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

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.

I had the opportunity at a recent event to host a conversation on stage with Ian Rowe and Scott Barry Kaufman. Ian is author of the new book, Agency: The Four Point Plan (F.R.E.E) for All Children to Overcome the Victimhood Narrative and Discover Their Pathway to Power, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and CEO of Vertex Partnership Academies, a network of charter high schools. Scott is a humanistic psychologist, the host of the Psychology Podcast, and the author of 10 books, including Choose Growth, which debuts in September, and Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization. I hope you enjoy what was a very lively and informative conversation.Michael Horn:  What we really want to talk about as we do this live today is unpacking a lot of these themes that you both write so eloquently about and the importance of developing all individuals in our society. And so I want to start with the name of your book, “Agency,” because it's a concept all three of us have written quite a lot about. And you have a definition in it, Ian, which I'll quote: "Agency is more than free will. It is free will guided by a moral sense of right and wrong." It's a different definition from the one I think most of us think about when we hear agency. So I want to start with you unpacking that definition of why you chose to write it that way, what it is and isn't. And then Scott, I'd love you to jump in with your own way of thinking about agency.Ian Rowe:         Yeah. Well, thank you, Michael and Scott. Great to be with you and be with everyone this morning. As you mentioned, I'm launching a network of schools, but I've run schools in the heart of the South Bronx in the lower east side of Manhattan for the last decade, elementary and middle schools and now we're launching high school. And the reason I run schools is I want young people, our students to know that they can do hard things, that there are pathways to success even given their current circumstance. And what I've witnessed though in the last few years, but especially accelerated in the last one or two years, have been these narratives that in my view are robbing young people of this sense that they can do hard things. It's robbing them of this sense of agency.                        And so there are these two meta narratives that I've really identified what I call blame the system and blame the victim. In the blame the system narrative, that's a view of America that says America itself is flawed and rigged against you. Based on your race, your class, your gender, you're inherently going to be oppressed in this country. There's a white supremacist lurking on every corner. Capitalism itself is evil, and these systems are so rigged against you that you are essentially powerless to do anything unless there's some massive government intervention or some other societal transformation. And on the other side is blame the victim that in that narrative, America's great. America's the land of opportunity. If you're not successful, you are the problem. You are the architect of your own failure. You didn't pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. And of course, that ignores the challenge when a kid is born into an unstable family or lacks a faith commitment or doesn't have access to school choice.                        So both of these narratives in my view just kill the ability of young people to see, what is my pathway to a self-determined life? And so rather than just shouting in the rain, I thought important to create the empowering alternative, which I do define as agency, the force of your free will guided by moral discernment. The force of your free will guided by moral discernment. So this idea that all of us have the ability to make independent decisions, but where does the ability to become morally discerning come from? And so that's the importance of important local institutions, family, religion, education, and entrepreneurship. We can go into each of those, but I believe if more young people were to learn the power of embracing those four pillars in their own lives, we'd usher in a whole new age of agency and self-actualization.Scott Barry Kaufman: Wow. That was so interesting because you opened up a lot of can worms for us cognitive scientists who studies philosophy of mind who doesn't really believe we have free will.Rowe:               You don't believe in free will?Kaufman:          In the ultimate sense, I feel like we could have a whole conversation about does people’s will exist? Could be a separate conversation.Horn:                The world just got more interesting than I thought.Kaufman:          Yes. So much of what you just said was so interesting to me ultimately, but I do believe we have, in our day to day lives, we do have agency and we do have the capacity to learn from our mistakes. We have the capacity to error correct, to plan for the future meticulously so that we can't plan all the things that are going to come. But the more we can plan, the less likely we are to be affected by it. The fact that you include morality as well in your definition is also fascinating. So literally everything you just said to me, my brain is on fire. And I'm like, which thread do I pick up?                        Put free will one to the side, but the one about including morality, so that's not necessarily how I've thought about it, but I could definitely be persuaded for that. I've thought about it just more simply as do you feel like you're the author of your own life? Do you feel like you are, in a conventional self-determined sense, like self-determination theory within psychology, do you feel like you have autonomy? And autonomy to me includes not just external constraints, but our own internal barriers that we have, such as our lack of self-belief, our lack of... So for me, self-advocacy is a big part of agency, especially among kids in special ed, which is the kind of population I've been trying to help. Yeah.Rowe:               Interesting. I do believe that there are constraints on free will. Think of free will as a vector or velocity, where velocity is not just speed. It's speed and direction. And constraints are good, because there are many people with free will that do all sorts of bad things. So the question is, what's the context in which young people are learning how to exercise their free will to their own self betterment?Horn:                It's interesting because I haven't added that moral component either, but I've also thought that agency is something that you develop in young people. You (Scott) talk a lot about how hope is not necessarily a natural state in the book, that you build that in people over time as well. And I've seen it similarly. Sometimes in education, we fall back on these monikers of just voice and choice and that is equal to agency, and that's not how I see it. I see it as you actually see evidence that your actions can impact your trajectory and those around you in the ways that you want to bend it, and that's developing agency over time. And my argument has been context matters a big deal in that, because in our current system of education, you sit for a number of minutes in a seat, you have a lesson delivered to you.                        And then honestly, regardless of the effort and work you put in, the next day you show up, you're on a different lesson. After three weeks, you're on a different unit, and you don't actually see the value of your hard work and mastering something as being the thing that pushes you along and actually gives you agency, I would argue, along. And so the context really undermines that. I hadn't thought about the moral component and moral dimension in that, but you obviously talk a lot, both of you, about context. Scott, let me go to you on this one, just because you talk about context of some people being born into these hardships that Ian writes about, single parent families and things of that nature, where some of those skills actually might be to your advantage if we can see them as their own kind of intelligence, and schools could lean in on that a little bit and develop that part of it. I'd love you just to explicate that, because that was a new idea for me.Kaufman:          Oh yeah. I see where you're going with that. Yeah. Well, I think that there's an extreme movement where we want to reinterpret everything that is a hardship in life and reinterpret it as a gift. And I don't go to that extreme, but I do think that there is some recent research coming out that shows that people that grow up in very chaotic environments where there's maybe a lot of violence in their environment or there's lack of meaning, like coherence, they can't predict anything in their environment, they actually can gain some skills that can be an advantage in a school system. Your ability for being able to read people's emotions, your ability to be able to... They do all these kind of cognitive tasks and they find that people that grow up in those kinds of environments actually have advantages in very specific niches and ability to predict things and street smarts. My advisor, Robert Sternberg, distinguished between street smarts and IQ type smarts, and that's seems to be an interesting distinction to be made.Horn:                Can you say a little bit more about, yeah, what is a street smart versus IQ-Kaufman:          Practical intelligence. I guess you would call it practical intelligence, your ability to become a good business person, your ability in the social world, your ability to understand the tacit implicit knowledge of things as opposed to the explicit knowledge that is required on tests.Horn:                Ian, I'd love your take as someone who runs schools.Rowe:               Yeah. So context, that absolutely matters. And in the schools I lead, we have kids who are born into exactly the kinds of chaotic situations, single parenthood, as well as married two parent households as well. The question is when we see kids who are in these environments, some emerge completely dysfunctional and others emerge thriving and able to achieve. What makes the difference? And the reason I wrote my book is that in my observation, it has usually been the presence of local, mediating institutions like strong families, strong faith commitment, and access to great schools that have usually laid the foundation that even if I'm born into a chaotic environment, my context is now something I can manage. My context is something that I have more control in my ability to thrive and make good decisions, even if in the house next door that has, on its surface anyway, the same conditions, the kid is not successful. And so that's why agency is individually practiced, but socially empowered. We cannot ignore the power of local institutions to shape my ability to handle my context, however on the surface it might seem hostile to my dreams.Kaufman:          