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

Diane Tavenner and I welcomed Stacey Childress, Senior Education Advisor at McKinsey & Co., back for our second episode in our two-part series on the challenges facing K–12 education and promising strategies for addressing them. In this episode, each of us made the case for one high-impact reform to address the challenges laid out in the previous episode. We talked about: reforming how schools evaluate and recommend students, unbundling the core education experience, and doing more to instill character in values through education. Diane Tavenner:Hey, Michael and Stacey. Wow.Michael Horn:You got to say hi to both of us. This is fun.Stacey Childress:Hi, Diane. Hi, Michael.The Two-Part Series on K12Diane Tavenner:Good to be back together with you two. This is part two of a two-part episode the three of us are doing together. The premise for this episode started when we did a two-part episode previously around higher ed, and some of our devoted listeners and folks said that they enjoyed it so much, and they encouraged us to do something similar for K12, which we are doing. So this is our second episode, and it's so much fun to be back together with the two of you.Michael Horn:Hopefully, our listeners are not regretting that request after listening to the first part, but we're going to be briefer this time. It's our resolution.Stacey Childress:Yeah, we even wore ourselves out on episode one of this series. So, yes.Diane Tavenner:Just to remind folks, if you haven't heard it, part one was identifying the elements of the K12 system that are the core elements and then identifying the problems with them right now. That's all to lay the foundation so we could propose solutions. Since we recorded the first problem episode, we've had some good conversations, the three of us, and really pressed each other about how we wanted to approach solutions. We ran through a bunch of different options. But I think the one we got most excited about, and where we ended up landing, is rather than trying to go through a laundry list of all nine elements. Because it's expansive, if you listened to the first one, you had to hang in there for quite a long time with us. We decided that we would each pick one of the nine to work on solutions for. And it turned out we all picked different ones.So I think the approach we're going to take today is to make our case for why we would try to solve the element that we're picking, how we might solve it, and what solutions might be in the world already that are attempting to solve it. And in that, is there a way to unbundle it from the others to make it more possible? The other two of us will react to that and see if we have anything to add. Does that sound right?Michael Horn:Let's go forward with that as a plan. Diane, you get to go first, so you model what this looks like for us.Diane's Proposal: Reforming Schools’ Evaluator-Recommender Role Diane Tavenner:All right, well, I'm happy to go first. I suspect some folks might be taking some bets right now on which of the nine we chose. I am going to pick what was item number six in our first episode, the evaluator recommender. Let me just start by saying I think there is a huge opportunity. You both know I've spent the last several years trying to figure out what I want to do post-Summit. As part of that exploration, I've been searching for what I think is the greatest lever we have for change in the K12 system. I keep returning, sort of sadly and reluctantly, to assessment at the big level. I am attracted to this category because I think it's a huge opportunity.I also think it's one of the easier things to unbundle from the rest of the K12 element list. I know that probably sounds counterintuitive to a lot of people because how in the world could you unbundle evaluation and recommendation? But I think with a mindset shift, it becomes pretty doable. Let me unpack three ways that I think we could do that and then share the mindset shift that would have to happen. First, when we talk through evaluator recommender and the element that schools do, they write these recommendations for colleges. There's a huge expectation from higher ed that high school teachers and K12 will put in substantial effort to make recommendations of students. As Stacey pointed out in our last conversation, that's for a relatively small number of students, but it takes up a huge amount of energy and time from people. I think the way to decouple this in K12 is to just stop having higher ed ask for recommendations as we know them, which are these letters. The most offensive part of these questions you have to answer as a recommender would say, "In what percentage of your lifetime experience with students does this student fall? Is it in the top one, top five?" I see you, Michael, leaning in because...Michael Horn:This is the worst question ever.Diane Tavenner:Worst question. Anyone who knows about the way our brains process will know no one's capable of doing this in any unbiased way. It's got to be the worst data ever. I don't know why people keep asking for it. So, anyhow, I think do away with that. My invitation to higher ed would be to rethink how you're doing admissions because, by the way, you should just rethink that to begin with. There's better ways of doing it. And stop putting this extraordinary amount of work on K12 that is super biased and probably not helpful.The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.You're probably not even really factoring it into your decision. What I would offer in exchange is, if you have to do something, do reference checks once you've already decided. Mirror the professional world: once you've already decided that you want to accept this student, if you want to do a reference check, great. Make it a simple, straightforward call-up reference check. I'm sure we all do reference checks regularly for former employees, and it can be very efficient. It would take far less time, it would be far less biased, and I think that would be a strong way to go and a change that could be made quite quickly and efficiently. I think it would be greatly appreciated by K12 on multiple levels and take them out of that role. The next thing is grades. As you all know, I have long believed that teachers should not be asked to both teach and coach and develop and grade their students for external reasons.Diane Tavenner:Let me offer how you would provide students grades or feedback if not by their teacher. Step one: technology is actually pretty good at a lot of this, and with AI, it will get significantly better. It's already getting significantly better at this. Put as much on technology as we possibly can. For a decade-plus, we've been doing this at Summit, and there's people doing it all across the country. This is not out of reach. This is totally happening and possible and getting better every single day. Do as much there as possible.I would argue the only type of grading that teachers should be doing is if it is a combined part of their professional development where they're growing and developing their skills of teaching. There's a whole methodology here, been doing it for 20-plus years around calibrating your scoring and then doing that in a group scoring. The more we have high-quality curriculum, which I expect might come up in some of your proposals later, the more the world is going. You have common assignments that this can be done around, which is a win-win for everyone. You have other teachers who are providing the actual scoring of your students. It makes the whole system better and a learning system. I think those are very possible, doable changes that could be made fairly easily and decoupled from most of the other elements.Diane Tavenner:The final piece is around the high school diploma and the transcript. Here, a lot of people are working on a vision where the student is the keeper and the owner of their own transcript. I think this makes so much sense. More and more every day, students are learning from multiple institutions and multiple places. This is such an antiquated notion that you would go to one institution and have this transcript there. If you look at kids' high school transcripts now, they're already including community college and other types of institutions on those transcripts. The mindset shift is that the student is the owner and keeper of their transcript. Again, technology is our friend here.It can be used to make sure this is validated, true, honest, and that they have the world of learning opportunities available to them that get integrated into the transcript. They control where it goes, who they share it with, and who they give it to. It's very similar to a portfolio model and very complementary to a portfolio. It's just the right way to think about young people and even older people having agency and self-direction around their own learning and how they're driving it, and then what they're sharing with the world. My last piece on all of these things is it focuses us more on evaluating the quality of the work that people have done versus someone else's evaluation of who knows what. That's my proposal. What do you all think?Discussion of Diane's ProposalMichael Horn:Stacey? I'll jump in first, and then you can tee off there. We'll flip the order a little bit. No surprise, Diane. I love peeling this off from the rest of the enterprise. We've talked about this before. I would think about it conceptually almost in reverse order, in the sense that particularly grading and things of that nature should come before the reference checks. When you started with reference checks, I thought, that's a lot harder for colleges to do for 18-year-olds than we might think. But if we flip the order and start with the system where the student is the keeper of their record, they're having their performances and accomplishments validated by a range of individuals—teachers from other districts, professionals themselves—maybe actual projects for companies and organizations.There's real importance to what they're doing, not pretend, but real. There's an incentive for those professionals to give feedback on it. Using technology to help with inter-rater reliability, making it translatable, and so forth. The application then comes into a college, and they can trust it. They can say, "I'd love a double click on this." You have a team around you of folks that have worked with you. So, I know who to call. When I imagine it almost in that way, then I start seeing how this hangs together even more.I would offer just one last observation on this. You all know I've long been fascinated with Western Governors University in the higher ed world. They have a whole separate faculty who is trained just in the art and science of assessment. When you haven't mastered something yet in their competency-based model, you don't blame the teacher because the teacher who assessed you does not know you. To your point, Diane, it just seals that thing. They're not evaluating something about you as the individual or a bias or whatever else. They're just looking at the work. We can have multiple faculty members who are trained in assessment looking at the work to make sure it really represents what a great performance does or doesn't look like. Stacey?Stacey Childress:Yeah. I like flipping the concept of evaluation and recommendation on its head as well. I resonate with moving to a world where a student is the keeper of their portfolio of learning experiences and the evaluations of those. I wonder about which actor in the ecosystem is the keeper or provider of this different construct. Is it like at Western Governors University, where it's still in-house, but we're staffed up differently in terms of expertise, roles, etcetera? And in the K12 system, maybe think about the system more granularly or modularly. How does this look in the early, elementary to middle school years, and then how does it start to shift in middle school? Maybe it's fully from an outside partner in high school, where we need to see the supply of partners who have the tools in school districts that have this kind of expertise. It doesn't have to be built inside the system. That probably increases the validation, credibility, and legitimacy of the credential as it then goes on to the next steps in education and preparation. Diane, I'm not sure how you were thinking about that, but it's an interesting idea to think about. How does the ecosystem shift as kids get into their teen years on their way to graduation from high school in a way that creates an opportunity to introduce new players, new expertise, and maybe increases the validity and credibility of the signal to the next step on a kid's learning journey. But just wondering how you were thinking about that.Michael Horn:Yeah, I was going to say quickly, quick clarification, then I want to hear Diane's answer. You raised a good point. Western Governors would be better, in my mind, if it was an external entity playing that role. I think the reason why at the higher ed level we can't get to competency-based education and replace paying for seat time is because no one trusts that the institution is going to fairly evaluate itself for learning. I think they're right not to trust that when dollars are at stake. The more unbundled this can be, the better it is. Diane, you can give the more thoughtful answer, though.Diane Tavenner:Well, no, that's super thoughtful and pulling strings from both of you. One of the things I love about this proposal is I think it helps us start to unbundle the role of the teacher, which is something we have all been talking about for a decade-plus at this point. There are people who are amazing at assessment, and they love assessment, and they think about assessment. You could unbundle those roles within an institution. That would be one way. Like you, I like it even better across institutions. When we talk about a common high-quality curriculum, it doesn't make sense anymore for an individual teacher to be writing and developing their own individual curriculum. We should be using high-quality curriculum that is across institutions.There's a huge opportunity there for people from different institutions to be evaluating on the same projects, the same work, etcetera, across institutions. I do think, and I'm personally involved with a number of them, some I can speak about, some I can't, efforts are underway to build nonprofits and for-profits that have the ability to do these evaluations. The ones that I think are most exciting are on-demand for students and families. No matter where I'm learning, I'm able to go to a place where I can validate the skills I have, the knowledge I have, and the work that I can do. That way, I am not handcuffed to my zip code and the one institution that may or may not be gatekeeping me on multiple levels.What this does to the psychology for families and students about what's possible, it undoes so many of those negative effects we were talking about yesterday in these other groups where the system is not actually doing what we wanted it to do. We're not going to touch on that particular element today, but I think we are because this is a powerful solution to fulfilling that number nine, that dream, that promise. If you work hard and drive your own learning, there are ways that you can show that and truly benefit from it.Stacey Childress:Yeah. I love that.Michael Horn:Should we dive into the second one?Stacey Childress:I think it's probably an interesting segue into my choice, which was number one, just that core education experience. It was at the top of my list. If I had to pick from our 17 or 82 on our list, however many there were. Twelve, nine. So, just to remind folks, this is like, when we think of school, we think of these things, right? It's the core educational experience. Historically, it started with the three Rs: reading, writing, arithmetic, and lots of other subjects have been added over time. It includes the strength and breadth of the academic program and the social learning. It's different than social-emotional, but like, how to be part of a community, what's it like to be in a group, in a class, in a team, your people. It also includes those social aspects of managing yourself.Stacey's Proposal: Unbundling the Core Education ExperienceStacey Childress:On top of that, extracurriculars, sports, interest-based activities—all of those experiences we consider part of the education of our kids. We said a challenge with it was often what we teach and how we teach it is not aligned to the current science of learning. What we know about how learning happens and what makes for a good, integrated set of learning experiences, but also towards what end. Our second challenge is a lack of vision and purpose. We have these large cafeteria menus at high school and a broad waterfront of concepts, skills, and topics that we ask elementary schools to cover. But the "to what end" has gotten lost over time as we've added more and more. That was one of our main critiques.Following our model here, I thought first about whether this core academic function could be unbundled. Diane, you started to talk about how unbundling the evaluation and recommendation piece might open up more opportunities to start unbundling the actual core educational experience.If you were able to demonstrate your learning outside of the mandated tests at the school or state level, maybe you could have more options for how to get that learning, how to experience it, and prove it to an outside provider. Another thing that would have to shift is policy, which was number five on our list. Policy would have to be in play to create some of the shifts we see. Along with evaluation, funding policies would need to shift. There are efforts in states about this, which can be quite controversial and politicized. But for unbundling the core function to work at any scale in a community or region, along with the evaluation function moving to something external, the dollars would have to come to families. Not just follow students to their chosen place, but actually be in the hands of families to spend on educational services.These types of programs, such as traditional voucher programs and education savings accounts (ESAs), usually go to a bundled school experience. They are not driving the unbundling of the core educational experience in any way. I am an informed, interested observer, but because these policies are not driving the unbundling of the core educational experience