented at building amazing courses. The way he takes you from A to Z is very accessible, is funny and it's like... It's a really good course, so that's what really drove blocks of loaders onto the platform. It was because it was not a business back in the day. We started that really as a hobby and many students and colleagues and peers, from all over the world, started learning coding through open classrooms in French speaking countries mostly. So we became the reference platform to learn coding and we have many students and through word of mouth mostly. And at some point we realized... Many of them actually told us, "I got... I graduated. I've got a bachelor's in computer science, but all I've learned was thanks to you guys through your website. I learned nearly nothing through my school or my college or my university. I learned everything on your website."                        It was fulfilling and clearly we had an impact but at some point we realized that many, many of them actually told us, "I'm still a student at my college because I need a degree. I needed to find a job to signal the market and have the skills I have." And at first we didn't really realize this but after a few years we thought, "But if we do the heavy lifting, why can't we actually give a degree at the end?" And this is when we started to try and become accredit in France and at this time we became the very first fully online college. So the first accredited online college and we managed to get there and we started to reward degrees and in a very non-traditional manner if you will, because it's based on skills, on projects with one world mentorship. It's fully online. So it's a mix of synchronous and asynchronous support, human based, really high touch group and social learning as well when still leading to a degree at the associate bachelors and masters.Horn:                It's just an incredible story. I mean in many ways you're one of the original boot camps but online and then you become... Right? And then you've moved up market, if you will, into this accredited degree space and you're then one of the few success stories, I think, worldwide of a new entrant in that university space that is often designed to keep those new entrants out. But you actually have changed that dynamic and now as I understand it, you're moving into a new phase from just being a course and in some cases this accredited degree provider, to actually integrating far more into the world of apprenticeships themselves. Apprenticeships are becoming a hot topic. Tell us more about what your plans are and why you're moving in this direction.Dubuc:             Yeah, no definitely. So we started apprenticeship programs in Europe about five years ago. We became a pretty big apprenticeship provider. We do apprenticeship on about 30 different jobs at associate bachelors MSS level. We do a lot of, what we would call, degree apprenticeship, so apprenticeship leading to degrees. And then 18 months ago I relocated personally to New York City to really-Horn:                Our gain, by the way. Our gain.Dubuc:             Exactly. No, it's actually... It's been an amazing journey. So I love it also from a personal standpoint. So it's been great but I deemed down because I was well enriched to invest small time in the States, building accreditation but also this new product that is apprenticeship and trying to, let's say, monetize or bring European style vision of what apprenticeship means, because apprenticeship is pretty major in Europe but I would say in the States it's been more like old fashioned in a way, more focused on trade jobs, on lower level of qualification, not really on college degrees. So more like blue collar jobs. You can become an electrician, a carpenter, but it's pretty hard to have a massive degree in data science for apprenticeship, which is something highly doable in Europe now. And that drove really a huge growth in the number of apprentices in Europe.                        So this is what we're trying to do. So we started to become registered with the US Department of Labor to offer register apprenticeship programs that are 12 months long. So it's a walk-in study program. That means that you have a work contract from day one of your apprenticeship program. So you are employed by an organization, a public or private employer. You're going to walk for four days away. So it's called on the job training, four days a week. And then you're going to be trained by Open Classrooms for one day a week, train online with one on one mentorship by a video conference. You have projects to complete, courses and other apprentices and students you're going to collaborate with. And then for 50 weeks, for 12 months you're going to have a mentorship session every week. You will validate through projects and then you'll get to a certificate of completion by the US DOL.                        It maps against Irish credits. So we do not have our own accreditation in the States yet. I mentioned the accreditation's in Europe. We're building that also in the States, so it's clearly our intent. But right now what we do is we have Irish credit transfer agreements with other universities for example with UMass and UMass recognizes our programs and basically ground... Sorry, credits to our graduates. So the important thing here is that, under an apprenticeship program, you have a work contract and you are paid while you learn. So that means that not only you don't have to pay any tuition fees, no debt, nothing to pay or pay back ever, but you are actually receive wages from day one of your program and those wages increase over time and typically on our jobs, so mostly tech and digital jobs, would be your call focus. You're going to be paid between 20 to $30 an hour and you are going to probably end up being around 40 to $50 an hour. So really quality jobs and you'll paid while learning.Horn:                I mean, it makes a ton of sense. You're starting to deal with really one of the reasons people often drop out of online degree programs or hesitate to go in the first place, which isn't actually the cost of the program, it's the opportunity cost of what am I foregoing in my life and how does it integrate with all these other demands and expectations, right? It's not just monetary, it's in terms of my time management and things of that nature. And so the apprenticeship you designed tackles a lot of those. I'm curious what's the demand look like from on the employer side? What are you finding in the market? Because as you said, this is a concept that's well understood in Europe. Outside of the trades in the United States, not historically the case. So what are you learning about demand? How are you educating the market?Dubuc:             Very good question. So clearly it's still a nascent market in the States. So we need to educate employers, organizations and also people. I think this changed. This transition actually happened about five to 10 years ago in Europe, but 20 years ago it was the same thing in Europe. Apprenticeship was mostly for trade jobs and blue collar workers.Horn:                That's interesting. I didn't know that.Dubuc:             That changed over time. And when I studied some time ago, I won't tell you how many years, but it's been some time actually. It doesn't look this way but it's been some time. There was no apprenticeship at my college and I studied engineering and graduated masters. So somehow like there one colleges in France. No apprenticeship there. Now it's about 30% of their students end up on apprenticeship. Nearly-Horn:                That's a sea change.Dubuc:             Yes, it's a sea change. That means that you have a significant portion of an age group going through apprenticeship even for elite education, so-called like Ivy League type universities and colleges, so that's really a big challenge. So we think that this momentum is building up in the states right now. So why so? First there is a huge demand from employers in terms of talent shortage. We need more developers, we need more data scientists, we need more cyber experts, we need more of many different highly qualified jobs and this shortage is just growing and growing. So that's one. It's the shortage. The second one is a diversity issue. We have massive diversity issues in those areas and jobs. So we need to obviously have less just white people walking on tech jobs but also Asian and Black and other non-white minorities. And we need to shout out that apprenticeship is really tapping into new talent tools and we are enabled employers to build talent pipelines that are more diverse and that will close the skills gap. So it's a great solution, basically, to tackle both the shortage and the diversity issue.Horn:                Super interesting. Now, I'm curious, one of the big conversations we've seen in the United States is that people say, "Well, in Europe they have this thing as an intermediary. So basically employers don't want to take the risk of hiring these individuals themselves and so you need some sort of intermediary to come along, take that risk on, do the higher trained deploy as our friend Ryan Craig would call it, and then ideally they transition into a full-time employee role at the employer." Are you seeing that need for that intermediary in the United States? Are you playing that role or who is playing that role for you if it's not you?Dubuc:             Good questions. I think there are different components actually and not just the one you mentioned, but it is clearly a relevant one. Usually you have the training provider, so really the teaching part of things. That's one. You have the matchmaking which is really finding applicants and candidates, pre-screening them, finding employers and trying to do this matchmaking process which is kind of a recruitment process if you will. And somewhat also career coaching for candidates because maybe they will never had experiences previously in tech, talking to employers. You need to coach them a bit. That's the matchmaking.                        