Can I put off that idea of empowerment? Because I really like that a lot. I do believe that agency can be activated in a really strong way if it was dormant before. I personally experienced that as a child. I was in special ed up until ninth grade and there was a moment where I was very inspired to take myself out of the whole system and to challenge everything. And then from that day forward, I had this agency I didn't even know I had. So I guess my point, which I think is very in line with what you're saying, is sometimes we have this deep reservoir of agency we didn't even know we had.Rowe:               Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. But my thing is I wanted to be deliberate. It sounds like it happened for you and it just happened, as opposed to we know these things. And so how do we become more intentional about creating an intersection with these institutions that we know that you can have that epiphany moment? I had a similar one at 12 years old as a function of my family. But we know the institutions that can help shape young people's beliefs and their ability in their capacity to achieve, and yet I think we just leave it at random. So it might have happened. Imagine if you hadn't had that epiphany moment.Kaufman:          My whole career is trying to find those triggers and systematic and I feel like we're on the same page. Yeah.Horn:                I'd love you both to reflect on how we don't make it happenstance and luck. And Ian, I want to quote again from the book where you said, "Pure self-reliance is a myth," which is a very powerful statement. And then you go on to say, "Individuals do not develop such dogged self-determination until someone or some institution first helps them grasp that their effort is integral to advancing toward that goal basically that they have."Rowe:               Yeah. That's these blame the victim, blame the system narratives that, "Well, you should have just pulled yourself up by the bootstraps." No. Pure self-reliance is a myth. And my concern is that young people are hearing these messages. I'll take one example of Nikole Hannah-Jones, who's the lead author of the New York Times 1619 Project. She wrote an 8,000 word essay in the New York Times magazine basically saying that black people have no ability to close a racial wealth gap without a 14, $15 trillion reparations program. And in this essay, she says, "It doesn't matter what a Black person does. Doesn't matter if you buy a home, doesn't matter if you get married, doesn't matter if you get educated, doesn't matter if you save. None of those things can overcome 400 years of racialized plundering."                        Just think about that. And imagine teachers who adopt that ideology and are sending this message to kids. And by the way, Nikole Hannah-Jones has done all of those things in her own life to lead a quite prosperous life, just as an important aside. Just the point being that these messages of, "You should have pulled yourself up by the bootstraps," or, "It doesn't matter what you do. Someone else has to come to be your savior," all of these narratives ignore the power of agency. But establishing that, we can't ignore the importance of the institutions that help you build personal agency.Horn:                That resonates from my perspective and it defies the sense of the systemic weight of things around you that cause you to be unable to act, firstly. And secondly, my mentor, Clay Christensen, often was saying, when you're looking for an explanation of why something doesn't work in a particular area, find the anomalies and then say what's different about that. And so there's tons of anomalies to the Nikole Hannah-Jones statement with all of these Black individuals who have gotten married, who've gotten the education, including her, and lead very good lives. And it's important to study those anomalies to say, "Actually, what causes those people to be able to lift themselves out." And then as a result, I think, the logical extension is, what do the institutions around these individuals do differently to create more opportunities for that?Kaufman:          Yeah. I think there's some really interesting questions to unpack there as to what extent do individual differences matter. Some people do have more of a perseverance, conscientiousness as a personality trait I study. That does have a genetic basis to a certain degree. So I feel like on the one hand, we surely don't want to say it's all agency. But other hand, I think we'd be remiss if we didn't say in the predictive variables what explains one person or another to completely leave out that personality variables do matter that are influenced by genes to a certain extent. That shouldn't be controversial at all.Rowe:               Right. But do you think conscientiousness, so while there might be a genetic connection, do you think it's learnable, even if a kid doesn't?Kaufman:          Yes, absolutely. And I think that's a great myth about using the dirty word genes is that it means that you can never change. We're just talking about inclinations. I don't want to give up on anyone. I'm the least person in the world to say that we only select certain people who score a certain cutoff on a conscientiousness score. But with that said, in my predictive models and trying to understand how do we predict who goes ahead and who doesn't, some people do have this kind of personality trait of a personal initiative that can't be purely explained by external factors, if that makes sense.Horn:                So I think that actually takes the conversation exactly where I want to go to, which is the power of the individual and the question of individualization in our schools versus standardization. It seems to me one of the, I don't know if pushback is the right word, but one of the key tensions in this conversation is what should be learned commonly by all or most students as they're growing up? And where do you start to allow individuals to follow strengths, passions, interests, things of that nature? And I'm just curious how you both think about that tension about what's common versus what's individual and school's role in customizing or not around those things.Kaufman:          I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.Horn:                Yeah, Ian, go ahead.Rowe:               Yeah. It's a good question, because education is very disaggregated system, but E. D. Hirsch wrote about this many years ago where he basically posited that any society or every society has a core body of knowledge that is assumed. If you read a newspaper, there aren't 3,000 word articles because the writers are compacting because they're making assumptions about things you should know if you make a reference to the declaration of independence or George Washington. But if you're on the periphery of that body of knowledge and you haven't been taught it, then that has deep consequences for you to be able to participate fully in that society.                        And so he, E. D. Hirsch, actually created the dictionary of cultural literacy and it was, in my view, an amazing book and he was attacked for it. It was not inclusive enough and all this. But at some point, and it's hard to do in the United States because there are arguments constantly over what's in and what's out of the core body of knowledge, but it exists. Even in the design of our high school, we are creating what we believe is an incredible canon of books that we think every kid coming out of high school should have read to be not just functioning, but to thrive in our community.Kaufman:          I just think things like critical thinking skills are not being taught in... There are things that just definitely are not being taught as a common core that we desperately need in our society right now. Imagine if school children actually had exercises where they engage with people who are so very different from them who have completely different ideas. There's just a whole bunch of things we're not setting children up for in the real world that I think is missing.Rowe:               Yeah.Horn:                I was just going to briefly say... Sorry. It's interesting. In my book, From Reopen to Reinvent, what I talk a lot about is we need to think deliberately about the knowledge that we want all individuals to learn and we need to have these conversations, I think, in a way that we're not in the individual schooling communities, because I suspect that there's a common strand that is across the country. I suspect it's smaller than we sometimes expect, and then I suspect that there's a common strand in a state, in a community that you also want people to know and be able to work with.                        And by the way, then skills and habits of success are next on my rungs, and not in an order. They're interdependent in my view. But you can't learn critical thinking without having a deep reservoir of knowledge to think critically about. And I think sometimes, in the education world, we fall back and we say, "Oh, critical thinking is this thing that we identify as a skills based thing." A, we haven't rigorously identified what skills we do. And B, we should be practicing them deliberately as we go across bases of knowledge so that individuals can actually transfer them as they come up that novice to expert spectrum, if you will, as they master knowledge.Rowe:               No, that's exactly the point I was going to make, because the need for develop critical thinking skills and the need to build that core body of knowledge are intertwined. And oftentimes, somehow they're put at odds with one another. Yeah. What is it that we want kids to critically think about? Let's have that be the great works. Broadly defined, but let's design, what is it that we want kids to know when they're leaving our schools and then how to critically think about it? And to divorce those two thing, unfortunately, I see often being done in K-12 education.Horn:                Well, and I agree with that. I think someone that I work a lot with, Diane Tavenner who runs Summit Public Schools, she talks a lot about no single use tools in the kitchen, no single use tools in the school either. When you're teaching knowledge, you should also be teaching skills and agency and executive function and all these other things that are critical to someone, not just passing through school, but thriving in life.Rowe:               Yeah. And think of the great characters that you can read about that are grappling with real issues that you can then bring into the classroom. It's amazing.Horn:                Yeah. No, I agree with that.Kaufman:          I love Diane.Horn:                Yeah, no, she's a wonderful human who's taught me a lot about all these. So I want to turn to your books and your work, both of you, in the time that we have remaining, because I'm curious. There's a lot written about both of you. There's a lot written about your scholarship. There's a lot written about the work that you