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

Diane Tavenner and I have launched a sixth season of Class Disrupted! In our welcome back episode, we talked through my newest book, the bestseller Job Moves: 9 Steps for Making Progress in Your Career. We also mapped its implications back to K12 schools and students through Diane's startup, Futre.me.Thanks for reading The Future of Education! Please share this post with folks who will benefit from it!Here’s what ChatGPT thought were the top 5 takeaways. We look forward to your thoughts!* Schools must prioritize agency and self-discovery for students rather than seeing colleges or careers as something "chosen" for them* Help students identify what drives their energy and the capabilities they are developing as part of their education* Treat career exploration like a learning and design process* Teach students to evaluate return on investment of different pathways—in terms of money and time* Leverage tools that support lifelong career navigation, not just in-school navigationDiane Tavenner:Hey, Michael.Michael Horn:Hey, Diane.Diane Tavenner:It is really good to be back for a sixth season, and it's especially good because I'm recording in person with you.Michael Horn:We always treasure those times when we actually get to be face to face, not in front of the video cameras. And that's another perk because, Diane, the other people in the audience listening to us, they don't have to see us. That's a good thing.Diane Tavenner:So some folks have been wondering if we were coming back for the sixth season, given how late it is in the school year. We wanted to just be transparent about what's going on. And so two things. First, we've always wanted to come back. We get tons of feedback and questions and suggestions that are totally awesome and interesting, and it just suggests to us that there's a lot of people across the education spectrum who are listening and getting some value. So we want to be here. And our roles have been changing and our schedules have been changing, and they're a little bit less predictable. And so there are just some logistics we've run into.But here we are. And excited to be here.Michael Horn:Yes, indeed. We're figuring it out. You have taken a new job over the last couple years, which will be directly applicable to today's episode, obviously. I teach in the fall, and then I've learned teaching while putting out a new book that we're going to talk about. It's just really busy, and I don't know if I would have repeated that if I had the chance, but now we're here in person, we're doing this, so let's talk.I would say our curiosity is really leading us to focus on some books that not just me, but other folks have coming out. And also artificial intelligence. AI is everywhere in the education landscape. People are asking a lot of big questions. Frankly, we are asking a lot of big questions. There are a lot of hot, polarized takes, and I think that's never been our thing, Diane.Diane Tavenner:No, I mean, you know we've always talked about our original motivation. And the reason we started this podcast is because we wanted to think about third way solutions. We wanted to think about bringing groups together for really meaningful, purposeful engagement and education and solutions - things that would move us forward. And so, you know, I think that combined with the fact that we both share a very strong belief that schools are in desperate need of redesign, I think maybe growing more desperate every day.Michael Horn:Maybe that is our hot take. But we're different from the poles in that way…Diane Tavenner:Right, right. And, you know, they have to change in order to meet the needs of today's learners as well as our society. And when the pandemic began, we both thought it would be finally this catalyst that we needed to accelerate the change. We thought we could maybe contribute to that by highlighting what learning could look like and elevating sort of third way perspectives and solutions for how to get there. I don't think either of us are satisfied with the progress that's been made since we started this several years ago. But we remain optimists and determined and so here we are.Michael Horn:Those are good words to use, I think, to describe how we both feel. It's also one of the reasons AI is so interesting to us, because we do think it's an important tool. And I'll say that again. It's a tool, not the ends. So do not expect us to talk about AI for AI's sake, but rather in the context of learning and the learning environments we create. And I'll say in all candor, as we start this season, like I don't think anyone really knows its ultimate impact. Anyone who does, they're lying because it's a lot of theorizing right now. I remain incredibly curious about it. I would say I'm very malleable still in my thinking.Michael Horn:Maybe "Malcolm Gladwellian," if you will, if that's a phrase. I don't know if I'm going to reverse everything I've ever thought, but I'm really curious about where it will and won't have impact. What's positive and negative about that, the timeframe over which it will happen and want to learn a lot about that. I will also say I think it's important to note because it's on the minds of a lot of folks. We are obviously statement of the obvious about to have a change in federal leadership and the President and the administration. And there are a lot of questions, of course, about how that might influence or impact what's happening in education as well.Diane Tavenner:Yeah, and I think one of the things we do is we lean into topics that arise and certainly, you know, there's stuff that's going to be coming our way and when we think that we can bring a useful perspective or make a contribution, we, we get together and talk about it. And so I think we can expect some of that over the next year. We're not exactly sure what it will be, but I think we can expect it. And then I think finally, you've always spanned K-12 higher ed and workforce. My work continues to expand as well. And so I think we'll always or continue to center K-12.You know, we hope to help folks see all of the connections between these, you know, sometimes siloed elements of education and learning, because there really is a bigger, broader picture and set of connections.Michael Horn:I'm glad you've come over to the dark side of not just K-12, but, you know, look, K-12 at some level is a dependent system on higher ed in the workforce, and those are extraneous macro conditions that impact what K-12 is preparing students for. So it's a really important conversation to frankly set the context for our schools.Diane Tavenner:Totally. And so with all of that context studying as we launch this new season, I am really excited for this first conversation. Michael, your new book came out literally yesterday as of recording time, and I really wanted the opportunity to interview you about it. We had such a fun interview this summer with David Yeager around his. His book that came out 10 to 25.And I just wanted to do a reprise, you know, like, how do we do that again with your book? You being you, when I suggested this, you said it should be a co-interview. And I was like, I don't have a book coming out.But you rightly pointed out that your book is so related to the work that I'm doing and this is new work for me. At first I thought, you know, well, I don't know. And then I really read the book and I was like, okay, this. This could be interesting. Usual. You were right. So we're going to have this kind of hybrid book talk today.Michael Horn:Well, you actually were showing me a version of the product platform that you're building. And I was like, holy cow, we did it again! Unintentionally. We have wound up with a lot of similar insights. We come there different ways. We do, but we often find ourselves in these places of convergence.Diane Tavenner:Yes, indeed. It’s awesome.Well, let's start with some basics. Your newest book is called "Job Moves: 9 Steps for Making Progress in your Career." You have two co-authors on this one, so Ethan Bernstein and Bob Moesta. And the book was released on November 19th. And so I guess my first question to you is, why? Why do you decide to write this book and why is it so important, especially given this moment that we're living in? Like even more important than when you started writing it, I think.Michael Horn:Yeah so I will say there's a personal story to that and then there's like the story of why we think this is the right book for the moment. And I'll lean into that second one for a moment because what we saw obviously during the COVID pandemic was the great resignation in the United States. We saw literally unprecedented numbers of people leaving jobs, trying to make progress in their lives and then frankly, unprecedented numbers of them really dissatisfied with the moves that they had just made. And I'll say 1 billion people roughly every year worldwide switch jobs. In the US we switch jobs every four years. And we have a lot of evidence, according to Gallup, Pew others that at least 2/3 of the workforce in the jobs they are presently are completely disengaged, quiet quitting, whatever you want to call it. And so our basic sense, I think is that we make progress at some level by switching jobs, but it does not line up with how companies think about progression.And we want to help empower people to realize you get to hire your next job, treat it like product development, prototype what you could be doing and figure out the trade offs you're going to make. Like what's a better or worse fit for you so that you can get the progress that you're really prioritizing. So that's where we've landed and why I think it's so important. And we've obviously pitched. You know, we talked last year on this, on this season about your own switch. But like, just to remind folks, you started thinking, "Hey, college for all is not the narrative either." Careers in K-12 schools and the jobs and what people like doing is a really important thing to start figuring out. So maybe talk about that as well.Diane Tavenner:Well, first of all, all that really resonates for me and it's just, it's stuff I know, but when you just lay down all those stats that way, it just is a really profound, it's so important. That's why we're doing this work. So here's what I would say. One of the fun parts of being in a startup is that I get to spend a lot more time with young people than I did when I leading a much bigger organization. And you know, over the last year we've been working directly with high schools and their students to build Future, the Future Platform, which is a life navigation platform and it's really designed for right now, young people, ages 15 to 25. And you know, our small team is made up of college interns and recent college grads. We're building for this group.We need to, you know, be this group, except for a couple of us sort of older and grayer folks. And working with them has been so fun and inspiring and enlightening. And you know, we set out to build Future because we didn't think anything like it existed. So as you're going through your list, you're like, there's all this reality and we don't think, you know, when we look around we're like, how do high school and college students figure out what life they want to lead and what careers will enable that life and how to connect that to the day to day decisions and activities they're engaged in. Which, by the way, may very well be college. But college is a means to that end. It is not the end. And I think that's where we went wrong or went sideways for quite a while.And I'm saying "we" in the, you know, grander sense there. And so currently there's a bunch of technology that's designed to manage the process of applying to college. There's a bunch of websites, you can search for information on careers, but there's nothing that meets you where you are and kind of walks beside you for a decade plus as you figure out you are what you want, what the world has to offer, and where those two things intersect and meet. And so even though your job moves and future are focused on people at different ages and stages, one of the things I noticed immediately was that you identify four primary questions for why people seek to change jobs. And those seem to be so similar to the motivations of young people who I'm talking to and working with. And so let's talk about those four. Will you tell us about those four motivations and what you learned?Michael Horn:Yeah, absolutely. So we did the Jobs To Be Done methodology, I should say that, which is like, explains why people switch behavior. One of the big things is "Bitchin' ain't switchin." Just because you're complaining about something doesn't mean you're going to actually switch behavior. We want to see people who've actually made switches and then we code for the pushes and pulls. So the things that are driving them away from the status quo and I'm pulling you toward this new future. And then we cluster them. Okay, so four quests.First one, get out. These are people who are like, just ain't good. It's going nowhere fast. Managers, you know, we're not vibing. The job description is not working. I want to reset how my energy is being used and how my capabilities are being used. I need to find some place better and quick. The second quest is what we call regain control.And these are people who are really like. I actually like a lot of what I get to do on a daily basis, like how it uses my capabilities. But I don't like how it energizes or makes use of my time. I feel like that's out of control. This could be like I need more work life balance. It could be I actually want to figure out how or where I do like hybrid work. Right?Has become a big deal remote work. It could be that micromanaging boss. My energy's out of whack. The third one is what we call regain alignment. So these are people who basically say the opposite. I really like how my energy is being used in my time. But I'm feeling disrespected for the skills that I bring to the table and what they're being what I'm being asked to do. And then the last one, we call these folks to take the next steppers.This is I would say the closest thing to sort of climbing the career ladder or in our choosing college book, like get into the best college for its own sake. I have no idea why but like I just. That's what I'm supposed to do. And these are people that like actually I like my how my energy is being used. I like what I'm doing. Let's take that next step. I will say there's like U turns in this one as well. We profile some people where that is but it really is fundamentally for all these quests.And we'll get into this something that I've learned from you which is the “ings”—what you're doing, not what the title is and the perks in the surface level. Like does what you do on a daily basis really line up with the things that give you energy and are the skill sets that you're good at? And as you know, those are interdependent.Diane Tavenner:Totally. For those people who work in K-12 and specifically in high school, I and specifically with seniors in high school, I suspect they recognize a lot of connection there. So when I read these motivations I was like, oh my gosh. This is is describing high school kids. They want to get out. They're maybe not regaining or real control or realigning. They're doing it for the first time, really.Michael Horn:I think that's right. And we also, you've noted to me we don't really give high school students in our present design of schools the opportunity to, like, go deep in something and then be like, "Oh, I actually want to regain alignment because I've gone off somewhere." Right? Like, we don't actually give them those choices.Diane Tavenner:Right, right. But as you describe the energy, so many kids in high school are like, my energy is not here. This is not feeding me. Like, I. I could be out doing things, making money, you know, and I don't feel respected. There's tons of high school kids who don't feel like what they can do and are capable of doing are being illuminated or highlighted. So I just saw so many connections there, and I thought it was such a great way to start the book. We're going to get very practical here, but let's spend a couple of moments on the research.There's a ton of research. Oh, my go, gosh, buckets of research underlying your book. And the same is true for our platform as well. So let's just spend a couple of minutes on some of those key points that really matter to you and connect to those nine steps with the, you know, journey. And again, I'll. I'll point out, I bet there's going to be some intersections there. But let's do that for a few moments.Michael Horn:Sounds good. So I'll just say, like, we actually... Ethan's a qualitative researcher. He's a professor at the Harvard Business School. Bob Moesta is the "Jobs to be Done" guy. He created the theory. He loves to do interviews. Over the course of a decade plus, we collected data on over a thousand individuals making the choice to switch jobs.And then Ethan designed an entire course around it, which allowed him to coach literally hundreds of people in lots of different career walks. Not just like your HBS students, because it was an exec online course. So, you know, they're construction workers. Like, it's a pretty wide range to actually start to build processes and protocols. And then Bob actually, when the pandemic hit, Clay Christensen died. This is the personal side of the story. And the three of us agreed within a few weeks to write the book with each other. Bob started prototyping with cohorts, actually coaching them through the process.And so we built a first process. He then improved it in a second step. Then a third step. He tried to break it by seeing how fast. What if we limited time? Like, how are all the ways we can purposely break it and then the fourth and fifth were like, let's put it back together with what we've learned. And that's what's in the book.Diane Tavenner:Yeah. That's awesome. And again, so parallels. You're doing this in a more analog version.Michael Horn:Yes. And you get to do it in a digital.Diane Tavenner:I'm doing it in a digital. But so, so, so similar. And, you know, I think what I'm drawing on is the research around how young people develop, the learning science behind that. The power of purpose in driving. You know, the striving for a good and fulfilled life. And that's all present in what you're doing.Michael Horn:And I would. Yeah. On that front. Right? Like, I would say, we pulled in a lot of those unintentionally throughout or maybe intentionally. Of purpose was a big one. Progress is really what jobs to be done is all about. That's connected.And then Ethan, obviously, being a professor at HBS and sort of the HR person has a mountain of research on a lot of stuff around. Like he's the transparency paradox guy. Like, when is that actually a good idea, when is it a bad idea and things of that nature. And so we got to pull all of that in as we were building these.Diane Tavenner:Yeah. Yeah. And I think what's cool is that, and this is a thing we're both committed to is that research for its own purpose is not useful.Michael Horn:Not very useful.Diane Tavenner:So we want it to always be applied. And so, you know, what we have, what we are building is the app is embodies the application of that research. And so we're very committed to the research, but in that real way. So let's just jump into a few of the steps. I'm not sure we'll get through all nine.Michael Horn:Let's not do all nine. Let's focus on the ones that are interesting for your purposes as well.Diane Tavenner:Okay. So I love this [second] step. Energy drivers and drains. And you just sort of alluded to it. But let's dig in a little bit more. It addresses so many of the challenges I have with traditional career coaching. So. Yeah.Michael Horn:Oh, boy. So I want to hear this on the back end because it occurred to me we wrote a book, for people, frankly, who've had at least one job and then the backward mapping of into the K-12 and higher ed processes I actually think is your platform does it pretty naturally. But this big first one is not a new idea. A lot of people have written about understand what energizes you, what drains your energy, how that changes based on context. You know, Bill Burnett, design your life like a lot of this stuff. Right? But what I think we did uniquely here is we want you to look at your. Your actual experiences and reflect on times when you were in flow and your energy was really turned on and it was building and so forth.And at past work where it was draining that energy. Now, for someone in the job market, we're looking at past jobs, past roles you've had. My sense is if you're a K-12 student, it's looking at the projects you do, the times you're in classes, the extracurricular activities you're involved with. And then I think this is where your ings come into Diane, and where you've built around this a little bit.Diane Tavenner:Yeah, yeah. I mean, so I think you're exactly right. So one of the things I notice and observe both in K-12, but also in anytime people are sort of coaching or helping people figure out career paths is it's a pretty common practice that they give people sort of this, what I would call a black box assessment that is somehow going to figure out what your aptitudes are or, you know, what you're going to like. But ED is a black box. People don't understand what's going on in that assessment. And what it usually spits out is either some very high level things like, you know, you're a whatever, or I'm not even thinking I'm a good whatever because I never pay attention to these things. But you know what I'm talking about.Michael Horn:Yeah. No, you said you ship to my class. Right? Like, you know, these. This is your fixed personality, so to speak. Or this is your fixed, you know, aptitudes.Diane Tavenner:Right?Michael Horn:And therefore you should be, you know, communicator. Right? Or you should be. Mine is like writer, private equity, like three others. Right? And you're like, what careers?And I mean writer. I guess it landed. But you know, when I might.Diane Tavenner:Well, when they get mortician, they're like, what? What are you talking about? For the most part. And so I don't like that black boxiness because the whole point is we're empowering individuals to figure out the life they want. And so what I love about this is they're actually reflecting on and thinking about things they've already done to apply them to the future.Michael Horn:Well, stay with it. Right? This is the big flip in the book, which is that most places think of job seekers as the supply side, like the, the available pool of talent and the jobs out there as the demand side. Companies demanding workers. Our notion is you flip that. That the individuals, right, have to actually learn about themselves so they can figure out what they are demanding.Diane Tavenner:Yes.Michael Horn:As they go seek out work and that they are the demand side. So it's a flip from labor economists, but it's what I've learned from you about the importance of agency, frankly, building this metacognition about what really makes you tick and then being able to pattern match well.Diane Tavenner:And this is exactly the flip I want high school students to have is I want them to, whether it be applying to college or the career they're thinking about, I want them to see themselves as the people who are making the choice. And I think one of the, you know, challenges that the College For All movement and exclusive colleges have created is that young people feel like they're just trying to get someone to pick them and that it's very arbitrary. And they don't, you know, they're. It's not clear what to do versus feeling totally empowered to be like, no, I'm gonna decide who I am and what I care about and then I'm gonna go find the fit for that. Totally. So I love this. Let's. Let's talk about another one.So there's this idea, and it's very connected, this idea of the career balance sheet and the assets and liabilities, which in my view is such a positive kind of flip from what we normally hear, which is like strengths and weaknesses. So talk about that contrast and what you're doing here.Michael Horn:Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, the big thing, right, is that again, this sort of strengths and weaknesses, which I like, I think is useful input and data, but it's a very fixed perspective on what an individual is. How many of you have taken Myers Briggs and like come out with a pro personality type and then realized, actually, in this situation I'm quite extroverted, and in this situation I get a little withdrawn and like, my introverted side comes out. And context is really important. Todd Rose talks about the context principle, right? And so our big thing. And then there's Carol Dweck's work around growth mindset that you can actually build capabilities over time. And so this is the big idea, right, is that we actually have these career balance sheets. Boris Groysberg, the professor at HBS, there's that research, came up with that idea.And basically what he said is that assets from an accounting perspective are resources that have future economic value that are acquired at cost. And so your capabilities, if you will, your assets are skills, your knowledge, your ability to do things, also your credentials and degrees and things of that nature that have value and they're acquired at a cost. And that's the liability side. What's the time and money it takes to actually learn that third language, if you will, to actually become a coder? These things don't happen magically, which is, I think, frankly, another weakness of a lot of these things is like, oh, you'll just learn these skills and do it and no one asks you, what's the trade off in terms of the time you have to invest. Oh, go be a doctor. Well, you gotta get through organic chemistry, at least in our present system.So is that gonna work for you, that investment? And so that, that's basically the idea. And then I guess the last thing I would say is we also want people to realize that these assets you build, they have a shelf life. They depreciate over time. Your degree will be a lot less valuable 30 years from now than it is when you first perhaps come out of college. Your technical coding skills, we know those are eroding faster than ever, thanks to AI, maybe even faster than that. And so what's the useful life of each of these assets you've built? And be like brutally honest with that and then really understand what are the trade offs of, like, where you want to go in developing your further assets? The last one, I'll say this, we talk a lot about the importance of social capital and network. It is, but those have shelf lives as well. Unless you're consciously reinvesting in them to build them up in the directions you want to go.Diane Tavenner:Totally. This is so aligned with how I have experienced some of the best folks across the country starting to talk to and engage with young people about their futures. And they're framing it in the language of ROI or return on investment. I think we're talking about the exact same thing here, which is this idea of like, we need young people to realize, like, whatever you're doing post high school, you are making an investment that is a liability.Michael Horn:When I saw that on your, in your platform, I was like, oh my gosh, like, alarm bell. I was like, this is the same thing. It's just a different age and stage.Diane Tavenner:It is. And so what we're trying to show them is like, think about not only your, your money, but your time, because that is your most precious resource.Michael Horn:That is your most precious resource. I mean, right when people talk a lot of times, and I'm now talking about adult learners, for example, about their lack of resources to, you know, they're working three jobs and they're trying to get the degree to get ahead. Time poverty is the biggest poverty they face.Diane Tavenner:Totally. Well, I mean, I feel that right now.Michael Horn:Right? We feel it right now. Yeah.Diane Tavenner:Literally. So we talk about that return on investment, like what do you, what can you spend and how quickly do you need to have that start paying off? Like what is it actually going to buy you? Buy a good return. Right? Like you've got to invest in assets that are going to get you the return you want. And I, I fear that a lot of young people don't even think about their time or their money into college as investments. And so there is no sort of plan to get a return on that. And as a result, so many are not getting a return on that investment. And so they're, they have massive debt, not just financial debt, but, but this sort of more skill, knowledge.Michael Horn:Yeah, I mean we call it like this is how careers go bankrupt when the liability side is bigger than the assets you've built and frankly are misaligned. And this is where these things are interconnected; misaligned to what gives you energy.Diane Tavenner:Yeah. This is so interesting. We could have a long conversation about how I feel like in education we've gone so far away from thinking about money and business that we've actually done a really significant disservice to everyone who's in it. And I kind of know why we maybe sort of went that way, but we went way too far. And I think we've got to, we've got to pull it back.Michael Horn:Yeah, yeah, I think that's right. I think it probably also explains some of the populations that have become more disaffected with schooling over the years. I'm thinking of males at the moment as one example, but I think these are all factors.Diane Tavenner:Yeah. One of the things I love about the book is that of course you're asking people to prototype the jobs and the careers that they want. And you know, you and I are both pretty obsessed with prototyping. We talk about it all the time. I was in your class yesterday, we were talking about prototyping and I think we're obsessed with it because it's so much smarter to spend time, you know, in a low stakes way, figuring out options and ideas and really sort of digging into them before you actually spend all this time and energy to get into them. And so talk about how you, how this comes to be and what it looks like in the job moves world.Michael Horn:Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think that's exactly right. What you just said is prototyping is how we learn. And so what we really want you to do in the book is get away from one of the biggest mistakes I think people who are looking for new jobs make is they think like, "Oh, I'm chasing the one job." And instead we want you to create divergent prototypes, like really far afield. You know, next role, same company, totally different company, same role. And then like different careers. Things I've always dreamed about, like, really go spread them wide, A so that you can start to understand and learn about many different careers and how what drives your energy and your capabilities, like back to those ing is what you like doing actually maps onto these different types of roles and start to flush them out.And I, I guess this is the next piece of it. We really want to help people learn before they switch, not afterwards.Diane Tavenner:Yes.Michael Horn:And to do so, as you know, there's all sorts of things you could do. Job shadowing, you know, the expeditions. Right? You had in Summit, right? Where you're actually spending real time with real professionals. All that is great. It's not always accessible to people. And so the other way we do it is suggest is informational interviewing. And this is a very different kind of informational interview from the one at least as a kid I went on where like, you know, my parents would say, like, "Oh, here's a friend of mine, you know, they're a journalist. Like, go do an informational interview with them." I had no idea what to say or ask in those conversations. But here what we want to say is like, you've done the reflection on what you want to do and what drives your energy. So figure out is what they do on a day-to-day, week-to-week basis. Where does it align and where does it not align? So you get a real sense of what it would be like to be in this job.And then the contrasts between these things start to create meaning about where do you want to go next? We, I guess we could talk about how to funnel it down. But I'm curious, like, you've built this out a little bit as well. Right? So how do you think about it?Diane Tavenner:Yeah, I mean, very aligned with what you're saying. And I think a key point I want to pick up on is like, people are really, you know, attuned to and focused on. And I think you're seeing more in high schools where people are trying to do More shadow days, more job fairs, more, you know, company visits or employer visits, more informational interviewing. And I think you just made a really important point that we're focused on, which is those things are all great, but they're not nearly as good if you go into them cold and not knowing what to ask or not what you want to learn for them from them.It's not as good for you. It's not as good for the people who you are with. And so one of the things we're doing in the platform is helping young people really do exploration before they get into those experiences so they can make the most of them. And I think your whole steps, your sequence, really helps people get ready for those experiences so they make the most of them. And in our case, you know, we have 868 careers that. And there are all these really thoughtful ways to explore them and figure out, like, what parts of this career are you going to like that match up with who you are and your ings and what you like doing. And so you go into those, those experiences and conversations with a lot more knowledge and with, with what you actually want to figure out coming out the other side and then reflect on. And I think then you talk about moving into ranking those prototypes, which is, which we're moving towards as well.And I'm curious, like, what, what does that look like? And then, you know, if people open up really wide, how do they then, you know, bring that back and converge, which is another concept you've got in here.Michael Horn:Yeah, absolutely. And I'll try to cover it quickly and then ask like, how you guys do it. But also one of the questions that's always on my mind about doing this in the K-12 environment versus where we are doing it, where like someone's theoretically anyway going to try to find a job within the next few weeks or month or something like that. So the way we do it is you have these energy drivers and you have these capabilities and we've had you bucket them right into the must have the ideally would have and like, okay, I can live without. But, you know, all things being equal, it'd be pretty sweet if it did this too. And then we have you rank these different prototypes and your current job on all of these dimensions. You can think about it of a scale to 1 to 10. And then we've got on jobmoves.com, this really simple Google sheet that will literally multiply it out to give you a mathematical answer.But I think a lot of people frankly have a gut feeling after they've gone through this and you start to realize one of these prototypes or maybe your current role really is hitting most of these critical must have things that you'll be doing. Again, emphasis on the doing, right? That is so important to you and that's how you learn to your point, I love that point. This learning agenda, that's how you start to learn, is you start to use the rank your prototypes so that you can converge and say, this is the one or two things I'd really love to get out in the market now and go find for what I could do next. So we hope the math helps. The force ranking of, you know, I'm on an, I'm an eight on working with people, but I'm a two on leading meetings. You're probably pretty high on leading meetings, I suspect.And so right? And we understand how that role, you know, fills in against it. You know, people should check it out. I didn't explain that correctly, but I think when they check it out, you'll start to see how it works and gives you information about yourself at this moment in time because it changes. So that's the question I want to ask you is like, how do you do the convergence but also how do you do the fact that like people are changing quite a bit when they're still in high school? And also the world of jobs is changing so rapidly. Like we have it easy, right? Because that job, presumably it exists. Yours, like it could be totally different in five years from now because of AI and automation.Diane Tavenner:It could be. And so that's why I think knowing yourself and who you are and what you care about will always matter a lot because then it's a matter of matching up with what a world is offering today, tomorrow, in the future. And so that underlying piece of knowing who you are and in a really granular level, like what gives you energy or what doesn't, or what do you like doing or, you know, all those things is so critical. But we've got a experience we call Compare. One of the things we heard is just let us take two careers side by side after we've done some exploration and then compare them to each other. And there's a couple of things going on here. You know, we're, we're sort of showing a framework for how you can do analysis about the exploration you've done, which it sounds like, you know, you're using some math and some ranking. We're doing something similar. And then the sort of head to head of one versus the other really does illuminate what is more important to me than other things.And it sort of gives some, some credibility to those gut instincts, like you said, or at least makes you talk through them and, and articulate what's going on for you there.Michael Horn:And so I think that's right. And this is, I think, the big thing that our book does. Like there's other books that have a lot of these notions in them. "Design your Life" is, I think, both of our, you know, one of our favorites. But I think what we really want to help people do is figure out how you make the trade offs because there's no job that's perfect. And so we want you to visibly see, oh man, if I take this job, I'm going to have to lead some meetings. But you know what? I'm willing to trade off on that because of all these amazing things I got that are at the top of my list. That's a trade off I'm willing to make.Or the one that Bob loves to always say is, man, I'm going to have to have an hour and a half commute, but it's more money or do I want less money and like it's five minutes from my door. These are real tradeoffs that like you've got to figure out and you have to do it relative to the things that you most want to get in your next role.Diane Tavenner:Totally. And so Michael, where do they go from there in your process after we're sort of converging and we've done this analysis, just bring us home.Michael Horn:Yeah, I'll try, I'll try to whip through the final few steps quickly for our, for our audience, Diane. But essentially this is all the demand side, right? We're doing a ton of demand side work around what you want and the trade offs you're willing to make. So now we switch to the supply side. What jobs actually exist. We're going to start looking at postings, we're going to use those interviewing techniques to actually talk to real people and use our network because it turns out 70% of jobs are filled by a network, someone in your network. And the reality, I think, with AI is that's going to become more in the years ahead. I think social capital is going to get more important.And so we then help you find those jobs, unpack what they really mean. Are they actually what you think they are? We teach you to tell your story through Pixar. All this reflection you've done you need to be able to explain it in an elevator pitch. We help you with that and then we help you. The final step is just a personal cheat sheet so that you know in a really easy way what makes you tick, the work environments where you're most likely to be successful. But it's also something that if it's not too Millennial or Gen Z, you can share with people around you so they know where you're excellent. And frankly, like, you know, you know, a bunch of my weaknesses, we all have them.Like, let's be honest with them. This is where I'm not as good. And can you build other people on the team that are awesome at it? Because frankly, my energy is such that I'm probably never going to really lean into that. Let's be asset based as opposed to deficit minded.Diane Tavenner:Yeah, I love so much about that. The, the last quick thing, I had an amazing mentor who always says, like, you know, people spend all this time trying to improve the things that they're not good at, rather than doubling down on the things that they are good at and being great at that, you know,? So I favor that approach.I will just say, you know, for those who've listened for a long time, you know that my son graduated from college in the spring and he spent the summer working for the Aspen Institute, and then he joined as a field organizer of the Presidential campaign. So he's just coming off of that. And I ordered the book for him, Michael, because I think it's like such a perfect moment and way for him to approach this. And it's funny because so many people really respect what he did. I mean, field organizing is no joke. And they're like, wow, he probably has a lot of skills and a lot of knowledge, and it's just like swimming around there.And I think this process is going to be really amazing for him to make sense of it and figure out where he wants to go next. And so I'll report back, but I'm excited to see how he progresses through that.Michael Horn:Well, thank you. I hope it's a positive one. And I hope for folks listening also that if they check it out for themselves or frankly, if they're trying to retain a team at a school or a nonprofit, they can use it that way. Or frankly, that they get to see how it maps onto what you've built at Futre at Futre.Me right? Because it's an incredible resource. Obviously, you are architecting for kids that they get to keep with them as they leave high school, which is so important. So let's use that as a segue.You bought the book for Rhett. I appreciate that. What are you reading or listening to or watching? Let's wrap us up there.Diane Tavenner:That's great. Well, I have read a ton since we last talked, but the thing I'm immersed in right now is "Nexus" by Yuval Harari. And I will say that I am a big fan of his writing. And because it really provokes me to think differently. I feel like he tells stories and that are very relevant and very current in a way that I'm like, "Oh, I hadn't really thought about it that way or looked at it that way. And this is no different. It feels like very appropriate to this moment in time. And then you burst my bubble a little bit and told me about how he was being brutally attacked for his research.And so I did some looking at that as well, and, you know, that's a longer conversation, but I'm going to stick with it. I think the book is really provocative, especially in this moment as we are coming off an election and into a new administration. And thinking about social media and the media in general and information. Super, super!Yeah. Making me think a lot. Yeah. How about you?Michael Horn:No, that makes sense. That makes sense. And look, I think at the very least, he helps us ask big questions.And that's the theme of what I was going to bring to you, which is that I've been trying to ask better questions, to listen, better not interrupt as much. It's sort of been a New Year's resolution of mine. And so I've read a trio of books around that. First is "Ask: Tap into the Hidden Wisdom of People Around You." You have it there for unexpected breakthroughs in leadership in life by our good friend Jeff Wetzler at Transcend. This is not about his work at Transcend, but it's an incredibly good book around asking questions and approaching problems with curiosity.And then I read Hal Gregerson's book from, I think it was 2018, where it's called "Questions Are the Answer: A Breakthrough Approach to Your Most Vexing Problems at Work and in Life." Great book as well.And then I'm rereading the book that I suspect you like as well, which is "Never Split the Difference" by Chris Voss.Diane Tavenner:Love, Chris.Michael Horn:So good. So good. And I felt like his Masterclass is amazing. I just felt like, okay, I need a refresher on this, because a lot of the stuff that, like Amanda Ripley and others write about in terms of deep listening and frankly, the jobs to be done approach that underpins job moves is all around that deep listening of, like, what is someone really saying and really understand on their terms. So that's what I've been reading.Diane Tavenner:So cool. I like how you got those all piled in. You know, you, you, you slipped three into one.Michael Horn:I'm going thematic, which gives me license. And, hey, it's our show, so we get to do what we want. But for all you tuning in, thank you for doing so. We look forward to the season to come, 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.