Then potentially you need also this higher end trained model. So it's more of a staffing company type of model. You hire this apprentice, you train them at the same time and you build an employer as a contractor basically. So those are different things. I think mostly you will find you will always need the training component. You will always need the matchmaking. The staffing component is not required all the time so sometimes you will need it, sometimes you will not. We do not do it. We partner, for example, with Euro Pro, so part of Europe and Euro Pro does that for us. So we also collaborate with major staffing companies doing that for us. But we do all of the rest. We do the training, we do the matchmaking. We are technically also a sponsor and an intermediary reporting to the US DOL on behalf of the employer. So we do everything else but staffing because we think staffing is a very specific component and we partner on that front.Horn:                And just to stay with it for one moment. Then the matchmaking piece that you're doing in terms of helping people find the right employers or pathways or whatever it might be, that's the use case where you're working with an intermediary and you're trying to help place that individual into the right employee that might be the right fit or does it take on a different dimension even?Dubuc:             Yeah, actually you have, depending on markets, you could have two types of apprenticeship, what we would call refer as student led or employer led, because at the end of the day you need an apprenticeship provider, an employer and a process. So it's a three way contract. So you could start from the employer side. It is typically the case in the states, but in other more mature apprenticeship markets, you can start from the student side. So student led apprenticeship, meaning you have a candidate willing to do an apprenticeship in data science and they're going to actually apply several employers to try and find an employer to find a job basically. So it's a job. So they apply for a job as an apprentice and they're going to find an apprenticeship contract. So they might come back to you and say, "Oh, actually I found an apprenticeship contract in this small business nearby" that we, Open Classrooms, have never talked to.                        And then you can walk with this employer and build a contract, sign it and then deliver on it, so that's student led. Employer led is you start from the employer side obviously. Usually that would be a larger organization, kind of a Fortune 500 type, if you will, but not only. We can also collaborate obviously on smaller scales just for one or two apprentices and then this employer will say, "Okay I need to hire a cyber surgery expert or digital marketing specialists." And then we'll find candidates and pre qualify the candidates for them and then those profiles, they're going to interview them, then the one they like and then we'll sign the contract and deliver on it.Horn:                Super interesting. Okay, last quick question about this apprenticeship side of how we unleash this marketplace, which is some people are the view that we really need policy changes to unleash this in the United States and some people are the view this is happening, the demand is clear enough, the supply imbalance is clear enough, employers need to make this happen. What's your view as you've started to come into this market in the United States? Do we need policy change? What are those policy changes if so? Or is this a problem that is being worked out by employers, organizations like yours and so forth that you all got this in hand?Dubuc:             Good question. I would say it is definitely challenging and the real trigger of this challenge is really the employers demand. If you have employers demand it is going to change. So there is that. It starts with employers demand and you need to explain and educate employers around a partnership. That's one. That being said, with proper public policy you can accelerate the challenge. I do think that there is room to accelerate this challenge as we've seen actually in Europe where many markets change policies in the UK with the apprenticeship levy.                        In France as well in 2018 and 2020 we've seen public policy changes and just to cite precise examples of what we've seen move the needle. So first of all, in the States, the funding and the support that employers get to pay for both the salary of the wages of a process and also what we would call the related training instruction, the RTI part, the training, training cost, this funding is grant based or it's a tax credit, meaning that maybe you need to bid, first of all. Those are RFPs and grant programs you need to bid. Then maybe it’s a yes, maybe it’s a no and maybe it’s there, maybe next year it's not there and it's local, it's you walk with walk call development balls or maybe state agencies. So it's quite complex to be honest, especially if you start operating a scale in different states. So it's hard to scale the way it's structured right now.                        What we've seen, walking in Europe, is it was the same in France, it was regional and grant based. They switch it to a national funding scheme that is a formula based funding, meaning you hire an apprentice, you get paid that much, you hire two apprentices, you get paid twice much, et cetera, et cetera. And it's uncapped.                        So that means the more apprentices you hire, the more money you get, but it's very explicit and kind of automated, if you will. So you know what to expect and it's there to stay. It's not a grant or RFP process. So that's one. And then they realign also interest because they pay not only if you sign the contract, they pay 30% up front when you sign the contract and then they pay based on the apprentice progress, meaning they need to complete the program, right? Because otherwise you can pay upfront and then if they adjourn or if they don't complete for whatever reason, then frankly it's not... Interests are not aligned. So you need to pay accordingly, align to the progress and pay until the very end of the apprenticeship contract. I think that's very important to align payment terms to student progress. Then they started tracking also student outcomes in the form of graduation rates but also job placement rates.                        How many of them after completion will actually be employed full time as a permanent employee in the company or company. So that's very important to track student outcomes. And then finally to market this to the general public employers, public policy makers and so on. And you've seen actually many governments running large scale advertising campaigns in favor of apprenticeship to showcase apprentices both to employers and apprentice and families as well to move the needle. I think now saying that you can get a master's degree, a bachelor's degree from the top goal in a country, I mean clearly that is a strong signal that apprenticeship is high quality, is really something that can be desirable. So the marketing of it is also something where public policy makers can help.Horn:                Incredibly helpful. I love, not only obviously, to certainty breed more confidence from businesses to act obviously in getting a consistent funding formula that scales seems critical to that. But then also the other piece you said in terms of measuring progress and being focused on those outcomes. Theoretically, actually that could move us away from a seat time based system to competency based as students make progress in their learning journey, which would be even better in terms of revolutionizing higher ed in our workforce education system. Last two questions as we start to wrap up here. You also have done a lot of work to get on the state and local workforce board lists, I understand, so that you're able to start to move workforce federal money in this country, not just federal financial aid perhaps or other mechanisms like that. Why is that important in this evolving vision and how does it fit with the strategy?Dubuc:             I think it's really back to this public policy issue because if you have employers willing to hire, say, a hundred apprentices next year, if you can find public support, public funding so they can scale that program, not to a hundred but to 150, then clearly this is something we should explore. And again, we've seen that walk in all countries, especially in Europe where our partnership is pretty big. So this public funding component, I think, will be key to really accelerate the market. It's getting there anyway, but you can get there faster. So we're starting to walk with state agencies and workforce development also at county level. We are on the Elisa Berg training coalition about multi states approximately with our apprenticeship programs. So that means that we can apply for funding to help our partner employers to scale their apprenticeship program. So that's really the intent there.                        But again, right now the system is very scattered and different from one ball to the other, from one state to the other. Criteria and the different funding, the threshold, the criteria of the requirements and so on are different. So obviously over time public policy might change and might get better alignment to help us scale better, but it is part of the process. You need to start walking with a few balls in a few states. Some states also maybe more forward looking, more innovative, a bit more flexible in how they can allocate funding and UC, actually, for example, the state of California which has doubled their apprenticeship budget for 2023 roughly.                        