now, it makes me wonder what would have to happen. It also makes me a bit skeptical that these policy solutions will lead to an unbundling of the core experience. Let me say a little about why I think that is. There’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation. There aren’t sufficient choices for families to take advantage of in core educational opportunities. That includes the core academic experience and character-building experiences, the social learning aspect. Even if I got my money directly from the state, I don’t have enough options to spend it on in sufficient quantity to choose among them. I am likely to choose a bundled experience that is better than what I had but may not allow me to unbundle.Unbundling shifts a lot of non-financial costs to families. If I don’t have that bundled experience to go to, I am responsible for putting things together. I might not have the time or interest in doing that, even if I do have the resources. You can imagine other providers growing up that could play that orchestration or concierge role among some online experiences and some local, regional, and state providers. That’s super interesting. The biggest barrier is it flies in the face of our concept of school as the place we go, where our kids go, and where we get everything we need or most of what we need. But there’s something compelling about the idea.As more choice options emerge in states where there is a financial and policy component, the long-term aspiration of what it could be if we unbundled evaluation, unbundled the money, and had some incentives in the communities for the options to arise based on the science of learning, are clear about what vision they're educating against, and maybe have chunks—maybe I’m not getting reading here and math there and character here—but maybe I’m getting those bundles from a provider and also have options for sports leagues, which already exist. A lot of sports leagues, children’s theater, and those kinds of interests and extracurriculars show much more promise.What does that hybrid look like? Where we’ve got some bundles validated with the science of learning and an external evaluator? I am more optimistic and less skeptical about that. So, that’s my unbundling piece in the bundled environment. I think we’re seeing some interesting things. Diane and I are on the board of an organization we helped start called Transcend Education. We worried about communities not being engaged in the vision of schooling. Transcend has this amazing process that takes whole communities through to create or unearth the values, wishes, dreams, and intentions of a community against what an educational experience should aim for.They have built expertise around processes to be on a journey of reinventing your schools and your system of schools in ways that align with that vision, so schools and districts aren’t on their own trying to do that piece. It’s still a bundled experience. The work they're doing in Texas with lots of districts, for example, Aldine Public Schools, which has 60,000 students and 80 schools, and 90% of the students are economically disadvantaged. There’s this beautiful community-wide process with the help of Transcend as an expert partner.I’d love to see more Transcends, more capacity for Transcend, and more Transcend-like organizations that can work with systems and schools in their communities. We still need more opportunities for school creation. Diane, you know this better than any of us. When you can have that conversation with a community and create a new school that lives into that vision, is based on the learning science, and isn’t trying to do everything but has agreement on the core things they will do across core academics, character building, and interest-based activities, you’ve got a lot more likelihood of achieving coherence. I am distressed by the reduction in new school creation around the country, both with philanthropy and policymakers. In the last 20 years, and even in the eight years I was at New Schools, we helped enough new schools come into existence to serve as many kids as the San Francisco Public Schools and the Boston Public Schools. These interesting models meet community needs, create great results for kids, and have more ability to do it because they’re not burdened with the layering that has gone on over the last 100 years or 40 years or 30 years. I’ve been talking for a long time, so I’ll pause. But we need a vibrant mix of opportunities so more unbundled services can arise, so districts can undertake this with expert support, and we still have new schools opening up that meet these aspirations and provide examples of what’s possible while serving their communities.Discussing Stacey’s Proposal Diane Tavenner:Wow. There’s so much in there. Let me try to pull out a couple of things. I resonated with all of it. One thing I feel is this tension for families. When we talk about family choice and parent choice, there really is only choice at the bundled school level for the most part. That’s as far as we’ve truly gotten.It’s like you can either pick a whole school for your child, or you can be a homeschooler family. In that case, you’re responsible for everything. Over here, you still have to curate a lot because the school doesn’t generally work in the summer, so you have to curate the summer. Oh, by the way, the holidays don’t match your workdays. It feels a little more steady, so that is very limited choice in my mind. I love that you’re proposing a more doable choice if it’s on a continuum, something more in the middle of this concierge model, these new entities. I think this is an interesting space for new entities to come into where they have a different mindset.They want people to be able to assemble what works for them and make that easy and doable, without putting the full burden on a parent. Most parents I know have spreadsheets to try to manage summer experiences alone. By the end of summer, I was exhausted. Just put me back in school, even though it’s 8:00 to 3:30, because at least that’s consistent except every other Friday and the holidays, whatever. You know my rant about this. I love that idea paired with ESAs. These are very controversial right now because they’re happening quickly. I think we’re up to maybe eight.Michael Horn:14 or 15 states, I think.Diane Tavenner:Okay. Who have these in motion. There’s probably another ten that are working on them.Stacey Childress:Texas will likely happen this year.Michael Horn:Yeah, exactly. There's a bunch that failed last year, but after the primaries, it will likely pass.Diane Tavenner:There are people from multiple sides of the political spectrum who don’t like ESAs and are working hard against them. The two primary arguments are, one, accountability—how do we ensure kids are getting quality education, which we all care deeply about—and two, adult reasons. They don’t want money going away from the system, which is sometimes the largest regional employer. There’s more to it than that. I’m not being nuanced, but you know what I’m saying. They’re not thinking about what’s good for families and kids. These systems are far from perfect. Policy is very difficult to write. I don’t want to throw it out because we have a couple of egregious examples of someone using their ESA money to buy a big screen TV and claiming they were showing their kids learning content on it. Not awesome. That’s not the kind of thing we want. We need to learn how we can help people spend this wisely. We need significantly more supply of good science-aligned options and help for them to assemble those options to really take advantage of it.I hope we can keep moving forward and make this better versus trying to rip this system out. I think we had this intuition when we said we were only going to talk about three topics that we'd end up touching on many more. What I love about what you said is in this vision, it contributes to the mixing of people, socioeconomic mixing and political diversity, which we’re concerned is not existing right now.A lot of people get afraid when people want to talk about school choice. They’re worried it’s going to cause more polarization. I think this approach has people doing more mixing because you are picking and choosing and engaging with other people. It goes to that big societal intention and hope of our system if we can stick with it and figure it out. What do you think, Michael?Michael Horn:Yeah, I agree with what you just said. I’ll unintentionally come back to this when I tackle my lever. On the mixing point, when you have dollars that can unbundle the school experience in the way described, you lower the stakes on picking the thing. My guard comes down. I’m worried less about the mix of kids around me and the parents. It becomes a more optimal choice for something different now in these different experiences that contribute to what you just said, the different mixing.I wrote a piece on how we shouldn’t expect a great unbundling right away. In all markets, customers initially prefer highly proprietary, interdependent bundled offerings because they don’t yet know their preferences and customization they want. We don’t have any experience as a society for the most part outside of homeschoolers and increasingly hybrid homeschoolers in picking and choosing and thinking outside of a school frame of reference.It’s not surprising that you look at the state of Florida with its education savings accounts. The majority of those dollars go to full school tuitions. What’s interesting is if you look at Florida over time, fewer dollars are going to tuition. I had a conversation recently with someone in Utah, and they were seeing the same trend. That’s starting to change. The big thing is now we need the supply side of the market to catch up. We need more good school operators in there.We need more concierge-type services and more one-offs in the ways we can imagine. What’s exciting is I don’t see a way to incentivize what Diane was talking about in her first point unless we go in this direction. Otherwise, you’re asking a school to somehow pay out money to an external validator. They’re not going to want to lose those dollars. If it’s the kids and the parents saying, "I want to validate that Michael learned how to do X and show evidence of it," and it’s dollars that I get to control in a wallet, it’s greatly preferable to vouchers or tax credit scholarships, which I don’t think accomplish any of what we’re talking about.Stacey Childress:So you’re saying ESAs as a preference?Michael Horn:Strong preference. I think the other two are not. They do several things wrong. They don’t force me, as the individual, to think about value trade-offs in terms of saving the money for different offerings. When I think about Diane’s vision of separate places to validate what I’ve mastered or learned or accomplished, you can imagine in the professional world, there’s the CFA, CPA. There are longstanding credentialing bodies that we pay for to show mastery. You can imagine a flourishing of supply-side options that start to do the same thing. Colleges, employers, apprenticeship programs start to say that’s a valuable signal. That’s how we start to get around some of the accountability concerns in the longer run, by this flourishing. We have talked about the challenges with philanthropy in this country. We may find a time to come back to this topic. This calls for real patient capital to seed this marketplace and acknowledge that it’s not going to all come together at once and be comfortable with a messy transition as we get there. Diane gave one example of messy, where there’s going to be some bad spending, as though that never happens in districts today. There will be a messy transition of us trying to figure out how to do this in a way that doesn’t overstress parents and comes together. It’s not going to be an overnight process. It’s very grassroots, what you just described.Stacey Childress:Yeah, it's interesting. We'll kind of wrap up on this one based on your reflections, both of you. I do want to say I think I might be a little more skeptical than I hear the two of you being about our shared ambition for socioeconomic diversity and racial diversity in the choices that emerge. I often say, if I had more confidence in my fellow man, I'd be a libertarian. If I had more confidence in my government, I'd be a liberal. If I had more confidence in my church, I'd be a conservative. So I actually don't know where I fit on all of these.I'm not sure. I think where I get a nagging sense that the critics are likely right about this is that I don't know if, left to our own devices with ESAs as currently conceived in the policy frameworks, we're likely to get less isolation rather than more. If I had to lean one way or another, I'd say we're not likely to get more equity. I'm not certain about that. It could happen, but I'm not certain in the current climate and conception. But I do think it's interesting to consider ESA policy provisions that don't squelch their vibrancy and goodness but include some thinking about the great American experiment. It could be an interesting addition to the thinking.Michael Horn:It's a great point, Stacey, and I don't think Diane or I want to sound pollyannish on this. I'm putting words in your mouth, Diane, but I guess what I would say, and increasingly have felt, is the current way we're doing it isn't accomplishing it. So I'm willing to take a gamble.Stacey Childress:Yeah, totally. No, I'm not certain. You guys know me. I'm not defending the status as better.Diane Tavenner:No.Michael Horn:I think it's an important caveat, though, that you introduced.Stacey Childress:Yeah.Michael Horn:Yeah.Diane Tavenner:I think this is a nice segue into, Michael, the element you've picked to unpack and provide hope and solutions for. But I just want to mark, I feel like the three of us should take an action item out of this conversation so far. We have this privilege of engaging with a lot of, whether they be your students at the university level or young people, at least younger than us, who are very entrepreneurial and ambitious. There is such significant opportunity right now to conceive of new nonprofits or for-profits to create the supply that is so needed here. So I think we should all take, not that we don't already, but even extra care in nurturing and encouraging that type of entrepreneurship going forward. I just gave you an action item, Michael.Michael's Proposal: Teaching Character and ValuesMichael Horn:The best meeting is one where you assign someone else to work. Okay, so let's jump in. She's good at it. The one that I picked was the character values bucket. It was our second bucket yesterday, and it was, to use Diane's words, more macro than the social bullet that fell under the core education that, Stacey, you just tackled. To remind people, there were three big pillars we talked about yesterday. One was the basic norms and values of living with other people in society together, preparing people for adulthood.So something we often call habits of success. I've adopted Diane's language on this. Character, though certainly in the now sunsetting Character Lab, has used that phrase to encompass a lot of these characteristics. And then thirdly, being a participating member of a democratic society. The observation I made is that the public school system in many ways got its start around this particular purpose of inculcating, and I'll use that word intentionally, democratic values in the populace. The first question, can it be unbundled? I'll lead with what, in a lot of our worlds, would be the controversial statement: of course it can, because parents are the first teachers. There's that observation, but that's not where I want to sit with my thoughts, because I know a lot of families, and to your equity concerns, Stacey, that's not the entry point.Where I want to go is a different starting point. Yes, that's part of this possibility and part of the fabric. But what I want to say is, in our conversation yesterday, the flip side we observed is that while there's significant polarization and arguments against certain character education, there's actually a lot of commonality in the populace around what we agree the centerpieces of these things are. I can't remember the exact number I said, but there’s a lot of agreement. It's interesting that in education savings accounts, there's a lot of agreement at the population level that they're popular. It's just the politicians that don't necessarily agree, which is interesting.My observation is that there are two ways to approach creating a common set of democratic values, civic values, and values of how we conduct ourselves in a society with people we may or may not agree with. One is a top-down approach, almost like the Common Core approach, which aims to get alignment. The challenge I've observed is you get a lot of energy around what’s in and what’s out, and you get a lot of anger on either side that often erodes consensus. The controversial point I want to push forward is that if we took an unbundling approach, very much like what you said, Stacey, in our previous conversation about how each school community comes together and has this conversation around its purpose, and we trust that most Americans have these central values they want their kids to learn, we can get 80% of the results with 20% of the effort. This might be the most productive way to move us forward on these things we really care about in a grassroots way, rather than spending 80% of the energy trying to get the 20% to fall in line. I get it, it doesn't solve everything, but we're not solving everything at the moment either. An 80-20 rule that takes some of the tension out of the culture wars would be a really important way to go. I think education savings accounts are an interesting way to approach this. I can start to opt into school communities, and I'm going to trust that families are going to make choices where they're making sure that, for the most part, 80% of the population is saying, "I want my kids to understand the promise of the American dream, acknowledge the dark parts of our history, and strive for a more perfect union." These values are integrated into these experiences.I think this approach will open us up to a lot of innovation in terms of form factors and how it integrates. I really like your observation, Stacey, that we'll rebundle the content with the character as we unbundle other things. One question I'd love you both to reflect