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As the political conversation heats up around the impact of tutoring at-scale and the actual results from all that one-time emergency money school districts received in the wake of COVID, Jessica Silwerski, cofounder of Ignite Reading joined me to discuss the organization’s approach to literacy tutoring. We talked about the science of reading, the keys to Ignite’s success, and how districts are budgeting for tutoring as those one-time elementary and secondary emergency relief (ESSER) funds dry up.Michael Horn:Welcome to the Future of Education, where we are dedicated to building a world in which all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their potential, and live a life of purpose and to help us think through that today and how we get there, how we get to that promise for all individuals. I'm really delighted that we have Jess Reid Sliwerski. She is the co founder and CEO, most recently of the the literacy tutoring company Ignite Reading, which we're going to hear a lot about today. But Jess, welcome. You have a fascinating education background in general, so we're going to get into all that and more. Thank you so much for being here.Jessica Sliwersk:Oh, my gosh, Michael, thank you so much for having me. I feel like I am living the dream right now, getting to do a podcast with you and talk about my favorite thing ever, which is teaching kids to read.Jessica’s journey to the work Michael Horn:Which is incredibly important. And that's why we're both excited for this conversation as a result. So let's dig in. But where I want to dig in is both the founding story behind Ignite Reading, because it came about at a really important time, the country's history, the world's history, the school's history at a challenging moment, but also your own background into that story, because, as I said up front, like, you've had some really neat roles in the world of education. Lots of different organizations, seen lots of different stripes of all of this. And so I'd love you to blend those two together, if it's possible.Jessica Sliwerski:Yeah, definitely. I am going to go back in time about 20 years, when I first started my career in education as a classroom teacher. And then I'm going to tell you all of these really interesting steps I had along the way that I believe in retrospect, positioned me to be doing exactly what I'm doing in building and leading Ignite Reading. So 20 years ago, I joined Teach for America on a complete whim and was placed into a fifth grade classroom in the Bronx in New York City after a six week crash course. And it became very apparent to me within my first week of teaching that many of my students still did not know how to read. And over the course of the next two years, I tried everything I could to figure out how to teach them to read. And, you know, 20 years ago, we were just starting to use Gmail. There wasn't a bunch of resources that you could google around science of reading in order to figure this out. And so I was asking everyone, you know, how do I teach my kids to read, and nobody knew how to help me. And so it wasn't until my third year of teaching, when I was a founding first grade teacher at a school in Harlem, that I finally learned how to teach my kids to read. Because it just so happened that that school was using an evidence based foundational skills curriculum. And I vividly remember, Michael, that feeling of going from working with kids who were just learning the Alphabet to then watching them learn to read words and sentences and paragraphs of text. And it was so deeply, emotionally gratifying. And I was also angry as hell that I had gone my first two years of teaching not knowing how to do this. Because what was so obvious to me, even as a baby teacher myself, was that, yes, learning to read is a science. And what I was able to very easily understand was that it was not rocket science.Because here I was in my early twenties, and I was learning to do it, and it was working, and all of my kids were learning to read in first grade on time. And so that was when there was this fire that was lit in me, and I became absolutely obsessed with wanting to help as many kids as possible learn how to read. And so fast forward. Over the course of my career, I've had a really unique mix of roles in education. I became a school leader. I was a K-12 instructor instructional coach with a focus on foundational reading and, you know, the other strands of what lead to highly skilled reading for kids. I was coaching principals across New York City in best practices and literacy instruction. I was a literacy specialist for a network of 22 schools in New York City. And then I accidentally co-founded my first edtech company with a literacy app that I designed with the goal of helping teachers and helping school leaders. And then it was like, oops, I think this is a product, and we now need to build an ed tech company in order to scale this. And that was when I then had my first taste of national impact, which for me, the work has always been about trying to help as many kids as possible. So that was exhilarating. And when I got my first taste of working at a national level, I just wanted more. And I went on to lead a nonprofit called Open Up Resources that publishes high quality instructional materials. And this is where it gets even more interesting, because while I was running Open Up Resources, my daughter started Pre-K in Oakland Unified school District. And of course, being an educator, I was like, oh, I can't wait to volunteer in her classroom. And being a CEO, I had the flexibility with my schedule to make that happen. And I quickly saw that kids in her class, as well as the grades above, were not being taught to read with an evidence based curriculum. So at this point, it had been about 15 years since I had been in the classroom, and I'm just having this moment of like, are you kidding me? This is still happening, even though we know better. And so I started teaching kids to read using a structured literacy approach, and then was very quickly kicked out of volunteering because I was being a troublemaker. This was in a school that was using the Lucy Culkin's curriculum. They were using guided reading. I was told, if you want to be a volunteer here, you must do guided reading.And my response was, you want me to do something that has proven to be ineffective and harmful to kids rather than giving them what the reading research shows their brains need in order to learn to read? And they said, yes. And they said, I'm not going to do that. And they said, then you can't volunteer here.Michael Horn:Wow.Jessica Sliwerski:And I am stubborn. And I also, when it comes to kids, I fight really, really hard because I think about the fact that I am so lucky to have the education that I have, and it's not right that any kids in our country shouldn't be getting the best possible education. And connected to my story is that I'm also a cancer survivor. And as obsessed as I was with teaching kids to read prior to my cancer diagnosis, having gone through the experience of cancer right after my daughter was born, surgeries, chemotherapy, I learned how strong I am, and I have a deeper appreciation for just how short and precious this life is. And I want to live every day with purpose. And so there's this passion that I already have that is now on completely steroids because of this crucible that I've experienced in my life. So I get kicked out of volunteering, and I'm just like, oh, hell, no. No. And I go to the office that places volunteers, and I say, hey, is there a school I can work in where they will embrace the fact that I know how to teach kids to read? And they said, oh, yes, definitely. And they dropped me in the lowest performing school in all of Oakland. It's in East Oakland, and at the time, had 2% literacy proficiency. So their mentality, I think, was like, okay, troublemaker, go here and see what you can do.Michael Horn:Yeah. Yeah.Jessica Sliwerski:Meanwhile, Michael, I'm like, challenge accepted.The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Michael Horn:Accepted. Let's do this. Roll up our sleeves.Jessica Sliwerski:Let's do this. Bring it on. So I show up in this classroom with this first grade teacher who's in her second year of teaching and is completely frazzled because the only thing she's been given is Lucy Culkin's units of study, and she can obviously see it's not working. Her kids aren't learning to read. And yet, like me, when I was a new teacher, had no other resources, had no other support, and nobody else helping her figure out how to teach kids to read. So in I walk and I'm like, hey, I'm Jess. I'm here to help teach your kids to read. And she's just like, great.Jessica Sliwerski:I will take anyone with a pulse. And she's kind of thinking, I'm going to do what like a lot of folks do, which is just sit with her kids and read books, right? I start teaching them.Michael Horn:But you don't.Jessica Sliwerski:I don't. I start teaching them, and very quickly they start learning to read. And then she's like, what are you doing? I need to learn how to do this. So I teach her, and then the two of us every afternoon are pulling small groups and we're doing differentiated instruction. And her babies were learning to read, and they were learning to read fast, and they were on a trajectory, for perhaps the first time in the history of that school to end the school year reading on grade level.Michael Horn:Wow.Jessica Sliwerski:Which, when you learn to read on time, which is ideally before the start of second grade, it fundamentally changes everything else about your school and arguably your life trajectory and the opportunities that are available to you. And I was, like, watching all of this happen, it was incredibly, incredibly exhilarating. And then, boom, it came to a screeching halt because of the pandemic. We packed the kids up for what we thought was going to be an extended spring break, and they never came back that school year. And I couldn't stop thinking about them. And my personality is kind of obsessive. And I'm watching, in the meantime, my own child transition to Zoom school. And I'm thinking to myself, this is a disaster, but there's something really interesting about this. And then meanwhile, the teacher I'd been mentoring was like, hey, we're gearing up to go back to school in the fall and be fully virtual. What do I do? And I said, you're going to do exactly what we were doing, but we're going to adapt it to be virtual. And I'm pretty sure your kids are still going to learn to read. And she trusted me and she tried it. And sure enough, within the first month of instruction, we had a crop of data showing, from baseline to progress, monitoring. Her kids were growing as readers.Michael Horn:Goosebumps listening to this.Jessica Sliwerski:During a pandemic via Zoom in a school where she had little to no support, high population of multilingual learners, high poverty students with IEPs. Every single odds stacked against her and her kids, and they were doing it. And as I looked at this data and I looked at what we were doing together, I was like, there is a model here. What would it mean to create a core of highly trained reading instructors who meet virtually with kids during the school day and teach them to read? What could that mean for those kids? What could that mean for the teachers in those classrooms? Because I know firsthand how hard it is to differentiate and give every child what they need. And what could it mean for catalyzing the system to really, truly embrace the science of reading and all of the nuances that are connected to that. So this was like the genesis of Ignite Reading. And there's actually a documentary film called the Right to read. Have you seen that film or heard about it?Michael Horn:Yeah, sure.Jessica Sliwerski:So, fun fact that teacher, Sabrina Causey, is the teacherMichael Horn:Oh, wow.Jessica Sliwerski:And I am Jess, who she mentions in the film, who taught her to teach her kids to read.Michael Horn:Oh, that's wild.Jessica Sliwerski:Okay, so, fun fact, a little bit of behind the scenes tea. Is that the Right to Read film? And the story of Sabrina Causey is also the origin story of Ignite Reading.The Ignite Reading model Michael Horn:Very, very cool. Very cool. And so there's a couple angles of this that are so important this time, right? Because coming out of the pandemic, or as the pandemic hit, the emphasis on tutoring became a big deal to differentiate instruction, to be able to get kids the right thing that they needed to unlock progress. Obviously, the focus on literacy, science of reading, became a huge conversation across the country, and frankly, how we were ignoring the best evidence in hundreds, thousands of classrooms across the country. And Ignite Reading model really takes both of these things and pulls it together in a model. So tell us how it actually works today.Jessica Sliwerski:So, at the highest level, the way that our program works is that we partner with schools and districts to provide live, one to one virtual tutoring that helps kids who need extra support learn to read. Our tutors are working with students specifically to master foundational reading skills, not because decoding is the game, but because it is the ticket to the game. And when you can decode to the point that it is automatic, you don't have to look at the word and sound it out. You can just look at it and nothing be able to help but read it, then your working memory and your brain power is freed up to do the rich work of comprehension. So when you see high stakes testing scores starting in third grade that are indicating a lot of kids are below proficient, typically what's underpinning that is disfluency. And disfluency is caused by kids having gaps in their decoding skills. And so our tutors are working with students one on one every day, virtually for 15 minutes a day. And it's during the school day until such time as the kids become fluent automatic readers. But the thing about our model is that we honor what we know is best practice when it comes to teaching and learning, specifically in the realm of literacy, but that it is so difficult for schools to do on their own because the system is simply not designed to enable them to make the main thing the main thing. And in the design of Ignite Reading, there are five important things that make our model distinct. So the first thing is that our tutors are highly trained and accountable. They are completing over 100 hours of paid professional learning and practicum experience before they're certified to tutor up to 30 hours a week. And then even after they're certified, we are maniacal about ongoing performance management in order to ensure they're implementing with fidelity. The second thing that we do is that we differentiate instruction so that every child's precise needs are being methadone. Kids don't have time to waste. And the reality of classrooms is that there's a vast spectrum of where kids are on the continuum of learning to read. So precision matters. Third, the nature of one on one enables the necessary at bats or repetition that kids need to solidify the code. And while we're all running around talking about science of reading, what a lot of people don't know, but is also core to the science, is that the research shows that at least 60% of kids must have not only direct instruction, but also ample at bats and repetition to create that automaticity. So the one on one provides that additional practice for kids. And the fourth thing is that this human element is so crucial. The relationships that tutors are building with students fosters the motivation to persist. Learning to read is hard for little kids. Humans don't like to do hard things. Look at the number of adults that you probably know who have to hire a personal trainer because otherwise they won't.Michael Horn:Work out, they won't do it right.Jessica Sliwerski:So our tutors are like personal trainers for little kids, adorable brains, but they're building these caring relationships that then enable kids to be more motivated. They're not going to opt out and try and avoid it because they care about pleasing this human that they are so excited to see every day. And then they're learning these competencies which create more motivation to persist. And it's this really virtuous cycle when it comes to learning. And the fifth thing that we do that is especially unique, and I am really, really proud that this is part of our model, is that we are focused on also building capacity with our partners by giving them a designated Ignite Reading literacy specialist who meets with them at the beginning of the program to unpack baseline diagnostics and every month thereafter to talk about progress and to connect the dots instructionally back to the literacy ecosystem and what teachers can do to piggyback off of our intervention. So these are all like really intentional moves. It is above and beyond what you typically see in this space from an edtech company. And I believe that's because the person at the helm, me, is someone who comes into this with the lived experience of an educator and understands all of the pieces that have to be at play to make this sticky so that we can work together to ensure every one of our babies learns to read well.AIR study on Ignite Reading outcomes Michael Horn:And it's paying off. If I understand, like you have some research a couple years now, I think, worth of research, why don't you share those results about what you've learned, about what it actually is happening in the field, and how you just set up those research studies?Jessica Sliwerski:We are actively building our evidence base. And this is really important because, as I've already said, and you've certainly picked up on, I want to prove a point and I want to prove what's possible for kids. And I want to prove that the issue with the literacy crisis in our country is not because kids can't, it's because there hasn't been equitable access to all kids getting what they need.Michael Horn:The adults haven't. Right? It's not. They can't.Jessica Sliwerski:That's right. And so we have a study that was published last school year, school year 22, 23 by AIR, and it showed that kindergarteners through third graders who participated in a 14 week pilot experienced 20 weeks of learning. And that meant that on DIBELS, they went from 11% on benchmark to 45% on benchmark. And that was after merely a 14 week pilot. Fast forward to this past school year. We have a forthcoming quasi experimental study from Johns Hopkins University that looked at first graders across 13 school districts that we were working with in Massachusetts, and the outcomes are phenomenal. But I can't yet share them, which, of course, is killing me, Michael.Michael Horn:Killing you right now, we'll have to.Jessica Sliwerski:Do a part two to this.Michael Horn:You'll come back. You'll come back.Jessica Sliwerski:But anecdotally, what I can tell you about our DIBELS data, because we validate the growth our kids are making with a third party assessment, is that we saw, with first graders in particular, who we were working with, which is the best return on investment. You can close the kindergarten gaps, you can tackle the first grade content. You can graduate them ready to start second grade building knowledge. That being said, heartbreakingly, we work with kids through high school. But in one of our analyses, what we saw for first graders in particular was that our students went from 17% on benchmark in DIBELS at the beginning of the school year to 51% by the end of the year. So that's three X growth right there. And, you know, the. The recovering perfectionist in me and the advocate for kids, advocate for kids looks at this, and it's like, this isn't good enough.Jessica Sliwerski:This isn't enough, and how do we get even better than this? So there is a level of continuous improvement we're constantly thinking about. But at the same time, what we have to recognize, the kids we're serving are the kids who historically come into first grade, or whatever grade they're in, already having gaps. And rather than those gaps being addressed and then the kids being accelerated forward, the gaps just widen. So when we're working with older kids, we see many of them still don't even know the alphabet or how to read simple words like sit or mug. So it's pretty significant that we saw three X growth. And then what was even more exciting about that was that the kids who had the most significant gaps when they started with us, for example, not knowing the alphabet, those kids had five X growth in our program over the school year. And this is where we see a lot of tropes in our country around why kids aren't learning to read. And you'll hear things like, oh, well, it's multilingual learners, or they have IEPs. The reality, Michael, is that it comes down to access and kids getting what they need when they need it, when they need it, then honoring the research around how the brain learns to read. And it sounds so simple to do those things. But we know that K-12 education is a very complex system, and that's where the design of any kind of product or service has to be so deeply intentional. And all of this data that we're seeing in our forthcoming study as well gives me so much hope. It tells me that we really are living in an era where if we all put our minds to it, and if we work together, we could actually have a world where every single child learns to read on time, which is ideally before the end of first grade.Tutoring post-ESSERMichael Horn:So let's take this, because you've said several obviously interesting things, but the one I want to pick up on at the moment is we're different from your average edtech company, and I think that's a good thing on a few dimensions, as I'm hearing it from you, I've argued edtech companies can't just simply throw their product over the wall and hope it gets implemented. And they have to be really intentional about thinking about the whole model and the coherence across all the tools being used, which is effectively what you're doing as you build capacity with your partners and really leaning in not just to make sure it gets used, what you're offering gets used efficaciously, but that it coheres with the rest of the activities going on in the building. I would love to hear you reflect on two things out of that one curiosity, like what are the resources for a school district to be able to afford that sort of services? And then the flip side is, we know a lot of the federal aid out of COVID is going away. There's a lot of talk about the tutoring services that have been offered that have in many cases not been implemented efficaciously. They've missed on some key things that you just described, but either way, those might be going away. How do you maintain and grow this service that you're offering? As maybe resources are being stripped away with what I imagine has some resources that are required to be able to provide it.Jessica Sliwerski:Really great question. And this is something that when I look across the landscape of Ed tech and particularly high dosage tutoring, you see a lot of companies that are struggling in this moment with ESSER funding evaporating. And we are not in that category. And the reason that we can maintain our program in light of what other companies are experiencing as like catastrophic funding shifts is because we get results. And the results that we are getting are results that schools and districts cannot get by themselves. Even in the most perfect literacy ecosystem, where you have adopted all of the right programs, all of the right assessment tools, you've done letters, training with your teachers, right? You are checking all of those boxes. And the reality is, for a host of reasons, kids will still fall through the cracks. And so Ignite Reading becomes that foundational skills safety net, working in partnership with all of the other strategic intentionality that's at play within the ecosystem. And oftentimes our partners say we are the missing ingredient that pulls it all together. And because of that, and because we are so transparent with our partners about our outcomes, we are self reporting every single month via the Ignite Reading literacy specialist. And they are seeing that this is a phenomenal return on investment for their kids, especially when it is a just in time intervention in first grade versus a reactive RTI situation for older kids when they can see this. And it also aligns with their own intentionality around really, truly making sure all kids have the right to learn to read. They find the money in their budget. So what we're seeing is that many of our partners, in light of the ESSER cliff, are now going into their budgets and they are operationalizing us with more sustainable funding streams. Be that title funding idea, it could look like school improvement funds. Right? The beauty of our model is that there are so many different funding streams that can be strategically braided together, and we work with partners to figure out how to access those funds creatively and to think about, well, what are the other things you're spending money on? And are they working because there's some historic vestiges of edtech products that they've been purchasing that they might be reluctant to get rid of? I see this a lot in education.Jessica Sliwerski:We like to hoard.Michael Horn:We don't like to prune very much in education.Jessica Sliwerski:No, no, not at all. It's like, I remember when I was a classroom teacher and I first walked into my classroom and opened the closet and there were like floor to ceiling materials from the last 50 to 100 years. We don't like to get rid of things, even when they don't work, even when they're not good for kids. But I think what we're helping to create is a new vision for everyone that we're working with and for the market as a whole of what's possible for kids and how best to allocate precious public dollars and budgets to do what I would say is the most important thing we can possibly do in education, which is make sure our kids learn how to read.Michael Horn:Love it. Jess. Final word, final thoughts. Where can people stay tuned for that study when it comes out and find out more. Take us home.Where to learn moreJessica Sliwerski:So our website, ignite-reading.com, is the best place to get lots of information and insights around everything that we are uploading to and if anyone is interested in learning more or wants to be part of this incredible movement, they can also contact us via the website. I anticipate that once the study is released that there will be lots of people talking about it. And I cannot wait.Michael Horn:Well, I'm looking forward to it. I'm glad it's in Massachusetts where I live. I'm glad to hear that as well.Jessica Sliwerski:I planned that for you, Michael.Michael Horn:Yeah, yeah. Just exactly right. That was the reason.Jessica Sliwerski:And like every holiday that you celebrate all combined into one, it'll be the best gift, best gift, best package.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. 