And they're willing... They're thinking of moving into this formula based like paper apprentice vision. So it's interesting. If you start having California doing it, then why not New York state and then from there a bunch of major states might come in as well. So we're really at the tipping point. It's really interesting to witness and that's why we open the conversation with state agencies in workforce boss to say, "Okay, this is what we do. Those are the employers we walk with from MER to Amazon and many others. Is it something that you like to see more of in your state and how can you help us scale those operations?"Horn:                Yeah, it's fascinating. You're probably one of the few if only online providers, at scale online providers, that's worked with that many local workforce boards. So it's just... And it's helpful to understand why and I suspect those listening will take a cue. But last question as we wrap up here. How do you see this future playing out for apprenticeships as it pertains to Open Classrooms but also more broadly for the sector as a whole? We come back in five years from now on this broadcast or we're walking the streets of New York City again and we're talking about how the future has unfolded. What's your sort of sense for what this landscape is going to look like in five years from now in the United States?Dubuc:             I think two things. One is the number of apprentices. At the end of the day, if there is a challenge, you need to see the number of apprentices grow tremendously. And right now we have about 400,000 apprentices in the states, which is very low to... Compare it, for example, to France. Right now France has about one million apprentices in a country that five times more. So in the States that there would mean something like five million apprentices to compare it to. So I would like to come back to you and while we are walking in streets of New York City say, "Now we have maybe like a million apprentices in the country," and with a better gender balance, because right now apprentices in this country are mostly men, mostly white and mostly in trade jobs like truck drivers or carpenters and construction jobs. I would like to see more gender balance, more highly qualified jobs, for example in tech, IT, cyber and other jobs maybe in healthcare.                        And I would like to see a partnership more connected to higher education because obviously there is a huge issue around higher ed in the States around student debt and so on. And I think there is a way to solve both the skills gap that are in shortage and this higher education issue that we have by creating degree apprenticeship and linking apprenticeship to college education. In one way, maybe actually the way we're going to found apprenticeship will not be necessarily only through workforce development bots, but it could be through something as systemic as title four in the future. So we could imagine that because apprenticeship works really well in terms of employability, in terms of completion rates. So it's a great outcome for the country. And if we think this way, maybe we should actually invest much, much more on apprenticeship in a comparable fashion as how much we spend on higher ed right now through title four.Horn:                Well, it is one of the few, I think, dare I say, bright spots or hopeful spots right now in the sector of education, broadly speaking from K through 12, through higher education, through education up scaling and lifelong learning. This is one of the few bright spots that starts to bring a lot of strands together. Pierre, keep up the great work. Thank you so much for joining us and thanks to all of you for joining us. We'll be back next time on The Future of Education. Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.

Founded in 1988, the NCEE (National Center on Education and the Economy) is a non-profit organization dedicated to helping states, districts, and schools discover, design, and lead high-performing education systems. I had the chance to sit down with Vicki Phillips, CEO at NCEE and formerly of National Geographic and the Gates Foundation, and Jason Dougal, President and COO at NCEE, to discuss the organization’s Blueprint for a High-Performing Education System report. Many of the themes echo recommendations from my new book, From Reopen to Reinvent, which was fascinating to explore in the conversation, including competency-based assessments, the role of content, team teaching, and the importance of teachers not being the final assessors of their own students.As always, you can read the transcript of the conversation, listen to it, or watch it below.Michael Horn:                Vicki and Jason, thanks so much for being here today.Jason Dougal:             It's a pleasure to be here.Vicki Phillips:             Thanks, Michael. It's great to see you as always.Horn:                Yeah. So I'm delighted and I want to start with how you all came into these roles with NCEE. Vicki, we've known each other for many years now, obviously from teacher to superintendent to the Gates Foundation, and then National Geographic, and then now to NCEE. I suspect a lot of folks would love to hear why this felt like the right next step for you. If we could start with you, Vicki.Phillips:             Well, as you said, I've been fortunate over my career to sit in a lot of chairs from teachers to state chief to philanthropy. But what people might not know is that my very first job when I left my home state of Kentucky was actually with the National Center on Education and the Economy. So it was along my career path, and one of the things I so valued about what I learned there was that the international benchmarking and the other work that the Center was doing helped set for me when I went out to be a superintendent a north star of what really worked in terms of practice. And even though I needed to translate that into my own context, it gave me a much broader view from which to work from. So I'm actually coming back to family in many ways.Horn:                Makes total sense. There's going to be a separate podcast at some point, by the way, about why Kentucky has been the birthplace of so many influential education leaders and policies, I think. But we'll hold that for another time. Jason, I want to go to you next. And tell us about your path because as I understand it, you were a lawyer. I'm not sure what the connection with education was, so I would love to know your own path into the president COO role at NCEE.Dougal:             Yeah. I guess I'm an alternative route candidate here. I did work in a Manhattan law firm doing mergers and acquisitions, of all things. I was lucky enough about 19 years ago to meet Mark Tucker and Judy Cotting, who were running the National Center at that time, and we were working on a small transaction. I got to know the organization as an outside attorney. I fell in love with the mission, I fell in love with the people, and they invited me in to join the organization just a little less than 18 years ago. I have held many roles here at the center from originally being a business and lawyer person, and got involved in operations, got involved in the research, got involved in the leadership aspects of the organization, and ran our National Institute for School Leadership, which is the largest provider of leadership professional learning in the country. And I was able to lead a pilot program that researched competency-based approaches to high school in four different states. So I've done a little bit of everything around here over the years.Horn:                So I want to dig into a bunch of those strands. But in particular, there's so much that the center does that we could talk about. But you all put out a report that I believe predates you joining, Vicki, the Blueprint on Education. And I want to spend some time on it because many of the themes from it, certainly not all, but many of them echo a lot of the findings and recommendations in my new book, From Reopen to Reinvent, which Vicki, you, of course, read in advance.                        And so I just want to dig into these because there's areas that you write across from rigorous and adaptive learning systems to effective teachers and principals, and then equitable foundation of supports. But the part about the teachers and principals really spoke to me on many dimensions that I thought, frankly undergirded the other two areas of the report. So I want to spend a lot of time on it.                        And the first recommendation that jumped out that I was like, "Whoa, I need to learn more," was you actually said that higher performing systems tend to have fewer teacher preparation programs. And you pointed out that some states might have 50-plus, I think the number was, teacher preparation programs, and we should be aiming for 10 instead. And I'd love to know the why behind that. Why is the number important? If we shrunk the number of teacher preparation programs, how would we still produce the volume of teachers that this country needs, and things of that nature. And just unpack that a little bit for us.SubscribedDougal:             Sure, Michael. I'll start. What we noticed from our research, and if you look at Finland, where I believe there are seven, maybe eight schools for teacher preparation, Singapore where there's a single one, Shanghai where there are just a couple, what you see in each of those jurisdictions is that the standard for teacher preparation is quite high, and therefore, only their most respected research universities have teacher prep programs. That allows for the jurisdiction to control the flow of future teachers and keep the standard very high so that the number of applicants as a proportion to the number of those accepted can be anywhere from 1 in 10 to 1 in 20 in these high-performing jurisdictions, which is very different from what we have here in a typical United States state where we may have 40, 50 such institutions, and where quite frankly, the academic standards for acceptance are lower. And I think that leads to a less rigorous preparation program and drives some of the challenges that we have in the profession that I'm sure we're going to talk about throughout the podcast.Phillips:             And as you might imagine, because expectations, the profession are high, the standards are high, satisfaction among teachers is also very high in those places.Horn:                That's interesting. So in essence, resets the entering expectations of those humans when they enter the profession from the get-go. It raises them up. Is your sense that if we shrunk the programs tomorrow and change the standards for getting in and raise them, that we would start to see really the market in the US, for lack of a better word, start to adjust? Or