on, in addition to the stuff you react to, is that starting with Diane's point, we're going to do a lot for increasing agency in this country. We're going to do an incredible amount, and that's really important to thriving and having people feel better about themselves. I think the two questions we should worry about and think about are coherence among experiences, which goes to the concierge, but also content and things of that nature. The second question, which has been on my mind lately as we've watched things unfold across college campuses, is how we embed a sense of humility in kids. How do we make sure they know they're still learning and don’t know everything? The one nagging worry I have is when I see so many great interest-based school communities thriving, kids are picking things they're excited about. But when is the thing that says to them, "You don’t know X, and that’s okay"? Are we modeling things that introduce some uncertainty where they get the feedback that they can do, but also the humility to say, "I don't know everything"? I don't know if that's well articulated, but that's the one thing on my mind at the moment. I'll kick it to you all for reactions.Discussing Michael’s Proposal Stacey Childress:Go ahead, Diane.Diane Tavenner:Okay. Still processing those questions. As you were talking, Michael, and listening to this whole conversation, here’s what’s coming up for me. First of all, I can imagine what you're proposing, because like Stacey said, Transcend does this work. I did this work with Summit Learning for a number of years. I had the privilege of working with communities in just the type of experience you're talking about. It was fascinating and amazing.Diane Tavenner [00:51:46]:Communities really did come together and identify what they thought the purpose of education was. There was huge agreement, and it was a powerful experience. I could imagine this, and I've seen it with Transcend and others. What was coming up for me is we're at a point in time where the public has lost trust in most institutions in our country. Trust in institutions is at the lowest level we've seen in a long time. I hear this all the time, "I don't trust, I don't trust, I don't trust. You don't have my trust. You've broken my trust. Trust, trust, trust, trust, trust." In my experience, the only way to build trust is to do meaningful, authentic work together, which builds trust. People often say, "We have to communicate better to build trust." I don't believe that at all. Communication is important, but it is not the pathway to building trust.It's truly working together and building relationships over meaningful work. This is such a powerful idea that every school community can do. Every school community in the country is doing some sort of community engagement, whether through their accreditation, strategic planning process, or federally or locally mandated committees of parents that do work. Most of the time, that is not meaningful, authentic work that builds trust. It is box-checking, perfunctory, rubber-stamping. What if we took those existing opportunities and flipped them into true dialogues and consensus-building around what the purpose of education is? What do we actually share together, and how are we going to build that? I think that’s a very doable thing within the existing system that would go a significant way towards the vision you’re talking about and building the trust we need. Let me pause there with my reaction and turn to Stacey. I will gather my thoughts around your good provocative reflection questions.Stacey Childress:Yeah, and Michael, I want to pick up on your powerful insight about the challenges with top-down approaches at any level, but especially at the national level. They are destined for disappointment. Even though I joked about different political philosophies, I trust people with their own choices, especially parents making decisions for their kids and families. Since I joked about it, I want to make sure that’s clear. What I love about what you said, Michael, is because we trust that, and because we know top-down approaches are probably not going to be all that good anyway, and we're allergic to them as Americans, where real trust is built is on the ground, doing meaningful work together. If we give up trying to get national consensus, we're going to get it at the ground level. Where people are together every day, showing up at school or other educational options, in the grocery store, in their churches, and at community activities, they agree on 80% of important things.If the locus of shifting to a vision of learning and education that works better for kids and sets them up for long-term community living, self-sustainability, following their dreams, and being strong and productive members of our democratic society, starts where they live today, tomorrow, and 20 years from now, where we actually experience all the dynamism of being part of a pluralistic society and a functioning democracy is in our neighborhoods. I love what you said, Michael. If we ever do have the conversation about philanthropy, I think this is where we miss big time. We're looking for scale and things that can work everywhere, but scale is healthy communities doing strong work together. That leads to clarity about shared values and a vision for how to help the next generation build towards those values. As Michael said, "Yes, I'm capable of everything, but right now, I don't know everything." What are the habits of mind, skills, and habits of success that lead to that possibility at the micro level for every young person, at the building level for every school, at the community level for groups of families in schools, and then it builds up from there without feeling like we have to have national fights and mandates. I think we’ll be much more successful moving from the smaller level to a larger agreement if we're talking to each other in our communities and neighborhoods.Diane Tavenner:Awesome. Maybe I'll say a quick word on your provocation around humility in kids. I’ll leave the coherence aside and just say two words: Swiss cheese in the existing system. There’s no coherence given the way it is. On humility, here’s what came to me: the habits of success and the building blocks pyramid we often reference. One of the top building blocks is curiosity. Underneath humility is curiosity. We can cultivate that because it feels impossible to lack humility if you are truly curious. What I see across our country, and it’s not just young people, is a lot of people who act like they know everything and are not curious about other people's perspectives, lived experiences, or what knowledge they may or may not have. As a K12 educator, I believe curiosity is something you can cultivate.There’s debate about whether you can teach it, but there’s a whole suite of skills around it that curate that approach and mindset. That is where, and I would put that under both of your buckets, core education and values, character education. Working with communities across the country, curiosity often comes up as a value they care deeply about in developing young people.Michael Horn:Well, maybe as we transition out of this to our final segment of the show, I'll just say you gave me a lot more faith. Thank you. That was a very helpful answer. The other thing that occurs to me, hearing both of your reflections about the declining trust and faith in institutions and that there’s humility in recognizing we don’t know the individual circumstances of every single community and family. As my co-author in "Choosing College," Bob Mesta, likes to say when he does the jobs to be done research, you can’t imagine someone's job to be done from a kitchen table. You have to go out and shoot the movie of them living to figure out what their circumstances are. There’s no way to create blanket statements or policy that covers all those unique circumstances. I appreciate y'all digging in on this.Media RecommendationsMichael Horn:As we wrap up, I hope everyone's enjoyed it as well. We get to return to the segment we know a lot of people enjoy and have even created tracking lists around. You don’t know this, Stacey, but our recommendations for books or things that we’re watching, reading, or listening to. We’ll give Stacey a moment. Diane, why don’t you go first, then Stacey, and I'll wrap us.Diane Tavenner:I'm happy to go first. Some folks might not know that I actually lived in LA for about ten years a long time ago and lived in close proximity to the Academy Awards show every year. I used to be an avid follower but have sort of fallen off. This year my husband and I watched all ten Best Picture nominees for the 2024 awards from last year. I have been pleasantly surprised. What a spectacular lineup. There are the big banner movies like "Oppenheimer" and "Barbie," but there are so many gems in that list. We had such an enjoyable time watching all of those films.If you want a movie list, pick those ten and go through it. It’s hard to pick a favorite. I love "The Holdovers," which provides commentary on schooling and education. I love "American Fiction," and I really loved "Past Lives." It’s such a beautiful, nuanced film that is incredible. It’s a reminder that I don’t think it would be made in America. It’s not a film we would make here. What a gift of a global community to share such a beautiful film.Michael Horn:Very cool. Stacey?Stacey Childress:Yes. I have not seen "Past Lives," and I'm always a sucker for a movie about a school. So I also loved "The Holdovers." I recently finished the book called "Hello, Beautiful." It’s about four sisters in Chicago. I’m the oldest of four sisters, and the title comes from what their dad would say to them when he saw them: "Hello, beautiful." It follows them from their late teens, early twenties into their early fifties. It’s wonderfully written and beautiful, but it’s also really hard. They are very close, but as they go on their life’s journeys, things happen, and sometimes people don’t live up to high standards. There are breaks in relationships, and then suddenly you’re in your early fifties looking back, wondering where all the time went and missing your family. It was not what I thought it was going to be, and I really loved it. So, "Hello, Beautiful."Last time you guys invited me on, I was so excited about the Astros. Then the season started, and the Yankees showed up in town and literally punched them in the face, swept them in four games, and they had a hard time recovering. They are off to their worst start since 1969 when I was four years old. I’m hanging in there with my guys, but it is really hard. It’s really hard.Michael Horn:Well, you've had a run of success that most places would be envious of. We're spoiled. I’ll wrap us. I love all these. I thought, Diane, you had routinely watched all the Best Pictures, so this was a learning for me. I finally kicked back into overdrive and started reading a bunch of books. I’ll pick out "The Three-Body Problem." It sent me and a few others said I had to read it. Now it’s on Netflix as well. But I read the book first, and it definitely made me think. It made me ponder a bunch of scientific concepts, as good science fiction should. It also freaked me out a little bit. It hit all the points.Diane Tavenner:Are you going for number two and three? Because that is a trilogy, Michael, my son’s favorite all-time trilogy.Michael Horn:Is that right? We’ll talk offline about how I’m thinking about it. We’ll leave it there. Thank you for joining us on yet another epic episode. We’ll see you all next time on Class Disrupted.The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Thank you for subscribing. 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Inspired by our last conversation together on higher education, Diane Tavenner and I welcome back Stacey Childress, Senior Education Advisor at McKinsey & Co., for the first of a two-part series on the challenges facing K-12 education and promising unbundling strategies for addressing them. In this episode, we outlined the nine roles that K–12 education systems in the U.S. play and the problems schools face in playing each. We highlight the disconnect between current teaching models and the latest in the learning sciences, unravel the operational challenges schools face, stress the importance of intentionally teaching character and values, and more. If we missed anything, please let me know by writing!The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Diane Tavenner:Well, hey, Michael.Michael Horn:Hey, Diane. How are you?Diane Tavenner:I'm well. It feels like it's been a minute since we've been together here, but I am excited about how we're coming back together. We are so pleased to be welcoming back Stacey Childress to the podcast. What fun! Great to be here. We are getting the band back together again. For those of you who've been following along this season, the three of us spent two pretty extended episodes talking through the elements of higher education, the problems there, and potential solutions. We did that in response to a podcast by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz.We were all pleasantly surprised at how much great feedback we got from our listeners. They loved those episodes, enjoyed them, and wanted us to do a parallel experience for K-12. We couldn't say no to that. So here we are again, and I'm looking forward to this conversation. The last one was quite rollicking, and I suspect this one might be fun as well.Michael Horn:I'm glad, Stacey, that you chose to, against your better judgment I'm sure, rejoin us for this conversation.Stacey Childress:Listen, I'm thrilled to be here. I had such a great time with you guys last time. I heard some feedback from people I know and some people I didn't know. Through LinkedIn, people sent me messages. That's been happening in the last week, which is interesting. I'd love to do it again. I also just left that conversation feeling certainly challenged but also energized from the quality and dynamism of the discussion. So I look forward to doing it again.Michael Horn:Well, we are glad you are back. Go ahead, Diane. Introducing the Two-Part Series and the Nine Roles of Education Diane Tavenner:Michael, I should just say, I guess I'm assuming that everyone knows Stacey, but let me do a quick introduction for those of you who may have missed those episodes and don't know Stacey. Stacey is a good friend of ours and a good friend to education. She has a long, amazing history of being a teacher, a very popular professor at Harvard, and working at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, NewSchools Venture Fund, and AirDef. I could go on and on about her credentials, but most importantly, she deeply cares about what happens for our young people in America and has always been at the center of what we can do to serve them better. We are super grateful for her rejoining us.Michael Horn:Yes, indeed. With that, let's frame the episode today and get into the meat of it. For those who remember the higher ed episodes, we did two responding to the Mark and Ben podcast about the challenges facing higher ed. We reacted to those challenges they identified in the first episode and their solutions in the second episode. For this one, because we are doing it from scratch ourselves, Diane has been willing and generous enough with her time to come up with the core functions of the K-12 system, and I'll put it in air quotes. Right, it's sort of tasked with providing in this country. Diane will go through her list of, I think, nine areas at the moment. Stacey and I might supplement a little, but then we're going to dive into each one. Diane, you'll tell us why you put that on the list and the problems or shortcomings right now. We will withhold solutions and thoughts about how we can make it better until the next episode. With that as prelude, Diane, dive in. Tell us, what are your nine areas? Just give us the overview, and then we'll go from there.Diane Tavenner:Great. Thanks to both of you for your comments, feedback, and help in organizing, because, as you know, the original list was very long, and we've done some grouping. There are nine. The first six are broadly related to the student experience and their actual education and learning. The next two are more about the function and role of schools in the community and the local environment. The final one is more about the role that K-12 schools play in America. I think it's fair to say that we're focused on public schools in this conversation. Obviously, there will be some overlap with private schools, but we're here talking about public schools.Just quickly, those first six include what we're calling the core education, the role of teaching character or values to young people, the role of the school in terms of custodial care (Michael, we've talked about this several times on the podcast), and the security of those young people you're charged with caring for. Number four, we're labeling it a social services agency—school as a social services agency. Five is policymaker. I think this one's interesting to dig into in terms of the policies that schools and school systems make. Six is what we would call evaluator or recommender. We could start with six. There's a big argument about what comes first, chicken or egg.Nonetheless, those are our first six. In terms of the local community role, the first is that schools and school districts are, in many ways, local government agencies. That's a very important role they're playing. They are also a community hub. Those are seven and eight for us. Finally, we're calling it social reformer in this national role. But I'll be curious as we get into it. I think we might come up with a different name as we talk about it.So those are the nine that we've landed on for today.Michael Horn:It's a good list of nine. I'm not sure I would add much to it. Stacey, how do you think about that list before we dive into each one?Stacey Childress:Yeah, I think it's a good list. I can't think of things that aren't contained in those categories. I'm excited to dive in.Michael Horn:Let's do it. Diane, why don't you take us through that first one, which is core education? Talk to us about what's in this grouping, what's maybe not in this grouping if that's relevant. Then let's start to go deep into the problems before Stacey and I react.The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Core EducationDiane Tavenner:Great. I think when people think of schools in the most