do with kids. What's most misunderstood about what you have written or the work that you do that's out there right now? And I want to ask it that way because I think sometimes, we all become caricatures outside and you get to correct the record, if you will.Kaufman:          May I?Horn:                Yeah. Go, Scott. Yeah.Kaufman:          This one's very interesting. It's very nuanced. But sometimes, I wrote a book called Ungifted, and when I'm put on interviews, immediately, I'm put in this I'm anti-IQ camp. They're like, "Oh, Scott, tell us why IQ tests are terrible and why you want to change." My actual view is a little more nuanced, which is I'm not anti-IQ. I'm just anti measuring every individual by one standardized metric and to the extent to which you deviate from that standardized metric, because then to which you deviate from some ideal of human potential. That's what I'm really against. But I'm not anti-IQ and I believe that in fact, a lot of kids who are intellectually gifted are really falling between the wayside in our education systems, especially a lot of people are cutting gifted education programs. I'm an advocate for gifted education. So I think that'd be one of the biggest ones that people assume I'm like anti-gifted. I'm anti excellence. I'm not anti-excellence at all. I want all children to have the opportunity to be excellent in their own way.Horn:                Yeah. Ian, what about you?Rowe:               I think because I write about agency and the power to overcome challenges, somehow for some people, that means that I'm not acknowledging structural barriers that may exist. I'll say often, look, sure, there's structural racism, there's institutional racism, there's systemic racism, but there's also surmountable racism. And the reason it's important to say that is that you can acknowledge that a kid will face barriers in their own life, but they are not so debilitating that you lose your ability to overcome. That is the central message. And so that's in my view, the kind of lazy pushback I often receive.Horn:                No, that makes sense. I'm curious what you both are most excited about in education at the moment. When you look out at the landscape, what has you on fire saying, "This is something that's promising. We ought to do more of this."Kaufman:          Do you want?Rowe:               Well, at the moment, I'm very excited to be on the verge of breaking the stranglehold that unions have on opening great high schools in New York City. Yeah. So we're launching what'll be an international baccalaureate high school in the Bronx, and this is a district where only 7% of kids that start ninth grade four years later graduate from high school ready for college. The numbers are just staggering. And within this school, there'll be multiple pathways at the end of sophomore year. You can choose a college or university pathway, or you can choose a careers pathway. At the end of four years of high school, you can have a credential in computer science, something related to architecture, even phlebotomy that we're working with the Mayo Clinic. I think high school is this final frontier where we have to... The whole college for all mentality. You can talk about we're against the whole one size fits all.                        Well, that's a big one that we need to break, but we need high schools to create multiple pathways of equal stature that you can go to college if that's your pathway and prepare for that, or prepare for industry in a way that's real. And the reason that the unions are suing us is that they recognize that this kind of model, I think, and the governance structure that we've set up is threatening to their stranglehold. I'm very excited that when we win, and we will, incredible education entrepreneurs can open great high schools for not only kids in New York City, but the model can be replicated then across the country.Horn:                Scott, what about you?Kaufman:          Yeah. I'm really excited about the idea of scaling up this idea that every child has a coach or someone that believes in them and feels scaling up this whole idea of, how can we inspire all children to realize their potential? Been working with this organization called The Future Project. I don't know if either of you have heard of it where they have an actual position in the school of the dream director. So any child can go to the office of the dream director and tell them what their dream is and they help them find resources to enact that. And then I've been trying to create a self-actualization coaching program for teachers so that they think of themselves in the classroom as self-actualization coaches. And what would that look like for the teachers actually to be trained in the science of human potential? So that's why I'm excited about it. Yeah.Rowe:               So there's a position called dream director.Kaufman:          Yeah, yeah, yeah. They ask the school psychologist and they bring in... No, I'm joking about that, but they bring in the dream director. Yeah.Horn:                I love it. These are how good ideas start to spread. Now we have some ideas that we're going to carry ourselves. I will say briefly what I'm most excited about at the moment is parents feeling like they have choice in education and that they're acting on it. And I think either the system will stop treating students and families as one size fits all as a result or we're going to see a lot more entrepreneurship with a lot more opportunities and options that fit the priorities and needs and circumstances of the students and parents as they need to make progress in their lives. So I'm excited about that. Last word as we wrap up here. I'm curious. Stakeholders are trying to figure out how they can lean in and be helpful to the sorts of things that we've talked about and overthrow this one size fits all system. For business leaders specifically, what would you say, "Lean in on here. It could really help and make a difference right now."Rowe:               Not to, again, promote the high school structure that we are creating, but I think a lot of businesses would benefit from investing in models at the high school level that, again, treat a college pathway and an industry pathway of equal stature. Because it often turns out that a lot of businesses, even when kids come out of college, they're spending all this money to retrain them in industry specific areas. Why not allow that choice to be made by a student in high school at the end of sophomore year where they have more time to be trained in particular industries? It would seem that businesses would be interested in that kind of model.Kaufman:          I'd like to see businesses be able to offer more resources to those who could help inspire children. So for instance, a child has a dream mentor. Being able to actually get the resources to have that person mentor the child and also get the child the resources to actually enact a very significant project that might be apart from the standard curriculum they're learning.Horn:                I love both of those. And I'll say what they share in common, I think, is businesses starting to integrate more into the lives and education of these individuals to give them opportunities. And frankly, it's in the interest of the businesses too. They get folks working on projects that are meaningful to them and develop them as the future pipeline of talent for them. When I spent time in South Korea studying their education system, I was really struck by these Meister high schools that they were starting, where literally it's co-located with a semiconductor plant. And you have cutting edge technology, fab technology, where these individuals have chosen, the students have chosen, I want to work in this, and with an ex-CEO of a semiconductor company as the school principal. What message does that send?Rowe:               That's great.Horn:                Anyway, thank you so much. Ian, Scott, thank you all. This is has been fun. This has been fun and thank you for joining us on another episode of The Future of Education. Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.

College admissions has been criticized for being opaque and confusing for students and their families. Concourse Global is a startup aiming to change the equation so that colleges must do the work to reach out to students and students get to choose where they enroll. Its founder, Joe Morrison, joined me to share its mission and progress. As always, you can also watch our conversation here, but in a new feature, you can also listen to it as a podcast or at the embedded link above.Michael Horn:                When I wrote Choosing College with Bob Moesta, a major message from the book was that we needed to really flip how students thought about the college admissions process. Rather than hoping that colleges choose them, realize that as agents, as individuals, they have power in this equation and they ought to be choosing the school that makes sense for them, with their fit, with the progress they desire and so forth. But in some cases, easier said than done. And so my guest today, Joe Morrison, the founder CEO of Concourse Global in my mind has really created a platform to begin to reverse that equation in some pretty fundamental ways. I will let Joe tell us way more. And so by way of introduction, I'll, I'll bring him up to the main stage, so to speak. It's good to see you, Joe. Thank you for doing this.Joe Morrison:         Yeah. Thanks Michael. For inviting me to this show, I'm excited to have this conversation.Horn:                You bet. And for those who are joining, you can certainly ask questions. I will be monitoring the chats and bring them in where it makes sense, but Joe, you can disabuse me of where I'm wrong, I guess, on my vision for what you're doing in the system as we go through this. But let's just start off with, we're getting to meet here for the first time as well. Tell me about your background, and how did you come to recognize that this was a problem and your inspiration for creating Concourse Global?Morrison:         Right. Well, first in terms of personal background, from a young age, I was obsessed with computing. So I was writing code most of the time. I studied computer science at Waterloo and MIT. And my first job out of college was actually writing computer music software. I loved that job. Didn't pay very well, but great job. And later on, I landed on Wall Street at a FinTech consulting firm, kind of building software for investment banks. And eventually, I landed on the commercial side of that company.                        