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

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.

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