are there other steps that we would have to take on that road to really changing the way we prepare teachers and who we're preparing?Dougal:             Yeah. Michael, as you might expect, I mean, there's both a supply and a demand aspect of this. If all we did was limit the number of teacher prep slots by limiting the number of teacher prep institutions and increasing the rigor without changing the compensation and the work environment of the job itself, probably all you would see is a significant reduction in applications to teacher prep institutions. So you can't make it as difficult and as rigorous to get into a teacher prep institution as to get into a law school or a medical school and expect that you'd get similar applicants if the job on the other side is so different. So I think that not only would we need to be looking at the supply side where teachers are coming from, where they're being sourced from, and how they're being admitted into teacher prep institutions, but the demand side. What does the job really look like? What's it compensated like? How professional is it to work in a school environment versus say, a law firm or a hospital or any number of white collar occupations?Phillips:             We'd also have to set right now a reasonable path toward that because there are serious teacher shortages across the country depending on how you look at the data.Horn:                And it gets into another piece. I want to go to the demand side in a moment, actually Jason, where you started to go. But I want to stick on the supply side for another moment because another part of the report talks about the importance of having programs, and I'm going to quote here from it, "That emphasize deep understanding of content, whereas the US has no common curriculum, and therefore often trains teachers on a set of generalized principles for effective pedagogy. Universities in the highest performing systems design preparation programs specifically focused on the curriculum that teachers will be expected to teach. Candidates learn first to understand where students are in their learning, and then how best to support them to make progress."                        There's a lot in there, but a few things jump out to me. One, the importance of content knowledge, the importance of clarity around what you're going to be teaching, and then the importance of understanding where students, individual students presumably, are in their own progression of learning and mastering that knowledge, and presumably skills around it and so forth. I'd love you just to talk about the importance and the centrality of that in teacher preparation and making for effective teachers.The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.SubscribedPhillips:             Well, it's actually important not just in teacher preparation, but once teachers get into the profession and they're continuing to grow, and almost all of these high, or really virtually every one of these high-performing places has rigorous, aligned, more national curriculum, if you will. In this country, it might be state by state, but they actually have common curriculum and aligned ways of determining student progress. And then they have ways of helping emerging teachers get better at that as well as helping veteran teachers take leadership.                        Michael, you speak to this in your book about all the ways in this country we might think about having teachers come to that level in their craft by helping each other and having more master experts that then help emerging educators. So there's multiple ways to get to that path, but virtually every high-performing place really thinks hard about the rigor of the curriculum and the alignment of that and the ways in which teachers both through preparation programs and once they get into their ongoing profession continue to get better and better.Horn:                I'm curious just as a follow-up, and Jason, you could take this as well because obviously, the Common Core, I suspect, try to do some of that. Vicki, I won't try to rehash all that we went through around that. But I guess I'm curious. There have been states like Louisiana that have tried to make common curriculum and assessments a more central part of the craft and what actually occurs in schools for students. Is that the example of what we're thinking about or is it something different?Dougal:             I think Louisiana is actually a pretty good example of that, and it's a state that we've worked with extensively over the last five to eight years. And as you can see in Louisiana, and some of the most recent research about learning and achievement in Louisiana really supports this, that when you have something more of a common curriculum, it helps support teacher pedagogy. It helps support teacher preparation because those teacher prep institutions understand what the curriculum is that their future teachers that they're training are going to actually be teaching. It really helps support the focus of those teacher prep institutions. And of course, it helps support the focus of the way in which teachers work together, either within schools or across schools within a district, or even across districts.                        What you see in these high-performing jurisdictions, and I think you'll see it the more and more that states here in the US try to focus on curriculum, is that you can teach pedagogy in a very different way if it's deep inside a discipline. It's hard to teach pedagogy generically. And so you need teachers who deeply understand their discipline in order to deeply understand a more disciplinary approach to pedagogy. The way in which you approach math teaching is not the same as you approach science teaching. I mean, obviously there are some commonalities, but when you really get into the depth of the pedagogical approaches across disciplines, having a deep content knowledge is really important.Phillips:             And there are states in the country in addition to Louisiana that have a rich history in that. I think about Massachusetts. And for example, right now, they're tackling project-based learning and helping many teachers in the state understand what that looks like and what that looks like inside deep content knowledge and expertise.Horn:                Yeah. It's a good point, Vicki, obviously in my home state. So hoping that we can fig continue to push the bounds on that and deepening the commitment there. I'm curious just to go where you went, Vicki, also in your answer, which is around these pathways for teachers. And the report does a really good job, I think, of outlining how we'd start to change what, in my book, I call them motivators, if you will. And part of that is that... And again, I'll quote from the report, that teachers have the opportunity to take on different, increasingly demanding roles without having to leave the classroom. And you obviously contrast this to the traditional system in the US where teachers have the same job on the day they retire as they did when they first entered the classroom, or if they want career pathways, they leave the classroom in many cases.                        But part of this, and again, quoting, "The work of schools would be organized around the idea of the strongest teachers leading and mentoring new and struggling teachers through formal dedicated roles like lead and master teacher." It goes on and talks about what those responsibilities would be, how you would earn it not just through tenure, but through real mastery of the craft itself and evidence of that. It's really a rich section of the report. And it sounds a lot like, say what public impact has done in a bunch of districts with these multi-classroom leaders, for example, or the work of maybe what Arizona State University is doing out of its teachers college right now with working with districts with teams of teachers. I'm just curious how you all envision this going out and happening. Which countries also do this well today? Where should people be learning from around creating these rich, vibrant pathways where you can deepen your expertise, deepen your responsibility in a variety of ways without leaving the classroom?Phillips:             Well, virtually, again, almost every high-performing country and jurisdiction, including some in this country, do that. And they are not only making sure that teachers get those kinds of leadership opportunities, but they're addressing the single number one thing that teachers in this country say they need, which is time, time to come together and learn how to work together to share practice.                        I mean, the experts that teachers trust most are other teachers. And what a lot of high-performing places do is really maximize that expertise among their veteran teachers having multiple opportunities to coach and support and mentor emerging teachers to teach larger classrooms, and the subject area, and then to have facilitated support going on in the classroom with others that can learn from that. There's a variety of models both in this country and in other places where teachers get those opportunities in a routine basis. And I think the question for us is how do we rethink time and talent in particular in districts and in states in order to afford teachers here that opportunity, and particularly that opportunity to share and collaborate in the way teachers want and with the people they trust the most to help them gain better knowledge of practice in a way that's nonjudgmental and elevates them.Dougal:             If you put a real fine point on it, what these top-performing jurisdictions are trying to do is identify their best teachers and then leverage that expertise, as Vicki was referencing. Of course, we're trying to do the same in this country, but often, what that translates to is taking your best teachers and moving them out of the classroom, moving them into administration, whereas in a Singapore, as an example, which probably has the richest example of a very well-engineered career set of pathways, but this is also true if you look at Shanghai, if you look in Finland and Estonia, that you'd also see less formal structures, but still the same conceptual approach, and that is, find your best teachers. Don't pull them out of the classroom, but lessen their teaching load. So rather than teach a full load, maybe they'll teach 80% or 60% of a full load.                        