And I started getting interested in education actually, because my wife who's also an entrepreneur. Started a company to help universities put teams on the ground in Asia to carry out either recruitment activities or alumni development for institutions to build their own teams. And when that company started getting big enough, we started having the discussion, was it time for me to maybe pivot and join the family business? Which in your 40s is kind of a huge deal?Horn:                That's a big daunting pivot, yeah.Morrison:         It was. It was a terrifying decision, but we decided to go for it and go into the family business together. And it was just fantastic. We had a blast building out her company together, which was called Grock Global. And I ended up kind of unexpectedly spending my lunch hours surrounded by university recruiters from all different colleges and listening to their. And that was the experience that kind of created the ideas... That led to the ideas behind concourses. Because I started hearing the same complaints over and over again.                        "None of these software platforms are helping us enroll the right students." And at the same time, I was meeting parents and teachers whose kids were really struggling with the university admission process. And you probably found this when you were working on your book. Kids at every single level academically were all racked with anxiety about college admissions. Didn't matter how smart you are. And I'm a person who loves learning. And I sort of thought the route to college should be a gentle extension of what you're doing. It shouldn't be this huge deal.                        And then the other thing that I got really obsessed with was the inequity problem, where I was kind of shocked by how much people were spending on college counseling. Upward of $200, $300 an hour for two years to coach your kid through everything, essay prep, test prep, ed application strategy. And there's a lot of families who that's completely out of reach. And they're not making informed decisions about where to go to college. They're just kind of throwing darts.Horn:                Yeah. I think the point you just made also about the anxiety racked through that, that leads to that market developing. And frankly, then there's a bunch of people that do pay for that. There's a bunch of people who wish they could pay for that. There's a bunch of people who don't even know it exists, right? But they're all racked by this anxiety is very true even if you're applying to open enrollment schools largely it's still racked by anxiety, which is interesting out of this. So I'm curious then to go directly into this Concourse Global story itself, what was the problem specifically you were seeking to solve with it, and why do you think it's such an important problem if you will?Morrison:         Right. So first why I think it's an important problem, I feel like we live in a knowledge economy. Our national competitiveness, for any country really depends on having well educated people entering the workforce and you can't have a two tier system, where a whole population or subpopulation is kind of not making the right decisions about higher education because the system is so complicated. And then I was looking around me seeing so many solutions trying to navigate the system as it is. And maybe because I wasn't that... I was new to the industry. So I sort of, wasn't making the same assumptions as everybody else, I guess, I thought, "Why don't we just change the system so it was not so complicated?"Horn:                I'd love to actually just pause you there for a second because I'd love to do deeper on when you say there's a bunch of other solutions out there, you had different assumptions, can you sort of name those a little bit because I think the contrast will be interesting in really illuminating the fresh approach you decided to take with sort of standard day to day business as usual.Morrison:         Yeah. Well, so for example, one of the platforms I ran across early on was Naviance, where I feel like there's a piece of software that's been around for a long time, and it's a set of tools for navigating the process as it is. And it's a huge platform. They have these scattergrams that everybody knows about, which are trying to help you guess, "Which colleges might let me in." And then all these tools for picking colleges and searching for them, and then pulling together documents. And it dawned on me that there's like 1,000 tools that are needed to navigate this process.                        But if you just made the process simpler, so for example, the first thing that's I think kind of at the root of what I saw as a problem in the marketplace is the idea that an application takes a long time to put together and it costs money. So people ration them. You can't send 100 applications. The wisdom is you send 10 or 15 maybe, but that means that if you only get a few, then you've got to guess who's going to let you in.                        And I saw everybody sort of trying to guess, "Who will let me in, and I'm going to use that to decide where to apply in the first place." But you don't really know. It's still just a guess, even if it's educated. And in fact, I saw Naviance getting misapplied, for example, for international students where those scattergrams actually were not giving correct data because they were designed for... Anyway, all that. I sort of had this mental model of like you're trying to cross this giant river and everybody's teaching each other how to swim and how to build boats. And I'm just thinking, "What if you just build a bridge and just walk over the river?"Horn:                Well, that's a good segue I think, right? I love the analogy though, because it strikes me on two levels, frankly. One, a lot of these artifacts, these software solutions, whatever else on top of a challenge, they're addressing symptoms, if you will. You're basically saying, "Let's go to the root cause itself and flip it on its head." So that gets us, I think, perfect segue into what is Concourse Global? What is the solution that you have fashioned?Morrison:         Right. So to basically explain what it is, we saw these two problems, right? One is the student challenge navigating their way to university. And the challenge on the university side, trying to find the right students to build your enrollment pipeline. And our idea was, what if you saw those as two sides of the same problem? What if you had a single platform where students in universities could meet and almost transact. And then I think the biggest idea we had was, when we realized there's an information asymmetry. The universities have all the information, so why don't they make the first move?                        So that's when we came up with this idea, let's flip it around and say to a student, "What if you put out who you are and just created a profile." We do a whole bunch of things to make sure those profiles are trustworthy, but then create an environment where universities can come in, find students that are a good fit, and then just admit them through the platform. So instead of saying, "We like you should consider applying," just say, "You're in already. Can we have a chat? And would you like to learn more about what we have to offer?" And then the student, we created an environment where the student is anonymous at that point because we have to protect their privacy.                        So we thought, well, they can decide whether or not to allow the conversation by deciding whether to share their identity. So the student starts getting offers and they can say, "I'm interested in this one, this one and this one, so I'll release my information to them." And then you go straight to kind of a high quality, much more personalized conversation at that point because both sides have now winnowed down the field. The student already knows a few institutions that have admitted them. And the institutions know, "Well, this student is admissible and wants to talk to me." So it actually becomes worthwhile to have a conversation.                        And maybe I'm sort of going on too long about the details. I could talk about this all day, of course, but I realize that part of the reason the traditional enrollment system is a little bit problematic is because there's no good way for both sides to zero in on the right counterparties early. Then it has to be based on mass mail. You can't take 10,000 leads and have a phone conversation with every single potential student. This idea of the enrollment funnel, which starts with leads that get sort of moved along a conveyor belt until the last step is the admissions' office says yes or no.                        Then the only way they could have come up with a more personalized student-centric approach is to create a way to quickly narrow the field so both sides are talking to the right people. So that's how we did it, is we filter the students to meet the requirements of the admissions departments. They decide who to make offers to. Students decide if they're interested, and then they go straight to a conversation, rather than kind of the whole traditional email based mass marketing.Horn:                Makes a ton of sense. And I like several aspects of this, but the information asymmetry piece that you brought up early on, that opacity is something that frustrates so many on the student side when it comes to this process. But I think it begs the question because many commentators have noted, "Well, the opacity serves a lot of these institutions. Well, they get to sort of control supply and demand in funny ways and doll out applications to shape, if you will, their class, both in terms of makeup, but also frankly in terms of dollar amounts that are coming in revenue management." So I'm curious what type of schools are adopting, who's not adopting the platform as they look at this solution?Morrison:         Right. Well, first I'll talk briefly about that information asymmetry kind of angle to this. You can't shape a class out of students that haven't made it into your enrollment funnel. If they're not in your applicant pool, they're not available to you. And so, one of the things that's kind of a key element of this platform is, universities need to be able to reach out and connect to students who might not have considered them. That's part of how we approach that problem. And then in terms of the information asymmetry, universities also know more than the students are likely to about scholarships that are available, about the exact right majors that are right for the student.                        So this reversal of the process kind of solves those too, because instead of the student having to kind of swim through a giant website saying, "How much scholarships could I be eligible for and how do I get them?" In this model the university says upfront, "We're making you an offer and it's got this much scholarship in it." So yeah, and then you talked about kind of what kinds of universities are embracing this? We have over 100 universities already on the platform. So pretty exciting. We've only been around for two years. And so we're accelerating.                        About two-thirds of them are US based. And about two-thirds of those are private. And then about a third are public. 