Geordie Hyland, president and CEO of the American College of Education, joined me to talk about how ACE is helping more educators earn degrees with less student debt. We discussed the college’s laser focus on learning, implementation of credit for prior learning, and the role of employers.Michael Horn:I am delighted that you're all joining us on the show 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. And to help us think about this today, I'm delighted because I've got a longtime friend whose career I have followed through his different stops along the way. His name is Geordie Hyland. He's currently the President and CEO of the American College of Education, which we're going to learn a lot about today. But, Geordie, so good to see you. Thanks for joining us.Geordie Hyland:Yeah, thanks for having me. And I've been a big fan of yours over the years. I'm a big fan of your podcast and your work, so it's really an honor to be speaking to you today.Thanks for reading The Future of Education! Please feel free share this post so more can benefit from the insights from this conversation. The Founding Story of American College of EducationMichael Horn:So, you're the doer, so let's dive in. Tell folks about the American College of Education, ACE, what you do, you know, who you serve, how you do it. Because I suspect while it's a really neat story, I suspect it's not one that many people have heard.Geordie Hyland:Okay, well, appreciate the opportunity to do that. So American College of Education, we refer to it internally as ACE. I do think it's a unique institution in higher ed, and we're really trying to get the word out to students, but I think it also has a unique model that's relevant to other higher ed institutions. So it was founded in 2005 with the original premise of offering a Master's less than $5,000 to teachers. And there was a founding decision, not even though it's HLC accredited, Higher Learning Commission accredited, not to accept Title 4 loans. And so I think with. With the original premise and with that founding decision, we've really scaled over time with those guiding principles in mind. So we're at about 11,000 students right now, and we offer programming in education to teachers, but also in healthcare, nursing, and business. And we've really been focused on quality, flexibility, and affordability. And so that affordability combined with quality is key. And currently our Masters are less than $10,000. Our Ed.Ds are less than $24,000. We have a wide range of programming. For example, in education, we can take paraprofessional all the way to a superintendent and everything in between. And I think what is remarkable and something that I wanted to talk about today is the student outcomes. So we have about 85% graduation rate. We have, in States where our students are taking licensure exams, they meet or exceed the state averages. And one of the things that really differentiates us with our focus on working adults that are working full time while they're studying with us is the majority of our students pay as they go, and 85% of them come out with no debt. And in the larger context of higher ed, where there's $1.6 or $1.7 trillion, I can't keep track. There's a lot of federal student loans outstanding, and the average debt rates for a Master's degree student from studies I've seen is about $83,000 and PhD students is about $125,000. I think it's very differentiated and very remarkable that our students come out, 85% of them with no debt and in great standing to be able to proceed in their careers, receive salary adjustments, and really benefit from the experience.Disrupting Educator EducationMichael Horn:Wow. Okay, so there's a lot there that's, I think, super interesting that we can unpack together. But the under $10,000, right, for a Master's degree, the principled decision not to take federal financial aid, meaning students are by definition not going to go into certainly student loan debt from the federal government, maybe they have some private loans. But 85% of your grads graduate with no debt whatsoever, and you have an 85% grad rate. And you're an online program, which means you're much more convenient and accessible. It seems to me like you're sort of fitting into this definition of disruptive innovation that we think. Right? Lower cost, more accessible, more convenient.But you've done it not just around that, but around a value proposition where you're actually delivering on these student outcomes together. I'd love to just hear you sort of riff on that for a little bit. And you know, I guess the corollary is like, it's nice to be a disruptive innovation, but why does it matter? Why? Assuming you think it is.Geordie Hyland:Yeah, why? When I think about disruptive innovation, I go to Dr. Clayton Christensen's book and your important work in the area. And so seeing as you actually wrote the book or a couple books on this, I feel kind of funny talking about it, but I'll give it my best shot in terms of. So when I think about it with disruptive innovation, that the new innovation needs to be convenient and it needs to be affordable. And over time, it moves up market and starts to disrupt an incumbent that is less nimble. And I think another characteristic that's really important is that it brings more consumers into the market that wouldn't previously be interested in that product or service. So at a high level, that's kind of what comes to mind for me. I know there's a lot more behind the theory and in your analysis around it, but that's ACE to me. I mean, when I think about ACE, we've really had the discipline to remain affordable. We haven't raised our prices since 2016 in the larger context of huge tuition inflation. And then we're really committed to credit for prior learning. So we often can, where it's appropriate, provide college credit for professional development for students as they come in or for previous learning to further bring down the costs. And so over time, our net tuition has actually decreased over the last few years. And obviously with the fully online modality that's very convenient for working adults. So our typical student is a working teacher, a working nurse that's working full time, has family commitments that's able to do this while they have lots of life issues going on and then they receive a tangible benefit at the end, typically with more career opportunities and a salary adjustment. So that's very differentiated than the traditional model where a student would have to take time out, they'd have to travel into a bricks and mortar location. And it's just a very, I think a less convenient model traditionally. But I think we're also changing the paradigm with not accepting Title 4 loans and creating a model that's based upon pay as you go, keeping the prices down so our learners are able to do that and for the majority come out with no debt. So to your second question about why it's important. I think that within higher ed right now, I mean I'm a huge believer in the benefit of higher ed. I think that higher ed has such an important place in society. Lots of studies have shown that there's huge benefits to the individual, to society, to all sorts of things. But I think there's elements of higher ed right now that should be disrupted. And one piece of that is the reliance on debt. As I mentioned before, $1.7 trillion of outstanding federal loans, the average debt rates of $83,000 for a Master's, $125,000 for a PhD. Those debt levels can be catastrophic in terms of the impact on individuals lives as they build their career following graduation. There's life decisions like buying a house, starting a family that can lead to mental health issues. There's all sorts of knock down effects with those sorts of debt levels. And I think it makes it challenging for higher ed. Institutions to show the value proposition when there's this addition of the student debt. So one of the things that we've really been able to do in a compelling way is show the ROI for our students. We've worked with Lightcast, which is a market research firm. They looked at the earnings and the data on our graduates, and they calculated that for every $1 a student invests in our tuition, they receive $19.20 in future career earnings. And that's huge. I mean, that's a very tangible metric in terms of what students can expect. And I think that in my opinion, there's huge swaths of higher ed that really are focused on institutional ROI rather than the student ROI. They're not adequately tracking the graduate earnings and career pathways, and they're not as aligned to the, to the business community as they could be in support of their students. There's been a number of studies. I could point your listeners to a couple that I think are really interesting onthis. One is from the Wall Street Journal recently.It was called “Colleges Spend like There's No Tomorrow. These Places Are Just Devouring Money.” That's an interesting one. It studies the 50 major public institutions and it shows that with data looking at their financial statements that they're really not focused on - while the tuition has been going up - the focus in terms of their expenses hasn't been on teaching and learning. It's been on facilities, amenities, more administration, and sports coaches. And another recent study which is really interesting from Georgetown, it's called “Graduate Degrees:Risky and Unequal Paths to the Top.” And it shows that the graduate tuition has increased significantly over the last 20 years and challenges around that. So following that release, we actually called for higher ed institutions that are graduate granting to have a freeze on their tuition for the next five years. As I mentioned, we haven't raised our tuition since 2016. And I really believe there's a place for more higher ed institutions to focus on the teaching and learning, really bring more discipline to their expenses in the interest of the student to try to bring the cost down.ACE’s Secret: A Focus on LearningMichael Horn:There's so much there that's, I think, differentiated, stands out, right? Is really focused on the student and making sure that they get ahead. I mean, that ROI, you listed every $1 of tuition, $19.20 in return, I've got to ask, like, what's the secret sauce? Like, how are you getting outcomes like this? Because, you know, in other online programs, you know, if they graduate 50% of students, we say that they're doing an amazing job for working adults, you are at 85% and getting these sorts of outcomes, like, what's the secret sauce?Geordie Hyland:Well, so I think there's a number of elements to it. I mean, first of all, we have fantastic students that are great students that see the value in coming to us and are really dedicated to the academic, the academic journey. But from an institutional perspective, we really do focus on the teaching and learning. We're focused, since founding, on the value proposition of students. We have a centralized curriculum model. We spend a lot of time on training our faculty, on investing in the process for building their curriculum with our SMEs and with our internal instructional designers, and then on supporting the students throughout their journey. We also are very committed to continuous improvement. We leverage a lot of data to continue to over time, constantly and relentlessly looking at how students are performing and how we can better support their success. And the budgeting process with us is very rigorous. I mean, we're with not increasing tuition since 2016, but with growing over time. You know, we're growing typically 20% a year. We have ratios in terms of our staff to students for some of the positions. And we also have invested heavily in our platforms and our technology. But we really have a lot of discipline in terms of what we invest in and in terms of innovating and trying new things. We pilot a lot of things and then we have a succeed or fail fast approach where if things aren't working, we're proactive in terms of, okay, let's shut this down and focus on another pilot. And that's our approach to innovation.Striking the Balance with Credit for Prior LearningMichael Horn:Gotcha. No, it's just, it really does stand out. And I guess the other piece of that is you said credit for prior learning, your net tuition has decreased over time. Yes, I guess I have two questions on that. One, it strikes me that a lot of institutions, they'll give a lot of lip service to credit for prior learning, or frankly credit from credits earned at another institution, but it feels not really in their business model or their faculty's interest to do so. And so they sort of make it hard and complicated. But then the second question, I guess is the corollary, which is like, how do you make sure you're not just giving credit for prior learning and becoming a diploma mill. Right?And just giving out degrees because it sort of gets people through quicker. Like, how do you balance those two things?Geordie Hyland:That's a great couple questions, and there's a lot to that, but I appreciate the question. So I think first of all, it's very consistent with our model of being focused on the student value proposition to have a well thought out approach to credit for prior learning. So as students come in, we're looking at their previouslearnings and assessing credit as appropriate. But we also have corporate partnership with professional development providers where we've looked across their professional development and then for the professional development as appropriate, we've provided pathways for credit into our programs. And I think there's a lot of benefit there to the student because it can shave off time, which is a huge value proposition to student and tuition cost in their journey with us. And so it's in the interest of the student. And I've often heard that there are barriers set up in a lot of higher ed to doing this effectively, but I don't think those barriers are in the best interest of the student when the credit is provided appropriately.In terms of our approach to that, we've set up an internal team. We have individuals focused solely on credit for prior learning. They're following the industry best practices, they're working across our academic and other teams to make sure that there's comfort in how we're assessing and providing credit for the prior learning. And so we're very comfortable with the process and with the fact that it's solely in the best interest of the student. If they already know the materials in a given area and they've put in the time and invested in it, it makes sense to provide the credit for them.Michael Horn:Yeah, it makes sense. And obviously I guess you see it in the licensure exams. Your graduates are having no problem graduating. So you know, you're not like reducing academic standards or something like that?Geordie Hyland:No, for sure. And we also see it in the employer satisfaction, over 90% in terms of their satisfaction with us. And we see that in the career progression of our graduates. Our graduates self report their first year salary increases and the latest data on that is in the first year across our degree programs, the average is over $20,000 in terms of that salary increase. So we're seeing a lot of value for the student and we're seeing a lot of value for the ultimate employers. So the school districts or hospital systems in them supporting our students as they get their degrees and continue to go on their employment journey with the employers.The Role of Employers in Higher Ed.Michael Horn:Well, so that's the next part I wanted to talk about, which is like the, the employers, you're graduating students into them, sometimes they're working and you're sort of elevating them within. How do you think about employers and their place in the higher education ecosystem? Maybe more generally or at a level of like philosophically. Right? What's the role of employers in higher ed?Geordie Hyland:Sure. So I think that given that there's a challenge with the value proposition of higher ed, it's important that higher ed works closely with employers to make sure that there's a close connection between the learnings and the career pathways of graduates so that the school experience can provide a pathway for, that's relevant for students into employers. So what that means for us is, I mean, we work incredibly closely with, with employers. Obviously we're working with working adults. So the stakes are high. We need to make sure, so we have advisory boards, we have lots of feedback loops. We need to make sure that our, our curriculum is, is as relevant as possible and as close as possible to job experience to enable our graduates to get ahead. We also have in many of our courses, job embedded learning opportunities where our students can work with their employers on actual assignments and projects. So that's one piece of it. We need to be very relevant for our adult learners. But then there's lots of other pieces to it that we're focused on. So we have partnerships with thousands of school districts and hospital systems where employees can come to us and receive an education as benefit, pay for our degrees, and then be reimbursed by their employer. Those are really important relationships. And again, very, you know, we spend a lot of time with those partners to make sure that we're supporting those relationships. So that's another piece. The professional development partnerships that we talked about with credit for prior learning, that's another really important piece where we work closely with corporate entities and then we are fortunate to serve the teachers and nurses.And in those industries there's a lot of shortages. So everyone that's listening, I'm sure, has read about teacher shortages, nursing shortages, and so we are very passionate about doing what we can to contribute to helping to solve or being a solution to that contributes positively to those shortages. So we, in the spirit of that, we work directly with the leadership of school districts and also hospital systems to provide bespoke solutions to help strengthen the human capital and to help those institutions better attract, retain and upskill their employees. So there's a number of levels on how we partner and support employers. And so it's very important to us, and I think it's hugely important to the value proposition overall for higher ed.Leveraging Elements of the Apprenticeship ModelMichael Horn:No, it makes a ton of sense. Okay, we could finish up in a couple different places here, but like, it's actually two more questions. So it seems to me, as you're describing this that you are not an apprenticeship model, but you actually have a lot of the features of an apprenticeship model. And what I mean by that is the students you're serving, they're often employed, not just in general, but like employed at the place that they might then continue to work as they upskill.Geordie Hyland:Right.Michael Horn:And so it strikes me that like, and you're giving credit for prior learning and like if they do something on the job, you can, you can give credit for that or work based learning. And so I, you know, teacher, excuse me. Apprenticeship degrees are getting a lot more attention right now.Geordie Hyland:Yeah, no, it's great to see.Michael Horn:But it seems like you are actually doing a lot of the features of an apprenticeship without the name. Am I, am I misreading it or do you.Geordie Hyland:No, I think that's fair. And we're certainly doing everything we can to support school districts and hospital systems. And if you think about how we work with a school system, for example, I mean we have programming from a Bachelor completer to a Master's, a principal certificate, teacher licensure, Ed.D, and a wide range of different programs. And so we can really support the career pathway of an individual as they progress in their career. And our programs actually stack together. And so for example, many credits come through from a Master's into our Ed.D. And so I think you're spot on in terms of we're looking to make our learning come alive and be as relevant as possible. There's opportunities for individuals to work directly with their employer as they're in our programs.And we're also really trying to map what we do to the organizational help of the organizations that we're supporting. And I think, you know, one of the things that we're hopeful that we're, we will do over, that we contribute to over time and we'll be able to show over time as well is as we're working closely with the school district supporting the progression of the strengthening of the human capital that really helps with learning outcomes or likewise at a hospital system as we're supporting the progress of the human capital that can lead to better health outcomes. So we're very focused, I think on the strengthening of human capital and ultimately the communities that we work in.The Employee Experience at ACEMichael Horn:So a lot of mutual benefit there and then the other place it seems like you have mutual benefit is the people that make it happen internally at ACE, which is the employees. I know you have incredibly low turnover rates. People stay, they build careers at the college. Talk a little bit about sort of, you know, the employee experience at ACE, Faculty, staff.Geordie Hyland:Yeah.Michael Horn:And why that matters for what you do.Geordie Hyland:Yeah, no, appreciate the question. I mean, we are a people business, so we live and die by our people. And I think one of the aspects of ACE that's really important to call out is there's a very strong connection between the mission of the organization and our day to day operations. And so I think there's a close connection there where our teams and our staff and our faculty can feel like they're contributing to helping strengthen the human capital of school districts every day or hospital systems. And it's very tangible and so I think that really helps. We have a very mission driven team that really wants to make a difference and I think a lot of them, it's fair to say, really feel like they are making a difference day to day. So I think that's very helpful and really helps us to hire the best people as well because there's people that come in and feel like they can make a difference with us. We've been fortunate to be recognized by Energage as a top employer over the last three years. 93% of our employees feel like there's a strong mission and sort of believe in the direction of the institution. So I think that's important. And then also we're a B Corp and so that that is a separate process that we go through with B Labs that validates that we're having a positive impact on the greater good. And our staff can volunteer in their local communities 14 hours a year. That's supported by us as PTO. We call it Civic hours. So there's a lot of aspects of ACE that I think are helping people feel like we're trying to do the right thing by our students and by our communities. It's interesting.I've seen a lot of articles lately about employers bringing staff back to the office. We're actually fully remote. Our students are obviously fully remote. Our staff is fully remote. And I think that also helps us to attract the best people for any given role because we're not constrained to one specific location within the United States.Michael Horn:Super interesting. Geordie, thank you so much for coming on and talking about the American College of Education. What you do, the students you serve, the employers, districts, hospital systems, etc. That you serve and then the people at the heart of it really appreciate what you are doing for students. Last thing before we leave, folks who want to learn more about ACE, where should they go besides listening to your voice? Come on commercials while they're maybe on a rower watching the NFL Channel.Geordie Hyland:Yeah, no, I would recommend just going to our website, www.ACE.edu. There's lots of information there and I'm always available to answer questions if anyone wants to reach out to me as well. But I really appreciate your time. And as I mentioned, I'm a great, great fan. Congrats on your new book and love watching what you do.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.