That enables those teachers to establish what are essentially model classrooms for other teachers to come and observe. But it also creates 20% or 40% of the time for those expert teachers to support their colleagues so they will act in mentor and coaching roles. So there's a tremendous amount of mentoring and coaching going on in these jurisdictions, but they don't have dedicated roles to being a mentor full-time or a coach full-time because they want that expertise to stay in the classroom as well.                        And so those teachers, those expert teachers, those lead and master teachers will lead the learning of... And that might be across disciplines at a particular grade level or deeply within a discipline across multiple grade levels. It might mean a one-on-one type of mentor-mentee relationship within a new teacher to make sure that that new teacher gets the support they need to become a competent and then an expert teacher in the future. So there's all sorts of ways in which those relationships, especially powerful, are the way that supports induction because these expert teachers can support it. A teacher, they can use their own classroom for observation and then debrief. It's a tremendously supportive model, and it would help with teacher retention, which is just a bit of an issue here in this country.Phillips:             And in general, if we speak to Singapore, again, teachers there have 55% more time to collaborate, to conduct research, to improve their practice, to work with other teachers. So it's across the board that teachers have more time than we afford here. And it's a big question for us. I mean, we're not Singapore, obviously, and we have various context to think about in this country. But the opportunity to give teachers more of what they say is their number one need is something that we need to be as school district and state leaders thinking hard about and creating a path toward.Horn:                It's interesting hearing you say that on a couple of dimensions. One, it seems if we had more common curriculum also within jurisdictions, that would create more compatibility for these interactions and more leverage, if you will, in the system for these collaborations and cooperation. The other piece that I think of when you talk about rethinking the nature of time and talent and the reconfigurations there is that so many schools during the pandemic, for all the challenges they had, many of them by default went to this structure where they had the master teacher and different teachers maybe doing the module with a small set of students or helping answer questions over Zoom or things like that. And it worked where there was common content that they could leverage across the grade or subject or whatever it might be. Where that was absent, a lot of schools struggled, I think, more because teachers were on their own at a particularly brutal, isolating time in the world's history.                        But the other piece of this that strikes me is something else you talk about in the report, which is the changing nature of time along another dimension, which is perhaps my favorite topic, which is getting out of our time-based learning variable system and moving to competency-based or mastery-based learning. And you talk first and foremost about how teacher education like the K-12 education system ought to be competency-based and, "Exiting teacher education requires a meaningful demonstration of mastery of craft. This can involve some combination of a written reflection, a videotaped lesson submitted for peer review, a challenging exam, or a demonstration lesson given to a live panel of experts." I think that's a really rich vision with a lot of options.                        I'd love to start with the teacher side of this, and then as we end the conversation, flip to the student side of this. But just what would a competency-based teacher preparation program truly look like and how would we get there, in your mind?Dougal:             So if I could, I'll use an example. It's not a perfect analogy, but an example from Shanghai where teacher prep institutions really focused on content knowledge. And then when you're assigned to your first school, the focus is on how you build your pedagogical skill in that content. And so by the end of your first year in a Shanghai school, you're going to have to teach a lesson that's going to be critiqued, and it is based on a competency metric that proves that you're ready to continue in your job. You're essentially not a full-fledged teacher until you've gotten through that competency measure. And of course, many do because of the great support that they're given. Some do not. And what happens there is that they'll be given additional support and they'll have another opportunity in the second year. Obviously, if it's a situation where the teacher isn't likely to meet that competency-based standard, they'll be counseled out of the profession.                        But that's not the only piece of the competency-based system. They also have to do some research. And then the interesting thing is, I had read about this and I thought, "Well, that doesn't sound very competency-based," until I found out it's more what we would call action research. You have to study your own practice and then publish a paper in a peer-reviewed journal of what you learned about your own practice. And so when I was in Shanghai to visit, I was enthralled by this and I asked a lot of questions of young teachers about it. And not surprisingly, they didn't all love it. It was a serious challenge that they had to get over. But what it did do is it made them very reflective about their own practice. Long after they passed the criteria to remain a teacher, they were still much more reflective, much more engaged, in much more metacognition about their own teaching, not only individually, but with their peers. And I think it's because of that standard that exists.Horn:                That piece of metacognition makes a ton of sense also in terms of being reflective of your own craft. And if we're serious in this country, not just in our K-12 education system, but frankly all the professions about having us be forever learners or lifelong learners, that development of metacognition to learn how you learn and continue to upskill yourself and your chosen craft is obviously critical, which comes to the last topic, which is the student side of this and competency-based learning for them. And the question that I have there, obviously, I've said if we're serious about embedding success as opposed to failure in the system, we need to move to that bar. I'm curious. Who does this well, in your opinion? It's been hard for me to pinpoint one system that I think really puts it at the center, but what have you found in terms of your research internationally?Phillips:             Well, I'll start and Jason can add, but virtually what most systems do that's different than what we do in the United States is they assess competency at certain points along a student's trajectory. And typically it's to understand if they're ready for the next level. So it's a key transition points along a student's career. And then the professionalization that we just talked about of teachers allows teachers to all the way along be judging growth and progress toward those competencies. And then those competencies typically include some core that is the demand of the country or the jurisdiction, and some actual choice options that students get to decide.Dougal:             If I could, I want to focus just slightly differently, and that's on the importance of the assessment and the transparency of the assessment. In the jurisdictions that have really strong competency-based systems... And I know I've referenced Singapore repeatedly already, but it is really a fabulous example. They actually use as the basis for their examination system, at least in the academic subjects, the Cambridge exams produced by Cambridge University, very similar to the International Baccalaureate exams. And what's so special about these exams is that not only do they not include any multiple choice, but all of their prior exams are released to the public along with often student responses that met certain scores. So you can see a score that's an 8 out of 12, a 10 out of 12, and a 12 out of 12. And it allows for students and teachers and parents, anybody who cares to understand it, to really see the difference between what an 8 or a 10 or a 12 out of 12 really means.                        It's very different from the way standards are often approached here in the US where they're often written in very flowery language and we really concentrate hard on getting the description exactly right. But then you could ask five different teachers to interpret that standard and they will see it in five different ways. But it's very different from using examples of student work with a transparent assessment to really understand what proficiency means.                        