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Clayton Lord of the SHRM Foundation joined me to discuss shifting from a degree-centric hiring system to one that is skills-based. We talked about how the Foundation is helping employers operationalize this transition, the benefits it accrues to candidates and businesses, and the risks and challenges being addressed to spread its benefits on a broader scale.Michael Horn:Welcome to the Future of Education, where we are dedicated to building a world in which all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their potential, and live a life of purpose. To help us think through that today, I'm tremendously excited. We have Clay Lord, he's the Director of Foundation Programs at SHRM, joining us to think about how we help unlock that path of progress for individuals, employees, and their jobs, but also for employers who can get so much more out of those individuals when there's a better match in all facets of how they work with each other. So, Clay, thank you so much for joining us today.Clayton Lord:Of course. Thanks for having me.Clay's Journey to the Work Michael Horn:Yeah, no, you bet. Your work obviously gets to interact with lots of different individuals, lots of different companies, creating changes in a variety of ways. But just before we dive into that, talk us through your own path to the role you're in now and your passion for it, and how you got to know SHRM originally.Clayton Lord:You know, it's an interesting and sort of circuitous story. I've been at the SHRM Foundation for about 18 months now. Prior to that, for about 20 years, I was in the arts and culture sector, working at the local level and then at the national level on a variety of issues that I would now roll up together as workforce issues for the cultural sector in the United States. This sector mirrors a lot of the populations that we work on now at the SHRM Foundation, in that it is generally speaking, chronically economically insecure. It's extremely diverse. It doesn't have the strongest voice as a class when it comes to policy. I came out of Georgetown. I grew up with a lot of privilege, went to a really good college, and dove into the cultural sector. Through a lot of engagement with different partners, I developed my understanding of what equity meant and my understanding of how I got to where I was and where that was me and where that was the conditions that I was given at birth. Since then, I've tried to devote a lot of my work and my life to increasing opportunity for folks who are otherwise left out in the cold because they don't work within the same systems or don't have the same advantages as some people do. I ended up at SHRM because I knew some folks who were working there. SHRM is the largest society for HR professionals in the world, with 340,000 employer members predominantly in the United States. The SHRM Foundation is one of the only real loci for driving employer action, particularly through the HR function, to be agents for social good. It seemed like an interesting fit for me as I was trying to navigate from the niche work in arts and culture into broader conversations about workforce and the future of work.SHRM Foundation’s Skills-Based Hiring WorkThe 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:Super interesting to hear that pathway, and I love how it's not linear and yet ends up in a place of passion for you. On that topic, over the next decade, you all have set a lofty goal of aiming to transform hiring and advancement practices for 100,000 employers, 500,000 HR professionals, managers, executives, and specifically as part of that, your aim is to shift away from a degree-centric hiring model toward a skills-first model. I'd love for you to talk through what that would look like when it's done and why it matters so much.Clayton Lord:Well, it's a great question. The short answer is that it is responsive to the evolutions in how people are being educated and how they're trying to find their way into work. Today, two in three working-age adults in the United States do not have a four-year degree. Yet, three in four job postings require a four-year degree when they're posted. This represents a significant and ongoing mismatch between where and how people are finding their skills, aptitudes, and competencies, where they're developing the things that they can bring to bear in the workplace, and what is required as a first gateway to access a lot of jobs. Among three focuses that the SHRM Foundation has, one of them is what we call widening pathways to work. It's focused on two sides of that coin. One is around untapped pools, helping employers understand where, when, and how to engage folks who have historically been marginalized out of the job market, including people with disabilities, people who've been justice impacted, people connected to the military, older workers, and opportunity youth (people aged 16 to 24 who don't work or go to school). On the other side of that coin is skills-first at work. We focus on helping employers shift their hiring and retention practices from being degree-centric to embracing a broader aperture of hiring and advancement that we shorthand as skills-first. This is not to the exclusion of degrees. It's to say that people get skills in all sorts of ways, at various moments in their lives. If they're doing it right, they're learning new skills every single day. All of those skills deserve to be taken into account when you're hiring for a job, which is essentially a bundle of skills. At the SHRM Foundation, we are making that investment by creating the conditions to help employers, 90% of whom today say adopting skills-first strategies is a good idea, but only 15% of whom are actually saying they're doing anything about it. We aim to move them from agreement to action by offering incremental, measurable, manageable opportunities for change, allowing them to move towards a skills-first mentality that lets them access the full spectrum of talent. You asked what that looks like. In ten years, if we do it right, we will hit what we think is an inevitable tipping point. Skills-first is the future, whether we do anything about it or not. Those who think we aren't moving towards more people accumulating skills outside of a four-year institution will be left behind. However, we believe there's a way to handle this transition that is less chaotic and more manageable for the world of work. For us, if we get to that moment, we will have 100,000 employers who have demonstrated that they've moved in the direction of skills-first hiring. We don't think it's flipping a switch, but we will build maturity models to test how employers are doing and how much they've embraced these practices. There are nearly 3 million HR professionals and millions more who touch the hiring function every year. Even a small percentage of those, which we tag at 500,000 HR professionals, hiring managers, and C-suite folks, educated on skills-first hiring and advancement practices, would create a tipping point. Our goal is that skills-first hiring becomes ubiquitous and unremarkable, the default practice that happens all around us. Right now, the default is degree-centered, leaving many people out. Changing the paradigm to hire for the full spectrum of skills, regardless of where, when, or how they were acquired, will open up more opportunities for people and provide workplaces with the full spectrum of talent.This edition of the Future of Education is sponsored by:Barriers to Skills-First HiringMichael Horn:It strikes me that you want employers and companies to hire people who will help them progress, recognizing individuals not just as a bundle of credentials but through the collection of their experiences. This alignment benefits both the employer and the employee, who get to make progress in their lives by matching their capabilities and drives. You started to allude to it; this isn't a switch that you can just flip. What are the big barriers toward moving toward this vision that you see right now?Clayton Lord:In our research, there are three main barriers to moving from degrees to skills. The first is the ROI being murky. The return on investment for a degree-centered practice is relatively well known. Sometimes it works out well, sometimes poorly, but when it works out poorly, the blame is usually placed on the candidate, not the business or HR provider. If you hire five people from Ivy League schools and two of them don't work out, the assumption is that something didn't work out with those two people. If you hire five people from skills-based backgrounds without a degree and two of them don't work out, the assumption is that the HR professional or hiring manager took too big a risk. The second barrier is around trust, quality, and knowledge. There are about 60,000 providers of credentials in the world and over a million credential options, many of them of dubious quality. There is also an ever-growing number of startups and vendors in this space. Pair that with the fact that knowing how to move from degrees to skills is different from believing that moving from degrees to skills is a good idea, and you have a challenge, particularly for small to mid-size employers. The third barrier is risk aversion and loneliness. Businesses are naturally risk-averse. When you ask them to take a leap into something new, using language that expresses risk and innovation instead of incremental change, it creates conditions that are not great for business decision-making. This movement often starts with a single person or business within a sector, creating a sense of loneliness and risk. Our goal is to build tools, trainings, coalitions, and resources that tackle each of these challenges by consolidating information, raising awareness of the positive ROI, and creating opportunities for the coalition and community.Tools for De-RiskingMichael Horn:Yeah, that makes sense. So let's tackle that risk aversion one. Governments and companies are great at dropping degree requirements, but for HR, mitigating risk is important, and hiring someone with a degree just feels less risky. What do those tools look like that really de-risk this and give them the security to hire someone without a degree but with demonstrated experience?Clayton Lord:Well, it's a good question. Risk comes in a variety of forms. We think about the different types of risk at play, such as financial or structural risk to the organization. We're exploring ideas like de-risking the near-term financial obligation of skilling through low or no-interest loans, mini-grants, and consortium models. We've done this in some of our pilots, providing seed money for interventions, which boosts success rates. Skills-first hiring and advancement are already happening under the proxy of a degree. Every person is ultimately hired for their skills. The current model doesn't allow time to take in the fullness of a person's skills and aptitudes, often reducing a resume to a six-second glance. Technologies are being developed to parse resumes and experiences into skill stacks, matching them with job requirements. This technology allows a candidate to progress to an interview based on their skill stack rather than their degree.Another risk is personal risk. If a candidacy fails, sometimes the blame is on the candidate, and sometimes on the person who picked them. Over time, we need to deal with this reality. We've identified two main strategies. First, we lack great case studies of skills-first hiring and advancement strategies demonstrating positive ROI. We're working with the Business Roundtable and the US Chamber of Commerce Foundation to create a compendium of diverse case studies. Second, we're investing at the individual level, working with Opportunity at Work and other partners to create a credential for skills-first hiring and advancement for HR professionals, hiring managers, and C-suite decision-makers.This credential will provide documented expertise, supporting dialogues with decision-makers and boosting confidence in one's ability to implement skills-first practices. The Skills-First Center of Excellence, coming online at the beginning of 2025, will organize resources, provide direct information, and offer certification for skills-first hiring and advancement professionals.Understanding and Communicating Skill RequirementsMichael Horn:Makes a lot of sense. You've actually answered a bunch of the other questions I had. Let me ask this one, because it strikes me as a bigger question mark. Employers often don't know the skills at the heart of successful employees. They might know the technical skills, but job descriptions are almost more legal documents to mitigate risk, listing every possible skill. How do we move to skills-based hiring if employers don't understand what the skills should be?Clayton Lord:It's a fair question. People use degrees as a proxy for much more than they're actually for. They're doing this because they don't know how to write an accurate job description that reflects the full spectrum of what someone will do. Most job descriptions include core tasks and a catch-all "other duties as assigned." When advocating for employers to shift from degrees to skills, we ask them to consider what it takes to adequately and accurately describe what a person needs to do to succeed at work. This involves more than just hard skills. Employers often say they can train most hard skills into someone. What they look for is a specific combination of durable skills, plus a desire, aptitude, and positive attitude for the work. We did a pilot in Arkansas, and many employers said they want an enthusiastic person to show up every day, on time, and sober. They can do the rest. Degrees as a proxy are an unfair way to start that conversation.There are emerging technologies that help. For example, tools using AI to pull skill stacks from resumes and job descriptions, matching them together, and proposing candidates based on these matches. This allows hiring managers to stay within their comfort zone while expanding the pool of candidates.Indicators of SuccessMichael Horn:Got it. That makes sense. Last question as we wrap up. In a decade, if you meet your goals, what are the big indicators that will show we've reached this vision of a skills-first hiring environment?Clayton Lord:The biggest indicator will be if skills-first hiring is ubiquitous and unremarkable, the default practice. It will be an exception if degrees are in job requirements or if applicant tracking systems lock people out without a degree. We'll see workplaces with more fluidity between jobs, reflecting SHRM's own experience. At SHRM, we've simplified job descriptions to focus on core skills, allowing broader engagement and fluid movement within roles. This is essential as work becomes more intersectional and evolutionary.We'll also have our hard metrics: 100,000 employers and 500,000 individuals involved in skills-first hiring. We estimate that skills-first hires, moving from non-degree to degree-equivalent tracks, could result in an average of $26,000 more per year in income, $900,000 more over a lifetime. This would benefit populations historically disadvantaged by degree requirements.Given the decline in two-year and four-year degree attainment, we need to change or face a significant worker shortage. Some industries are already in crisis due to degree requirements, and they're the most open to skills-first innovation. Our goal is to be proactive, helping the world of work adapt before every industry reaches a crisis point.Michael Horn:When the alternative is no human talent at all, employers realize there's a lot of human talent on the sidelines. Let's unleash that talent. Clay, thank you so much for your work in moving companies toward these practices and for unleashing the potential of many who would otherwise be sidelined.Clayton Lord:Thank you for having me. This has been a great conversation.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.

Phil Vaccaro and Nita Bhat of EY-Parthenon joined me to discuss their work partnering with Arkansas to help the state design and implement its Education Savings Account (ESA) program. They shared the big questions every state must consider when developing and operationalizing their ESA programs and discussed the thinking behind some of Arkansas’s choices. I confess, when I think about ESAs, I hadn’t thought about all the questions that goes into operationalizing them beyond passing the legislation, so this was a very interesting conversation for me. I look forward to hearing from all of you!Michael Horn:  Welcome to the Future of Education, where we are dedicated to building a world in which all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their potential, and live a life of purpose. To help us think through how that might work with some new designs cropping up in a number of states throughout the US right now, we have two special guests today from EY Parthenon, Phil Vaccaro, a partner there, and Nita Bhatt, a senior director. Nita, Phil, thank you so much for joining us. I can't wait to have this conversation.Phil Vaccaro:  It's great to be here, Michael. Thank you for inviting us to participate.Michael Horn:  You bet. I'm excited to dig into this because you all did this fascinating work that we're going to talk about in some depth around education savings accounts, particularly ESAs, and their implementation in a state. People might pause there and think, "Wait a minute, implementation of ESAs? What does that even mean?" We're going to get to that and why it's so important in just a couple of minutes. But let's start at a high level. What brought you to this work in education in Arkansas in general? Phil, why don't you start us off?Phil and Nita’s Journey to the Work Phil Vaccaro:  In some ways, Nita and I bring a similar background to the work, but I started as a teacher in the New York City school system, worked for the school district for five years under Mayor Bloomberg, and then switched over to the Parthenon team to do this work in education from a consulting standpoint. For the past 14 years, my goal has been to stay relevant from a commercial standpoint, tracking what states and districts are doing, what their top priorities are, focused around system-level change and school improvement. We've seen various waves of what education reform looks like and which policies have been more or less in vogue. Over the last few years, private school choice policies have really accelerated in terms of their adoption across states. This builds on a trend that’s been a long time in the making with school vouchers and the broader school choice ecosystem. We've supported school systems with strong choice environments. This is where we currently are with these new policy initiatives around education savings accounts.Michael Horn:  Gotcha. Nita, how about you? What's your own story into the work?Nita Bhat:  Yeah, absolutely. Thanks, Michael. For me, it goes back to how and where I grew up, which was in Miami, Florida. I remember going to four different public elementary schools and high school, applying to and being waitlisted at a bunch of magnet schools, some fairly far away from my house, because my parents wanted me in a specific program or felt some aspect of my schooling wasn't meeting their expectations. We didn't have the right vocabulary for it at the time, but that was my parents saying they didn't want the house they could afford to limit the quality of education they wanted me to get. Fast forward after college, I had the opportunity to teach at different neighborhood and public charter schools in Philly, another angle on school choice. Then, at Parthenon, over the last decade, I've served in some interesting school choice contexts, including in New Orleans, which has really shaped my thinking, where I gained an appreciation for how to design a system that promotes not just choice for kids and families but good school choice. That's what brought me to this work with ESAs in Arkansas.The Core Components of ESAs Michael Horn:  Super interesting and an unbelievable background with your parents engaging in that before people thought about these questions in the same depth. As I mentioned, my audience is certainly familiar with education savings accounts. It's something we've talked about on the show, but they're clearly different from some of the other forms of private school choice we've seen historically: tax scholarships, vouchers, even the charter space. I'm curious, in your minds, what makes a funding vehicle an ESA? What are the core components to level set us about what exactly we're talking about with ESAs? Nita, why don't you lead us off on this one?Nita Bhat:  Rather than getting too technical, I want to take this conceptually. What makes an ESA unique from vouchers is two main things. First, ESAs are being rolled out to serve a much broader set of students than ever before. While vouchers were primarily targeted at low-income families, at least in the beginning, ESAs, in today's avatar, are intended to serve many more students. In some states, any family is allowed to apply, so it's called universal. The second thing is that ESAs can be used for a much broader array of expenses than vouchers. Vouchers typically went from the government directly to a private school to support tuition, whereas ESAs involve the state putting the money into a digital wallet for each participating family, and then they can deploy the money where they choose to, whether it's a private school or to curate a curriculum, buy books, uniforms, or a course at the public school or a local charter school. That's the difference. In terms of why we think they have taken off, the pandemic illustrated that traditional school models aren't working for everyone. In fact, that may be true for a large number of students. Nationally, we see the rate of chronic absenteeism, where kids aren't coming to school, has doubled between before and after the pandemic. Parents and advocates are saying they want to take education back into their own hands.The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Arkansas ESA ProgramMichael Horn:  Super interesting. That leads into the work you all did in Arkansas, where they were launching a universal ESA program. Tell me about that experience because I suspect folks like me might think they passed a policy, allocated funding, there's a digital wallet, and boom, you're off to the races. I’m certainly interested in learning how this really works and when we’ve had some back and forth before this, it sounds like it's not nearly so simple as that. It’s much more complicated. Phil, why don't you lead us off and talk about some of the major design choices that go into launching a universal ESA program and give us a sense of the complexity involved?Phil Vaccaro:  Yeah, I'd love to. To start, it is complex, and I'm glad you're focused on the implementation piece because that is the overlooked factor in bringing these education savings account programs to life. There's a lot involved. There are a number of strategic and operational questions that need to be answered, and you have to build a team with the capacity to implement the work. From a strategic standpoint, one of the first questions a department has to ask itself beyond where it will live within the state. In Arkansas context, it lived with the Department of Education. In other systems, it lives with other government agencies. A big question on the front end is what will you do internally and what will you hire someone else to do? There are a few vendors active in this space that bring primarily a technology solution but can also bring some process around it. Departments need to figure out what to insource and what to outsource. With that knowledge, how do you design a process where the department can work with the vendor(s) on a regular basis to get the work done? The set of activities during the launch of a program can differ from the activities once a program is launched. When we first got into Arkansas, our support for the state is public record. We co-authored a LinkedIn blog post with them about our work. I'm proud that the folks in Arkansas dedicated time to getting the implementation right because we've seen mistakes in other states that have set back those initiatives. Nita spent a lot of time on the ground from day one working with their team on the nitty-gritty issues. You start with a statute and then bring that to life. The first step is a deep dive into the rules. What doesn't exist in statute that needs further clarification? That sets up a number of design choices and operational decisions. I'll turn it over to Nita to talk about some of those.Nita Bhat:  Sure. There are hundreds of design decisions, and I can't go into all of them. Phil said he could talk about this for three hours, and it's true. I'll stick to some high-level things that both the law had to consider and we had to build on during the design and implementation. First, is around what population do I intend on serving? Is it kids in low-performing public schools? Is it everyone? Something in between? That line of inquiry is usually figured out in the law, and then we build on it. There's a whole layer of questions around accountability. Do I want to measure how students on ESAs are performing academically? How do I want to measure that? Do I want to test them? In what subjects? Are there consequences for providers or families if a student isn't testing well? How long do I give them? How do I use the information I collect? Do I make it public? There are hundreds of questions in that layer. One of my favorites is around financial safeguards. How do I curtail providers from unreasonably inflating their tuition? In some states, the ESA goes into effect, and let's say it's $7,000. The private school had a tuition of $7,000, but after the ESA goes into effect, they raise it to $14,000. The families aren't seeing the benefit of the ESA. They're paying the same as before. That's unwanted behavior. How do you curtail that? There's a layer of questions on what can I spend the money on? Books, tuition, uniforms, great. Sports uniforms? Shoes? Are shoes okay? Can I buy the new line of kicks? No. Is transportation allowed? Can I take an Uber? Can I expense that? Private school tuition fees are allowed, but what about required donations to the church, do I want to allow that with this publicly funded taxpayer money? It becomes very nuanced. Hope you get some sense of how complex it can get.Design Decisions Michael Horn:  Yeah, I'm thinking through those and wondering how you parse through them. Let's take some and dig deeper. Let's start with the program's intended audience. You mentioned it's universal, but that implies a level of focus and outreach. How did you work through that question in Arkansas? How much was in law, regulation, and figured out on the ground?Nita Bhat:  Yeah, great question. I'll take it broadly than just Arkansas. Some states are clear in their intentions, like prioritizing kids in low-performing schools, as Georgia does. Some states are universal, like Arizona and that is where Arkansas is headed. Sometimes states take a middle approach, phasing up to universal by prioritizing vulnerable populations: special needs, low-income, homeless, foster, etc. They might also prioritize kindergartners. In year one, we fill the program with those kids. Next year, we have more budget, and we're going to grow our program a little bit. So we let more vulnerable kids in but maybe lower the threshold slightly. If the income was the most stringent threshold in year one then in year two, we’re going to relax it a little bit. It’s still for lower-income kids but slightly higher income than it was in year one. This year we are going to let kindergartners in again and add first graders. We’re growing and phasing in a way that seems reasonable. One thing that I don’t think people are necessarily thinking of is in these situations the kindergarten and first-grade uptake rate becomes quite high compared to the high-needs population unless you are intentional about it. This is quite