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In this latest episode, I got to join forces with my colleague Ann Somers Hogg, who leads health-care research at the Christensen Institute and hosts the podcast, Life-Centered Health Care. Our guest was Craig Sprinkle, CEO of MedCerts. We discuss how MedCerts trains health-care professionals, from how it delivers hands-on learning through remote instruction to the savings students have incurred and future innovations on the horizon.Michael Horn:Welcome, everyone. Michael Horn here. And I'm thrilled for today's episode of our podcast, which will be different from what we've done in the past. And that's because we're doing a joint podcast, if you will, so that this episode will actually air in two different places. There's, of course, my podcast, the Future of Education, where we're dedicated to building a world in which all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their potential, and live a life of purpose. And then we're partnering today with Life-Centered Health Care, a podcast that my colleague at the Christensen Institute, Ann Somers Hogg, produces. And Life-Centered Health Care delves into what disrupting health care really means. Not the buzz phrase, but what does it really look like and how do we do it? And how do the innovation theories that we use at the Clayton Christensen Institute shed light on the evolution of the broader health-care ecosystem to inspire others seeking to transform health care? So first, a welcome to my co-host for today. She's a senior research fellow at the Christensen Institute, Ann Somers. So good to see you. Happy New Year.Ann Somers Hogg:Great to see you. Happy New Year. Thank you for having me today. I'm excited about this.Michael Horn:Yeah, absolutely. I'm glad we're teaming up together on this. And for those wondering why we're doing a joint podcast, I will say the reason is because those who fill the jobs in health care, of course, do so through forms of medical education. And that's a place in sore need of innovation itself as we think about that broader ecosystem. So with that, I'll introduce our guest for today who's going to shed light on all this. Craig Sprinkle, CEO of MedCerts since 2022, you're an InStride company. And of course, Craig joined MedCerts in 2018 in a combined role as the CFO and COO and has served as the CFO since 2020 before stepping into the CEO role. So, Craig, great to see you. Thank you for joining us.Craig Sprinkle:Yes, thank you for having me. I'm really happy to be here. So thank you. Great to see both of you.The MedCerts Origin StoryMichael Horn:Yeah, you bet. So I want to start actually, you know, predating you at MedCerts, but what led to the launch of MedCerts, You know, what's the market need you all were fulfilling and the credentials that you're really helping fill in the health-care system. I will say, like, I had the chance to watch some of the formation of it, but I've never actually heard from someone at MedCerts how they view the opportunity and market needCraig Sprinkle:Yeah, absolutely, so as you said, it kind of predates me a little bit, but I'm happy to share that. First of all, we just celebrated our 15-year anniversary a year ago. MedCerts originally was founded and frankly still operates very similarly today, in a way that we saw a lack of quality online health-care training that existed 15 years ago that would quickly elevate students to be able to gain new skills, be job ready, and be ready to step into a job or a career. So we saw that gap, we saw an opportunity to ultimately fulfill that. At the same time. And what still carries forward today is that we're addressing a skills gap in the health care and IT industry. Employer needs are continuing to grow. They're looking for more out of job candidates and people that they want to fill vacancies that they have. And there's just a lack of available talent. So we saw a need not only in terms of delivery of that curriculum and delivery of that education, but also fulfilling a need on the employer side to really train towards skills that employers are looking for and making sure that those students are ultimately job ready when they come out of that training.Ann Somers Hogg:Yeah, you mentioned that there was a lack of quality online medical training. Could you tell us a little bit about how do you compare with other market offerings in terms of thinking about your business model? So what are the resources and processes that you have in place to educate your learners?Craig Sprinkle:Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I know that we'll probably talk a little bit more about delivery models and things like that as we continue the conversation, but if you kind of rewind 15 years ago, you know, a lot of things that the experience that a student would have is mostly like in classroom instruction, there wasn't a lot of hands on experience being taught. There wasn't a lot of applicable skills being taught inside that classroom experience. And that was ultimately leading to a gap whenever a person would walk out of that training to ultimately be ready to step into a job. We saw that, and I don't think that it was perfect at the time 15 years ago, whenever we first started delivering this, but bringing more of those applicable skills into an application environment where the student is not only listening to instruction on screen, but they're also learning on how to apply those skills as they're learning and going through that training. So that's a little bit of the difference, if you will, between the delivery of something that we were doing at the time online versus more traditional in classroom instruction. Not as much hands-on experience and not as much interactivity, if you will, within the classroom itself.Providing Hands-On Learning in an Online EnvironmentAnn Somers Hogg:Got it, got it. Thanks for explaining that. And this is probably going to sound like a silly question, but I want to dive into it because if it's an online based education program. You mentioned the importance of the hands-on training and a lot of medical training involves that hands-on experience. So how do you provide these hands-on learning opportunities for students in that online environment?Craig Sprinkle:Yeah, absolutely. So a lot of our programs first and foremost involve a clinical requirement. So there is hands-on training required in order to even obtain the credential to begin with, in many of the programs that we train towards. The way that we accomplish that is a couple of different ways. One, we have a lot of partnerships with employers whereby they have agreed to allow our students to come on site, in their environment, work alongside someone else and ultimately obtain those skills. So they're not only taking what they've learned in classroom, if you will, through our didactic portion of our training, but also taking that into a live environment and applying it alongside someone that's already working in the job or the role that they're ultimately seeking to be a part of. So some of that is through those relationships that we have. We also work with a lot of local training facilities that ultimately host students to allow them to come into a simulated classroom environment, or, sorry, a work environment to where they can do the same thing, it's just not on site with a particular employer. So we do that in both ways. We do it through partnerships that we have with employers. Then we also do that through training sites that we have relationships with, whether that's regionally or locally based, to where our students can go into those facilities and ultimately complete those clinical requirements and hands-on requirements that they have. The third element of that is that we also have skill assessments built into our training itself online. So as the student goes out on site, they get some of that hands-on experience, they come back, if you will, into the virtual classroom. We have assessments that we will walk a student through to ultimately test their proficiency on how well they understood some of those things that they learned. And they're going through assessments on a regular basis and getting feedback on areas where they can and need to improve.The Student ExperienceMichael Horn:It's super interesting to hear you sort of break that down, Craig, because what is coming across actually is that you weren't just innovating in the area of online education, but you were also innovating against the traditional model, as you described, to create a much more interactive experience, a more active learning experience it sounds like. Just talk us through what a typical student experience looks like over the course of their certification program. But also maybe Ann Somers, we can ask the question about business model in terms of program costs relative to other options in a moment but Craig, just focus on like the interactive learning experience itself and how that differs and how you facilitated that over the course of their certification.Craig Sprinkle:Yeah, sure, absolutely. And I guess I'll preface this by saying that obviously every student experience is a little bit different. But by and large, when a student first enrolls in their program, first and foremost they're looking for that alternative route in order to get a fast track into a career. That's sort of fundamental to what we do, is that we offer that affordable training. It's something that we can offer in a fast and rapid way for them, it's much more affordable at little to no debt to that individual at the end of the day. And it provides that faster path into a career that they're ultimately looking for. Remember, the end goal is not the training itself, it's the job or it's the career that they're trying to build towards that we're really trying to help them with. Generally speaking, our students, once they enroll in one of our programs, they're typically going through a three to six month process, depending on the program, whereby they're completing initially a didactic portion of the training. That's the virtual online piece of it, typically that's built around quizzes, virtual assessments, interactivity, there's gamification if you will in a lot of the training that we do, there's real time feedback that they're getting through avatars and things on screen that they are interacting with and then that's followed up in some cases depending, on the program of course, with a clinical component that we were just talking about where that student will then go out on site, complete a lot of the hands on training that's required associated with their program and learn a lot of that in person either through an employer or training facility that we were talking about. They're taking regular assessments along the way, so they're getting continuous feedback around areas that they're doing well in, areas that they need to improve upon. And there's one to one support that we're ultimately offering them as well. They have an advisor that's assigned to them from day one. That advisor follows them all the way through, providing support, providing encouragement. As you can imagine, in an online environment it's very self led, self paced, it's sometimes very individualized and there can be an element of loneliness that comes along with that. So having someone that they can connect with on a regular basis, we feel is critically important to that success of that student. Along the way as well, they get connected with a career coach. That career coach is also helping them begin to develop a resume, begin to go through skill development as it relates to having a successful interview, getting connected with employers. While we certainly don't guarantee employment at the end of a program, we help students as much as we can get connected with job opportunities and openings that may exist in the geographical area that they're a part of. So that gives you a little bit of a window into, I guess, more of the specifics of how we deliver the training, but also the support and the service that we give along the way as well.Access and AffordabilityAnn Somers Hogg:Yes, that's really interesting, especially how you pointed to the connection to the advisor and how they're really helping them through the process, so that there is that feeling that people would probably be getting in the one on one or sorry, in the in person environment where they have that one on one connection with a teacher or an advisor. So one of the things you mentioned towards the beginning of the explanation about the typical student experience is it's an affordable training and it's a fast and rapid way to get a certification with little to no debt. So could you talk a little bit about how your program costs and maybe the options for student payment differ from traditional models? What sets you apart and makes it more affordable or makes people able to get through with little to no debt?Craig Sprinkle:Yeah, absolutely. So I think I mentioned a minute ago that typically our programs are structured to cover training that goes around either between three weeks up to about six months. From a pricing perspective, those programs range as low as $2,000 for a full certification program, all the way up to $6,000, but generally the average is around $4,000 at the end of the day. And whenever you kind of stack that up against, you know, a traditional undergrad program or even course hour costs at the four year college level, it's much more affordable and less expensive whenever you start to compare it on that level. At the same time, the speed at which someone can move through that training, first and foremost is self paced, which is a huge advantage to an adult learner who has a lot of distractions in their life at the end of the day, they do want to dedicate the time to getting the additional training, but they may not be able to sit and dedicate 8, 9, 10 hours a day to doing it. So we allow that flexibility in their scheduling to do that at their own pace. The funding and the ability of someone to be able to pay for their programs actually comes from a number of different places. Number one is that a lot of our students come through relationships that we have with employers. So there's typically a tuition reimbursement policy behind a student or other funding that's available through their employer, that from a student's perspective or that employee's perspective, it's basically no out of pocket cost for them at all. They're simply utilizing those benefits that they have through their employer. Some of the students that we ultimately interact with are also eligible for either state or federal level grant funding, depending on the program, depending on where they're taking advantage of that training, and they're able to tap into some of that funding as well. And then lastly, we also provide very affordable tuition assistance programs, payment plans, that allow a student to effectively take out a loan for their program. But it's a relatively low payment in the grand scheme of when you think about traditional student loans and the cost of tuition and things like that, it's a much more affordable monthly cost for them that they're paying for as they go through their training. And by the time they frankly complete their training, they have none of that debt left at that point in time. So they're walking out not only with a credential, but no further debt or payment obligation as it relates to the program that they just took advantage of.Michael Horn:Super interesting on a few fronts, Craig, I have a set of questions around outcomes and success. But before going there, just to double back on something that you just said as you were describing the loan, you know, when the few circumstances where people are taking out loans, it sounds like it's not federal student loans. So do you all not participate in the Title Four, you know, federal government, right, funding of higher ed?Craig Sprinkle:Yeah, that's correct. So we don't actually take advantage of any of the Title Four funding that's out there today. The loan programs that I'm referring to, those are programs that we've structured internally ourselves. So if you think about it for a second, we are ultimately underwriting, you know, the default risk, if you will, associated with a lot of those payment plans. But quite frankly, we find that the performance is very, very positive. Because at the end of the day, you do have students that enroll in these programs that are very motivated. They are looking for an opportunity to take the training and very quickly move into a job and a career in a very short time period. So we see the performance of those payment plans, frankly, being much better in a lot of cases than what you would see through some of the other funding sources that you mentioned. And that allows us to continue to just do more of that, you know, over time.Evaluating OutcomesMichael Horn:Super interesting, because it strikes me that that does a few things, right? One, by not participating in Title Four, you all save cost in compliance, but you also get permission to do a lot more innovation in terms of program delivery, distribution, cost of acquisition of students, so forth. But secondly, I would imagine because you're doing the loan programming, your incentives are actually well aligned with your students because you are bearing the risk just as they are which is a central problem right now of the higher ed financing, right, is that the institution doesn't have any skin in the game on that. Let's talk about metrics of success and value and so forth. I know this a little bit because I was at Guild, I think when MedCerts became one of the providers for helping employees be able to move into health-care roles, depending on where they were with their employers. And a big thing for the Guild was we want to choose online programs that serve adults well. We want to choose programs that have good outcomes. How all do you measure outcomes? What are they, and how do they compare to traditional models?Craig Sprinkle:Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, first and foremost, I mentioned a minute ago that the end goal and the ultimate outcome that we're looking for is the student's placement into a job. And again, that can take different forms when you're talking about relationships that we have with employers, because some of those students and those learners are already existing employees of that particular employer, but they are looking for upskilling or reskilling opportunities so that they can move into that next role or move into the next step in their career ladder. So ultimately, that is the end goal that we're looking for. Beyond that, it's more the traditional outcomes that you would see, regardless of it being MedCerts or any other training provider or education institution, you know, number one is whether you call it a graduation rate or a completion rate, that is something that we look very closely at in terms of how the rate at which our students are completing successfully their training and their programs. I would say the next largest or equally most important one is ultimately the employment rate. And we look at that very regularly. We are surveying our students on a regular basis. We stay in contact with them post graduation after they've completed their certification training, to stay in contact with them to make sure that either A, they did get the job that they were looking for or B they are looking for something different and if we can be of assistance to them to help connect them with other employers and other opportunities, we definitely want to do that for them. I will tell you that comparatively, and I'm certainly biased whenever I say this is that I believe that our outcomes are ratably better than what you would see in more of the higher ed space. Our completion rates or graduation rates are well in excess of 70% across all of our programs. That's blended by the way, some are a little bit lower and certainly some are much higher. But that's the overall average. And the way that we ultimately look at it's not traditional placement at the end of the day, but we look at employment and our employment rates of all of our graduates again are upwards of 70% or higher. And again that to be fair, that's a blend at times of both in field and out of field. But the vast majority of the employment that we're typically reporting on and looking at is infield associated with that. So there's other outcomes certainly, but those are the biggest ones that we definitely look at.Michael Horn:Yeah, go ahead Ann Somers.Ann Somers Hogg:Oh, I was just gonna say when you're looking at employment rate, is that employment rate at completion of the program or is that at one year, six months? Is it at a certain time period?Craig Sprinkle:Yeah, it's actually over a time horizon. So it's at the point that they have completed their program and then 12 months following that time period. Because you have to remember again, depending on the program, there are clinical requirements that still have to be completed. That student still needs to sit for their certification exam. So it's really getting them in that employment opportunity in that time period immediately following graduation.Ann Somers Hogg:Great, thanks for explaining that.What’s Next?Michael Horn:Yeah, it's super interesting. Just one more question before I turn it to Anne Somers for sort of a final question, if you will. But when you talk about those metrics, those are actually stunning metrics for on ground programs, for an online program, those are astronomical. As you know, when you're talking about excess of 70% graduation rate in particular. And obviously the ROI to the student is very clear because these certifications have very clear labor market value. So the return is very clear. I'm curious, I guess a two part question as we think about where MedCerts maybe goes from here. Apprenticeships are becoming a very hot topic in the education career space, particularly in health care, is one of those places being identified for them. I'm curious if you're doing anything there and then the second question is what are you doing with AI in terms of program delivery as well? Because that's obviously another hot area. So AI, apprenticeships, things that we ought to keep an eye on there.Craig Sprinkle:Yeah, absolutely. So let me address the first one first. So I would say in terms of a traditional apprenticeship, we are doing a little bit of that, but not significantly. What we do a lot of frankly, is more of like externship placement. So again, in terms of an employer and ultimately what they're looking for from our graduates, sometimes depending on the program of study, the vacancies that they have, they may not look to fill that vacancy right away, but they want that person to come out on site and almost do further on the job training with the employer in an externship type setting, and then that leads to a job for them at that point in time. Apprenticeships can get a little bit complicated, to be quite honest, about what it takes to manage that at the employer level. It's not that we shy away from that. It's just a little bit more difficult to execute. At the end of the day, we find that again, to change the word a little bit, you know, a traditional externship provides that faster and easier path to where it's a little bit of like test driving from the employer's perspective and test driving from the employee's perspective. And we find that that works out pretty well.Michael Horn:What about in terms of AI before I turn it over?Craig Sprinkle:Yeah, yeah. So I would say probably 12, 18 months ago, we really started in earnest to start to embed elements of AI into a lot of our training. The best examples that I can give you today is that we have a mental health support specialist program that we train towards today. And part of that training, a good core of the training, quite frankly, is on the screen interaction with a persona that an individual learner is interacting with. A patient that is already pre wired, if you will, with a certain personality and based on the nature of the conversation, obviously intelligent large language models, and we start to build up that intelligence in the interaction that starts to build that relationship and that conversation as the person navigates through, through that interview process with the patient. So that's just one example of that. I will also tell you that we're actually leveraging AI quite a bit from a product development perspective to just help expedite how quickly we can move through new product development and bring new offerings to market as well. So I don't want to diminish that fact, but we're, I mean, we're finding every way possible that we can leverage AI in the most positive way.MedCerts’ Work With High SchoolersAnn Somers Hogg:Great. And as Michael mentioned, I'll try and close it out with an all encompassing question here. So is there anything about what makes MedCerts unique that we didn't ask you but you wish we had? And if so, what's the question and what's the answer?Craig Sprinkle:Yeah, I mean, I think we had some really good conversation by the way, so thank you for that and I really appreciate all the questions. I think the main thing that we maybe didn't talk about, that I'm particularly excited about, is that what are the additional things that we're really doing to have a material impact on the vacancy crisis in health care? And I would say one of the bigger things among many, quite frankly, that we're doing is really focusing on early talent development and early skill development. And what I mean by that is that we're accomplishing that by really reaching down into the high school population and working with K12 providers to really bring our training into like juniors and seniors in high school, so it becomes part of their path towards graduation. And we kind of look at it as like a triple benefit at the end of the day. And what I mean by that is in many cases a student will have the opportunity to walk out of high school with a high school diploma. They will have a nationally recognized certification, and in some cases they will also have credit for prior learning associated with that certification at the college level if they choose to go down that path. And if you think about that, that is a massive cost saver for that learner at the end of the day where they may get credit for upwards of a semester's worth of education at the college level, which saves them a tremendous amount of tuition costs downstream, not to mention the skills that they've already built before they ever came out of high school. So that's just one path, if you will. But for those that are maybe not going down the four year college path or the two year college path, they are ready through that certification to step into a job that ultimately an employer is looking at that skill set and saying they're ready to be hired at the end of the day. So that's an area that obviously I'm really excited about, you can tell by the tone of my voice at the end of the day. But it's really something that we've seen a really large movement towards in the last 12 to 15 months.Ann Somers Hogg:Absolutely. I'm so glad that you brought that up. A few of the interesting models that I think I've sent on to Michael and another one of our education researchers at the institute have really piqued my interest when I see that a large health system is partnering with local high schools in order to do what you were talking about, in order to help those juniors and seniors really have a career path as soon as they leave high school.Craig Sprinkle:Yeah, that's a great point. I think to your point, employers are also seeing that opportunity where they can ultimately tap into talent earlier as well and not necessarily be solely relying on a training provider, you know, to bring all of that talent to them. They can find that through that partnership with that local high school district. And then we simply become an element of allowing or enabling that training to get that student job ready.Michael Horn:Yeah. It seems to me also I like it for all the reasons you guys have said, but it's dual enrollment with a lot more teeth in it because it's a meaningful credential that's backed up by a certification. So it's not just sort of the high school said you learned it. You can actually show that they've learned it and it has value whether they go labor market or college. I think that's going to be much more meaningful as a set of credentials.Craig Sprinkle:Yeah, absolutely.Michael Horn:Perfect. Well, look, thank you, Craig, so much, obviously, for the work that you're doing, for joining us on both Life Centered Health Care and the Future of Education today. You get two for one out of this conversation with us. And for all you tuning in, thank you for joining us. Ann Somers, great to see you. We'll look forward to more conversations on both of our shows. Thank you so much.The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.