traditional sense, they think of the three R's: reading, writing, and arithmetic. This starts there and then grows a little bit. Obviously, over time, it has grown, but it is what most people think of as the most core function of a public school: to teach kids academic skills and knowledge, including reading, writing, and arithmetic. Of course, we've expanded to history, science, second languages, and I couldn't even begin to list all of the elective and interest courses that have come into schools. But there's still that core set of knowledge that is generally tested, assessed, and common across schools.Then there's also how that is done. Schools are places where lots of people come to learn together. This is not individual tutoring. So, how are you part of a community, a group, a classroom? What do those skills look like? A big part of schools has become extracurricular activities and interests—all of the activity that happens in schools for young people. Regarding core education, which is a little more about how we do it, we have a very significant and robust special education component to our system. This is driven by federal legislation providing supports, resources, and accommodations for young people who qualify for having a learning disability and therefore an individual learning plan. That is a significant part of what happens in the core program now, in terms of resources, people, focus, etc. So that's what's in this bucket.I started listing problems, and when I was at the micro level, I was getting into hundreds of them. So, I rolled it up to one big problem from my perspective. Thank you both for laughing at me. I would argue that the core education model in America, in the vast majority of schools, is just not aligned with the current science of learning. I would say on two fronts: what we teach and what we prefer to teach, and very much how we teach it and how we expect people to learn. As I went through my laundry list of all the things that were wrong, every time I thought about what was wrong, it was because we're not following the science. You can take this all the way down to the youngest kids. As the country is waking up to, we have not been using the science of how kids learn to read. We haven't been doing that in most of our schools. It's everything from that all the way up to something we are all very passionate about: how you actually personalize learning as young people get older, enable them to self-direct their learning, drive their learning, build those skills around it, and everything in between. I'll stop there, but that's my macro problem.Michael Horn:Stacey?Stacey Childress:Yeah, I definitely agree, Diane, with that as a way of thinking about an umbrella category for lots of things that we might list in more detail. Alongside that, maybe not always the choices that folks are making in the system and in schools within the system about the academic program and the social aspect of schooling and all the other things you mentioned. There's not always agreement at the community level or, if you think not quite that broadly, at the family level. What's our overarching idea as a community or bundle of ideas that school is for? How do we ensure that what we're doing every day for twelve years for young people, from kiddos all the way through late teens, is driving towards some common vision of what it means to leave our system ready to do whatever's next?Sometimes there's either ambiguity around that or, where there's more specificity, tensions and disagreements about the end goal. This can filter back through, especially at the high school level, but it can go all the way back through what frame within which we are making choices as a community and a group of professional educators about academic programs, how we're approaching the social learning aspect of school, how much emphasis and what's the mix of interest in extracurricular activities, and how these tie back with a longer-term view of purposes, skills, and mindsets that kids might leave their experience with. I think that ambiguity or lack of coalescence around purposes makes it hard to balance all those things, Diane, on your list, all of which are absolutely functions of school within its core education mission.Michael Horn:Yeah, it's interesting to hear you say that, Stacey, because my head went one way when Diane was giving the list. I was noting that as you look through the extracurricular or non-core classes in American schooling over the 1900s, it was just an ever-expanding list of classes. The proverbial grocery store analogies were so prominent in "A Nation at Risk," of course, in 1983. At some point, it became, well, actually the definition of school is how much you are learning, which shifts much more to how we teach and learn, as Diane referenced. I would argue that schools continue to expand in scope along the other eight dimensions you listed, Diane, which we'll get into later on.Another point within core education is that special education has continued to expand in terms of resources and identifying students who need special education. Diane, you spoke passionately and persuasively last season about how our incentives in special education are not around innovation, efficiency, and delivering, but around more resources and a lot of box-checking.I reflect on that expansion theme. Stacey, when you jumped in, I loved where you went with the purpose conversation. What's the purpose of this education? As you both know from my most recent book, my big argument is that communities need to have that conversation almost tabula rasa. What are we trying to go for here? They don't. Instead, they just accept the four math, four social studies, three or four science, whatever it is, and just accept these structures that have been handed down without getting behind the intent.So many of the food fights, even within the camps trying to find their way through what the science teaches us about how and what we learn, are because we are guilty of not having an "and" conversation. We're too often having an "or" conversation, talking past each other in some of these rooms, and missing the changes we could make if we started with Stacey's conversation around what we are driving toward and why. Those are my three reflections from this list. At the end of the day, it means we're teaching a bunch of things that don't have a lot of coherence. We haven't given a lot of thought to why we've privileged this branch of math over another one, and we're not following all the lessons from the science of learning. We're not incorporating them or at least trying them out with different populations to learn what works and why.Diane Tavenner:Yep. We're off to a rough start, friends, because that's the thing we're supposed to be good at. Oh, all right.Michael Horn:Well, then tell us your second one. Maybe we'll surprise you.Teaching Values and CharacterDiane Tavenner:Okay, here we go. This one we've labeled as the teaching of values and character. I almost hesitate to say those words, but I do think some of this conversation is designed to provoke a little bit. Those are provocative words in our country, as we know. It's confusing to me why because young people are in schools for a good amount of time, as you said, for twelve or thirteen years and for significant parts of their days. It seems logical to me that a school should help them figure out basic norms of being a person and being in a community beyond just the learning side. How are you preparing to be an adult and a participating member of our democracy? When public education was conceptualized, these were huge aims of what we were trying to do.We could go back in history and talk about some of the ill intentions, such as forcing certain groups of people to adapt to other norms. But at a macro level, just the idea of being a citizen of our community, our country, and our nation, and how you actually do that and become an adult, it seems logical that the school would play a role in partnering with families to help that come about. There are very significant challenges here. I've expanded to two this time, but they're still broad. The first one, for people who've been listening, will not be a surprise: I think it's the college-for-all push. In recent history, we've gotten away from preparing people for careers, employment, and life outside of school. We're so focused on preparing them for the next educational institution that we've lost focus on that front.Michael Horn:We're all going to generalize.Diane Tavenner:Systematically, right? So, I think that's problem number one. The second one is the obvious one in our current society: whose values and whose role is it to teach these things? These are not small, little bickerings; these are big societal questions, and schools are caught in the middle of them. School systems, using the fight, flight, or freeze analogy, do one of the three. Some are duking it out, some are running away as far as possible, only teaching the three R's, and some are frozen, not knowing what to do. There you have it, category two.Michael Horn:Stacey, you get to go first again.Diane Tavenner:Great.Stacey Childress:I love that fight, flight, or freeze analogy in this context. You're right, Diane. Going back to something we talked about in the higher ed episodes, the original podcast we responded to called this "moral instruction." We weren't crazy about that phrase. The podcasters had a particular point of view about it that we didn't entirely share. I'll go back to part of our discussion there. I grew up in a very religious and politically conservative part of the country and moved back here. I went to high school about 13 miles from where I'm sitting today. These issues are still fraught with challenge.Part of what I think about this is, I get why it's hard. It's hard because it's very important, and it's hard because of the multiplicity of points of view about which values and whose values. Schools are in the context of our larger political and cultural moment, which is very hard. We know it because we're trying to work through it and bridge it in our own lives with people in our families, friends, and colleagues. Of course, it's hard in schools. The flight or freeze option is not happening because, as I said about college, values are being transmitted, messaged, inculcated, shared, and massaged even if it's not intentional. As you said, Diane, kiddos are in school from a few minutes after they wake up until right before, right as, or right after their parents get home from work. It's impossible for your eight most active waking hours of the day to be values-neutral or values-free.If you are fleeing or freezing, what you're opting into is almost anything goes until somebody is mad about it. Individual educators and administrators are making almost individual choices about which values they're bringing to bear and which norms they'll prioritize or not in their classrooms or cohorts of students. That's a recipe for more tension and more upset because there's not an overarching perspective. There's not an overarching, even loose agreement about why we might be committed to ensuring that a set of values and some character attributes are prioritized in our experience. This while allowing for plenty of different perspectives and points of view across families, religious traditions, countries of origin, and other factors. Fighting over hot-button cultural issues or freezing or fleeing because it's hard and you don't want to upset anybody is missing the boat both at the micro and macro education levels. Acting as if it's not the role of schools and educators to provide some underpinning of values, character, and moral reasoning is misguided. You need to filter it through age appropriateness, but we need to be more intentional about it, not less. Lean into it with intentionality and good intentions rather than trying not to offend anybody, which usually offends more people than being intentional about what you're doing.Michael Horn:It's interesting to hear you say that, Stacey, because you mentioned age appropriateness. The last time we were recording, you said moral instruction was one of Ben's lists. The thought I had at that time, which has been borne out based on recent events, is that college is too late to build in a lot of these things we want to see students do—having civil conversations across disagreements and recognizing disagreement as a strength rather than a threat. Obviously, there's age appropriateness regarding not introducing content that is inappropriate for, say, a six- or seven-year-old. But I think building these character skills, these habits, what I think of as fundamental democratic values, is incredibly important. And to your word, intentionality—very intentionally. This was the purpose of the public school system. This is why we got public dollars.Stacey Childress:That's right.Michael Horn:To do this enterprise above anything else—preparing for careers or anything. With all the caveats that Diane alluded to, where it was misapplied and certain groups were discriminated against, the purpose was to knit us into something larger. The debate now is often, should we or shouldn't we, not acknowledging that we are. And then it's this weird pose, like the right being, "Character matters," and the left, for a period of time, was like, "I don't know about that." Now, it's the opposite: actually, it's important, and here are the values we think. And the right saying, "Wait a second." It's a weird conversation against a backdrop where I'm going to get the number wrong, but 80% of the population largely has a common set of answers for what these values are. That's what is so frustrating. It goes to your first point when we were talking about the core program. If individual school communities came together and said, "What's our purpose? Where's the agreement that we can all get behind?" My wife and I were having a conversation recently, and she said, "Isn't that great?" Or I can't remember it exactly. I said, "I don't know if they should be doing this." She said, "Good point. We ask educators to do a ton of stuff for society that probably overstretches them."I don't know if it was in reference to the bad therapy book by Abigail Schreier or what. The point, which I learned deeply from you, Diane, is that a lot of these things can be done in the context of academics rather than a special carve-out lesson that's going to offend some group. My fifth-grade graduation speech comes to mind. I remember talking about learning the value of fair play, respecting your classmates, in just the lessons themselves. David had three apples, and I took two. That sort of stuff communicates a lot of this. We pull these things apart in strange ways that provoke fights. As I've learned from Diane, you actually learn it better when it's all knit together rather than atomized. One other quick point, Diane, before you react: you also mentioned the notion of college for all distorting a lot of this, which I completely agree with. It looks like Stacey's going to jump in after this. What's interesting is that I think preparing people for careers, life, etc., outside of school is spot on. That's also a controversial statement.Many would say it can't be about those material interests or shouldn't be about whatever else it should be about. I'm not sure what they think college's purpose is. They would say it's about something larger, and college represents it. In the backdrop we are in right now, that seems absolutely crazy to me. Stacey Childress:Yeah. Diane, Michael, I'm glad you flagged that because, Diane, I was glad you named this value in the system that many of us had been working on for a couple of decades—the college for all value and the expectations we were trying to build in for students to see themselves as capable and worthy of being on a path to college. The Ed reformers from 1995 to 2015 had college for all as a driving purpose. I always try to be cautious about this and say it wasn't in a vacuum.It was in the context of very real national data that showed up in medium and small ways at the state, local district, and school levels, where you had significant gaps in outcomes. If you traced them back, you could see why those outcomes were so different because we developed a great way of sorting kids pretty early, before they were preteens.Michael Horn:Yeah. Deeply disturbing ways, right?Stacey Childress:Deeply disturbing ways. You're either on the path to college, which only a small percentage of you are headed towards, and the rest of you, well, we'll do other things for you. Much of policy in general and different sorts of social issues and reform efforts end up being these pendulum swings. To counteract that undesirable state we were in 30 years ago, we ended up narrowing our focus. We've got to get everybody to college or at least ensure everybody could go to college. It's hard to do all the things on our top six things that we're going to talk through. We're only on the second one. It's hard to do all of them, so we focused on a few things. Let's do reading and math to ensure our kids are ready to take important tests that will make or break this college-for-all path.When it comes to character or whatever other words we use, it's in service of good grades and doing well on tests—the persistence, grit needed to get to and persist in college. I don't mean to suggest those things are bad, but because we narrowly focused and hyper-engineered an accountability system around it, we ended up in a place where a broader notion of what it means to be a successful human, a young adult who has what they need to choose a path and navigate it effectively, got chipped away. So the three of us and a lot of other great folks we've been on this journey with have been pushing in a different direction or an adapted direction. It does have values embedded in it. That's why I was glad you put it here. Those values affect young people, families, and educators. I talked too much on the last podcast, so I won't do it again.Custodial CareDiane Tavenner:No, it's a robust conversation, and I think we are too ambitious when we begin, but I will encourage us to pick up the pace here on these next ones. Those are two big ones, and probably the rest are as well, but maybe we might not be as passionate about them. Let me go to number three. I'll start with the problem here. No passion here, conflict with the first two elements in many ways. This third one is the role that the school system plays