Shiren Rattigan joined me to talk about her work as a founder of Colossal Academy and the Innovative Educators Network. We discussed the motivations, challenges, and opportunities of starting a microschool and connecting microschoolers in her area. We also dove into how Colossal is preparing students to be similarly enterprising through its entrepreneurship-focused curriculum.Thanks for reading The Future of Education! Please feel free to share this conversation with those who would benefit from it!Michael Horn:You're joining the show 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 and to help us think through how we get there, I'm really excited because we have Shiren Rattigan. She's the founder of a school we're going to hear a lot about today, Colossal Academy, as well as the Innovative Educators Network, which we're going to discuss what that does and the ecosystem, really, that she has built around helping a lot of school founders build meaningful places for kids to learn. So first, Shiren, great to see you. Thanks so much for being here.Shiren Rattigan:Thank you so much for having me. You're one of the people. I have very little accolades, and you're one of the check marks. I'm like, I’m on Michael Horn’s podcast.The Origin Story of Colossal AcademyMichael Horn:That’s very kind of you to say, but you're the one doing the work. So let's dive into that. Introduce folks to your origin story of Colossal Academy. I'm excited to hear it.Shiren Rattigan:Yeah. So I am a fifth-generation teacher. My great grandmother, my great great grandmother was a one room schoolhouse teacher on a farm in Illinois. My great grandmother was a teacher. My grandfather was a superintendent of schools in rural Illinois. My mother, special education in an urban setting for 35 years. And then I came in, and I was like, no way I'm breaking the cycle, right? And all signs pointed always back to being a teacher. And so I finally submitted to the fact that that's my calling. And I went into public school because that's where you go when you're a teacher. You get trained. You become a public school teacher. And then I swiftly found out that it was physically dangerous for me to be there. I was breaking up fights. I was pregnant, and I was like, this is nothing… What I saw, I saw myself as Miss Frizzle. And we're going to go to the digestive tract, and we're going to learn all these things. And when we get there, it was like, mandates, here's your curriculum. How come they're behind the test? Here's the state. And it wasn't what I thought. So I said, okay, let me go to private school. It must be better there, right? Really elite, very expensive, top 2%, very elite. But there were bodyguards for different reasons, right? Cause these kids could be taken right? At the school that they had their personalized bodyguards.And I was like, this isn't it either. I'm still checking in badges. There were still some expectations there that I just was like, this isn't it either. Something's wrong. We're not outside. We're not going on field trips. We're not in the real world.Maybe Montessori is it. Let me go find Montessori. So I went to Montessori, and that was lovely, but I felt like something was missing for the future, that I felt like students really needed to have some future forward competencies in order to be successful. Computations, coding, programming. And I know that many Montessori schools do that, but I felt like it needed to be real and relevant and actual. The pandemic hit, and I decided I really love teaching. I didn't want to be a people manager and asking how long they're washing their hands for and mandating the mask and making sure it's up past their nose.It's not what I wanted to do. I don't know if I got fired or if I quit, but short end, I no longer had a job at my school, which meant that some of the families that wanted to be a pod hired me to be their full time teacher. And I said, okay, well, if they're paying a little bit less than what they're paying as tuition, they could pay me to be... All I need is four kids to make my salary. And then I started with four kids. We moved to six and 10 and 12. And so that's kind of the genesis. But what I found out there is like, I get to do whatever I want, and when I mean whatever I want, it's whatever the kids want, whenever they want in real time. You want drones? Look at drones. It'll be here on Thursday. Let me Amazon. What do you want? You want to learn how to code? You want to go surfing? Whatever you want. I can be that, and I can give it, and I can create those opportunities for you. And I was like, this is it. This was the Miss Frizzle that I had imagined, and it took me so many stops along the way to get there, but I found it, and I found where I was able to be the teacher that I knew I needed to be for young people.Colossal’s Education ModelThe Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Michael Horn:So cool. I'm just reflecting on what I heard, and my father's family is from Illinois, sort of a city, but not a main city anymore from there, so have some resonance there. And then I feel like I went to public schools. I was then in the independent school world, and the board of NAS for a little bit. Microschools have certainly spoken to me. My kids were in Montessori schools. The pandemic hit. We went into sort of this pod like thing very similarly, but they went back to Montessori because we couldn't find a different solution that would lean into some of the things you just talked about. To be clear, it's been beautiful, and I hear some of the excitement and passion you've introduced. So tell us a little bit more about the educational model itself from Colossal Academy. And as you do so, I'd love you to sort of reflect on, you know, kids desiring to learn about drones getting whatever they want versus, like, are there certain non-negotiables that you say, well, and this is really important that you learn through the experience? I'd love to hear you sort of walk us through that.Shiren Rattigan:Sure. So there are definitely absolutes. We really firmly believe in a deep knowledge in language, literacy, and numeracy. We deeply understand that. And we think that we're presupposing that we're going to need that in the future. Right? Even if we are replaced with robots, I still believe in, like, passing on knowledge. Right? As humans, that's what makes us different than any other animal, that we're passing on knowledge and we're teaching. We also firmly believe, and we're declaring that nature is a future competency. You have to be in touch with nature. You have to understand how nature works. You need to be able to identify plants and know how to grow some food. That is a part of our model as well. Entrepreneurship is really rich and deep. We understand that the traditional education system is outdated. And part of it, the reason it's outdated is it's not relevant for the future moving forward. We're not in an industrial era. We're in the future era. And so what is that? It's going to require people to be entrepreneurial, make their own jobs, problems, solve on a deep level, and consciously make money. And that's part of what we do. And what we found is we have amazing projects. And we took over this vacant lot next door and turned it into a food forest. We're in downtown Fort Lauderdale in the art district, and there was a vacant lot full of bricks and rebar and the kids themselves pulled it out. We got it. We had to talk about responsible dumping.Where do you put things like that? Where do you put a battery? Where does that go? Right? And so that was a beautiful project that we were able to do. And they love their garden, and they think it's amazing. And they eat from it. We have sugarcane and bananas and all kinds of local Florida native tomatoes and foods and roots. But what I find really unlocks them is when they have an enterprise. So when they are making money, that's where I find that it's like, oh, I got to understand how to work. Okay, what's the spreadsheet about? I'm like, I told you guys, like, you need to see your projections. What's your Q3 looking like, guys, how many more to get your $200 goal that you spend for yourself? Okay, once you make $200, what are you gonna do with it? Like, so those things, those skills, I feel, become super relevant when there's an actual dollar amount that they are earning. So all of our students own their own business. They learn to be CEO's of their companies. Right now we're working on a beautiful project.Across the Collosal Academy. We have an online school as well where they design T-shirts based on their identity. So they go into their identity, they build out t-shirts, and they all have their own drop shipping site, right? And so all of that goes into being relevant. They learn how to use Canva, they learn how to design. They learn how to ask questions. They learn how to, like, show their identity, find their core values, attribute those to colors, find the chroma hacks, all of those things. They have a brand kit, all of their brand kit, and that's theirs. And they have to justify why they're using Kelly green, right? Like kids, like, I'm Irish, I'm using Kelly green. I'm like, that's great. You have to be able to understand, why do those colors create that kind of reaction in you? And what is that doing for you? And how does that represent the brand and what kind of font do you want to use? Right? So asking questions like that, and then the skills that we're learning in it are transferable. They're able to have that. They can build portfolios. They have their own websites that they build. Every, every week they drop into their websites. They have their own LinkedIn accounts. They're meant to find and create connections with people because that's what elite private schools do. It's really your rolodex that you get from a private school. It's not that the education's any better or the quality of learning is any better. And in fact, I might argue the opposite. Don't come for me for it, but I think it's different. Some of it is the accountability piece. Right? When you have a lot of money, you can turn those Ds into an A, right? Those things happen at very elite schools. And so it's not that their models are any better. It's that they built a beautiful network of when you needed a job, who are you going to call? Right? And so we have to elevate who's within our network so that we can change our trajectory as far as who we're going to be out in the world. So that's kind of like the model itself. We center everything around relevancy. What is relevant for you? We have a very large waitlist. We have four locations, but at the downtown Fort Lauderdale location, extremely large. I could just get another building, but I'm not going to because once you go beyond 30, you become a people manager, and then you have to use those old systems of, like, bells and whistles and times and clocks. You have to manage people rather than, like, interact with people. And we just are refusing to be larger. And it might not be the best, you know, the old school, best business decision, but that's what we're doing.The Scale of ColossalMichael Horn:But it sounds like you're spreading. I'm sorry. There's so much to love and dig into here. So let me go in this direction for a moment. It sounds like you are spreading, though. You have four locations, if I understood correctly. 30 kids in each. You have an online school as well. Tell us, like, tell us, like, who the students are, how many, and, like, how are you staffed? You know, these are not traditional teachers that are working with them, clearly. So, like, who are the adults that get to interact with them? Yeah, who of them, maybe the right way to ask is who of them are on your payroll versus, like, they get to interact in the community as they build the social capital you just described, which is beautiful, by the way.Shiren Rattigan:Thank you. Yeah, it's been. These are all questions I'm answering, and we're building it as we do it. But who we serve are really the students who are on the fringes of the Internet, like the traditional ed. The kids with the largest adverse reaction to the traditional ed is who we're serving. And they're really the first generation of whatever education system is coming next. They really are the trailblazers. They really are the students that are developing the new model. Right? But what's profound about these students is, although they have adverse reactions to the traditional model with all kinds of symptoms that can look across the board like many different things, what we're finding is they're extremely talented and totally capable of so many other powerful tools. That skillset that's going to drive innovation forward, right? So they might not be great at sitting still and taking notes and doing, but what they're really great is powerful solving and collaboration and communication and figuring out a new business that's going to. I have a student who has costumes for guinea pigs, so she made wings for guinea pigs. Not a traditional student by any means where her talents lie is there. So that's, you know, who we serve. A lot of times parents are just like, I cannot stick my child in a traditional classroom. I don't know what it is. They're magical, I believe in them, they're dying in a traditional system, you know, in other matrices for us is joy. You should just, you can get to the same result joyfully, right? So we try to unlock the joy in everything that we're doing. So our online school, as you know, most of what's happening in the future is going to be digital. How do you practice showing up online if you don't ever have to do that? What is your background? I'm not actually the prime example, but what does your background look like? How do you dress for online interviews, online communities that you're going to be in, that's the workforce of the future. So the online school really helps us. All that learning, digital citizenship, how to show up, how to collaborate across screens, and that's allowed us to be with our students in Jacksonville and Miami and have all kinds of cross pollination. So our online school also serves 6th through 12th grade. Okay, so the beautiful thing about that is I as a micro school could not hire one biology teacher to come in three days a week for 1 hour. We just couldn't do it. So what we're able to do now is be able to utilize the same pool of teachers to make sure that our students have in the areas that they need to. We have partnered with ASU Prep and license some of their classes and then we “Colossalize” our other classes. So we use AI tools that help to help with research. They learn how to manage their projects and find collaborators across them. So to your initial question, yes, we have four locations, Miami, Jacksonville, and we have a school in Mexico, Marydo, Mexico, and my school in Fort Lauderdale. Teachers own, their school belongs to them, it doesn't belong to me. And the point is you serve your community. My community looks different from somebody else's community and you need to serve your community and call on the community experts to pour in because they're dying to come into our classrooms and teach something. So my job is to teach her to be a teacher for a day, for 45 minutes. Don't talk for more than ten minutes, sir. Do not talk for more than ten minutes. How are you going to engage them? What are they going to eat? What are they going to touch and engage their senses? And so I give them like a rap sheet of how to do that and then they build partnerships within the community. So our staffing looks like we have two amazing veteran teachers whose goal, I think most teachers goal is to like unlock the child within really deep discovery, joyful learning, play based learning, nature, nature, awareness. And they're, they're both veteran teachers. Those are kind of like our staples. And then we have the other teachers that do some deep depth and then we have specialists in Florida. We're so blessed with so many people that decided to leave education but stay, leave the traditional classroom but stay in education. Thank God for them. So that might look like just chess or home economics. You're able to bring back into the classroom or someone to do permaculture. And so these are our specials. Podcasting, t-shirt design. Right? Like those are the, those are the specials that we're able to bring in from teachers who have left the non-traditional classroom and decided to start their own.Michael Horn:Very cool. Very cool. And so, and then the online, if I understand correctly, that's older students. The in-person, is that younger and older? Just younger? Like what's the age? You know?Shiren Rattigan:Yeah, six to twelve grade. We're six to 12th grade.Michael Horn:Okay. Insofar as there's grades. Yeah, yeah.Shiren Rattigan:That could be a 7th grader doing algebra. It could also be a 7th grader doing fifth grade.Michael Horn:Got it.Shiren Rattigan:Whatever that looks like. But their age wise, it's about 11 to 18.The Policy Environment in FloridaMichael Horn:Very cool. And so now, as I'm jealous in Massachusetts of what you're starting to build in Florida. My turn to ask the next question, which is like, you were frustrated as a public school teacher with a lot of the requirements, restrictions, things of that nature. Right? But how is the policy ecosystem helping you here? And maybe where is it still leaving something to be desired as you're starting these new micro schools and serving families in these really cool ways?Shiren Rattigan:Well, the policy in the Florida has actually created more need for microschools. Right? So people are deciding that they want something that serves their family because unfortunately the public schools have become like a battleground of culture wars. Right? And so we've been able to build community schools or microschools however you want to like title them, in order to serve the communities that are needing that. So if that means you want to read African American history and take an AP African American history class, then you can design a school like that. And that's great.You want to be LGTBQI inclusive, build a school like that. And then the culture wars don't need to exist because you have a safe and inclusive space where students feel seen, loved, heard and can actualize. Right? And so the policy now, you know, we are open to having universal savings account, which really allows for accessibility so that students can make choices, families can actually make choices. The hardest part is really about the visibility, knowing that we're there because we're so tiny, which we can talk about with, but we're also just so tiny and we're all just in our own little orbit, right? So the ESA has really unlocked a lot of entrepreneurship. And in fact, Broward County spends $19,000 per pupil, our tuition is $15,000. And once I started to look at my budget, I'm like, where is all the money going? How are people? Every square inch of this place is accounted for. Every dollar is accounted for. If I had $19,000, Elon Musk and I would be putting kids in space. If I had that much money, where's all the money going? Right? So I think having access to funding that allows us to be sustainable has been amazing. Where policy and practical are kind of in dissonance right now. I have the same school zoning requirements as a 4,000 person high school. So the fire, which is costly. It's costly to outfit of school. The zoning requirements I have 4,026 sq. feet. That means I need a sprinkler system and a whole fire system. Some of the health department restrictions just aren't matching the micro environment. So where the opportunities for growth need to be. And I think we're working on it. Right? Like if you have 20 kids, do you really need to be zoned as a full fledged standalone commercially? It just doesn't, it doesn't, it doesn't make any sense.The Innovative Educators NetworkMichael Horn:Yeah, it doesn't make any sense at all. Okay. No, super helpful. So that's a perfect transition then, because the other thing you founded is this Innovative Educators Network.Tell us about what it is and its purpose and why you created that.Shiren Rattigan:Thank you for bringing that. So I'm going to just tell you, if you don't know, Surf Skate Science. Michael, the next podcast you need to do is. I'm going to email you after this. Tony from Surf Scate Science. Tony and Yuli already started this amazing program and our students utilize surfing and skateboarding on Fridays to learn physics, marine biology. We're out. They turn features and skate parks into classrooms. And it was during the pandemic. And Tony was like, would you want to get lunch or dinner? And I'm like, yeah, let's get together and just hang out. And we have the same issues, right? Like zoning requirements and where do we find this form and how do we, and so then we asked a couple more people, Tobin from Acton, Fort Lauderdale. Amazing. We have four kind of Fort Lauderdale locations here. And I was like, Tobin, Miss Suarez, Miss Ratchett, you guys want to have lunch with us? And so it just started to grow. And as we were growing, we're realizing we're all facing the same issues and so we just decided to do something about it. Tony is incredible about like super action oriented. I'm very grassroots. And so the two of us just have been such a beautiful partnership in making sure that microschools and providers, we have 120 in south Florida, which is West Palm Beach, Miami and Broward counties, serving over 8000 students. Tampa has opened up their own chapter and so is Jacksonville. And so our key, our key pieces, the key contributions that we do are visibility. So we have showcases to let parents know and bring everybody together into the same space. We do conferences and showcases, press, getting, helping, getting the word out nationally and locally. Local is always hard.What else are we doing? Oh, just entrepreneurship. How do you keep your books? How do you do marketing? What's a funnel? Like, who's a bookkeeper? Where do we get insurance for twelve students? You know, like those kind of shared resources that we're able to help each other out with and Tony's gonna kill me. There's a fourth one. Oh, yeah. Okay. Just like what this changes in education, in the platforms, like, what are the best practices so that we can share those better practices with each other. So we have guest speakers come in and you can choose to come to the webinars or not come to the webinars. And really what we are is a community. We show up to each other's open houses. We cry when we have to close our doors together. We help you play like we had a school that just closed and we helped all of us buying a chair, buying some kind of something from the school, showing up, passing the word around so that when this person closed, not only did she place the students in a better environment or an environment that would serve them, but just like helping her dissolve that business with love and kindness around the work that she's done. Wow.Thinking Macro on MicroschoolsMichael Horn:Very cool. I want to connect that work to something you said earlier, because you said that your teachers own their own school sites. You don't own the one in Jacksonville or Miami and so forth, because I think you said something powerful, which we often forget in my experience in education, which is that these are really local of the community, of the context, institutions, maybe we call them, that exist in that environment. And, yeah, they're things that are, like, common, just like the laws of physics transcend San Francisco to Boston to Miami. But how you build the bridge in each of those three places is very different because of the local terrain. And so, too, I think, as you build these schools, and I guess I'm curious because as I hear you talking and you've built this Innovative Educators Network, the thing that I keep thinking is, like, scale, I don't think is one of these schools growing from 30 to 100,000, but I suspect scale is like a lot of families getting the right option for their kid to make progress and sort of as a movement growing up over time with these principles underlying it. And I just. Maybe I'm leading the witness, but I'd love to just have you reflect on how we get to that greater scale. It's something that we think a lot about on my end, and Tom Arnett, my colleague at the Christensen Institute, he sort of has this belief that as a sector, we're going to have to be able to solve more complicated and different kinds of problems. Or like the kid that stays in traditional high school because they love football, even though the rest of the experience sucks, we have to sort of figure out how to bring those people in over time. I just sort of love you to wrestle with that question or tension or opportunity.Shiren Rattigan:Yeah, I see Innovative Educators Network and I see the moms, family members, aunties, caregivers, teachers. If you mess with our kids, which traditional ed has, we are endless, relentless. We will stay up till 4:00 we will drive 8 hours for our children. Right? And this is true for both teachers and caregivers. And so it's like, almost tirelessly, we're taking on this mission. Right? But the other piece I will say is, I feel like the independent microschool owners, and that's who ed focuses on. We're like the mycelium of this movement, and we're a network that's just kind of underground, and we move really swiftly, and we're supportive and super collaborative. Right? And I think that that root system is really going to keep us grounded. I can imagine, as we see schools closing, we can still have a sports program. We can. We can have micro schools within a larger school. We can have 20 micro schools in a large high school. Like, they're okay.There are schools now opening up in malls. I think we have to really reflect and think, what is school? What is schooling? Who has to go to school? Should you have to go? All these, like, underlying questions of, like, what is education? How should we be delivering education? What's compulsory? What's not compulsory as a society? Do we want educated population? I'm gonna say yes. That's my own standpoint, and I think we'll solve those problems as we come. And we see now we have, in our network, we have a coach, an Olympic coach, and he does PE for students and runs sports. And we have, because there was a need for homeschoolers to also still be able to do the sports. They have a competing team. They have competing teams. And so they're still able to compete and be in the. And go for a professional athleticism. We also find that professional athletes are using microschools and homeschooling as a real option because they get their school done, and then they do what they need to be doing. So they're training after school, they have private trainers, or they're joining in in a different way. So, yeah, I think that. I think where our challenges are right now are some of the, like, landmarks of graduation. And so I think we're just gonna create those. I think there's a problem. We're entrepreneurs. We'll just solve the problem. One of our micro schools is doing a prom this year, so.Michael Horn:Oh, wow. Okay. And you're modeling it, I guess, right? You're modeling it for the students. What it looks like to be entrepreneurial, to build something meaningful and lasting that contributes value to the community and those who participate in it. So let's leave it there, Shiren. This has just been really educational for me, and just beautiful, just beautiful stuff you are building out there, both within the schools that you directly support in this broader network. Thank you so much.Shiren Rattigan:Thank you. 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.