logical. We see families with more information and resources are the first to take advantage, applying fast. Once a child is in the program, they’re in. What you see in the out years, years four, years five, years six, and onward... If you're a kindergartner and you're in the program, you could be in the program for 13 years. You could end up with a day where the program is approaching full or is full. Now you have a situation where the composition of the program you have is not all that strategic, leaving new families out. This is something people might miss. We had the benefit of modeling it out.Funding  ESAs Michael Horn:  Yeah, no, it's fascinating. I'm imagining the keyboard warriors signing up for summer camp. It's the same sort of phenomenon. I'm going to be the first one to get in on that before it fills up. But then it brings up the question that naturally comes, which is around financing and funding levels for these programs. Are they pulling from public school dollars? Are there caps to the funding? How has that all worked out, and what are the major things people ought to be thinking about on those dimensions?Nita Bhat:  No, this one's great. So Phil and I are district finance nerds. Our head goes there pretty quickly. One of the common criticisms that we hear about ESAs is that it's taking money away from public schools. There's a logic to that, right? The student leaves a public school to go to a private school. The public school loses the money that it otherwise would have gotten for that student. But the reality is more complicated because, in many states, not all students in the ESA program were public school students to begin with. In fact, some of them were always in private school. In some states, we know that most of them were already in private schools. So what's happening is the government is allocating new money towards that student that it wasn't before. That money is usually coming from the state's general fund, which is tax-based, maybe from some reserves, but it's not education-specific dollars. In effect, a state may be investing hundreds of millions of dollars in new money in education, but it's only going to fund a very small fraction of the state's students. Critics will ask if that's the best use of new education funds. That's a criticism states have to contend with if they're designing things this way. Down the road, if your ESA program gets big enough, policymakers may need to ask themselves where that money will come from and if they need to cut funds on the public school side. These considerations need to happen within a broader frame of how much is being allocated to this program and what the caps are year over year, even if it's a universal program.Michael Horn:  Just stay on that for one more moment. You mentioned the providers that maybe double tuition once they see there's $7,000 of public subsidy coming in. So they still get $7,000 from the families because they were paying it before. Why not charge $14,000 in that hypothetical example? How do you navigate those considerations? Where did you land on trying to curtail some of that behavior? Or is that something that you say stinks in the early years, but hopefully, the market has enough providers that it shakes out?Nita Bhat:  Yeah, I think that's a good question. Different states have approached it differently. As far as we know, Arkansas is the only one that has put a stake in the ground and said they are going to monitor this and do something about it if they think it's unreasonable. That was a promising place to start. By the way, this isn't happening broadly, and I don't want to overexaggerate the extent to which this is happening. We toyed with a number of considerations for that particular question. Should we be monitoring growth? Should a school provide justification? Should there be a limit they can go up to? Ultimately, we felt if we defined a limit, maybe it's 5% or 10%, we worried that schools would use that as permission to raise to that amount, even if historically they weren't or didn't intend to. Ultimately, we left it as we are going to monitor this, ask for rationale if we see an above-average increase or an outlier, and take a case-by-case approach.Fitting ESAs in Broader StrategiesMichael Horn:  Gotcha. I assume you're trying to avoid the college tuition behavior over time. Phil, let me turn to you because I'm thinking about how you situate these ESAs in a broader, not just school choice strategy, but a school improvement strategy across an entire state. How do you think about that as a component within a strategy? Where are you landing on helping not just Arkansas but any state think through that question?Phil Vaccaro:  Yeah, it's a really important question, Michael. One just making sure that the conversations emphasize education savings accounts as one lever of school improvement in a system, whether it's because you're getting more kids into better schools or creating more competition in the system. The notion being that creates a rising tide for all boats. We've seen systems go heads down quickly in terms of implementing the statute. But really, what are they doing to think strategically about how this fits in with other school improvement strategies they're pursuing? How are they coordinating with districts, which have been responsible for supporting a student's learning? In Arkansas, we built into our process a regular cadence around strategic discussions. It helps to map out where the students are, where the schools are, where the lower-performing schools are, where the private school capacity is, and where there are parts of the state without sufficient supply to meet potential demand. Where are there robust charter systems, and how do charter schools fit in with private school choice? There are strategic questions about how private school choice helps in certain parts of the state or where you have many private schools, but they're mostly full. You have to think there will be a percentage of students that benefit from this program, and hopefully, they will have access to a better school or create competition that helps those schools improve.In places without capacity, how do you provide new capacity into the system? Whether it's through new charter schools, micro-schools, or consortia of home schools. That's a huge strategic question that states need to think about. Also, in coordination with the districts where there's a net outflow of students, there is a funding implication because they are serving fewer students. If that happens to any degree of scale, it changes how that district can serve students. Taken to its logical extreme, it can change the dynamics in which those school districts serve students. You think about this policy in the broader landscape of school choice as part of your theory of change. The LEARNS Act in Arkansas was a comprehensive bill specifying policy change in a number of areas. Where the program lives is important. If it lives with the Department of Education, it has a higher likelihood of staying connected to other strategies implemented in the state. If you give it to other government agencies, you can run a great program, but you must make a concerted effort to coordinate with the Department of Education to consider this policy a lever for school improvement in the broader context of other things that states and districts are doing.Supply and SustainabilityMichael Horn:  Yeah, you hit on a couple of important things. One big thing I've been thinking about is the supply side. Not just how do you trigger new operators coming in, but do they have sustainable models that will last more than two or three years? A lot of teachers say they'll volunteer for a year or two, but then what? The second question you're raising is coherence with the Department of Education and the rest of the programs they oversee strategy, etc. As we start to wrap up, reflect on that part of it.  You began with one big question to think about was not just where it lived—Department of Education may be one answer to create that coherence—but also what are the resources internally and externally, and where do those different things sit that the department or wherever it's sitting will deploy to implement and operationalize this program? Reflect on that. A state launching an ESA going into year two, what are we talking about in terms of effort? Are there off-the-shelf things that can help? How should we think about what it takes to do this well?Phil Vaccaro:  Yeah, it's a great question. Historically, states' roles in education have been standards, policies, budget allocation, and accountability. They have not been set up to do direct-to-family programs, creating a need for capacity at a level of scale that hasn't existed within school districts. You have to build out a team to do this work. Nita can tell you war stories of all the inbound questions about filling out applications incorrectly, whether they got accepted, or when tuition will be transferred. You can do a lot with FAQs, but people want to talk to someone on the phone. There's real work involved. You can outsource that to vendors, so choose your vendors wisely. Be explicit in the RFP about what you're looking for and the division of responsibility between the host government organization and the vendor. You need to build out your team. Working side by side with your team during the launch period helps build out workflows and data flow to specific places at specific times. You must be very specific about making these connection points. We are reimagining what the state is responsible for in terms of the work they are committed to, not just setting policy but focusing on implementation. This can get confusing with the school districts. Role definition needs to happen upfront to maintain coherence. This is where we can't lose the discussion around strategy and how these levers fit within a state to support school improvement.What’s Next for ESAs Michael Horn:  Super helpful. Huge thanks to both of you. I feel like we're just scratching the surface, and I see, Nita, why three hours wouldn't be hard for you to talk about in-depth. Each of these things has trade-offs at any decision point. As we wrap up, reflections from each of you as we move into a new legislative season. I suspect we'll see new ESA programs pop up. We already know Texas is pushing to get that on the radar. We're going to see more of these. Bring us home. One or two things to consider going into the season of implementation.Phil Vaccaro:  I would say set out a clear list of guiding principles. In Arkansas, we had six guiding principles around empowering parents, expanding educational opportunities, supporting high-quality school options, and so on. It's important to have guiding principles for two reasons. One, when making decisions, it's helpful when you want to develop a coherent program to refer back to your guiding principles and say which of these decision options are most aligned with the guiding principles we set out to accomplish. So being able to have a common reference point I think is important. Two, it helps with communication, so you have consistent talking points. Sometimes systems say the real purpose of this work is X, and someone else says it's Y. Both can't be true, so which one is it? Being clear on the communication piece is important. On the implementation side, these systems are allocating tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars to these programs. Take the time upfront to design the work well and put a clear plan in place for implementation. If you're going to spend $800 million, spend $5 to $10 million upfront to consider the strategic and implementation issues. Map out budget possibilities, implications, how it fits with other school improvement strategies, what can go wrong, have contingencies, and dedicate time upfront. It's a high-stakes endeavor for any state. This is part of the Republican platform now, with 17 states implementing it and others in the process. States can't think about this only from their state's perspective. This is a national movement. For the movement to be successful long-term, states need to implement it well so students who can benefit most can access these programs.Michael Horn:  Super helpful. Nita, final thoughts?Nita Bhat:  I think that was great, Phil. The only thing I'll repeat is this should be a school choice movement. It's great to create options for kids and families, but let's have them be good options. What do you have to do as a system to ensure quality choices for kids?Michael Horn:  Nita, Phil, thank you so much for sharing just a fraction of your expertise on implementing ESAs. Hopefully, we can have you back to tell us more findings as you continue this work. Deeply appreciative of you both.Phil Vaccaro:  Thank you, Michael. We are proud of the folks in Arkansas for their work. I think they've done a great job.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.

Cyndi Court, CEO of Tiger Woods’ TGR Foundation, joined me to discuss the organization’s education work. It was an eye-opening conversation, as we talked about different components of career-connected learning and its benefits to students and employers. Cyndi shared stories of student’s journeys through their programs and the Foundation’s plans for the future. I loved her framework to organize career-connected learning as “learning about work, through work, and at work.” Have a listen or read the transcript and let me know your thoughts in the comments. Michael Horn:Welcome to the Future of Education, where we are dedicated to building a world in which all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their potential, and live a life of purpose. To help us think through how we accomplish that, I am tremendously excited for our guest today. She's the CEO of the TGR Foundation, none other than Cyndi Court. Cyndi, thank you so much for joining us today.Cyndi Court:Thanks for having us, Michael.Cyndi’s Journey to the Work Michael Horn:You bet. So, before we get into the work of the foundation and some of the labs that you're running and scaling, just tell us about your own journey into the TGR Foundation and what attracted you to this opportunity specificallyCyndi Court:Yeah, I'm an educator. I did my education degree many years ago in Toronto, Canada, but I fell in love with the after-school space when my husband and I moved to Tampa, Florida. I love the creativity that happens in the after-school space. I love the fact that we can come alongside both schools and be great partners, supporting schools and local educators, but also come alongside families and provide wraparound services in the after-school space. I've spent the majority of my career with the Salvation Army and over a decade with the Boys and Girls Clubs of America. The national office for Boys and Girls Clubs movement, I was their chief development and marketing officer. This opportunity appealed to me because of the big differential in what Tiger is trying to do here.The mission is very clear. It's about empowering young people to pursue their passions through education. We run programs during the day, and we have kids come in from local schools all over Anaheim. While they're getting hands-on creative STEAM curriculum, their teachers are getting teacher education. We have this beautiful 35,000-square-foot facility with the latest technology. It’s not just used after school; it’s used all day long. This partnership with schools and communities was incredibly attractive to me.Career-Connected LearningMichael Horn:That is exciting. What an opportunity. When I hear you talk about it, I always think after school and these wraparound areas are what I would call in our research areas of non-consumption, where the alternative is nothing. You can often reinvent the space and give students opportunities they otherwise never could have. Start to describe that. I know in these learning labs you do a lot of work with career-connected learning and employer-based partnerships. When you're talking about exposure to passions, you are not kidding. There are a lot of opportunities for kids to have those experiences. Tell us about that work and what it looks like.Cyndi Court:We've started and actually done career-connected learning by exposing young people from under-resourced communities to careers from the very beginning. Starting in fifth grade, our STEAM curriculum is designed so that kids are introduced to careers available to them. We know that 11% of the future jobs and the 11% of the growth are in the STEAM area. We want to make sure they’re prepared for those. So it’s begun from the very beginning as far as exposure. We do pre and post-assessments, measuring our students' engagement with us. They often tell us in our post interviews that they learned about a career and felt more confident in their skills to pursue that career. Now, we're beginning to be very intentional and target the teen population, which is tough to serve. It's more expensive, and it’s hard to attract and retain them. But we're being super intentional with those high school students. They get exposure through our curriculum and real-world opportunities to meet professionals from different careers in kind of one day career fairs. These career opportunities are where we have professionals come into the learning lab and share what their career path looked like and just expose them to different opportunities.I'm a first-generation college student, the first in my family to graduate from high school. So I know firsthand, often kids from under-resourced communities don't even know these careers exist. So there's a lot of work to be done just exposing them. We call that learning about work.  So how do we help students learn about work? Then we go deeper with them, with pillar three of that program for our high school students, where we help them learn through work. One of our marquee partners is Providence Healthcare on the West Coast. Very large healthcare system, 52 hospitals, and one of the biggest employers on the West Coast They brought their professionals in and gave us a challenge that they’re having around doing community assessments in under-resourced communities in their health system. We gave this challenge to our young people, did a six-week curriculum in the classroom, and they were split into teams to solve the problem for Providence Healthcare asa competition. So they were actually learning through doing the work. They came back, Providence evaluated them, and it was a great way for them to understand some of the careers and actually do the work. They were out delivering healthcare assessments in communities.The third pillar of our program is learning at work. How can we help them secure pre-apprenticeships, internships, prepare for mock interviews, and build their resumes and LinkedIn profiles, even as high school students? Some careers require college, some don’t. We help them understand the credentials they can pursue. We’re trying to be intentional and wrap around the whole career-connected learning area.Employers Partner with TGRThe 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:That's an incredibly helpful overview. I love the way you've divided it up into learning about work, through work, and at work. I'm curious, you hinted that this benefits not just the students who obviously get this exposure, connections, experience, actual real internships and pre-apprenticeships, and the like. But you started to hint to it that the partners get something out of it as well. Talk to us about the benefits that companies and employers get out of partnering with you all.Cyndi Court:For a lot of the companies that partner with us, they are committed to doing good and improving communities, but they also have a business issue. They have a workforce issue, trying to drive a diverse, highly qualified workforce that might stick with them and grow. The employers get a great benefit and we're preparing the students. Some employers are looking at which jobs require a college degree, which ones maybe only require two years, and which ones require just some credentialing. How can they help us get the workforce into those jobs and provide career ladders within their industries so that their workforce is staying longer? It's about how we diversify them, prepare them, make sure they have durable skills. Some people call them soft skills; we like to call them durable skills. How do we help them work as a team, understand work ethic, and be prepared? We want to make sure our students are great employees and help them stick in those industries so they have a career.Michael Horn:Makes a lot of sense. Let’s back up a little. There's a lot of points of leverage that you all, and Tiger woods, when he was thinking about this, could have picked. There's a growing amount of research about the importance of career exposure for really fifth-grade, middle schoolers, and high schoolers.  Getting them aware of what's out there, building social capital, a lot of things historically the education system hasn't thought a lot about.  Why did you all decide this is the leverage point where we want to insert ourselves? There's growing research on the importance of career exposure for fifth graders, middle schoolers, and high schoolers. Why did you all decide this is the leverage point where you really want to insert yourselves?Cyndi Court:It was after 9/11. Tiger was caught in another place, rented a car, and drove home. Driving home, he thought about how to make an impact and change communities. His mom always made him hit the books before he hit the course. Education was important to her. He grew up in Anaheim, so he had a sense of communities without many opportunities. After 9/11, he asked what we could do in the Anaheim community where he grew up to ensure kids can chase their dreams and have a safe place to do it. It came from multiple factors but converged around what a lot of us did after 9/11 rethinking how to do more.This post was sponsored by:Future Plans for ExpansionMichael Horn:Completely. So then talk to me about this. You're in Anaheim with the learning lab and all these opportunities. You're scaling and expanding. Talk about what's coming down the road and where else the foundation will be operating these labs.Cyndi Court:I get construction pictures every day now from Cobb's Creek. We're going to Philadelphia. Cobbs Creek is a revitalization of a golf course that has been there that has been a great story of inclusion since the golf course was built. Charlie Sifford learned to play there. So it's a wonderful story of Charlie Sifford and Tiger, and he was a mentor to Tiger. It is a forgotten corner of the Philadelphia community. A lot of students who need a place to go need the kind of programs that we're offering.So we're going into Philly. We'll actually get the keys on December 11, not that we're counting days, but we'll open the doors in early February of 2025. Then the next year after that, we'll be in LA, just beside Los Angeles International Airport and on a very large campus called Lulu's Place, which is being built. We've broken ground there with a philanthropist named Doug Kimmelman and the Kimmelman Family Foundation. It is a partnership with USTA. Every one of our facilities has STEAM programs, career-connected learning, and health and wellness opportunities for kids to go outside, be active, learn about hydration, and explore things they may not have opportunities to do in their communities. Again, they may not have an opportunity to play golf or tennis in the communities where they grew up.Michael Horn:Wow, such a neat set of opportunities. In terms of scale, how many students will you be serving in the next three to five years?Cyndi CourtIn Anaheim, we're serving about 7,000 a year. So we'll be serving as many as 21,000 and are already looking at other markets.Michael Horn:Wow. Let's go micro now to individual student stories. I was reading about Sammy Mohammed, highlighted at Tiger Woods's return to competitive golf. What are some of the student stories that stand out to you?Student Success StoriesCyndi Court:One of them is Brandon, who we highlighted in a video on our website, learned storytelling at the learning lab. We really are STEAM, which does include the arts. Brandon got a lot of opportunities to explore photography and podcasting. We have a podcast room. We need to have you come, Michael, and do a couple of things. But Brandon had a great opportunity to do all that and had experiences. Another student, during our Genesis golf tournament in Los Angeles, got to job shadow with the Golf Channel and do media interviews with the Dodgers. It was a chance of a lifetime. There were about 41 young people from the learning lab who got job shadowing that day. Our students are flourishing. We’re looking at our alumni, reconnecting with them, and doing a lot of storytelling because they're doing fantastic things.Michael Horn:Now I have to ask because I didn't expect to hear podcasting as one of those avenues and all that media exploration when I was thinking about STEAM. You're right, Arts is obviously a critical pillar of those of that acronym. These students, when they get this exposure. They're connecting with different companies. They're connecting with different mentors. What do they gravitate toward? What are you learning about what careers are most interesting to the students?Cyndi Court:We have a great supporter Nick Gross. We use a product that he built called Find Your Grind, which helps young people assess their passions. It’s not a typical assessment of careers but looks at what they’re passionate about. For example, if they love to connect with people, we show them careers that fit that passion. It helps them understand what they're great at and try different things whether that’s an afterschool club or robotics club. They love our drone class, the science of cooking. So we may be putting some great chefs that just understand the science behind what they do, but helping those people identify what their passions. Then try different things on again. If college is required, they know before they even go to college, a sense of their direction. So hopefully, they're not changing majors four times in four years and ending up there for eight years.  We aim to prepare them to hit the ground running and be successful in life.Michael Horn:Amazing. I'm just thinking about those chefs now in the science of cooking because my wife's in the culinary world, and her chemistry knowledge is way more than mine because she actually uses it. As we wrap up here, anything else the audience ought to know about TGR learning labs helping to shape the future of education and where you all see this impact going as we continue to chart forward?Cyndi Court:There’s a place for everyone to help. If it’s not with TGR Foundation or at a TGR Learning Lab, find a place to give back to these communities and kids. Everyone is needed and can make a difference. Check out tgrfoundation.org. Find a learning lab and ways to get involved. We have mentors and a college scholarship program. Get involved somewhere, whether it's volunteering or financially. Together, we can make a big difference.Michael Horn:No kidding. I love how you’re prototyping the future for these students by allowing them to try on different career hats. You’re probably teaching the mentors a lot as well as they help these students, and they probably get inspired daily. Cyndi, thanks for inspiring us today and for sharing so much about the learning labs, how they’re scaling, and their impact.Cyndi Court:Thank you for having 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.