in providing custodial care. If we're going to be provocative like Ben and Mark, we'd say babysitting. With that comes the obligations around protecting the security and safety of young people. That's two levels at least now: their physical safety and emotional, actually three, as well as their data and privacy. This is as big in the virtual world as it is in the physical world in many ways. The biggest problem here is that people who work in schools, for the most part, don't want to do this job. They don't conceptualize it as their job. They don't like it, and they don't do it terribly well, probably because they don't like it and don't want to do it. Most school people think of themselves as academic teachers, learners, not babysitters or security guards.I think that's one of the biggest problems. The conflict is that families want and expect this. It's also not done well because the people doing it don't want to do it. I'll stop there.Stacey Childress:Yeah. You want me to go? You want to stay in our order?Diane Tavenner:Michael?Stacey Childress:I would say a couple of things about this. I don't have children in our public schools. I see all these videos now. I'm not on social media often, but when I am, I see these videos. If I went by that, I would assume not just our high schools but especially our high schools are in chaos with physical safety concerns. Thinking about the physical safety of kids from each other, and sometimes from teachers, and teachers from students. I don't know how widespread that actually is. I have educators in my family. They teach younger ones, and I do not hear these stories about their schools.But I see these videos, so there is a sense in the popular consciousness that at least our high schools are out of control. Part of the contributing factor, maybe the biggest driver, is discipline policies. I know we'll talk about policy later, but the approach schools have been taking to ensure good community order in the building has changed over the last decade to think more about restorative practices and ways of building community through tough moments rather than just a punishment philosophy. There’s this tension playing out and who knows where it's headed. It's not only physical safety from outside in, but physical safety from kids, kids from each other. What it makes me think about is school shootings. You know that some young people in my family were high school students in a school shooting in our hometown back in 2018. There's so much to talk about there, which we're not going to, but the idea that kids are a danger to each other.In my niece's situation, the shooter was a student, an 11th grader that people had known since third or fourth grade. It wasn't an outside threat. That shifted the culture of the community and the school, with kids as dangers to each other. The stakes and incentives that creates around safety result in an enormous amount of community time, attention, emotion, and real dollars. The dollars have to come from somewhere, so they come from something else, probably those things we were already talking about, academics, values, etc. The interplay between physical safety and what we have to do to signal to the community that we're providing safety and what it turns our view of young people into, and therefore, how that affects the culture of the school, is a uniquely American problem right now, and a real one, certainly for the concrete reason of physical safety but also this cultural notion of how we think about our schools and young people. We used to have fire drills when we were kids, and now active shooter drills start as early as they can.So there's a real issue here. I've already spent too much time on it, but it's a real challenge that our professional educators are facing day in and day out in their communities.Michael Horn:I'll try to be brief, but just pulling from that, I'm having a déjà vu moment because it occurs to me the three of us were at an elevator in a hotel about a year ago having this very conversation, and it spurred Diane and me to have a podcast on the issue you just talked about, Stacey.Stacey Childress:Yes, folks should go back and listen to that. It was very good.Michael Horn:So, with that acknowledgment, the couple of things I would say are, one, the tension in this one seems ironic at this moment in our society's history, between the childcare piece, not having adequate hours or time and availability for the working families of today, and on the other end, chronic absenteeism being the highest it's ever been that I can remember. Those are two things in direct tension with each other. It connects to a couple of things here, which is, it connects to the safety and discipline piece of this. It connects to the formation of character in the second one. It connects to the relevance of the curriculum in the first one, and whether people have passion for this and see a place for it in their lives. That all connects to mental health, which then connects to the shootings.So these three actually connect in interesting ways. The last piece is this is yet another place where we fight a lot on the edges with each other. One of the fights is the restorative justice, don't discipline versus the zero tolerance policy. A lot of people pushing for restorative justice get lumped in with the restorative view, but that's not quite what they're saying. Like Dr. Becky or someone like that, they believe in consequences for actions and hard lines and limits. They just don't believe in arbitrary ones that have nothing to do with what you just did. Again, there's this third way through these poles that we keep missing. Maybe I'll just leave it there.Diane Tavenner:Yeah. It's hard not to go to solutions, and it's hard to do all of these in short periods.Michael Horn:Sorry, I jumped.Diane Tavenner:Right.Michael Horn:Let's get to the next one. Because it connects also to these.Social Services ProviderDiane Tavenner:It does. It's deeply connected because, quite frankly, a big element of schools' purpose, or at least what they're spending their time and resources on, is essentially as a social services agency. When we go through the responsibilities of most schools and districts, transportation—many school districts run full transportation fleets. Meals—they are serving not just lunch anymore, but breakfast and oftentimes snacks. They're providing full feeding of large numbers of people and some basic health elements.So, they're testing your eyesight, for lice, and dealing with all of the COVID-related issues. Schools literally turned into clinics. I'm not even going to talk about how I felt when California started encouraging every high school to have the ability to administer Narcan if there's a drug overdose. What more, please? Schools have always played this role, but it's more complex now. They have to connect families and children to other agencies that support them, especially during crises. Let's not forget the role of schools as mandated reporters. It is incumbent upon schools and everyone in them to report if they suspect child abuse or neglect. Some schools now employ social workers, counselors, and school resource officers. So, they're running huge systems that go well beyond just the classroom.The most obvious challenge here is that these are operationally intensive endeavors. They require a whole set of skills and knowledge that are not necessarily aligned with everything we just talked about. Most people in schools don't want to do these extra jobs. They feel extra, on the side, added on. When you treat jobs that way, without operational efficiency and excellence, they don't get done well, which ends up being this whole spiral.So, those are the big problems.Stacey Childress:Yeah. I have nothing to add on this one. I agree completely with your explanation and identification of problems.Michael Horn:Yeah, I'm in the same boat. I think this is maybe the best evidence of the expanding nature of what we have thrown on schools. Every social ill, it seems, we ask schools to solve. This is where we have thrown another one. I'm not sure they can completely get out of thinking about these things if they're trying to accomplish the first three, which we can get into maybe in the second episode.So, Diane, why don't you march on?PolicymakerDiane Tavenner:Great. A lot of tension there. Number five shifts us to what we're calling policymaker. I think later, I'm going to offer a local government agency. Some people might say, what's the difference between the two? Aren't those the same? Let me make the case for why I have separated them here. When people talk about government, they spend a lot of time thinking about the federal government, less time thinking about their state government, and even less time thinking about county government. We're talking about people in school buildings and on school boards who are literally making policy decisions regularly that have the biggest impact on the lives of children and families. Everything from grading policies, discipline and behavior policies, and health and safety policies. All of those decisions during COVID were made at local school and school district levels, generally with guidance from the federal and state governments.One of the challenges we had was that they didn't actually tell us what to do. They gave us guidance, and then we had to decide what to do, which basically meant they told us what to do but gave us no cover for doing it. Local people have a lot of power to create policies that impact families. For example, when schools and districts decide to have professional development during the workday, parents have to pick their kids up at noon or whatever schedule. To your point about not being family-friendly in terms of care and things like that.The problem here is that under any circumstance, good policy is hard to write. I would challenge anyone who has never written a policy to try to do it and see how hard it is. We have about 130,000 schools and almost 14,000 districts. We do not have people who are well-resourced experts capable of writing the best policies under hard circumstances. Instead, you get whatever people think sounds good, and the implications are extreme.Stacey Childress:Yeah, totally agree with that. The policymaker, the local school district, plus any school-based policies are the biggest policy influence on the day-to-day life of families. It dictates what time people get up in the morning because whatever time school starts, you have to count backwards from that. Wake-up time is dictated by the school schedule and then on from there. We just make it very concrete and embedded in our lives. One of the things that was so hard about COVID, or a thing about COVID that was difficult for families, was just how central school policy was in their family clock and calendar. Diane Tavenner:Right.Stacey Childress:When you go with what you said, Diane, I totally agree with just how hard it is to make good policy at any level. It's hard, and we ask folks to—well, it's their job, it's their responsibility as board members and educators—to make policies that touch every family with a school-age child in their community without a lot of support and knowledge building. It's very complex, and we have it here. It could be elevated depending on how you want to structure a list.It does flow through almost everything: grading, course schedule, graduation requirements, all the things.Michael Horn:Yeah. I don't know that I have much to add. It spills into transportation or transportation spills into it, and all these things just show how interdependent these are. What I'll observe is that pulling them out and naming them, Diane, in this way is useful because we see all of the complexity and all of the possible areas for breakdown. As you said, people aren't trained to do a lot of these roles, and yet they are core functions that they have been asked to play or defaulted into playing in many cases. With that, let's go into your sixth, which I think is sort of an exclamation point for a bunch of these.EvaluatorDiane Tavenner:Well, and it sort of rounds out the student experience grouping. I could have led with this one because then everything sort of falls from it. The role of the school district in K-12 is to evaluate young people—their skills, their knowledge, their character, etc.—and to recommend them for what comes next in their life. This is a profound role that the school and the people in it are playing in terms of the outcomes and lives of young people and their families. This is true in terms of determining the grades of kids, which we know makes a big difference. They confer the credential on them. They make recommendations to colleges and employers. The quality of their school signals to those other folks the type of education that the young person has received and the experience they've had.Okay, there's a problem with every one of those things. They assign grades, but this is discounted now because of grade inflation. They assign the high school credential, but that isn't valued in our society anymore, so it's pretty meaningless. They write recommendations for colleges, but those are undervalued, partly because it's the same people having to write them over and over again with no time to do it and not a lot of resources. They all start to sound the same. In fact, a lot of people kind of copy and paste, and colleges know that. So those are undervalued. There's this huge, giant role that they're playing, but no one values them playing it. What I would argue is the most important—and this is sad to me—role that K-12 is playing, and this is primarily high schools, is the reputation they have. Colleges and universities have these perceptions about high schools, mostly aligned to the socioeconomic status of the student population, of how good those schools are. They factor that into their admissions decisions. There's this giant, important role that all this time and energy goes to that I would argue is not actually being valued or used in meaningful ways. Big problem.Michael Horn:Stacey, would you like to jump in?Stacey Childress:Yeah, I totally agree with that. I think when we go to solutions in the next episode, we can get a little more detailed about how some of these components of this function play out and how we could do it differently. It's interesting, Diane, this last one that you mentioned about school reputation being the signaler, especially to those applying to selective colleges. Then you tie that to the higher ed conversation we had on the last episodes. It's a very small percentage of kids go to a selective college. Even in the college for all concept, it is a very small percentage of institutions, higher ed institutions that fall in that bucket. So then what about for everybody else? What's happening here with this evaluator recommender function? It's a weak signal.Back to some of the other things we talked about, not very intentionally conceived and organized around outside of compliance. Transcripts have to get created and all that kind of stuff. Like, what's. So what are the use cases for a credential and to what end? And how does that backward map to things we might do in the core education component and then the social component?Michael Horn:So, yeah, that's interesting. The compliance observation. When I was looking at this, I was struck by two things. One, Diane, question: Would you put the counseling function, the guidance counseling function here, would you put it in courses? Would you put it in social service agency, all three, because that's something we know schools are tasked with doing. But do it. I mean, we know the ratios are like 400 something to one students, to guidance counselors. But it seems to fall into a bunch of these.And so this is the one where I thought to mention it, because you have this signaler or helping shape, right, where students will go after in this one. And then I guess the other one that occurred to me was this last bullet that you had as well. I heard Raj Chetty speak recently, and I hadn't focused on this before, but he put the slide up of schools that disproportionately get their students into selective colleges. And I had just assumed. I live in Lexington, Massachusetts. I had just assumed Lexington high School, closer to where you live, Diane, Palo Alto High School. I just assumed that they would be on par, frankly, with the top private schools, and they're not.And I was struck by that statistic. It's like, basically a title one Lexington high school sort of count for about the same andover. Whoa. Okay. Now, that counts for a lot. And so I thought that was just interesting against this backdrop then that you mention it. And it seems to me, obviously incredibly problematic because it's completely decoupled, as we know, with the actual work that students are, in fact, doing. And the rate of, as Ryan Craig would call it, the distance traveled.Right. We would call it growth, but of individual students and what that might signal about where or where not would be a good fit for them.Diane Tavenner:On the positive front, I think this category is ripe for solutions, and there's a big opportunity there. So I'm excited to talk about it when we get into the next episode. Local Government Agency Diane Tavenner:So that sort of rounds out the experience of the young people. Now I want to shift to two that are more about the local community and the role that schools play there. And so this first one is what we're calling local government agency. And I just want to tick through the role that schools and districts play. So, number one, they generally have elected school boards. So we've got a full election that's going on. And this seated board that holds public meetings and are beholden to all of those public meeting laws and rules and regulations and all that goes on there. I will just quickly say that many superintendents say that they spend literally half their time, this is the chief executive of a school district.They will argue that they spend half their time managing their board and those meetings. So take that. The next thing that they do at schools and school districts, most of them can levy taxes, they can issue bonds. I mean, these are government agencies taxing the people. Maybe the most important role of the government in the US or the thing we take most seriously schools can do. They also are required for collecting an extraordinary amount of data and reporting it at the local, state and federal level. This goes on and