Bill Kerr, Professor at the Harvard Business School and Co-Chair of the Managing the Future of Work project, joined me to talk about his perspective on the present and future of business education. We discussed the hastening rate of skill obsolescence,  how HBS keeps their pedagogy up-to-date,  and the role of AI in the future of business education.Michael Horn:Welcome to the Future of Education. I'm Michael Horn and you are joining the show where we are dedicated to building a world in which all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their human potential, and live a life of purpose and to help us think through that and frankly, the shifting landscapes in how we prepare managers and leaders to lead organizations in this world. I'm delighted to have Bill Kerr. He is the D'Arbeloff Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School, Senior Associate Dean for faculty development and research. Long list of accolades, but the one that I also want to hit is he's co-director of Harvard's managing the Future of Work initiative, which is so critical in thinking about how we develop human talent and how organizations, leaders, managers evolve in this world. And he's Faculty Chair of the Launching New Ventures program. I could go on and on, but I'll also just add Bill's neighbor, friend, and used to be a CrossFit buddy. I think you still work out occasionally with my wife. But Bill, it is great to see you. Thanks so much for being here.Bill Kerr:Michael, thank you for having me for your work and for those listeners that don't know it. Michael is amazing at CrossFit. He smokes me every time.The Evolution of Business EducationMichael Horn:Not true when we get on a rower, but this will be fun. So look, so much is happening in the world of work right now. Big technology changes, automation, rapid changes in skills, demographic shifts, could go on and on. Haven't even mentioned AI, obviously, but I want to focus on the areas in which you teach as well as research and think about the future of business education itself, particularly at places like the Harvard Business School where you're training the next generation of managers, leaders, frankly, through the exec ed programs, people already in leadership roles. How do you see business education itself evolving, Bill?Bill Kerr:Well, I think there's a very robust future for business education, Michael. I would suspect that the future is going to have many more types of programs. They're going to be more granular. They're going to be fit for many different purposes. But all the features that you began describing, the world's kind of constant evolution and very rapid pace of change is going to require business leaders and business students to stay at that cutting edge. So I think our MBA program is going to have a robust future as people look to prepare themselves for careers that will be ones where they're going to change jobs a number of times. And they're going to be thinking about the impact that they could have on the world. If you go later in career, many companies and many individuals are going to need to retool, reskill themselves for that future. That's going to give us a lot of exec ed opportunities and gaps to kind of help there. And then you can go even back upstream. Harvard Business School doesn't teach undergraduates, but many schools do. And in that business context, if you're an engineering student, you're going to want to have some business school courses to go alongside that. We don't separate those two functions anymore in the corporation. And so likewise, education is going to mix across them.The Velocity of Change in Business LeadershipMichael Horn:Yeah. So I want to then focus, Bill. I'm just sort of curious because we talked about all these technical skills changing. You talked about more granular ways of educating leaders more on the job, in many cases adapting curriculum. But sort of at a base level, as you think about the future of work, and frankly, where we've been like, have the essential skills for business leaders changed all that much in recent decades? Do we see the same velocity of change in those skills that we do in the technical fields?The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Bill Kerr:Well, let me start the end part there. There has been some important work that describes the rate of change for technical skills, for digital skills and similar compared to more traditional, non-digital skills. David Deming, who is a faculty member in the Kennedy school, did a remarkable study where he looked at the same job ten years, so 2009 to 2019, same company, same position, everything was exactly the same and did this at scale with many, many job postings and quantified that digitally focused activity, had a faster turnover in the skills that were required, what the job ads were asking for compared to non-digital activities. So if you looked at what traits people or qualifications employers were requesting, if it was something that was closer to the digitally based world, it moved faster than, than otherwise. But that, you know, kind of how that plays out for the broader landscape of business success, like what helps a leader kind of move faster up in the career. I think we're still learning a little bit. My favorite study on this regard goes from Joe Fuller, who's my co director of the Management Future of Work project, as is Rafael Sedun, his co-author here, where they looked at CEOs and job descriptions and also what mattered most for CEO success over a 20-30 year period. And there was a lot more emphasis on social skills today compared to two decades ago or three decades ago. A lot more emphasis on technology and kind of products and sort of those relationships to consumers, less on things like finance and some of the more traditional strategy functions. Likewise, if we look at some of the, the profiles of people that have been most likely to kind of ascend up through the ranks and ultimately end up in the CEO role, they've been coming out of a different, a different set of line responsibilities than before. So we'll anticipate that continuing forward. And the question I think many of us are going to have to work with is in a world where it moves so fast, let's face it, sometimes the academic programs don't move as fast as we need them to be. And you're going to see some differences emerging both across fields, across schools and so forth, as to what's the gap of the recency of what's required in the workplace versus the syllabi and so forth that are being taught. Now there's some very interesting work that's being undertaken at Yale right now that's measuring that for the first time. Like actually measuring syllabi and what are they teaching there versus what are employers kind of saying is the crisp latest frontier skills that they're hiring for?Do Employers Know What Skills They’re Looking For? Michael Horn:So I want to come back to that in a moment, but I want to stay on what you just were talking about. Also about if you look at job postings and what employers at least seem to be requesting from technical skills, the rapid turnover that we've seen in the past decade now, plus there, compared to maybe other managerial skills, what some people call the softer skills, I don't always love that phrase of turn, but I know it is one. But I'm just curious, like as you analyze this space, how much stock do you put in the job descriptions and what people say they want? Leave aside the technical skills for a moment, but the softer skills, the social skills, the managerial ones, how much stock do you think we can really read into what's in a job description versus actually spending time shadowing managers and CEO's to see what they actually do? Because, and I'll betray my hand a little bit, it often seems to me, of course I'm going to write critical thinking and problem solving in the job description, but what that actually means on the job is not always as clear, if that makes sense.Bill Kerr:Yeah. Yeah. Let's, first off, we will label soft kind of a social skills because I think that at least captures a bit more of the essence there. Michael, you raise a great question that I'm going to broaden slightly, which is a lot of the ways we have been talking to employers at the Managing Future of Work project is to appreciate what is their expectations of new hires and what is it they are kind of most hoping to grasp with the new talent that they're bringing in. And there's one version of the world which is I am going to wait until I have a specific need. I'm going to write out a very exacting job description, and I'm going to expect a fully loaded, fully prepared candidate like Michael to show up and then, you know, offer his services to me at a very, very low rate, you know, and that really doesn't work for a variety of reasons, including the, you know, the overall challenges in finding the talent these days. But it also doesn't work in an environment where six months, 18 months after Michael joins the job, I'm actually probably gonna need to have him shift into different types of activities, like the pace of change is going to move where he is. And so what we would hope that the employers would begin to appreciate more is the willingness to go learn, the openness to new experiences, the capacity to learn on the job through that shadowing process, through the ability to kind of see both what others around me at the organization are doing, and then also what's the emerging opportunities that I should be learning as quickly as I can in ways to be useful for those tasks. So it's going to be both in the job ad, but it's also in the expectations of how we're hiring somebody for the next. If you're going to keep somebody for five years, ten years, which should always be your ambition or goal, then you're going to have to anticipate they're going to have multiple waves of the things that they're doing on the job. And so let's not overly, overly make ourselves rigid around what we're expecting on that very first assignment and task.Keeping Academia Up to DateMichael Horn:That makes a lot of sense. So let's go to then, the other part that you ended the previous answer with. That seems to me to link to something, which is you talked about given rapid velocity of change in job roles, curriculum, needing to keep pace historically, that's been a challenge from my perspective, that points to one of the big things that, you know, goes on at a place like the Harvard Business School, which is you're not just teaching and delivering, you know, obviously case study method in the case of Harvard, but you're also doing a lot of research, presumably so that you stay on top of the big changes and are able to adapt curriculum accordingly. Just talk about the interdependence and link between those two areas. Not every school, frankly. Actually, let me, before you answer, let me just say to the audience, there is no school that I've ever come across that cares about teaching as much as the Harvard Business School does, for a research institution. It is truly different from anything I've seen up close, but talk about the link between those and how that enables you, presumably, to keep curriculum up-to-date.Bill Kerr:Mike, this goes back to my sort of overall point of view as to where the world is, what matters for business success, and then what's the role that business education and business research plays into that environment? And you began the podcast by describing this rapid pace of change and the many, many things that are coming at us one after another, and that have material impacts on how our businesses operate, what our employees need to be tasked with, and how we can best guide and lead them. I think you have to be increasingly focused on where new information is coming from, new insights, new technologies, new opportunities, and then how you as a person, and also you as a business can be connected and learn from that. So it's a strong mindset shift from maybe where we were 15-20 years ago, where oftentimes you had this idea of, wow, we have a wonderful R&D division. We are accumulating a body of firm specific knowledge, and we're going to think about that as the asset that we take out into the world. And there's still certainly places and opportunities for research that happens inside companies to really push it into a proprietary advantage. But increasingly, you also have to be able to be close to these places where new stuff is springing forth, coming out. And I think business schools are going to play an important role in facilitating those types of connections. Being a conduit for an individual manager, or maybe even a broader company as a whole to have access to those pieces of knowledge. And where that then ultimately brings the faculty member into is what a concept we often call absorptive capacity, absorptive advantage. That if you're engaged in the research process, if you are out working in these new ideas and their applications, you're going to have, first off, some stuff that comes from you specifically. Maybe Bilker has a lab that is producing some of these insights, but it also puts you on the ground and gives you the tacit understanding of how to interpret many of the other things that are going on in a place like the Boston area, where you have MIT and HBS and Harvard and all these kind of different places. It gives you a way of kind of harnessing some of those and providing them into the classroom and into the lives of these business leaders for them to then work on and grapple. So I think this research teaching kind of combination is actually going to probably strengthen going forward due to this way that it puts you close to the frontier so that you can both appreciate it and then you can also help transmit it or help others understand how it could be useful for them to grapple with.Michael Horn:It strikes me that it also could increase the connection for experiential learning and sort of embedded, certainly the case study, but also simulation, anything that has the individual learning more closely connected to the case or set of experiences that they're actually going to be working on. It strikes at me that that'll be strengthened as well in this fast moving environment. Is that your view?Bill Kerr:Absolutely, absolutely. And it's something that many of us are going to need to be much more hands on in the future in our work lives as well as also in the classroom to support that. You hear phrases like hands on the keyboard, where it's not that management is just up there kind of architecting direction, but without direct hands on the keyboard type applications, you're not going to understand the technologies, you're not going to understand, you know, what they could do to the organization and build it, build it from there. It also has direct implications for how we think about, you know, the, the life of a person and what points we can connect into them. We're not in a world where there's going to always just be early education, be an undergraduate or an MBA, and then, you know, you're done, you're good. You can go work on this for 20-30 years and send us an alumni check every so often. We're going to have a lot more interaction with people on the way because, you know, the part of the value proposition was to be close to where these insights are coming, but they're going to keep coming. And so how can we be somebody's signal? How can we help them discern what could lie around the corner?The Lifelong MBA Program Michael Horn:I'm curious, in your view, does that like, maybe we start seeing business models and business education around lifelong learning models? Where to your point, do the MBA, come back a couple years later, get a two week course, get an online module here? Just a lot. Like does it open up to creativity around that?Bill Kerr:I think it's going to open up the necessity around that and then creativity will probably follow as we and other schools work. To that end, I don't have the one to one translation of this metaphor down, but what has struck me recently is the idea of hardware being built for software based applications. And so one of the cases that we've taught at HBS is around Toyota and has some sort of linkages here. But like the example of hardware for a hardware based application, you tend to be very exacting. So if you need 10gb of memory in that hardware, you don't put in 15. Like, you know, you put in exactly ten, you cut the cost right down. You're ultra efficient. If you're building hardware for a software based application where you're going to anticipate continual upgrades being needed into the future, you often overbuild the hardware. So 10gb would do right now, but you want to put in 30gb because the next software upgrade and the one that's going to follow after that, and the one that's going to follow after, they're going to be ever more memory intensive. And so you're trying to build the hardware in a way that can allow the product to stay more relevant, to stay more up-to-date into the future. So if I then kind of bring that into the business school world, and we agree that the lifelong learning concept and the rate of change is going to require us to have continual check-ins, maybe that means that we should be thinking about things differently, at the very first MBA level, early career investments. Are we overbuilding the hardware at that point with the notion that you're going to be coming back to campus every three or four years, you know, for one of these kind of software updates, and then you're going to come back again and that maybe the package that we provide to the people that are part of our community will engage in this kind of longer term. You're part of it. You're a citizen here. You know you are. Once you kind of enter into this world, we're going to be a way for you to stay at the edge of the new ideas and concepts that are emerging and that preferential access is what we're, what we're building for.Michael Horn:It's interesting because it's often said education is wasted on the young. And I know graduates of the MBA program often say, wow, that case study on X, 20 years later, that's when it all of a sudden I realized what it really meant and it was so valuable to me. It just occurs to me that as you describe this, really helping people see this is something that they can keep coming back to. It's a change in relationship. It makes probably, the ask from an alumni, you know, this is for schools more generally who are saying, how do we get donations? It's not a donation. I actually feel like I'm getting a service on a real-time basis. Does this also point to a lot more virtual education in your view, Bill? And what does that look like in the future?Bill Kerr:Yeah. Let me begin with the first part of your statement there, which is, you know, when you're an MBA here, Michael, I'm guessing you had approximately 600 cases or some crazy number over the course, and some of those are ones that have immediate applicability. Whatever you're going to do right after, you need to be able to interact with the team member and so is developing some of those skills. And then there's probably a case or two that had you as the CEO of a large organization, which nobody was going to go immediately into that task, but it was both a way of learning how the role operates and then also kind of preparing the almost like a future capacity to be in that spot. Like we want to open up these conversations earlier and awareness of the types of career dynamics that will later occur, knowing that by the time that a student actually becomes the CEO of one of these large organizations, the world will have shifted and they're going to need to have kept up to pace there. So sometimes, again, you want to kind of open the student's perspective to the bigger set of issues that are going to go into the future. And it's actually the, almost like the value proposition of business school. You may have been for three or four years really crunching numbers away at Goldman Sachs on the latest deal or doing something, you know, for Deloitte Consulting on its packages, but you didn't have the chance to kind of see the bigger picture of the world of business that you are going to be working in for some time. And we're trying to start that conversation just like in the entrepreneurship group where I've been, you know, for 20 years at the school, many of our students, in fact, the majority of our students who become entrepreneurs don't do it immediately upon graduation. Usually there's, you know, a few years maybe due to student loans or to other kind of desires of building a knowledge base before they launch business where they're, they're going to go do something and then it's five years later that they begin their enterprise. So we want to prepare them for what that journey might look like ahead, recognizing that when they get there, they're going to need to know the actual term deals that venture capitalists will provide. So we like to have that kind of capacity. This does think about, and again, it goes to this idea of the hardware and kind of continual software pieces. I used the phrase citizen a little earlier, and it's an interesting, I think, term of how we might think of our communities, because a citizen both has rights and responsibilities. You think of the package that somebody is participating in. We're in that relationship. And to your point, I think it does change how one thinks about being a citizen of a community over a longer horizon, and that this is not just, hey, as you think about your philanthropic giving, maybe you can spare some money for us as well as also for some other good causes, but instead kind of think about this is we want to be relevant to you. We want to be somebody that, you know, is on your short list of where you might go for insights on the following. And so how can we make that an attractive package for the future? I think the digital piece is going to be critical. That was the last part of your, of your question there, because, you know, even if I was to describe this idea that you're going to come to the campus every four or five years, you know, for one of these kind of upgrades, it's a lot of time that happens in there. If you were going to come to campus this year, the last upgrade until now would have been the introduction of ChatGPT. That would have happened within that window, and it probably would have been a little too long to wait until your next time on campus to pull that off. So I think we'll want some very high frequency digital outreach. Again, in part of the relationship to being at the cutting edge, that you have to be able to hear things faster, and that will be an important component to sit inside the broader suite of executive ed type activities.The Lifetime of SkillsMichael Horn:I want to get to AI in a moment, but something you just said triggered this, which was your colleague, my co-author, Ethan Bernstein, made the observation recently to me that no wonder Gen Z has this reputation of being so impatient to sort of rule the world and have these rights, because we constantly keep yelling at them, hey, your technical skills, your skills are eroding faster than ever before, and they're like, well, I want to put them to use. I guess when I hear you say all of what you've said, I wonder if it can put them at ease a little bit and make them a little bit more secure in, hey, you're going to have a progression and progress in your career, and there is some patience, and it's okay because we're going to be, you know, sort of rebuilding around your needs. It's not just sort of "come in for the MBA and you're out and gone."Bill Kerr:To, I guess my thought on that one is, it's a yes and it's a both. The atrophy of digital skills is rapid and to some degree, if you are trading off of your digital skills, you should be very impatient to get them to work. And I do the opposite. When I talk to large organizations, I basically say, you want to, you tell me you want to go hire all this digital talent? Well, let me tell you about the worst thing you can do is you hire, but then they can't put anything to use. They can't see progression. They are stuck at the bottom of, you know, a very, very long process that's in front of them. You have to have the escalators, the things that can allow them to put their skills to work faster and also stay up-to-date. Like the worst thing a company can, I think, do, well that’s not true, there are many even worse things a company can and have done. One of the worst things in this context that a company can do is have its employees feel like they're missing out on the next generation of skills. The company is stuck in what was maybe even very relevant in 2019. But the talent base doesn't feel like they are staying at the edge of the skills that are defining right now and will be relevant for the next two to three years. An organization that has that people look at it in that way is going to find it very, very hard to keep the talent that needs to be kind of always up-to-date and always refreshed with their skill base. So I want to recognize that dimension. But on the opposite side, to, I think the second part of your perspective there is to appreciate that the most durable skills, the most durable things that people are going to be able to build careers on probably go back to those social skills, probably go back to kind of their ability to coach young team members.Many of the things that are not the specific hard skills of this moment, but instead are the things that the organization most needs in order to activate the technologies that are available to it, to activate the talent that it has in place. The things that are, that are impossible at this stage and probably will be for some time to automate, but instead can be important for the employees to be able to realize the potential of the organization.AI Applications in Business EducationMichael Horn:Gotcha. Okay, so I've teased this AI thing, that we're going to ask you some questions about that for a while now. So let's get into it. I'm just curious how you all, as faculty, right, are making use of Gen AI by students and their work and the tools that you're developing for them to use or whatnot. But also, if you could reflect on the research side as well, how that might be changing the work or even the curriculum itself. It strikes me that building simulations, for example, that put someone in the shoes of a case protagonist, rather than just reading about it, those things might become more possible than a future imagined state. I imagine there's a bunch of things you can do with it if it's not feared. But I'm curious what reaction has been.Bill Kerr:Yeah, the reaction has been overall has been positive. I think maybe there's like a cautious optimism of us bringing into it. There's no, try to hold back the tide here. I think our stance from the beginning has been Gen AI is going to be here, it's going to be a tool in the workplace. You should use Gen AI. And if anything, I think more often than not, we have been kind of prompting students to actually use it more than they otherwise would. And even going so far as early in their MBA career, having them be introduced to Gen AI. And it can do this and it can do that because not everyone that comes to campus has been as immersed in ChatGPT as other people. And then the second is kind of making sure that in some classes the professors may be even very pushy, as I want you, for every class, to ask ChatGPT the following types of things about the case. Now, I was actually, as I was walking over to this podcast, I bumped into a colleague who was describing, however, in his class, how he's getting very disparate answers and the quality level's not right. And he himself is also using ChapGPT to see what he thinks that it would tell them as a potential answer, so that he can kind of think about like, what is their independent learning. So there's complications and things that we need to kind of work through in this level. But the overall stance has been that this is here to stay and we should make it work. We don't use it for, they're not that easy for exams, obviously. We have, even before the introduction of large language models, had a policy of no Internet use during the exams, and that continues to hold. So it's still, at the end of the day, Michael, and the case is going to be the final product, but it's important along the way. We're excited at HBS about the ways this can make faculty more effective towards the classroom. One of the things that we've always struggled with, and this isn't a live product yet, I'm just kind of putting it on the roadmap. One of the things we've always struggled with is if we're going to do case-based work, it's very, very time intensive for us to do a practice exam or to do anything. That's like taking Michael and his 93 section mates, have them write an eight page case that we're then going to, you know, provide detailed feedback about Michael and what he was getting right or less right on the exam. Large language models chat, that gives a lot of opportunity that if we can train the models, the models can help us provide this feedback to students early on, it's still going to be the case that faculty will grade the final exams, but nonetheless, we can provide a lot more kind of real time development along the journey. There you raise the idea of simulations and the like. I think our state of the art right now are bots that we have developed for specific classes, both in the first year as well as also in the elective curriculum that digest enormous amounts of material that is about the course. Like every case study that's going to be done through the course. Some background notes, some other things that within the walled garden that the instructor places in there, lets students then engage in Q and A. And sometimes they're doing some stuff that's about like, can you remind me what this acronym means? Or I want to, what was the concept that brought this and that can kind of bring all these sort of things, you know, to help make the student more prepared for the classroom environment. We're going to, I think, see going forward innovations on the material itself, using AI, as you're rightfully suggesting. I think the easiest kind of cases are going to be, let's customize our case library a little bit. So if Bill is going to Turkey for an exec ed program, maybe I can try to take a case and have it customized to the Turkish context, like, you know, kind of fill out a few of these extra pieces that make it more locally relevant than it would be if the case is set in Brazil. So we maybe some things we can bring across from there. Likewise, we'd already begun experimenting and building out some more traditional if then kind of bots that had been developed based upon data for things like venture capital, term sheet negotiations. I think there's going to be the next generation of those types of products that can take advantage of this power as well.Globalization and Business EducationMichael Horn:I mean, it's really cool, frankly, to hear where this could go and the tools that you can probably envision before it was sort of futuristic and science fiction feels like it's in the roadmap now. Last question as we wrap up here, I'd love to talk about the global picture and internationalization of business education. When I was at the business school, one of the most enriching things was not just that cases were worldwide and HBS had research centers all around the world, but also that my students. Right. My fellow, you know, my fellow peers were from all around the world. That's obviously been a big trend in higher education more generally in America over the last many, many years. It's also one that, as you know, not at Harvard per se, but elsewhere, has receded a little bit over the last, call it eight to ten years. And there's sort of winds blowing, right, Bill, in the political conversations about a retreat from globalization. I love your perspective. Like, international students continue to be a growth sector for us. Business education, is this something that retrenches a little bit? How do we think about this in the current context and what matters here?Bill Kerr:Goodness, Michael, you like to end with a big bang. A bang, yeah, a bang there. I actually related a little bit back to where we ended the last one with AI. And kind of, I'll start there because one version of hearing about all these new even phrases, kind of crazy simulation world that perhaps we could generate and live in and just the digital world would be, is that going to somehow weaken the need for a student or the desire of a student to come and be in Boston for a period of time with their studies? And I think exactly the opposite. There are probably going to be a large amount of synergies between what we can do in the digital world and what we can also do then in the physical world. And if we have the amazing content to help somebody work on their business problems in the time that they're away from the campus, what we can also then do is make it more valuable that they were a part of the campus and made some of those personal ties and connections at a period of time that we're kind of continuing to refresh and update from there. The analogy I've given, you know, and I think others certainly have given as well about this, is like when you think about phone calls and emails and Zoom, you know, those tend to be used mostly within organizations like, like my number one, you know, people that I zoom with or other HBS employees. The number one destination of emails is HBS, and yet it makes the campus even more important and vibrant despite the technologies being weightless. So if we kind of start with that premise, which is to say that there is a value to being on the, you know, on the campus, on the location, then yes, I think it's important and will be the case that international students will continue to want to be in the US for higher education. And recently, we've gone back up above 1 million total students. This is undergraduate, graduate, and so forth, which was, we're slightly less than where we were in 2019, but we're almost back to 2019 levels recovering from the pandemic in that way. So there's the demand there. There is pressure that is blowing in political winds. And it's not just the United States. A number of countries are kind of struggling with the questions about what's the role of immigration in our economy and in our society and similar. And I think, broadly speaking, I have a very long term enthusiasm and, again, support. I think we're going to recognize, especially for the most skill based work, countries are going to start competing like crazy for talent, like, as you think, as you look ahead to environments where there is an aging population, you have large fiscal imbalances, you have the need to stay towards the cutting edge of technologies and so forth, there's going to be a fight for talent rather than pushing it away. And that gives me the enthusiasm, the optimism for the horizon. Can we mess it up? Oh, we absolutely can mess it up. I think one of the scariest studies, and they didn't actually think they were writing a scary study, but it was scary for me, was a group of scholars that looked at H1B visa reforms that happened in 2002. And so, as a little bit of background, the US had its most expansive policy towards skilled immigration in the early two thousands. And in 2002, there was a sunset clause that basically brought the program significantly down in terms of, of its size and - perfect for researchers - there were, most countries were affected by that decline, but there are a handful of countries that weren't affected due to specific relationships they had with the United States or exemptions under the policy. So I gave a wonderful kind of treatment and control group to look at. And what this study looked at was the inbound students in 2002 to 2003, as this decline was happening. Now, let me again position this in time. They're not going to enter the labor market for another four or five years. These are inbound college students when the decline is happening. And they found that the treated countries had a 10% lower international student application and coming to the United States rate. And the ones that we were most likely to lose were the best students of the group. So the SAT scores also went down. And your listeners are education scholars, they're probably not interested in the minutiae of immigration policy, but this was not like an extraordinary change. And it was also something that if you had been a part of the policy environment at that time, you would have imagined we could easily correct or change. And yet it had that level of impact on forward looking students as they thought about I want to go to school at the place where I also want to have a career and work. And so when I come back to our current political environment, I always emphasize that choices around education are often an investment. And as an international student, I want to invest in being in the United States in many cases, because I also then want to anticipate working in the United States and whether or not we have direct policy change, whether or not we have a lot of animosity about the issue, it's still going to tarnish and then lead to weaker investments among the inbound students that we, that we could have competed for. So I hope that we can find a way to navigate through this and not have those tensions flare up the way that they have over the last decade. But it's an important, it's a very important topic for higher education.Michael Horn:No, it's super helpful, Bill, because I walk away thinking the war for talent is heating up, if anything. And so those countries that are the best at being attractors of talent, which starts in education are best positioned to come out on top. And I believe in positive sum worlds, but there is certain zero sum elements of where talent goes.Bill Kerr:Yeah, let me second that by saying, I think there are several what we call pathways that immigration operates. And in the United States context, arguably the most important pathway has been the education pathway. People that came here as a high school student, people that came here for college, people that came here for graduate school, their impact both while they were here. And, you know, there's various studies that have quantified the billions of dollars for the local economy, but even more importantly, like how they then connected to the United States, staying for work even when they went back home, the interactions that they facilitated with our economy were very important, and we absolutely must keep that alive for the future.Michael Horn:Beautifully said. He's Bill Kerr. You can see why he's terrific. And you should check out his Managing the Future of Work. What's the podcast name, Bill?Bill Kerr:Managing the Future of Work. We always stay on brand.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.