Techno-optimists have high hopes for how AI will improve learning. But what’s the merit of the “bull case”, and what are the technology’s risks? To think through those questions, Diane Tavenner and I sit down with Ben Riley of Cognitive Resonance, a “think and do” tank dedicated to improving decisions using cognitive science. Ben evaluates the cases made for AI, unpacks its potential hazards, and discusses how schools can prepare for it.Diane Tavenner:Hi there, I'm Diane, and what you're about to hear is a conversation Michael and I recorded with our guests, Ben Riley. It's part of our series exploring the potential impact of AI in education, where we're interviewing optimists and skeptics.Here are two things from the episode that I keep thinking about:First, our conversations are starting to make me wonder if AI is going to disrupt the model of education we've had for so long, as I think Ben perhaps fears, or if it's actually going to strengthen and reinforce our existing models of the schoolhouse with classrooms filled with a teacher and students.The second thing that I was really thinking about and that struck me was that Ben's sort of one case for what could be beneficial about AI is something that's directly related to his work and interest in understanding the brain. And kind of how learning occurs. To be fair, there's a theme emerging across all the conversations we're having with people where they see value in the thing that they value themselves. And perhaps that's an artifact of the early stages and who knows, but it's making me curious.And speaking of curious, a reflection I'm having after talking with Ben is about the process of change. Ben is a really well reasoned, thoughtful skeptic of AI's utility in education. He comes to his views at least partially from using AI. I would consider myself much more of an optimist and yet I'm finding myself a little bit annoyed right now, that every time I want to write an email or join a meeting or send a text or make a phone call that I've got AI pretty intrusively jumping in to try to help me. And it's really got me thinking about the very human process of change, which is one of the many reasons why I'm really looking forward to sense making conversations with Michael after all of these thought provoking interviews.In the interim, we'd both love to hear your thoughts and reflections. So please do share. But for now, I hope you enjoy this conversation on Class Disrupted.Michael Horn:Hey, Diane. It is good to see you again.Diane Tavenner:You too. And I'm really excited to be back. Coming off of our last conversation around AI and education, it's making me even more excited about what we're going to be learning in this series. And I think today will be no exception in really stretching our minds and our thinkings about the possibilities, the limitations, the potential harms of AI and its intersection with education.Michael Horn:Yeah, I think that's right, Diane. And to help us think through these questions, today, we're bringing someone on the show that I think both of us have known for quite a long time. His name is Ben Riley. He previously founded the Deans for Impact in I believe 2014. And Deans for Impact is a nonprofit that connects cognitive science to teacher training. And then Ben stepped aside a couple years ago, and has most recently founded Cognitive Resonance, which is a think and do tank, in its words, and a consultancy organization that's really, its focus actually is on this topic of AI and learning, which is perfect and makes Ben the perfect guest for us today. So, Ben, welcome.Ben Riley:Thanks so much for having me. We'll see if you still think I'm the perfect guest by the end of it, but I appreciate being invited to speak to both of you.Ben Riley’s Journey to the WorkMichael Horn:Absolutely. Well, before we get into a series of questions that we've been asking our guests, we'd love you to share with the audience about how you got into AI so deep, specifically because I will confess and I'll give folks background, I've been reading. I've actually been an editor on a couple of the things that you've submitted into Education Next on AI, and I found them super intriguing. And then somehow I had no idea that you created this entire life for yourself around AI and education. And you have some language on this that I think is really interesting on the site where you say the purpose is to influence how people think about Gen AI systems by actually using the lens of cognitive science. And you believe that will help make AI more intelligible, less mysterious, which will actually help influence what people do with it in the years to come. And then you write that you see it as a useful tool, but one with strengths and limitations that are predictable. And so we really have to understand those if we want to harness them in essence. So how and why did you make this your focus?Ben Riley:Yeah. Well. And thank you for clearly having read the website's cognitiveresonance.net or the substack Build Cognitive Resonance, in many ways, the organization reflects my own personal journey because several years ago I started to become aware that something was happening in the world of AI, and at the time it was called deep learning, and that was the phrase that was starting to emerge. And to be completely candid, my focus has always been, and in some ways still very much is on how human cognition works. And so AI, artificial intelligence, is considered kind of one of the disciplines within cognitive science, along with psychology and neuroscience and linguistics, philosophy. There's like it's an interdisciplinary field. And for me, quite honestly, AI was sort of like this thing happening somewhere over there that I had maybe a loose eye on. And I got in touch with someone named Gary Marcus at the time, and we'll come back to Gary in a second, and then just said, hey, Gary, can you explain deep learning to me and what it is and what's going on? And that, you know, sort of began that conversation. And then quite frankly, I just kind of squirreled away and didn't think much about it. And then, like it did for all of us, ChatGPT came into our lives. And I was stunned. I was completely stunned when I first sat down with it and started using it. And what really irked me was that I didn't understand it. You know, I was like, I don't get how this is doing, what it's doing. So I am now going to try to figure out how it's doing, what it's doing. And that is not easy. At least it wasn't easy for me. I don't think it's even now. I don't think it's easy for those who might have spent their entire lives, much less those of us who are coming in late in the game or just trying to make sense of this new technology in our lives. And what I was able to draw upon was both sort of the things that I do know and have learned over the last decade plus around human cognition and frankly draw on a lot of relationships I have with people who are in cognitive science broadly, and just start having a bunch of conversations, doing a bunch of reading, and really trying to, you know, build a mental model of what's taking place with these tools and with large language models specifically. And when I finished all that, I thought, well, geez, it seems like, you know, that took a lot of work. Maybe it would be helpful to sort of try to pass this along and bring others into the conversation. So that's really the thesis of Cognitive Resonance.The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.AI’s Educational UpsideDiane Tavenner:Ben, everything you just described is just so consistent with my experience with you over the years and the conversations that we've had and what my perception is what you care about. And I'm so glad you brought it together in that way, because I'll be honest, when I was like, wait, Ben is doing AI? Like, that didn't totally land with me. And so what I'm hearing from you is like, well, I'm super curious for this conversation because I'm. I'm not getting the vibe that you're a total AI skeptic. I'm not getting the vibe that you're a total cheerleader. I'm guessing we're gonna have a really nuanced conversation here about this right now. So let's start there. Like, let's start with kind of that polar, and then see where we go. Can you make the argument for us of how AI is going to positively impact education? And I'm not saying it has to be your argument, but can you just stand up an argument for us based on what you've learned about how it could. Like, what's the best case to be made for AI positively impacting it?Ben Riley:Yeah. So this is what people are now calling steel manning, right? Like, can you steel man the argument that you may not agree with. I had a law school professor who taught me that the best way to write a good legal brief is to take the other side's best argument, make it even better than they can make it, and then defeat it. And you all gave me this question in advance, and I've been thinking about it since you did, and I don't know if I can make one best case. What I want to do is make three cases which I think are the positive bull cases. So number one, one that I think should be familiar to both of you because we've been having this debate for nearly a decade, is sort of personalized learning, a dream deferred, but now it can be real. When we said we were going to use big data analytics and use that to figure out how to teach kids exactly what they want to know, when they need to know it. Like, what we meant was we needed large language models that could do that. And now, lo and behold, we have that tool. And as Dan Meyer likes to joke, it can harness the power of a thousand suns. It's got all of the knowledge that's ever been put into some sort of data form that can be scraped from the Internet or from other sources, not always disclose what those sources are, but nonetheless, there's a lot of data going into them and using these somewhat mysterious processes that they have of autoregression and back propagation. And we can go as deep as you want in the weeds on some of those terms, but we doing that, we can actually finally give kids like an incredibly intelligent, incredibly patient, incredibly, some would even say loving, some have said that, tutor. And we can do that at scale, we can probably do it cheaply. And boom, Benjamin Bloom's dream, two sigma gains. It's happening finally. There we go. All right, so that's argument number one. Call that personalized maximization argument. Argument number two, I think, is the sort of AI as a fundamental utility argument. And the argument here is something along the lines of, look, this is a big deal technologically in the same way the Internet or a computer is a big deal technologically, and it's one of those technologies that's going to become ubiquitous in our society, the same way the computer or the Internet has become ubiquitous in our society. And we don't even know all the many ways in which it's going to be woven into the fabric of our existence. But that includes our education system. And so some benefits will accrue as a result of its many powers. Okay, so that's the utility argument. The third argument would say something like this. It would say the process of education fundamentally is the process of trying to change mental states in kids. And I mean, frankly, doesn't have to be kids, but we'll just talk about it from teachers to students.Michael Horn:Sure.Ben Riley:And, there's some really big challenges with that. When you just distill it down to the act of trying to make a kid think about something. One of the challenges is that we cannot see inside their head. So the process of what's taking place, cognition or not, is opaque to us, number one. And number two, experiments are really, really hard. They're not impossible. But you can't really do the sort of experiments that you can do in other realms of life the same way. It's just for ethical reasons, but also just frankly from like scientific, technical reasons. Because again, we can't see what's happening in the head. So even when you run an experiment, you're getting approximations of what's happening inside the head. Some would then say, well, now we have something that is kind of like a mind and we can kind of emphasis on kind of, see inside it. And we definitely can run experiments on it in a way that doesn't implicate sort of the same ethical concerns and others. That argument, and I'll call that the cognitive arguments, human and artificial, would say that can use this tool to better help us understand ourselves. In some ways it might help us by being similar to what's happening with us, but in other ways it might help us by being different and showing those differences. So those are the three arguments that I see.Evaluating the Case for AIDiane Tavenner:Yeah. Super interesting. Thank you for making those cases. Which of any of them do you actually believe? Now you, I'm curious about your opinion and why?Ben Riley:Yeah. So I have bad news for you. The first one, the personalized maximization dream, is going to fail for the same reason that I would like to say I predicted that personalization using big data analytics would fail. We could spend the entire podcast with me unpacking why that is. I'm not going to do that. So I'm going to limit it just to two arguments. Okay. The first would be that these tools fundamentally lack a theory of mind. Okay. So that's a term that cognitive scientists will use for the capacity that we humans have to imagine the mental states of another. And these tools can't do that. There's some dispute in the literature and researchers will say, well, if you run these sort of tests, maybe they're kind of capable of it. I'm not buying it. I don't think it's true. And there's plenty of evidence on the other side as well saying that they just don't have that capacity. Fundamentally, what they're doing is making predictions about what text to produce. They're not imagining a mental state of the user who's inputting things into it. Number two, I would say, is that it obviously misses out on a huge part of the cultural aspect of why we do and why we have education institutions and the relationships that we form. And I think that the claim that students are going to want to engage and learn from digitized tutors the likes of which Khan Academy and others are putting out, I think is woefully misguided and runs counter to literally thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years of human history. Okay, so number one, doomed. Number two is to me like a kind of like, so what? Right? So I use the example of computers and the Internet as ubiquitous technologies that AI might join. So, like, let's say that's true. Let's say that comes to pass. So what? Like, we have the Internet now, we have computers now. We've had both of these things for decades. They have not, I would argue, radically transformed education outcomes. The ways in which technologies like this become sort of utilities in our lives, transforms our day to day existence. But just because a technology is useful or relevant in some way or form does not mean emphasis, does not mean that it is somehow useful for education purposes and for improving cognitive ability. So I have absent a theory as to in what ways these tools are going to do that. Whether or not they become, you know, ubiquitous background technologies is kind of a, so what for me. Number three, the argument, the cognitive argument that this tool could be a useful example and non example of human cognition, I have a great deal of sympathy for. I am very curious about. There's a lot, a lot that has changed just within linguistics, I would say, in the last several years in terms of how we conceptualize what it is these tools are doing and what that says about how we think and deploy language for our own purposes. We may have just scratched the surface with that. The new models that are getting released that are now quote unquote reasoning models have a lot of similarities in their functionality to things in cognitive science like worked examples and why those are useful in helping people learn. A worked example being something that sort of lays the steps out for a student as to here, think about this, then think about this, then think about this. Well, it turns out if you tell a large language model, do this, then do this, then do this, do then this, or just sort of program it to do that, their capabilities improve. So you know, without sounding too much like I'm high on my own supply, this is the cognitive resonance enterprise. It's sort of to say, okay, let's put this in front of us and instead of focusing so much and using it as a means to an end, let's study it as an end unto itself, as an artificial mind, quote unquote, and see what we can learn from that.Michael Horn:Super interesting, Ben, on, on that one. And I'm just thinking about an article I read literally this morning about where it falls short of mimicking, you know, the true neural networks, if you will, in our brain. So I'm pondering on that one now. I guess I, before we go to the outright skeptic take if you will, I'm sort of curious on like other things that you think AI won't help with in your view, beyond what you just listed in terms of, you know, this broad notion of personalizing learning or AI as utility, if you will, and, and the so what question, like are there other things that people are making claims around where they think AI is really going to advance the ball here. And you're like, I just, I don't see that as a useful application for it.Ben Riley:Well, you know, we launched into this conversation and we didn't define what we're talking about when we talk about AI. Right, sure.Michael Horn:There's different streams of it. Yep.Ben Riley:Yeah. And I think that, like, when I'm talking about AI, and least have been talking about it in this context thus far, I'm talking about generative AI, mostly large language models, but it includes any sort of version of generative AI that is in essence, sort of pulling a large amount of data together and then sort of trying to make predictions based on that, using sort of an autoregressive process or diffusion in the case of imagery, but sort of like trying to essentially aggregate what's out there, and as a result of that, aggregation produce something that sort of relates to that. If you're talking about beyond that, like, who knows? I mean, there's just so many different varied use cases. There's, I was mentioning off air, but I'll say now on air, there's a great book, AI Snake Oil, written by a couple of academics at Princeton, which talks about sort of the predictive AI, which they put in a sort of separate category from generative AI, and they're very skeptical about any of those uses. My fundamental thing is that to the extent people think like the big claim, right? And unbelievably, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, just a few days ago declared that, like, we've already figured out how to create artificial general intelligence. In fact, that's like a solved problem. Now we're on to super intelligence. I think people should be very, very skeptical of that claim. And there's a lot of reasons why I would say that, which again, could eat up the entire podcast. But I'll just give you one. What we now know is true, I think from a scientific perspective about human thought, is that it exists, it does not depend on language. Language is a tool that we use to communicate our thoughts. So if that's true, and I would argue in humans, it is almost unassailably true. And I can give you the evidence for why I think we think that or why we know that, then it would be very strange if we could recreate all of the intelligence that humans possess simply by creating something like a large language model and using all of the power of all the Nvidia chips to harness what's in that knowledge. Now what people will say, and frankly, this is where all the billions and the leading thinkers on this are trying to do is okay, well now we can only go so far with language. How about we try to do it for other cognitive capacities? Can we do that? Can we create neuro symbolic, as it's called, AI that is as powerful, powerful as generative AI with large language models and sort of start to piece this together in the same way that we may piece together various cognitive capacities in our own brain and then loop that together and call it intelligence. To which I say, well, good luck. I mean, honestly, good luck. But there's no reason to think that just because we've done it with large language models that we're going to have the same sort of breakthroughs in the other spaces. So don't know if this fundamentally answers your question, Michael, but I would say that it's sort of like, you can have progress in this one dimension. It can actually be quite fascinating and interesting. But I would urge people to sort of slow down in thinking that it just means that, you know, all of science and humanity and these huge questions around whether we will ever be able to fully emulate the human mind have suddenly been solved.The Skeptical TakeDiane Tavenner:Yeah. Wow. So fascinating. I have so many things coming to me right now, including my long journey and experience with people who make extraordinary com, you know, claims and then kind of make the work a little bit challenging for the rest of us who are actually doing it behind them. But let's turn now, we're kind of steering in that direction, but let's go all the way in on the skeptical take. And so I feel confident you've got some good material here for us. Like what