Description: Michael is joined by Jon Carson of the College Guidance Network to discuss their new AI-Driven tool designed to improve postsecondary outcomes by bolstering high school guidance. The two dive into the tall task facing guidance counselors, the importance of the importance of informed decision making at the end-of-high-school transition period, and the potential of their AI chatbot, AVA, to support students, parents, and counselors.Michael Horn:Welcome to the Future of Education, where we are dedicated to building a world in which all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their potential, and live a life of purpose. To help us think about how we can do that better today, I'm thrilled to have Jon  Carson, the founder and CEO of College Guidance Network, CGN. Full disclosure, I host shows on occasion for them on careers. I'm delighted that Jon is joining us today to talk about their work and how they're helping individuals, families, and parents better navigate the landscape of post-high school. Jon, it's great to see you. Thanks so much for joining us.Jon Carson:Good to be with you.The Why Behind College Guidance NetworkMichael Horn:Let's dive in. You're a serial entrepreneur and have had many interesting ventures in your background. Let's start with the why behind this one, behind College Guidance Network. Why this company? What's its mission, and what does the work look like?Jon Carson:It started four years ago with my oldest. He was in the college process in high school, and there were a set of experiences I had that, as an entrepreneur, made me start to dig into how the college and career guidance system works on a large scale. I ultimately came out of that with a much better understanding of how the system fundamentally does not work in some very structural ways. Having worked in edtech for many years, as well as in content and media, it seemed to me like there was a way to solve this. At that time, AI had not yet come into the picture. Now, as AI has entered the scene, it's clear we're in a period similar to 1990-1996 when the Internet started. For us as entrepreneurs, we've come up with a design that can fundamentally change the way college and career counseling is provided in the United States at scale.Diagnosing the Problems with Guidance in American High SchoolsMichael Horn:Super exciting to hear that. Before we get into the solution, let's diagnose the problem a little bit. In your view, there are some big structural factors that drive the challenges around guidance for high school students. I know you see it in the outcomes: student graduation rates, dropout rates of college are not that great. I think in your view, at least some of that is structural. It starts with the guidance system in place. Talk through what those major factors are in your mind that lead to the brokenness of the current system.Jon Carson:You almost have to start with the supply side, which is the colleges. We've got an increasingly complex process that is a bigger and bigger high-stakes financial decision. With that complexity, we have a situation where, unlike when I was graduating from high school and all escalators went up, not all escalators go up anymore. In fact, some go down and can become non-recoverable. That's the supply side. On the demand side, the issue is that you start with a high school counseling department. Those counselors typically have a union contract of about 180-185 days a year. So right away, about half of the year, they're not available. Then you have the next issue, which is the high ratios. I was unable to get a hold of my kid's counselor, and that school is at about 220 kids per counselor. Some schools have 300,400, 600 kids per counselor. It's just not possible. That is not the counselors' fault; it's a math problem. So you have a big access problem. Then you have the issue that counselors typically have their degrees in social work and are being asked to be knowledgeable across a wide range of topics. How can a counselor who talks a kid off the ledge in the morning also be an expert in how STEM careers are unfolding in the world of AI? They can't. Lastly, if you think of this whole process as a metaphor of a car and the kid is driving the car into life, they don't know how to drive the car. They may not even want to be driving the car. They're often distracted by social media. The counselor is in the back seat but in 400 back seats. I, as the parent, am in the passenger seat, wanting to be helpful but not knowing how. The counseling department doesn't have anything for the parents, who are the only other adult authority figure in the car that can reasonably have the capacity to help the kid. If you put all those things together, the system's not working. You talked about the default rates and dropout rates. Burning Glass has just released data that shows that 52% of all college graduates are underemployed after a year. We clearly do not have good decision-making at a very high-stakes point in the cycle. The system is crying for something to fix it, and you can’t do it internally because schools are not going to have the dollars to throw more counselors at the problem. You have to have something else.Ava, the AI assistantThe 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:Super interesting to hear you break that down at all levels, frankly, in terms of how the matching problem starts and the dynamics throughout the system. One of the parts of your solution revolves around AI. You mentioned that earlier, and you've launched this AI solution. Your agent is named Ava, I believe. You're coming to market with Ava, not as a standalone AI offering but bundled with a variety of other elements. How do you think about this AI product strategy? How do you think about AI in this current solution, and how is it woven into what you are doing to solve the challenges you just described?Jon Carson:First, I'll just say that I may sound fairly coherent right now, but it has not always been so. When we first started out, the idea was to mimic a company called Masterclass, which had begun producing a very high-end video library around things like cooking and sports. Our idea was, what if you could create a Masterclass for college and career guidance? We began building this library of experts, but it turned out that was not the right answer because not that many people want to walk the stacks. That's like work. That was version one. Version two, the next step was putting a layer of technology on top of the library and turning the whole thing into a personalized roadmap generator for mom, dad, and the student. It was a month-by-month roadmap that included workflow management videos from top experts personalized to you and your kid. The third piece, which we are currently in the process of rolling out over the next two months, is adding the AI piece. Ava, which stands for Another Virtual Assistant, is our AI counseling assistant. Ava's distinctive characteristic is being trained by the content we have across these experts. We currently have just under 300 experts across 110 topics and just under 3000 videos. We've better understood that content equals data, and very high-quality content equals very high-quality data. That's very important in having a quality conversational assistant. If you put together a conversational counseling assistant with a personalized roadmap, personalized text and email nudges, and a year-round live programming schedule of live experts, that becomes a total solution. We think of it as guidance in a box. This allows a school to provide the capability to a family to have access to the best guidance 365 days a year, 24 hours a day. This takes an enormous load off of the counselor's plate, which is important because there's a whole teenage mental health crisis that desperately needs more counseling time. We think this can be a win for everybody.Michael Horn:Super interesting. If I understand you right, you're basically saying, counselors, you can lean into your expertise around social work and working individually with students who need the help. We have this breadth of content experts, 300-plus experts, and 3000 some odd videos that allow us to handle the breadth of questions any young individual might bring. My interests might be different from yours, so we have the expertise and content breadth to work with that. You're using the experts to provide the best advice for any given topic and have this knowledge graph that Ava is trained on so that I get the right piece of advice, the right direction, and the right nudge at the right time in my journey. Am I getting this right? Is this how it all comes together?Jon Carson:It is. I'll simplify it. We've done a ton of field research, and it doesn't really matter the socioeconomic background of the student or the family. Everybody really wants the same four things, which actually makes it easier from a design standpoint. We want to know what to do, when to do it, how to do it, and why to do it. If that can come from top experts that we can trust and that are credible, then that's the package. It's about delivering what, when, how, and why. To do that, you have to have a conversational capability. That's Ava. You have to have workflow project management. That's the personalized roadmaps. You have to have access to live experts. That's our live programming. And you have to have remind nudges because we're all so busy. There could be a window closing for the SAT registration test this summer. This whole project started because my wife and I barely made one of these within four hours. She turned to me and said, "I just want a plan." This is the plan. This is what guidance in a box would look like for someone navigating a very complex thing they've never done before.Differentiating CGN's approachMichael Horn:I can hear the exasperation in her voice as you tell that story that leads to this solution. Talk to me about the limited budgets of schools, states, and the like, and how they can't just throw money and people at this problem. How does this content-centric approach coexist with some of the software solutions like Naviance or Score? I hear it a lot of times. A lot of states and schools say, "We've already got something." What's your take on how this is complementary and critical to their operations alongside what they think they have?Jon Carson:The best way to think about it is software versus content. The software solutions are robust aggregations of tools. There's something to build a college list, do scholarship searches, request a recommendation letter, provide your transcript, and integrate with the common app. These are software tools. The people who work at these companies are typically software engineers. Using my car metaphor, this is the steering wheel that the kid uses to drive the car from A to B. You must have that steering wheel to get from here to there. We are more like the GPS system that helps the family navigate. We are about guidance and content, not software. We do not have a robust software team. Our people come from PBS, ESPN, and Family Education Network. We think cars drive better with navigation. That's our role: to aggregate experts into a cohesive user experience that's not overwhelming, personalized, and complements the steering wheel.Activating Parents Michael Horn:You just said a few interesting things that I want to key in on as we start to wrap up this conversation. You used the word "guidance." You are not the software; you are the guidance. That's a critical piece missing in the depth and breadth we need across the system right now. You have a real focus on parents. Talk about why parents and guardians are the linchpin from your perspective and why this is such an important solution for them. A lot of people think, "Naviance, right? My kid has access to it in the school. They jump on in the career office or the guidance office, put in their scores and interests, and get some lists of colleges." You are providing much more guidance and really helping parents with this. Talk about that decision and focal point.Jon Carson:First, we know the current system is not working. If it were, we wouldn't have these massive dropout rates, default rates, etc. Just giving someone a large toolbox is not enough. You have to give them the instructions and navigation as well. Asking a 17-year-old to make this kind of high-stakes decision with all the complexity is asking a lot. Asking them to do it by themselves leads to problems. We can't put it all on the counselors because there's a math problem there. We're running out of options, but there's a really good one: the person in the passenger seat who's going to be either writing a check or co-signing a loan for a lot of money, who's biologically wired to care about the individual in the driver's seat, and who is desperate to be helpful but just doesn't know what to do, when to do it, how to do it, and why to do it. You have to make it easy for them. They need expert access because they're on the journey as well. Parents are really a linchpin. Jeff Riley, the commissioner of education for Massachusetts, has called them the sleeping giant. They just want to be harnessed. Their anxiety levels are high because they see these issues. As we watch the effects of AI on the workforce and entry-level jobs, it will become even more complex and important that kids are thoughtful about picking their career paths. We spend a lot of time getting experts on AI because we think the future of work is really important.Parents have to write the check, they care about their kid, and they see their kid is distracted. They want to get it right, but nobody's given them the right solution so they can become that counseling assistant at home. We talk to schools about turning all parents into an army of counseling assistants with a caseload of one or two. That's an enormous amount of capacity that can be unlocked, and you don't have to pay for it because they'll do it because they care about their kid.CGN's Content Categories and What’s NextMichael Horn:That makes a ton of sense. Parents care about this, have a lot of anxiety, and probably spend a lot of time on this. You're helping them be smarter and more secure in decision-making. For parents who may tune in and listen to this, I will say there are great resources to help their kids assume more agency and develop executive function skills so they can take more ownership. There's great guidance in CGN around those topics, not just the checklist of what to do next. It's a much more comprehensive solution, right?Jon Carson:We think there are four content categories: college, money, careers, and family dynamics. How do you talk to a teenager who won't talk back? The kid is separating biologically, which is important. There are right and wrong ways to engage that kid. Many parents make the wrong decision by leaning in too much, causing the kid to push back. We try to give parents access to family therapists and experts on teenage phone screen addiction and other issues that get in the way of healthy exchanges between an engaged parent and their kid.Michael Horn:Perfect. Jon, how can folks tuning in learn more about CGN and get in touch?Jon Carson:Our URL is collegeguidancenetwork.com. There's an ability to request a demo or reach out to us. At the end of August, we're rolling out this combined solution with personalized roadmaps and Ava integrated into the experience. We're excited about the fall pilots we're running. The commissioner in New Hampshire has funded a pilot, and we're excited to have a scalable solution that can change the way guidance is done in American high schools.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.

I was so excited when Diane Tavenner reached out to me this summer so that we could interview David Yeager, psychology professor at University of Texas Austin and author of 10 to 25, a new book on youth development, on our Class Disrupted podcast. Together, we discussed lessons on healthy youth development tackled in his book, including the science of mentorship, importance of transparency, and strategies for how to help youth reframe stress.Diane Tavenner:  Hey, Michael.Michael Horn:  Hey, Diane. How are you?Diane Tavenner:  I am well. This is a first for us. We are doing a special summer episode, and for good reason.Michael Horn:  We are trying to break out of the old structures of a summer break where kids go home and don't go to school. We're trying to break out of that model that we've always done in this podcast and have an important conversation about a book that is upcoming and will be out by the time this podcast is released. So, Diane, why don't you introduce the book and our special guest?Diane Tavenner:  I'm excited to welcome Dr. David Yeager to the podcast today. He's a professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin and has a long, long list of accomplishments and works with a number of other learning scientists. I encourage you all to go look at that impressive bio. Let me just share personally that we met about a decade ago, and I have always been such a huge fan because David's work is so applicable to schools, young people, mentoring, teachers, and parenting. He is, in my view, one of the rare researchers who not only has a background in those areas but is deeply committed to making sure his research is actually meaningful and embedded in practice. Over the years, we've had tons of incredible dialogues and conversations about very practical things in schools. He had a huge influence on our summit learning model when I was at Summit. I am so excited for his upcoming book called "10 to 25." It's all about mentoring, which is a huge part of what I have worked on and focused on in my career. I am thrilled that you're here with us today to have this conversation. David, welcome.David Yeager:  Thanks a lot. It's great to be here. Diane, I think it was 12 years ago we met.Diane Tavenner:  Wow, Yeah.David Yeager:  You were my favorite person. We met at this crazy meeting where we were briefing thought leaders in education reform. The last question of that interview was, "If you could do one thing, what would it be?" Whatever I said, a week later, you're like, "Okay. So we did that thing you said, now can you help us?" I was like, I love Diane Tavenner. She's just gonna make it happen. So I've always been your admirer, and it's great to be on this podcast.Michael Horn:  It's not just talk with Diane, it is action.David Yeager:  Yeah, be careful what you say. She'll do it.Filling in the blanks on youth motivation Diane Tavenner:  Well, thank you. We are thrilled to have you. I wanted to jump in. This is going to be kind of silly, but I think it's meaningful. Your new book introduces what I would call a Madlib activity. It's like a fill-in-the-blank activity and the fill-in-the-blank sentences. I know you've asked a bunch of people to complete this, so I'm curious about the different responses you've gotten. It starts with this idea: The sentence, "Given that young people are ____, the best way to motivate them is ____." I’d love to know your response to that. Also, what do you normally hear from people when you ask them to fill in those sentence starters?David Yeager:  Let me just start with the most common things I hear. The most common thing I hear is, "Given that young people are kind of short-sighted, lazy, hard to motivate, not listening to grown-ups," or something like that. Something kind of denigrating. Then you tend to see one of two things. One is “Explain to them why all their choices now are not quite right and why they're not aligned with their long-term best interests or motivate them with either threats or rewards.” So, "If you do this, something bad is going to happen to you," or "If you do this, I'll give you this nice thing." Either bribes or threats. That's the most common answer I see. The second most common answer I see is, "Given that young people are stressed out, overwhelmed..."Diane Tavenner:  Addicted to their phone.David Yeager:  Right. Addicted to their phones, recovering from COVID, lonely, in the middle of a mental health epidemic, etc. The best way to motivate them is to remove their demands, chop up what they're doing into tiny steps, help them feel a sense of success, let them feel confident, don't overwhelm them. Basically, make it easy on them to grow up. Both of those internal logics make sense, but neither of them are great. The big punchline from my book is when I started studying people who do an awesome job at motivating young people, even in the most difficult of circumstances, they complete the sentence with, "Given that young people are capable of doing incredible things that make contributions to the world, the best way to motivate them is to inspire them, sometimes to get out of their way, to run interference, so that way things don't derail their ambitions and hopes, but really support their potential to come alive." I like this exercise because it reveals how our beliefs about young people are intimately tied to our practices and how we deal with them. That sounds obvious when I say it, but it's not obvious to most people. They just think, "Okay, the best way to motivate people is the following," and they don't question the fact that that's a choice, and it comes from a belief system, and it's something that could be changed.David’s Motivation for Writing 10 to 25 Michael Horn:  It's really interesting. I'm feeling jealous at the moment because Diane's had the chance to read the book in advance, and I will read it once it's out. What motivated you to write this book, "Ten to 25?" What was your intention? What's your hope for the book?The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.David Yeager:  For me personally, the book comes from 15-20 years of frustration, feeling like the advice I had been given as a teacher and later that I saw in the research literature just wasn't cutting it. It wasn't good enough. I remember being a mediocre middle school teacher and caring so deeply for my kids and wanting to do everything for them and feeling like I never got that kind of inspiring, enthusiastic love of learning, where kids were embracing the hardest stuff and coming after class because they were curious about the topic. Then when I started doing research, I also felt like the answers I saw in the field were very... I don't know, just not useful. It was very abstract and bland and not applicable. We've conducted a lot of research over the last 15 years, and part of the book is, "All right, let's put that all in one place."I'm often asked about this part of my work. Some people think of me as the community college student success person, others as the purpose-in-life person, others as the youth mental health, and others as the growth mindset. I wanted all the work to be in one place, but the other thing was just an acknowledgment that there was a lot I didn't know, and I needed to go out in the world and find great leaders who were awesome at motivating young people. The book is a combination of the science we've done over 15 years and original reporting on what I've learned from the wisdom of practice, I guess you could say.The Mentoring MindsetMichael Horn:  Very cool. I'm curious, then. Diane teased that a lot of this book is not just about motivation and how to spark students, but a part of that is this mentoring mindset, I think you call it. I've certainly bought hook, line, and sinker on the importance of mentoring, but the mentoring mindset is a phrase that is unfamiliar to me. So, what is the mentoring mindset?David Yeager:  Yeah, the mentor mindset is an approach or a philosophy you take with a young person where you maintain very high standards. You're tough, you expect a lot, but you're supportive enough so that a young person can meet those standards. It's not just saying, "Hey, I have super high standards, you can meet them or not," which often ends up with maybe the top 5% doing well and everybody else struggling. It's not saying, "I care about you, but I'm not going to ask a lot of you," where maybe kids feel supported but they don't grow and improve. The basic mentor mindset is high standards, and high support. It's a simple idea.Where does that come from? It comes from this investigation of the most successful people I could find in K-12 education, higher ed, academic research, NBA coaching, parenting, management at retail, grocery stores, management, and technology firms. I wanted to look at anyone who's in charge of or relates to someone aged 10 to 25 in any of these domains. What do the most successful people have in common? The answer was this mentoring or mentor mindset. In the book, I describe it and also describe what's the opposite of that. What happens if you don't have that?Diane Tavenner:  Michael, you'll love it because it is a two-by-two because you always have.Michael Horn:  You're saying I'm going to feel at home is what you're saying.Taking an Asset-Based ApproachDiane Tavenner:  You're going to feel very at home. I love the mentoring mindset because it embodies the belief system that I've had for my career, this idea of high expectations and high support. Let's just put names on the other ones that you were describing, David. There's this enforcer mindset which is like you were describing, high expectations but no support, and this protector mindset which is high support but no expectations. One of the things I love in our conversation is you never start from a deficit mindset. You're always an asset-based approach where you're like, "Look, even those other two places have one of the two parts of the equation, so they're halfway there. We just need to get the other half in there, if you will." Say more about that.David Yeager:  Yeah, I think there are two ways in which it...Diane Tavenner:  Hopefully, I explained that properly.David Yeager:  Yeah, it was great. Later on the test, I'll give you a high score. As a professor, I'm just walking around grading everyone. Just kidding. There are two ways in which we try to be asset-based. One is that suppose you're in one of these off-diagonal cases, the enforcer mindset: all standards, low support; protector: all support, no standards. That's coming from a good place and I started to talk about that. Then the second is, as you're saying, reframing those two off-diagonal cases as you got half of it right, so just add the other half. Why do I say they're coming from a good place? Well, I think for a long