Jonathan Hughes, Associate Director of College Planning and Content Creation at the Massachusetts Education Financing Authority, joined me to discuss the organization's work of helping students prepare for post-secondary education. We discussed how MEFA has evolved over its 40 years, including the addition of MEFA Pathways, an initiative focused on career navigation.Thanks for reading The Future of Education! This post is public so feel free to share it.Michael Horn:Welcome to the Future of Education, the show where we are dedicated to a world in which all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their human potential, and live a life of purpose, and to help us think through how individuals navigate so that they can do all of those things. Delighted to have another neighbor to the show and our guest, Jonathan Hughes. He's the Associate Director of College Planning and Content Creation at MEFA, the Massachusetts Educational Financing Authority. We're going to find out all about that and more in just a moment. But first, Jonathan, thanks so much for being here. It's great to see you.Jonathan Hughes:Yeah it's a pleasure to be here. Thank you very much.The History of MEFAMichael Horn:Yeah, you bet. So let's start with just that. Like, you know, the history of the Massachusetts Educational Financing Authority, which in the state we call MEFA, but people outside of Massachusetts might not know the acronym. Tell us the history, how it's changed over the years. What does it do now?Jonathan Hughes:Yeah, absolutely. So MEFA, as you said, is the Massachusetts Educational Financing Authority. And we were actually created, we're a state authority. We were created by the Massachusetts State Legislature back in 1982, so about 42 years ago. And what we were initially created to do was to offer a loan. We were actually created at the behest of colleges. At the time, there was a limit on the plus loan, which is the parent loan for undergraduate student, at $4,000. And there was not a lot of educational loan options for families to go for financing.And so MEFA was created to offer that loan. That's something that we still do. However, as I like to say when I'm doing presentations, you know, since 1982, as you may have noticed, the cost of college has continued to go up. So we have a public service mission to help families to plan, save, and pay for colleges. Just offering that loan wasn't going to be sufficient to do that. So we expanded in the nineties to offer two savings programs. In 1995, we added the U Plan, which is a prepaid tuition program. And in 1999, I believe it was 1999, we added the MiPA U Fund, which is the Massachusetts 529 plan. So that takes care of paying for college and saving for college. The third part of that being planning. That really started to bloom about maybe 20 years ago or so, where we really started to flush out our guidance initiative. And so we offer hundreds of free seminars and webinars every year, you know, in person and virtual, on all topics related to planning, saving, and paying for college. So that's savings, admissions, college financing, et cetera. And now even further sort of branching out from just being college focused, like a lot of things recently, you know, we're sort of branching out to include college and career training. So we have MEFA Pathway, which we'll talk about later on. And we also were selected to offer the state's 529A, or ABLE plan, which I'm not sure if you're familiar with it, but it is essentially, it works in a similar way to the 529 college investing plan. It's for individuals with disabilities, so you can save in a similar way, tax deferred, and use those funds to tax free for qualified educational, I'm sorry, not qualified educational, but qualified expenses, which include educational expenses, but also health, assistive technology, transportation, daily living expenses, things like that. So that is a real change for us as well, and a real expansion of what we do. So I know I'm talking a lot, but it's hard to encapsulate everything that we do, and it takes a lot. But also, I think the backbone of who we are is offering that free guidance to people. So we are here for people in Massachusetts, but anyone as well.The Evolution of the OrganizationThe Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Michael Horn:Okay, so that's interesting. So I'm curious then state authorizes you, that's how MEFA is created. It's evolved a lot, as you said, not just loans, abilities to save, like the 529 Able Plan you just talked about, the guidance and so forth, is that, and then obviously, you said the big thing also not just college but also career guidance, is, you know, how does an organization like this evolve? Is this an independent set of decisions? Is this a state sort of mandates that help you evolve? Like, what's the interplay with the state at this point around those decisions?Jonathan Hughes:Well, I think it's a bit of both of those things. So we have certain things like MEFA Pathway, which was, and then we're going to talk about that later on. That's our college and career portal. That was an initiative from the governor's office at the time, Governor Patrick, and we set to work creating at that time, it was called your plan for college. But also, you know, we, in order to do the work that we need to do and be a resource for everybody in Massachusetts, we have partnerships with high school counselors, college administrators, and try to be a resource for them and for their population. So we hear basically what's needed. I'll give you a good example of this. We heard from our college administrators that they were seeing a lot of students who were confused at the point of when they were receiving all their financial aid award letters from colleges, and they needed to make that decision of where they were going to go. A lot of them were having a difficulty deciphering the letters and then comparing the offers among different schools. So, as you know, they're really confusing.Michael Horn:Yeah.Jonathan Hughes:Yes. It's confusing when you're looking at one of them.Michael Horn:Let alone comparing them. Yep.Jonathan Hughes:Right. And, you know, there's not a lot of uniformity between award letters. So we created this campaign called our paying the college bill campaign, where we go and sort of break down what you might see in award letters and also how you figure out what your balance due is at each. And we encourage people to actually bring their award letters so we can help them compare and figure out what they have due at each college. So a little bit of both. Some things come from sort of top down, and some things, a lot of things, I would say, are in reaction to what we hear from partners and what folks need.Building In-State NetworksMichael Horn:No, that makes a lot of sense. Okay, one last question, and then I'm going to switch to the MEFA Pathway. But I'm just sort of curious. In general, you have all these products, services. I didn't realize people outside of Massachusetts could use them as well. But within Massachusetts, does the relationship as a state created entity, even though you're a separate nonprofit, does that allow you to get better distribution, to have these partnerships with high schools? Or, you know, how does what you offer get in the hands of not just students, but frankly, the students who maybe need the most support and guidance around these questions that, you know, maybe they're a first gen potential college student, they might not have that knowhow in their household they really need a service like yours. They, you know, plausible.aren't getting the support given what the student to teacher, excuse me, student to guidance counselor ratios are something like what you offer would seem really important. How do you get that distribution and connection with schools, district students?Jonathan Hughes:Yeah, and I think you hit it there. I think it is the relationship with the counselors, and it is relationship not just with counselors, but with CBOs, community based organizations as well, other agencies like agencies. For example, there's one called Mass EdCo, which is headquartered in Worcester, but it's also a free resource for students to use to file financial aid forms and help figure they can help them do a lot of things, basically. And I think so. Trust is key and ease of use, I mean, we are a free resource for folks to use. We do try to encourage guidance counselors or high school counselors rather, to reach out to us with any questions. We are happy to take calls. We do have free appointments that people can set up with us and we do, as I said, take that feedback from counselors.What are their students experiencing? We work with a sort of number of ambassadors that offer free financial aid nights. We will come up with materials, and a lot of this fits in with me for pathway as well, because high schools that use MEFA Pathway have access to us for free, and we're able to sort of hop on a call or run out to a high school to help them administer that. So it is just a lot of important partnerships that we cultivate, and that's why, as I said, trust and usability is so important for us.Michael Horn:Gotcha. And you're able to offer it free because the state helps fund that or how does that work?Jonathan Hughes:Yeah, so we are, financing is done through our loans. So that's how we keep doing what we're able to do. And that's why the loan piece of it is very important to us. That's how we keep the lights on. That's how we keep going out to colleges and to high schools and to K-12 schools and to offering everything that we need to offer to our citizens in Massachusetts and elsewhere.MEFA PathwayMichael Horn:Gotcha. Okay, so let's get, we've teased it now multiple times coming up with another question, but MEFA Pathway, what is it? Where did it come from? What's the purpose and what does it do? And have you had to partner with folks to be able to stand it up? What does that look like?Jonathan Hughes:Yeah, so MEFA Pathway, I said, was created by, through an initiative through the Patrick administration at the time, it was 2011, and it was meant to be a free college and career portal for students in Massachusetts. So that was your plan for college, as I said, and went through some iterations. It became your plan for the future later on, I think about 2017 was when it became MEFA Pathway, and it's just continued to develop. I mean, we work with, to build out the platform, a company called Folderwave, and we sort of have partner schools that we try to get. We're sort of enlisting schools in the effort to use MEFA Pathway in their schools as their college and career portal. Now, you know that there are other college and career portals as well for use in high schools and for middle schools. And so it's been, you know, a process over many years of trying to get more and more schools. And the thing I can say about MEFA Pathway, how it has changed, it has just grown more and more expansive I mean, every time I look, they're sort of adding something to MEFA Pathway. Um, so it's for use beginning in grade six. And of course, in grade six, you're starting to. I just have a son, actually, who just started grade six, so I can't believe he's at the point now where he can set up a MEFA Pathway account and try to figure out what he might want to do for a career. But, yeah, I mean, when you're in grade six and you start to use this, it's going to focus primarily on fun things, you know, things that you may want to do for a career. What are your interests? What do you like to do? What are you good at doing? What's your learning style, et cetera. When you get to high school, of course, it's gonna be a little bit more in depth, a little bit more planning your courses, et cetera. And the functionality of it has just gotten more and more in depth and comprehensive. So you can use it as a sort of just, any student in the Commonwealth can open up an account or anywhere, really, but it's mainly targeted towards Massachusetts can open up an account and do these things, or a school, a high school or school district can opt to use MEFA Pathway and use it for free and have sort of their guidance department use it as their portal. Different schools can use it at different levels. So some might use some parts of it and some might use another college and career portal for something else. So it has just continued to evolve and to get more in depth and to encapsulate more, not just college. As you can see, it started off your plan for college, and now it's the college and career portal piece, which is continuing to be built out more.Differentiating MEFA from Other Career NavigatorsMichael Horn:So it should be said in the interest of full disclosure FolderWave, who I've done some advising for, is the one that connected us together for this conversation. And obviously, then, as you just said, providing some of the technical infrastructure behind what you all offer. I love to stay with that journey that you just described where it's very, you know, what do you like doing? Fun,engaging. as you get into high school, more serious navigation questions around choices that have to be made based on those interests and understanding of where you tick and so forth. But help us understand how it's different from, you know, as you mentioned, there are a lot of tools out there. There's a couple of market leaders out there, right, that have big presence in more high schools than middle schools around this college. Navigation in particular, they’re starting to add careers as well. What really differentiates MEFA Pathway from the other things out in the market?Jonathan Hughes:Sure. Yeah. No, its a good question. And I think a couple of things make it different. The first I’ve mentioned a few times is that it’s free. So it’s a free resource for schools to use or for students to use. And so that is different also to be trained and support on this is also free. I know that that's not the case with other college and career portals.They might charge to be trained or for troubleshooting, what have you. I was just sort of in preparation for this, talking with some of the pathway team that goes out to high schools. And we did, I think, 150 or 160 visits or conferences with high schools over the past year. So that's one thing. The other thing is we do have that interplay with counselors. So we do solicit feedback and we do act on that feedback as quickly as we can. There's a relationship there that's really, really close and that extends to something we hear a lot about lesson plans that we can offer. So we have created lesson plans for teachers, counselors to use in their school. So we heard from counselors that, you know, we have all this great information on MEFA Pathway, but, you know, on top of classes and on top of everything else that students have to do, they're not really getting this information. So it would be great if they could use it in classes. So we developed lesson plans for advisors or teachers to use in class so that they know students are getting that information. And it's all sort of lined up with MyCAP guidelines, which are through the State of Massachusetts. So it stands for my career and academic placement. And so that makes us different also because we have that Massachusetts focus to us. So we are aligned with the MyCAP program. We have specific tools on our site on MEFA Pathway where people can go and see what their savings might be. If they go through a Massachusetts community college and use the mass transfer program, see what their savings may be versus not doing that, they can search careers and save those that are Massachusetts focused as well. So those few things I think make us different. And also the other thing is that, you know, as I said, we are, everything is done with sort of a human face. We're a small shop and we are very responsive to questions or issues.Shifting Mindsets towards CareerMichael Horn:No, it makes sense. So I actually want to stay on something that you mentioned because you had the career academic placement standards, you talked multiple times about how MEFA Pathway and you all in general, are not just sort of a “college for all” shop anymore. Career is a much bigger piece of this. This is obviously, you know, in some ways a back to the future moment for high schools across the country, but with the different emphasis that we want people to really make informed choices as they're navigating this college career, not just one time decision, but frankly, like interdependent set of decisions throughout their lives. I just love your perspective on how the state, the standards, you all have evolved to help people really think about the tradeoffs or questions that they want to be asking is they're thinking, hey, I'm going to graduate high school. Have I set myself up to go right into career first trade school, community college, four year college, gap year. There's a lot of decisions there. How have you evolved that to help? You know, pretty like, these are very different initial pathways, big steps that have big implications. How do you help people think about that?Jonathan Hughes:Yeah, and I think, you know, that's a shift that you've seen across the industry and across the country in general. I mean, just hearing folks talk about college and career is different than it was 20 years ago. As I mentioned, and I'll mention it again, when we first started off, it was you were playing for college. And when I started working at MEFA a long time ago, we were completely college focused. And as that has changed, we have to grow to meet where people are and to adjust for other pathways as other people are doing. And it's hard. Everything in high school, counseling or counseling and postsecondary endeavors, it's all, like you said, interlocking sets of decisions.You have to get in front of people at the right time to get them thinking about the right thing so that their next step is the right step and putting them on the right path. I think how we do that through pathway, well, how we do it through MEFA in general, just start talking about these things and mentioning that there are other ways other than college. And it's not that everybody has to go to college. College will be important for many people. It's a great investment in many ways, but not everybody needs to go or goes to college. It's just whatever happens after high school, we want our students to be in a good position to succeed.So I think how we do that through MEFA Pathway is getting in front of them at a young age, in the middle school years, to try to see, to try to get kids thinking about what they might want to be and what they might want to do.This is also where the lesson plans for high schoolers come in, too. So a lot of these lesson plans are designed to get folks thinking about this. And this is what the MyCAP program is all about as well, to sort of let the student drive the process. And the first part of that is self discovery. The first part of that is knowing what the student wants to do for themselves, know what they want to do, and go that way. Now, that's not going to be the reality for everybody. And I know that I can only imagine myself at 17. You could have given everything, put in everything in front of me, and I still probably would have had a hard time. But to try to get that in front of people and give folks as many ideas as possible and to let them know that there are viable pathways wherever they may want to go, there is something out there for them. And then to the extent which they can use the tool and to try to carve these pathways out, there will be, as we were mentioning, a new focus on work-based learning. As there are more pathways for work-based learning in high schools, I always think of tech. That's the first thing I always think of when you talk about work-based learning is technical high schools. I've talked to a lot of technical high school students who go out to a job for, you know, one day a week or one week every month, whatever it may be. And I always thought that that's such a great thing to do. And I talked to a lot of them who love it. You know, I interviewed students on my pod, on our podcast at MEFA at a technical high school in Massachusetts.And the reason we got in there was because they were a pathway school. So they use MEFA Pathway to do various things. But this work-based learning is getting more and more notice from a lot of people. It's something that a lot of high schools and colleges are looking at. For our work-based learning, we have a portal where, well, not a portal, but a feature where counselors can list all the work-based learning opportunities that are available to their students. Their students can go on, if they log on to MEFA Pathway, see the options that are available to them, apply for those internships, job shadowing programs, whatever it may be, externships, and apply that way. What's coming soon, hopefully, is a employer portal where they can manage that part of the process as well. So this is something, as I said, that just giving students exposure to that and letting them know that there are other pathways out there and that they're valuable and they can lead to good outcomes and good salaries.Michael Horn:Yeah, no, I mean, I think that's part of the name of the game. And obviously, to your point, I probably was similar to you in this way. I would have been very hard for me at age 17 to imagine. But the flip side is, if I'd had more exposure to lots of different work-based learning opportunities, maybe actually, I would have known far more about what made me tick and what didn't, at least to the point that I could have started to rule certain things out in a meaningful way, which I often think we expect people to be like, oh, that's the thing. I think we're much better as human beings saying, that's not the thing, nor is that. And it might be these five other things.If you can help with that. I think it makes a lot of sense. What do you see in terms of utilization numbers and sort of, I don't know if you have quantitative ways of looking at impact, but at least qualitatively?Jonathan Hughes:Yeah, I mean, we do have some numbers in terms of accounts. I mean, there's about, I would say around 55, 56,000 accounts set up the MEFA Pathway. We have about 180 schools or so that are in Massachusetts that are signed up for MEFA Pathway, and they may be participating to varying degrees. Right. So some may use, you know, the lesson plans, but not use the common app parchment integration, for example, to send all of the transcripts and letters of recommendation to the colleges. That's a tool that we have on MEFA Pathway, but, you know, people can use it to their comfort level. And we are just, I think as high schools, you know, they have contracts with certain other college and career portal providers. They may sign up with me for pathway.These things take a long time, but, yeah. So, and from what we hear from counselors and from students, we know that it's really working out for people, particularly lesson plans, scholarship searches, and app applying through school. But there's so many tools, and the comprehensive nature of it is so great and getting greater all the time. I feel like I was talking about MEFA Pathways of its own, little sort of separate thing, and now I feel like it's, it's the other head on the shoulder, so to speak, so well.How Guidance Counselors Are Managing the ShiftMichael Horn:And it's gotten a lot of support from the governor's office, the current governor's office, obviously, with the public service announcement and so forth. And if I'm not mistaken, 180 high schools in Massachusetts is about 40, 45% probably, of high schools in the state is my guess.So that's, that's pretty good coverage there. Last question as we wrap up. It seems to me the other part of this equation as we move away from “college for al”l to a more robust understanding of what individuals can do to lead productive lives as they leave high school is that there's a fair amount of re education of counselors, like a lot of the guidance counselors, you know, for the last generation, it's sort of been college, college, college. That's a big switch on them. I'm just curious if you see, you know, how are they doing with that switch on the ground? You probably have a view of that. And I, I imagine a resource like the ones you provide is actually super useful to them, getting educated around other options beside the, you know, the ones that they've been focused on for the last 30 years.Jonathan Hughes:Yeah, that's a great point. Yeah, it really is. To be honest, I'm asking them so much of what they're seeing from their students that they, they're the ones who told me, you know, because I asked them, are, are you seeing more students go directly into the workforce to college or you see them, you know, going the career vocational training pathway? And a lot of them say yes. And I think that there's a sense, too, among students and parents that, you know, this is, I think it's different from when you and I were going to college in a way, and, or when we were graduating high school that this is seen as more of a viable option for more folks than it was. So, yeah, I don't, you know, to be honest, I don't really know. I don't have an answer for you.Michael Horn:I was just curious because it seems like a stark shift. And so services that are maybe, you know, have bigger budgets, right, to do the work and resources that MEFA Pathway has and the lesson plans, it seems like that can be a real resource not just for the students but maybe for the counselors as well.Jonathan Hughes:Yeah. And I think that's where employers come in and other CBOs and other sort of industry partners and local partners come in to sort of shape that. But, yeah, I think that makes sense.Michael Horn:That makes sense. Jonathan, really appreciate you coming on to explain all about not just MEFA Pathways but MEFA itself as an organization. Where can folks who, you know, they, they finish this conversation? They want to learn more. How should they do so? Jonathan Hughes:Well, they can go to a couple of places. They go to mefa.org. they can go to mefapathway.org and they can follow us on our social media channels. They can follow, they can look for the MEFA podcast, but they can go to? Michael Horn: Where they get to hear your voice on if they lucky them, rightJonathan Hughes: They get to hear me. Yes.Jonathan Hughes:I would recommend folks to go to mefa.org or mefapathway.org for more information.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.

Kevin Stoller, CEO of Kay-twelve, a school furniture provider, and Board Chair of the Second Class Foundation, joined me to discuss the importance of reimagining learning spaces in the broader effort to transform education. Kevin shared how his work in creating adaptable school furniture drove him to create a new docuseries on school spaces titled “What We Show Them.” You can watch episode 1 here.Michael Horn:Welcome to the Future of Education. I'm Michael Horn, and you are joining the show where we are dedicated to a world in which all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their potential, and live a life of purpose. And to help us think through how we can better do that, particularly in the K12 education system. Delighted that we have Kevin Stoller. He's the CEO of Kay-Twelve. That's spelled K-a-y twelve spelled out so not the normal sort of K12 that you often see. He's the author of the book Creating Better Learning Environments—after my heart—about how do we can think about space and architecture and the furniture inside of places to better facilitate learning. And he's also behind the Second Class Foundation's new docu-series called “What We Show Them,” which we will get into in a little bit in this episode. But first, Kevin, great to see you. We were on a podcast in the midst of the pandemic as I recall together talking about some of these things. It's good to see you here.Kevin Stoller:You too. Thanks for having me. You are one of those change makers in education that I always talk about. So I learn a lot from you. I love all the work you're doing. So I just really appreciate you having me on.Reimagining School Spaces Michael Horn:Well, very, very kind of you to say, but I'm excited to learn from you today because you've got a lot of things going. But let's, let's start high level. Introduce yourself to the audience. Like, the premise behind your work more broadly has been what?Kevin Stoller:So it's really been around how do we improve education? And I got into this in total, total by accident. I always say that. I ended up. I never thought I was going to be anywhere near education. To me, school was just something you get through. And then I somehow landed in my career of owning a school furniture company. And I still remember the moment where my mindset shifted when I was just walking into really the most ordinary type of school anywhere in the country, happened to be in my backyard when I was living in Worthington, Ohio, and walked into the lobby. And this time something felt different. Something felt different. I went to go check in with the principal that I was going to meet with, and I just felt there's this, like, buzz coming from this one wing of the school. Like there was this, like, almost like electricity coming. And he comes out and he's one of those. One of those principals that just like everyone, like, looks up to and loves. He just makes everyone feel great. It's one of those where it's like people want to move into the boundaries of his school so your kids can go, yeah. And he just smiles. And he's like, follow me. And I'm like, what? I'm like, what is going on over there? And he shows me. Brings me into a classroom and shows me a teacher. And she goes, watch this. And she has all the students kind of in a U shape around her, and they're all paying attention, and she explains what they're going to do today. And then all of a sudden she does like a clap, like a break, like they're breaking from their huddle and they go. And they immediately go into groups of three or four working together. One kid you would see, like, break away from the side and start doing some solo work just trying to comprehend something, then come back in. She would just kind of dance around the classroom and all of this would happen. And by the end, there'd be presentations that would happen in there. And then she'd bring them all together and wrap it up. And it was the first time that I realized I'm like, oh, crap, I don't own a school furniture company. Like, my this actually matters. And it was like the moment where, like, we need to figure out how to do this, because these straight rows of classrooms facing the front of the room, like, that's all I knew school was. And that was really the turning point that shifted us from having a school furniture company to having a mission driven how do we improve education company.Michael Horn:Very cool. Very cool. Yeah, I've had that experience now a couple times where I've spoken to school furniture companies or design companies or whatever it is, and I got lucky enough to take Vince Scully's class in college. And you just realize so much of how we relate to each other is because of the space in which we inhabit together. And we don't even think about the impact on mood, collaboration, all these patterns. And you're right. Like, if you reframe it, you can all of a sudden be part of that change and create that dynamic, exciting environment that you got to see that day in Ohio. It sounds like.Kevin Stoller:Yeah, it really was eye opening to me because it was, you know, like the engagement level that you start seeing in there. And, you know, and that was only the first part of the story, because the other part is we did this in four classrooms. So we were trying out this new furniture in four classrooms, and we go to the other three, and the other three literally would have X's with painter tape of saying, this is where your chair has to go and you cannot move it.Michael Horn:Oh, okay.Kevin Stoller:So. So it was really like the entry of, like, oh, wow. I can see where it can go. But I also see that this is a much bigger, bigger initiative here, because this isn't just about changing out the furniture. This is about how do you really change the culture and how do you really drive things from the leadership level and, you know, and really changing the perception of what school could actually look like. Michael Horn:All right, I have to tell one more story because it's now fun, because my kids, they go to a Montessori school and they're now in fourth grade, but they call the type of school traditional schools that I went to and my wife went to, they call it schools with desks, because to them, that's what it looks like, right? So, like, you went to a school with desks. Let me get this. Like, why did it work that way? And I'm like, I can't really explain to you why, but anyway, there we are. So then you have the Second Class Foundation, where I think you're the board president, and they are launching this docuseries. Tell us about this organization and how it intersects with your work.Extreme Makeover: School EditionThe Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Kevin Stoller:Yeah, so what. What really happened was it was a lot of years in works here, and it really came from someone on our team. Kirsten, on our team was like, you know, I'm sitting here and I'm watching all these, like, home renovation shows and, like, these makeover shows, and I see the work we're doing and how it really changes the learning environment and, like, where's, like, an extreme home makeover but school edition of it? So this is really, you know, four or five years in the works of, like, hey, that's a good idea. Why can't someone to do it? And, you know, because we. Our mission is to improve. Improve learning environments. We said, well, this is really the missing piece. It's like, we can talk about these at educational conferences, but we really need the movement to come from outside of the walls of school. How do we get to the point where people, like, just general community members start saying, well, why doesn't my school look like that? Like that? And that was really what we identified early on of, like, that's really the tipping point that if we really want to drive this change, how do we get it to that point where it's not like saying, like, well, don't put this fancy school furniture in my school. It's more of like, why doesn't our school have those types of opportunities for our kids. So we went down this path of saying, hey, can we pitch this show to Netflix? How do we get this on the network? How do we do this? And we quickly learned that either we could sell this concept, we can do this, and we can sell the concept, and then, you know, they can, you know, whoever buys it can do whatever they want. But we said, that's really not the intent of why we want to do this. And we said, well, we really can't do this by getting, like, product placement. We don't want to look like a big commercial. So we were like, we really need to do this as a nonprofit. So we set up the foundation a few years ago, and it's really with a blank slate of how do we improve education through the use of media and storytelling? Because we really want to do a lot of projects like this docuseries that we're launching, but as well as we want to highlight other types of work that's going on and how do we meet people where they're at in a more entertaining format so that this isn't just for people who are seeking kind of education documentaries. How do we do really entertaining, good work that people would want to watch when they're sitting down trying to figure out what do we watch on Netflix tonight?Showing the ‘Before Picture’ of School InfrastructureMichael Horn:Yeah, I, Well, I love that premise of Extreme Makeover School Edition and the demand side of the equation, because I think you're right. And obviously you're. You live in Arizona, so you're in the land of ultra school choice and parents making different decisions around their school at the moment. But I think the bigger premise is correct, which is parents saying, like, no, I'm not settling for the school with desks, because now I know that there's something else out there that can be done that's going to light a fire under my kid. And that's the opportunity that I want. And once community members start demanding these things en masse, you start to see bigger changes, and that's possible. So you're launching this docuseries. It's called “What We Show Them.” I've seen the first pilot episode about a school in Idaho, and I will say it's sobering. We don't see the rebuild in the eight minute segment that I saw or nine minute or whatever it is, but it's, it's a sobering first message. Talk to us about that first episode and sort of the larger arc of what you're hoping to accomplish.Kevin Stoller:Yeah, so it was one of those where we had our film crew and we were trying to figure out how do we hit home as fast as possible on this. Because to produce anything, like, at this level, which I would say is at, like, film quality level, like, I mean, it's outstanding.Michael Horn:Yeah.Kevin Stoller:Like, they did an unbelievable job with this, but they started looking at stories around the country. And what's amazing is they have a lot. There are so many good, like, characters and stories that are going on in education, but this one stood out as, like, we need to capture it right now. Like, we need to go out there right now and capture it. And you use the word sobering. I like that term. I'm probably gonna take that. It's. It's. I've been saying it's heavy. It's a lot heavier than the intention of the whole series. But if you look at any type of good storytelling and the arc is that you look at any movie or any character at the beginning of the book, it usually starts out with. With the situation. And you can almost always predict that the end of the movie or the end of the book is the exact opposite. And I just so look forward to us getting to that point. So we can show the exact opposite, but it is very heavy right now. It's a school in Idaho that honestly, like, at any moment, the school can crumble. They've actually had their gym fall, like, collapse in 1996, and they have not made any structural changes to the school. And Idaho is an interesting one. And when we get into this is, we really want to figure out who's the antagonist in here because we don't want the general public to be like, the enemy on this. But every time they've gone to bond to try to try to get the vote for a bond. Idaho is one of two states that requires a 66.7% approval before the bond can pass. And they've been getting, like, their last vote, they got 54%. 54% in a vote anywhere else in the country is like a landslide victory. But in Idaho, it's not passing. And. And because of that, they are going again, trying to do this and trying to really get ahead of this, and they're doing all the work that they should do. But what I give them credit for, and, you know, and I'd highly recommend that people watch it and we can. We can share the link. What I give this district credit for is that, yes, they want to solve the issue for their school, but they are also Taking on the bigger battle of. They're just one of the communities in Idaho. Everyone is running into the same thing. And these are old facilities that need updating. And they're trying to change that law so that it doesn't require the 66.7%, but just like a normal majority vote where, you know, where, you know, in 48 states, the rest of the country has it that way.Michael Horn:So this is a school then that it's still in that state. This is not the other side of nirvana yet. In this particular school.Kevin Stoller:No, they actually have, you know, in this November. And so not sure when this. This episode releases before that. But. But they are using.Michael Horn:It'll be before the election. Yeah.Kevin Stoller:Okay. So they are using it to help get their local support. And I hope they do get the 67%. But. But we wanted to make sure as a film crew, we are not dividing this community and trying to be like, well, the other 46%. What are you thinking? Like that's not the. I mean, that's really wasn't the intent. And the other piece of this too, is that the goal of the docuseries is that we have a whole bunch of different stories that we interweave because movement is slow in education and it is not exciting to watch. So being able to have other districts and not always dealing with facilities, of just having really good characters, which is what we've built up, is we have a list of really good characters that we want to highlight and that allow you to have an emotional connection with them that are just people that you want to see the work they're doing and transpose that. Where some are in amazingly new schools, some are like different stages, some are doing more like micro school. Like really just showing the different landscape of what education actually looks like in this country right now. And where I just keep coming back to in an entertaining format.The Range of Topics Covered in the DocuseriesMichael Horn:Yeah. So give real breadth to that vision of what school can and should be over time. But also against this sobering beginning. Just give us a little bit of tease. You said, you know, facilities is not the only entry point into the topics are some of the other entry points that this will tackle.Kevin Stoller:Yeah, I mean, one of the storylines that we look at is in the Virgin Islands. I don't know how much you follow what happened there, but literally almost all their schools got destroyed by.Michael Horn:Yeah, by storms yeah, okay.Kevin Stoller:Yep. So they are going through this and there's an amazing leader that they have that is like. That is rallying up the communities to re-envision. Be like, hey, this is our chance, like, you know, like we, we literally can start from scratch and do this. And it's super fascinating to see what is going on there. And then you have, you know, other ones where we actually have just a community member in Salt Lake City who just has taken a passion on and and is, is taking. Rallying people to just look at, again, look at education differently. And it's. And he is super like energizing and upbeat. So trying to really transpose some of these stories around the country and give a really good like, patchwork of like, hey, we're at a really interesting time in education and a lot of things are happening that maybe you and I see, but I don't think the general public really sees it.What’s Next for the Docuseries Michael Horn:Yeah, no, I think that's right. And you're right. U.S. Virgin Islands, that's the ultimate in, you know, what I would call nonconsumption, where you can truly create something that has not existed before because there's not everyone going to the status quo, if you will, and sort of locked in with the mindset of what this looks like. So, so wind us forward. Let's, you know, this fully gets off the ground. We're having this conversation in September right now, back to school, but play it forward a few years. You know, the nonprofit exists to move change in education through storytelling, through media. What's the hope for this series and beyond of what you catalyze? Kevin Stoller:Yeah, our hope for this series is that we raise the money so that we can complete. We have a kind of a story arc of a 10 episode docuseries that once it's produced, being able to sell it and license it to the streaming platforms, it's a lot easier for them when you have a product that they can be like, yep, we can air it now. So that's the goal with this one and we hope it becomes an ongoing one. But obviously like anything like this, you got to take one step at a time and see what the response is. But the nonprofit is really to be meeting people where they're at. We hope we can fund additional projects like this. We hope that we can be affiliated with people that are already producing like this and even things that honestly are probably like some of the low hanging fruit we want to tackle. And I'll use the example out of like any news story that you see on education, the newspaper or the website is grabbing some stock footage of what a school looks like from like 20 years ago. And can we have like an industry like, can we do that? Yeah. Can we upgrade some of the stock footage of what schools are looking like and try to change that perception of like, hey, they don't look like the way they looked in Ferris Bueller. And you know, in the mid-1980s, some still do look that way, but most of them actually don't. But, you know, but if you're not like walking into schools pretty regularly and, and I would say that the majority of adults in America are not really actually going to see the insides of schools very often, how do we change that perception? Because I do think there, there is a big element in this where we're just stuck where people are just like, oh, that's the way school went. Because I went there 30 or 40 years ago. It's probably the same.Michael Horn:Yep. Of course, school with desks, as my kids say again. But let's, let's end on this. How can folks find more support? I think it's secondclassfoundation.org/projects if they actually want to see the, the first pilot itself. But, but tell us how, how they can stay in touch and support.Kevin Stoller:Yep, perfect. Yeah, that, that is a great place. I just, I think that's a great place to start. Watch that. You can see the story or you can read more about it on the website. But on the Contact Us is really what we're looking for the help for. And we're trying to connect with the organizations, the individuals that can help financially support us but also help in additional ways. We have some additional board seats that are open that we can fill. And then, you know, there's also kind of the volunteer level, you know, like just ones that can help spread the word and share, you know, like share this and other work that we're doing on social media and within their networks. But those are really the three, three things that we're asking for at this point. Trying to find the, you know, like those right donors or organizations or individuals that can do that, board members and the volunteers.Michael Horn:Perfect. Kevin, thanks for the work you're doing. Thanks for the storytelling you're doing. Thanks for the reframing you're doing. And for all those tuning in, check out secondclassfoundation.org learn more, see how you can support.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.