is AI going to hurt specifically in education? Let's start there, and how's it going to do harm?Ben Riley:Yeah, well, I don't think we should use the hypothetical or the future. Let's talk about what it's harming right now. So I mean, the big danger right now is that it's a tool of cognitive automation. Right? So what it does is fundamentally offer you an off ramp to doing the sort of effortful thinking that we typically want students doing in order to build the knowledge that they will have in their head that they can then use in the rest of their life. And this is so fundamentally misunderstood. It was misunderstood when Google was starting to become a thing and the Internet was becoming a thing. You would hear in education, well meaning people say, well, why do we need to teach it? If you can Google it. Right? That was a thing that many people said, put up on slides. I used to stop and listen and look. It makes sense if you don't spend any time with cognitive science and you don't spend any time thinking about how we think. And so I don't, I don't want to throw those people too far under the bus, but just a little, because now we know. We know this. Like, this is a scientific, like, as established as anything else is established. It's like our ability to understand new ideas in the world comes from the existing knowledge that we have in our head. That is the bedrock principle of cognitive science, as I like to describe it. So suddenly we have this tool that says, you know, to the extent you need to express whether or not you have done this thinking, let me do that for you. You know like, this exists in order to, to, to solve for that problem. And guess what? It is very much solving for that problem. Like, I think the most stunning fact that I have heard in the last year is that OpenAI says that the majority of its users are students. Okay, the majority. Now, I don't know what the numerator and denominator is for that, and I'm talking to some folks trying to figure that out, but they have said that at the OpenAI education conference, Lea Crusey, who some of you may know who was over at Coursera, got up and said, and they said, and I think they meant this is like, they were happy about this, that their usage in The Philippines jumped 90% when the school year started. What are those kids using it for? Yeah, you know, what are those kids using it for? Like, I don't think, like, we need to stop pretending that this isn't a real issue. And for me, people sort of go, well, it's plagiarism, you could always plagiarize. And it's like, not exactly. Not exactly like. And I think it actually is sort of both overstates and understates the case to talk about it in the context of plagiarism. Because again, the real issue here is that we will lose sight of what the education process is really about. And we already have, I think, too many students and too much of the system sort of oriented around get the right answer, produce the output. And I think teachers make this mistake, unfortunately, too often, I think a lot of folks in the system make this mistake of we just want to see the outcome and we are not thinking about the process because that's really what matters. And building that knowledge over time. And you've got now, I mean I literally sometimes lose sleep over this. You've got a generation of students whose first experience of school was profoundly messed up because of the pandemic. And then right on top of that, we have now introduced this tool that can be used as a way of offloading effortful thinking. And I don't think we have any idea what the consequences are going to be for that cohort of students and the potentially, like, dramatic deficiencies in a quality education that they will have been provided. That's one big harm. There's another. I mean, there's many others, but there's another that I'll highlight here, too. I don't know if you, either of you watched, I imagine you did, the introduction of ChatGPT multimodal system last year, which included the family Khan, Sal Khan and his son Imran were on there. I thought it was fascinating and speaks again to the amount of users who are students that OpenAI chose Saul and his son to debut that major product. If you watch that video closely, and you should, you'll see something, I think, that is worth paying attention to, which is at multiple points, they interrupt the multimodal tutor that they're talking to. And why not, right? It's not a life form. It doesn't have feelings. And we know that, it's a robot. You know, to a degree. I don't think we've really grappled with the implications of introducing something like human like into an education system and then having students who are students who are still learning about how to interact with other humans, that's another part of education and saying, you know what, it's okay to behave basically however you want with this tool, right? Like the norms and the sort of, you know, ways in which schools inculcate values and inculcate, sort of how it is we relate to one another could be profoundly affected in ways that we haven't even begun to imagine, except in the realm of science fiction. And I think it's worth looking at science fiction and pointing to how we tell these stories. I don't know if either of you watched HBO's Westworld, particularly the first season before the show went off the rails. But if you watch the, if you watch.Diane Tavenner:Season one was a little intense, too.Ben Riley:Season one was intense, but it was good. I thought it was good. And, and, but it was haunting. And one of the things that was haunting about it is it's like for those who haven't watched the show, it's a It's filled with cyborgs who are quasi sentient, but they, you know, people come and they're at amusement parks and it's like the old west and what can you do? You can kill them. You can kill them and people do that or worse.Diane Tavenner:Right, yeah. Well, talk about the other bad thing.Ben Riley:Right, right. I mean, but, you know, but it's sort of like the fact that we now can imagine that sort of thing being a future where you could like humans, but not. The philosopher Daniel Dennett, who passed away, talked about the profound dangers of counterfeiting humanity. And I think that's the sort of concern that is just almost not even being discussed at any real level as we start to see this tool infect the education system.AI’s Impact on How We ThinkMichael Horn:I suspect that's going to be something we visit a few times in this series. But you've just, you've done a couple things there. One, you've, I think, more articulately answered, you know, a lot of the bad behavior we've seen on social media. How that actually could get exacerbated is not through deep fakes per se, but in terms of actually how we relate to one another. But you also answered another one of my questions that I've had, which is I can't remember a consumer technology where education has been the featured use case in almost every single demo repeatedly. And you may have just answered that as well. I'm curious, a different question because I know you and Bror Saxberg have had sort of a back and forth about, you know, where is certain things that maybe it's harming going to be less relevant in the future. And he loves to cite the Aristotle story. Right. About we're not going to be memorizing Homeric length poems anymore. And maybe that's okay because it freed up working memory for other things. I'm sort of curious to get your reflection on that conversation at the moment because I think Diane and I would strongly agree. Replacing effortful thinking, thinking that you can just, you know, have people not grapple with knowledge and build mental models and things like that, that's going to have a clearly detrimental impact. Are there things where you say actually it's going to hurt this, but that may be less relevant because of how we accomplish work or something like that in the future? I don't know your take on that.Ben Riley:Yeah, I don't think you'll like my answer, but I'm going to give you my honest answer.Michael Horn:I don't know that I have an opinion. Like, I'm just curious.Ben Riley:Yeah, I mean, I'm not a futurist and I've made very few predictions ever in my life, at least professionally. One of the few that I did was that I thought personalized learning was a bad idea in education. And I'd be curious, I don't know in this conversation another, whether you two reflecting back on that would go actually, you know, knowing what we know now, there were reasons to be skeptical of it and the, the I'm annoyed at the turn he seems to have taken because I used to like to quote Jeff Bezos. So with all the caveats around, you know, Jeff Bezos and anybody right now from big tech, he has said something that I think is relevant, which is he said, he's asked all the time, you know, how the, what's going to change in the future and how to prepare for that. And he says that's the wrong question. He says, you know, the thing that you should plan around is what's not going to change. He's like, when I started Amazon, he was like, you know, I knew that people wanted stuff, they wanted variety, they wanted it cheap and they wanted it fast. And he's like, that, as far as I could tell, wasn't going to change. Like, people weren't going to like, I want to spend more or take longer to get to me. And it's like I said, once you have the things that won't change, build around those. So I said it earlier, I'll say it again. The thing that's not going to change is fundamentally our cognitive architecture is the product of certainly hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years of biological evolutionary processes. It is further, I think, the product of thousands of years, tens of thousands of years of cultural evolution. We now have something, we have digital technologies that can affect that culture. So it does not mean, and I am not contending that our cognitive architecture is some sort of immutable thing, far from it. But on the other hand, it would suggest that what we should do is A, not plan around changes that we can't possibly imagine, but B, maybe more importantly, and I would say this to both of you, not try to push for that future, you know, that we should fundamentally be small c, very small c, conservative about these things, because we don't know, you know, I don't know what the amount of time that took place back in Socrates and Aristotle's time in terms of the cognitive transitions that took place, but they took place. My strong hunch not so much as the product of any deliberate choice, but to get a sort of social conversation about which ways in which should we talk to one another. And it was clearly the case that writing things down proved to be valuable in many dimensions. It may prove to be the case that having this tool proves very valuable in many dimensions. But let the time and experience sort that out rather than trying to predict it.What Schools Can Do To PrepareDiane Tavenner:Super helpful. I love where you're taking us, which is into actual schools. So I appreciate that you're like, let's talk about what's actually happening right now. And, you know, that is where my, like, heart and work always is, is in real schools. And so given what we are seeing, what you're articulating about what's actually happening right now in schools, and given that, well, I won't say it as a given. What do schools need to do to mitigate the challenges you just said to, to recognize this as a reality that is coming our way that maybe can't be put back in the box. Now, I'm going to say that with a caveat because I'm reading in the last day or two too, that it's people declaring, you know, that they've won the cell phone war and cell phones are going to be out of schools here pretty soon. So maybe, maybe you actually believe it's possible to kind of put it back in the box in schools. But, like, what's the impact on schools and what do they do literally right now, given what you're saying is actually happening already?Ben Riley:Yeah. So great questions, all of them. So, I mean, thank you for bringing up the cell phone example, because I cite that often and even before there was this sort of wave now, both at the international level, national level, state by state, district by district, to suddenly go, these tools of distraction aren't great for the experience of going to school and having you concentrate on hopefully what the teacher is trying to impart through the act of teaching. So we can, it's not easy, but we can take control of this. Nothing is inevitable. So, you know, people always say, well, you can't put it back in the box. You know, AI will exist, but how do we behave towards it? What ethics and norms do we try to impart around it? These are all choices we get to make. I like the phrase, and I'm borrowing this from someone named Josh Break, who's a professor at Harvey Mudd. He has a wonderful Substack called I think It's Just the Absent Minded Professor. But he writes a lot about AI in education. And his phrase is just you have to engage with it, but that doesn't mean integrate. Right? So what I do think, you know, Diane, you kept saying schools. I just think it's teachers, educators need to engage with it. That can still mean that the answer after you engage with it is no, not for me, and also no, not for my students. I think that's a perfectly acceptable thing to say. And look, maybe the students won't follow it, but that, you know, you've done what you can, right? And, and that is all you can do. There's a teacher out there who I'm desperately trying to get in touch with, but she made waves. Her name is Chanea Bond. She teaches here in Texas. She made waves on Twitter a while back by saying, look, I've just banned it from my kids because it's not good for their thinking. People are like, what? And it was like, she was like, yeah, no, it's not good. Like it's interfering with their thinking. So I've banned it. So that's a perfectly reasonable answer. I also think that, you know, once you start to understand it at a basic level, I'm not talking about getting a PhD in back propagation and artificial neural networks, but just starting to understand it, you'll start to understand why it's actually quite untrustworthy and fallible and that you know, if you just think that everything it's telling you is going to be accurate, you have another think coming, you know, and one of the things in the workshops that I've led that I've been very satisfied by is when people come out on the other side of them, they're like, yeah, okay, so this thing isn't reasoning and it's not this all knowing oracle. And once you have that knowledge, once you've demystified it a bit, I think it gets a lot easier to sort of grapple with it and make your own choices and your own decisions about how you want to do it. I will say that right now, in the education discourse, it's like, you know, things are way out of balance between sort of the hype and enthusiasm versus the sort of, hey, pump the brakes, or at least have you thought about this, if you'll forgive me, but again, sort of, you know, it's a, it's a free resource. But if you go to cognitiveresidence.net we've put out a document called the Education Hazards of Generative AI, which literally just tries to, in very bite size and hopefully accessible form, sort of say, here are all the things you really need to think about and might be some cautionary notes across a number of dimensions, whether you're using it for tutoring or material creation, for feedback on student work. Like, there's a lot of things that you need to be thinking about and aware of. One of the things that frustrates me is that I see a lot of enthusiasts and this ranges from nonprofits to the companies that make these tools, sort of saying, well, teachers, fundamentally, it all falls to you. Like, if this thing is not factual or it hallucinates, like, it's your job to fact check it. And it's like, well, come on, like, A, that's never going to happen, and B, like, not fair, you know, like not fair to put that on educators and just kind of wipe your hands clean. So I do think that's something that, like, we're still going to have to sort of sort through society on a, you know, social level as well as within schools and well as like individual teacher and ultimately students are going to have to bear some agency themselves about what choices they make around whether and how to use it at all.What We’re Reading and WatchingDiane Tavenner:I'm so appreciative of this idea of agency here. And I do think that that's like, certainly a place that I've always been and is core to my values and beliefs as an educator is the importance of agency, not only for educators, but for young people themselves. And so, I love that this is such a rich conversation. We go on and on and on. But I feel like maybe leave it there. Like really real people, real teachers, real students, real agency. So grateful for everything that you brought up, so much to think about. And we're gonna pester you for one last thought, which is Michael and I have this ritual of, at the end of every episode, we share what we've been reading, watching, listening to. We try to push ourselves to do it outside of our day jobs. And sometimes we seep back into the work because it's so compelling. And so we want to invite you, if you have thoughts for us and to share them.Ben Riley:So I told you I had a weird one for you here. So I was just in New Orleans and when I was in high school, for reasons that I won't go in detail here, my family got really into the Kennedy assassination and the movie JFK by Oliver Stone came out. And I don't know whether either of you have watched that film in a long time. It's an incredible movie. It's also filled with lies and untruths, and it's much like in large language.Michael Horn:I think we watched it in high school, but keep talking.Ben Riley:Yeah. Yeah. Well, the thing that, the reason I bring it up is because Lee Harvey Oswald lived in New Orleans in the summer of 1963. And that movie is based on the case that was brought by the New Orleans District Attorney, a guy named Jim Garrison. But there's a bunch of real life people who are in that movie or portrayed in that movie. And I just started to think about accidents of history where all of a sudden you could be, you know, just a person of relative obscurity as far as, you know, anyone broadly paying attention to your life. And all of a sudden something happens and now you become sort of this focus of study. And trust me when I tell you that every single person who had any connection with Lee Harvey Oswald in his life has become this object of study to people and books have been written. And so I'm trying, this is very bizarre, I know, but what I'm trying to do is think about and understand what it is like for people in that situation. Like what it is like to suddenly have your story told that you don't have control of it anymore, you know, and if you know where, this isn't supposed to be work related but in a way I think it does connect backup because it goes back to the fact that these tools are taking a lot of human created knowledge and sort of reappropriating it for their own right. And we haven't got touched on that. I don't think we need to now. But it's sort of like it's, there are a lot of artists who feel a profound sense of loss because of what's happening in a our society today. That's another thing I think worth thinking about.Diane Tavenner:Wow, you're right. I didn't see that one coming. But it's fascinating. Thank you for sharing it. I am unfortunately not going to stray from work today. I can't help myself. Three of my very good friends have recently released a book called Extraordinary Learning for All. And that's Aylon, Jeff Wetzler, Janee Henry Wood. And it's really about the story of how they work closely with communities on the design of their schools and in a really profound and inclusive way. And so I'm deep in that, been involved in that work for a long time and think it's just a really powerful kind of inspiration slash how to guide of how communities can really take agency over their schools and own them and figure out what they want and what matters and what they need and how they design accordingly.Michael Horn:So I was gonna say now, Jeff has appeared twice in a row in our book recs, I think, on episodes or something like that. So love that. Diane, I'll wrap up with saying I'm gonna go completely outside of, I think, the conversation today. But, Ben, you may say it actually relates as well, because I've been binging on season two of Shrinking. I loved season one and season two, with the exception of a couple episodes in the middle has been no exception, I think. So I'm. I'm really, really enjoying that so far. And I suppose you could connect that back to.Ben Riley:What is Shrinking? I don't know. I have to. I don't know what it is.Michael Horn:Okay, it's.Michael Horn:It's basically about three therapists in a practice and one who's grappling with the deep personal tragedy. And Harrison Ford is outrageously hilarious. Yeah.Diane Tavenner:So good. It's so good. Okay, well, I'm gonna tag on to your, you know, out of work one and say yes, we love Shrinking as well.Michael Horn:Perfect. Perfect. All right, well, we'll leave it there. Ben, huge thanks for joining us. For all of you tuning in, huge thanks for listening. We look forward to your thoughts and comments off this conversation and continuing to learn together. Thank you so much as always, for joining us on Class Disrupted. Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.