time people have felt torn. If I'm a manager, a boss, a teacher, a professor, I have a dichotomous choice between being the tough, authoritarian, dictator, kind of hard-nosed person who demands excellence. The negative consequence of that, of course, is kids and young people are crying and feeling debilitated and crushed. Most people don't succeed.But that is viewed as a necessary side effect of me upholding high standards. You can see how you could put your head on your pillow at night and feel good about that. It's like, "I'm the gatekeeper to excellence and high performance, and I'm doing what I have to do, though it's sometimes unpleasant to uphold the standard for culture or society or performance." On the other side, where you're very low standards but high support, what I call the protector mindset, there too, you can feel good about how you're caring. You love young people. You're putting their feelings and needs first. You're being empathetic. You're very attuned. Those are all good things to feel. The problem is that you're also a pushover and young people don't get anywhere. But it might feel like that's the necessary consequence of protecting young people from the distress of this dog-eat-dog world that they can't possibly succeed in. Both come from a concern for young people, both the enforcer and the protector. They're just a little misguided.The reason they're misguided is because they're embedded in this worldview we have about young people generally being incompetent. If you think they're incompetent and I have to be tough, well, that's enforcer. It's like, "I need to maintain the standards, and I'm the last defense against the world descending into chaos." That's why I have to maintain rigorous standards. On the protector side, they're incompetent, they're weak, but that's why I have to make up for what they lack by protecting them.Diane Tavenner:  Yeah.David Yeager:  So the mentor is like, "All right, let's just take both of what's good from those. You've got the high standards. Great. Add the support. You've got the support. Great. Add the standards so you can have two reasons now to feel good about yourself at the end of the day, not just one."The Transparency StatementDiane Tavenner:  Yeah, I love that approach. The book is filled with the science that's behind it. One of the things I appreciate about you is it's not only all the science and research you've done. You are highly collaborative, and you have an encyclopedic knowledge of all the other research in the space that everyone else has done. You are very generous in bringing those ideas into the book. We are not going to spend a lot of time on the science here today because we want to, given our audience, go to the practices that you put forward. But I will say for people who want to do a deep dive there, I've listened to the Huberman Lab podcast that you did. It’s 3 hours, and it's an extraordinary deep dive in that space. So I highly recommend that for people who want to go really deep there along with the book if you want to listen. I want to shift us over to these mindset practices. They're particularly profound here in conversation.Honestly, when I looked at the titles of these chapters and when I started digging in, these are things that Michael and I talk about all the time on the podcast. These are cornerstones of, in our view, what redesigned schools and learning experiences need to be building on, incorporating how they need to function, essentially. We are deeply aligned in our agenda for what learning can and should look like. Let me just say off the top because our listeners will recognize these. We'll start with transparency, which is a really interesting intro. I think you say these go from easiest to implement to probably most challenging. So we'll talk about that. Transparency, questioning, this reframing of stress, and then purpose and belonging. Again, our listeners have heard us talk about purpose and belonging sort of at nauseam, but we can keep talking. Let's start with transparency because you have this very, very, I would say, easy lift that people can do, called a transparency statement. Tell us about that. What does that look like? How does that get you off on the right foot, quite frankly, in your relationship with young people?David Yeager:  The transparency statement that I write about is very simply explaining your motives whenever you are about to uphold some high standards and/or provide some support so that young people don't interpret it in the worst possible light. That can be very short. Let's take Uri Treisman, the world's greatest freshman calculus professor I write about in chapter eleven. He'll give students large intro courses in calculus, five problems where they have to find the limit of a function using L'Hopital's rule. The thing is, most kids, when they take AP calculus, memorize L'Hopital's rule, and then they just apply it to find the limits of functions. But the problem is that L'Hopital's rule is not an analytic solution. It's like a workaround.So it doesn't work. It breaks a lot. He'll give students five problems, four of them L'Hopital's rule won't work for, and one it will. A normal teacher doesn't do that. A normal teacher would think, "You're a lunatic because they're going to cry," basically. Before he does that, he's like, "All right, I just want you to know the reason why I'm doing this is because you guys are preparing to be mathematicians and to think mathematically. I want you to have careers long beyond this class. I don't want you to apply math tricks. I want you to be able to take apart the math tricks, figure out how they work, and put them back together again." He says that before they spend 25 minutes struggling. If you don't, they would be in tears, thinking, "I'm dumb at math. I'm going to fail calculus. I'm never going to be a doctor or an engineer." That's where a freshman's mind is going to go. You have to say something. In a world in which he says nothing and there's crying, tears, and frustration, that's not a great world. The most marginalized students are going to quit first because they're also dealing with other stereotypes about whether they're smart enough, etc. But in the world in which he has a transparency statement, it's otherwise the exact same lesson and the students have the exact same great professor, but it means something totally different in that context.That's why it's the easiest. You can already be awesome at mentor mindset stuff, high expectations, and high support, and you could be coming across the wrong way to your young people. Sometimes all you have to do is remind them of why you're giving them something that's a little unpleasant. The societal narrative currently about young people is, "Well, I shouldn't have to explain myself, because if they weren't such woke, wimpy idiots, then they would know that I'm here for them." There's a version in which people, adults and leaders, think, "I shouldn't have to explain myself." My answer to that is, look, for most young people, starting at the beginning of gonadarche and puberty until they're in their twenties, that day you're talking to them is the day on which they have the most testosterone they've ever had in their entire lives. That day and the next day when you do something else, that also will be the day on which they have the most testosterone they've ever had in their entire lives, both boys and girls.That does all kinds of things to the brain that makes them over-interpret things that might be plausibly offensive. That's why their head goes to this crazy place of, "I'll never succeed," or "You hate me," or "This is biased," etc. You just have to explain yourself two or three more times than you think you need to. Not because they're too sensitive, but because the job of a young person is to figure out if they're being taken seriously and respected. Just don't make them guess. Just be transparent.Diane Tavenner:  Yeah. One of the things that comes up in the book is this idea that at that developmental stage, they want status and they want respect, and there's good biological reasons for that. When we are running counter to that, we're creating all sorts of distance between us relationally, which makes so much sense to me. I can just say from my career, I can't tell you how many of the rigorous teachers that I knew purposefully would not have been transparent upfront because they were actually trying to scare kids or create what is essentially a threatening environment because they thought that's what they were supposed to do with high standards. The science is pretty clear that the effect they were having was not the effect that I think they ultimately wanted.David Yeager:  Right. I mean, I think there's this mythology of the demanding leader that is impossible to please, and it's a little bit ambiguous if you've won them over. In that mythology, you're supposed to leave people you're leading a little bit in the dark for a while and then only at the end reveal that you cared about them all along, but they're supposed to be afraid for nine months so that way you get optimal performance. I 100% remember feeling that way as a teacher. If I tell them too quickly that I care about them, then they're going to take advantage of me. But that's not what the mentor mindset leaders do.They're super hard, and students are often crying in the first few months of their classes in college and K-12 settings. But they're also super transparent so that by October, or November, students can now trust that when they ask a question, Mr. Estrada—Sergio Estrada is one of the teachers I write about—"Mr. Estrada, is this problem right?" He'd be like, "I don't know. Is it right?" Initially, students hate that. But he says, "Look, I would never deprive you of the opportunity to know that you can understand physics. I care about you too much to lower standards. So that's why I'm asking you the question back. So given that, do you think it's right?" He's got to say that for a couple of months. Eventually, students know that and then they start thinking on their own, and they own their own learning. It saves him tons of time. Later in the semester, they become independent thinkers. They go on to the next course in college and can do well. He's given them that gift of being independent, thoughtful, curious, intellectual leaders, even though it was a little rocky at first because students aren't used to it. But you're not going to get there if you wait till May and they hate you all year. That's idiotic. That's mythology.Questioning Techniques: Asking v. Telling Diane Tavenner:  You've led us into the questioning technique. Some of those teachers we're talking about, their class would also look like the professor not giving them any help or any support. That's not what you're talking about. Sergio and others that you profile, don't they specifically have this strategy around asking, not telling? Tell us the dimensions and characteristics of that approach that are quite different from other folks.David Yeager:  I was really struck by the parenting coach that I followed who is almost always coaching parents to ask questions, not to tell their kids what to do. The similarities between great parenting and great teaching, great tutoring, and good management. The great manager I followed, Steph Akamoto, who was at Microsoft at the time, would do her performance reviews and ask questions like, "All right, how do you think that went?" and so on, get their opinions. Then she would say, "All right, for you to be a top 15% performer on your next performance evaluation, what's a task you could do that's above and beyond that would really impress everybody, and that would be something you would want to do and you want to learn?" Then they would generate two or three ideas. Then she'd be like, "Huh? All right, what are you worried about getting in the way of those things?" An example in the book is Steph's doing a performance review when she was on the software testing unit for Microsoft. They would write manuals that would help the developers know what Windows is doing, for instance. Someone on her team was like, "Well, instead of just testing it and writing the manual, I could go talk to the engineers and fix all the goofy things with the software now, rather than have 20 pages in the manual about how the goofy thing is a workaround." She's like, "Okay, what would be hard about that?" "Well, the engineers don't want to talk to a tester because I'm low status, and the manager is going to be like, 'Stop wasting my engineers' time.'" Then Steph would be like, "All right, would you mind if I contacted the manager and said, 'Get off her case and let her go talk to your engineers?'" "No, that's okay with me."So they formed this whole plan where her direct report could overperform and do something testers weren't normally required to do. Steph's out... She's not doing it for the direct report, but she's running interference to give her the freedom to be in the room to talk to the engineers. Six months later, her direct report is overperforming as the top 5-10% performer, gets a raise, promotional velocity, etc. But Steph didn't do it for her. That's what I mean by questioning. There's a version of questioning that's not good. If your kid comes home drunk and you're like, "What were you thinking?" that's not an authentic question. What you really mean is, "You were not thinking, and you're an idiot, and you're in trouble. I could not be madder at you." That's what you mean. There are versions of questions that are just about facts. What I'm really talking about is what I call in the book authentic questioning with uptake, where it's a legitimate question that the person could have a true answer to that, in principle, the asker doesn't know the answer to. Second, where the question builds on some thinking the person has done. I found mentors did that a lot and did it really well, whether it was the NBA's best basketball coach, Sergio Estrada in physics class, Uri Treisman in calculus, or Steph at Microsoft.Reframing StressDiane Tavenner:  It's resonating with me on multiple levels because as I build this new product to help young people figure out what they want to do in the future, this was the cornerstone of our approach. We would ask authentic questions of them and help them discover and explore versus the traditional approaches that kind of tell you, "We have this black box questionnaire or test, and then we tell you, 'Oh, guess what? You should be a firefighter or a mortician or whatever.'" Young people are like, "What are you talking about? That's not me." So very resonant. The next piece is a total reframing of stress. Especially coming out of COVID. Michael and I started the podcast during the middle of COVID and everyone, probably at the time, really swung one direction about, "People are so incredibly stressed."We have to completely fundamentally change our expectations and our behaviors in response to that stress. I still think there's a belief that young people and kids are so stressed. This is where I think the protector mindset comes in a lot. The science, though, tells us something very different. We should think differently about stress and then act differently accordingly. Tell us about that.David Yeager:  This was an important chapter in the book because there's a world in which managers are out there saying, or teachers, or professors, "I'm a mentor mindset. Therefore, I have mega hard expectations for you, and you need to suck it up and just deal with how stressful it is." That's not what you see the best mentor mindset leaders doing. They definitely maintain standards. They definitely imply you should stick with it. But they don't tell you to suppress your stress or feelings of frustration, etc. Instead, they have ways of reframing the negative emotions that tend to come from pushing yourself to your frontiers and reframing them as, one, a sign you've chosen to do something important and meaningful. If it was easy, then anyone would do it kind of thing.But the fact that it's hard means that you are doing something impressive. The fact that you're stressed often means you care about it, that it matters to you, and that's cool to do something that matters to you. Then, second, that those worries actually can be fuel to help you do better. You see that a lot. If you look at great one-on-one tutors or even a good golf coach or tennis coach, they're really asking you to go take on a challenge. In athletics, choose harder opponents, and if it's tutoring, choose the harder problems and try them if you can't master them. Second, that physiological arousal of heart racing, palms sweating, butterflies in your stomach, that's your body mobilizing oxygenated blood to your muscles and your brain cells, and that's helping you to be stronger and your brain to think faster and so on. Most people don't think that way.They think the fact that I have butterflies in my stomach and my heart's racing means my body's about to shut down, that my body's betraying my goals, and it's going to get in the way. We talk a lot about the science of reframing away from what's called a suppression approach. So classic suppression would be, well, as a parent, "Stop crying. Stop being sad." You just tell your kid to stop feeling the way they're feeling. But as a teacher, what you often see is, "You've prepared. You shouldn't feel stressed. You're fine. You can do this. You should feel confident." You see this a lot. Kids say it to each other, "Oh, you shouldn't be stressed out." It's like, no, actually, you should be stressed if it matters to you and it's legitimately hard. Reassuring you that you shouldn't be stressed is a suppression approach. It turns out if you suppress feelings, they just come back stronger and get in the way. The protector mindset leads you to that suppression approach. You feel so bad that you feel distressed that I want you to get rid of it, and I want to get rid of it either by removing the demand or telling you to push the feelings down, you know, push them away, don't feel stressed, etc. I tell the story in the book about a student of mine who emailed and said, "Look, my mom just died. Most important person to me in the world. I can't possibly do the assignments for the next couple weeks.I hope this won't make me fail, but I’m just telling you I can't do it." I could tell from the tone that most of my colleagues at UT would either imply that she was lying about it and that she had to prove it or would say, "Just take an incomplete in the class," either to save you the distress or because the teachers are worried about it being unfair to the other students in the class. That wasn't my approach. I had been thinking a lot about this stress approach, and instead my approach was, "Look, let's separate the intellectual difficulty of what you're doing from the logistical difficulty. The intellectual difficulty is you have to do an awesome final project that's very impressive, that hopefully you can talk about in your job interviews, can be on your resume, and that you're proud of. I don't want to take that away from you. That's why you took my class, was to learn new stuff and do things that are impressive. Frankly, your mom cared for you and rooted for you throughout college because you were doing cool, impressive stuff.So one way to honor your mom's memory is to do a great final project in my class. Do I really care that you do the daily busy work that I assigned? No. That's only there to help you get prepared to do the final project. What I did is I reduced the demands for the logistical stuff, like the busy work, and I was like, just communicate with your group, and whenever you're ready, come back and then do your final project with them. She took two and a half, three weeks off and just kind of stayed in touch with her group, and then they did a fully kick-ass final project. They created this whole AI-based support to help teachers do empathic discipline rather than very harsh discipline. Three years ago, they did this before GPT was released, and then she talked about it in her interview, got this job for a major financial services group, and now is traveling the world on this rotational program, fast track for managers. She immigrated from Africa, is a very interesting young woman of color who is constantly trying to help improve society and culture.I caught up with her a year later. I was like, "Did I do the right thing? Should I have just given you an incomplete?" She's like, "No. Half my professors told me to take an incomplete, but then I couldn't have graduated on time, and then I wouldn't be in this financial services mentoring program." That's an example where if you have the belief that young people are capable of impressive stuff with the right support, then you start thinking about, sometimes you maintain the intellectual demand or the demand for the work that's truly impressive, but the way you support them is to reduce some of the logistical demands. I think a lot of people mistake those two. They think being a hard-ass on deadlines is what it means to be demanding. But I think it's having people own thinking and contributions. That that's the demand. Deadlines are a means to get there.Diane Tavenner:  I love this chapter. The whole time I was reading it, I kept thinking back because you alluded to this in the beginning, David, but the first two times we met each other were arguably under very stressful circumstances that I would not trade, though. I mean, we were, in the first case, presenting our work to Bill Gates directly, and in the second case at the White House, presenting. If someone had taken those opportunities away from us, I think we would be very regretful. It was stressful. Those are stressful.David Yeager:  So stressful, but it's stressful in a way where you have to bring your A-game. I think the challenge is to see it as a positive opportunity to perform at your peak rather than a threatening opportunity to fail publicly. When you do the latter, you're still sweating, your heart's racing, and you're worried but doing poorly. But you also are like, all right, let's go. It's like if I'm a good surfer on a huge wave, that's how you want to feel.Purpose and BelongingDiane Tavenner:  So, David, with our last few minutes here, we're going to give you the tall task of talking purpose and belonging, which are very significant. I should say the end of your book pulls all of this into whole models and approaches. Tell us the key concept here of purpose and belonging in your work.David Yeager:  I think that, as you know, 10-15 years ago, those were not concepts people talked about in education reform. It was like curriculum and interests were probably the two biggest things. The idea of a meaningful purpose, that wasn't around. I think Bill Damon's work brought purpose to a lot of people's radars, and I did a lot of the early randomized experiments, but even now, I think it's not as well known. Belonging, for a long time, was thought of as this soft self-esteem boost. Everyone needs a hug from all the world's friends. It wasn't taken seriously.I think the common thread across the two is that they're super powerful, especially for young people who are trying to make it through the world, having a sense of status and respect. Purpose, because you want to contribute something of value to the world around you. Having a meaningful purpose where it's something beyond myself is depending on me, that's super motivating for young people. A lot of education gets that wrong because they just make an argument about making money in the future or using this lesson plan in a job in the future, or it's a delay of gratification, a long-term self-interest argument. I don't think that's ever really going to work to drive deeper learning. But the idea that right now somebody's depending on you, having mastered something and done a good job, I think that's really meaningful. In an enforcer mindset, you wouldn't think of that because you'd be like, well, they're going to choose the laziest possible way to do things no matter what. The only way we can entice them to do tedious work is through rewards, now, or delayed rewards later.Belonging is similar in that now that it's starting to get on the radar, more people are talking about it, but it's still misconstrued. A lot of people think belonging is, "I'm going to give you a 'You Belong' sticker to slap on your laptop, and all of a sudden achievement gaps are going to disappear." As I say in the book, you can't declare belonging by fiat. It has to be experienced. One of the big things that has to happen is you have to help young people tell themselves a story of how difficulties could be overcome through actions that they could take. Then over time, they actually feel a sense of belonging in a community. I think that purpose and belonging go hand in hand because one way you know you're valued by a community is when you've contributed something that they perceive as important to that community back in our evolutionary history. I think there's a lot more in the book and there are stories about how you leverage those two to get deeper, more lasting, meaningful motivations rather than more frivolous things like turning education into a slot machine.I don't think that's going to do it. What's more important is appealing to a deeper purpose, a sense of connection, a sense of mattering, and so on.Diane Tavenner:  That's awesome. There is so much more in the book. I can't recommend it highly enough. I hope everyone will read it and ping us with questions, thoughts, and what comes up for you. Maybe at some point, we can circle back and do even more on the other pieces when we hear from our readers what they think. Michael…Michael Horn:  I was going to say the same thing. Just huge thanks first, David. Check out the book "Ten to 25." I got a lot just from this conversation that has whetted my appetite, and I know many others will as well. Let's circle back once we have some more fodder because I can tell we're scratching the surface and you've hit these hot-button topics that, as you said, David, we sort of know there's something there, but the full depth of how it's understood is not there yet in the education field. I appreciate you writing this and joining us.David Yeager:  Absolutely.Michael Horn:  For all those listening, we'll be back next time on Class Disrupted. Thank you again.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.