And the reason why I wanted to highlight that, Michael, is because I think it really speaks to metacognition. It allows for students to own their own learning and think about how they improve because that's going to be a skill they're going to need no matter what. I mean, the truth is we're preparing students for a world of work that very few of us can imagine. But what's going to be really important is that the current students, future workforce, are able to learn throughout their lives. They're going to have to be dynamic. They have to be able to engage in that metacognition. And a proficiency based system done with transparent assessments that use student work as the examples of the standard and not just some really flowery written description, that really allows for students to take agency and engage in metacognition. And it allows their parents to support them in a different way. It allows their teachers to support them in a very different way. That's the type of system we're talking about.Phillips:             Yeah. And Michael, one thing I want to put a pin in about that is that this issue of student agency follows the course of their career in the same way that teacher agency does. So while teacher agency is incredibly strong, part of what they understand in terms of professional practice is to also empower learners and engage them in different ways than sometimes we think about on a day-to-day basis.Horn:                We could honestly geek out on this for a while. I'm getting excited hearing about these systems and the Cambridge set of assessments. I had forgotten about those, frankly. I looked into them several years ago and I was taken with how robust the questions are and the demands on performance. But you're right. The fact that they make that transparent really empowers both students. But to your point, what a great professional development tool also for the teachers to understand what are we working toward in terms of what mastery looks like against these standards?                        And I've always said the standards are one thing, but really, how you assess it is where you put teeth into these things. So it really stands out there. And then just the last piece of this that you're raising, Vicki, I think, that's so important is those clear thresholds, some of which are common, to your point. Like we say, as a society, like it or not, this is what is critical to having cultural competence and being able to partake in the civil society of our country and having that conversation, but also some choice and giving students the ability to start making decisions about who they are going to be and how they're going to contribute. But understanding what mastery looks like in those as well just seems so important as we think about what a comprehensive system looks like.                        And then the last piece I'll just call out is these assessments are not graded ultimately by your own teacher, but by other teachers who are looking at the work. And that seems like a really other important design principle. So I can't complain that I didn't master something because my teacher didn't like me, or because they did, and therefore, they passed me on, but that were really being serious about the rigor in a very human way that's not just multiple choice questions.Phillips:             Right. And teachers trust other teachers to be able to do that in a way that is truly reflective of what students are learning and the kind of common practice that they all hold as being the hallmarks of the profession.Dougal:             And it changes the relationship between teacher and students because teachers no longer judge. Teacher is the support to help you get over that challenge, to help you slay that dragon. And I think in schools all across this country, if you see the way students and AP teachers have a relationship because the AP is [inaudible 00:33:59] that gauntlet that needs to be run, and not view your teacher as somebody who's going to pass or fail you based on whatever criteria they might have, they really become your guide and your support.Horn:                And as Carol Dweck wrote in her book, Mindset, "If students think that their teachers are judging them, then they will sabotage their performance." And well, gosh, we shouldn't be surprised when they do so as a result. With that, Jason, Vicki, we could spend all day, I think, talking about a lot of these topics, but I'm so glad you're out there pushing this blueprint to help us question these critical precepts of what our school systems look like. And deeply appreciate you being with me on The Future of Education today.Phillips:             Thank you. We appreciate being here.Dougal:             Thank you so much.Horn:                Thank you all for tuning in, and we'll be back next time. Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) has been one of the major philanthropic forces in U.S. education for roughly a decade now. As schools have reopened and the challenges facing children remain as glaring as ever, I spoke with Sandra Liu Huang, who has served as CZI’s head of education and vice president of product since 2018. In our conversation we talked about some of our shared passions around what's needed to reinvent schooling, what supports children need to thrive, and how CZI is framing its work ahead.You can also watch the conversation here on YouTube and, while you’re there, subscribe to my YouTube channel.Michael Horn:   It's good to see you, Sandra. Thank you for joining me.Sandra Liu Huang: Yep. Thanks for having me, Michael. It's great to be here.Horn:                So I'd love to start with your personal background because I suspect a lot of folks don't know your own journey toward working in this field of education as it's wound around into to finding you leading the education work at CZI.Huang:             Yeah. So maybe I can start on the personal side. I grew up in the suburbs of Atlanta and grew up to immigrant parents. And I knew that they really valued education for my brother and myself, even though as immigrants, they didn't always understand what was happening in school for me. They didn't really know. But they really wanted us to focus. And that was always very important growing up.                        But for me, we actually spent some years in Taiwan, where my parents had immigrated from, when I was in high school, and in that experience, had the chance to get to know my extended family, meet my grandmother, and realized that... I knew this, but got to see firsthand that my family, we are farmers. My dad was the ninth of nine kids. My mom's the seventh of eight kids, so huge families. My aunts and uncles, still farmers today in this little village. But it really took an educator, a teacher in my dad's hometown, to really take a really... care, and take the youngest three siblings of this family of nine, and really encourage them through an educational pathway that led them to graduate study and immigrating to the US. And for me, that just always stuck with me, and obviously sticks with me today, that educational opportunity really doesn't just change the life of that student, like my dad, but really changes the life of his family and generations to come, as I've been impacted.                        And just from a professional standpoint, I've worked in product development most of my career, for about 15 years pre CZI. And for me, the reason CZI came about as an amazing opportunity is I've always loved working at the intersection of different disciplines. Because I think the problems that we face, they can't be solved with just the perspective of a single discipline, and the more that we can think about how do you weave what is known from different disciplines into joint solutions, the more powerful that is. And CZI has been a place that is really thinking holistically across our work.Horn:                No, it's an amazing... amazing upfront reflections. I'm just struck by, I guess, a couple themes. One, your point about how education just doesn't change the life of the individual, but really, the branch or branches of the family tree. I've seen that as well. And I'm thinking about your own immigrant story and my own wife, whose parents came from Korea, and her dad, who lived through the Korean War, and what that does to a family, and how they do or don't come out of that through education. And then, I'm also struck, of course, by your comment about a lot of these knotty problems and challenges being solved by multiple perspectives coming together. And I think that's right. It's true in every field that the biggest breakthroughs come not from subject matter expertise, but a variety of subject matter expertise being able to look at a problem orthogonally, almost, and these big breakthroughs occurring.Huang:             Yeah, absolutely.Horn:                So I want to shift, then, a little bit from... that's your personal story getting into this. But I want to think, as we're starting to... I'm not sure we're allowed to say that. But I think with the CDC guidance, we're allowed to say we're starting to exit the pandemic. There's obviously a ton of focus on a lot of issues. There's a mental health crisis among our youth. There's rampant learning loss. There's a loss of connection with many students and families. There's shrinking enrollment in many traditional schools. I'd argue that there's an outdated schooling system more generally, and so forth. I'm curious, you look at all those things we could list, what do you see as perhaps the biggest challenge facing our youth and their education in this country at this moment? And perhaps, as you think about the role of philanthropy against that, what's the sweet spot where philanthropy can perhaps make the biggest positive impact right now?Huang:             Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I think coming out of these last couple years, we have, in some ways, grappled with realities that have existed for a long time. And the way that I think about that is that our education system really is structured and designed and built to be a bit of one size fits all.It was built for a different time of bringing students in through this content knowledge that we wanted to impart on them. But during these past couple years, I think we've seen really clearly that students aren't just a brain that comes in, where they're downloading content and that's it, but students are developing adults and humans. And we need to think about an education system that is thinking about how do you really support student wellbeing to help them be able to pursue the academic learning and achievement that we want for them. And I just really think that, as an education system, we should be thinking about how do we equip students well, because that equipping is going to be the fabric of our country for years and generations to come.                        