20% of our universities are Canadian. The rest are kind of from UK, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Asia. And just to give you some specific examples, University of Missouri recently signed on, Kent State, Colorado State, those would be like big publics. Privates might include Tulane, The New School. We have liberal arts colleges. So anyway, that just gives you like a sense.Horn:                No, that's a pretty good flavor of it. When they do so, are they abandoning their traditional process or this is alongside of initially? How does that work from a market adoption perspective?Morrison:         Yeah, that's a really good question. It's not an abandonment of the traditional process. Partly that would just be too big, a leap to make.Horn:                Sure.Morrison:         And so the way we approach institutions, is we say, "Look, we're going to help you get populations of students that you want that you're really having trouble reaching right now." So for example, on the international recruitment side, kind of our specialty is diversity. If you want to get students from countries all around the world that you probably can't travel to, from everywhere, Africa and the middle east and south Asia. There's some markets that are well understood, but some markets that are just too small to access the traditional way.                        Concourse works great for recruiting those kinds of students. And then inside the US, it's more about underrepresented students. First generation and students from low income families. Those are the kinds of students who are hard... It's hard for institutions to reach. And so on our platform, they're right there. We work with amazing organizations like College Green Light, which is part of EAB. We have a partnership where we're working with them to bring students into the Concourse ecosystem so that universities can discover them, make offers.Horn:                Super interesting. So talk to me then about the student side, because part of that promise then is that you'll have students from which these universities can look out and see who might be a match and offer that acceptance on the front end. How are you getting students, what's the traction look like on that end?Morrison:         Yeah. The traction is, it's really been growing beautifully. One of the things we did that's, I think, a secret to our success is we decided that college counselors are key to unlocking this ecosystem. And we realized that if we were just trying to reach students, we didn't want to be playing the same games where we're trying to reach them through ads and traditional marketing. Costs a fortune anyway. We thought, "Well, what if we worked with college counselors in schools, and we made their lives easier, and we provided them with tools that helped them solve problems?"                        And that gave them a reason to bring students into the ecosystem. Well, if we can make one counselor happy, we can have them for their whole career, and get students year after year. And the other thing that's wonderful about counselors is both sides trust them. So if a counselor invites their class to Concourse, we set it up so that any offers received by their students, the counselors are always notified. They're part of their conversation.                        They can help advise the students on whether these are good offers or not. If the counselor doesn't like them, they can tell their students, "Man, you should decline. I don't think these are the right offers for you." But if the counselor likes the offers, they can actually help saying, "Johnny, come on, this is a great opportunity. Go talk to these guys." And the universities trust the counselors as well. So they sign off on the data. That's part of the magic that kind of makes all this work.Horn:                Makes sense. Sorry. Keep going.Morrison:         Yeah. Well, so we go by, "Are we making counselors happy?" And then once they get hooked on the platform, for example... Well, we've only been around two years, but the old timers doubled their usage basically going from year one to year two. So we thought, that's a good signal. We have more and more counselors. We launched a program called Blue Skies, where counselors can basically schedule an onboarding session with us and bring their whole class onto the platform. We've tripled the number of Blue Skies signups in year two over year one. So, so far I think we're on the right track. Counselors seem to really like the platform, and we're really listening to their feedback.Horn:                That's terrific. And it's an interesting strategy then, because you're not looking for share of budget from the schools or the guidance counselors themselves, but instead giving them this free tool. And the freemium model is the students that will come on the platform matched with the universities and colleges on the platform, which is clever.Morrison:         Exactly. And on the college side, we can save them so much money. Right now, colleges are spending $10,000, $20,000, $30,000 on travel to visit random countries to try and recruit students. That money could be so much better spent just directing it into the platform and in the form of scholarships to students that you're trying to attract.Horn:                Yeah. It's interesting. I imagine this may not be something you'd want to talk about publicly, but especially as a lot of schools have moved to SAT/ACT optional, and a huge part of the business of those entities has been to sell leads essentially to schools that they can then mass market. With those potentially going away to some degree, you give institutions another way and a far more affordable way than actually to reach out to a lot of these students, I would think.Morrison:         Yeah, that's a really interesting point. And it's true, I think. The test optional movement has been an interesting development. I think we're probably going to see some of those standardized tests coming back, but I do think that paradigm of kind of taking those names and kind of selling lists and those search services, I think that's kind of played out.                        And students they're already getting hundreds of messages saying "Apply here, apply here, apply here." I think it's just not working anymore. And furthermore, I don't think it's that respectful of their privacy so we're really, really careful about student data privacy. And we say, "You put out whatever you want in your profile to be assessed." And the students are anonymous anyway through the process and only authorized universities can look at them, "And you'll decide whether to reveal who you are, if you get an offer you like.”Horn:                That's interesting. That's interesting. So it really is them choosing the college after they've been reached out to, at that stage.Morrison:         It really is actually. And it is probably a little bit of a challenge sometimes if you're on the college side, and you make an offer to a student and then the student says, "I'm sorry, I respectfully decline your offer, because I chose someone else." And they're receiving rejections. And I think sometimes it stings a little bit, but maybe it reminds institutions what it's like for the students.Horn:                Yeah. Well, I was going to say, and hopefully makes them more learner centered ultimately to create more reasons for those students to come if they thought that they were a good fit, but for some reason, the student concluded otherwise. As we sort of wrap up here, Joe, I'm curious, just as you think bigger vision, five, 10 years down the road, what success, what do you want to see this look like? How should we judge success, if you will?Morrison:         Yeah. Five, 10 years from now, I would like to see Concourse in every school be part of every counseling curriculum. I don't think it should be the only route to college. I think there's always going to be room for the application in the process, but I feel like there should be a baseline system where if you're enjoying school, you're enjoying learning, you're academically talented. It should just be expected that in your senior year, you start getting admission offers from colleges that want you and scholarships. It should feel natural. And then if you want to apply to more, great, but I think concourses can and should be ubiquitous.Horn:                Makes sense. And so we'll keep an eye on just that. I was going to say the other piece of this, I suppose, is that we see a lot less friction and maybe anxiety around this process in the long run as well with schools, maybe better understanding what the progress is that students are desiring, and students having a better sense of what their options really are out there, and that they are far more empowered than they are today.Morrison:         That's what I want to see happen. I want students to feel more of a sense of power in this process, less anxiety, and keep the love of learning at the forefront. It should be, "I love computer science. Great. Here's three places I could go continue my studies if I want."Horn:                Well, I've put the website up here for those watching, concourse.global, but how else should people stay in touch, follow what you are doing, and keep abreast so that they can follow this pattern? Because it seems like, this could be a disruption along the lines of what the common app in many ways did, except that you're actually changing the process itself. So I suspect a lot of people who tune in are going to want to keep up to date with developments.Morrison:         Right. Well, I appreciate that. The first thing would be to follow our social media channels. We publish updates on what's going on with Concourse. If you're a college counselor, I encourage you to come to our site and just ask for an account for free. We can get you up and running super quickly. And the best way to get to know how the platform works is try it on one of your students. We have so many who try one or two students and then think this is great, and then they bring a whole class the year later. And for higher education institutions, if you're looking to recruit populations that are hard to reach, diverse, international students outside mainstream markets, or within the US, underrepresented students, we're doing a regional focus, but it's not too early to kind of get in touch with us through the website and we can get to know each other.Horn:                Terrific. Well, we'll keep an eye on it. Joe, thank you so much for what you're doing. Thanks for being here. And for all those tuning in who've enjoyed this, give us a thumbs up so that people can find more content like this out there, and follow the progress of promising innovations like Concourse Global to create a more learner centered feature. So Joe, thank you again. And for all that you watching, thanks for tuning in. We'll be back next time.Morrison:         Thank you, Michael. Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.