Mike Flanagan, CEO of the Mastery Transcript Consortium (MTC), joined me to talk about the organization's recent “acquisition” by ETS, as well as its broader work in changing how we measure student learning and represent that to colleges and employers. Could the broader adoption of MTC change the game for how students choose college—and allow colleges to be more diverse, rather than “one-size-fits-all” as many are today? This was a fun conversation where I pushed Mike on a few ideas around skills—and then learned a lot from his nuanced answers. Look forward to your thoughts in the comments.Michael Horn:Welcome to the Future of Education. I'm Michael Horn, and you are joining the show where we are dedicated to building a world where all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their potential, and live a life of purpose. And to help us think through that today. I'm. I'm really excited. It's my longtime friend, Mike Flanagan. He's from the town over from me here in Massachusetts. But we've known each other since I was on the board of the National Association of Independent Schools, and he was running one of the very cool business lines for NAIS, as well as, frankly, all things technology for the organization. But then he became the CEO of the Mastery Transcript Consortium, which was acquired recently by ETS, an organization focused on testing across the country and internationally as well. And we're gonna talk about all of that today. Mike, so good to see you. We're not in person, but it's great to be with you on camera.Michael Flanagan:I am so excited. Yeah neighbors first, but, like, this is, what a great opportunity. I really, really appreciate the invite.Michael Horn:Yeah, I should have added, you're a CrossFit certified coach, as well. So, you know, we've got, like, I'm not that, but, you know, we have certain other things in common, as well, so.Michael Flanagan:Yeah, I always have to put that in asterisk on that. I was former. Former coach. Unfortunately, my certification lapsed when my job changed, and I found wound up spending 90% of my time on planes. You know, Crossfit's a great way to be healthy and stay in shape, but if you want to get injured, a really good thing to do is do Crossfit once a month.The History of Mastery Transcript Consortium Michael Horn:Fair enough. Fair enough. Don't do that. Get some regular rhythm, but hopefully not afflicting you. But it's good to see you. Let's dive in. You and I have had a long set of conversations around what the Mastery Transcript Consortium pre ETS acquisition is. We might call it MTC, so you know that's the acronym. But let's just talk about what Mastery Transcript Consortium was at the outset through its history, before the acquisition itself.Michael Flanagan:Yeah, I mean, I will say just a preview. It's what and still is, the changes as a result of our new home with ETS, which we'll talk about in a bit are much more about expansion and kind of continuation of what we're doing versus, like, a radical kind of rethinking of it. But to go back to the start, the way we talk about MTC, to educators out there is, to start with a pretty simple premise, which is that we think there are better ways of doing school, right. That the schooling models we have today, for a lot of kids, they don't feel very relevant, they don't feel very useful, they don't feel very engaging. And yet, at the same time, there's all these counterexamples of amazing schools. You talk to them all the time, right? School leaders who are innovators. They're doing project based learning, doing interdisciplinary work. They're getting kids out of classrooms, into the world of work. They're putting kids in teams and solving real world problems, and they're really focused on skill building. And the challenge we had, or the thing that kind of kept pushing us was like, these models are awesome. Why aren't they everywhere? Why doesn't every neighborhood have a school like this? And what we realized, talking to a lot of the same people you talk to, school leaders and innovators, is that what we kind of have is an infrastructure problem. We basically know how to produce this amazing, innovative learning. But all the systems we have to, frankly, keep score to credit and credential that learning are completely yoked, completely invested to old ways, credit hours, academic courses, and GPAs. And so the question is, like, what do you do if you're a school leader and the model you have, like, doesn't map to any of that? And the answer to the question for us was a grassroots effort, the consortium and MTC, the Mastery Transcript Consortium. And what we've built with our schools is, simply put, an alternative credential. It's one that's completely based on competencies and skills and also centers artifacts of student learning, like actual work product, and then combines the two. So you have the best attributes of what we think is a competency based transcript and a portfolio system. And that's it. That's MTC in a nutshell. We've built this system so that kids that are doing innovative learning don't have to translate or water down that learning to have it make sense to colleges and to workforce, but they can actually have a credential and exit ticket that is fully consistent, both in terms of philosophy and design, with all the hard work that the people that started their school are probably doing.Michael Horn:Very cool. I think what I've learned and appreciated over time, as I thought about it, Mike, is, is two things. One, by focusing on those folks that either have an innovative model or want to, to your point, you're creating the infrastructure for them to grow, for them to validate what they're doing to be accepted by colleges or trade schools or employers or whatever else, sort of giving them a consistent infrastructure across the school. So it's not just, oh, here's another one off here, here's another one off there. And then, number two, what I think I've come to learn is you're not necessarily in the weeds of my big thing of competency-based or mastery-based learning of we're throwing over seat time, and you get to move at your own pace. What you are more is on the, yes, that would be great. But you're more on the end of that saying, okay, whatever the system is, let us represent what you have mastered in some way that I can then click in and see the artifact of learning that proves you've in fact, mastered that domain, skill, knowledge, whatever it is. And so it's really, the way I kind of think of it is it's like an asset-based report card. At the end of the day, these are the sets of things I can do. And yeah, it may be jagged, but, like, that's a reflection of then who I am as an individual. I don't have to lie about it, right? I don't have to puff up these other areas. How do you think about that exactly?Michael Flanagan:I mean, jagged. Jagged and asset together, right? And I think if there's one thing that we spend, I mean, MTC is a nonprofit by design, because if we were a for profit, we wouldn't be able to invest so heavily in advocacy and outreach to higher education. And if there's one place where I think we've had to work very hard to move the needle and change the mindset is folder reading in universities and colleges today is largely done through a deficit mindset. It's how many APs did school X offer? Did applicant y take all the ten APs? And if not, why not? And it's a very weird way of thinking about the high school journey. It has this weird, pernicious effect where the most high achieving kids actually have the most narrowed options in terms of what they study and how they study, because they are basically engaged in a full time exercise of compliance. Like, how do I put the best portrait forward, no deviations allowed, whereas all the best real learning. I mean, 80% of the great stories you tell when you're talking to somebody who's innovated or built something new. All the Clayton Christensen work is like, oh, what comes from failure? What comes from looking at things through totally unexpected ways of bucking systems. And so if you build feedback loops and measurement loops for high schoolers that say, oh, no, we want you to be creative. We want you to take risks, but also we need you to be perfect at everything all the time. No variants allowed. They're smart kids. They know what the actual assignment is.Michael Horn:They know what the game is. Yeah.Michael Flanagan:Yeah. Michael Horn:No, and I mean, I think, look, this should be a huge thing for colleges as well as, you know, I famously earned, famously sitting there watching the closures and mergers of colleges. My argument is, lean into what makes you as a college, distinct. Look for the students who match that profile. And guess what? We don't all have to try to look the exact same, which is the current system. Michael Flanagan:One of the things that I, when you're starting new things, it can be very hard to find signal in all the noise. Right. And so I think one of the things that we've learned both in this role and in some of my previous jobs is generally, you know, you're onto something when you see that users on both ends of, like, a performance curve, like what you're doing, or see some value in what you're doing. Right. So for higher education, if I'm in charge, first of all, I want to stipulate that we as a society overly obsess about 20 colleges, and they're very, very low selectivity rates. And that's not where kids actually go to school. You know that better than anybody, written books about it. But since we do, if you are in one of those 20 colleges, you are still, you still have the mandate to yield a diverse, representative class. And the Supreme Court just tied your hands. So they now are saying, oh, you have new metrics. You have different ways of visualizing student capacity and capability in a systematic way. That's interesting to us. We want to have that conversation. So that's not anything MTC did. That's the kind of market shifting to kind of wind up where we already were. And then to your story earlier, the vast majority of enrollment managers at these institutions are actually just trying to find kids, right? So. And right now that the signals we give those same kids when they're wayfinding, trying to find the right, you know, destination, they're very blunt tools. It's like, okay, you have this set of SAT or ACT scores. That means if you theoretically stack rank all these schools, how high up are you allowed to aim? But there's no lateral dispersion. There's no way of saying, but what about fit? What am I actually going to do if I get into one of these schools. And that level of fit, real skill profile, that's where the jagged becomes a feature, not a bug.Joining Forces with ETS Michael Horn:Yeah, that second one, I confess that's where I'd love to spend the energy that. Not so interested in the former, but the, but let's, let's jump in then to the ETS question, because they made the choice. We're now, this is September, so I guess it was June or something like that.Michael Flanagan:Yeah, we went, we announced it in the middle of May. Signed the paperwork in early May.Michael Horn:Okay, so May. We're now a few months in. They acquired MTC. Why was this interesting for them? How does this fit into ETS strategic plans? Folks who follow the industry know they have a relatively new CEO. There have been a lot of changes at ETS as well. Wrap it in. Tell us the story.Michael Flanagan:So, first, what I will say is just for, in case you have any professors of law out there, it's not technically an acquisition, because we are a nonprofit and they are a nonprofit. Legal junkies out there will know that what we did was called a sole member substitution. But let's just say in plain English, we are now a wholly owned subsidiary of ETS. We are one of the ETS family of companies, so we still operate independently. MTC is still its own 501(c)3 but we are absolutely now in this kind of family that has much vaster resources and I daresay, like, grander aspirations. So ETS has been very busy. The ETS that you and I grew up with, Educational Testing Service, has rebranded. It's just ETS now. And if you look at their tagline, they're talking more about education and talent solutions. Amit Savak, who you just kind of name checked earlier or referred to, is definitely leading the organization in a new direction. I have heard him get on stage and talk to an audience of ETS customers and thought leaders and say, hey, standardized testing isn't going to cut it anymore. I mean, that's a very bold statement for him in that role of that organization to make. I think the strategy is that skills are the future. Interdisciplinary skills. If we really want to give targeted supports and take advantage of emerging technologies to give actionable insights to young people when they're in school, to young adults as they traverse high school to college or work, the more and better information we can give them about their skill profiles, the better job they can do of self-advocacy and wayfinding. In what I think we all kind of stipulate is a very complex and fast changing world. The classic compact that you and I had together, which is study hard, sharpen your number two pencil, get to a good college, get a good job. Like, I mean, good luck with that. I mean, that is a, that whole, call it a treadmill, if you want to call it quality, value proposition, has been very deeply upended in some ways for better. I think there are equity stories to tell in finding talent through new and different lenses. But that's sort of the big picture direction of ETS. They're going in a new direction. They're focusing on skills and most specifically in the area of K-12 schooling. They have an initiative, a partnership with the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning, which is led by Tim Knowles. And I know you've spoken with Tim yourself. Tim's vision for education is to upend K-12 educational architecture. He, like, we believe architecture and infrastructure drive practice. And so if you can move beyond seat time, as he has said many times more eloquently than me, the Carnegie Foundation created the Carnegie unit as we know it. And they're sorry, they're trying to kind of disrupt that. If we can move beyond seat time and we can widen the aperture of what counts as skill development and what we, you know, assess and credential inside of schools, we open up more pathways for young people to be successful. So I never thought I would say this, but we have been working at MTC now for seven plus years, kind of at a grassroots level, trying to be like, seat time, move beyond it, right? Like, hey, expand your aperture, think about skills. So to suddenly have those two organizations be like, no, this is right, this is where we should be going. That was a huge kind of, I guess, wind in our sails and also let us, you know, it was pretty short discussion when we realized just how aligned the senior leaders were of those organizations and our admittedly much smaller team and our senior leaders on board for what we were hoping, the change we wanted to see in the world.Defining and Codifying Skills Michael Horn:So quick question, and then I have a longer one. But the quick one first is when you say the word skills, so many ways to think about what that word means, right? Some people, it's critical thinking, problem solving. Some people think, you know, it's, it's the ability to do a task in a certain domain, you know, and maybe think, you know, show critical things, like lots of different ways to show that. Sometimes it's just applied knowledge. How are you all like, what does that word mean in MTC land?Michael Flanagan:Yeah, we are borrowing very explicitly and with a lot of gratitude, the phrase durable skills from our friends at America Succeeds. And so for your listeners out there, please check out America Succeeds. Google durable skills. What you'll see is a wonderful research project where they did a meta analysis and like a data extraction of 80 million different job postings online. And what you see when you look at those is that there's a tremendous consensus about what employers are looking for. Technical jobs require certain technical skills, and I don't mean like STEM jobs, coding jobs, although those certainly do. Right. One job in a bakery, there are technical skills you need to have, like understanding how doughs proof and how to laminate doughs if you want to make croissants and things like that. But there's also soft skills, which they have rebranded as durable skills. You have to be able to communicate and partner well and make this problem solve on the fly. So whether you're in the bakery or whether you're working at Facebook, those durable skills are transferable across those in ways that the technical skills are not. And more importantly, employers are very comfortable, we think, skilling up entry level hires in technical skills that are specific to their tasks.Michael Horn:I see if they have the durable skills, they'll take the chance on them.Michael Flanagan:They have a much higher bar for their expectation for what we as education leaders give them as product. And so in terms of there being a mismatch between what K-12 is doing and what employers might want, we think it's the opportunity to add more value is in the explicit creation of durable skills. And I hit that word really hard, right? Cause I am a former English teacher. That was my first job out of college. I was a liberal arts major. I majored in English. I'm a huge believer in a liberal arts education. I know my communication and critical thinking. And I guess in some ways my negotiation skills were built around the seminar table. I had no doubt about that. The difference is those were implicit. The compact was go to a school of certain profile, major in certain subjects, and we can trust as an employer that you'll have that toolkit. It'll just kind of happen. Like the secret sauce will just out itself. We're actually saying, no, these are explicit skills. You can see clear progressions. The progressions are backed by learning science. Teams with the capacity of, say, ETS or Carnegie can surface those very explicitly. And when they do that, it's to the whole betterment of the sector for us to be able to use those as yardsticks as we coach and mentor young people through the skill development. So just as an aside, you know, as you know, I spent now the past seven years talking to a lot of very skeptical admissions offices. Right. I'm saying, hey, we want to give you something you've never seen before, but it's going to do a better job. Trust us. One of the best conversations I had was with the admissions team at West Point, because I showed up there and they're like, okay, look, we've read your website. We get it. But honestly, we're kind of into this ranking and sorting thing. Like, we think that's a feature. And what I said, yes. And we probably also agree that leadership can be taught, like, it's not this, like, thing some people have, some people don't. You can. It's a process. And they were kind of like, okay, we found common ground on that. So if they believe that leadership can be taught explicitly that there's ways to do it developmentally at scale, that's sort of the big idea that we're trying to lean into with durable skills and skills for the future at MTC.Michael Horn:Stay with me on this, because I think we'll lead into why the ETS partnership probably makes triple sense. But I guess the push I want to have is durable skills, like critical thinking or problem solving. Does it really transfer that much from domain to domain? Because in a bakery, it looks very different from a coding job. Looks very different from me behind my desk podcasting. Like, how do you think about. Or is it. No, we've codified it. And therefore, like, whatever domain you're working in, yes. You got to build up the knowledge base. But as you progress beyond novice, we expect to see this sort of set of behaviors.Michael Flanagan:So the easy thing, because it's the right thing, is to just agree with you and say it's more of a matrix than a ladder.Michael Horn:Okay.Michael Flanagan:There's not a unified model of critical thinking that is domain independent. Okay. But there are versions of that ladder that are optimized for critical thinking, say, in the humanities or critical thinking in the STEM fields. And I don't know how fine grained we can or even should be as we parse those. And I use the we there very loosely. Like, I am not a psychometrician who's going to be making that deliverable for the sector. I'm very lucky that ETS employs, I think, 75% of the psychometricians in America so that we've got the capacity to do that. Now. Smarter people than me will be figuring that out and also working across the sector, you know, bringing into domain experts. So we can have their voices as we build out the skill progressions.Michael Horn:No, that makes sense. I mean, I know at Minerva University, the way, and I'm on the board there, the way that they have thought about it is what you just said, which is we create a clear framework for these different, they have different names for them, but these different habits or skills. And then whatever you're learning, like, we expect to see the progression over time that you mastered. And so it becomes a habit that does transfer, to your point. As I move domain to domain, I guess the question there, or the, perhaps maybe I'm jumping to something, but it seems like ETS the partnership rather than just resources. The other thing now it does for you is we can actually create validated measures to say, like, yeah, what you just represented in the MTC transcript, that artifact of work like this, is how we assess it, validate it. And so that's sort of scalable, if you will, across the platform. Maybe there's even a third party way to do that that gets out of the, oh, my teacher liked me and therefore said this project was good.Michael Flanagan:That's exactly right. I mean, I think of the....Our moonshot is if you think about why AP's have gotten such traction, right, and why they. It's that there is value in having a national verified, psychometrically sort of stamped, you know, exam that certifies on a scale of one through five that, you know, student is at this level of capacity in Area X. Huge value in that as like, as a premise. The downsides are one time a year, very high stakes, you know, very significant upstream effects on what the curriculum is. And what if you didn't have to compromise? What if you could have a student doing an independent study, a portfolio defense capstone project completely of their own choosing, all the right adjectives. You would want self directed, personalized feedback, you know, from, you know, defending into experts in the community. But you could take the deliverables that came from that and run them through, we'll call it an engine, and get valid feedback about their communication skills or evidence of their critical thinking. And you could do it in theory, ad infinitum. You could run it through that engine as many times as you want. You could take a single high stakes exercise into a formative exercise, and you could take one of the biggest gating factors to the adoption of these exciting models, which is teacher workload. And you could turn some of these technologies into copilots. We're not taking humans out of the loop like, education is a relational, human centered exercise, but if you could have that kind of heads up display. Right. Those metrics on the side that assisted educators took a little bit of the burden off them, but also improved the validity and accuracy of the feedback they were giving to the students. I just think it could be transformational for the adoption of these practices in actual classrooms. And yes, they result in credential, whether it's a mastery transcript or a learning record. The biggest area of pushback we still get with justification is, well, these are really just collections of local assertions by the schools, which, by the way, is what grades are. So that's the current state that we're kind of solving against is grades. But yes, a competency based transcript currently generated by MTC school is ultimately what the school says. So. And we work very closely to make sure their competency models are as. As strong as they can be. We have to advocate implicitly and explicitly on behalf of those models. With higher eds, we have skin in the game and making sure they're high quality, but that's not the same thing as all as being able to say, oh, because we've run this portfolio of work through a process, we can now certify or stamp or put a badge on those things. I hesitate to use the word badge. Let's scratch that. But you can certify or stamp those. To say, no, you can take this to the bank. Means something third party.The Role of AI in MTC’s Work Michael Horn:Very cool. I have to ask, is AI a central component of being able to build that scaled infrastructure in some way?Michael Flanagan:I mean, it's not even a yes or no question. It's sort of in what ways? Right. The areas I'm most excited about are thinking about certain kinds. Like, if you think about what a mastery transcript is today, you pull it apart. From a technology perspective, what it really is is an assemblage, a collection of varied artifacts, student work files, meta tagged with a lot of data about skill and skill development and scales and other things by humans. That is a really interesting kind of corpus of data and text to put into a large language model. I'm really excited to see what happens when we have a lot of these flowing into trained models and to see what we learn by doing. The other thing, too, is that there are problems that we face now as a consortium. So last count, we had about 400 schools and districts that were working within the MTC environment, right? That probably means we got about 400 bespoke competency models that are in play. Each of them is kind of built with good intentions and backwards design and community buy in, but that's a lot of different ways of defining communication. So there's two ways you solve for that problem. One is by fiat. Somebody comes in top down and says, no, this is how we do it, which is terrible for change management and terrible from a product and customer perspective. The other is you say, hey, we've looked at all of these in a very analytical, thoughtful way. We've run them through different large language assist models. And what we can tell you is that in all these different models, it looks like there's actually two meaningful variants. If you have communication, you're probably doing it either this way or that way. And we'd encourage you to maybe like choose one of those and try and move towards that. That kind of like AI assisted harmonization, I think is going to solve a lot of our problems in the coming years.Michael Horn:Very cool. Very cool. As you were saying that, I was laughing to myself at your earlier assertion again, which is like, hey, grades in English suffer from a lot of the same problems, but we sort of accept it because we've accepted the Carnegie unit and we think we have an understanding of what goes on in an English class. Even though I would argue the signal of grades has been increasingly breaking down over the last several years in particular, always flawed in my mind, but really breaking down in the last few years.Michael Flanagan:Covid pressure tested our kind of national and local assessment practices and not surprisingly, found them wanting in areas, as you've, as you've documented, probably better than, better than anybody. No, but I mean, you know, for those of, you know, listeners out there who are less familiar with mastery learning, I could see some of them saying, well, isn't this kind of just standards based grading? And it's that the answer to that is not a no, it's a yes end. Like standards based grading is awesome. It's criteria and referenced. It's very objective. You can look at, you have scales. The difference is you can still do standards based grading and not tinker all that much with the fundamental architecture of school, right? You can still have everything in, like seat time. You still have everything based in like, academic subjects. Not a lot of, not a lot of, you know, moving the needle on sort of what school feels like and is a lived experience for kids. Still better than status quo grading. And that's my point on that. But we think that's a good start. And what we want to do is take the same essential principles, really clear criterion reference scales, but expand them so we can use them to measure new and hopefully more relevant things and create.MTC’s Plans for the FutureMichael Horn:The room for that jagged asset base. Okay, so last question then for me is you all are a separate nonprofit still legally, that's how it works. But there's obviously a great deal of integration. What does this look like down the road as you play this story forward with ETS and MTC in the work together? And what's the hope for what this looks like in five years?Michael Flanagan:I think you can almost work backwards. And when we talk about this now as a team, we have two big goals. One is to use all the amazing support and the brand equity and the relationships with of our new parent to grow the footprint of what we're doing. Like we more or less, without spending any resources on sales and marketing, just kind of grassroots, have managed to build really good sustaining relationships with like these 400 schools and districts. There's no reason we can't double that in the coming year. And who knows? I would love us to be and say, be available to half of school districts, right, as MTC by 2030. I think, and we're now in an organization where like you talk about having a couple hundred thousand kids and they're like, yeah, it's a good start. So I think that's one thing. The other is anything. When we think about product and we think about innovation, it's just contributing as much as possible to the success and product development of the Skills for the Future initiative. I want to be very clear, Skills for the Future. It is owned by Carnegie and ETS. Those are the organizations. That's their jam. But anything we are bringing to the table that can be used or leveraged in terms of thinking about how you build skills based credentials, skills passport or skills transcripts as Amit sometimes likes to refer to them. And also the fact that we do have, you know, as we work with these five states, that first Skills for the Future that Carnegie and ETS have recruited as co design partners, we also can use the portfolio of MTC schools to get feedback and kind of testing new innovations and assessment and insights. So all of it I think fits together from a product perspective and a growth perspective.Michael Horn:Very cool. Mike, thanks so much for the work. Thanks so much for joining me and walking us through where you've been and where you are now and where you're going. Really appreciate it.Michael Flanagan:Thank you for, thanks again for the invite. Love the conversation.Michael Horn:No, I'm, I've been thrilled to watch from afar and sometimes close. And it's great to see. And for all you tuning in, we'll be back with more stories like this next time on the Future of Education.Michael Flanagan:And you can find us at mastery.org.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.