We wouldn’t ask a piano student to attempt an advanced concerto before they had Mary Had a Little Lamb down pat.So why do we do the equivalent in schools?In this video I use a comparison to music instruction to illustrate why tying school curriculum to students’ ages rather than their skill level doesn’t work for anyone.(music playing)Oh, hey there. I was just brushing up on a piece that I have not played in a long while. It's Schubert's Fourth Impromptu, and it's a piece that I'd actually mastered a long time ago on the piano.But now I'm trying to get it up to speed on a keyboard—and it's a very different experience. But you can imagine that if I was just starting piano—I'd never played before or maybe just a couple lessons and my piano teacher said—well, Michael, you're 44 years old and it's August. So that means our lesson plan says it's time for you to be learning Schubert's Fourth Impromptu. So let's get started.That would be insane. Why?Because I wouldn't have mastered any of the foundational building blocks to be able to play such a piece. More appropriate for me would be trying to learn something like this. Right?So it would be literally crazy for someone to say, sorry, it's time to skip on to what the pacing guide or the lesson plan says you should be doing based on your age.Now, to be fair, that maybe wouldn't be a classical piece of music.Maybe they've taken some of my level into account.But still, maybe it'd be something like this. (music playing) Or maybe even this. (music playing)But the point is that it's pretty obvious that I should be moving on to something more advanced only once I've really shown that I've actually mastered or at least become proficient in the current piece and the set of skills that I'm working on.No piano teacher worth their salt would do otherwise.Thanks for reading The Future of Education! This post is public so feel free to share it.Yet here's the rub.Our traditional schools, they do this all the time and every single day. And we—the public, parents, even educators—most of us don't even bat an eye. We accept that that's just how school works.Even though we know that's not how learning works.Even though, of course a kid who has not mastered double-digit addition is going to struggle if they move on to double-digit multiplication before they're ready. It's crazy.And it's time that we had people—students, kids, all of us—learning at the right level for them, just above where they've achieved mastery, so they aren't bored and there's some struggle and effort required to really engage them, but also so that they aren't discouraged, as there's too much struggle and too much effort required.So let's wake up and move to mastery based learning and embed success for each and every child—not what we currently have, which is failure for most.The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.

On this episode, John Bailey, who advises on AI and innovation at a number of organizations, including the American Enterprise Institute, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and more, joins me and Diane Tavenner. We discuss AI’s potential to democratize access to expertise, weigh the costs and benefits of its efficiency-boosting applications, and consider how it will change skills required for the workforce of the future.Michael Horn: Hi, everyone. Michael Horn here. What you’re about to hear is a conversation that Diane and I recorded with John Bailey as part of our series exploring the impact of AI on education, from the good to the bad. Here are two things that grabbed me about this episode that you’re about to hear. First, John made the point that this technology is really different from anything we’ve seen before. Specifically, how these large language models could, from the get-go, produce artifacts of work that would rival what an entry-level person in a variety of professions would create. And how we’re just scratching the surface of their capabilities. And most people don’t even realize that yet. So what could this mean for education? Second was John’s observation that just because we can do something faster doesn’t mean it’s being done better. Said differently, making the wrong work more efficient isn’t necessarily the right solution. Now, when we finished up the interview, I had several reflections. But one I wanted to share with you now is this. John’s big framing is that through AI, everyone now has access to an expert in virtually every field. So if the internet democratized access to information, the analogy essentially is AI is democratizing access to expertise. But I’m curious if someone isn’t as skilled or knowledgeable or experienced as John, would they know what to do with or how to use such an expert at their fingertips? I’m excited to be in conversation with Diane for more sensemaking after we’ve talked with a number of people. And we’d love to hear your thoughts and reflections. So please, please share, whether over social media or by dropping us an email through my website at michaelbhorn.com. But for now, I hope you enjoy this conversation on Class Disrupted.Diane Tavenner: This is Class Disrupted, season six, and the first. I know. Can you believe it? The first of our AI interviews. And we, in this case, we have the first best person, John Bailey, as our guest. Hey, Michael.Michael Horn: Hey, Diane. Good to see you.Diane Tavenner: It is always great to see you. There’s so many things we could talk about. But I’m really eager to jump in today to our topics. We’re going to go there right away. When we kicked off last season of this podcast, Class Disrupted, we said that one of the things that we really wanted to delve deeper into was our curiosity around AI. And it’s hard not to be curious about AI right now. In our most recent episode, we were pretty straightforward about kind of where each of us are at this point in time and our understanding and our perspectives. And we overviewed some of the kind of current debates that are taking place specifically around education and AI. And today we get to go deeper with someone who, I think you’ll agree with me, frankly, knows a lot more about AI than both of us.Michael Horn: So I agree with that. I think it’s very fair. It’s one of the many reasons I’m excited for this conversation, because, as you said, it’s going to be the first of many where we bring folks on who, frankly, have very different views from each other around the impact of AI, sometimes from ourselves as well. And so to start this, we’re welcoming back someone to the show who’s been with us, I think, twice before. So this is like a three peat, if you will. So he’s clearly one of our favorites. None other than John Bailey.John Bailey: It’s so, so good to be on. Congrats. Six seasons. That’s huge.Michael Horn: Yeah, we’re still kicking, right?Diane Tavenner: Thank you. And just in case anyone has missed John previously, quick, quick background here. John’s served in many, many posts in the state and federal government around education and domestic policy more generally. He’s a fellow at AEI. He holds numerous posts supporting different foundations. I could go on and on and on, but what some people might not know, John, is that you originally entered education as an expert on technology and ed. And, you know, we’ll hear that expertise coming through because you have gone deep in the world of AI and how it’s going to impact education, and so, welcome. We are so excited to have you back.John Bailey: Oh, my gosh, I’m so excited to be here, and I just admire both of you and I’ve learned so much from you. So it’s so good to be on the show today.John’s Journey to Education AI WorkDiane Tavenner: Well, before we get into a series of questions we have for you, we’d love to just start with how, I guess how. And maybe it’s a how/why did you go so deep into AI specifically? We know you have a lot of experience with sort of frontier models, and maybe you can describe that term for us as well as we sort of begin this conversation. But tell us how you jumped into the deep end and come to this conversation.John Bailey: It’s such a good question. And it’s also like, my point of entry into this was interesting because, as you mentioned, I’ve been involved in a lot of technology and policy intersections for a number of years, including in education. And if I have to admit, like, I’ve been part of a lot of the hype of, like, we really think technology can personalize learning. And often that promise was just unmet. And I think there was, like, potential there, but it was really hard to actualize that potential. And so I just want to admit up front, like, I was part of that cycle for a number of years. And. And then what happened was when ChatGPT came out in December of 2022, everyone had sort of like a moment of ChatGPT, and for me, it wasn’t getting it to write a song or, you know, a rap song or. Or a press release. It was. I was sitting next to someone with a venture team and I said, what is, like, what is an email you would ask an associate to do to write a draft term sheet? And she gave me three sentences. I put it in ChatGPT and it spit back something that she said was a good first draft, good enough for her that she would actually run with it and edit it. And I was like, oh, this is very different. And then it just sort of started this process of seeing, like, what else could it do? And it just became insanely fun to kind of play with it. And then I was posting a lot of this on Twitter, and that caught the attention of some of the AI companies. And then they gave me early access. So I got to play with something called Code Interpreter for OpenAI, which was the ability of analyzing spreadsheets and data files, and then did some work with Google beta testing, Bard, and a handful of other things as well. And so I get to work with some of the companies now on safety and alignment testing, but also seeing kind of a little bit what’s over the horizon, Google Notebook LM I’ve been playing with for the better part of Over a year and giving them some feedback on it. So I think what’s happened though is that for me this feels very, very different from all the other technologies I’ve been exposed to at least over the last 20 years. And that has caught my excitement. I’ve rearranged my entire work portfolio to spend more time on this, just because it’s rare to see something that I think is going to be so transformative. I don’t think that’s going to be immediate. I think that’s going to play out over years and over decades. But also just the pace at which this technology is improving and new capabilities are being introduced is something like I’ve never experienced. In just the last two weeks of December, you saw so many announcements from OpenAI and Google that you can’t even wrap your heads around it. So better models that do deeper reasoning did not get a lot of attention. But OpenAI released Vision Understanding so now you can use your camera. And so I walked around a farmer’s market and it analyzed all the produce and the meats and it was giving me recipes on the fly.Thanks for reading The Future of Education! This post is public so feel free to share it.Diane Tavenner: Yeah, we were playing with it at the holiday dinner table. Yeah. And just like what, what’s on the table and what are ,you know, and, and I think the amazing thing was with my 82 year old mother in law who was like into it and so, and wanted us to get it on her phone so she could go show her friends.John Bailey: Oh yeah, it’s. Yeah. I mean it just feels different. It feels like something I want to just dedicate a lot more time and attention to understanding it. Both the benefits, lots of risks, lots of challenges on it. But it just like I’ve seen, you know, my mom’s using it to your point, like it’s just an advanced voice and the style of. Is just great entertainment for kids too with telling stories and whatnot. So anyway, so that’s my journey into this space.The Best Case Scenario for AIMichael Horn: My kids have started to leapfrog me by just taking their search inquiries right to ChatGPT themselves and then get frustrated with some of the answers. Let’s dive in then John, because you’re getting to see a lot of these large language models clearly up close. You’re getting to experiment and help advise these companies that are at the leading edge in many cases. And I think what we want to do in these conversations, frankly is have both the advocates for and skeptics of AI and you clearly have a little bit of both from what you just said, make the case for both sides. You know, how’s it going to impact positively, how’s it going to impact negatively? So we can start to unpack the contours and figure out where the puck’s really going in classrooms and schools. And so I’d love you to start with this, which is to make the argument for how AI is going to positively impact education first. So leave aside your concerns and skepticisms for a moment and in your mind, like what’s the bull case, if you will, for AI?John Bailey: One is, I think you have to do a lot, I’ve been wrestling with this a little bit. I think most of the other technologies up until this point have been about democratizing access to information. So that’s everything from the printing press to the computer, like CDs and with disks to then the Internet, the Internet democratized access to Wikipedia and you could get any information you want within your fingertips for almost no cost whatsoever. What I think is different about this technology is that it’s access to expertise and it’s driving the cost of accessing expertise almost to zero. And the way to think about that is that these general purpose technologies, you can give them sort of a role, a Persona to adopt. So they could be a curriculum expert, they could be a lesson planning expert, they could be a tutoring, and that’s all done using natural language, English language. And that unlocks this expertise that can take this vast amounts of information that’s in its training set or whatever specific types of information you give it, and it can apply that expertise towards different, you know, Michael, in your case, jobs to be done. And so for the first time, teachers have experts available at their fingertips, just typing to them the way they would type to a consultant. So give me a lesson plan. Here’s an IEP of a student, help me develop three lessons that I can use for that student that’s based on their learning challenges and the interests that they care about. So I think that’s going to unlock both, it’s going to be an enormous productivity tool for teachers potentially. I think it’s also going to be an amazing tutoring mechanism for a lot of students as well. Not just because they’ll be able to type to the student, but as we were just talking about, this advanced voice is very amazing in terms of the way it can be very empathetic and encouraging and sort of prompting and pushing students, it can analyze their voice. And then this vision understanding which was just sort of introduced. Google’s had this in a studio kind of lab format for a couple months now, but I think that’s going to just unlock, imagine a student to be able to do a project and presentation and having an AI system give them feedback and encouragement. That is like science fiction two years ago. And it feels like it’s very much within the realm of possibility. Maybe not right now, but you see the building blocks for where that could actually be assembled into a pretty powerful set of tools for both teachers as well as students.Diane Tavenner: So John, when you, when you step back from everything you sort of just described of what’s possible in schools, teachers. Well you didn’t say schools. So among teachers and students, I sort of mental mapped a school on top of that concept. What part of that do you actually believe is going to be real, you know, for students and teachers and why. And maybe I think you’re probably going to put a timeline on it too is my guess based on what you’re saying.John Bailey: Yeah, I think, I mean if other industries are a bit of a roadmap here, what you’re seeing in almost all the other sectors is that where AI is getting deployed first is a lot of back office functions. It’s in their IT shops. With coding, we don’t have that in education. But there are other, a lot of back office things where again the benefits can be pretty high and the risks of it being wrong are a little bit less than if like it’s engaging in a tutoring lesson with a student and hallucinating. That’s like high risk. Right. And so, you know, I suspect we’ll see a lot more sort of back office improving parent communications. I think we could see this, you know, beginning. There’s already been, you know, decades of legacy of trying to use AI or technology computer based scoring for assessments. I could imagine that. And then I think you’re going to see it roll out with a handful of tools for teachers. You’re seeing companies like that already with like brisk teaching. But also, I mean all these capabilities we were just talking about with Google, I mean they, if the moment they flick a switch and roll that out over Google classroom, that’s bringing AI into 60, 65% of classrooms and teachers around the country. And, so I think what you’re going to see is a lot of teacher productivity tools and then over the next, let me call it two to five years, a lot more sort of student facing things. As those technologies mature and as we build more robust products around it that have some of the safeguards that you want and need that ensure accuracy and quality as well as safety, I think for students as well. So I think there’ll be a lot of potential, but I think we’ll roll it out to students over a longer period of time. Meanwhile, like the teacher productivity, you know, enhancements for this could be pretty huge immediately.The RisksMichael Horn: It’s interesting to think about building off that Google classroom platform and just the access. Right. That solves in terms of distribution that perhaps historical products have struggled with in schools and gaining access to teachers and students. Let’s turn to the other side for a moment, John, and just like, where is AI not going to help things with teachers, students, schools, learning, you know, what’s sort of the, the place that people are dreaming up right now that AI is going to do something and you’re like, I just don’t buy it.John Bailey: Oh, it’s interesting. Don’t buy that’s a different I, where I was going to go. I worry a little bit of, just because something done faster doesn’t mean it’s done better. And I know like, if any of the white papers are like, teachers should always be in the loop and teachers should always use their judgment, but teachers are also human. And I think one of the aspects of human is that if you’re overworked and you’re tired, sometimes the fastest response is the one you go with just because you’re just, you’re trying to maximize your time. And that’s one of the reasons we see teachers using like not great instructional quality resources from Pinterest, you know, and from Teacher Pay Teachers and from some of these other websites. That is a problem that exists now that I worry AI will exasperate. You know, if you’re a teacher and say, give me a lesson plan on literacy or reading something of reading in the third grade, you have no idea if that’s based on the science of reading, if it’s based on, if it’s aligned to your curriculum, if it’s adding coherence. And so there, there could be a sense of this instead of really augmenting a teacher’s judgment it could lessen it. In the same way that I think we worry about this with students, that part of the way you learn is through struggle, and struggle comes with not writing a perfect first draft. It comes from the first draft, the second draft, and the iterations and revisions on top of it. And I worry that the moment like students have just have a button that can automatically improve a paper, a paragraph or a sentence, they’re atrophying a muscle that is really critically important for this going forward. And then lastly, you know, we’re in the midst of this national discourse and debate right now about social media and phones and is that leading to more social isolation, loneliness and mental health issues with young people and inject into this these AI tools that I think as much as people say this will never happen, the risk of an AI companion where you’re talking, literally talking to an AI that’s empathetic and warm and adopting Personas and that’s going to be easier than the friction of talking to real life people. And so I worry that there’s a scenario where this AI companions will start leading to exacerbating the social disconnectedness and divide. And that is something that if you look at kind of the headlines that we’ve already had a couple cases with some tragic situations with kids who have committed suicide, I don’t think it was because entirely of the AI, but the AI was a contributing factor in that. And that’s something I think if we want to get ahead of where we are in the social media debate now, that’s something we should be thinking about researching and adding some guardrails to as well.Diane Tavenner: John, I’m wondering, as you’re sharing these perspectives, how you think about. I guess what’s coming up for me is I feel like the main structures of school and education are still in place. And I agree with you, like the efficiency plays are the first places people go and does AI sort of risk reinforcing the existing model of school and education because it will make it more efficient? So like if teachers were just like barely, barely holding on and now we can keep everything sort of the same but just give them this like boost of efficiency we can keep things the way that they were. And obviously I’m biased because, you know, I want to, yeah, change up the way, pull apart everything but I’m curious just how you think about that, especially as things will unfold over time and like the easy places to start and the asymmetry of adoption too, you know, I mean, not every teacher in America has even ever logged into ChatGPT before. And then there’s some that are like power users at this point.John Bailey: Yeah, I mean a common theme for both of your works and including over the six years you’ve done the series too, has been, you know, we have this system and institutions within the system that are remarkably resistant to change. And I think what we’ve seen is like technology doesn’t change a system. The