The author of 18 books on education, Jay McTighe is well known among educators, particularly for his book "Understanding by Design" with Grant Wiggins. A regular speaker at education conferences, he's also the author of a more recent white paper for rethinking the nation's assessment system. In this conversation, McTighe walked through the present problems with today's assessment system and the steps he would take to better capture and encourage student learning. As always, in addition to listening to the podcast above, you can also watch the conversation here.Normally these transcripts are released only to paying subscribers, but today I’m sending this out to every subscriber as a bonus for the start of the summer. If you’d like to subscribe to get this content and more, click below.Michael Horn:  In addition to being a legend in the circles of education, Jay McTighe is the author more recently of a white paper around assessments that caught my eye because I think it's a topic that is critically important. Too often in education, my sense is, that we think of assessments as something that are either good or bad rather than digging into the nuance and realizing that assessments are important, both in understanding how students and schools are doing, but also because they're a critical tool in learning itself.                        And yet, today's assessment system, in my judgment, honestly does a pretty poor job on both accounts. And I think it's holding back deeper innovations in practice that we need to allow all students to build their passions and fulfill their potential. So enter Jay's paper against this backdrop, and I think it's one of the smartest distillations I've seen of what's wrong with the current system, and offers a great portrait of something that could easily and feasibly replace it and be significantly better for every stakeholder. So with that as backdrop, Jay, thanks for doing this. It's good to see you.Jay McTighe:     My pleasure, Mike. Thanks for hosting this and hello to everyone who may be listening.Horn:                Let's start with your own background in this topic. For those that don't know, how did you come to this question of assessments? In your prior background, have you seen this as an important topic with which to grapple?McTighe:          Well, I'll try to be brief, but I've been in education more than 50 years, starting my teaching in 1971. And I've worked at school, district and state levels as well as now my work as a writer and a consultant working literally around the world in international education. So my interest in assessment was not front burner for me. My interest has always been in my career, teaching for what I'll call deeper learning, engaging students in meaningful learning, framing learning around authentic tasks, engaging students in, what I hope for them is, authentic work, including emphasizing higher order thinking, et cetera. So my roots were initially in instruction and the kind of teaching that led to those kinds of learnings.                        Then mid-career, I met and wrote the book Understanding By Design with Grant Wiggins, which as some people know, is really a curriculum and assessment framework, but it's oriented toward the same goals that I described momentarily. Focusing on more deeper learning, teaching for understanding, engaging students in authentic tasks, where they apply their learning in realistic ways.                        Assessment then, my route to assessment was really through the back door. Like you in your opening statement, I observed over many years, both as a teacher and administrator and even in state ed, the driving impact of assessments and particularly external standardized assessments used for accountability purposes. And it struck me that in many cases that the assessment tail seemed to be wagging the dog, the instruction and curricular dog. And so I got more interested in assessment because I thought if the assessments are not so impactful in how they influence teaching, learning, and curriculum and classroom assessments for that matter, let's put our attention to the tail. Let's think about try to better understand assessment and how to make the tail wag the dog in a better direction, if you will.Horn:                I love that analogy. A little scary, but I think it's an accurate one of what's happening right now. I'm curious, let's dig into the problem itself. The first third or so of your paper does a really wonderful job of explicating the problem you see with today's dominant assessment system in the United States. I'd love you to detail that and say exactly the challenges that it causes on the ground.McTighe:          Well, I'll give you my analysis, but I suspect you could talk to anyone who's been teaching more than a few years and certainly any school administrator and I think they could echo and probably expand on this, but to summarize, in the United States, primarily standardized, external standardized tests are used as accountability mechanisms. And I think there's a legitimate purpose and an important question that educators should not shy away from, which is there's a huge expenditure of public monies going into education and the public and policy makers deserve an answer to a basic question. How well are schools doing? How well is this considerable expenditure paying off in terms of learning? And so that's a legitimate question.                        I think the flaw is that the attempts to answer that question have, as we know, typically come out in the form of a once a year, typically once a year, external standardized test where the results are collected, compiled, communicated, published, and those are used as accountability systems for ranking schools and determining essentially school quality based on a single snapshot test score. So in terms of some of the casualties of such a system, I think these are well known. For understandable reasons, most external standardized tests use a selected response format, IE multiple choice or some states have a short answer component, often known as brief constructive responses. Now, it's understandable. These are testing hundreds of thousands of students. They need to be able to get results quickly. And so you can machine score selected response format test items and get scores quickly. So that's understood. That makes sense.                        The problem, one problem of course, is that format of selected response is inherently limiting. It does not or cannot appropriately assess all valued educational outcomes. It's good for assessing certain things, do kids know basic information. You can test for basic concept understanding through a multiple choice format. And in some cases you can assess some degree of skill proficiency, but it's often an indirect method at skills. Having said that, there are many, many things that we value that aren't appropriately assessed in that format. And here's the simplest of examples.                        English language art standards in every state and province and anywhere in the world in fact that I've seen, call for developing student proficiency in reading, writing, listening, speaking, and often research. I know of very few standardized measures, accountability tests, more specifically, that test listening and speaking and research. And right now in the US, very few states now have true writing assessments. What they're using are proxy multiple choice items to make inferences about reading and writing. Well, understandably, the large scale nature of such tests make it not surprising that they're using multiple choice kind of methods, but the casualty is that we're not assessing many things that are at the core of literacy. I mean, listening and speaking are the underpinnings of reading, writing, but we're not assessing those.                        But that links then to the "high stakes" of these assessments. Schools are judged by these assessments. Districts are judged by these assessments and there are consequences for poor performance. In some states, a school can be taken over by a state entity or a commercial company if they're not performing over time. Administrators can lose their jobs if the scores don't go up, particularly in the low performing. And teachers are under enormous pressure for these as well. Consequently, the high stakes pressure of these tests often drive instruction and drive curriculum and drive classroom assessments toward them. To me, it's like a black hole. It sucks everything into the prescribed format. And so what we potentially see is a lot of what I'll call multiple choice teaching, narrowing of the curriculum to focus primarily on just the tested subjects and the tested skills at the exclusion of some of the other things that may not be tested.                        I have literally been in schools where I've seen announcements by administrators saying, if it's not in the state test, it should be very low on your teaching priority, even though the standards say we should be doing these things. Even when we go outside of academic disciplines, and not all of those are tested, we have other goals that are important to a modern education, often embodied in what some districts are developing or schools are developing known as a portrait of a graduate. And the portrait of a graduate process, I think, is important and timely because it identifies competencies that we know are important in the world outside of school. All the employer lists of the skills of employment today call for things like the ability to communicate effectively using multimedia, the ability to work well in teams, creative thinking, critical thinking, global or just normal citizenship is often recognized as an important competency. And yet these important competencies are generally not assessed through high stakes, standardized tests in their present incarnation.                        It's the double whammy, if you will, of the high stakes, the restricted format that conspire to narrow the curriculum and focus teaching around the tested areas and also focus teaching often on developing isolated knowledge and skills, decontextualized, as opposed to, can students understand and put it all together in a more authentic way. Because the tests don't assess in authentic ways.Horn:                Jay, I just want to double click on something and you do a good job of talking about it in the paper as well. You point out that even given this reality, it's actually not even the best way to move the needle on the current tests that we have is to narrow practice and things of that nature. You use an analogy, the one that I like to use is sort of similar to doctors in the 1800s where we said, "Oh, we got to lower blood pressure, therefore we'll put leeches on you." And yes, it was effective at lowering blood pressure, perhaps not improving overall health. That a lot of the narrowing of the curriculum actually hurts reading scores over tests and things of that nature.                        Just to play devil's advocate, it's a question I like to ask and I'm curious your take on it, if there are actually better ways to move the needle on these narrow assessments that don't test the range of things that we want to see, but actually a broader set of practices would also help move the needle on these things. Why is it the fault of the tests rather than the reaction of the educators to the test? I'd love you to just go one beat deeper, because I think the pushback I hear to what you just said is sometimes, well, sure, that's true, but we don't want to have the most onerous assessment system ever. You have an answer to that, but we'll get to that in a moment. I'm just curious sort of why you think it's the fault of the tests versus the way we've reacted to the tests.McTighe:          Oh, I've never claimed that it's solely the result of the tests. I think your question gets at another key point, which is, I think there's a prevailing misconception about how to "raise the test scores" on the traditional use or current round of standardized tests, which are primarily selected response in nature. The misconception is, because the test items are typically multiple choice, they must be low level. And the best way of getting the scores up on those kinds of tests is to do a lot of practice testing. So you give kids practice in the multiple choice format and also covering a lot of content just in case an item might be tested and therefore the students will know it.                        