Amar Kumar, Founder and CEO of KaiPod Learning, joins Danny Curtis in this conversation! They discuss the growing microschooling movement, unpack what teachers need to feel successful starting and operating their own schools, and envision a future in which districts leverage the power of microschools.Danny Curtis:Welcome to the Future of Education, where we are dedicated to creating a world in which all individuals can fulfill their potential, build their passions, and live a life of purpose. I'm Danny Curtis, producer of the podcast and collaborator with Michael Horn on all things learning innovation. And I  am stepping in front of the camera here again this week for a conversation with Amar Kumar who is the founder of Kaipod Learning, which is a technology solution and service provider for microschools. Amar, thank you so much for joining us here today.Amar Kumar:It's great to be here. Thanks for having me, Danny.Amar’s Journey to the WorkDanny Curtis:Yeah. Well, Kaipod Learning has been such an important player within a microschooling movement that has been growing rapidly and earning a lot of attention. So I'm so excited to have the chance to learn from you about all of the great work that you're doing. And so to start us off, Amar, could you tell us about your journey to microschooling and the founding story of Kaipod learning?Amar Kumar:Yeah, happy to. I have been in education for almost 20 years now. I started off as a school teacher where I taught a high school math class in a very high needs school in India. And I discovered in front of the classroom what I think a lot of teachers discover, that you might be planning to teach the pythagorean theorem today, but there are kids who are not ready for that. They're maybe doing math at a fourth grade level, and there are some kids who were way past the pythagorean theorem and they're doing calculus and they're all sitting in front of you waiting for a lesson. That problem of I just couldn't appropriately target all kids with the same lesson plan was really, really difficult for me, and it caused me to want to try things differently, create small groups. I started experimenting in my classroom, which worked to some small effect. I became the principal of the school, saying, I'm going to do this across the whole school. And it all failed because I started to realize that the construct of a rectangular classroom with a teacher at the front and students sitting down all getting the same delivery at the same time, that construct itself is the problem. I wasn't the problem as a teacher. So I left traditional brick and mortar education to do a lot of things in education. Eventually, that journey led me to online schooling, where a curriculum and lesson plans and assessments are all pre-created on a predictable path, and the students move through that at an unpredictable pace. So students get to choose how fast they're consuming that knowledge, demonstrating understanding before moving on to the next thing. And I loved it. I fell in love with that model because I said, this is the future. Every teacher doesn't have to reinvent the lesson plan. The teachers just focus through an online network how to help each child. Loved it. I became the head of product for Pearson's online schools business. And of course, as much as I loved it, I started to also realize the flaws in that system. When students are completely home alone, it can be really difficult from a social and emotional perspective for them. It's difficult for parents when maybe just need some childcare, when the kids should be in a safe place outside of the home. And so I knew that that solution was also incomplete. And when the pandemic happened, like all education companies, I said, what do we do now? And we in Pearson were seeing massive growth of our online schools business.And the families who were in those schools were saying, wow, my child is thriving in an online learning environment. And never predicted it, but, oh, my goodness, like, I would never want this long term because socialization, childcare. And so for me, there was a really important insight there. While the conventional wisdom was, everyone's going to go back to traditional schools, for me, the counterintuitive insight was, but this form of learning really works. So what if we could create small groups of kids who come together socially in a safe place outside of the home, and they're learning at their own pace? So I thought I'd invented a brand new learning model. I was going around telling someone, I've invented something new, until someone said, this is called microschools. We know what this is. And so for me, it was a really interesting sort of bottoms up way to enter this space when I just found this problem that I thought I could solve.The Evolution of Kaipod Learning Danny Curtis:Got it. So, you know, you saw the shortcomings of traditional education from inside the four walls of the classroom, as you said, and also some of the challenges of tech only from within ed tech, and then tapped into this microschooling movement that was trying to get the best of both worlds. And that was a movement that was in the midst of a lot of growth and change. When schools were closed during the pandemic and more parents were sort of entering their students into these small, personalized learning environments, learning pods, and some of which stuck with it even after school doors reopened. And I understand that Kaipod learning is also in a period of growth and change. Could you tell us a bit about how Kaipod looks differently now than when it started?Amar Kumar:Yeah. It's interesting because when we first started, we grabbed onto this concept of learning pods, or pandemic pods, as people were calling them, where parents would voluntarily come together, hire a teacher, meet in someone's basement, and the children would be learning in person. And same thing as what I mentioned earlier, parents who were in the system said, wow, my kid is happy. He's not being bullied. He's learning. This is wonderful. I love it. It's the best year of school he's had. But when schools reopen, it's like, why? Why would you do this? This has been great for you. Again, the insight there was, it was a huge pain to organize these learning. It was a huge pain to hire the teacher. So when we started off to your question, we said, we can organize this for you. We'll grab the space. We will hire the teacher. We'll set the schedule. We'll recruit the families. You just pay a membership fee to join. And that model scaled from our first site in Boston three years ago to 16 sites across the country. And so we saw families were craving this model. Families who'd been homeschooling or families who've been doing online schools. And what we discovered is every time we would want to open a new site, we would get hundreds of applications for our learning controls, and then we would get hundreds of families who said, I'm interested in learning about this. So we just knew we just couldn't do it faster. We knew we could never open enough. It's very capital intensive, as you would imagine, to open one of these learning pods. And so for me, I really wanted to bring this learning model to many, many more cities and states across the country. And I said, I don't have to hold the secret. I don't have to be the one that has my name on the building. It can be someone else who opens it. And so I went sort of down the path of franchising, but there's a lot of legal hurdles there. And then eventually we discovered, actually, if a teacher in a community has a lot of passion around creating her own school, she knows the families in that community, she knows the geography, so she knows kind of where the school could be. She has her own how she wants to run it. Why don't we support her to get her dream off the ground? And then once she launches, we can continue to provide that support, and that can be the start of a new business model. So that's what Kaipod is turning into, is we have sort of our core pods. Those are like our innovation sites where we continue to learn and iterate. We work with great kids, we help improve their life outcomes. And everything we learn there goes into supporting our partners. And there are now almost 100 partners across the country who are opening their own microschools. And so I'm sure we'll talk about that now. But that program is called Kaipod Catalyst.Kaipod CatalystDanny Curtis:Yeah. Yeah, I think it's a great segue. I would love to focus in on that work that you are doing to bring new founders into the fold and support aspiring micro school founders in making the leap. And I know you all have been doing a lot of work around it, as you mentioned, and have some big goals around it, too. So could you tell us a bit more about that initiative?Amar Kumar:Yeah. The number one goal here is lower the friction to start your school. So if you're a teacher who's got this dream to say, I wish I could have my own school, or if you're a teacher who's sometimes in a staff meeting, like, I bet I could run this place a lot better than those people. If you have those types of attitudes, you should think about starting your school. And when you start thinking about starting your school, you get overwhelmed very quickly, because that's a really big task. And through our research, we've identified four really big barriers for teachers who want to do this. The first is sort of content and knowledge. They don't know what to do.So how do you build a website? How do you figure out regulation? How do you build, set your price? How do you do marketing? How do you enroll families? There's so many things, probably hundreds of decisions you have to make. Teachers don't have a knowledge base to do that right now. That's the first big barrier. The second big barrier is confidence. Teachers don't have the confidence to say, I am going to be, I'm going to be a small business owner. That's a really difficult transition for teachers to make, but it's really important going to start school. You got to see yourself that way. The third is community. If you're doing this alone, it can be a really lonely journey and a lot of people give up. In fact, 90% of the people who want to do this give up—90%. So we know there's a huge problem where people feel alone in this journey. And then the fourth barrier is capital. You need a little bit of money to get started. It's not tens of thousands of dollars, but it is some money to get a lease, to pay for some marketing materials, to buy curriculum, etcetera. So there's a little bit of capital required. So these four barriers prevent teachers from starting their schools. And if you prevent teachers from starting new schools, you're not creating new supply. Because the new supply starts, the more demand generates, more and more parents get interested. So this is the problem we're setting outwards. How do you break down each of these structural barriers? Teachers and the catalyst program is very specifically designed to break down each of those barriers. On the content side, you have our entire playbook. Everything you need to know to start a school is in our course. That includes lessons, videos, master sessions, tools that you're going to need, templates like, gosh, I spent like $15,000 on my first staff handbook and family handbook with lawyers. Don't spend that much money with a lawyer. Like just use my handbook. Customize my handbook for your school. It's just like that. There's lots of these templates that the school founder has to build. It takes a month to do it. So we think we can accelerate your journey about six to seven months to get your school off the ground.On the confidence piece. We provide a lot of coaching, one-on-one coaching, group coaching to help these teachers make that mental transition that I am first, a business owner. I'm figuring out how to build a sustainable microschool for my community. So it serves kids forever and it gives me a sustainable wage. So we do a lot of coaching.The third is the community itself. Like I said, we already have about 100 founders. We're tracking more than double that this year. So the idea is that you are not alone. There are people on this journey who are a few steps ahead of you. There are people who are a few steps behind you, but you're all moving together to create new education options in your community. And one of the most famous phrasing sayings in our community is don't make this mistake, we've made it for you. Because whenever someone asks, oh, I think, I'm going to buy this, like 15 people will say, don't do this. I bought it. It was garbage. It didn't work. And so it really helps people see how they can learn from each other. And these founders are all over the country, and they're really helping each other because there's no competition. They're all over the place. And so it's a really vibrant community. And our founders helped. They feel so supported. Every time there's a win, the first place they go is their husband. The second place they go is our community.Every time there's a fall or a hurdle, they come to our community because they want the help. They know there's going to be 15 people who have ideas for them on how. And then finally, capital, which is the fourth. We're working with banks to provide loans. We're working with nonprofits to provide grants. We have access to our own grant that the catalyst founders are eligible for. So we're trying to build all these wonderful supports so that there's as little friction as possible if you want to start school.Danny Curtis:Yeah. It strikes me as a comprehensive set of offerings that you all have, no doubt informed by the 360-degree view you got into the challenges of microschool operators during your time or in your role as a direct service provider yourselves. And I love that you are not just leveraging your own expertise and experience in this field, but crowdsourcing, the wisdom of microschoolers everywhere, through the community piece that you're describing.Amar Kumar:Our network just gets stronger and stronger as more people join the network, that crowdsourcing gets better and better. And so we're really excited about the future.Serving the Varied Needs of Microschools Danny Curtis:Yeah. And to stay with the alliterative c theme, I'm wondering about another term starting with c customization. One of the great parts about microschools is the wide variety of microschools around the country. Kaipod is plugging into schools with very different missions, different methods, different student populations. And so I'm wondering, how have you all designed your product, your services, to allow it to meet the needs across so many different contexts?Amar Kumar:This is great. I think the first thing you picked up on is that the strength of this movement is its diversity. This is the primary reason I decided that the franchise model was the wrong model, or just like the company owned center is hundreds of times the wrong model. Because the reason microschooling will be successful is that they can completely flex to serve their community. They're founded by people from the community for their community. And they're in the community. Right? So I'm sitting in Boston. I have no business telling a founder in Wichita, Kansas, how to launch your school. She knows her community, so then my job becomes to give her a wraparound support and give her the key principles and teach her what would make her successful in her community. So, essentially, we have 15 building blocks of success. Each microschool needs to think about these 15, but the way they adapt them within their school is going to differ. And so, for example, one of them is family relationships, right? Obviously, a great microschool has very strong family relationships. They're not just, we do a parent teacher conference twice a year, but, hey, family member, like, you're getting pulled into the school to support each other, support the other families, support the other kids. Now, for some schools, that dimension is very explicit. There's an expectation that families are volunteering. They're running enrichment activities or field trips for other schools where maybe they're serving a different segment of families that might be busier. There's not an expectation that they volunteer, but there are regular community events. So we don't prescribe how you should do these 15, but we give them guiding principles. We give them the way to think about how their school brings these 15 to life to get to excellence. And so we found through that framework, all of our software, all of our services, all of our coaching, everything can flex to support each founder in their journey. And the biggest proof of that is in our network today. We've got one school in the Bay Area who's charging $30 to $40,000 a year for a very high end gifted student education. That's what that market commands. In the same time, we have microschools in our network who are serving very low income families in Atlanta for less than $5,000 a year. And we, as the network, can and have been supporting both founders serving these extremely different sectors. And so that, for me, is the promise that microschooling diversity is great, and we, as a network, can flex to support that.Danny Curtis:Yeah, got it. Accomplishing two very important goals, providing the bones and the structure to stand these things up, maybe more quickly and more easily, and also providing and affording the flexibility to adapt these to different contexts and environments, both of which so important to doing this at scale and making room for the potential for innovation, the enormous potential for innovation of the microschooling movement.Amar Kumar:This is the great thing about having teachers start them, because teachers have a million ideas about how to do things better, how to do it differently, for their community. So to give them that flexibility, the bones, like you said, giving them the structure to innovate within is exactly what's right for them.Founders’ Experiences Danny Curtis:So, Amar, I'd love to hear what you're hearing from the microschool founders that have gone through the program, both about the program itself and the experience of moving into the micro school founder and leader role.Amar Kumar:I would probably categorize their reactions in three buckets. And the first is we're hearing that the comprehensive nature of compliance support is really valuable to them. They love that they are never alone and that that support doesn't stop once they launch their school. So I haven't mentioned this, but the way the Catalyst program works is you actually don't pay anything to join the program. You don't pay anything for any of our coaching, any of our support, any of our content, because my vision, my passion is not to run an accelerator for schools. My passion is to run a network of really successful schools. So my incentive is to get you to that point that your school is so successful that I'm so happy to be in your network. You're in my network.So essentially the way our model works is it's free to join the accelerator, and then when you launch your school, we essentially do a revenue share model, like a first student fee model for your school. And so what people love about Catalyst is that it's a full amount of support and we're with them forever. Like, we don't give up or we don't let go once they've launched. So they always feel like they're part of a bigger team. The second thing we hear is this, this phrase that comes up all the time, that this is literally a lifesaver. I think literally is being used a little extremely here, figuratively a lifesaver. We've had founders who've been two days from being evicted, that we've been able to step in. We've had founders who have accidentally signed a lease for a department that wasn't zoned. So we've been able to step in and help them out when they've made these types of unfortunate mistakes. And so I think knowing that there's a national network with connections, with resources, with the ability to help them get out of sticky situations has helped them get the confidence to keep going on this journey. You can imagine it's really stressful for a first time founder to have made a big mistake like that. And so we're there to help them in that. So that's, we feel great when we hear that. And third, which for me is just the most amazing, is when they say, this journey and this program has changed how they see themselves or it has changed how their family sees them. And they use phrases like, I used to be, quote, just a teacher, unquote, but now I built a school, now I'm a founder. And those phrases, you know, it's really hard to be a teacher. Saying just a teacher is not a great phrase. It's a really, really difficult job. But to make that leap and then see yourself differently and see your community, have your community see you differently is just so incredible to see that transition. And these, these people, they just sit up a little straighter. They carry themselves with more confidence, and they tell us that, hey, I was at the grocery store and someone recognized me as, you're the lady who started a school, right? And their daughter is beaming with pride at their mom being recognized. I love those stories. Like, these are people who are creating jobs in their communities. So this is as much of a story of education innovation as entrepreneurship in some of the most disadvantaged communities or with some of the people, these teachers who've been really forgotten, who aren't respected, and now they're taking matters into their own hands to do something about them.Danny Curtis:Yeah, I love to hear that. One of the biggest drivers of career dissatisfaction that we hear about from teachers is that lack of career pathway in a lot of traditional education settings, the lack of opportunity for experienced, excellent teachers to sort of grow their responsibilities and their role within the traditional school context. And so it's nothing surprising to hear that that is the opportunity to be a CEO and a leader and a decision maker within their own school and in their own classroom. That that is one of the most gratifying and rewarding parts about this switch. But for those teachers that might be skeptical of microschools or apprehensive to making this switch, what would you say to them?Amar Kumar:Yeah, there's plenty of them. I don't think starting a microschool is right for everyone. Like I’ll be upfront about that. But I think the first thing I would say is every teacher deserves more than they’re getting. And I don't think that's a controversial statement. I think everyone of any political stripe would agree with that. Teachers deserve more. That's the first.The second is asking these skeptic teachers who may be skeptical or apprehensive, asking themselves why they got into teaching. And when I had this conversation in an interview for Catalysts, they often sort of give, like, the rehearsed answer, but then, like, I push, and then I let them sort of sit in some awkward silence. And then it really gets into the real reason, you know, the spark in a kid's eye. Or, like, my grandmother was a teacher, and she inspired me to do it, but now I've lost the passion, etcetera. And so we asked them, why did you get into this? And are those dreams still being fulfilled? And if not, which, unfortunately for the majority of teachers, it is not being fulfilled, then I would say, just start looking at some of the profiles of people who started schools. Believe it or not, they look like you. They have the same struggles as you. If you go to our website, Kaipodlearning.com, you'll see these profiles, you'll see these men and women of all ethnicities, in all geographies, all income levels, all backgrounds, all ages. Who said, I need to take charge of my life, of my careerAnd all of them were. All of them were skeptical. No one wakes up and says, that's it. I've decided I'm gonna start a school today. No, that's not how it works. Entrepreneurship isn't this magical spark that we might see on Twitter or on TV. It is a slow and fearful journey. It's a journey where eventually you say, oh, my goodness, I have to do this. Something or someone is calling me to do this. So if you're religious, that someone or something is God. If you're not religious, that someone or something is your own inside or the fire that's burning inside you saying, you've got to do this. So if you're finding yourself moved by some of this, just read profiles of people. Type in microschooling, type in how to start a school. Go to our website, whatever you want. Just start learning.Because it might take you three years to get there. It might take you three days to get there. But everyone should. Every teacher should say, I deserve more, and I want to know what I can do about it.The Future of Microschooling Danny Curtis:Yeah. To your first point, a big fan of using the five whys to get at that deeper meaning or those deeper reasons. And on the second point, I can imagine that as microschooling grows in popularity, and more and more teachers are seeing more and more teachers like them developing these schools. It becomes easier to imagine themselves in those roles and taking on that responsibility. And for this last question, as we wrap up, I want you to get your crystal ball out and look five years into the future, and I'm curious, where do you see this microschooling movement going? How is it growing or evolving over that period?Amar Kumar:Yeah, I think there's probably two scenarios on how this plays out. The first scenario is microschooling starts to get steam. More teachers are starting schools. More parents are then leaving traditional schools, public or private, to start there, to join these micro schools. And that plan just continues. More and more people leave the system, which creates more demand for these microschools, which then spurs more supply. More demand, more supply. Right? So you can imagine a world where, say, 70% of kids are in a microschool in the next ten years. It's not unrealistic. You might think I'm crazy, but it's not unrealistic. North Carolina today already has 25% of kids who don't go to public school. 25% are already opting out of traditional public schools. That's one state. But it's not inconceivable that across the country, 70% to 75% of kids will have opted out of public school. That's a really big existential crisis for the public school system. It is also an exciting opportunity for education innovation and transformation.So that's one scenario. The second scenario is public schools see this trend, and they say, we're not gonna. We are going to start competing for these kids. Public schools say, I will not lose another kid to these new microschools, because why? I'm gonna empower my own teachers to create new pathways, new microschools within my district. So I have this really wonderful teacher. She's a middle school math teacher. Everyone loves her. She's got such amazing energy. I'm going to say to her, you now create your own pathway for robotics. A microschool focused on robotics within the Boston Public Schools system. You're still a tenured teacher. You're still in our union. Families still join public school. But now kids can opt into your pathway. And if they opt in and that pathway grows, she can grow, she can add more teachers, and if that pathway dies, then someone else can do that. What a great pluralistic system that would be to build within the public sector. That's the second scenario. Now, which scenario will it be? Anyone's guess. And I think it comes down to how the public sector responds. The way I see it is this innovation is going to happen regardless. Whether the innovation happens by teachers who have left the system or by teachers who are still in the system is the choice of the people who control system. Yeah, it's an exciting vision that you've laid out in that second scenario where students in more traditional settings are getting access to this personalized small learning environment. But obviously, as you have already alluded to, a lot will need to shift or change for that to become a reality. And so, I know I said the last question was my last question, but if you'll allow me one more, I'd love to hear what do you see as those necessary supports or changes that would facilitate or accelerate that future? And feel free to take this any direction you'd like, from culture to technology to policy. I mean, I'm a pretty simplistic person when it comes to this. I feel like there are, when something feels too hard to do, you think about what are the barriers? And there are barriers that sometimes exist in nature, and then there are barriers that are man made. And I think in this case, all of the barriers are man made. Right. All it requires is the political will of a strong school superintendent or school leader, the support of the bargaining units, the excitement of local parents and the passion of teachers. Those are all man made. Like, these things can happen in any school district in America, but those four ingredients don't exist yet. And so the question is, how long will it be until the school leadership, the staff, like sort of the membership organizations like unions, the parents and the teachers, how long will it be until they come together and say, we're tired of losing kids, we want to do something about this. Right? So I think those are the things that have to happen. Am I optimistic? No, but that's for the next five years. It's all really I can see. I don't think it's going to happen in the next five years, at least not at scale. But I do know there are school districts who are thinking about this today. This is not a pipe dream. Some of them are saying, I wish we could do this. What would we have to put in place to get it right? So it will happen in small pockets over the next five years, not at scale. And my hope is that in the five to ten year horizon, you do start to see the majority of districts say, we're going to build this within.Danny Curtis:Yeah, well, thank you, Mar, for sharing that vision and the ingredients it will take to realize that vision and more generally, your knowledge and expertise within this world of microschooling, and not only with us on the podcast here today, but with microschooling founders around the country. I look forward to watching as you continue to inspire innovation and facilitate learning across education and just really appreciate you joining us.Amar Kumar:Thank you. Appreciate you having me. And to the teachers who are listening, I'm serious, you deserve more. We need to look into what that means for you. We have a new program of Kaipod Catalyst that's going to start this fall. So if this is something you want to think about doing for next year, go check it out. This could be the right, this could be the thing you've been waiting for.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.