systems have to change to accommodate and harness and leverage the benefits of whatever technology or sort of new innovation has been introduced to it. So I’m a little skeptical there. I think you’re going to have capabilities of AI outpacing the institution’s ability to harness that. It’s going to take time to figure out what that looks like and what that means going forward. I do, I come back though to this idea of like it’s access to expertise and I wonder if that mental model starts unlocking things as well, that if you’re a school principal, all of a sudden you have a parent communication marketing expert just by asking it to be that Persona and then giving it some tasks to do. And if you’re a teacher, it means all of a sudden every teacher in America can have a teaching assistant like a TA that is available to help on a variety of different tasks. And going back to what Michael’s point was saying with like Google Classroom, imagine if you’re a teacher, you’re in Google Classroom and you have your TA that’s able to look at student folders and just answer questions. You have. Like, I see like John and Michael really struggling in algebra what are some ways I could put them in a small group and give them an assignment that would resonate with both of their interests and help them scaffold into the next lesson? That was impossible to do before. Like that those three sentences could easily do that. And, and that’s why I think you’re going to see this idea of assistance very much kind of entering not just the education narrative but also the, the more sort of broader corporate landscape as well. Where you see that also by the way, is, is a little bit in how OpenAI is thinking about the pricing for this. There is an OpenAI model. Most people probably didn’t see it. The most robust, smartest and the one that has the most reasoning and they’re charging $200 a month for that. And most people are like oh my gosh, like I would never pay $200 a month for software. And that’s because it’s the wrong way to think about this as a software. The way to think about it is will you easily spend that much on a consultant or in a part time staff person. So OpenAI is even adopting almost like a labor market pricing strategy or the expertise that they’re giving you. And so I think this is an amazing thing for schools to think about at time of tight budgets is, you know, again, if you want to maximize your teachers, how can this fill different types of labor market roles in the education system to enhance and support teachers in the limited staff, given budget tensions that are going to be coming out in the next couple of years here.How AI Is Changing the Skills LandscapeMichael Horn: It’s interesting hearing you say that and draw that analogy, John, because actually Clay Christensen, before he passed away, one of the big interests he had was how do you scale coaching models in education, in health care, in lots of these sort of very social realms as the recipe, if you will, for sustained behavior change and success and things of that nature. Never got to really dig into it and write about it. But as I’m hearing you talk about this, it suggests that maybe a disruption of that might be afoot. I guess that’s the question I want to lean into though, as well, which is you named a few things that this could hurt. And so the flip side of it being a great coach is that it might take away social interaction. Or you talked about essay writing and that, you know, actually the learning is in the process of doing it in revision and sort of pushing the easy button, if you will. Right. Jumps you ahead to the product, but not necessarily the learning and the struggle from it. I guess what I’m curious about, and I’m going to borrow an analogy that Brewer Saxberg, former chief learning scientist, I think was his title at CZI Chan, Zuckerberg Initiative and you know, Kaplan and K12 and a variety of places. He talked a lot about how Aristotle back in the day worried a lot about as the written word became a thing, that people weren’t going to be able to memorize Homeric length epic poems anymore. Aristotle was absolutely right. And I don’t know that we regret the fact that most of us.John Bailey: Speak for yourself, Michael.Michael Horn: Two of the three here could do it, but I, so but the question I guess would be, you know, of these things that might hurt, which are really going to, are they still going to matter in the future or are there going to be other things that we, you know, other behaviors or things that are more relevant in the future? And how do you think about sort of that substitution versus ease versus actually like really, you know, frankly, I think when you talk about social interaction that could be, forget about disruptive, that could be quite destructive.John Bailey: Yeah, no, it’s, it’s a great question. It’s a good point. It’s also this is an area where some of the best studies of this are happening in the labor market and looking at like, how is AI changing? There was just one study I was just reading today with Larry Summers and Deming from Harvard that are looking at, you know, AI, one of the things that they’re finding is AI is chipping away at some of the entry level jobs. It is for the same reason that, you know, you don’t like, if I’m in Congress, now all of a sudden, I don’t need an intern to just summarize legislation. I have something could summarize it for me better in five seconds. And that actually hurts that intern because they’re not developing the skills of reading legislation and analyzing and summarizing it. But it also means the other thing that they’re talking about in labor market sort of terminology is that it’s really raising the skills for those entry level jobs. Now you’re not expected to summarize, now you’re expected to do more and a higher level cognitive functions with it. That, that’s interesting. But I also mean that’s going to place a huge strain on our education system. Like if you’re looking at just the results of TIMSS and NAEP and where kids are, they’re not in that higher cognitive function in terms of being able to ask those questions or do those capabilities. And so in many ways I think if this is going to change the future of work and going to raise the level of what’s expected, that’s going to put more strain on our education system to make sure that we get kids that are capable of doing all those different things. I think about that with myself. Like I’m not like, there are many people who are Excel gurus, very good at analyzing data and they do P tests and other things that statistical things that are very important and I would not be able to do. And this was one of the first experiences with code interpreter, with OpenAI is that all of a sudden I had again an expert, a data analyst who could do that for me. But what that meant is that for work I can no longer say, well that’s not something I can do. Now I could do it because I had an analyst that could help me with it and that in some ways don’t tell my employers this, but like now that could like raise their expectations for me as well. But I have to get smart on the type of questions and the type of direction to give it in order to get the answers that I can use to synthesize into some sort of response. So anyway, I think this is going to be a very messy way. It’s going to change the labor markets, but it feels like it’s lowering the floor in many respects and access to these higher cognitive tasks, which in turn then raises expectations in a lot of different ways. And that’s very powerful. But it’s also, I think it probably a huge strain on our human capital systems. Did I answer your question?Michael Horn: Yeah, I think it does. Before I think Diane has another set of questions. But before we go there, just one quick follow up, which is it strikes me that then you knowing that you can ask those sorts of questions and sort of having a sense of the contours, right of like what are relevant questions, what are. What is knowledge base that is out there, that I could ask this in meaningful ways and how to structure it. Like those are topics that I might not need to know all the mechanics of how to do it, but I need to know that they are questions that can be asked and, and the relevant place to ask them is that a…Where am I on or off on that?John Bailey: Yeah, I think that’s right and also again, this is where AI is amazing. Like you could give it a spreadsheet and say what are 20 questions you can ask with this? Or give me 20 insights that you glean from it if you don’t know where to. Like I’ve started again, treating a lot of AI people will tell you not to do this, but if you treat it, if you treat it a little bit, almost as if you’re talking to a person, it does unlock a lot of capabilities. There’s risks of doing that. But also I just find sometimes like I want to do X, like give me the prompt in which to do that or I want to do Y. Like what are. Ask me all the questions you need to be able to answer that. And then it asks me 10 questions and then spits back an answer. I just helped someone with, she’s coming up with a name for her social impact advisory firm and so we created a little GPT and AI assistant that was a brand advisor and it asked her questions the way a brand advisor would and then it spit back 20 names and one of them she’s going with. And so that’s like incredible. But again, she had expertise that could ask questions and facilitate a conversation to unlock some of her thoughts and preferences and then spit back an answer from it.The Interplay Between AI and PolicyDiane Tavenner: So much there especially given my current focus of sort of 15 to 25 year olds and who are going to be intensely impacted by, I think every, are already intensely, I think impacted by everything you’re talking about. I want to flip over to policy and I want to come at it from the angle of, you know, most people think about AI policy around safety and you know, what are we controlling and what are we, you know, protecting people from, et cetera. But let’s come from the other direction that you sort of introduced a little bit ago about the structure of education in schools. We’ve got some pretty interesting policy movement happening in education right now. We are seeing the rise of ESAs or educational savings accounts, which, you know, puts money in the hands of families to spend it where they want to spend it. We’re seeing a lot of states adopt sort of portraits of a graduate or graduate profile that are these more inclusive, holistic views of like what someone should be able to graduate knowing, doing, being able to do and an openness to how they actually get to that place and the different pathways. Talk to me about like those things going on sort of in the policy world and AI happening over here is that kind of the intersection where we could sort of start seeing some structural differences. And again like a more user centered approach to educate, you know, a student centered approach potentially. So I’m curious your thoughts there.John Bailey: No, I think it could, I think it’s a yes. It’s a yes, but in some ways the yes is, you know, I think there’s a whole class of ways of using AI that is about navigating and navigating really complex systems. And ESAs are one of those. And I think, you know, I. One of the first GPTS I built on OpenAI to demo this was, like if you go to Arizona’s ESA, it’s like two websites, there’s a weird random Excel file of expenses and then PDFs that like a 78 page PDF. And again that was the best that team could do with limited resources and also with the limited technologies. And I just put that into a GPT and all of a sudden it was a bilingual parent friendly navigator. And if you said can I use funds for Sony PlayStation? It didn’t say no, you’re a terrible parent. It used warm empathetic letter answers to say like no, you can’t and here’s the reasons why, but here’s what you can do. And it was all conversational. And I think this friction of dealing with education systems and education policy could be immensely improved by using AI. Another example, I have a friend, she has kids in a school district and they send these terrible absentee reports and I say terrible. It’s like her daughter’s name is capitalized. So it’s like shouting. And then it’s like has missed six days of school. It’s very, it is reading, reading like a hostage like script. It’s like your daughter’s missed six days of school. It’s very important for her to go to school. We are here to help you. And then it does this weird bar chart at the bottom that’s like meaningless and like I just gave it to ChatGPT as an image and say make this better and give three questions a parent could ask their kid for why they might be absent. Amazing. It was like. And that I did in an Uber ride crossing the Key bridge in Washington D.C. like, you know, that’s an amazing set of powerful tools that can remove friction and help improve the system to make it work better for parents and for kids and also teachers and administrators too. So the but on all this is like, I think that’s going to be powerful and it’s going to make policy easier. I’m still, until we create more flexible ways for teachers to teach, for students to learn and students to engage in different types of learning experiences, I just think we’re going to end up boxing and limiting a lot of this technology capabilities. On the portraits of a graduate. I do think like again, an easy navigator on this is to take student work and student interests and student grades and say I’m not really sure where to go, like help me, Ask me the 10 questions I need to figure out. Should I pursue an apprenticeship program, a two year degree or a four year degree. It feels like again, we’re very close to being able to do something that, you know, it may not be perfect, but it’s much better than what the vast majority of students have access to right now. And if it helps them make a better decision in this process and pick a better path that’s based on their interests and their passions and their skills and their abilities. That’s great. Like we should do everything we can to help maximize that.Diane Tavenner: Awesome. Maybe just to round out anything. What policy do you think we should be keeping our eyes on as we focus on education in relation to AI? What should we be worried about? What should we be thinking about? What should we be paying attention to? I know you spend a lot of time thinking about policy.John Bailey: I do, yeah. A little bit. A little bit of policy. So one is that Congress is going to move very slow. We thankfully though, in this day and age of such polarization in so many of our politics, there are two remarkable bipartisan roadmaps. One from the Senate, Senator Young and Senator Schumer introduced. And then there was a House report that got reintroduced right before break that is also bipartisan, remarkably good. It’s 218 pages and they have a lot, I take great comfort in the fact that there’s a bipartisan, durable consensus. It’ll take time to enact that. That’s okay. It’ll take time. At least we have a little bit of a pathway on that. The thing I think for most of your listeners to really pay attention to is what’s happening at the state level. And there, I mean, just last year we saw close to 400 something bills that were introduced at the state level. Everything from dealing with deep fakes to copyright issues to regulating the models themselves. The most famous one was in California. And those don’t on the surface look like they have anything to do with education, but they do. If that California bill had passed, that limits in many respects the types of models that would be available for teachers and for students. There’s another bill, similarly in Texas right now that’s being debated. And so I think we need to pay more attention to what’s going on at the state level because that is going to either restrict or enable access to a bunch of these different types of tools in the models. I think, Diane, you had mentioned too in one of the previous questions, like most people haven’t used ChatGPT, and I think that’s exactly right. But I think what’s going to start happening is ChatGPT and Google Gemini are going to come to where people live already. And you’re seeing that with ChatGPT being integrated into Apple’s iPhone, that, you know, I think for the vast majority of people in the country, their first experience of ChatGPT is going to be through their iPhone. And I think for a whole other set, especially teachers, their first experience is going to be using one of the AI tools on Google. And that’s okay. But again, what’s going to either restrict or expand access to those different types of tools are going to be these laws that are either restricting or adding more scrutiny to the models themselves. And what I will say there is, I don’t think anyone’s cracked the code on how to best regulate this. Whatever policymakers think they have the models improve or they’ve done something that they didn’t think was possible. And for the longest time, policymakers are like, we have to restrict these powerful models and it’s based on computing with some astronomical number. And then on December 24, China announces something called Deep Seek that is pretty much as good as ChatGPT4 and Llama3. And they did it with far less computing power. And so that would slip in underneath as like an exception. And I think policymakers are really wrestling with the best way of thinking about this and restricting it. So anyway, I would do more of that. You’re going to see a lot of other attention to AI literacy. I tend to be. I think these literacy efforts are great, but I have lived through, we need tech literacy, we need media literacy for everyone. It has felt like it. This is by no means to disrespect folks that are approaching this that like every new technology gets attached to literacy component to it. It is not really clear we got much from tech literacy back in the 2000s or some of the other things. And so maybe there’s a way to make sure that we get right what we got wrong before. But I don’t think that’s going to be the quite the silver bullet that we need it to be.Diane Tavenner: I think that’s right. This has been really such a good way to start. Michael, do you have anything else you want to.Reading, Listening, or WatchingMichael Horn: No, let’s. Thanks, John. This has been a really tremendous overview of a number of currents that I know both of us have been making notes on the side as you’ve been talking and we’re going to want to dig in more. Maybe let’s pivot away from the topic that we’ve been delving in as we wrap up here and just, John, what have you been reading, listening to, watching outside of the AI education conversation? Hopefully AI is not dominating every single thing. Although I won’t be surprised if you give us some movie or fiction or something like that with AI coursed in its veins. So what’s on your list?John Bailey: Oh my gosh, what is? Unfortunately, it is like, it’s not unfortunate. It’s just I have. I found myself waking up at like 5am like 2 years ago just thinking about this. So like all of a sudden you’re reading books on, you know, intelligence and human expertise and human psychology because you’re trying to understand like intelligence and what is, what makes something intelligent and that. So anyway, that’s nerdy stuff. The new Henry Kissinger book with Craig Mundy, the Genesis book has also been good. I’ve been reading David Brooks’s book How to Get to Know Someone, which I sort of have missed the first time it had come out. But I think also it has an AI play too because that’s trying to get to know the essence of someone and the humanity of someone. And so it’s been great kind of reading through that in light of kind of everything that’s happening kind of around then what am I watching? I don’t know. Some great series on Netflix, the Lioness. Yeah, it’s good. Oh, and all the Landman too which has also been quite good. Coming out of Yellowstone.Diane Tavenner: Cool.John Bailey: I don’t know.Michael Horn: That’s good. I’m impressed with your range. Diane. What’s on your list?Diane Tavenner: Well, my new exciting project for 2025 is we are planning a trip to Greece. And as Michael knows, when we sort of plan these trips, one of the big parts of it is spending like six months reading and learning and exploring before we go. And so I actually had a conversation with ChatGPT like you have advised John. When I flipped to just talking to it like a person changed everything to structure a reading and listening list and like all the things I’m going to do. So I have started in on that list that we co constructed and built together, which is pretty awesome. With the Greeks by Roderick Beaton. And this is on the nonfiction side. I have fiction too, but this one rose to the top because I really asked Chat to say I, I need you to find history that’s like engaging and that’s going to keep my attention and you know, give me all the, the way that I want history, the sort of the big swaths and so, so far so good.Michael Horn: Very cool. Very cool.John Bailey: One other thing, this summer when I did a vacation, I actually created a GPT with all, the travel itinerary, the PDF and everything else into it. And then it was awesome because I could just ask it questions, but it would give me, it would also speak phrases if I needed it to.Michael Horn: Oh that’s next level, that’s very cool.John Bailey: It was kind of, it was just kind of a fun little, little thing. But I’ll share the prompt with you later. Yeah, yeah.Michael Horn: Because we used it for itinerary planning for, for all the different interests in our group, but did not jump to that level. John, that’s, that’s a good one. Mine has just been a book, so I feel boring compared to you both. I polished off Israel: A Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth by Noa Tishby, which has remained in my mind quite heavily. And so I highly recommend it. I thought it was quite good and quite humorous and quite engaging the way she wrote about it. So I enjoyed it. And that’s what I’ll, I’ll recommend for folks, and I think we’ll wrap there. But John, huge thanks for joining us again, kicking this off with a lot to chew on for all you listening right in with your questions, thoughts, things that are on your mind coming out of this conversation. We’ll look forward to the next one on Class Disrupted.The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.