Well, there's a logic to that. In a sense, if this is the measure, we should prepare kids by doing a lot of practice in the measure, but here's the misconception. The misconception is that because they're multiple choice format, the items are quote low level. If you and any of your viewers are familiar with the depth of knowledge scale, or DOK, a framework developed by Dr. Norman Webb, he profiled four levels of the "cognitive complexity" of an assignment or a task or a test question for that matter. And often what we see in test prep materials that are in place to "help kids practice" and get better at the test format to raise the test scores, are low level. They're level one of DOK, which involve basically recall or very simple skill applications. Whereas, and this is something that viewers and listeners can check out, if your test, if your state or province releases test results and releases item analyses, and you can also see the same thing on NAEP, the national assessment of educational progress. Here's the question. What are the most widely missed items on those standardized tests?                        They are not, in general, items of basic skills or recall ability. They're DOK three items. That the items, even though they're multiple choice in nature, require some inference or interpretation in reading passages, some reasoning in multi-step application in math problems. They're not low level. And so people are often seduced by the format, IE multiple choice equals low level. Therefore we can drill and practice low level thinking so the kids will raise the test scores. Look, we've had 15 years or more of "test prep" stuff. And there's a whole cottage industry of companies, including some of the test companies for that matter, selling "test prep" materials and schools and districts often have their own version, often known as benchmark or interim assessments that some districts might create. Often those are lower level than the items missed on the state test.                        Here's my therefore. If you do nothing to change the present accountability testing system, and you're stuck with the kind of test we have now, the best test prep in my view is to give kids lots of opportunities to apply their learning in more authentic ways, engaging them in higher applications, inference, interpretation, analysis, problem solving, creating, as in writing and presenting, and that's going to be the best test prep. As opposed to drill and practice on low level items, practicing the multiple choice format.                        Just to finish up this little ranch with the analogy, and my colleague Grant Wiggins came up with this brilliant one. He says, practicing for a standardized test to get the scores up, is like practicing for your annual physical exam to get better results. And by the way, I literally have a physical, my annual physical tomorrow, and I had to take my blood test last week so the physician would have the results. Well, if I wanted to practice for my physical, I might have changed my diet the last couple days to cut out sugar or carbs or whatever to kind of skew the results. But if my doctor knew I was doing that, she would say, "No, Jay. Uh-uh (negative). Just keep up your normal routine because we're just sampling and we're going to get a sample of your health."                        Now, the analogy breaks down in one kind of interesting way. In medicine, if you take a blood test or any kind of test and the results are abnormal or out of the ordinary, or maybe disturbing, what do they do? They say, "We have to do some further testing." Because they recognize that the blood test or the annual is just a sample of a few things. What do we do in education? We publish the results in the paper.Horn:                We just move on.McTighe:          As if that one snapshot is the be all and end all. But anyway, I like the analogy that Grant came up with.Horn:                It actually lends itself well, though, then into the solution to the assessment problem, that could perhaps be part of the reason that educators start to feel that they can embrace more deeper learning and more robust, real life projects as part of the learning for students, and you go into a three part solution. I'd love you just to outline at a high level what, what you conceptualize and then we can dig into each of the three components.McTighe:          Great. So assessment fundamentally should be based on our goals. And so we need to start, before thinking about an assessment or assessment system, we need to think about our goals. And categorically speaking, I propose that there are three broadly cast types of learning goals. And these aren't new, but they're important to keep in mind. There's what Grant Wiggins and I have called acquisition goals. Namely, what knowledge and skills do we want students to acquire as they're learning new things. Now, by knowledge, I'm talking quite literally about factual knowledge or basic concepts. And skills are just that, simple skills, to more complex skills going into processes. Those are what I call acquisition goals, things we want students to acquire.                        We also have what I've called understanding goals. And an understanding is more than just a fact. An understanding is about a more conceptual idea, a concept, a principle, LE. And also a process understanding the nature of scientific methods or what makes good persuasive writing. There's understanding about those processes. And thirdly, we have transfer. Defined as the ability for a learner to take what they've learned in one context and apply it effectively and appropriately in some something that's new. So it's not just rote, it's not just recall. They have to think and apply their learning effectively.                        Arguably, we have those three goal types. And by the way, you can analyze published standards in subject areas. And you can see that there are all three goal types in the standards. And the so-called portrait of a graduate competencies or 21st century skills really call for transfer. We want to develop critical thinkers, not on a given issue, but on issues they encounter in their lives, and so forth. So if you take those three goal types and ask the question then, what assessment evidence should we collect that will help us know how kids are learning those things? That to me implies a multifaceted system.                        Here's my analogy, then I'll summarize the three types that I'm proposing. Think of any assessment as a photograph or a snapshot. Like a snapshot, it's revealing. It gives us a picture of something, but a single picture is inadequate to showing the full range of a person or a situation. For that, we need a photo album. A collection of pictures taken over time is much more revealing, much more informative than any single picture within. So let me start by saying, let's think about an assessment system that has multiple pictures as opposed to a single once a year snapshot, because that's inherently limited. And psychometrically, we are less able to make sound inferences from a single piece of evidence than we are from multiple sources.                        So having said that I'm proposing a three-part system, think of it as a three legged stool. One part would be similar to what we have now, content oriented tests to test important knowledge and skills that students should acquire, typically within subject areas. The second one is a set of performance tasks that are more authentic and then engage students in applying their learning in realistic situations, thus giving evidence of understanding and transfer. And the third leg of this three-legged stool would be curriculum embedded local assessments. And this would bring in a variety of things, including traditional course exams that many high schools have now, but also things like genius hour or personal projects, passion projects that kids are interested in. It could involve exhibitions. It could involve a variety of more authentic learnings that are otherwise outside of the mold of traditional tests. So that's in a nutshell, the three legged stool based on the fact that we have different, but important goals, that should be assessed. Photo album, not snapshot.Horn:                That's perfect to start to lay out what this could look like. Let's drill into each of those one by one, and then we can wrap up. Because I realize we both get excited about this topic and we go longer than we intend. The first one, in terms of the content specific assessments themselves, importantly, you have this sort of like NAEP, if I understand your proposal correctly, that it would be a sampling mechanism. So not everyone in the country will be sitting down to take the two hour test each day for two weeks or whatever it might be. But instead some subset say 100 students in 50 schools or something like that, or 50 students 100 schools, whatever, would take some portion of a set of content tests in any geography basically to get a sense for, are we accomplishing these knowledge and skill acquisition goals themselves? Am I getting that correct and what would you amplify on that?McTighe:          Well, there are two parts to the first leg of this stool. Basically standardized tests, pretty much like we know now, selected response, maybe some brief constructive response formats, testing content, knowledge and skills, kind of acquisition level. My simple proposal is why do we need 50 different sets of state assessments? It's a huge expense. Why not use a system that we know and is psychometrically sound, NAEP. We could use NAEP tests. We have them already and use them nationally. So that's part one. But even if every state wanted to do their own thing, you could still do that because you have that now.                        The sampling part of that equation, however, goes back to the purpose of standardized testing. My contention is the primary purpose of external standardized testing is for accountability to answer the question, how well are schools doing? To answer that question you need comparability, which to me, why would you want to have 50 different sets of state tests that aren't comparable? Use NAEP, now you have a comparable measure. But secondly, your goal is not individual scores. Your goal is not to say how well is Jay's grandchild doing in third grade? Your goal is to get a broad brush look at how the schools are doing overall, so you don't have to test every kid on every item. You can sample and thereby save a huge amount of cost and testing time while still getting the data you need to answer the school accountability and district accountability question.Horn:                Super interesting. And just to be clear, you could use the NAEP infrastructure, if I'm understanding you correctly, which is already given on a biannual basis to accomplish at least large parts of that. So you would save actually a lot of cost and time from what exists currently in these snapshot, once a year assessments.McTighe:          The only difference I would suggest with NAEP is if you were going to implement the ideas that I'm putting forth, you would do more than sample 1000 eighth graders. You would probably test every kid in a school and district that is currently tested. The difference is you're not going to test them on every single item. You would have a sample of kids doing the math and a representative sample doing the ELA and so on.Horn:                Gotcha.McTighe:          But you could use the NAEP items as the content of the test.Horn:                Gotcha. Okay. That's super helpful. So then on the second part of this, the projects, the authentic projects that students would be doing, in the paper, you talk about how you would establish rubrics and validity and things of that nature and training teachers to be able to do this scoring, much as we do, say, in AP exams or things of that nature. Talk a little bit more about what that would look like. How it's feasible and practical from a cost and training perspective and what you would envision that ultimately looking like. Would these be teachers in one school assessing the projects of students in another school or what would this actually look like?McTighe:          The second leg of my three-legged stool is the big one. I'm going to describe them as performance tasks rather than projects.Horn:                Yes. Thank you.McTighe:          Projects tend to be longer and more student directed. These are going to be developed tasks, well developed tasks. Some will be within subjects, but often the task will spill over from one subject to another. So you might have a language arts and social studies task, or you might have a science task that has a writing component for instance. These are well developed performance tasks, and they are intended to be curriculum embedded. And by that I mean, rather than saying, "Oh, we have to stop teaching and now do these tests." The assessment should be an outgrowth of our teaching. They should be derived directly from standards, but because they're performance tasks, they would draw on the standards that involve performance. They would call for transfer. Can students apply their learning to this new situation? That's what the task sets up.                        