John Woods, provost and chief academic officer at the University of Phoenix, joined me to discuss how the University is drawing a closer connection between college and career. We discuss steps the college has taken to build career pathways and equip students with the language and signals to communicate their skills. This episode is worth the read/watch/or listen, as all that they’re doing I suspect will surprise you.Michael Horn:Welcome to the Future of Education. I'm Michael Horn and I'm excited about today's show because we're going to get to geek out on topics that have just become more and more of interest to me as we think about where the puck is going in education, learning, upskilling and so forth, which is a lot about careers and skills and things of that nature. And so to help us navigate that conversation, delighted, we have John Woods. He is the Chief Academic Officer and provost for the University of Phoenix. John, thanks so much for joining us.John Woods:Thanks, Michael. And thanks for the hockey reference. That resonates with me as a Canadian.John’s Journey to the WorkMichael Horn:There you go. And we’re trying to make you really feel at home, right? But let's start and make you feel even more at home. Before we get into some of these conversations around skills and careers generally, let's talk about your own career path to the University of Phoenix and perhaps reintroducing the University of Phoenix to folks. You and I got to spend some time together just a few months back and with a lot of the senior leadership team at the University of Phoenix. And it's clear to me anyway that it's a very different place from, say, 15 years ago, say a decade ago. So if it's easy to do, interweaving your own story with how the University of Phoenix has evolved and how you've landed as the provost there.John Woods:OK, so real kind of quick backdrop here. I've got a coal miners lamp on the shelf behind me, one of the many things on that shelf. Both my grandparents were coal miners and my parents, neither one of them went to college. I had two older sisters that didn't go to college, so I was a prototypical first generation college student. I was not a very successful student. I tell the story of my mother dropping me off and some upper class students grabbing my duffel bags and me waving goodbye. And that was it. And I was there for eight years. I don't think my parents visited the campus once. I did an undergrad and a master's and went on to do my PhD in higher ed, higher education administration. And I took a real interest in that because of my own experience in higher ed. And I did a couple areas of focus within my PhD work. One was adult learning theory and the other one was academic honesty. And I thought I would return to Canada from the US with my PhD in hand and go to work at a Canadian university. But I had a lot of opportunities in the US and stayed. I worked for about 25 years for adult focused institutions some eight years ago, I was contacted by the University of Phoenix when they were looking for a future provost and lucky enough to come on board there. Coming up on my 7th anniversary, I guess it would be soon and been part of this thing you just described, which is becoming a very different university. When I joined, new owners had recently purchased the university as well as a number of other companies within that same portfolio, and they sold the other companies off. Some of them were institutions in other countries and they really focused on the University of Phoenix, which had kind of a different model when it was publicly traded. There were not only these other companies within the portfolio, but there was sort of a central service providing really help to the different business units, including the University of Phoenix. And what they sought to do was really divest of all the other things and focus on Phoenix and push all the services back into the university to make it a standalone soup to nuts entity. And as well they decided that they were going to make a number of changes to improve the outcomes at the university. I've been part of that journey, which has been fantastic. I really consider kind of to be the capstone of my career, working with working adults.The Career Optimism IndexMichael Horn:Very cool. And obviously I think this is going to be a more natural segue than I had even planned with that backstory because obviously now you're making sure the education you all provide is not just academically rigorous, but it's also career relevant. And maybe career relevant is where you all start. And I don't think I have to tell you that it's unusual for a provost at a university to have that sort of focus and that be the portfolio sort of charge, if you will. But one of the things that you oversee each year is the Career Optimism Index. It surveys 5,000 American workers to understand their points of view and their sentiment on the labor market economy and so forth. And we'll be sure to link to the current version of it, the 2024. But I'd love to hear from your perspective, what jumped off the page. What were some of the highlights from this latest installment? Because I will say it was interesting to me that there seems to be a lot of tension in the market right now. That was one of the things that really came out loud and clear, but I'm curious if that stood out to you as much or what your big takeaways were.John Woods:Yeah. To connect some of the transformation at the University of Phoenix to the most recent findings in that survey, which I think there's just a wealth of good information in there and I'm glad you can provide maybe a link to it. We presented it to chambers of commerce across the country and a number of different organizations that are really interested in that data. So some good stuff in there. The transformation kind of, of the University of Phoenix included eliminating a lot of programs that we're not tracking to above average job growth projections. So that's where kind of this starts. And only adding new programs that met that criteria for a certain amount of growth that was projected in terms of jobs. And when I laugh a little bit sometimes when people kind of compare the size of the university to what we used to be and say the beleaguered University of Phoenix, which is much smaller than it used to be.Michael Horn:What is it right now? Like 100,000 or so?John Woods:We're over 80,000, but getting smaller was intentional. So moving away from campuses, because working adults had clearly chosen online as their modality of choice, moving away from programs that didn't track to really good job growth prospects, and then adding programs that only did that, those were big steps. And then probably the next biggest couple of things is we reduced the cost of attending the University of Phoenix in 2017 and haven't increased it since. I think I saw a statistic the other day that, on average, higher education has increased its price at a rate higher than the rate of inflation for something like 65 of the last 70 years. So we really bucked the trend there. And then we skills mapped every one of our programs so that when a student completes a course in their program at the University of Phoenix, they've earned a number of skills. But we clearly signal to them what the three top skills are that they've earned, and that skills mapping tracks from the learning content that they are exposed to, to the assessments they complete, to the data we collect, that tells us the level at which they achieved on those assessments. So how I connect this to what the Career Optimism Index survey tells us in its most recent iteration is that, as you said, not only do we survey a bunch of workers to get their sentiment on their career prospects, but we also, as part of that study, survey a number of companies, and we hear from them as well. And it's interesting to kind of see the points of differentiation between the two sets of populations and their perceptions. Companies are saying it's hard to find people, hard to find people that have the right skills, that they need. Workers are saying that companies don't seem to value professional development as much as they once used to, and companies don't do enough to develop their talent, to keep their talent, to grow their talent, and so that's an interesting, you know, kind of dichotomy, because the, the mapping of our programs for skills, we think, has given our students a language that they can communicate in with an employer or a boss or a future boss or prospective boss. We've now issued 685,000 skills badges. The badges are collections of skills, and the students can post those instantly with a couple of clicks to their LinkedIn profile or zip recruiter profile. But more than anything, as I said, it's given them a language they can speak in that companies understand. And that skills mapping that took three years to do has enabled us not only to do that badge work, which I think is probably more badges than any other institution is issued so far, but we've also created a set of career tools with that same data. So one tool allows students in their portal to be sent actual jobs that match their skills profile with us. So the data is all connected that way that, Michael, I could send you three jobs and you'd see that you are an 85% match to those jobs, and you could apply or click on a link to get help to apply from us. And we think that's changing the game, because the notion of, I'm going to go back to school, and when I finish, I hope I get a better job, it shouldn't really be that way. The degrees and what people learn should be far more transparent, and people should be able to earn as they learn, maybe change their circumstances, not only at the end, but even as they go. But that can't happen with the opaque nature of a degree where people say, I'm done my second year, can you hire me? It can't even be done sometimes when they've got the degree in hand, because it's not clear what's in the degree. So we think this really can unlock some of that.The ‘Grain Size’ of SkillsMichael Horn:Very cool. So let's double click on the skills part of it and the badging and so forth. I'm just curious because sometimes employers have, like, really clear understanding of the skills that they want, and sometimes, as you know, they don't really have much clue, so. And you all have an unabashedly sort of both and approach to this, right, degree and skills, which I think stands out in a marketplace where, you know, a lot of places are all in on one or all in on the other. I'm just curious, can you give us a sense of, like, the grain size of the skills? And are you the one certifying them? Are they third party? And just so you know, the reason I ask, I was with a CLO of a large company the other day, and he was observing, “you know, I think we're sort of overthinking the skills conversation. We're trying to get so granular and specific that we sort of lost the plot,” was his argument. So I'm sort of curious your take and what grain size we're talking here.John Woods:Yeah. So I find it really fascinating. When any of these lists are published annually of the top skills employers are looking for, they usually come out from people like SHRM or the big consulting firms. Those lists always have what we'll call soft skills.Michael Horn:Yeah, the communication, critical thinking, which aggregates well across all skills and industries.John Woods:That's getting somebody who can really function and by their sheer nature being able to function while they're more teachable or trainable along the technical skill stuff. And so we mapped for that, too. And I think that's been really important, those types of things, executive functioning skills, some people call them. They exist in core classes and they exist in gen eds, and we've mapped for them too. So park that for a second, because I think those are really valuable and helpful, making people better workers and more promotable and all these other things. But the mapping we did of all the technical skills kind of took a bit of a Rosetta stone to build that, because the inputs were many and employers certainly wanted input. We have our industry advisory boards made up of companies that gave us those inputs, but we also have programmatic accreditors who say these things have to be in your programs for you to hold our accreditation. And then on top of that, we had all the kind of industry groups that weigh in on these things.And then you actually had all of the jobs and their definitions from the Bureau of Labor. All the jobs have codes, and all the codes have a number of ingredients baked into them of what the skills should be. So we mapped all of that and saw that we taught all these things in our programs, but we needed to probably simplify to what you said and identify the top ones. So where, from all the source data, where are the things that people are asking for? What are those, the things they're asking for the most? So we rank them, and the top three are most clear, and those are the ones that we make more clear to the student, and it's collections of those that give students badges. Now, on the other side of the coin, to your question, we're doing an awful lot of work with employers, so we can tell employers this on behalf of our students and make them more interested in our grads but we also have some tools that leverage, and I know you wanted to talk a little bit about this today, but we have some tools that leverage AI, which will allow an employer to identify the skills being demonstrated by a group of people within their organization and map that up against. Maybe it's the next level position in that organization, that they've identified the skills for that job, and we can show them what the gaps are. And in that way, we could maybe do some just-in-time training for the people. They've got to be developed into these other roles, which is a lot less costly and risky than bringing on brand new people for those roles, plus more enfranchising for the people they already have to take an interest in their growth and development and show them a path to promotion. So we've actually got a couple of pilots going on with employers where we're doing that leveraging, like I said, some AI tools.Michael Horn:I mean, that gets cool, because I think what you're saying is the AI allows you to assess and skill in context, as opposed to pulling me out of my job. And as you also know, critical thinking, we use the same words in every field, but how it manifests in one field is very different from another. So now I can develop that critical thinking skills in the context of the industry I'm working for.John Woods:Yeah, and I think, you know, we hear an awful lot about employers and their frustration with higher ed. I think this can really solve for a lot of that. And, you know, I think kind of running parallel to their own skepticism of higher ed and some of the pronouncements some of the bigger companies have made, that they'll hire people without degrees, you know, no degree required, we'll train you. Running parallel to that, in the last year, we've seen 100 institutions either go away entirely or merge with somebody else. We know higher ed is costing more and more. We've seen dozens of institutions announce that they have big deficits, that they have to cut programs and even sacred ground, eliminate tenured faculty roles. So higher ed doesn't have a great brand right now of solving employer problems. And we think the combination of being more affordable and being much more granular, to your words, around what the student is learning and making that connection more clear, that people can speak to what they've got in terms of skills, employers can hear it and understand it and feel more confident. We feel this is kind of a recipe that is, it's time has come kind of thing, especially with what's going on in all of higher ed, as I described.Reducing Anxiety, Increasing Transparency Michael Horn:Well, it's interesting. If you step back from that and you think about the anxiety that you described in the Career Optimism Index on both sides, the employees and the employers, one of the things it seems to me that you're doing is trying to strip out anxiety on all sides. right? We're not raising the price you've held at constant. You're trying to make the skills that you actually learn within the degree much more transparent. So you know where the matches are in the market, and then you're trying to do it within context so it's less of a step away, if you will. And I want to try this one out on you and see how you react. Someone observed recently, actually my co author on the upcoming book Job Moves observed to me that everyone sort of wants to rag on Gen Z for being impatient and looking for the next thing right away and so forth, and he's like, can you really blame them? All we do is sit there yelling at them that their skills are eroding faster than ever. Of course they're impatient to use them and put them to good use.I'm curious, you know how that lands with the moves that you are all making and the folks that you're serving.John Woods:Yeah. And this one hits close to home, too, because I've got a grad, a college grad from, I remember that three months ago who's looking for a way to launch, and I need them off the payroll. And then I've got one in college who's trying to figure out what to major in. And right now she's, she's majoring in psychology and, well, I have to wonder where that's going to go. So we'll figure all that out. But the generation you're talking about, I think they need a better set of tools to navigate a really complex, rapidly changing work environment. And the frustration that they're facing when they talk to employers or prospective employers, I think, is that they're not speaking the same language. And I think the anxiety of folks on the employer side who could hire their way out of this thing can't anymore.John Woods:The labor market is pretty tight. Unemployment is pretty low. There's not as much churn as there was in previous years in the market. So just finding people to do the things they need to do is not easy. So I think they got to grow their own people, and they might have to bring more people in at lower levels and have great programs in place to engage and develop them. And the only way they can do that with any amount of specificity or accuracy is the skills kind of map the skills taxonomy, the skills pathway that I think we've sort of tried to unlock here. So we're really actually pretty excited. We can reduce anxiety in both those groups.Michael Horn:Yeah. And I forgot the other way you're reducing anxiety is by eliminating degree programs that don't have that positive ROI. And I'm going to get the number wrong, but I think it was Third Way that said, over a third of bachelor's degrees - right. - have a negative ROI after five years. I think Preston Cooper's research has shown, like, 25% or something, always have a negative ROI. Getting those off the table and being transparent about it, I think that probably helps a great deal as well.John Woods:And those numbers being well documented, if you put that up against the number, that seems to persist. And I wrote it down here for today, the New York Federal Reserve said that people with bachelor's degrees are earning, on average, $60k versus $35k for people without. If you think about that and the negative ROI and a bunch of degrees, it means there's a lot of degrees out there that are really helping people improve or change their lives.Michael Horn:That's a great point.John Woods:Yeah. And so what we try to, I think, make clear to folks is the degree over the long haul is still an amazing ROI. And if it comes with a couple of caveats, the school that's offering it should be able to tell you our degree because of the network you'll get at our liberal arts college. And another school will say our degree because there's a need for technicians who do HVAC or whatever it is. And we'll say it's our degree because it's practitioners who've done the jobs you want teaching it. And the skills that we've mapped into the programs, into the courses, give you what you need to, with confidence, share what you know, and employers will understand that. So everybody kind of, you know, across this vast landscape, diverse higher education institutions, they've got to have the, you know, the story that backs up what they are selling. And that's some kind of great thing about American Higher Education, is its diversity.But the stories are being challenged, so you got to back them up.Educating EmployersMichael Horn:Yeah. And I love the way you just framed each of those narratives for three very different universities in very different parts of the stack, if you will. Last question for me as we start to wrap up, which is you've talked about growing your own and the reskilling or upskilling that employers have to do. I think that's right. Some people worry, well, will they go to another company. And as Richard Branson, I think, quoted once said, yeah, but what if they stay at yours and you didn't upskill them? So I think it makes a lot of sense. The curiosity I have is you're introducing the skills, taxonomy and language so that people, employers and employees, or prospective employees in some cases, can talk with each other better and make these matches. How much education are you having to do on the employer side? And the reason I ask is, my observation at least, is they do have a pretty good grasp of the core technical skills that are at hand in any given job.And then the critical thinking, communication and stuff like that. They know it's important, but they don't really know how to measure or assess or like what it really means in their context. And so I'm curious how much education or to get them to buy in, if you will. You all have to do on that with sort of the leadership role you have to play?John Woods:Yeah. The interest we've had, when we share what you and I just talked about for a few minutes, the interest is really high. It comes in within an environment of a lot of people talking about skills-based hiring, maybe more than I've ever heard talked about. And like you said, the proof is in the demonstration of the skills, whether they're technical or executive functioning, soft skills, durable skills, whatever you want to call it. I think what we've been able to do is show them how we assess those things, how they can assess those things. I think that will be an evolution. I think we'll get better at that and they'll get more receptive to that. And I think the driver for that is the sheer economics of it. Many of them are already paying for their employees to go back to school as a retention tool because some other employer will offer it if they don't. They want that to make sense for them and for the learner. And making sense means they'll stay, they'll be increasingly more valuable to the organization. So those economics all work far better than we had. X number of positions we couldn't fill for a long time, and they were vacant, and as they were vacant we were hurting from it. Or we filled x number of positions, but a lot of them flamed out of or we hired a bunch of new people at a tremendous cost. We wish we didn't have as much churn and need to do that.John Woods:The economic drivers are at least those and many more for folks to be open and interested in this concept, in this conversation. So I think it's for those reasons we've had great conversations with companies and are helping, we think, kind of solve some of this challenge for them.Michael Horn:Yeah. So actually I lied. I want to ask one more question about that because it's so interesting. I guess my observation then out of that is like you're basically tagging these skills to a much clearer KPI's so they can understand the ROI with much more granularity perhaps than past education investments they've made. The flip side of that, I guess, is as you're starting to show them how you assess it, can they start building that into their own performance management systems to better show the growth of their employees and where they need to work?John Woods:Yeah, I think that's possible. I think in a couple of really far along conversations we've had with companies, we've talked about doing exactly that as kind of follow-on work. Step one would be we have people we can demonstrate, have the skills to the jobs you've got today. Just need to give them that opportunity. We're confident we've got the skills right for what you have. Second part of the conversation, we think we can assess the skills of the people you've got and get them to different positions within your organization, not even maybe with whole degrees, but with courses or certificates. And as you said, the third part of the conversation would be kind of following those people along and being able to measure the actual demonstration of skills that we all kind of bought in and thought would happen and seeing where they go over time. And I think we'll get there. I think AI is going to be instrumental in getting there. There's a lot of way to evaluate different kinds of work product and use inference and some of the large language models to inform what is versus what is not in terms of the work product. So we're excited because that's only evolving and at a rapid pace. We think these conversations can get even better. We're excited about where we are, but we think there's a lot more to come.Michael Horn:Very, very cool. I mean, I love the transparency, careers making skills a real currency and lingua franca, if you will, on both sides of. John, huge thanks for joining us and talking about the approach that the University of Phoenix is taking on this.John Woods:Thanks, Michael. Enjoyed talking to you and happy to do it again, maybe give you a ere's the rest of the story down the road.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 Curtis, producer of the Future of Education podcast, joins me on the “mainstage” to discuss a new bill introduced recently in the Senate that would increase Research and Development in the Department of Education. We discussed the bill’s potential to spur learning innovation, the demand-side challenges to adoption, and systemwide reforms that can support in addressing those. Danny will be making more appearances in the weeks and months ahead, so I’m thrilled to introduce him to you all here by video.Michael Horn:Welcome to the Future of Education. I am Michael Horn, and you are joining the show where we are dedicated to a world where all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their potential, and live a life of purpose. And over the past year and a half, it's been really fun because I've had a partner in crime on this. He's been largely behind the scenes, although we have bylined some articles together. So you’ve seen his name pop up in different things, different forums, but he has literally been overseeing all of my digital products, all the digital work that I do. He's helped bring up the quality a ton, but he also happens to know a lot about education as we'll get into it in a moment. He's none other than Danny Curtis. Danny, thanks so much for actually coming on the live stage and showing your face to the audience today.Danny Curtis:Thanks, Michael. It's great to have the chance to step in front of the mic today.Danny’s Journey to the WorkMichael Horn:Well, why don't you tell folks about yourself? Because part of this idea is we want you to be in front of the mic a little bit more, either riffing with me, bylining with me, or maybe even interviewing some guests. I know you've done one interview that’s super interesting coming down the pipeline, but why don't you give people a taste of, you know, your background, your experience in education specifically, and workforce issues as well. Before you and I teamed up to start doing some of this work together.Danny Curtis:Well, outside the work that you and I have done, Michael, I have also worked in education workforce policy, as you mentioned, at the state and local level, and a nonprofit, all towards designing systems that do a better job of connecting learners to opportunity. And got my start in this work as a high school English teacher in California, where I met so many inspiring people, teachers, administrators, students, and saw incredible work being done and also noticed the ways that that work was constrained by outdated systems. And that's really what got me into policy to try and create that change. And it's also why the mission of the Future of Education, to unlock the potential of schools and students through innovation, why that resonated so strongly with me.The New Essential Education Discoveries ActMichael Horn:Well, I appreciate everything, obviously, and let's dive in. There's a bill that has come up that you called my attention to has some bipartisan support. It's around research, I think. But why don't you give folks a flavor of what we are talking about and why it caught your eye and worth talking about here in the show?Danny Curtis:Yeah. So I wanted to talk about a bipartisan bill. I know, very rare these days, that has proposed increases to federal education research and development funding. That was introduced in the Senate at the start of August. It's called the New Essential Education Discoveries act, NEED for short. And it was introduced by Senators Michael Bennett, a Democrat from Colorado, and John Cornyn, a Republican from Texas. And it would develop a fifth center in the Institute for Education Sciences that they're calling the National Center for Advanced Development and Education. And it would be dedicated to developing, disseminating, investing in what they're calling high risk, high reward, cutting edge innovations in education. And that includes technologies, innovative learning models. And it also proposes some changes to the state longitudinal data system. But for today, we'll stick to the R&D and learning. Innovation specialists have long argued that one of the great challenges of implementing innovation in education has been the lack of research and development and supply stemming from that. The federal education budget allocates only about $2.5 billion to R&D in education, which sounds like a lot, but it's only 2% of spending on education in the federal government and like, two tenths of a percent of total education spending when you take state and local into account. It also stands in stark contrast to the R&D spending in other departments. Like one department that it's often compared to is the Department of Defense with their DARPA fund, which spends $79 billion a year. And so for those reasons, this bill has garnered a lot of interest from learning innovators and a lot of excitement, too.Michael Horn:Yeah. And I think it's great. Like, if we start putting more research on those big sort of home run questions, if you will, budget behind it, see what we can develop out of it, I think that makes a heck of a lot of sense. Not nearly enough R, as you said, in education. I mean, that's, you know, that's pennies on the dollar when you think about what you just said. And for a sector where so much is riding on it, look, we'd never do that in healthcare at this point, right? We invest a lot in R&D. It's incredibly important. Basic research is incredibly important. Solving the most intractable problems, incredibly important. I think all those statements apply to education as well. And frankly, I talk a lot about personalizing, customizing education. That's akin to precision medicine in the medicine field. But they went through this whole field or movement where they had empirical medicine, where on average, if you have these symptoms, you should do this treatment. And, yeah, it didn't work all the time. But it started to come out of RCTs before they've started to refine it more and more. It's funny. In education, we don't even have the empirical stage often even in place. We don't even know on average often what works. And we're sort of trying to leapfrog into the precision or personalized. We just need a lot more research on a whole host of things, not just science of reading, so that we can get much more precise. I love all of that. The Education System’s Demand-side Differences Michael Horn:The one quibble I have is, and you didn't say it, but, you know, you hinted to it, which is that a lot of people compare this to DARPA, the defense advanced research projects arm that has given us the Internet, you know, GPS. Right. All those things. And I just, I don't love the analogy.Because in DARPA, it's big, thorny problems you're trying to tackle with a relatively centralized buyer that is also federally funded. Right, as in the military service arms. And if DARPA comes up with something really interesting, you have a buyer that, yeah, I get procurement is broken in the military, but relatively speaking, it's nowhere near as insanely fragmented or idiosyncratic, frankly, as school districts are in America, where we don't only do a very bad job of understanding demand from the top down, frankly, what they’re going to demand, the problems that they think are most interesting are often different from place to place in unpredictable ways. And so thinking that we can crank out something and then theres going to be an at scale adoption, thats the only piece that I would say, like, lets go a little bit easier on that part of the D, if you will. But I still think the reps of basic research leading into something that actually produces a product. Its not just an academic report on a shelf that has a lot of value. I would agree.Danny Curtis:Yeah, yeah, you raised some really important points there. And I agree for the most part, not only is the education system far more diffuse, you mentioned the defense has a fairly centralized buyer. And schools, there are about 14,000 school districts around the country somewhere around that. And not only is it diffuse, but many of these school districts, most of these school districts are locked into an industrial paradigm of education that makes it hard for them to incorporate a lot of these innovations and therefore kind of suppresses demand. And there's historical precedent for these challenges that you're raising. In the 1990s, there was the new American Schools federal initiative that had a lot of the same R&D goals as the current one. In the Obama administration, there was the I3 initiative. Having said that, I do think that there are some factors at play here that point to maybe this time being a little different. Post Covid, I think there's a lot of. There's a renewed sense of urgency around supporting students to recover learning and maybe increase openness from that. I also think that the growth of new education AI tools and all of the buzz around AI has created a sense of excitement about learning, innovation. And then in the post secondary front, I think the wave of college closures that we've seen also increases a sense of urgency to try something new. And also included in the bill, there are measures designed to solve for this. There's a lot of discussion about these within the bill, about these innovations being community informed. And the plan for going about that is they would create these advisory panels and they'd be comprised of teachers, specialists, parents, students. And the idea there being that they want to ensure that what is being produced by this new center is solving for problems that exist in schools.And so they're kind of working to ensure that whatever is created there is a practical use for. But I think that stops short of necessarily solving all the demand problems that you're describing. But there is more that can be done at the state, federal, local level to stoke demand as well.Michael Horn:Yeah, and in some ways, let's have the breakthroughs and then we could figure out the demand side of the equation is, I think, part of the thinking that I think would be great anytime we can get researchers, frankly, they struggle often to get into districts to do really good research. If we can get researchers into districts with companies, those who can create product, I think that's all to the good, and I think would get me excited. I'll add one other thought, which is we also know that there's another bipartisan bill around research. It's much more around the model providers. Our friend Joel Rose and new classrooms has spoken about this in the past, and I think model providers are super interesting because they can also more readily rethink the industrial model itself. Which to your point, frankly, if you're trying to innovate within an industrial model context, the model can only prioritize those things which perpetuate it, not undermine or overthrow it. And so I think having model providers out there, deeply integrated, maybe frankly, what about an army of 200 lab schools, truly lab schools, not sort of John Dewey reprised, but like real lab schools paired with deep researchers at research universities, were not just the ed schools, but cognitive of neuroscientists, etcetera, could come in and really be playing in an integrated way with all the different inputs there. I think there's some very cool things when you get into really rethinking the model, integrating all the parts in very different ways.Rethinking All the Parts Together Michael Horn:That's where the real breakthroughs, frankly, in any field come when you get to rethink all of the parts together. So, Danny, that Bill starts to get into some of the out of the box providers that have been written about that, Joel's written about New Classrooms, has written about, and a series of recommendations there for how we would start to get that really started as an engine of innovation in America's schools as well. Thoughts on that as we wrap up here?Danny Curtis:Yeah, I mean, you mentioned the Out of the Box report, so much good stuff in there on how the system can sort of more comprehensively, in addition to this R&D initiative, increase that demand and ensure successful implementation of innovations. And so looking at the federal level, I think there's a real opportunity here to create a grant and introduce funds that will facilitate the adoption of innovations by unburdening districts that decide to take these on of the costs of implementation and so helping them cover some of those startup costs for creating new schools and new classrooms that are going to be implementing new forms of learning, both state and federal level. There's an opportunity to change regulation, open up flexibility around testing and procurement so that districts can implement these innovations to their best ability or to their fullest potential rather. The California Math Framework that was immplemented this time last year stands out as a really good example of that to me. And then at the local level and at the school level, Michael, you write a lot about how difficult it is for an organization or a school to build the classroom of tomorrow while also operating the classrooms of today. And so I think schools can start thinking about creating those separate arms that are dedicated to innovation and dedicated to thinking up new ways of teaching and learning.Michael Horn:Yeah, it's a great point. It's a great point. Danny. Sorry, keep going.Danny Curtis:Well, I was just going to bring it back to your earlier point around model providers. We've already talked about the diffuse nature of, of our education system. So many districts doing so many different things. It can be really difficult to have your finger on the pulse of learning innovation when you are operating a school day in and day out and doing that difficult work. And so partnering with model providers who do have that landscape and have worked on implementing these new forms of teaching and learning across the country can be a great way to really get the ball rolling and ensure the success of implementing innovations.Michael Horn:Yeah, all of that makes a lot of sense. And I think, to your point, and we'll wrap up with this thought, is that as you start to have different arms, different educators coming to the table with space, time, and their only job is to create these new models and then find places for them, that makes sense, right? Asking someone to operate your classroom and innovate in a radically different way doesn't make sense. You never ask pilots to come up with new ways to build airplanes. That's insane. And similarly, I think with schools, frankly, that's true in healthcare, too. We're not asking the doctors on the front line to come up with the vaccines. They're giving input into the vaccines, but they're not actually doing that sort of work itself. That's where the researchers, the developers, et cetera, come together. Same principle here in some ways, like, it's surprising that we think, oh, you know, why aren't schools innovating more? Well, of course they aren't, because they're trying to operate the schools and serve the kids and like, of course you need other people to do it. So great set of points all around. Really appreciate you bringing this bill to the fore so we could talk about it, and we'll look forward to seeing you much more on the Future of Education. And for all of you tuning in, it'll be a relief because you won't just see my mug made for radio on the screen. You'll also get to see Danny. So thanks so much for joining us. 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.