on all year long. It keeps getting bigger and bigger every year.They are, when we think of this, they are entrusted with significant dollars, state and federal dollars. I was talking to a state superintendent the other day, she, as the chief learning officer, the state superintendent of instruction controls half the state's budget. And that is not abnormal. Most states are spending about half their budget on education. These are significant dollars that these boards and these people are entrusted to spending. Well, thoughtfully, etcetera. And then finally, they control huge amounts of the public land, you know, and it depends on the state and how that goes. But in some cases, they are even the people who perform the tasks of zoning and entitling land.Diane Tavenner:This is the role that the city or the state is often playing for everyone else. But, you know, schools can get exemptions and do that themselves in a lot of cases and places. And so massive, massive governmental roles that schools and districts are playing. And as I thought about this one, I just, I think about my experience in schools and how people who do things like this that involve a lot of money and a lot of land, I would argue, and I'm not going to give a value judgment here, but that is more valued by our society than educating people or providing care for children. Like, when we think about who do we think is more professional, who do we pay more, who do we get? You know, it's the people on the side of the land and the money. So if you revere that a little bit more, where will your time and attention go in a system? But to that, in my experience, there's very little connection between the six things we just talked about.And this part of the house, and there's very few people who work on it in K12. And I contrast that to our conversation about higher ed, where one of the critiques was, we're starting to see like a one for one, an administrator for every student, not so in K12 at all. So you have far fewer people with different areas of expertise kind of disconnected from the mission and the purpose doing all of these functions. That's a big problem in my mind.Stacey Childress:Yeah. I don't have data in front of me, but I want to push a little bit on that last point you made, Diane. I think this is where a broad brush might smooth out a lot of variability. So what you described, with far fewer people charged with managing, governing, asset, revenue generating, and liability functions, with far more educators, where these fewer positions are paid a lot more. I think in midsize to small communities, that's probably right. In medium to small size school systems around the country, it might break a little bit when you get to the largest school districts in the country. If you look at the 100 or 200 largest school districts in significant metro areas around the country or in those large counties in Florida and Maryland, there are a lot of administrators. You start to get ratios that are closer.So if you look at the headcount allocation in large systems like that, classroom fair headcount FTEs as compared with non-classroom FTEs, you get closer to that one to one or sometimes even one plus to one. But your point is well taken. Depending on system size, it might look different in most places. What you said, I think, is exactly right. The other contrast I've made is I agree with the way you framed it. As educators, their value in terms of what we are willing to pay and the people who manage this stuff in the school district, that's one comp. Another comp would be, some of these places, like the larger mid-size and the large ones, we're talking billions of dollars of assets in terms of real estate, physical plant, cash debt, all of those things. You're looking at 300 grand for somebody to be the head of one of these systems. That fits in the public sector. But start to think about the private sector. Somebody who's got billions of dollars of assets under management that they are accountable for, then you put the extra, what should be accountability and transparency of it being my tax dollars and yours and yours and all of ours are actually kind of underpaid. Well, I will be underpaid in terms of the kind of judgment, leadership ability, ability to bring people along into some of these, public levees that we need to do and the kind of expertise at the general management level to even know what right questions to ask, of the financial people who are managing all these assets. I can see it both ways. Underpaying educators relative to administrators. Yeah, maybe underpaying some of these administrators relative to comparable jobs in the private sector, managing this level of resources and complexity. I don't know. I could make that case, too.Michael Horn:It's interesting, Stacey. I was just thinking about AI as it comes in and perhaps maybe changes some of these dynamics. We want more human-facing roles, and some others can change because I had the same reaction as you did. I think of places like in New York City or Newark, where it's like half the dollar doesn't even reach the school. It gets stuck in central admin and what the heck is going on there? The second thing I had more as a problem because I think this is a good one to identify, Diane, is how many of these places, like the elections are off cycle. Voting is not very high, and yet you realize what a disproportionate impact.Stacey Childress:Yes.Michael Horn:These places play in our society and they're kind of decoupled from the democracy. Sometimes we hear an argument, oh, I just wish you were out of politics. Well, guess what? When it's public dollars from taxpayers, it's part of politics. We can hate it, but it is. We've done a lot to sort of take it out of the politics, and I'm not sure that that's been a good thing given to your point, the gravity and enormity of some of these decisions.Diane Tavenner:Yeah. Just to close this one, I've spent a lot of time in school board meetings over my career, and I think it's just so clear, the tension and a charge that I think is an impossible charge where you have, like this school board that is in the same meeting deciding, if an individual student is going to be expelled from a school and considering whether or not they should sell or buy a gigantic piece of land and whether or not they're going to exempt themselves from zoning and then how to spend bazillions of dollars. There's a problem with that. That's what your regular school board looks like.Stacey Childress:Absolutely. As you were kind of tying those two things, might want something. Michael was saying, what you just said, Diane. Oftentimes, school board election turnout is in the single digits. It can pop up above that in some smaller communities where there's a lot of, but not much like it's still a pretty low percentage of people in a given catchment area that are actually making these decisions about who is going to do all of these very critical functions indeed.Community HubsDiane Tavenner:All right, number eight, staying with this community theme, schools are a hub of communities. They are a centerpiece of many, many communities. When you get to smaller communities and rural communities, they literally are the heart of the community in many cases. If we have seen this over time, when anyone tries to close a school, even in a large city, the response from the community is generally overwhelming in terms of trying to protect that school from closure. So community hub is a huge role, partly because oftentimes schools are a very significant employer, a regional employer in some cases, and a union employer. So this is a significant role they play. They also are a huge part of something that everyone cares about, which is traffic. The comings and goings and the traffic are always a big issue around schools.As we've talked about, a lot of things happen in schools and their buildings and their campuses, everything from they are the polls, polling places in most cases where democracy is where we do go to vote, they host a whole bunch of events for communities and become the place of that. So this community hub is a significant role they play. The problem I would point out here, in addition to what we've already talked about, which is just like mission creep and capability and all of those things, is oftentimes we talk about in schools that adult interests get put above those of students. I think you start to see it here, where a lot of this is much more about the people in the community and the adults who are working there than it is about the kids. Those interests will preempt those of young people on a variety of topics.Stacey Childress:Yeah. Nothing to add there, Diane.Michael Horn:Yeah. The only thing I would say is there's a parallel to higher ed, right? Small colleges in danger of closing in many areas, many of these in rural areas. The argument you hear, we got to save them, is employment, not some deeper community value necessarily, which I think speaks to the dynamic. Not to say that employment isn't a deep community value. It is in service of what, right? So I think that's often a question.Pathway to the American DreamDiane Tavenner:All right, well, let me bring us home then with number nine. Now we're going to zoom way out to schools and back to the beginning, Michael, of maybe the original purpose of them or some of the original purposes at the most inspirational level. Public schools are the way that Americans achieve the American dream. The idea is that every single American can go to school, a good public school, and have the opportunity to achieve whatever they want to achieve. There aren't doors closed to them. Everything is possible. The American dream is possible because of our public education system. I think over the years, we've sort of layered onto that.People have built on that and added onto that, you know, this is the place where we actually bring socioeconomic classes together in public schools. And this is where we mix as people and as a community. Stacey, you cited the reformers of the last 20-ish years, or we're moving out of that era. We're not sure what's coming next, but kind of Clinton, Bush, Obama eras. Many people I know have often referred to public education as the civil rights issue of our time. So it is that significant and big that the aspiration and expectation of public education. I guess I would start, I would open the problem conversation here with the idea that I think we have a growing amount of evidence that the system that is public education today is actually producing results that are counter to those aspirations I just named. They might actually be doing harm rather than good. The system might be producing those results.Certainly we can go into depth there, but I will just leave it there for the two of you.Stacey Childress:Yeah. Yeah. I think this is a great one to spend a little time on next time. What we might do, what, if anything, we might do differently, going forward here. That civil rights issue of our time was very grand. It's kind of a messianic evangelical plea, I think, with all good intentions. You're trying to mobilize a broad coalition for improvement, change, transformation because many of us believed, lots of us believed, and I think still believe to some degree, that part of the promise of America is that if you work hard, play by the rules, get a good education, anything's possible for you. There's something deeply American about that notion. Even though we've got shifting ideas of what the American dream might be, I think the power of that as a concept is still quite salient. Even though it might be in transition to some updated definition, it's still a very powerful mobilizer. Part of my stump speeches for years was a quote by Barbara Jordan, who said, "All Americans want, what Americans want from their country is just an America that lives up to its promise."Diane Tavenner:Yeah.Stacey Childress:Which is small and enormous. Then I would say, part of that promise is a free, high-quality public education near you in your neighborhood. That was my kind of some of the animating instinct behind entrepreneurship for education. The ed reform crowd from, as you said, '95 to about 2015, like, we all talked about it maybe in slightly different ways, but it was that chief animating function. Again, it's kind of, as Michael said, back to the beginning of why we ended up with public schools that then became compulsory high schools that then was, like, kind of embedded in this notion. I think there's some critique of this both on the left and the right politically these days. On the right, the grandiose, progressive project of improving everyone all the time is kind of suspect, and on the left, what is the American dream, anyway? Who gets to decide? Are these institutions so kind of rotten at their core from the beginning, in their design that, of course, they're producing these inequities? It's what they were designed to do in the first place.I think there's contested ground. But, you know, as we said, on some of these other things, I think there's, I won't call it the great middle or I just think most Americans would still agree. Let me say it even differently. I think most parents and caregivers who have children in schools from pre-K to 12th grade have some things they agree on about what our public schools are for. If kids are going to be in school for 12, 13, 14 years, depending on whether they start at three or four years old, kindergarten, there are some things about our country, about our society that we want kids to understand, feel great about, be challenged maybe by some of the tougher moments in our history, and want to work to make those things not true in the future. That there's some role for our schools to still be that kind of aspirational meeting point, great leveler among different socioeconomic statuses, where in this country, you can still be anything you want to be if you show up, work hard, work with others, figure out where you want to go, and our schools should help you get there. I think there is an element of social reformer. I still can't think of a better word for it. There is one.I just can't think of it. Like reformer sounds, again, it sounds so 1920s progressive, and we're going to technocratically fix everything through our institutions, which I'm not a huge believer in that, on balance. But I still find something very inspiring about the underlying concept here. If almost every young, well, whether it's private or public, everybody except the percentage of kids that are homeschooled, goes to school starting certainly no later than five or six years old, and they stay there until they're 17 or 18, the things that are going on in those years during the daylight hours, autumn means something for who we are as a country and who we could be. So anyway, I'm starting to preach again, so. But it's still, you know, I'm still very sappy about it.Diane Tavenner:Yeah.Michael Horn:Yeah. No reason to run from that, right? I think the only two observations I would have here are one, when I saw this on the list, Diane, I thought of the zip code, one that you mentioned that everyone should have a great option for them in their zip code. I guess I thought of something different, which is I thought of our broader trends in society around segregation. We know the history with racial segregation, of course, but the bigger segregation we live in with right now is not race. It's one of ideology and political party, and that we, in fact, don't live in districts where we mix with people who generally think differently from us. So we don't have these conversations or are forced to compromise and live with each other at the Little League fields and in the schools, and sort of live up to what Stacey just was sketching. I guess that's the second thing that I've been wondering about a lot, which is, you both echoed the rhetoric that we used to have of the civil rights issue of our time. I guess I've been thinking a lot about what's the causality? Is it actually the opportunity, maybe above, that drives education to be in service of it, or is it the education that creates? I'm sure it's a bit of both. But going back to your original observation, and I'll end my thought here, Diane, is if we're not teaching in line, like, if we're not running an institution set to, you know, fundamentally around learning, we don't have a great what you learn or how you learn it, maybe it isn't actually driving the causality and the success in the American dream we've historically had. So I guess then that's a difficult set of questions. Is it in service of, and that's where we need to be asking our questions, or can it be different and actually drive this in a more positive direction going forward? That I think we all would hope because we all spend a lot of time on it, so.Diane Tavenner:Well, that's a good place to wrap today. Thank you both for wading through my list with me. And if folks have hung in with us this long for an extended episode, we appreciate you and hope you will come back for number two, where we're actually going to talk about solutions that are both already beginning and that we see might be possible and opportunities. So thank you.Michael Horn:We'll leave it with that. Right. Thanks for joining us in Class Disrupted. We'll see you 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.