Satya Nitta, Co-Founder and CEO of Merlyn Mind, an education AI company that allows teachers to automate and voice-activate once clunky digital teaching tasks, as well as the founder of Emergence, which just came out of stealth mode with a raise of a whopping $97.5 million in venture capital, joined me to discuss how the AI technology in Merlyn Mind untethers teachers from their computers, the new learning possibilities unlocked by that change, and the importance of the practical implementation of AI tools.Michael Horn: Welcome to the Future of Education. Where we are dedicated to building a world in which all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their potential, and live a life of purpose. Today, we will discuss transforming our K-12 system and supporting educators globally. I'm delighted to introduce our guest, Satya Nitta, the founder and CEO of Merlyn Mind. Merlyn Mind is one that’s been on my radar for quite a number of years for its approach to artificial intelligence. We’ll hear how their approach is very distinct from a lot of the hype and conversations around AI at the moment.Satya, thank you so much for being here. It's great to see you. I appreciate you joining us.Satya Nitta: Pleasure to be here, Michael.Michael Horn: You bet. Let's dive in. You founded Merlyn Mind back in 2018, well before the current craze around large language models like ChatGPT. Even back then, adaptive learning was a big topic, and AI was frequently discussed in that context. When you started Merlyn Mind, you made an important decision to focus on serving the teacher first. I’d love to hear about that origin story and why you made that decision. What was the vision behind Merlyn Mind?Satya’s Journey with AI in EducationSatya Nitta: Sure. Before Merlyn Mind, I was at IBM Research for 18 years. In the first half, I was advancing Moor’s Law, working on chip technologies. In the latter half of my time there, I worked on AI. I got into AI around the time Watson won Jeopardy. I was given the keys to the kingdom around 2012 to 2013 when Watson won Jeopardy. That was a seminal moment when a computer seemingly understood language, complex allusions, and puns, and beat the two best players in this complex quiz game. This was similar to Deep Blue beating Kasparov, and both events happened at IBM Research down the hall from where I had an office.When Watson won Jeopardy, IBM was approached by various companies wanting to use Watson in their industries, including education. In early 2013, I was given the opportunity to explore how to use AI in education. I had no prior experience in education. I was working on either advancing language modeling. Language models predated large language models, which is the whole chat GPT revolution. I was working on conversational systems and speech recognition, and I thought this was a great opportunity to take AI and do something in a particular domain. I concluded that AI works best in deeply domain-specific ways. So I spent six months to a year studying cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and learning science. I already had some exposure to neuroscience, especially cognitive neuroscience because of an interest in a branch of computing called neuromorphic computing. So I went back to IBM, and I basically said to them “Look, we can do a number of things with AI and education. We can take the Watson system and build question-answering applications or chatbots across a number of things. Universities can use it to help students who are onboarding get all kinds of answers to their questions. We’re sitting here at IBM Research, one of the places that has really advanced computing, we need to do something foundational with AI and education. When tasked with integrating Watson into education, I drew from the 1957 Dartmouth Conference, where the term "artificial intelligence" was coined. The founders of AI, like Marvin Minsky and Herb Simon, saw teaching machines as a grand challenge. We at IBM Research aimed to build an AI tutor, which was a significant undertaking. I basically said, look, I'm sitting here at IBM research in these hallowed halls where the dram was invented. Moore's law was advanced through Dennard scaling. Watson won Jeopardy. Kasparov was beaten by Deep Blue. Much of modern computing has some footprint in this building. I feel the pressure to do something grand. And we need to go after this grand challenge, build a computer to teach. So build a tutoring system.And I wasn't just making it up. In fact, that mantle of trying to get a computer to teach was picked up by generations of AI researchers. So we were sitting on top of 30 years of work in academia. Scientists like John Anderson at Carnegie Mellon had spent a lot of time thinking very hard about, how to get a computer to teach. What is an AI tutorial?And I'm going through this. Sorry, elaborate history because I want to establish the provenance of ideas and I want to land it to where we are in this moment in AI. IBM was thrilled with the vision. We spent about five years with a team of 130 researchers, investing millions of dollars to create this AI tutor. Before the current craze on AI tutoring, we had taken all the work in academia and built the first large-scale industrial tutor. Carnegie Learning is another company that's advanced.Michael Horn:I was gonna say Carnegie learning. Newton had another... There had been other attempts at it as well.The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Satya Nitta:Yeah. So we also looked at Carnegie Learning's work and we said, okay, you know, what they did was very interesting. And we wanted to build an even broader approach to tutoring, well beyond something very hierarchical like math and, you know, go into lots of topics. And at the heart of it, what we were attempting to do was to get a computer to build a chatbot that a student can chat within a very natural language. And this is well before chat GPT but with language models of that time. So the chatbot would ask the student a question. The student would respond in natural language. The chatbot would then analyze the response and tell them what they were missing and not give them the response and not give them the answer.So. And all of all, this is where we published all of this work.By the end of 2017, I was leaving IBM. I got recruited to go join Amazon, and head an AI effort there. Then I got this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to start Merlyn Mind. Some of the major backers in this company reached out and said, we heard you're leaving. What's happening to the team? Would you be interested in starting a company? I jumped on the whole idea. I left with a very key realization, which is, we built a tutor. It worked.Challenges with Uptake in AI TutoringSatya Nitta:It did something very complex and profound from a technological perspective, much more than anything today's tutors do.We had elaborate student models and knowledge models. We could score student responses, and we ran into a fundamental roadblock, which is that students weren't using it. We built this for higher ed, and we couldn't get them to use it, despite us leaning in on topics like multiple representations, which are multiple ways to teach a student a concept and put the student in charge. We spent a lot of time thinking about the user experience, but we just couldn't solve the last mile, which is the motivation problem. We couldn't get a student motivated enough to use the chatbot.And by the way, that fundamental question remains today. Okay, what most people don't answer, don't ask. When you see all these flashy demos of GPT four-based tutoring, are people using it? What's the monthly average use? What's the daily average use? How long are they using it for? Are they sticking with it? I mean, how much have they used it initially? And how much did they use over six months time.And nobody asked them the hard questions about, is this thing solving the problem of teaching these kids something. Are we seeing an improvement in learning outcomes? So all these things became major questions in our heads, and we finally concluded that the major problem here isn't a technology problem. It was something much more profound, which is, students learn from people best. That the teacher becomes the central fundamental role model, who delivers kind of wisdom and knowledge and serves as a human example of learning for students, okay? And they're motivating the kids. They're giving them examples. They know the kid. They're situating learning within their background. And so we learned the hard way what generations of educators had already known, and which is that the teacher is the central and most important figure and factor in improving learning outcomes. So when we started Merlyn Mind, we said, I don't think we really want to do something impactful. It wasn't about doing something flashy and raising a bunch of money and being in the news.It was about making a real change. We said the best thing we can do is to empower the teacher, okay? Use AI to reduce the friction, give them time back, give them cognitive space back, allow them to be with their students, and we're far more likely to help improve education than by attempting to replace the teacher.Which we learned from hard Noah, through hard experience is an incredibly complex problem.Empowering Teachers with AI Michael Horn: So let me pause you there. What you're describing is interesting. There have been efficacy studies on programs like Khan Academy and IXL, showing they work if used enough, but only a small percentage of students actually use them. Your point is that while IBM built a working tutor, it wasn't used. So, you shifted focus to the teacher. How is Merlyn Mind helping teachers today, especially with the recent explosion of interest in AI?Satya Nitta: Before COVID, teachers were already using numerous applications in their classrooms. They spend a lot of time at their desks, switching between different educational tools, which keeps them from walking around and engaging with students. We aimed to solve this by allowing teachers to control their computers with voice commands, letting them move freely around the classroom. We developed a system where teachers can use a small push-to-talk mic to control their computers, launch new tabs, play videos, share snapshots, and answer questions without being tethered to their desks. One automation we developed allows teachers to share links with their class through a simple voice command. The AI takes care of copying the link, opening the email tool, populating the student email list, and sending the link, saving teachers several steps. This untethers teachers, saves them time, and reduces their cognitive load, allowing them to focus on teaching.How the AI Agent WorksMichael Horn: So, the AI agent can navigate different apps, bring up lesson plans, and handle various tasks? Satya Nitta: Exactly. Our system controls the browser, which is where most educational tools reside. The AI operates the browser like a human, navigating tabs, clicking hyperlinks, launching videos, and more. This technology combines large language models with automation, allowing the AI to perform complex tasks based on voice commands. Michael Horn: Can you give an example of how a teacher might use this in a high school geometry class?Satya Nitta: Sure. A teacher could say, "Send this video to my period three class," and the AI will handle the rest. It can differentiate between classes and even send resources to specific groups within a class. We're developing the ability to customize content distribution further, but the core functionality already supports significant time and cognitive load savings.Michael Horn: Let's discuss the technology behind Merlyn Mind. How does it differ from large language models like OpenAI's GPT-4 or Google's Gemini?Satya Nitta: Our system does include large language models, but it also incorporates additional technologies. This emerging field of AI is called AI agents. Our system, which has been in development for a decade, combines voice computing, language modeling, and AI agents. These agents can control browsers, perform tasks, and automate complex workflows. While we use our own large language models for privacy and security reasons, the system's uniqueness lies in its ability to perform multi-step tasks that generalist models like GPT-4 cannot.Growing AI Awareness and Future PlansMichael Horn: How has the increased interest in AI, especially with ChatGPT, impacted Merlyn Mind?Satya Nitta: The rise of ChatGPT has been beneficial for us. It has made people more familiar with AI, reducing the need for us to educate the market. Now, people understand AI's potential and are more open to seeing how our tools can benefit them. This has helped us gain traction and interest.Michael Horn: Where do you see Merlyn Mind in the next two to three years? Satya Nitta: We aim to continue improving the teacher assistant and eventually extend our tools to help students. However, we won't replace teachers. Instead, we might offer review tools that package lessons for students to study. Privacy, safety, and security are paramount. We ensure that no data is monetized, sold, or used to train our models. We're compliant with regulations like COPPA, FERPA, and GDPR. We plan to deepen our large language model capabilities and allow others to build with our models. Our models are designed to be faster, cheaper, and safer than generalist models. We'll continue to empower teachers and eventually assist students, always prioritizing privacy and security.Michael Horn: Fascinating. We'll stay tuned to see how Merlyn Mind evolves and continues to support educators. Satya, 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.

Jean Eddy, President and CEO of American Student Assistance, joined me to discuss career preparation for young people. We talked about the lessons from Jean’s new book, Crisis-Proofing Today’s Learners (buy it here!), including the importance of the middle school years, necessary attitudinal shifts, and striking the balance between passion and practicality. For those who are paid subscribers, I look forward to the conversation in the comments—and Jean and I look forward to sharing more content with you all soon with a new partnership we have in the works! More to come!The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Michael Horn:Welcome to the Future of Education, where we are passionate about building a world in which all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their potential, and live a life of purpose. To help us with that journey today, I'm delighted that we have Jean Eddy. She's the president and CEO of ASA, American Student Assistance, a great thinker, great friend, and author of a very important book. We'll delve into many interesting things that Jean is doing. It's titled Crisis-Proofing Today's Learners. Jean, so good to see you. Thanks for joining us.Jean Eddy:Absolutely. My pleasure, Michael.Thank you for reading The Future of Education. This post is public so feel free to share it.The Ikigai ConceptMichael Horn:No, it's all mine. Trust me. So let's get into it. It's a terrific book, and for those who are wondering, should I buy it or not buy it? It's a fast read, but it packs so much information in each chapter, reframing how we think about the choices that young people have before them in their lives. But I want to start up front with this concept of Ikigai in your book. Tell us what that is and why it's so important.Jean Eddy:Well, I think that the Japanese absolutely got this right, where they were trying to provide a balance to an individual that would give them a full and meaningful life. Ikigai is about helping a young person figure out what they love, what they're good at, what the world needs—which is very important—and what they can be paid for. If you can provide those things over the course of a young person's lifetime or journey, then they have an opportunity to have that successful, meaningful, and happy life that Japan and, I would have to say, other countries aspire to.Michael Horn:Yeah. It's such an important concept, balancing self and purpose with contribution to the world and society, and what you can get paid for. So it's not just underwater basket weaving or something like that. Although maybe that's more important in the future. I don't know. But I guess I'm curious, in your mind, when an education system specifically, in a society specifically gets Ikigai right, what does that look like, and how far off are we from that today in America?The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Jean Eddy:Oh, boy. I would say that we're pretty far off. I'll start with the latter question. I think we are so focused within our systems about all the things that we believe young people need to have. It's really more about the basics and what we need to impart to our kids and less about this whole idea of discovery. I am a real fan of discovery work in that kids are looking for relevance, and oftentimes they can't see it in what they are doing in their classwork. They don't know how it relates to what they care about or what they see. In so much of the research we do, we find that kids oftentimes are even leaving high school without a sense of what they're good at. How is that possible? If our systems were more focused on that self-identification, what am I good at? What am I interested in? And then build from there, we could start to see the kind of change that we need to make in order to have our kids have the United States version of ikigai.Reevaluating College for AllMichael Horn:So part of the outgrowth of this focus on Ikigai is, and I think this speaks to the US as well, you have this really strong set of chapters in the book that push back on the college-for-all narrative. I have not been a college-for-all person for a long time, but your book really made me think about it in a different light. A huge part of your point is that when people say everyone should go to college, they're reducing risk for young people. But your argument, and it's really persuasive, is that actually for many people, by pushing them to go to college, we're increasing their risk. While this may seem prescient in our current moment, some people are waking up to this. Just tell us about your thinking about how for some people, college is actually increasing risk, and that's not something that I think has been popularly understood.Jean Eddy:Well, a college education is a really expensive endeavor. This is not something that you can ignore any longer when front page news is that some institutions cost $90,000 to $100,000 a year to attend. Think about the young person and their family who says, "We're going to go to college because that's what's expected, and I'm going to figure it out when I get to college." If you have limitless funds, that might work for you; you could stay in college for a number of years and finally figure it out. But I would say most people don't fall into that boat. Most kids come to college and they have some kind of sense of maybe what they want to do, but most don't. They end up either switching majors, which prolongs the time in college and costs money.But I'm more worried about two populations of kids. The first is they go to college, they can't figure it out, they've stayed there long enough to accrue some debt, and now they leave college. They don't really have a path to how they're going to repay this loan, and they get into trouble early. The other population that I think we need to focus on are those kids who make choices about college being the default, but can't afford it, so they do nothing. That is a huge number of kids in the United States right now. It's something like 5.5 million people who are in this situation. Our society cannot afford that. Look beyond the individual happiness and purpose of those individuals. What about the impact on our society and the number of individuals who really don't have a purpose or a plan?Michael Horn:Yeah.Jean Eddy:That just breeds all kinds of crises.Michael Horn:Yeah. Wow. So it's interesting because I think you're right. When we did our book *Choosing College*, we found out a significant number of individuals were going exactly as you said because it was expected of them. They weren't particularly passionate about it. In our data set, 74% of those students transferred or dropped out because they couldn't find a compelling reason to stay there when it got tough, and college was tough. So what you just painted is really significant. I didn't realize, as you said, 5.5 million individuals are doing nothing.Jean Eddy:Nothing.Michael Horn:Wow.Jean Eddy:They're not in school and they're not doing anything.Michael Horn:Wow. That's chilling. Yeah, that's chilling. So in your mind, what I think the book starts to do is it starts to say, let's reset this societal narrative around the primacy of college. I'm curious what a better, more balanced set of potential pathways might look like in your mind for students.Jean Eddy:Well, I think first and foremost, it is this whole world about exploration and discovery. We've got to do a better job really early on. Our focus at ASA is on middle school because it provides an opportunity for young people whose brains are just hungry like sponges for all the information we can provide. This is the time when they can really become self-aware. And then I'm not just talking about self-awareness; I'm talking about showing them all the possibilities. We just don't do a good job of showing kids what all the possibilities are. The job is often, "Okay, let's get kids through middle school, through high school. They're going to college." It's not about what opportunities young people could have to explore all the options that are open to them. I keep talking about skilled trades because we have young people who have the aptitude and the desire to get into those areas, but we don't show them what's possible how to do it, or the skills needed for it.Plumbers, for instance, aside from making a very good wage in Massachusetts, many of them have to be entrepreneurs. They need to have a business sense and a business plan. There are all kinds of things about skilled trades that we don't open the doors to our young people to tell them, "These are the kinds of things you need to be successful in these areas." How can someone know if they are suited to a particular job if we don't even show them what those jobs are? We can do a better job of doing that while they're in school.Starting Career Exploration in Middle SchoolMichael Horn:Yeah. So talk to us about that, because this is something you've, over several years now, have opened my eyes to about the importance of this. Middle school is when you all focus. Why middle school? Why is that the critical age when that exploration should start? And are there schools or programs out there that you're like, follow them, do what they're doing?Jean Eddy:Oh, yeah, totally. Well, first and foremost, when you think about middle school, not only does it give you an opportunity to work with a young person or to enlighten a young person who has not developed, or bought into what all our other friends are doing, but they're willing to go out and explore, ask questions, and do those kinds of things that can help them figure things out with all those other things bothering them. They are less stressed about what's going on in their world. Then, in just a few years, they're going to be highly stressed because they're in high school and they're worrying about all these things. One of the things I learned early on when investigating when was a great time to start talking to kids about careers is I actually read a study by ACT, and they were talking about the fact that there are certain things kids need to get while they're in middle school so that they can make good choices about what they do in high school. Think about it. These middle school kids have got to pretty much determine, okay, what is it I want to study in high school? It's not so dictated as it once was. If you make the wrong choice about a course you're going to take in high school and then find out later on that doesn't comport with what it is you need for that next step, suddenly you're out of luck. So middle school, to me, is absolutely prime time for all those reasons. Now, I think you've heard me say this a thousand times, Michael. I mean, the national model of how to do this well is in Cajon Valley and, you know, World of Work schools to be able to start working with kids. They do it early. They do it starting in kindergarten, where they have kids discover their talents and abilities, but then they make the courses that kids take in high school, even middle school, relevant so that they can go exploring. You can see all kinds of things to test and try.Michael Horn:Yeah.Jean Eddy:Now, there are some great schools out there that are doing things, with the CAPS Network, that are basically allowing kids to do hands-on things to discover if what they think they are interested in is actually what they would like to pursue further. We need to start, and it is happening, but it's happening in pockets. There are schools in New York that we talked to. There are some in Massachusetts who are embracing these kinds of philosophies, but it's not widespread, and I would say it needs to be if we're going to impact this.Resetting Expectations on Alternative PathwaysMichael Horn:Yeah. So I'm curious, what's the way forward for realizing that vision and getting more schools on board? Right. You're obviously, as you just, named a bunch of really interesting examples. There's CAPS, Cajon, and different schools that are doing some very cool things. How do we, you obviously have a lot of bottoms-up work. Right? You all also have digital platforms out there that allow young people to engage and learn about different career pathways and so forth. But it seems like a lot of this is in resetting the narrative and sort of societal expectations about how we think about these alternative pathways. So I'm just curious, about how we do that.In your mind, is this sort of a slow-moving until all of a sudden everyone sort of figures it out, or is this a national thing that we need? What's the right way to reset expectations?Jean Eddy:Well, one of the reasons why I wrote the book is that this isn't just about a school system or about digital initiatives or pockets of places across the country. This is about a conversation that needs to happen with legislators, with parents, with policymakers, with employers, because this is a problem that we all have to face. When I talk to parents about this, I oftentimes say, how often do you go to a school committee meeting? What is your PTO doing as far as being able to allow various things to happen within your school system and don't. And, you know, parents will say, well, they really don't care. They do care. If parents come in and talk about these kinds of things, it matters. I think, that there are superintendents across this country who have a vision and want to implement it, but they need the legislators around them and the policymakers to allow them to change the systems that they're in and give them the funding that they need. You know, I was really heartened when President Biden talked about the fact that he wants to institute apprenticeships across the country.But something like that is not only going to take, it's wonderful for the President of the United States to say that, but as you know, Michael, every state has their own set of policies that you have to kind of work through. This is going to be a case of starting, yes, national, but then state by state, which is an enormous amount of work to do. But this is why I write a book. You write books. We talk. As, you know, anybody who listens to us, we talk. And I think through that, more and more people are adopting.Balancing Passion and PracticalityMichael Horn:No, that's. Well, I appreciate the vision of where this goes and how it goes. Let me just ask the last question that's sort of on my mind, which is one of those other yeah, but questions, which is, I'm just curious if there's a risk in your mind that for students, we might overindex on interests at the expense of some, you know, other things that maybe are, um, you know, you could imagine, like a bunch of young people, they get exposed to influencers. They want to be an influencer. There are only so many people that can make money as an influencer. How do we get that ikigai balance? Right. So it's not just my interests and yeah, I love it, but also I can get paid for it and it helps society.Jean Eddy:The way to do that, I believe, is through work-based learning. It's through opportunities in high school. And I would also say the connections to employers are going to be critical because what you can be paid for is enormous in this context. You know, I keep thinking about the number of times I've had conversations with my grandson when he was just a little guy, big basketball player, loved basketball and had visions of, “I'm going to be an NBA player.” Now, the odds of a kid becoming an NBA player are this high, but loved it and was passionate about it. But along the way, as he went through middle school and high school, now he has come to discover, of all the things that can happen around an NBA player, what that means, and what you can be paid for. So I would not be at all surprised if at one point in time, my grandson said, I'm going to go out and I'm going to do sports reporting or I'm going to go and be a trainer for a sports facility because he's been exposed to those kinds of things.I think that is where we are going to try and close the disconnect between what you'd love to do and what you can be paid for. This is about exposure.Michael Horn:Love it. And the work-based learning and showing and getting people actually experienced in the workforce so that they understand that and build up their social capital, their awareness of what's out there beyond what their parents do and so forth is just tremendous. And it's a terrific book. Again, it's Crisis-Proofing Today's Learners: Reimagining Career Education to Prepare Kids for Tomorrow's World. And dare I say, it's really so that all individuals have this career education, not just some. And maybe it's really more about career education for all than college for all. Is that right, Jean?Jean Eddy:Very well said, Michael, as usual now.Michael Horn:Terrific. Well, look, thank you so much for the work you continue to do. Thanks for joining us in the Future of Education and keep up the good work. We'll keep an eye on it. For those who want to follow the stuff that ASA is doing, what's the best way for them to sort of stay plugged in?Jean Eddy:We're really easy. It's asa.org. Check it out. If you want to get more about the book, my book's also there as well.Michael Horn:Check it out. It's an important resource in resetting this narrative. Jean, thanks so much for joining us again.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.