There has been a national discourse around the wave of anti-semitism that has swept across higher education since the start of the Hamas-Israel war in 2023. But what has it looked like at the K–12 level—and what can that teach us about combating hate more generally? To tackle those questions, I sat down with Tyler Gregory, CEO of the Jewish Community Relations Council, the largest collective voice of Jews in the Bay Area of California. We discussed how anti-semitism has manifested in schools over the last two academic years, the challenge of balancing free speech with protection from discrimination, and how to better equip students and educators to combat hate.Michael HornWelcome to the Future of Education, where we are dedicated to building a world in which all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their potential, and live a life of purpose. Since October 7th, 2023, in this country, we've seen an outpouring of hate and specifically anti-Semitism across schools. The story has been well-known and well-told in higher education and our colleges and universities. It's also occurred in our K-12 schools and districts, and we haven't covered that nearly as much on this particular podcast, and so I'm glad we’ll get to delve into that today.But before we do so, I just want to address what some folks have asked: why are we covering this as a topic for the Future of Education? And I think the reason fundamentally is that hate, anti-Semitism, so forth, raises big questions about the discourse and behaviors in our schools in the future. It raises big questions around free speech in our schools. And to the point of the work here, it raises big questions around how we support each and every single individual in realizing their full human potential, regardless of their race, creed, beliefs, on and on. And so I'll also admit, as this has begun over the past, now, year and a half, this is personal as well for me as a Jew, but I think it raises larger questions.And to help us think through them, I'm delighted that Tyler Gregory is joining us because Tyler, you actually know something about this much deeper than i do. You've been on the front lines of this as the CEO of the Jewish Community Relations Council, the largest collective voice of Bay Area Jews in California. Under your leadership, JCRC pushes for a just world where Jewish identity is embraced and all people can thrive. And I think it's important to note before you jump in, you all have mobilized multi-ethnic, multi-faith coalitions to fight back, not just against anti-semitism, but to show up for lots of groups who have felt marginalized or experienced discrimination—from Black communities, the Asian Pacific, Asian-American Pacific groups, obviously, anti-LGBTQ, sorry, I cannot talk today, anti-LGBTQ+ groups, and so on and on. And so this is an incredibly important set of topics, not just in the narrow prism of anti-semitism, but much more broadly, of course. So Tyler, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for being here.Tyler GregoryIt's my pleasure. Thanks so much for having me, Michael.Anti-Semitism Prior to October 7thMichael HornYeah, you bet. And I'll do my best to talk a little bit better as we get going on, but you get to do most of the talking, fortunately. So I just want to have you give us the ground state of things. If we go back to October 6th, 2023, what was the state of anti-Semitism in California K through 12 schools specifically? There was a lot of conversation, I will say, around a proposed ethnic studies piece of the curriculum that some people felt had anti-Semitic efforts. So I'd love you to sort of give us what was the state of play prior to Hamas's attacks, and maybe how that's been similar or different from other states in the US that you've observed.Tyler GregorySo thanks so much, Michael. I would say that the October 7th attacks accelerated a trend that we had previously been seeing, which is an increasing amount of anti-semitism in K–12 schools, both environmental as well as in curriculum. You mentioned the ethnic studies course that is now going to be mandated in California schools and other states are following suit. We had a wake-up call almost five years ago when the proposed state model curriculum included anti-semitic rap lyrics that were references to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It was our community's wake-up call. And this discipline historically has not included Jewish Americans, Jewish studies departments and higher ed have been separate from ethnic studies departments, Asian Pacific Islander, Latino, African-American, indigenous communities in ethnic studies. But they started writing about us in derogatory ways, and they decided that the Middle East would be a disciplinary area that should be included in ethnic studies. And so that experience was a wake-up call for us that we needed to play catch up and also figure out how we wanted to fit into the story of ethnic studies. And so that's been a hotspot for us, but so too has been casual anti-Semitism on the playground, in the classroom, and often more of dog whistles and overt forms of anti-semitism that maybe your or my parents, Michael, might have experienced as kids. And so we have a lot of work to do to help teachers and administrators recognize those dog whistles and how that leads to exclusion for Jewish students today. So then, I mean, that's obviously a disturbing state of affairs that had been escalating.Responses to the AttacksMichael HornI assume it goes into overdrive, sadly, starting October 7th, but just talk to us about what the last school year looked like before we get into this school year. Just, you know, in the schools themselves, I suspect you have stories of parents and students who've reached out to you and told you things. Give us a sense of the state of play, whether that's through stats or the stories, to really help us understand what was going on.Tyler GregoryYeah, the challenges have evolved. So in the days after the horrific attacks, the main issues that we saw were from parents that felt the response from school districts to their communities were either inadequate, non-existent, had implicit biases, or there were other problems with the way they were communicating. And you talk about belonging on your show. This is really a moment for Jewish students, parents, families, teachers to feel like they belong as part of that district. And I think a lot of folks listening might not understand how these terrorist attacks impact Jews in America. This was the single deadliest day for the Jewish community since the end of World War II, since the end of the Holocaust. And that collective trauma, that generational trauma was felt across the Jewish world, whether we had direct connections to Israel or not. And so for a kid to show up on October 8th after that, whether they had a direct or indirect relationship to what happened, that was a traumatic event for all of us. And that was a time for them to be seen, felt, heard in the same way the response from school districts that we saw after the murder of George Floyd with Black Lives Matter, after a wave of Asian hate, particularly here in San Francisco where one out of three residents are Asian Pacific Islander, we saw the response from school districts to those acute moments for those communities. And we had the same expectation that school districts would hold our community in the same way. And sometimes there were insensitivities. Sometimes Muslim and Jewish students felt pitted against each other in these communications. And so that led to a lot of concern, if not disturbance, depending on the communication in terms of how administrators were communicating to their constituents about the issue.Michael HornDid you see like in the classrooms themselves, teachers lash out in different ways and districts, how did they respond if that happened? Because I mean, right on higher ed campuses, I think a lot of people saw the protests, right? They saw the sit-ins and basically encampments in many cases. And then the administration saying, yeah, it violates a policy, but we're going to sort of look the other way. What was going on in K-12 school districts themselves, in the classrooms, on the playgrounds around this outside of the district initial response?Tyler GregorySo as you can imagine, things got more complicated as Israel responded to the attacks and went after Hamas and Gaza, which is an incredibly challenging condition to conduct a war. You go after terrorists that are hiding under civilian populations. Gaza is one of the most dense places in the world. And a debate, and I don't think this is the place to give my personal opinion on what's happening, but there is a robust debate and differences of opinion. And no matter what school district setting you're entering, you're going to have a multitude of opinions about what's taking place for the war. So once Israel's response started, it got much, much harder for administrators to figure out how to hold everybody, including places where you had Israeli and Palestinian families, both in that district. And you saw activism, much like on higher ed campuses, we saw Gaza walkouts in Oakland and San Francisco Unified School Districts. And most administrators were woefully unprepared on how to handle that, because you'd have a set of activists, students, and in some cases, teachers, which in our mind crosses the line, call for their fellow students to walk out. So what happens if you're a Jewish student that's sitting there and you're not participating? You feel vulnerable. You see that you are being judged by your peers. There is not a good way for the teacher to address the situation in the moment. I would say there are some bad actors and we can talk about that. But for the most part, what we're seeing is a lack of competency on how to hold Jewish and Muslim students through this traumatic time.Holding Divergent ViewpointsMichael HornSo maybe actually, let's jump into that, because I'm super curious. It sounds like it's more of a story of we just don't know what to do to handle these challenges. Obviously, JCRC has been providing resources, I imagine, to help educate district leaders, school principals, et cetera, about what the proper response is. How have you all thought about how to hold these two divergent, two is actually probably the wrong word, right? Two Jews, three opinions. So it's probably multiple, multiple opinions and divergences in a community. How have you recommended people start to respond or lead their schools and districts given those conditions you just described?Tyler GregoryWell, one thing we quickly discovered is that in diversity, equity, inclusion programs or in diversity trainings, the Jewish American experience is lacking. And you could say the same thing about Muslim Americans. And so the first thing that we worked on was retooling our anti-Semitism and Jewish identity training to support administrators and teachers to make sure that they had the core competency to understand what a Jew is. And Michael, you know this as well as I do, Judaism is our religion. Jews are a people. We have peoplehood. But in many places, and this is not something to criticize if you're not fully versed in this. People conflate our religion with the rest of our identities, our culture, our nationhood, our relationship to Israel, or our secular nature. You can be an atheist Jew, right? And I think that our identities have been flattened in this Christian country such that teachers and administrators don't quite know how to put us in a box. And that's a very complicated thing to work through. So if you don't know who we are, how are you going to hear the dog whistles that weaponize various parts of our identity? And that's the way that we try to educate K-12 leaders, to make sure that they understand and can better listen for the ways in which our religious, cultural, political connection to Israel is weaponized in ways that echo forms of anti-Semitism that have existed long before the modern state of Israel, for example.Including Jews in Ethnic StudiesMichael HornYeah, it's super interesting as you get into that because Rabbi Wolpe, he's long made the point, right, that Jewish as a construct predates the Western constructs around race, religion, and so forth. It was sort of an amalgamation of a lot of these things, and you just described them. Even if you go to Israel now, you'll see secular atheist Jews, deeply religious Orthodox Jews, and everything in between, traditionalist and so forth, that doesn't even get into the divisions we think about popularly in this country around reform, conservative, and so forth. It's much, much deeper and multifaceted. So the trainings, it sounds like, is actually fundamental ground level education of just even understanding what is going on and what you're seeing in your context. I'm curious. That sounds like it would not provoke maybe the backlashes that some of the DEI trainings we know historically have done, but I'm sort of curious about the effectiveness maybe more to the point because we also know DEI trainings, but also frankly, Holocaust trainings have not been super effective often in protecting the populations that they're intended to. How do you all think about measuring that or protecting against it?Tyler GregoryWhat I would say is too often when we think about longitudinal students' experience with Jewish identity and anti-semitism, when they have an ancient world history course, they learn maybe there's a couple lines about ancient Israel and the Israeli kingdoms when we're talking about the Roman Empire, and then maybe we talk about the Jewish American experience the Holocaust, and there's certainly a Holocaust education component that is from 1933 to 1945. But Jewish history spans 3,000 years. And so that's why we think that Jewish identity should be a part of ethnic studies and that we do need to educate people about the multiple elements of our identities and talk about not only the bad things that happened to us, but to celebrate what we have contributed to this country. Jewish sports heroes, Jewish elected officials, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, people should understand how we celebrate being Americans as the Jewish community and the ways in which we've contributed to this country. And without ethnic studies, really, we're only talking about bad things that have happened throughout their history. And Michael, you know that most of our Jewish holidays are about overcoming the bad things that happen to us. And at the end of our holiday, whether it's our Passover Seder, we usually say, and let's eat, let's celebrate, l'chaim, right? But we can't just be in this victimhood mentality. We have to talk about who we are, what we believe in, talk about Jewish joy and what we mean to this country. And that's why I think whether we're newcomers or not to ethnic studies, there is ameaningful place for us in this story about what it means to to be Jews in this country. And that's something that I don't think takes away. For those that don't want Jewish Americans to be a part of ethnic studies, we're not trying to take away any other experience from being a part of this. We just think that the Jewish kid in the classroom that's going through an ethnic studies course could equally benefit by being seen through this discipline in the same way that we touch on Holocaust studies or helping kids understand what anti-semitism is.Michael HornSuper interesting. It's a very similar answer to the one Dara Horn gave me when I asked a similar question. I'm just curious, and I'd love to dig one level deeper, as I did with her, actually, on this, which is how do you make sure, frankly, for ethnic studies in general, but also, you know, the Jewish component of it, it's not just one more thing on a long list of items that schools should do because there's limited time. Right. There's lots of competing interests trying to get their segment in. Why does this rise to the top in your view or in inclusion? Right. Or are there other ways to go about this maybe that get the principles across but create more freedom for, OK, what's the precise knowledge or specific standards we're going to study as we learn about principles of, frankly, not dipping into anti-semitism, but hate more broadly?Tyler GregoryI think you've got to tackle both layers, Michael. We, as a community, are often the canary in the coal mine of a health, of a democracy, of society, as the Jewish community. And so to help students understand that a multiracial, multiethnic democracy, when one community is targeted, it often leads to other communities being targeted. And if you look historically to Jewish communities around the world, 1920s Germany was a golden era for Jews in Germany in that democracy. I'm a gay Jew. There were gay clubs in Germany. And we saw how the Jewish community was a canary in the coal mine for what was happening in the steady march to fascism in that country. And so we don't think anti-Semitism is only a Jewish problem. But if you if you zoom out and you look globally, oftentimes we're a scapegoat that is a harbinger of things to come and a measurement of the health of the society that we're living in. And so we think that we can talk about this in a much broader lens where we're helping people understand historically what some of the consequences can be when the Jewish community is targeted. I also think there's not a one shot to this. I don't see a silver bullet. The more ways we can integrate our very small minority in the context of America, two to two point five percent, depending on the day, the better chance we have of reinforcing what our community means.The Free Speech QuestionMichael HornSuper, super helpful and interesting. Let me ask you this, because one of the contours of debate that has come up in the higher ed context. Right. So we lay the education piece. People still have different viewpoints. How do we think about the line between free speech? You know, students expressing viewpoints about Israel or say, you know, maybe less savory ones around support for Hamas, even Tinker V. Des Moines, you know, stuff right. Supreme Court case of the ability to express your views freely. You don't lose those when you enter the school doors. But how do you think about that tenant, if you will, of the American experience? And when this crosses the line into blatant discrimination, bullying and stuff that is not OK, how do you think about that, I guess, in general?Tyler GregorySo for better or worse, anti-Semitic speech is free speech. I think when universities uphold free speech as their gold standard, we ask them, OK, if you're going to allow this kind of hate speech where Israel is the the scourge of the earth and responsible for all these ills that extend beyond what a tiny economy in the scope of global affairs could possibly achieve, we ask, where are you exercising free speech? If this is such an important value to you, why are you staying silent when Jews are not allowed to go to the library because they're being blocked? When are you staying silent when terrorism is being glorified by certain campus groups? We can respect their their value, but where we lose faith in their abilities is when they don't practice what they preach. And too many universities and since we're talking about K-12, unfortunately, too many districts are staying silent in the face of these discriminatory acts. And so that's where we would like to see education leaders step up right now.Michael HornDo you think there's a different line from K-12 to higher ed in terms of how teachers, you know, you mentioned the ethnic studies curriculum, obviously, and getting Jews included in that curriculum and an understanding, frankly, of Judaism more broadly built into it. You know, in higher ed, there's this sort of sense of academic freedom, right? Professors, they create their own courses. I get to lecture as I as I view. Do you see that extending into curriculum in K-12 as well? Or is there a different way we ought to think about academic freedom, slightly different from free speech, but still, you know, related and these noxious viewpoints that you just talked about that perhaps we're not calling out as clearly as we might?Tyler GregoryIt's a it's a tough question. And I think teachers have a right to bring their own lived experiences into the classroom so long as it does not target the experiences of other students. And unfortunately, we're seeing too much of that. We're seeing and this is a tough issue to talk through, but we're seeing Palestinian flags. If a teacher is a Palestinian American into the classroom and there's a Jewish student sitting there not knowing how to feel, are they going to be graded poorly? Are they are they safe being in that environment? And that gets really tricky because we don't want to deny a Palestinian their identity. But these symbols that for some people are personal are otherwise political. So I think we have a lot of work to do to figure out how to massage those issues. But we also don't want to deny the lived experience of teachers, which can be so rich for students to learn about. So I think it's a balancing act. And I wish I had a clearer answer for you.The Road AheadMichael HornNo, no, this is good. I mean, frankly, I think delving into the shades of gray is what's going to make us stronger over time. And as you said, you know, your mission has really been these trainings around the education to get awareness into the schools. I'm curious what you're starting to see the fruits of that. What does the school year look like? You said some of the anti-Semitism has morphed maybe over time. Where are we now? How are we doing? What else do we need to do as we think about charting a path forward for all students?Tyler GregoryYeah, so we did a poll a few months ago of Bay Area Jews, a random sample public poll, and we found that only 28 percent of Bay Area Jews are satisfied with how K-12 schools are tackling anti-Semitism. We also found that one out of three Bay Area Jewish residents have personally experienced or witnessed anti-Semitism. And then we asked those folks, where did that happen? And about 30 percent of them said that that happened in a school setting. Second, only to social media. So we think that it's a prominent source of the challenge that our communities face. And we have a lot of work to do still. What we're seeing this year is more of the incidents that we're getting calls with are classic anti-Semitism rather than weaponization of the war. So classic anti-Semitic tropes about Jews having too much power or privilege. And I don't think that we're quite to the bottom as to why that is. But the level at which we're getting those calls is clearly inspired by what happened last year. And so in the same way, I don't want to get too political on here, but after the initial election of Donald Trump, we saw a Pandora's box open on the far right with anti-Semitism. October 7th seems to have led to a Pandora's box opening with far left anti-Semitism. They look and feel differently. There are different types of threats. But that permission seems to continue to exist. And our job is to make sure that those forms of hate stay on both extremes and not creep into the mainstream of our society. And unfortunately, it seems like public and private education is one of the most important battlefronts in which we're dealing with this problem.Michael HornNo, super helpful. Tyler, as we wrap up here, just any other thoughts that we should be thinking about work that you're doing that you want to spotlight or conversations that we ought to be keeping an eye on as we progress through the rest of the school year? One thing that we think is really important to lift up, but I will not give any illusion it's easy. It's important for students to see Muslim and Jewish leaders talking to one another. And I think districts see, OK, we've got to have our anti-Semitism module, we've got to have our Islamophobia module, we need to have an assembly dedicated to Jewish Americans and Muslim Americans or Palestinian Americans. That's great. But if there are divisions in a classroom or in a school or even among parents, what better way to get them to change the tone of the conversation and lower the temperature and tensions than to see Muslim and Jewish or Israeli and Palestinian leaders talking to one another with civil discourse? And that's a broader conversation just in the context of this civil discourse. But if they can see role models talking through differences about how despite the fact that the war is six thousand miles away, both of our communities are in pain and trauma and that actually we have a lot more in common culturally and as immigrant communities than we do our divides over what's happening there. Maybe we can start to build bridges and change the way that we're having this conversation. And so we work with a Muslim organization both to provide joint trainings and to model civil discourse. But there are a lot of amazing organizations both in Israel, Palestine and here that ard trying to bring Jews, Muslims, Israelis and Palestinians together. And to model that in front of students goes a very long way. And so that's something that I think we need much, much more of as this issue plays out. That's a very hopeful note to end on.Michael HornLet me ask you a final question. How can people find out more about JCRC and follow your work?Tyler GregoryYou can follow us JCRC.org and learn much more about our education trainings. We'd be delighted to work with you.Michael HornPerfect. Tyler, thank you so much for joining us. And for all of you, we'll see you next time on the Future of Education.The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.