Brittany Miller and Jasmine Walker of the Southern Education Foundation's (SEF) outcomes-based contracting initiative joined me to discuss how this innovative approach, which ties financial payments to educational outcomes, is shaping the future of education funding and accountability. We dive into how outcome-based contracts works across different types of educational services, what sets SEF’s work apart, and why now is an opportune time for districts to get on board.Paying vendors based on student outcomes has long been one of my big pushes to school districts. It’s among the reasons I get excited by folks like Joel Rose and Teach to One who say they’d be thrilled to be paid based on outcomes. But so many superintendents have always asked me back: how can we actually do this? Brittany and Jasmine give some great answers—and helped me understand why past efforts in outcome-based contracts haven’t worked.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 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 this today… I'm excited about this topic because I feel like as far back as 2009 or 2010, after Disrupting Class had come out, I would be on the stump talking with district superintendents and the like, thinking about the importance of mastery-based learning, outcomes and stuff like that. I'd say, well, why don't you sign your vendors to outcome-based contracts? They would all look at me like how would we do that? And I didn't know the answer. So to help us think through that today, I'm tremendously excited because we have two individuals who are doing that on a daily basis. We have Brittany Miller. She's the director of the Southern Education Foundation's Outcomes-Based Contracting Initiative, so literally called the name that we want to talk about.And we have Jasmine Walker, who is the Senior Manager for the Outcomes-Based Contract Initiative work, and she's done this in Duval County, Florida, as well, which we'll hear about. So, Brittany and Jasmine, thank you so much for being here. It's great to see you both. Brittany Miller:Yeah, thank you for having us. We're excited to chat.Brittany and Jasmine’s Journey to the WorkMichael Horn:You bet. I'm excited to learn, so let's dig in with that. Before we get into some of the nitty gritty, Brittany, why don't I start with you? Tell us about how you got into this work. I understand that you put some of this into action in a previous position in Denver before you joined the Southern Education Foundation. I'd love to hear about your journey into this work.Brittany Miller:Absolutely. Prior to joining the Outcomes-Based Contracting Initiative on staff, I was a district leader participating in our cohorts, which is the way that we primarily teach outcomes-based contracting to districts. In that pilot cohort, Jasmine was my counterpart in Duval doing the same work that I was doing in Denver in that original cohort. What we were doing is we had just found out about all of the Esser financing that we were going to be getting for the district to support student learning recovery. I had just launched a new department, the Expanded Academic Learning department. With that, we had several initiatives that were focused on student learning recovery outside the traditional core instruction. One of those was high-impact tutoring. We had been involved in the feasibility work that happened out of Harvard University originally. I let out our first outcomes-based contracts for mathematics for our students in grades 4 - 12 with a virtual tutoring vendor, where I think it ended up being about 50% of the contract was contingent on meeting agreed upon student outcomes. So I learned a lot about how to reframe that conversation with a provider to focus on what I know best as a district leader, which with an instructional background is not contracting. What I know best is student learning. When you bring that to the forefront of the contract and you focus on what you want to be true for students, it just shifts that relationship between provider and district. Even down to the school level so that we can all be accountable to the same thing and be really clear about that. So then I was hooked and continued to apply OBC principles to my work in DPS until I ended up coming over and. And had the pleasure of coaching Jasmine through her first semester of implementation of OBC. And now here we are.Michael Horn:Wow. So, Jasmine, I want to hear your story into this as well.  Like Brittany just said, I understand you had done some of this work in Duvall County and it was also around tutoring. Also around mathematics, I believe. So tell us about your journey into this.Jasmine Walker:Yes. So I was first introduced to outcomes based contracting by my superintendent and deputy superintendent. They had heard about the work that was being done through the pilot, and due to COVID and all the things that took place there, we kind of delayed. We ended up joining that first cohort of districts that were learning about outcomes based contracting and how to use it as a lever within our districts. Specifically around those Esser funds and how we can use it for high-impact tutoring. During that time, I was the K-12 math director in Duval County. As I reviewed our data, we had a critical concern about how our students in middle school were performing in mathematics, specifically, those students that were enrolled in 8th-grade mathematics. Typically in our district, what would happen is students that were enrolled in 8th-grade mathematics, were actually students who were performing below grade level, because students who were performing at or above grade level, were in accelerated classrooms. As 8th graders, they would enter Algebra 1, where students that were enrolled in pre-algebra, as an 8th grader, their start, and access to Algebra 1 was being delayed. Some made it into Algebra 1 in 9th grade.Others weren't accessing Algebra 1 until 10th grade. And we all know that Algebra 1 is that gatekeeper course. If you can't get through it, it lessens the opportunity for other areas of mathematics, other coursework, like science, and then, as we look at students later on in life, what they have access to. What we wanted to do with our outcomes-based contract was change what was happening for our students in Duval County. Also have strategic use of the dollars that we were using through Esser so that we were tying our funds to student achievement.The Nuts and Bolts of Outcomes-Based ContractingThe 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, because we know the use of ESSER funds has become a bit of a flash button issue across the country in terms of were they really aligned to outcomes, and there you put it into the contract. So I'd love to dig into what these arrangements look like that you're putting in place. Brittany, you mentioned that 50%, I think, of the agreement was contingent on outcomes, but just talk to us about what these agreements look like. Brittany, why don't you go first, and then, Jasmine, on this one, you can supplement the answer.Brittany Miller:Yeah, so the way that we set up the arrangements as district leaders and then how we coach our districts that we work with now on this is, to start with what matters most to the student population that you want to serve. Everything is literally grounded in that initial concept. We do all of that before we open up what we call a rate card calculator, which is the dynamic pricing tool we have that helps districts price the outcomes. Essentially, once the district has decided on the student population and the outcomes that they believe students can achieve by participating in the intervention, then we coach them through putting together a rate card, which articulates to the provider how much money will be available as a base payment for services delivered, more like your traditional contract that you would have. And then the other portion of payment, we recommend at least 40%. A lot of our districts have been pushing that further to be contingent on agreed upon student outcomes. And so those payments are not delivered until after student data is available and you see whether or not students submit the outcomes. So that's, like, at a very base level, what it looks like. But there's a lot of different elements of both technical and adaptive work that goes into making those decisions as a district and then negotiating that with a provider, either via RFP or contract renegotiation, all of which leads to this mutual accountability between the district provider and school to land on those student outcomes.Mutual Accountability and Continuous Improvement  Michael Horn:You've both actually mentioned this mutual student accountability several times at this point. Jasmine, I'd love to talk. Have you talk to us about this? Because on the surface, I think when I hear these contracts, I think, well, this is putting the vendor accountable. How are you structuring it so that the district and school and everyone has skin in the game as well in the same way?Jasmine Walker:So I wanted to add on to what Brittany said and then go a little bit deeper into accountability. So one of the things that is different, like the big shift in mindset when it comes to outcomes based contracting that districts are having to make, is that they are paying for outcomes and not services. The district is driving the price because they're saying, this is what we're willing to pay for these outcomes. So that is a big shift, even for myself as a former district leader from traditional contractors. I just wanted to share that. And something that we always tell districts is this is like our slogan, if you will. We say, we buy outcomes, not services. And that's how we begin to shift toward that agreement of mutual accountability, because what we want is both parties to have skin in the game.So when we talk about mutual accountability, especially if we're doing like an RFP or bid documents, the district lays out what are things that they need from the provider in order to ensure that we're working towards meeting student outcomes. But in the same token, these are the things that the district is going to do in order to ensure that the conditions that are needed for the provider to be successful happen. Also in the RFP, the provider can say, hey, these are some additional things that we're going to need from the district to ensure that we can do what we need to do for our services or our products to work. So that's something that is very clear, that's laid out in an RFP and in a contract, so that the contract becomes more sticky, if you will, because you're clarifying what both parties are responsible for. So in the past, district took on all the risks they paid regardless of whether any outcomes were achieved. Now that responsibility is being shared. At the end, hopefully win win situation, students achieve the outcomes providers incentivize for their innovation and the work that they put into ensuring that students achieve those outcomes.Michael Horn:So stay with that for a moment. Jasmine, if I can go to you one more on this, which is what happens then, if, say, the district doesn't fulfill their side of the bargain, what's the upside for the vendor or protection, if you will, for the vendor in that circumstance?Jasmine Walker:Michael, I'm glad you asked about that because there is something that's built into the contract to support that work as well, because we all know things happen. So there's language written into the contract that says if certain things don't happen, the district will be responsible for not only paying that base payment, but those contingent payments for the students that were involved as well. So, like, an example that I'll use is when we talk about high impact tutoring, in order for students to receive tutoring, they actually have to be at school, or if it's virtual, they have to actually get on the computer. A provider doesn't have control of that. Who does have some control of that is the school. So laying in some language that where a district says attendance will be at 80% and so that they have a metric that they have to meet in order to ensure, again, that they're providing the necessary conditions for the provider to do, to meet those expectations that were laid out in the contract, those outcomes. Additionally, something else that is built in and part of our, a part of OBC that we're very passionate about is continuous improvement. So although we have these mutual accountability mechanisms built into the contract, it's not like, oh, in one instance, this didn't happen.District pays the provider, you know, regardless, there's checkpoints along the way so that both parties are able to continuously improve on the implementation if something isn't going right, coming together, problem solving, so that we can end up where we want to be, which is achieving those student outcomes.Attributing Growth to Specific InterventionsMichael Horn:Super interesting. So, Brittany, let me turn to you on this one then, because I'm just sort of curious how you measure growth and attribute it to a specific vendor, because obviously, and maybe, Jasmine, part of your answer starts to get at this. But we know that, say, math learning, there's a lot of things impacting that child's achievement, not just the tutoring intervention. So how do you think about attributing gains or not gains, right. To a specific vendor and measuring that?Brittany Miller:Yeah, it's a question that comes up a lot. My short answer is, we're not there yet. We're still in the process of evaluating this work and figuring out from, like, a rigorous evaluation perspective to what degree is outcomes based contracting really shifting the outcomes for kids? More generally speaking, when it comes to the specific provider and district arrangement, we are not claiming that it's a one to one correlation that if said student receives x intervention, then it's completely attributed to the provider. Depends on the intervention. It also depends on what else is happening in that child's life. So some of the students are receiving really strong core instruction from a supportive teacher on a daily basis. We have other cases where, unfortunately, you know, there's long term subs in the mathematics classroom, since that's such a hard position to fill, especially when we're looking at secondary schools, in which case, you know, perhaps it is more attributed to the tutoring provider because they're getting the same tutor every day, which, you know, is in some cases the most consistent instruction that we're able to get that particular child.In either case, the focus is not to demonstrate any sort of causality between the two, but instead to get us focused on the thing that matters, which is student learning and use the research base for that particular product line to name what we think is possible for kids.And so in the high impact tutoring instance, we know that students can achieve significant growth if they participate in tutoring sessions a minimum of three times a week for a minimum of 30 minutes in a group size of no more than one to three.There's been plenty of research on this coming out of the national student support accelerator and other entities that we work really closely with to understand the research base and what's possible. And so then what we're coaching the district around is saying, what is our theory of action of what it would take to actually achieve the outcomes that we know are possible from the research base, and then align that theory into practice, by the way, that we set up the arrangement with the provider.And then what that does is it shifts behavior of the adults in the system to stay focused on what we know can happen for a child based on the research for that particular product line. And then from there, if the outcomes are achieved, yes, the provider gets paid, but what they're getting paid is what they would have been paid regardless of whether or not outcomes were achieved in a prior relationship.And so there is an upside that we build into the pricing scenario with our district so that they are rewarding the provider should all of the outcomes be met for taking that additional risk. But it's not, you know, a bonus payment of any kind because there's so much money contingent on the outcomes that it's actually part of the payment that they would usually provide to a service provider just for delivering services.And so anyways, there's a lot of research questions that we're still answering about this, but the biggest thing that we coach our districts around is like, what does the research base on this product line say? What's your baseline data say about your student population? And then how do you figure out what you believe is possible so that we all just get focused on the right thing, even if it's not perfect.The Response from Vendors Michael Horn:It's really interesting the way you're segmenting it, the research based on the product or service that we're talking about, and making sure that the payments or the expectations are in line with what that could deliver. It gets into my next question, and I'd love to have you both comment on it if you want. Brittany, why don't we start with you? But it's around. Are vendors willing to do this? And do you see different vendors willing to do this, say, in tutoring versus textbooks or digital curriculum? What's that conversation look like? Because obviously, it's a very big shift for the vendor, but in many ways, it shouldn't necessarily be a surprising one because I always say, like, in any market, the customer should always be right. Education is this weird one where somehow that has not always been followed. So, Brittany, why don't you share some of your experience with that? And then, Jasmine, I bet you have some stories, too. Brittany Miller:Yeah, absolutely. And to that point, I think that that's something that is, we are always coaching our districts around, and Jasmine and I had to be coached around as well, which is you're the buyer. It turns out you actually have the spending power as a district.And that is, it's different for us in K-12 education. I'm not entirely sure why, but it's a systems problem, right. It's not an individual district leader or an individual provider problem. It's the system overall. And so what we found is that because in so many cases, the buyer is an instructional leader. And like I started with, I didn't learn how to negotiate contracts when I was going to, you know, school for all of the years, learning about instructional methods and how to, like, help kids learn and how you measure that, right. What I did do is learn how to apply that through the outcomes based contracting work to a contracting process, which then gives me the buying power and the leverage that I actually understand in order to drive student outcomes. And so taking that world of, you know, the chief financial officer's side of the house and the chief academic officer side of the house and putting those together is new and different for our districts. And it has the power to really transform these agreements with a provider to make sure that we stay focused on student learning. When we think about other product lines, we are constantly doing feasibility work to see where other areas are that we can go into outcomes based contracting. This is very new to k twelve. And so all of our district leaders, when they first learn about this, they're like, I should be doing this with everything. Why haven't I been doing this with everything all along? Right? And our response to that is, we agree, but not yet. Like, let's figure it out step by step. Right? It's new