Andi Fourlis, Superintendent of Mesa Public Schools in Arizona, joined me to share how her district is reimagining the teaching profession. We discussed Mesa's work on team teaching, its impacts on learning and teacher satisfaction, and the ins and outs of implementing such an innovative change. As always, I look forward to your thoughts. Paid subscribers are able to comment and exchange ideas.The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Michael Horn: Welcome to the Future of Education. I'm Michael Horn, and you are joining the show where we are passionate about building a world in which all individuals can fulfill their potential and live a life of purpose. To help us think through that, today we have a very special guest. Her name is Dr. Andi Fourlis. She's the superintendent of Mesa Public Schools in Arizona. Andi, thank you so much for joining us.Andi Fourlis: So happy to be here.Thank you for reading The Future of Education. This post is public so feel free to share it.Andi’s Journey to the Work Michael Horn:I can't wait to hear about your story because from my reading, it sounds like your pathway to becoming superintendent, and some of the formative experiences you had as an educator, have really shaped your approach as a superintendent. Can you share some of that journey with us before we get into the work you're doing now?Andi Fourlis: Yeah. This is my 32nd year in education. I'm a career educator. From the time I was a little girl, I knew I was going to be a teacher. This is a dream of mine to be able to support children in so many different ways. I started off teaching middle school and had the great fortune to teach on a team with sometimes as many as five other teachers. I've always worked in a team environment, and outside of my first two years, I realized I needed to have a team. More heads are better together. I've worked in a variety of environments, from low-income schools to affluent schools.Kids are kids, and the more adults we can put around students, I quickly learned, made me a better teacher and got better outcomes for our kids.Michael Horn:It's interesting to hear you say that because it makes a lot of sense. I think people from the outside think educators like to be by themselves, but that wasn't your experience. What really caught my eye and made me excited to talk was a conversation I had with David Schuler, the executive director of the School Superintendents Association. He told me about the work you were doing with the Next Education Workforce initiative. A couple of years earlier, I had Arizona State University's dean, Carole Basile, join us to talk about the work she was pioneering there at the Next Education Workforce initiative. I believe Mesa has been one of the pioneering sites for the team teaching they espouse. Can you tell us about how this work started in Mesa?Andi Fourlis: It's such an interesting journey. In 2019, I was a deputy superintendent, and I became superintendent in 2020. People always remember 2020 as a challenging year to become superintendent of the largest district in the state of Arizona. We had to invent and reinvent how we were going to do school, take care of children and their families, and take care of our employees. Throughout my career, I've been a classroom teacher, mentor teacher, and my path to the superintendency has been through teacher leadership. I've always been close to classrooms and understood that the working environment and conditions of teachers must change if we want better outcomes for our students. I've supported teachers as a director of professional development, director of curriculum, and assistant superintendent of teaching and learning. My pathway into the superintendency has always been about supporting teachers and learning.The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.I've never been a principal or assistant principal, but I was always in a support role. Through that role, I quickly learned that teachers are not leaving their profession; they're leaving their working conditions. As leaders, we have the ability to change those conditions. In 2020, as the new superintendent, we had to reinvent everything. It was the perfect time to break down the one teacher, one classroom model and revisit age-old research around team teaching. This isn't a new idea, but it's new in this era of education. Over time, we've built everything around the one teacher, one classroom model because it's easy to measure and hold people accountable. In an era of accountability from No Child Left Behind, we started measuring everything, creating artificial structures, and isolating teachers. As a result, our teacher shortage grew.As a leader, it was easy for me to reach out to Dr. Basile at Arizona State University to discuss changing the working conditions of teachers. We wanted to rethink what teaming looks like and define it for 2020 because it would look different than in the past. With the largest teachers college in America in our backyard and being the largest district in the state, it was a perfect match for us to work together.Explanation of Mesa's Team Teaching ModelMichael Horn: Super interesting. Let's fast forward then. You kick off the work, and you're in it now. What does team teaching look like on the ground? How have you changed the structures that isolated teachers?Andi Fourlis: We have a simple definition of what a team is: at least two teachers sharing a roster of students to co-design and construct deeper and more personalized learning. Sometimes we shorten it to two teachers sharing a roster of students, but it's far more than that. They share a roster of students to deeply understand their strengths and needs and create opportunities for students to get what they need when they need it. For example, a typical third-grade teacher with 25 kids on a team now has 50 students assigned to two teachers. One teacher could be doing small group instruction with a specific skill or content area while the other teacher works with the rest of the kids. This creates a different learning experience and opportunity for kids. When we talk about teaming, it's not just the teachers. Our definition includes every adult in the classroom as part of the team, not just an instructional assistant that comes in for 20 minutes on Tuesday. We are rethinking how we put adults and their expertise around the needs of students in different ways.Michael Horn: That's super interesting. I love how your definition in the district is about making sure each student gets what they need in this new structure. With at least two teachers sharing a roster of students and that personalization, you're singing my tune now. I love this reinvention work. My understanding from David is that this is even more innovative. Not only are you doing this team teaching model and personalizing the learning, but you've also created flexibility for teachers to help keep them in the classroom. Can you talk about that? I'd love to learn more.Andi Fourlis:Absolutely. Our larger teams, if there's a team of four, have a team leader who is a classroom teacher with leadership responsibilities. We pay an additional stipend for their leadership duties. They serve on the instructional leadership team of the school. The goal of our teams is to become self-improving teams, constantly reflecting and asking, "What do we need next?" They chart their professional development plans and address needs as they arise. For example, a team I met with recently saw an influx of refugee children and didn't have the skill sets to communicate with their parents or assimilate them into their classrooms. The team leader reaches out to our district office to request the necessary training. This coordinated effort brings resources to the teachers so they can better serve their students.Michael Horn: Wow. Okay. So now that creates a structure in which teachers suddenly have some authority to actually, when you say co-design, you really mean co-design because they're saying, "This is the set of expertise I need. This is the support we need. The student needs this." How many schools are doing this today? Is it throughout the district? What does that evolution look like?Adapting teacher roles and school infrastructureAndi Fourlis: We have 84 schools, from preschool to high school. We are a comprehensive K-12 unified school district in Arizona. I set a goal that by the end of this school year, at least 50% of our schools would have at least one team working within their school. We've accomplished that goal, and they are all at different places because every team is unique to their context. This is across Mesa Public Schools.For example, we have a Montessori school where collaboration and multi-age teaming are inherent. They have formalized those roles and what that looks like. But we also have back-to-basic schools, which our community requested many years ago. Teaming doesn't fit their philosophy, so I don't expect that to happen in those schools.Our goal of 50% is to look at each context, the desires and talents of teachers, and think about where to get started. Some schools started with a kindergarten classroom, others with a fifth-grade team that felt they could work better together. We have 91 therapy dogs across our district. In our teaming schools, therapy dogs are part of the team. They are used very intentionally to support students when needed, and teachers orchestrate the use of the therapy dogs. We have a feeder pattern of elementary and junior high schools that feed into one of our large high schools with a huge STEM focus and engineering program. We have a strong partnership with Honeywell Aerospace Division, whose industry mentors join our teams within that feeder pattern. They serve as mentors and project coaches. Students will ask their teachers, "Can I please FaceTime my engineer right now?" when they need coaching and support. When we talk about a team, it’s about expanding the expertise within our schools and communities to support student learning.Michael Horn: Wow. Okay, so talk us through this. I imagine the Montessori school was already set up for this sort of thing from an infrastructure perspective. But other schools, did you have to retrofit them? How have you made the buildings work? How does that play out?Andi Fourlis: What is most important is proximity. If you have a third-grade team, and many of our teams have become multi-age, the students need to be in close proximity because they are constantly moving around, and the teachers are moving around. In some schools, the biggest ask was to be together. They generally meet for a morning meeting, set their learning intentions for the day, check the health and wellness of their community, and outline the day. A principal requested doors opening between classrooms so kids aren’t going outside to the next classroom. We installed large opening doors with frosted glass that can be propped open during the day. That has been our most needed solution, creating interior doors that allow kids to freely move between classrooms. We have also installed some garage doors at our high schools.Evaluating the impact on teachers and studentsMichael Horn: Gotcha. Very cool. Okay, so talk to us about impact. What have you seen? How are you measuring it? How are you thinking about the impact so far from these changes?Andi Fourlis: Our original intent was to focus on the working conditions of our teachers. We've seen higher retention rates for teachers on teams, longer career plans, and increased satisfaction. Teachers prefer coming to work, have fewer absences, and often don’t need substitutes because the team comes together. If they do have a substitute, it’s generally not for teaching but for other tasks.Michael Horn: No more movie days with the substitute. We’re not sure where we are in the learning. That’s really cool.Andi Fourlis: One thing we pay attention to is how much instructional time we are capturing. Teachers on teams have higher evaluation scores. A particular study of one of our elementary schools showed at least a 1.5-month gain in English language arts. In our high schools, we see higher Algebra I scores, especially among girls, which we attribute to the collaborative environment.Michael Horn: Huh.Andi Fourlis: This has to change instruction. If we use the same old boring, non-relevant instruction in a team, we won’t get better results. The power is in teachers working together, each bringing their unique skills and strengths. If you’re on a team, you have a team of experts wrapped around you. We also have excitement in our Ed Professions courses, our high school career technical ed courses for students interested in becoming teachers. They join a team and do their practicums in a team. Some have a half-day schedule and work as instructional assistants for the other half. They have both a student ID and a Mesa Public School employee ID, building teachers to work in teams from high school.Michael Horn:Wow, that’s really cool. I love the point you made about having the best lesson because you have a math expert on the ground in the elementary school, making it coherent with science and social studies. What has been the reaction of parents and students to the changes?Parents' and students' feedback on changesAndi Fourlis: It’s interesting. Parents initially wanted one teacher to call. When they realize their children are on a team, they quickly understand that their child has a better chance of connecting with an adult, even if it’s not the assigned teacher. They see their children have more opportunities to connect and share passions with more adults. We have requests from parents to expand teaming to other grades. Our teachers stay longer because they never have to do hard things alone. They never call a cranky parent by themselves; someone is always on their side. Parents know the teacher is well-supported, which means they are getting a better product for their kids.Michael Horn: Wow, that's a phenomenal set of changes. It sounds like you’re riding a nice wave of momentum at a time when a lot of other districts are trying to find their footing. These changes have really led to reinvigoration across the district. Andi, thanks so much for joining us.Andi Fourlis: Oh, my gosh. It’s my honor. I’d love to talk to you more at another time and for you to talk to our kids about their experiences.Michael Horn: Let’s find a time to do that. I would love it. Thanks so much for joining us on the Future of Education. For all you tuning in, check out what Mesa Public Schools is doing and stay tuned for next time.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.

Stacey Childress, Senior Education Advisor at McKinsey & Co., rejoined me and Diane Tavenner to discuss the world of education philanthropy. Stacey draws from her previous experience at NewSchools Venture Fund and the Gates Foundation to analyze troubling trends in the sector. I was curious to learn what she and Diane would do differently—as funders and as operators. As always, thanks for reading, writing, and listening—and let me know what you think.Diane Tavenner:Hey, Michael.Michael Horn:Hey, Diane. It's good to see you.Diane Tavenner: It's good to see you as well. I think the unofficial start of summer has happened. I know that because I had a big graduation last week. My son graduated from college, which is quite surreal. It's also the last episode of the season, which I can hardly believe.Michael Horn:First, congrats to you and to Rhett on the graduation. It's very exciting news. I can't believe it's the end of the season. We've had the chance to interview many interesting people, and we've particularly enjoyed having one guest back on the show.Diane Tavenner:That's true. I'm excited to reintroduce Stacey Childress. Regular listeners will be familiar with her. We originally teamed up for a two-part series on higher education and had so much fun that we decided to do it again for K-12 education. Hopefully, folks are enjoying those episodes. During those conversations, we had some off-the-record dialogue about a big topic in education right now, and we decided it was an important conversation to have. So, welcome back, Stacey. We're thrilled to have you here. We've covered your credentials before, but today you're really in the expert seat, having been involved in multiple aspects of philanthropy, which is the direction we're going.Michael Horn:Hi, Stacey. Thank you for joining us again.Stacey Childress:I am happy to be here. There are two things I'm reflecting on now that this is my fifth episode in a row.Diane Tavenner:Yes.Stacey Childress:One, never say anything to you guys in an offhand way because it might become a podcast episode. Oh, we ought to do philanthropy, and now here we are. I've learned my lesson.The second thing is, I feel like I've moved from guest to long-term guest, almost like we’re in roommate mode.Changes in Education PhilanthropyMichael Horn: We'll see. Diane and I are persuasive. Either way, thank you for joining us. We're excited to dive into this topic of education philanthropy. As you both alluded to, it feels like the water around philanthropy and education is really churning right now. It feels different from how it has in the past. Maybe it's my imagination, maybe it's not. There was recently an article in Inside Philanthropy talking about the changing nature of education philanthropy, which struck a chord with us. Many of our listeners are running school networks, starting education nonprofits, or interfacing with donors. We wanted to dive into this important sector of the education reform movement to discuss how it is or isn't changing and its implications for our sector. Diane, what did I miss before we dive in?Diane Tavenner:I think you captured it well, Michael. Just a minute more on the philanthropy aspect. The article did a good job of capturing the feeling. The conversations I regularly have with folks in education, whether in nonprofits or school organizations, or anyone in the ecosystem who relies on philanthropy for their initiatives or operations, there's a real sense of worry, stress, and fear. There's a belief that there is less philanthropy available, and it's confusing what is being funded, if it's going to be there, and if long-term philanthropists will stay in the sector. This is a big conversation happening all around. Stacey, you’re in this a lot. Many people look to you as a whisperer in this space. Is that capturing what you’re experiencing?Stacey Childress:Yes, it is. There's a lot of uncertainty. Michael, you asked if these foundations routinely change their strategies every five years or so. Is that what's going on here? We can talk more about that trend, but this feels different. What I'm hearing from people raising money is not just the uncertainty of where we'll head next and what priorities givers will coalesce around, but whether they will stay in this field at all or continue funding at the same level. If you were giving $300 million a year, are you going to pause and then go to $100 million instead of $300 million? That shift pulls a significant amount out of the philanthropy market. If you were giving $100 million a year, are you going to reduce that, and what are the new priorities? The feeling is different. I had a concentrated period of fundraising from 2014 to about a year ago, and it didn't feel like this. We always shaped the priorities of the big givers, knowing they would do a strategy refresh, but we never worried about the money going away. In fact, we were confident we could bring more dollars in. It does feel different now, and I'm glad I'm not a fundraiser at this moment.Michael Horn:Well, with that context, but also a bit of sobering context, let's dive into the first question. Diane and I have a bunch of things we want to ask. Can you give an overview of philanthropy in education? What are we talking about in terms of dollars? To the extent you see it shrinking, can you quantify that a little bit so we have a sense of what and who we are talking about?The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Overview of Education Philanthropy Stacey Childress:I feel a little exposed. You called me an expert, and I have to say two things about that. One, I have an arrangement with McKinsey & Company as a senior advisor. This is not informed by my work with them, nor does it reflect their views. This is Stacey Childress: speaking personally. Michael Horn:But let's put it in context. New Schools Venture Fund, obviously raising dollars and giving, Gates Foundation, you were Next-Gen Stacey, right?Stacey Childress:Yes, I was Next-Gen Stacey.Michael Horn:Even with the book that Rick and I did, you wrote that incredible piece around the role of philanthropy in markets. So, you've thought a lot about this.Stacey Childress:Yeah, I have. I just wanted to make sure that I know a lot. So I'm not trying to be falsely modest and say I'm not an expert.I have expertise in this area, particularly in a very concentrated part of the space. But nothing I say today has anything to do with what McKinsey would say about this stuff. It's not related.It's been a while since I looked rigorously at the shape and size of this part of the philanthropic capital market for education. I can tell you what I know firsthand and how that may or may not have changed over time. When I joined New Schools in 2014, it was the first time I had to raise money after giving it away. I wanted to understand with a lot of specificity what that philanthropic capital market looked like because I wanted to get more of it for New Schools. I wanted to increase our share of that wallet if it wasn't going to grow.At the time, education innovation and reform philanthropists were giving a little over a billion dollars a year. So it was about 1.25 billion dollars of philanthropy to things like charter schools, charter school networks, some ed tech stuff, human capital initiatives like Teach for America, new leaders for new schools, and similar projects. There was about a billion plus dollars in philanthropy.My sense is that it stayed pretty stable the whole time I was at New Schools. Over about an eight or nine-year period, we stayed at about a billion and a quarter as a sector.I'm talking only K-12 and only the innovation reform wing of funders. Think of Gates, Walton, CZI, Schusterman, Dell, and similar players. There's a kind of an East Coast, West Coast, and some middle of the country folks. That group stayed at a little over a billion, with some comings and goings within, but overall about the same.My sense is that that's still true. It might have ticked down just a little bit, but I could be wrong about that since it's been three or four years since I've taken a firm look. Even with the pandemic shifts, that's still what we're talking about here.Now, it sounds like a lot of money, and I don't want to diminish it. It is a lot of money, especially once you're in the billions. The thing is, I learned this the hard way, but it's something you learn as you go.A big question for philanthropists, whether you're in this sector or any individual philanthropist, is that Gates was and I think still is the biggest K-12 funder of this type. They've stayed in the 300-350 million dollars a year range. So about a billion plus every three years, just Gates, about 1.2 or so billion, 1.5 billion every three years. But the public funding for K-12 education has grown from about 600 to 800 billion a year over the last few years. That's 1.8, almost 2 trillion dollars every three years.So you match up Gates' billion plus dollars every three years against government funding for schools at over a trillion and a half. It's vanishingly small.It's a lot of money, but in the grand scheme of things, not so much. The goal is to create the most impact possible in a sector that has enormous funding and is in vast need of improvement. How do you put those dollars to work in a way that, even though they're small, they have an outsized effect on improving student outcomes, access to opportunity, and those kinds of things?So it's a lot of money, but in the grand scheme of things, not so much. How do you get that wedge of innovation capital in? Diane, it looks like you've got...Diane Tavenner:Well, Stacey, I think this is such an important point for this conversation because I want to make sure people know what specifically we're talking about. I think you're really zeroing in on that. This conversation is about philanthropy that isn't generally funding operational funds. That isn't to say that philanthropy isn't out there.There are a lot of individual donors and people in communities who give money to their favorite nonprofit, schools, charity events, and galas. We're not talking about any of that money here. We're talking about a relatively small set of substantial foundations giving specific types of money for specific purposes, not for ongoing operations.So let's spend a minute on what those grants look like when that money comes in. What do they not look like, perhaps?So people can be really clear.Stacey Childress:Yeah, that's great. So, yes, that segment of donors we're talking about funds innovation. Whether it's startups or existing organizations in this ecosystem, they fund innovation—starting something new, creating something new within an existing structure, or radically changing the way something is done. Innovation capital and growth capital help when you're on to something, have good results, and want to serve more kids, train more teachers, or expand your core business. This kind of capital can help you grow and do more in more places or with more people. The hope is always that this will lead to sustainability without ongoing funding beyond what you receive per pupil if you're a school or a program that gets money through taxes for serving students, or through earned revenue.If you're more of a service-based nonprofit, you need to figure out who and what you're going to charge to continue operating without a constant philanthropic subsidy.Diane Tavenner:Yeah, we always call it growth capital. We would call them bridges versus piers. You're not just putting someone in the ocean; you're building a bridge to something sustainable, hopefully new, better, and scalable.Stacey Childress:Yeah, exactly. The size and time frame of these grants vary.Diane Tavenner:Yeah, obviously, it depends on what you're doing, but it's rare for one donor to fund your whole need. If you're an operator, you have to think hard about that because you probably don't want that. It sounds easier to get one big check, but it's actually good to have a mix of revenue or investment capital with multiple investors. This dilutes the power and governance of any one investor.Stacey, you've raised a lot of money too. I like having several investors because it allows us to do what we committed to our donors without answering to one set of priorities or perspectives.In this space, you're usually looking at