Now, even though this is the more demanding part of my three-legged stool, it's not unprecedented. Your example of AP scoring is a good one. My wife is in the arts and she participated in AP portfolio reviews in visual arts. We have music adjudications. But also, and this is one of my personal experiences, in the '90s there were several states that had statewide performance assessments, Kentucky, Connecticut, Vermont, and my state of Maryland. And I worked for nine years at the Maryland Department of Ed during the era where we developed our first generation of standards and, companion performance based state assessments. For nine years we had no multiple choice items on Maryland state tests. And I watched that through the lens of my children going through Maryland schools. And I saw the impact that the state performance assessments had on their learning and what they did at home and so on. It was for the good.                        But the real challenge in large scale performance assessment is the cost and the time required to score them, because you're not going to run a student essay through a Scantron machine or view their oral presentation. And that was the downfall of most state performance assessments even though the intention was good. It was not manageable or affordable.                        My proposal is straightforward and I believe it's doable, although I'm not confident that people will embrace it and make it happen. And that is, what if we had a series of well developed performance tasks and well developed rubrics that were given periodically during the course of the year, again, sample, not every kid takes everything, every one. And for the scoring we had, let's hypothetically say, three times a year, schools in a region would close and teachers in those schools and administrators would come together at scoring sites to actually review the work that kids produced on the performance tasks and score them against well developed rubrics, anchor papers, learning inter rater reliability protocols. We know how to do this large scale.                        The benefit to me, I witnessed this, so I will go toe to toe with anyone who challenges this point. When teachers learn how to look at student work in teams against a good rubric with an inter rater reliability protocol and anchor samples of the levels tied to the rubric of student work, it is one of the most powerful, professional learning experiences that professionals can get. In so doing, you really come to understand the standards being assessed. You look collectively at student work through the lens of a good rubric. And so you're really sharpening what makes quality work, what are the most salient traits? And even more importantly perhaps, when we did scoring sites in Maryland, it wasn't just about getting a score or a number, teachers were invariably talking about what this means for my teaching.                        If you spend a day with colleagues looking at student work on math problems or social studies, language arts tasks, whatever it might be, you begin to see not only the strengths in student work, but the areas of weakness. And much of the conversations in those scoring sessions was, how do you deal with this problem or do you know any resources for that? There was a lot of discussion about how can we improve the performance that we're seeing. So in a sense, what I'm calling for is an organized, structured, systemic approach to professional learning communities writ large.                        Here's a quick analogy, football coaches that I've known over my many years in education often will look at game film from Friday night or Saturday's game as a team of coaches. They'll analyze the team's performance in the game and they'll focus next week's practice on addressing the weaknesses. That's what I'm calling for, a system that can do this. We can get reliable scores using teachers with the proper training and well developed rubrics and anchor samples.                        And as to the cost, if you only label that scoring an assessment cost and you pay external companies to do it, it's unaffordable. If you conceive of it as a professional development/assessment system cost, and you do it as part of teacher's jobs, three times a year, it's well worth it. There's a lot of nuance in all this, of course, and the details, but that's the construct. And I have seen it work. I know it can work. I'm not wildly optimistic that the organizational system will be enacted to make it work.Horn:                It's interesting, just because you've dealt with the cost question about unlocking the professional development funds, it creates a much more purposeful, I would argue, professional development rather than what currently happens, where district pays some schmo like me to come in and do a day with the teachers and so forth. I think on multiple levels, it's very interesting. And the inter rater reliability piece of it built into the architecture, creates something that I think would address a lot of people's concerns historically about moving to more performance based tasks in the course of these assessments. I found it very interesting.                        Let's with the remaining time move to the third leg of the stool, the local assessments. Which in many cases already exist. They already go on in schools. I want to call out, I think a couple nuances that I think I see in what you've proposed, and then get your take on those specifically. One is, you have this notion of audits being part of it. So to make sure that these local assessments that are being used are in fact valid and reliable, we can believe what they are telling us.                        And then secondly, and this is maybe me inferring something that's not there, so I'm curious. But it seems to me, we could use the content assessments from the first leg of the stool and the sampling mechanism just to ask ourselves, are the local assessment results that schools are reporting out broadly in tune with what we would expect from these content assessments? Meaning they're moving together in some ways. And it won't be a perfect one to one because the local assessments will be far broader. There'll be things that we don't even think to test on the content specific assessments, but they may identify certain areas where, whoa. Those are wildly divergent results that might cause an auditor to go a little bit deeper. And so they sort of reinforce each other or check each other in some ways. What's your take on all that and what am I missing?McTighe:          I'll come to that in a moment, but let comment on one of the underlying purposes for this third leg of the stool, local assessments. First of all, one of the things I think an assessment system needs to be mindful of is, whether locals, and I'm thinking about students, teachers, parents, administrators, have any skin in the game. And let's be honest about another reality that some teachers and administrators recognize. In some states, in many states, in fact, where the standardized accountability tests don't count for students, sometimes kids will blow it off. I mean, I've been in schools where I've seen kids during test day, making pictures on the bubble sheets, cause they don't give a rats you know what about the test because it doesn't count for them.                        And often teachers will disown the tests. They'll see them as an unwelcome intrusion so they can get back to teaching when they're done. We want a system where people say the assessments matter and that we have skin in the game and we're going to take them seriously. Students are more likely to take something seriously if it's going to count for them, so these local assessment should count. They should be part of assessment and grading and so on. That's point one.                        Point 2 is, with the photo album analogy, the first leg of the stool, multiple choice tests, more content specific, might be like a wide angle lens. We're going to sample a lot of content through these tests. The performance task might be more like a close up or a macro view where we're going to go deep on a small number of tasks to see if kids really can apply their learning. To me, the third leg of this stool might be somewhat in the middle. Or to say it a different way, we want to complement things that are falling through the cracks from the first two legs. And so that may be in the form of traditional course exams or end of year tests that some schools have now, especially at the high school level. We're going to test some things that aren't on the other two legs. But it also could allow us to assess things that we know are important, but are otherwise eluding the first two, including giving kids some choice and voice in how they're showing what they're learning and what they can do. So that's the purpose.                        Regarding your sampling question of how might these correlate? I guess the correlation question.Horn:                Right.McTighe:          I would be cautious about that. For me, that wouldn't be the primary purpose.Horn:                Okay.McTighe:          Because ultimately, and arguably you're going to be assessing different things on all three legs of the stool. In general, you might say, "Yeah, we should be able to see some broad patterns." But I wouldn't want to say the standardized test are predictive of what the kids do in local assessments or vice versa, so I'd be cautious on that note. At least that's not my primary goal here.Horn:                So the auditors, you would lean on that for that part of the process, just to make sure that there's some valid and reliability.McTighe:          The auditing part is just to kind of keep people honest, but also recognize that schools can become somewhat siloed and their frame of reference is their internal operation. And so we might, for instance, just hypothetically, see a science assessment or a math test in algebra one or in third grade science being remarkably diverse and hugely different in terms of what's being assessed and the cognitive demand from school a to school B to school C. So an audit would be simply, periodically, let's just check who's doing what. What's the nature of these local assessments?                        The reality although, is they're not going to be comparable. The first two legs of the stool are comparable and there's a need for comparability and accountability testing. But the third leg, again, has kind of a different purpose, but in large measure, it's meant to round out the assessment picture and to make sure that we're assessing all the things that we claim to value, not just the things that are easiest to test and quantify.Horn:                Super helpful. Jay, really appreciate you being on here. I think the proposal, like I said, really addresses a lot of the challenges with today's assessment system, but not only that, would help bring our schools to something more robust in line with the goals that you laid out at the beginning of the talk. So I've provided a link here again to the paper, measuring what matters. You can see it on the screen. If you're listening to this, I'll post it in the notes and in the transcript so people can check it out. Read it.                        And I hope despite your contention, Jay, that they take seriously all three steps and focus on the second one around the performance tasks to see those implemented. I think it'd go a big step toward helping us create something more robust, both in assessment and practice and showing what we truly value for students. Really appreciate you being here and for all you tuning in, thanks again for joining us on the Future of Education. We'll see you next time. Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.

Nerdy and its flagship business Varsity Tutors are among the headliners driving the surge in interest in tutoring in the wake of the pandemic and the research around the value of tutoring in helping individuals learn. In this conversation with its founder and CEO Chuck Cohn, we dug into these trends, how these trends might become sustainable in the long-term, and learn what makes Nerdy distinct from the other online tutoring companies. Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.

Arizona State University's Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College has been at the forefront of rethinking teacher preparation, the schooling model in which teachers work, the job of the teacher, and how teachers work with other educators on a daily basis. Carole Basile, the dean of Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, joined me to talk about why the current teacher model is broken and what a more robust vision for teaching can look like—and how we can get there. Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.