At the outset of an AI-themed season, Diane Tavenner and I take stock of our prior assumptions, hopes, and concerns about the technology’s applications in education. We dive into where we see it being used to make adjustments to the current educational model and envision how it could be applied to revolutionize learning.Diane Tavenner: Hey, Michael.Michael Horn: Hey, Diane. Good to see you.Diane Tavenner: You too. I spent the weekend on a tradition I think we have talked about before, which is we hold a holiday party every year for what are now old friends. Because I think this is our 27th annual, if you.Michael Horn: 27th annual. Wow.Diane Tavenner: Yeah. And it just, it makes me appreciate longevity and just like I have such gratitude for deep, long relationships that have built over time. And yeah, it’s just really, it’s a good fill-me-up for the moment.Diane and Michael’s AI PriorsMichael Horn: Yeah. That’s amazing. We’re obviously recording this as we approach the holiday season, if people can’t figure that out from that intro. That’s an amazing place to start. And the gratitude you have around that, Diane. So very, very neat. Let’s lay out what we’re doing for folks today. And as we get into a little series on the topic that we talked about in the first episode back, which is artificial intelligence. You want to lay it out, Diane, what we’re thinking?Diane Tavenner: Yeah, I think as folks know, like, we are now following our curiosity and we’ve been doing that for a while. And, you know, I don’t think either of us are just like 100% all in on AI, like huge evangelists. And I do think that we’re at a minimum, cautiously optimistic about the possibilities of it. And so we’re just curious about it. And I think we find ourselves kind of talking about it and asking about it. And so we are going to do a little exploration. We’re not exactly sure. We’ve got some ideas of the format and whatnot. We’re not exactly sure how long it will last for, but we thought we’d just kick off today with where we’re starting that exploration. And I think I, personally, I think you’re with me. I hope I end in a different place, quite frankly, I hope I end in a place where I’ve, like, learned some stuff and talked to interesting people and, you know, maybe think a little bit differently. Hopefully smarter than I am now. But today we wanted to just kind of lay a foundation of where we’re coming from based on what we know so far.Michael Horn: Yeah, love, love that intro. And what I would add is it’s obviously a hot topic in education. Everyone knows that. But I think what’s also interesting to me anyway has been how OpenAI and Google and, you know, Facebook, like, or Meta, I should say, whenever they talk about AI, they seem to show education use cases is like a major part of all their launches. I’m sure that’s not quite right, but it’s more than I can remember on most product launches outside of maybe the iPad over the last 20 years. And so it’s obviously getting a lot… Education and AI together, Diane, are obviously getting a lot of attention and I find myself anyway, and we’ll talk about this in a moment: I start out with a strong prior and then I read a couple things and I completely flip my opinion and then I have that opinion and I talk to someone and then I change again. And so like I find myself pretty malleable still. But like you, it feels like this technology enabler that could be really, really intriguing. And we need to explore more.Diane Tavenner: I agree with you and I think we’ll do that in a way that we always do. We’re always looking for sort of third-way solutions that are very practical and very pragmatic and very connected to what’s actually happening with young people in schools, with teachers. And so yeah, I think that, you know, people might be like thinking, oh my gosh, more AI. But I hope that we’re going to bring a, a sort of pragmatic approach to it that that is actually useful for people.The Teacher- v. Student-Centered Approach to AIMichael Horn: Yeah, no, perfect. And I will tell you, when you visited my class and showed off Futre with the students, they noted that you never mentioned AI in your talk. So we are certainly not leading with AI, but we think it’s intriguing. And so against that let me start out with the opening framing I’d love to propose to you and then you can sort of react to how that framing sits. But it’s one that I’m stealing from a friend of ours in the venture world. And it’s something though that I’m noticing in the field and I don’t know that everyone who sort of is launching AI education products notices it this way. But what I’m seeing is that there’s sort of on the one hand a lot of AI startups and AI approaches that are very teacher centered or teacher facing as their entree, if you will, into the classroom or learning environments. And then on the other hand you have the student centered or student facing applications. This might be like the Khanmigo or, you know, some of those things that we’ve seen out there. And so there seems to me to be a bit of a dichotomy in terms of the startup space, the investors approach, different entrepreneurial approaches, even teacher, frankly and school designer and educator approaches on how they’re thinking about AI. Is it first a teacher tool or is it a student facing tool. What, what’s your take on that framing before we dig into each side of this?Diane Tavenner: Yeah, so I think that sadly, and I will say sadly for me, I think most people are thinking about it from a teacher-facing approach. The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.And I think I sent you an article the other day or an op ed where I was like very frustrated with the premise, which was this exact premise. And I, as you know, I fundamentally disagree with that approach. Do I think we should be using AI as a tool to support teachers and to support students? Yes, but I think we’re just retreading the, the old way of thinking about schools. And let me just start, Michael, and say, like in this conversation, I’m almost exclusively going to be talking about high schools because I think elementary schools are quite different. And, and you know, so if we get into elementary school, let’s note that specifically. But for me, I’m very much thinking about high school, maybe middle school as well, but older students, and I just think that the world is going in a direction for many, many, many reasons where they need to be owning and driving their own education. Of course, this is not unique for me. I’ve been doing this for a couple decades at this point. This is my fundamental belief. There’s such a downside that we are not focused on how we enable students to own and drive their own learning. And AI is such a game changer. I think potentially in this direction it can help us do things we’ve wanted to do and can’t do. And we’re completely missing the mark when our total focus is on the teacher and how this is a tool that we’re going to build for teachers.Michael Horn: No, that’s helpful. And right out of the gates. We know where you stand. I’m going to try to make the argument for the teacher facing up front and then you can throw cold water on me afterwards if you’d like. But, but let me try it. And, and maybe the way I will try it though is more to explain it about why I think the phenomenon is happening. And so number one, I would say on the why is AI better for teachers than students? Say false dichotomy, but let’s go with it. I think part of the approach is, look, AI hallucinates all the time. It makes mistakes. And these tools are better in the hands of experts rather than novices who can, you know, catch those mistakes and correct them in some ways. So number one, there’s sort of like a risk aversion approach to it. And so, and I think this, you know, we could probably contradict this in certain ways. But I think the AI like as risk to students is maybe driving some of this. Number one. Let me quickly add on that that I do think that there is something to it in the sense of AI when used by Amazon to get you to buy something that maybe you’ve looked at online. If they move the dial 0.001% that is serious dollars to their bottom line and if they alienate you, they don’t really care. Right. Whereas in education I think the argument would be if we actually mislead a student or you know, tell them a narrative about themselves that is going to mislead them in some, you know, like we could do deep damage to their self efficacy and, and, and, and sense of self and even their agency right down the line. And so that’s the reason for a teacher facing perspective maybe. Let me pause there before I go to the other two reasons because I, I that like a meaty set of claims that I think you should engage with first.Diane Tavenner: Well, I think you’re uncovering one of the challenges that we have in education right now, which is a comp. Just a real lack of imagination about what is going to be possible because of AI. And so I think that many people, most, I don’t know, a lot of people at this point have logged on to you know, ChatGPT or one of the others and they’ve typed something in that little box maybe a few times and they’ve had or they’ve read articles about these hallucinations. But in many people’s minds like that is what quote AI is. Maybe some people now are playing with NotebookLM from Google. And you know, one of the really amazing things I think is that you know, it will produce a podcast.Michael Horn: It’s pretty remarkable. A little over engineered but pretty remarkable.Diane Tavenner: And it is like at first it’s like pretty mind blowing and then when you actually start to listen, yes, it’s getting all the right words. I did it the other day. Someone like loaded a chapter from my book into it and then it produced a 22 minute podcast. Man and a woman talking. And I was like. And they were like is this the conversation you and Michael would have had about your book? You know and like there’s pieces of it, yes, but it’s not us, it’s not human. It is, it’s like literally going, it’s read what is on the page and then it’s like making it, sort of bringing it to life. But there’s no thinking and nuance. And dynamism there. Anyway, all my point is that that’s not, you know, that product is the, is one of where they’ve taken what’s underneath it, the AI and they’re actually turning into something that is more user facing. So my assumption is that we’ve only just begun to see what’s possible. And so this idea that like, is that like chat box going to revolutionize learning for kids. No, it’s not. But that’s not what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about as a tool embedded in really well designed experiences in my view, products that will move the needle. And so I think you, you minimize or eliminate those risks that you’re talking about when you build it in thoughtfully. Certainly that’s what we’re doing on our team and so.The Sustaining Innovations of Teacher-Centered AIMichael Horn: Well, and you’re leading with the product design as opposed to the AI, which is also a difference. Right. So let me say the second reason. I think that we’re seeing a lot of teacher facing things, which is that frankly, relative to today’s classroom, it does not require redesigning today’s classroom. It is in our language, a sustaining innovation relative to today’s classroom. And let’s be honest, that’s where the market is, right? As in, if you’re looking for volume, it is not in. I mean, yes, microschools are taking off, but there’s still a small percentage Of the education landscape. Certainly in the US, even more so in the world. And so teacher facing sort of as gateway in teacher directed instruction is where the market is. And frankly most VCs, when they enter a market, they have a five to seven year time frame to get out of the investment. They’re looking for unicorns within that. And that pushes you to where the dollars are, not where perhaps the puck should be going. So I think that’s the other thing driving this dichotomy, if you will.Diane Tavenner: I think you’re right and I think this is the problem we consistently have every time we think something might help us transform schools, right. Is that the, it gets, it get the gravitational pull back into the box, the box of the school, the box of the classroom, the box of the teacher, the box of the course, it just, all the pullback to that is so strong and every time people try to unbundle it or disrupt it, we’ve had many conversations about that. You know, there’s a few outliers who sort of make it outside of that, you know, planet, orbit, gravitational. I spent a lot of time with a lot of them last week and it’s very exciting and inspiring with them and then you get back to the mass market is all still living inside that box. And so, so I mean, this is where I just feel like, I feel like I can’t help but get hopeful and excited, but I’m a little bit worried that I’m going to get my heart broke yet again about the potential changes that we might see. Because that’s what I want to have happen. I actually want to break apart that model and change this to be a learning experience, at least at the high school level, where kids are truly driving their own learning and learning in ways that are much more customized and personalized for them. And let me just be super clear, that does not mean they’re learning alone. This is still very group oriented. It’s actually quite real world oriented and that’s what I think is possible. So.Michael Horn: But it’s not to say, let me just modify this before we jump to where you’re going, which is, I think you’d agree, there are plenty of low hanging fruit use cases to like to, to improve. Right. Teacher practice with AI, whether it’s better lesson plans, more diverse ways of reaching different student needs, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, frankly, assessment, probably to get more real time information where your students are or how they’re doing to. Or simplify a teacher’s workflow.Diane Tavenner: Yeah, and that might be the middle ground here. You know, I was the other day, I was sitting there thinking through how can we disaggregate the role of the teacher and what does AI enable? This could still exist in the box model of class, you know, but I do think it would be an improvement. So if we think about all the hats a teacher wears, which are impossible. The job’s impossible as you know, I know everybody knows the feedback we’re getting from the market is it’s impossible because no one wants to do the job anymore. People will get mad that I said that. That’s not true. Some people want to do the job, but here’s the job. So one, you are. And these are the main things that teachers think about and people think about. You’re planning your curriculum and your lessons and you’re delivering them. There’s a real argument that AI, that a single individual teacher should never be planning their own curriculum again, ever, ever, ever, ever. It’s like not time well spent. It will never be as good as what can be done, you know, more globally and with all the learning science and expertise that we have, and even quite frankly, the delivery a lot of it is not personalized and individualized. So that could very much be, you know, AI driven, technology driven. Then there’s feedback and assessment.Diane Tavenner: So I’m giving you like feedback. I know you’ve been grading some papers and assessing work. And again, like, again, we’ve done this for a decade plus at Summit where we took most of that off teachers’ plates. And the technology is absolutely capable of doing this now and better quite frankly, than humans. And so if we take that, that’s like the core of what most people think the teacher’s job is. So what’s left? And it’s the very human things, the things that I would argue matter. It’s the coaching and the mentoring of students. It’s helping them to figure out how they’re going to like sequence their learning pathway and what comes next and what happens when they get stuck and they need actual help in where they’re going. And so that coaching, that sequencing that, facilitating certainly a role in facilitating group learning and really cool real life learning experiences and giving real time feedback in those settings. There’s the social-emotional part of this. Like how do you, how do you become a person who understands a morning routine and actually, you know, knows how to manage your emotions and your relationships and all of those sorts of things. And then of course there’s like custodial care. That’s for younger, but to some extent older. Yeah, none of those things can be disrupted by AI, I do not believe. And for a lot of teachers, it’s the stuff that brings them real joy and it is really impactful for young people. So I think maybe the in between is a disaggregating of that role of the teacher.Diane Tavenner: If I saw products moving in that direction, I’d be happy.Michael Horn: So that that would be. So for all those listening, that’s the sustaining path we would like to see happen. And here’s the disruptive argument. Let’s get student facing here. Right. And student centered. And I think that is the argument. Right.Disruptive Applications for AIMichael Horn: Is that yes, tutoring today or student facing tools. And I’ll get into the second use case in a second. But like the more narrow ones first. I’ve seen all sorts of critiques and I think we’ll get some of them on, on the podcast as we go through this series around how it’s not, you know, it’s yes, maybe procedural knowledge, but not like the in depth, really emotion driven. Right. Learning pieces and other things of that nature and it makes errors, you know. Right. All the rest. The Wall Street Journal has done a few hit jobs on things and so forth. But if you get into non-consumption where the alternative is nothing at all, I don’t have access to a tutor if I’m, you know, however many millions of kids in the United States, let alone the world, clearly better than the alternative, nothing at all. There are some very interesting places to launch student facing applications in that area, number one. And number two, I think the argument for it, and I think this is where you also might be going is I see it as lifting the quality of work of what students are doing because AI now is a tool of work just like we use it in our workplace to better…so that they can create more in depth, more exciting, you know, things. Right. With spending a little bit less time on some of the mechanics and more time on the depth, if you will, of learning and evidence right in the product or performance or whatever they’re creating. And I’m being somewhat vague because trying to capture all the possible use cases one could imagine depending on what subject or grade you’re imagining as we’re talking. But I think that’s the other area is that like the sense of agency for kids where they can actually build professional level skills stuff as they’re exploring.Diane Tavenner: Yeah.Michael Horn: Has just taken a big step up. And it’s not to say that they don’t have to learn the knowledge and application and skills. They do. But then using AI to level up all of that is pretty interesting, I think. Go ahead.Diane Tavenner: Yeah. Let’s talk for a minute, Michael, about the broader context and why – because I think it’s so relevant here about what’s going on – I think in the world why this matters. So, so number one, it’s unequivocal. I just spent last week with people from the left and the right and like everywhere in between. And there’s a, there is an incredible agreement around the idea that school needs to be real world. It needs to be preparing young people, especially high school, for the real world, for jobs, for employment. It can’t be sort of this like theoretical, you know, thing anymore. And it’s not preparing them for that. It’s not preparing them with what I would just call basic professional skills. Like how do you actually like be an employee? How do you show up on time, how do you have agency, how do you do these things? And, and it’s, it’s not actually, if it’s not incorporating AI and how you use that in real work, it’s not going to be preparing them for the future that they’re walking into. And so I think that is happening. There’s a real move towards, you know, CTE, you know, career and technical education. As we know, we’ve got ESAs coming on in multiple states where people are going to be able to sort of more pick and choose their education. So you’ve got a lot of stuff happening where people are like, I don’t want to sit and get anymore and it’s not going to serve me to just sit there and take direction and then wait for you to tell me the next direction. And so I think what, you know. Do I think it’s a chat bot that’s tutoring me? You know, I think that’s super rudimentary. I think there’s so much better stuff coming, but you got to start somewhere. And I think that what’s more important to me is that like it’s, it’s breaking this dynamic of like 25 or 30 kids in a classroom, like waiting on instruction and the slowness of it and the exactitude of it and that. And so it’s moving us towards like this is the world we’re going to.Michael Horn: The waiting on is a really particularly interesting place I’d love to like pick up on because I see the same thing, no surprise perhaps in that one we’ve been pretty clear that more connection to real world is important. I also think the ability to codify and create like standard curriculum, given the fast changing nature of real work is going to be a fool’s errand. And so that pushes you more and more in the direction you’ve been around. Experiential. Right. And so as a result of that, like that’s going to be doing, which means not like you can’t be waiting on the sort of the one scarce resource in the classroom to come over to you, unlock the lesson plan for you and then you’re allowed to go learn that. That that’s not going to be the model that engages or works, frankly. And so it’s everything from knowledge acquisition to exploration. On the one hand we’ll put that like as a big bucket, right? To actually engaging with, connecting with and then doing the work. And AI is a really interesting portal, I think, into all three of those, I guess is the way I would think about it. Whether it’s up leveling the quality of resources on the front end or frankly up leveling the level of work that young people are able to do and they’re showcasing of that and problem solving to real professionals and getting real feedback on it.Diane Tavenner: Well, and I think this is so critical, Michael, because one of the things we’re seeing in the job market for, you know, post high school graduates, post college graduates is. And one of the things AI is doing is, is sort of competing with or removing those kind of entry levels. So no one wants to hire someone who doesn’t have experience anymore. You, you know, almost every job says you need a couple years of experience. So how are young people supposed to get experience? Well, their education is going to have to incorporate experience, if you will. It has to be experiential. It has to be a place where they’re going to be able to make the case that even though I just finished learning in some, you know, degree or credentialing program, I have experience. And so the, the act of learning and getting feedback and producing products has to be much more real world experiential if they’re going to have any hope of getting a job.Preparing Students for Success in the WorkplaceMichael Horn: This isn’t an AI point, but I just, I’m, I love that we’re getting away from