multiple donors to fund what you and your team want to do, whether it's innovation or growth. These grants are usually three years.Diane Tavenner:Sometimes.Stacey Childress:Yeah, sometimes they stretch to five, but often it's a year at a time. You do a little bit, get a little more, do a little bit, get a little more, which can be quite dynamic. There are expenses associated with this that aren't necessarily yearly. You're usually investing in people.Diane Tavenner:Yeah.Stacey Childress:To get good work done, so payroll is always a consideration. It's a good discipline. Three-year grants were common. I had a very small number of five-year grants, which were amazing but hard to get. Very rare. A lot of one and two-year grants.Diane Tavenner:A lot of ones and twos. If it's okay, I can put a little shape to this in terms of dollar numbers from my time at New Schools. We launched another fund while I was there. Between 2015 and 2022, I raised 550 million dollars, about half a billion, in seven or eight calendar years. Two hundred million of it was on five-year grants. For New Schools, the other 350 million had nothing longer than three years.Stacey Childress:But we only raised that from about 15 donors. I had multiple donors, but still very concentrated.Diane Tavenner:Yeah.Stacey Childress:Any one of them stepping off would have been a risk, but we kept renewing them for almost nine years. The risk was always there that one of our multi-million, multi-year donors would decide we weren't for them anymore, they were reducing their education spend, or they could do it themselves without needing us. It was a constant process of selling what we were up to and our ideas during the three-year terms because we always wanted to renew.Diane Tavenner:I think it's useful to reiterate that you raised all that money to give it away thoughtfully to operators. There are two groups: one raising money to deploy it to operators and another group, like me, raising money from both you and directly from big donors. It's a lot in the weeds, but hopefully, it's helpful to understand what we're talking about. Michael, maybe we should return to you because you're wondering if this is different from the past.Michael Horn:I think that's the question. When I was running the Christensen Institute and raising dollars, the Gates Foundation would change strategies every five years. Is the current moment different from other times in the field when we've seen similar shifts, or why are people asking these questions right now?The Impact of the Pandemic Stacey Childress:Yeah, I alluded to this earlier. Let me get more specific about this current moment and the difference as I see it.Michael Horn:As you perceive it, yeah.Stacey Childress:Yeah, as I perceive it. Somebody ought to do a really good analysis of this, an actual bottom-up analytic project to sort this out.But here's where I think we are. The pandemic was an exogenous shock that threw us all for a loop and put us back on our heels. None of us knew what to do during those early months of the pandemic in 2020, trying to figure out how things would sort out. You know me. I'm generally an optimist, a sarcastic optimist if that's a thing, but I really am an optimist. I always think we're going to figure this out and things will work out.During that time, I thought, this will be a wake-up call for all of us in philanthropy in two ways.One, if we reflect back, are you kidding me that this is really where we are in March, April, May of 2020? We couldn't even get kids learning at home effectively with decent digital content. I was devastated. I was next-gen Stacey at Gates Foundation, and we envisioned kids learning anytime, anywhere, in deep, rigorous, and engaging ways, and that learning should count even if it's not in the classroom.I still believe all that, but here we were, unable to do that on any kind of scale. There are lots of reasons for it, but I thought this would be a wake-up call because maybe we'll have another pandemic, or at least the mindset shift to anytime, anywhere learning is valuable.The other thing was, as a philanthropic sector, I hoped it would shake us out of some bad habits, or at least some standard operating procedures that don't serve children or grantees well.Michael Horn:Can you give a couple of examples?Stacey Childress:I was part of two different coalitions of philanthropists that met often on Zoom during 2020, trying to sort out what we should be doing. A lot of energy and good intentions, but no principles, just staff people. Many were heartbroken, stymied, and frozen because their ways of doing business were no match for what was needed. They couldn't provide the size of grants or the flexibility that operators needed to respond quickly.Operators needed resources immediately, especially those with a vision for how to respond. Their current budgets didn't allow for it, or they were doing something new and needed the money right away because kids were stuck at home, not learning.I had off-the-record conversations where people said they couldn't move fast enough or weren't set up to respond quickly. I told them they could, but they had to lead and make the case to their principals or decision-makers. We had to throw standard procedures out the window, at least temporarily, to respond to the crisis.Some institutions equate time with rigor, thinking a long process means rigor. But often, it means 15 people have to look at something, and it takes months when three people knew everything needed in the first month. Grants could have been made in a month instead of six or eight months.I've seen this as both a fundraiser and inside the world's largest education funder. Things just take too long, and I don't see that changing. Some figured it out on an emergency basis but have reverted to standard procedures, possibly with new organizational charts and consultants. It still takes a long time.With these shifts, Michael, people are getting stuck mid-process and can't get good information about what happens next. The staff inside these institutions are unsure of what will happen next, trying to respond to their decision hierarchies, leading to stalled processes.Stacey Childress:I know someone working on a multi-million dollar, multi-year grant that should be a renewal. There's no unknown about the grantee or the work, but it's stalled due to internal churn. They need the money last month and thought the first payment would be made then, but now it’s stalled for another six or eight months with no visibility into what's happening.I feel like I'm rambling, but there was a moment where we could have shaken off standard operating procedures. It was clear that even with good ideas, we haven't funded them at sufficient levels, smartly, durably, or for long enough to get where we need to go. Part of that is about how we do business. Could we take this moment to throw out old processes and reinvent them to be more responsive? We're funding innovation and growth, but this isn't how innovation and growth investing happens in other sectors of the economy. It's just not.Sorry, I have one more thing to say about the pandemic lessons.Diane Tavenner: It's interesting to have this conversation, and it's surprising to me we haven't had it before. I'd love to share what I was experiencing at that time. Michael and I started the podcast because, like you, we were optimistic that the pandemic would create an opportunity. We hoped people would see what was wrong not only in philanthropy but in how schools were being operated, offering a moment for change. And here we are, season five.Reflecting on it as an operator, everything you're saying is right. People don't understand how expensive it was to survive during the pandemic as a school system. The amount of money we had to spend on tests, masks, computers, hotspots—everything was immense.I would argue that Summit was one of the best in the country at getting things up and running effectively, just as you described, Stacey. I had to make some tough decisions, extending ourselves and thinking the money would come in. Interestingly, the money did not come in from philanthropy, as it couldn't cover the entire system. It came from the government, which moved pretty quickly, I would say.One of the challenges is, and I'm a pretty savvy fundraiser, I didn't know what to ask philanthropy for at that moment. We couldn't innovate; we were just trying to survive. We had a lot of money flowing in from the government.We did have one amazing funder, Arthur Rock, who came in within weeks, giving generously without a team or staff. His money allowed us to set up a mini-fund to help families in crisis, preventing them from being thrown out on the street, and ensuring they had necessities like a working refrigerator or internet access. It was immediate emergency cash for survival.Stacey Childress:Yes.Diane Tavenner:Thank goodness for Arthur enabling everyone who didn't have internet to have a hotspot within days. But that was it. That was all that came through. Arthur has an interesting way of thinking where he doesn't believe time will give him more information.Stacey Childress:And he also trusted you to know the best way to deploy those resources. Arthur trusted me and my team, and that's another challenge. As foundation staffs get bigger, they hire smart people who become experts lauded for their knowledge. They're less inclined to just give the money to someone like you and let you do what you need to do.Diane Tavenner:Yeah.Stacey Childress:Instead, they take nine or twelve months to put you through a process that yields no more information than they had at the beginning. I'm not insulting the people who work in these places. I have many friends and people I respect greatly. But the institutions and the culture create processes that are inefficient.Diane Tavenner:Same with schools, right?Stacey Childress:Right. Same with schools.Michael Horn:I remember this from over ten years ago. Giselle Huff was frustrated that they would hire people like you and not give you the autonomy to move quickly. It's an organizational issue, not the individuals per se.The bigger issue I'm hearing is that the pandemic didn't break these tendencies; it exposed them. It created an existential crisis internally where people questioned their identity and purpose, leading to more pause and churn. This indecision has created a lingering hangover.Stacey Childress:The hangover is still here. Gates might be an interesting exception, which I'll come back to. Many institutions faced a crisis in the first months of the pandemic, realizing that what they'd spent years and billions of dollars on hadn't made the progress needed.For institutional funders, there was a sense of, "What did we get for it?" The principals, whether trustees or living donors, were asking good questions but not getting great answers from teams trying to figure it out and not wanting to be wrong. There was a fear of going back to donors like Bill Gates, Mark and Priscilla, or the Walton family with another failed initiative.Giselle went to the president of the Gates Foundation a year after I was there and asked why they hired me but didn't let me spend my budget freely. I wished she hadn't done that, but it highlighted the issue. What are we waiting for? Who do we think will come up with a better answer? Where's the boldness that created the wealth in the first place?Shifting Strategies Michael Horn:Yeah, that's a really interesting point. Let me ask the question this way: I'm hearing from a lot of nonprofits, and I sit on boards of nonprofits, that it's as bad as it's ever been. We've seen a bunch go out of business or be acquired for virtually nothing.Maybe that's what should have happened, I don't know. But it seems different in many ways.Another question I have is about the shifting strategies every five years and the churn you're describing. Education is a space where change isn't going to happen across the country in five years. This is a big, complicated 50-state country with lots of challenges that interfere with the operations. It's messy. There's a huge installed base.Are we guilty of impatience, not just sticking with a good theory of action? Or is something else going on?Stacey Childress:Yeah, yes.Michael Horn:I didn't mean to ask a one-word question.Stacey Childress:No, I know. I was recently talking with someone from one of the large institutional donors. This person joined relatively recently, post-pandemic, and had been an outside observer and fundraiser from this institution. They had an insight that rang true for me: we've got a theory of change for what should happen in the sector over many years, but it's not very rigorous or periodically examined with any rigor.It's shaped around the personality of the donor and some senior staff preferences. It sounds fine, but then we're applying a lot of rigor at the individual grant level, creating 47-row outcome trackers for 18-month grants. We spend months creating these, and every quarterly call with the grantee digs into line items.But there's no intermediate view of how the ecosystem around these grants is doing because we're not clear about what those are. We've got four or five areas we're willing to fund, but even then, we're not looking at the portfolio. We're not seeing how individual grants add up to those areas.So, big idea, not a lot of rigor around developing it, and then intense rigor at the grant level. My time at Gates wasn't quite that loose, but there were features of it, especially the one-at-a-time approach, which isn't true rigor. It often meant lots of people, lots of rows on a spreadsheet, and many conversations, but that’s not true rigor. You spend five years and have three model grantees to show the principal, but you’ve spent $800 million or more. The pandemic opened up good questions for which there aren't good answers yet. Gates narrowed its focus to math, committing $1.2 billion over three years. This isn’t an additional billion; it’s their regular funding but focused mostly on math. This narrowing means if you were funded by Gates before but aren't focused on math now, you’re out. This has led to many organizations no longer fitting into Gates' funding categories. Diane Tavenner:Yeah.Stacey Childress:The downside is if, after three or five years, they can’t achieve what they want in math, then what? We’ve been through system-wide transformation, charter schools, standards, teacher systems, next-gen schools, and now math. If they keep switching every three to five years, what’s next? Michael Horn:Right.Stacey Childress:If the next cycle doesn’t work, they might consider an exit.Diane Tavenner:Yeah.Stacey Childress: I know what I would do, but in that institution, now 25 years in, by the time the math cycle ends, they’ll be 26 or 27 years in. Now what?Michael Horn:That makes sense.Stacey Childress:People worry the "now what" will be an exit.Diane Tavenner: Yeah, that's what people are worried about, for sure.Stacey Childress: And Gates isn't the only one. I use them as an example because it illustrates the issue cleanly.How Operators Can Help Diane Tavenner:Everything Stacey is saying resonates with me. Michael, what I'm thinking about a lot is our conversations about innovation. If we go back to the top of this conversation, this is philanthropy for innovation.I won't go into the long history we've had of trying to innovate within a giant, decentralized system because that is a massive challenge. What you're talking about, Stacey, is how does anyone tackle that? Clearly, no one can tackle that entirely, so we start to narrow our focus and aim to be successful at something specific. I'm not going to quibble with focusing on math because, in the work I'm doing now, I see how critically important it is for the future of the workforce and the country. However, that's probably not going to transform schools in the way the three of us want them to be transformed.This creates a sense of angst for me because most schools in America are just doing the same old thing. They're taking federal, state, and local money and running the same schools, with no real prospect of change.For those of us who believe change should happen, what are the levers? How does this relatively small amount of money create the change we want?Stacey, as we were talking through this, you mentioned a list of things you want funders to do. I thought of a list of things I want operators to do—those who want to innovate and raise philanthropy to do it. It's worth spending a moment on that because I think there are two sides to this.There are things that operators, like myself and my peers, need to do to be compelling and retain capital in our space. If you're not doing compelling, interesting things, your projects aren't going to get funded.First, I'll call it "getting your conditions in order." This refers to work done by several people, including folks at the Gates Foundation years ago, and more recently, Transcend has partnered with others to define the conditions of an organization ready to innovate. Michael, you and I talk about this all the time. You need structures and mindsets to be able to innovate. Use the available tools to ensure you have the right conditions. If you're trying to get innovation money without knowing if your conditions are in order, you're not primed to raise money.Second, do you actually have innovations that others aren't working on that could potentially move the needle? You need to understand the field and what others are doing to ensure your innovation is truly unique and impactful. This requires discipline and hard work.When you do this, you earn trust and face less scrutiny because it becomes apparent that you've done the groundwork. Lastly, I have always tried to see this as a collaborative venture rather than a competitive one. My experience is that many operators fall into a competitive mindset, seeing funding as a zero-sum game. This competitiveness is counterproductive because no one can do this alone. Acting more collaboratively could attract and keep more money in the innovation space and sector.That would be my wish list for operators.Changes Funders Can MakeStacey Childress:That's very good and definitely rings true. As an operator running a fund and having to raise money, I share your perspective. You mentioned visionary leadership, and both words are important in fundraising—a vision you can articulate clearly and compellingly about what the world should look like if it worked better for young people. Lead on it. Don't wait for a funder to have a strategy you can fit into. Lead.Spend time socializing that vision with other operators and donors. Donors will follow a compelling vision and leadership. You and I have both seen it happen and have caused it to happen as leaders.For the donor side, the first thing I wish they would do is just give away the money.Diane Tavenner:Yeah.Stacey Childress:Remember the fundamental purpose of what you're organized to do and what you're given significant tax breaks for: to give away the money. You're not organized to have internal meetings, PowerPoints, memos, politics, reorgs, and conferences. Those things can help your aims but can also distract from them. Give the money away. That's your whole job, not the coalitions and communities of practice. Those should support moving the money. It sounds silly, but it's frustrating. Your whole job is to give the money away. Increase, not decrease, your giving now. What are you waiting for? If not now, when? There's not one answer; there are many. Fund them, learn from them. Stop with the 47-row spreadsheet metrics. Fund the people doing the work, listen to them, believe them, recognize patterns, and fund lots of things. More gifts, bigger gifts, right now. Go. What are you waiting for? Go. Make decisions faster. You're not going to fund everything. Say yes fast and no faster. As soon as you know it's a no, tell the operator. You can't imagine how much time and energy is spent waiting for a yes. Diane Tavenner:And say no fast.Stacey Childress: Say no faster. It's not the last day of the process that you decide no. As soon as you know it's no, tell the operator. They spend so much time waiting for your decision, having conversations with their board and other donors, making plans. Time is huge. Tell them no fast. Yes fast, no even faster. If your processes get in the way of that, rip them down.Diane Tavenner:Yep.Stacey Childress:Do something different and do it now. One of the reasons this animates me so much, beyond the obvious good of getting the money into the field and letting smart, intelligent, visionary leaders and their people do what they can with it and learn from it, is that for donors who have, say, over a billion dollars in net worth, their fortunes are growing faster than their lifetime philanthropic commitments suggest they will get the money out the door. A few years ago, when I was in a fundraising cycle and was counting on a donor to come in at a certain level on a renewal, I got the sad news. I was trying to get tens of millions and got multiple tens of millions, but not as much as I had hoped. It was an enormous grant, something to celebrate, but I was disappointed because I had planned for more. Silicon Valley is like a neighborhood, and the donors all talk to each other. Many of them talk to me, and I knew that this person was at cocktail parties and other gatherings saying they had a billion dollars in their donor-advised fund at a community foundation because they couldn't find enough good things to fund, including education. And they had just given me multiple tens of millions.What are you waiting for? When I first joined New Schools and was figuring out the investment footprint before we did a specific strategy, I realized that what we had wasn't working. It was a quiet secret in the field. The theory had run its course, and New Schools had been struggling to raise money for a couple of years. It was time to rethink it.Someone who was a contemporary of Vinod Khosla, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, told me that when he first became a VC, he realized something new was coming from closed network systems. It had to do with packet switching and the internet. He convinced his partners at Kleiner Perkins that they needed to fund everything in these nascent categories because they didn't know who would win. They backed great teams and more than one in each category. This humble approach, funding lots of things with a vision for how the industry would change, led to massive financial success.From where I sat at New Schools in 2014, I felt like we were in a similar moment. We had glimpses of what the future could look like for kids, and our strategy was to push everything onto the table for this vision. Rather than trying to find the answer, we should take a broad view of the space and fund every good team and idea.Stop thinking that you have all the answers inside your foundation. Most of the smartest people don't work for you. Fund, learn, and fund again. Give the money away.I wish people would do more with intermediaries. If I were the leader of a foundation with $350 million a year to give away, I would convince my principal to give $300 million to four or five grantees in large chunks, and those would be intermediaries. I would have a staff of no more than 10 people, each managing relationships and helping us learn and adapt. Intermediaries offer leverage, expertise, and nimbleness.Follow MacKenzie Scott's example: big gifts, unrestricted, lightweight process, fast decisions, little to no reporting requirements. It's not perfect, but it gets the money out the door.Diane Tavenner:It is.Stacey Childress:Yes, it can be tough to figure out how to get in the pipeline and some transparency issues, but those challenges are far outweighed by getting the money out the door. Let's do it. Get that money out the door. If not now, when? Be honest with yourself. What are you afraid of from going big and visionary and moving lots of resources quickly to people doing important work?Michael Horn:Well, Diane, as we wrap up five seasons here with our final episode, I think we finally had our Jerry Maguire moment. It's no longer "show me the money," it's "give away the money."Stacey Childress:Give away the money.Media Recommendations Michael Horn: And Stacey, you have nailed it. So with that as a segue, as we wrap up an episode, I've learned a lot from both of you. Thank you both. Let's finish up with some things we are reading, watching, or whatever. Stacey, we'll call on you first. Hopefully, it's not Jerry Maguire, but if it is, we understand.Stacey Childress:It's not Jerry Maguire. Sadly, I'm still watching and listening to heartbreaking, disappointing Astros baseball, but hope springs eternal. A new thing: there's a relatively old, about 10 years old, documentary on Prime Video called The Wrecking Crew. It's a deep dive into a loose group of studio musicians in LA in the '60s and '70s who backed 60-70% of the big radio hits of that era. They backed artists like the Righteous Brothers, the Mamas and the Papas, Sonny and Cher, and the Beach Boys. The Beach Boys performed live, but The Wrecking Crew played on their studio albums. They were behind so many iconic songs. It's fascinating.Diane Tavenner:Well, this is what happens when you have an episode with two of Stacey's passions: philanthropy and music. It's so exciting. I agree with everything you're saying. I hope it happens because I feel like we're at an early 2010-2011 moment again. I hope people jump on and in. No one else in the world is ahead of us yet in redesigning their education systems. We have an opportunity in America right now, and I'm deeply optimistic.I'm reading an early advanced copy of 10 to 25, Dr. David Yeager's new book. I love him. He had such an impact on our work at Summit. He's an amazing researcher who connects research with actual work in schools. The book talks about a mentoring mindset, a continuation of the growth mindset. It's incredibly powerful and will be out in August.Michael Horn:You're going to have to dig in then. That sounds exciting, Diane. I'm glad you're reading it. I'll just wrap up mine. My kids went away for their outdoor nature's classroom for a few days, so my wife and I went to New York City and saw a couple of shows. We saw Merrily We Roll Along, which I highly recommend, and Enemy of the People. Both were terrific. Like you, Stacey, I've been watching a lot of sports, but the Celtics are having more success than your Astros. I recently finished Outlive by Peter Attia. It was great, with a few new tips, some things I already knew, and a lot of common sense.Stacey, thank you for joining us and enlivening the last five episodes. We'll see where that goes. Diane, as always, thank you for the partnership. For all of you listening, thanks for joining us for five full seasons of 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.