But the pandemic, this period was a time where it was very, very clear, not just for students, adults alike, that you're a life, and what you do in the school building or in your workplace, those are intricately connected. And if you are not feeling safe, or your mental health is challenged, it is going to impact your learning as a student. And so for us, our vision and hope is that the school system can really acknowledge that as a way to think about how learning can happen better.                        You ask about the role of philanthropy, and I mentioned it. At CZI, we really do think about how do you bring new tools and new interdisciplinary thinking to some of these problems. And for us, we are really thinking about how do you take what we know about how students learn... Academic research is really learning and understands a lot more than it did 10, 20 years ago about how students develop, how they learn, what conditions need to be in place to help them learn. And how do we take those and make it really practical and useful for teachers.                        And so our role, I think, because we really think about that problem space, we think about what tools do teachers need to make this really doable and possible. What conditions need to be true to help the leaders of schools be thinking about this as the goal of education, not just imparting the knowledge, but really equipping students holistically, thinking about their learning, and bringing what we know from learning science into classroom practice.Horn:                That makes a ton of sense. And I love the holistic perspective on this, that we need to really support all facets of a learner's home life as well as their school life, if you will, if we really hope to see the progress that they want to make to being a prepared adult for our complex, evolving society. I'm curious, for those who aren't familiar at CZI, how is your strategy and the grant making and building that you all have done shifted over the course of the pandemic? I assume, but I don't actually know, there's probably a fire drill phase where you just have to help the urgent now, and there was probably some work to be done there. I suspect that then there's been a midpoint, and maybe now... How do you describe that strategy and the work you're doing at the moment, but how that's evolved over the pandemic?Huang:             Yeah. I think one thing the pandemic... at least for me and the team, we realize the things that we have been talking about and caring about, in some sense, feel really salient, or felt really, really salient during these last couple years because of the different tools that we're bringing to the table. Maybe I can first start with the way that we thought about it, and then I could talk about how that's evolved.Horn:                Yeah, perfect.Huang:             A large part of our grant making, we call that team research to practice. It is really thinking about how do we connect what we know about how students learn and develop, and make that actually practically useful and doable, given a classroom and a teacher has tremendous responsibilities and very full plates as it is. So how do we think about the innovations that can happen there?                        I think in this work, the last two years, we have seen teachers be tremendous sources of innovation because they have had no choice but to innovate, to find their students sometimes. And I just find that something has really exciting energy, even though, as we exit the pandemic stage, there is probably this back to normal pull that happens. But I think we've seen that innovation is possible, and that teachers really see the need to think about student wellbeing as part of their learning package. So that's in our grant making work.                        The other major part of our work is tool building. I think one of the unique perspectives of CZI is to think about how could software and product development be philanthropic tools. And our team on the tech side is thinking about how do we take what we know about those practices that can work on the classroom, make them into usable, useful practical products that can help teachers do some of these research based practices in their daily teaching and in their daily interactions with students. I would say a lot has evolved in ed tech these last couple years, and so yeah, we definitely have gone through the moment of, hey, what can we do quickly?                        And I can talk a little bit more about a product we built during that time. One of our largest products is the learning platform for Summit Learning, a really large program, very comprehensive. But we knew, with COVID, that wasn't a moment that a lot of people could take on such big change if they hadn't already started that process. So we're really excited to bring Along, the product's called Along, that really takes this mentoring piece and thinks about how can we bring that practice in to more students and teachers. So Along is a new product that we have rolled out. It is really to help be a teacher-student connection builder. And it makes it really, really easy for a teacher to take research backed questions... sometimes you can think of getting to know someone as a very hand wavy, casual thing, but we bring this framework of developmental relationships to ground in these research questions that are really easy to access and use through this product experience. And so we are really excited to keep working and iterating on this product because we think that teacher-student connection is just an essential piece of the puzzle.Horn:                No, that's fascinating. I think I'm putting the right link below, you can double check if I have it there, so folks that are interested can check that out. But I think it's interesting... What's that?Huang:             Yeah, no, sorry. Along.org is right.Horn:                Good, good, good, good. Okay, good. Got the right one. So check it out for sure.                        I want to get more into the products and so forth because you all are very unique, it seems, in the philanthropic landscape. You're actually building stuff that gets used. You're not just giving grants to organizations, you're really getting into that nitty gritty. I want to dig into that a little bit more in a moment.                        But before we go there, you all also are connecting all this research from the learning sciences and things of that nature, along with the lived experiences, if you will, of teachers and students in these school environments. So I'm just curious, your own learning evolution and your own learning journey, or CZI's, maybe, more broadly, what is something that maybe wasn't intuitive, or you've learned along the way, that contradicted previous beliefs and has allowed you to evolve over time as you're building these tools? I'm just curious for you to take us on your own learning journey, in effect.Huang:             Yeah. I guess what has been interesting for me is some of the things I've talked about feel really, to me, very obvious in some ways. Like, yes, we should take what we know about how students learn, and yes, that should be really usable for teachers. And I think for me, those feel really sort of... that should happen. That should just be the way it is. And I think, through my time at CZI, and really, through my own learning, the team's learning, how we interact with really amazing partners and grantees out in this space, is that just doesn't happen for a number of reasons.                        I give the example of a lot of schools still use this idea of three cueing. It's a theory around how reading comprehension happens. And it's been maybe over 20 years since that has been debunked as the way... that students are really guessing at words. But that is still being used because we don't really have the mechanisms to update that. And I think, for me, that is something that really pushes us to say, okay, well, wait, education is a complex system, so what are the different pieces that play into the fact that these innovations don't really get to teachers, and obviously, anyone working in education. There are many factors that come into play, and I could talk about our perspective on that in just a second as we go into that building part that we do. But I think that's the piece where we just really think there is a lot of existing research about how students learn, but we need to think about how to unlock that and make that really available to teachers.Horn:                That's a really good example. So let's stay with that learning science strand and how it's formed your investment strategy. You just mentioned Along, you mentioned Summit Learning. What else are you building right now that you're really excited about that you want to share with folks so that they can go check out?Huang:             Sure. I mentioned that research to practice grant making portfolio, and the team there is doing a lot of exciting work, I would say a lot of the innovation of where might there be good research learnings to put into practice. Those are the types of innovations that we've been investing in. I'll give a couple examples. We think a lot about wellbeing of students, as we've talked about a little bit here, but if we want to talk about student wellbeing, you also have to talk about teacher wellbeing. I mean, just as an adult who's lived through these last two years...Horn:                It's been hard.Huang:             Real. It's hard. But we really have to think about all these real human beings in the building. So there's been a program that came out of a team in Madison, Wisconsin, called the Healthy Minds Innovations. They have built a program that's app based that's really thinking about teacher wellbeing, and really helps teachers go through podcasts and lessons to think about how do they grow in their awareness, connection, insight, and purpose. That's an example of a type of thing we might fund, where there's that innovation that is really practical and that teachers can pick up. After the early studies, after about a month of using this program, teachers both had self-reported feelings of greater calm, less of that distress and stress of life, less disconnection and loneliness. And even in the follow up months later, there's still that persistence.                        