credential based hiring and that skills based hiring is a phrase, but I think I find it overly technocratic and a sense that we’re going to be able to define skills in narrow ways. And the word you just used, experience, to me is the way to think about it of experience based hiring. And the way you show you can do and step into a job is through the experiences you’ve had where you’ve done that. And if we believe, let’s go to the equity question. If we believe we want to give everyone a chance at that school has got to be providing it because otherwise my kids are going to be able to find those opportunities, but a lot aren’t. And so I think schools are going to need to be. A long time ago there was a professor, either I think UCLA, but maybe USC, and you can correct me if I’m wrong, and he wrote about how like schools of experience were the right way to hire people to see, like, you know, have you led teams, have you, etc., etc. As opposed to like, gee, Diane built a great product by herself, now we want her to be a manager. Two totally different sets of skills underlying that. Forget about naming the skills, let’s just look at the experiences themselves and say, like, how’d you do what, what lessons did you learn? What would you do next time? How does it equate to the culture here? Those are the sorts of questions and conversations I’d love us to be having in hiring. And so what you Just said, I think makes a lot of sense for the schools to be stepping into that. And the challenge, right, if we stay with our teacher centered model is that to ask teachers to sort of be the font of all of that is, is crazy.Diane Tavenner: It’s not even, it’s not even possible by definition. You know, they are, they’re, they’re waiting on, the student is waiting on instruct. It’s not preparing them to be productive. No, no. And it’s not even neutral anymore. It’s negative because the incentive system in our traditional schools is actually counterproductive. It’s creating behaviors and incentivizing behaviors that are, are counterproductive when you’re going into the real world. And so, and I would argue the learning isn’t even that great. So it’s not like they’re coming out as masters of math or you know, and, and on top of it that. I mean, let’s just go back in time for a moment. We talk a lot about the industrial model and wanting to move away from industrial model schools. But I think some of the things that people forget is the design of the industrial model school was actually preparing people for…Michael Horn: An industrial model economy.Diane Tavenner: The factory. Like you showed up to a bell, you moved on a bell, you, you produced work at a rate and a speed in a way that was going to be very real world, very comparable to what you were going into. And our schools look nothing like workplaces at all anymore. And they’re not preparing young people for all of those pieces of it.Michael Horn: No, we’re going off AI but I’m going to make one more point and then maybe we’ll bring it back. Which is, I actually think when people think about higher education also, and they’re like, oh, the rarefied university experience that I want all 55 million people for some reason to have, that is, you know, Harvard or whatever else, they forget that that is also a vocational experience, which is to train people for the professoriate down the line to prepare them to get master’s and PhD degrees. So for what it’s worth, I think it all has echoes to your point of the world into which you were trying to prepare individuals. And that world has changed totally.Diane Tavenner: And I think that AI becomes a tool because I think a lot of the objections to changing this model, if you will, the box model, the classroom, the school building, etc, has been like, how can we actually do that? We have, you know, 55 million people in the schooling system. There’s a huge operational component like, how do you actually do that? And I do think that AI brings us a new set of tools in a very meaningful way if we deploy them properly. Not properly, if we deploy them, you know, interesting, smart, visionary ways that make that more and more possible.Michael Horn: Maybe let’s leave the conversation there and I’ll put out one more question that I’m really interested to get from folks, which is when…We’re going to talk to people who are skeptics, who are optimists, probably in between. And the questions that I’m curious about are many. But one of them on what you just said is like, how does it maybe make certain things that we thought were important historically less so in the future? Like, yes, it might ruin the ability to do X, Y and Z, because AI is going to do it. But also that thing is no longer that important either as an artifact anymore. And where is that not true? Where is it going to ruin that thing that actually still really is important? How do we think about that? I’m curious to hear what people think.Diane Tavenner: I’m curious about that too. I also will just put an invitation out, Michael. You know, we’re gonna do this for a little bit and we’ve got certainly a list of people we want to talk to and a list of questions. But we always love hearing from listeners. And so if there are people or questions you are curious about, send them our way and we’ll do the best we can.Michael Horn: Perfect. Ok so let’s leave it there. Lots of, lots of energy around where we want to see AI solve problems. And let’s flip, as we always do, to what we’re reading, listening, watching, basically anything outside of our day jobs. What’s on your list, Diane?Diane Tavenner: Well, I have one that’s legitimately outside of my day job, which is The Diplomat Season 2. And it’s just, that’s so bad.Michael Horn: I need to get on that train. I really, for a variety of reasons, I know I would like it, so I will try to catch up to you. Mine is less, is, is not actually divorced from my work. I’m reading student papers non-stop right now. The AI I’ve tried a couple AI tools, Diane, that grade, I will tell you they don’t because they don’t understand context and the content knowledge. They’re very good at telling me, you know, grammatical things. I am not an English teacher. I don’t, I literally don’t care as long as I, it communicates the point in this particular case. So as a result, it’s still manual labor for me, for the next few days.Diane Tavenner: Well, I’m so sorry. I hope that ends.Michael Horn: No, all good. Some of them are great ideas, and I’ll hold to those. But for all of you listening, thanks as always. We look forward to hearing from you. Look forward to hearing your thoughts about who we ought to talk to, what we ought to learn from. We’re excited to do this and do a deep dive on AI with all of you. Thanks so much. And we’ll see you next time on Class Disrupted.The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.

Is it better for education solutions to have an interdependent, self-contained design or a modular one? Well, it depends. That contradicts the advice of a lot of CEOs and investors who adhere to one or the other view. In this video, I use music as a metaphor to help explain the tradeoffs and best uses of each architecture.Thanks for reading The Future of Education! This post is public so feel free to share it.One of the big questions that I often get is this: Is it better to be vertically integrated That is, you control everything you do. You make all the parts, you have a proprietary architecture.Or is it better to be modular, that is horizontally integrated? You're just one step or part that fits neatly into a whole that others also contribute to in clearly defined, predictable ways.And basically what we've learned is that, contrary to what Apple or anyone else might tell you, the answer is… it depends.The theory of interdependence and modularity says that when you're trying to improve the raw performance or functionality of a product, a system, a service, composition, you need an interdependent architecture. The reason is you can't specify in advance how one part works and functions and the way another part works and functions because they're interdependent with each other. If you make changes in one, it changes the other and vice versa. And so when you're trying to wring out every last ounce of performance from something, you need to wrap your hands around everything and really embrace this interdependent architecture.IBM mainframes are a classic example, highly interdependent product. IBM did everything. They built the logic circuitry, the operating system, the memory, they manufactured it, they did the sales, everything.But frankly, most Apple products are very interdependent as well.And we can make this idea of interdependence come alive in music as well, because it's a confusing concept. And I thought if we did something very outside of the bounds of how we normally think about it, it might come alive a little bit more for folks.And I'm going to do it by demonstrating something by Bach. It's his Fugue No. 2 in C Minor, and it's a great example of an interdependent architecture. And by having [that architecture] he really optimizes the overall raw functionality of the composition I'm going to illustrate it here on this keyboard—and I'll apologize in advance it's not a weighted keyboard, it's not going to be a beautiful grand piano sound, it's clunky here and there—but i think you'll get the idea. Essentially what Bach has done in this Fugue is that he's going to have three subjects come in you can almost think of them like melodies and then there's going to be counter subjects that respond to it with movement and opposition and he specifies in essence by writing down music everything in advance to create this incredibly rich composition together.It starts with this first subject, which is the alto part, which you'll hear here. And I'll just play it—it's very elegant and simple. We'll use a Steinway grand piano sound so you can get the idea.[Piano playing]Elegant. Simple. And then the soprano in the right hand is going to play that subject as well—the second subject—in the very next set of measures. And it goes like this.[Piano playing]And while it's doing that, we're going to have the left hand introduce the counter subject that's going to move in opposition.And at this point, it's still in that alto range, but I'll let you hear what it sounds like, and then we'll put them together.[Piano playing]Okay, let's put it together with the right hand so you can start to get a sense for how they're interweaving and responding and moving in opposition to each other to understand that interdependence. [Piano playing]So you can see how the counter subject—it's literally moving in opposition in many ways to that subject and it's starting to create this real richness. And just a bit later then we're going to get a third subject that's going to be in the base part in in the left hand again—it's that repeat of the melody if you will. And then the right hand of course will be doing its own counter subject at that time and you're going to start to get a really cool exposition as these three parts start to play with each other in intricate interdependent ways that optimize the overall composition. Rather than play each of the parts, I'm just going to play the whole together just a little bit of it so you can start to see the beauty of that interdependence.[Piano playing]You get the idea.Now, on the other hand, sometimes we're not worried about the raw performance or functionality of something. What we really in those instances want is speed and customization, personalization, and really the ability to improvise within all the different components.And there you need a modular architecture—where the ways that these different parts come together—the interfaces—are specified in advance in very tight ways. In other words, how they fit together, very predictable ahead of time. No surprises. But a lot of freedom within the different parts themselves on the other side of the interfaces to really freelance and customize and make sure that you can meet different demands and so forth.There’s no right or wrong way to be on these different spectrums—interdependence versus modularity.When we're talking about modularity, instead of an IBM mainframe, we're thinking about a Dell personal computer. Instead of an Apple iPhone, we're thinking about an Android phone. Much more modular architectures that allow for customization.Now, of course, we can illustrate this again through music.And in this case, you probably know where I'm going, but jazz—the ultimate in customization through improv. And I'm going to use a specific type of jazz composition to really show modularity. I picked out a piece here called Little Sunflower. It's written by the great trumpeter Freddie Hubbard. And it's what we call a modal piece—almost sounds like modular—in the key of D minor Dorian.And basically what that allows me to know is that in the bulk of the music, when we're in D minor, I can play any note in that D minor Dorian scale as I'm improvising. And the note, it's going to work. There's a clean interface, which gives me a lot of freedom to improvise with melodies in the scale itself and have some fun.Now, when I go into the bridge, there's going to be a D major for four bars and an E flat Lydian first for four bars, and then those will repeat.So I'll work through those.But just to give you a sense for how Hubbard really creates these modular interfaces, I prerecorded a simple baseline on the D minor Dorian, just so you can get a sense of the texture of that, what we're going to lay down over which we can improvise and what it sounds like.So let's go ahead and mute these drums and we'll play this baseline.[Bass line playing]You get the idea. Very straightforward, simple.And then we're going to just add some drums on top of that. It would really be a Latin, medium Latin sort of groove if you were playing it. But just for the sake of this, I just chose a simple rock beat just so you can get the idea of how these two parts come together. I put this together ahead of time. This is what it sounds like.[Music playing]You get the idea.And then the melody is going to go on top of that. And we'll choose a basic classic electric piano. And I'll do a little vamping in the left hand because the interface is clear. I know I can play different variations of D minor chords. And the right-hand melody is going to sound very simple.It's just... I'll play it in fourths just to give it a little bit more texture. And again i can do that with a melody because it's a modular interface. I know as long as I stay within the D minor Dorian no problem it gives me a lot of room for improvisation. And what I'll do is I'll play the basic melody with the drums and bass behind it and then I'm just going to start improvising earlier than you normally would just to give you a sense of how this modular architecture allows you to really customize, improvise in the different parts themselves and create a very cool piece, very different from Bach and that interdependence, but awesome in its own way as well and far more customizable.So let's lay those first eight bars down and then I'll start to improvise.[Music playing and fade]The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.

Often, incumbent leaders recognize well in advance that they’re being disrupted by a new innovation but feel powerless to make the changes needed to survive.In other words, they’re held captive by their pre-existing business model. In this video, I use music as a vehicle for explaining why organizations respond to threats with such rigidity and how they can be more nimble when it matters most.One of the biggest challenges that successful organizations have is surviving disruption.When they see a disruptive innovation afoot, they know that if they don't do something, they're going to get overrun by it, potentially in the long run.But responding to disruption is hard because it just doesn't feel natural.Remember those newspapers we all used to read back at the turn of the century? They saw online news coming and they're like, we've got to do something.But they just didn't know what.And they were in essence held captive by their existing business model. We've seen what's happened to so many newspapers since then.So how do you survive disruption and even thrive or pioneer the disruptive innovation yourself? How does an existing organization do the disruption?Clark Gilbert did some really important research years ago, looking actually at the newspaper industry. And what he saw is that the first thing you have to do when you see a potentially disruptive innovation is that you have to frame it as a threat.Why is that?Because framing it as a threat will motivate you to throw resources at the problem and really take it seriously. So the first thing to do is to frame it as a threat.And the way I like to think about that so I can get in that threat mode is you think of like that disruptive innovation, it's coming at you. It's like the Imperial March from Star Wars. Darth Vader's coming at you and you have to do something. (music playing)You get the idea. But here's the problem.If you leave it in that threat framing, then the organization gets super rigid. So you're motivated. You have the resources to tackle the problem. You're ready to go against Darth Vader. But now you're also kind of like Darth Vader. You're trying to move in that hard shell, awkward suit. You're super rigid. And you see a lot of command and control behavior in organizations when they leave it in a threat framing. A lot of top-down leadership, classic Darth Vader sort of stuff.And Clark Gilbert called this threat rigidity.And the problem with threat rigidity is this: You see the threat, you framed it as such, and you're dedicating resources to it. I mean, after all, Darth Vader's coming at you. But if you become rigid with those resources, it's the exact wrong response.Because no one at this stage knows what the disruptive innovation should really look like yet. How should it work? How will it help consumers? How do we design it? How do we structure the business?And so to figure all of that out, you need to be the opposite of rigid. You need to be nimble. That means lots of fast testing of key assumptions, learning from those tests, and then iterating.So the question then obviously is like, how do you become nimble? And so it turns out that after playing the Imperial March and galvanizing the resources, you then need to do a reframe to see this disruptive innovation as an opportunity.Think A Million Dreams from The Greatest Showman.Because the question should turn into this. Disruption is going to happen. So why don't we do it?And to frame it as an opportunity, Clark Gilbert found that you need to build an independent, loosely connected organization and empower that small group of individuals to go and explore and pioneer the disruptive innovation.Because why not close your eyes and see that the world will only wait for you if you go out and allow an independent group to seize the opportunity for innovation.The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.

A false dichotomy has formed in the education world: rote practice versus project-based learning. As in music, it’s important to both drill the knowledge & skills AND pull it all together into a cumulative performance.Thanks for reading The Future of Education! This post is public so feel free to share it.I have a confession. When I was a kid, food fights, I kind of got the appeal. But as an adult, not so much.Yet we have food fights all the time in education. And we pit things against each other that I don't think are actually diametrically opposed to each other. Here's a classic one. Have you ever heard an educator say, no more drill and kill? It’s not good for kids! And while what they might mean is they don't want someone doing just busy work for its own sake on something that they've already mastered, what they also often mean is that they don't think it's important for someone to work repeatedly at a foundational skill to really ingrain it in their long-term memory.On the other side, you'll get the people who just say, no project-based learning. I don't want students learning projects, just direct instruction. None of this inquiry-based learning or anything like that. And what I think they mean is that there has to be something substantive in the learning. It can't just be a whiz-bang project masking as learning. They really also need to learn the knowledge underlying something and automate these things. But what they're also saying is that why you're learning something, its relevance, I'm not sure it matters, is what they're saying. That putting these things into larger context, not that important.And to think about how absurd these two poles are, all you gotta do is think about music. Learning piano, for example. Like, do you think that it's not important to learn scales? (music playing)Maybe it's not important to practice, say, your octaves? (music playing)You get the idea, right? But what about practicing some different patterns for jazz or something like that? (music playing)Is that not important? I mean, you know, yes, it's meat and potato stuff, but it's critical for foundations. And yeah, it's kind of drill and kill. And yet it turns out that it's pretty important to commit your times table to long-term memory for more advanced math and science and engineering.But now here's the thing, if you told most people, hey, the only thing that you're gonna learn this year is scales, because trust me, scales, like those are really important, they're not gonna do that. They want a project, they want a performance, they wanted the scales to be a part of a whole. And like, I'm willing to do the work, but most kids, not all, but most, they want it to be for a reason. They want that relevance. And that's the performance. They want to work on those patterns and scales and octaves so that they can play something like this. (music playing)Or so that they can play something like this. (music playing)You get the idea, right? And look, they don't want that performance or that project to be the dessert. No, they want it to be the main course. It's the purpose. The repetitive practice, the drill and kill—that's also so I can build the muscle memory and the muscles and automate my skill set so that I can then play those pieces and express myself.But it isn't one thing or the other. As with so much in education, rather than an “or,” we need to move to a both-and. And see that at some points, look for a novice, like one set of exercises to build a foundation, that's going to be critical. Like the performance for a novice isn't going to be one of those pieces I just played, but maybe something simpler like this. And look, maybe if, you know, I'm not an expert, maybe I'm, you know, or if I am an expert, maybe I'm not doing sort of simple exercises like this. (music playing)But maybe I am—even in the beginning just to warm up—because both the drill and kill and the projects are important.And let's be real. Tell me that LeBron James is not spending time drilling his free throws and working on his mechanics, but he's also scrimmaging and playing games.The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.

Danny and I enjoyed recording this live episode on the Substack app last Friday. It was fun interacting with all who joined! To that end—to join us for our next live video in the app, click the link below from your mobile device.Paid subscribers also get access to the recording of the conversation—so enjoy!The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.