So it just shows how a small intervention packaged in a way that's doable can be really impactful. And again, thinking about how teachers can have better wellbeing, I think, is really essential if we want to talk about supporting our students as well.Horn:                Totally agree. If you don't have the teachers in place supported, you're not going to get the student success either, for sure. And it sounds like you haven't just funded that group to continue to advance in their own product development, but you've also monitored or funded, maybe, the research alongside of it. Is that correct?Huang:             Yeah. A lot of our work... some of it is some of that initial innovation work, but a lot of it, we either follow up or pair with this goal of generating more evidence of these practices. And again, a lot of our work is around wellbeing and relationships because we think it's... It's not a cherry on top. It's not this extra thing to academic learning. We think it should be integrated and thought about at the same time. And so in addition to the innovations, yeah, we do a lot of the funding that is, how do we generate more evidence around this to show not just that the research is valid, but that putting into practice in these practical ways can also have impact and results.Horn:                That's awesome. I find far too much philanthropy doesn't think about that efficacy and research piece, and just sort of throws it out in the wild and hopes it sticks and hopes it does good things. So I'm glad you're doing that, one, but two, I also love that you said the word integrated. Because I guess that's my other piece of this, which is sometimes these different strands are very disintermediated or disintegrated from each other. So you'll support the healthy minds or good social emotional wellbeing and so forth, but it's not in the context of that academic growth, and so you don't see the impact on the other side of it, or vice versa, to your point, you treat it as the cherry on top, and you forget that it's actually foundational to someone having the security, if we think about this as a Maslow context, to be able to think about their progression, self-actualization, and so forth. So that integrated piece strikes me as an important part of the conversation.                        I think it actually blends right into where I want to go next, which is, you mentioned it, several times, it's not just how these tools work in a vacuum, but how people actually use them on the ground. You had the reading example, which is a great one, of guys, we've known this for a couple decades, but gee, it's not changing in practice. So I'm curious, as you fund these tools, how you think about making sure that they're designed either in accordance with how they're designed to be used, or how do they fit into the progress that people are prioritizing, even if it's maybe different from the conception of progress that you all have as you create them?Huang:             Yeah. I think that's a really salient question for us. And you mentioned it earlier, as ed tech developers, we're like, hey, if the teachers would only use it this particular way. I think for us, there is a real threading that we need to think about because research is great, but if it's theoretical and not usable, it doesn't have impact. Existing teacher practices may be great, but if we don't take what we know about learning, it's less effective than it could be. I think it isn't right for us to say, hey, teachers, very full workload, figure this all out on your own.                        And so as we think about tool building, I mentioned Along, I think we want to really blend how do we take the research and make it practical, and that's the task of the tool builders. I think as a philanthropy, it is unique to be building, but there's a couple reasons it's actually quite powerful for us to do in-house. One is to really practice that interdisciplinary weaving. And it's not easy. We speak different languages, we have different goals, different ways of knowing. And so as we build, we get to really share a goal of making it practical and useful with these different components.                        And the Along example, I think, is quite powerful because we got to work with the Search Institute. They're a partner and grantee. They have worked on this developmental relationship framework. It's research based. It's intentional about how do you actually build a fruitful, positive, productive, developmentally appropriate relationship between teacher and student. So they are the backbone. But instead of that being on a website, you have to go find and figure how to action. We partnered with them to build Along, which has research questions. Those research questions are grounded to that framework. And then we can also work with communities. We've worked with the Black Teacher Collaborative, Character Lab, to get feedback from teachers and students about, well, does that resonate? Because as adults, we can say, oh, this is a great question for my kids. And if you've got students, you know some of the times that does not land.                        And so if we can help do some of that research work to make it more resonant for students, it's easier for teachers in the end. And so we package all of these things together to make sure, and then to measure and iterate that we can bring the good practices that are theoretical into the classroom in real practical and powerful and valuable ways for teachers and students.Horn:                Yeah. It occurs to me that learning engineering approach, that because you're developing, you're getting those cracks at it, seeing how it is or is not adopted, getting to adjust and reconcile that with the research base. It transitions where I want to go as we wrap up this conversation, last question, which is, we talked about your work in terms of developing directly, in terms of funding interesting developments and teams building things, your work doing research and efficacy and understanding the use cases, and how does it actually interact, if you will, with the real world. The last piece of this is, though, thinking about, for lack of a better word, how that real world changes, how the system itself perhaps changes to determine what gets adopted. And I'm curious, as you're building and funding tools that have a lot of research behind them, how do you think about moving the market forward toward adopting these tools that have that rigor and efficacy research behind them?Huang:             Yeah. I've talked about this a little bit less, but when I think about us as builders, there is certainly the product and software component of it. But another big piece of building is actually building the bridges to partner with all the people across the ecosystem that I think are going to have to work together. I mean, this is my theme of working interdisciplinary in interdisciplinary ways. I really think that there are a lot of people who see things commonly that we can do better for our teachers and our students. And in our work, in addition to the building work and all the things that we get to learn from that, we are also making grants that help acknowledge all the insight and knowledge that partners know in their local communities, wherever they may be, and then figure out how do we find common ground to say, hey, we need to shift, whether it's the market for technology or the policies that go into what's happening, that we can thread a needle around holistic student wellbeing and achievement in their academics as one conversation.                        To give an example, one of our partners is King Makers of Oakland. They are really working very deeply with their local community to think about how do we support Black youth? How do we understand from the community and the caretakers and the families what they mean when they want their students to become leaders and develop well. So that's an example of going local.                        And then at the same time, we're also looking at how do we create bipartisan coalitions. We're really proud of just the work, to your point, of early in the pandemic, some of the responsive work that we did to really make sure that we were able to, with our partners on the ground, work towards that $7 billion in funding federally to push around the homework gap and connectivity that students were going to need to access during that time.                        So I think those are just a couple of examples, deep and broad, that we are thinking about how do you evolve that broader market or the policies that drive what's important and what's funded.Horn:                Gotcha. I know that's super helpful. Last question as we wrap up, I slightly lied, but last question, which is, folks tuning in, following this, they want to follow your work. They want to follow what else you're funding, developing, building. What's the best way for the field to keep up with all these developments?Huang:             Yeah. That's a great question. I hope I got to highlight some of the amazing work that our partners do.Horn:                Yeah, I would say so.Huang:             And our team at CZI, we just... Major theme is we have to work together. A lot of people are going to need to work together to evolve and to build this better future for everyone. And we're really excited if folks want to tune along or reach out to us. Our website, chanzuckerberg.com, has links to the education work. And we also have our Twitter and other social media for updates along the way. But the website probably is a great place to start. And you can hear what we're up to there.Horn:                That's perfect. I'll throw that in, trying to grab it quickly, chanzuckerberg.com, so people can see it at the bottom here. … And Sandra, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having the conversation. Thank you for what you're building, funding, and doing every day to advance this agenda to help every child make progress in their lives and be prepared for this world in which we're living. Deeply appreciate it. And for all you tuning in, we'll be back next time on The Future of Education. Thanks so much. Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.