to the marketplace and in more developed marketplaces, like the Ed tech intervention space that we're in now, we see that there's different nuances that we have to pay attention to.So when we're talking about high impact tutoring as a use case, we had 55 unique providers apply to the different rfps that were released over two cohorts. No RFP got less than ten responses. And all of the districts were able to successfully negotiate a contract and are either implementing services now or have renegotiated and continue to implement services either with the same provider or a different provider.Making OBC Work for EdTech Contracts So we have those proof points in place, and we really believe that because of the feasibility work we did and because we worked alongside both providers and districts to understand what arrangement would actually work for this, we've seen so much traction from the provider side where they're definitely willing to do this work. So we're in that same process now with Ed Tech, where we haven't had any rfps released yet, but our template is going out to our districts, I think today or tomorrow for the RFP based on all the work that we've done. And so we're working to develop that infrastructure alongside our districts and providers and make sure that what we're putting out really aligns with that research base. And edtech is a much more advanced and stable marketplace. And so it is different than when we were talking about high impact tutoring in these providers were in many cases growing pretty rapidly in the time of Essa.We're not talking about a time when districts are really shrinking their budget, specifically when they look at how many ed tech interventions they've put in place over the last several years and thinking more critically about how to really serve students effectively with those interventions. And so we have to think about things like, what's your data interoperability look like in your district? Like, will you be able to successfully share outcomes with your provider? And all of the different metrics that, you know would lead to those outcomes.What is your usage rate look like currently for that product? Like, what's realistic in terms of what to get to for usage rate if you were to shrink the student population and have a more focused intervention for that group of students.And so all of those different elements go into what makes it something that providers are willing to consider because of the intentionality around it and that shared risk. It's not that all the risk goes to the provider. It's a shared risk so that we can really nail down, like, how to arrive on student outcomes effectively.Michael Horn:Jasmine, what would you add?Jasmine Walker:I would add that I was definitely one of those district leaders that said, I'm going to do this for everything. But what I tell districts now, let's not treat outcomes based contracting like it's a silver bullet. Let's get clear about how we are using our procurement processes as a lever to support implementation of products and services for our students. When it comes to vendors responding, I was one of those districts. I was like, people are going to actually respond to this RFP. I got 16 responses. So there were vendors that were willing to get in, roll up their sleeves, and, you know, help us to move our students. So that wasn't an issue at all, as I think about the districts that we're working with now, now that we're in the edtech space.Brittany shared that, you know, we conducted a feasibility study. So the people that participated in that feasibility study was both districts and providers, small districts, larger districts, nonprofit providers versus for profit providers, charter school management organizations. So there were different groups of people that helped to inform network. In addition to that feasibility study, we also pulled together an edtech working group, and that group was made up of district leaders and providers to help inform  this mutual accountability piece that we talked about to inform what this pricing model was going to look like. Because, like Brittany shared, it's different from high impact tutoring. So we got a lot of folks involved, a lot of different stakeholders to help us to build out what this work was going to look like as we moved into this new area of innovation, like we shared, you know, we're educating districts about this form of contracting, but we're doing it for providers as well. So we just finished a provider series where we wrapped up talking about what outcomes based contracting looks like, specifically targeting our edtech providers so they can become knowledgeable about outcomes based contracting and how it applies to their context. In the fall, you do a little plug.In the fall, we'll be doing a fall, our annual fall convening where district leaders come from across the country to learn about outcomes based contracting and begin to think about how they can leverage it in their districts. Some of the folks are our alumni. They're returning folks that want to expand and deepen their work in their districts. And then others are just new. They heard about us. They want to learn more and they want to do it this year. We're also going to do. At the end of that, we're going to offer a provider summit.So we're going to engage with providers, both from the high impact tutoring world, from the edtech world, and maybe even our curriculum based professional learning world, so we can continue to spread the message and educate folks on both sides.Why OBC Is Working This Time Around Michael Horn:It's great. And the fact that you'd get 16 vendors off the top and then start to develop this ecosystem through these convenings and the like sounds incredible. Momentum. I'm just curious a little bit more about the why hasn't this happened before? And when I dug into this a little bit, it seemed like there were some efforts to try this back in the 1990s and stuff like that, and it didn't really work out, and I don't know the reasons why. So I wondered if you can sort of point to what's maybe different now than past attempts to try to put this in place. I'll let whoever, whichever one of you wants to take that can jump in.Jasmine Walker:I jump on the first, and then Brittany can follow up with it. But what I would say is the world is different. When we think about how fast, like, everything is starting to innovate, how AI is coming into play, how things are. When I think about the McDonald's that I just saw where there are no people, everything is automated. There's trucks, semi trucks driving down the road with no driver. So I think that this type of contracting is just the right time. I don't think we were quite ready for this level of contracting, maybe in the nineties, but the way that we're going, we're to innovating. We have to innovate when it comes to our buying practices as well. And I think OBC is one of those things.Brittany Miller:Yeah, I'll add on to that, Jasmine. I think there's a couple of things coming together at the nexus of this context. And then I'll also speak a little bit to, like, the things that we've learned that are making these arrangements successful. So when it comes to the context that we're living in, right. We have AI, we have declining budgets for school districts, we have a lot of boards of educations across the country saying, what happened with our esser funding? Was it actually tied to outcomes, as you named earlier, Michael? And so with all of those different factors coming into play together, outcomes based contracting has found a way to sit in the middle of that space for the districts that are participating so that they're really able to understand how we can leverage those different elements of the contract in order address all of those changes that are happening.And the reason that I believe that we're seeing so many districts signing on to do the ED tech intervention work is because they recognize that something's going to have to shift if they're actually going to make good use of technology in the classroom.It's no surprise that we have really low usability or usage rates for these ed tech interventions that we know can make a difference in a kid's life. But none of them are actually used the same way that they are in a randomized control trial.So we're thinking about that really carefully and because of the way that boards of education are asking for. What's your evidence that this is actually working for kids? Why are we spending x million of dollars on it? And the district's just having to shrink the budget like, this is a really practical application of those different factors coming together and for the edtech components of that, specifically, when it comes to all of the driverless vehicles and technology that Jasmine was speaking about, I think we have a real responsibility to make sure that as we go down these new frontiers, we stay focused on what matters in education, and that is student learning, period, the end. And so we don't just collect quantitative data. We also collect qualitative data and go and do empathy interviews with students in the districts that we support so that the provider and district can hear directly from kids about how this is impacting them.That creates that power and that relationship to stay focused on the student experience and student learning. And so when all of of this different innovation and rapid change is happening, we can ground in one thing, and that's something that we can all measure together and really understand how to get better and better at that as the world continues to change. So that's kind of the context piece. I can answer what our project does differently as well. Would that be helpful?Michael Horn:Yeah, I think let's do that. Yeah.The Southern Education Foundation Difference Brittany Miller:Okay, cool. And then, so for the outcomes based contracting project in particular and the work that we've been leading, I think that the difference from what I've seen in other pay for performance models, because we get folks that call us and say, hey, what do you think of this pay for performance model? Is really that the pay for performance in its most traditional sense early on, was really focused only on how to hold the person providing the services accountable and the real shift in the way that we do business and that we've worked with our technical assistance partner or third sector capital that's done this work in various social sector industries is to make sure that it's not just the provider that's accountable, but also the entity that's purchasing the service. And that is different from what I've seen in other models where it still leaves everything up to chance. Because even though it's in the best interest of the district to achieve those outcomes, if it's not something that you're contractually obligated to and payment is tied to, as Jasmine was explaining for the mutual accountability language in the contract, then it doesn't rise to the top of your list as a district leader. You're just too busy. So by tying it into the contract and into payment, putting it in front of your board, it's a lot easier for me as a district leader to say to all of the folks that I'm working with, we actually have to do this because if not, we're going to have to pay for outcomes that our kids aren't achieving. And that shifts the conversation and it shifts the way that we're able to work alongside the district and provider. What happens with funds that are spentMichael Horn:It's really interesting. There's two elements there that seem really important. One is the fact that you have those qualitative measures so that you're not getting too, I guess, narrowly focused on maybe one number or something like that, that could get manipulated or something like that. And then second, it sounds like that really thoughtful conversation about making sure that the district is accountable is so critical so that it becomes a priority for all parties. It's not just sort of like, well, we threw it over the fence to the vendor and somehow they'll do magic. I guess that gets into the last question I want to finish up on, which is the outcomes piece of this I think is the most exciting part. Right. If we're really able to align around moving the needle for students, that could be huge.The second piece of this is presumably the districts can now save resources where it's not working for a given student and then either redeploy those resources to something that is of higher value for that individual or save it for the next year so that they can help that child. I love you to talk us through when funds aren't spent, those contingency dollars that the boost for really being successful. What happens with those dollars and how are districts thinking about that piece? Because that was a question I would get a lot is like what happens to those extra dollars that maybe we had put aside if they were successful. What do we do with those now?Brittany Miller:Yeah, I can start. And then Jasmine, feel free to jump in. Yes. We've done a lot of work on the financing side of this, too, because that's the first thing that we've heard from CFOs. If I don't spend my title dollars, they're just going to go back to the government.So we actually have on our website, it's OVC dot southerneducation.org. We have a section that has a bunch of different tools in it. And under the resources section, there's one that's a federal funding faq. And it goes over what the allowability is for federal funding, like your entitlement funds that would typically be used for something like an outcomes based contract. Now that we're moving into a post Esser era. And what we found in doing some digging is that the language for federal stipulations doesn't actually say that you have to spend within that year. It can actually roll into the next year because all of our title dollars are actually on a three year spending timeframe. And so we go through the guidance for that and what that could look like in terms of being able to spend down those dollars in the future.Another thing that we've seen our districts doing is thinking through how they can braid funds with some of their general funds as well. And then those general funds are more flexible to roll over year over year. So that's another area of consideration. Honestly, we've heard a lot of concern about this. And to date, we haven't seen anybody actually have an issue with figuring out how to spend down the dollars later. But it is a fear that folks have. And so we have done some due diligence to try to address that, but it hasn't become an issue today. And I think what we have heard more is that it's not just the cost savings of not giving the money to not paying the provider for the outcome.The other cost saving that comes in is when the kid is actually successful, then they move out of the intervention. And so when you think about that at scale, then you don't have to continue to deliver the same level of intervention to students year over year because they're not actually moving.So one of our districts in Colorado Springs, in one of the schools, half the students no longer qualified for the intervention at the mid-year point.And so in that case, like the principal was like, can I have spots for my, you know, third graders? No, because my fourth and fifth graders have matriculated out of the program. They don't qualify anymore. What a wonderful problem to have. I'm sure we can figure out how to spend the dollars more effectively if that's the problem that we're trying to solve for. Michael Horn:Well, that, I mean, it's fascinating on a few levels because then you get to a more nuanced understanding of, you know, spending your resources on those who need it the most and being more strategic about that. But, Jasmine, last thoughts from you here.Jasmine Walker:So I was one, I had funds left over after my implementation, and what it actually empowered us to do was to expand our work with outcomes based contracting. So we launched a new contract for high impact tutoring the, the following school year, actually, this school year is running right now and using those dollars and added some more dollars to support our students. And we expanded the program actually to now cover 7th and 8th grade so we can kind of catch students a little bit earlier and support them so that we are ensuring that our students are getting that algebra readiness that they need for the future. But I wanted to add another note to that. Duval county actually is, has joined our cohort now for Ed Tech as well. So that work, not only did they continue to work with high impact tutoring, they're actually expanding into edtech as well. So, you know, the chief academic officer, she really saw the benefit of using outcomes based contracting as a lever with these dollars. Additionally, I just met with another district right before joining you for this caAnd something that, like, happened, we, they just, you know, took an assessment. Students just took an assessment so we can measure whether, you know, the outcome was achieved for this period of time. And they actually maxed out their outcome cap. And I was like, wow, what a celebration. You allocated, you know, this many funds to this particular outcome, and the students just exceeded, you know, what you expected. So, you know, that feels good to a district. Like, districts want to spend the money, but they want to spend it on the outcomes, like students actually achieving. Michael Horn:Well, we'll say amen to that. And just, Brittany, Jasmine, thank you so much for spearheading this work, not just in the districts you were serving, but now to a much larger cohort across the country and really appreciate the work you're doing.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.

Mackenzie Price, the founder of Alpha, an innovative private school network in Texas, and 2hr Learning, an educational technology that has sprung from the curricular model at her schools, joined me for this latest conversation. In it, she explains how Alpha leveraged technology and redesigned traditional school structures to more effectively and efficiently teach core competencies. 2hr Learning is now packaging that model so its benefits can be realized by educators everywhere.We talked about how schools can use the time freed up to better support students in pursuing their passions and building life skills—something that homeschoolers, Summit Public Schools, and Acton Academy (just to name a few) have long known. But Alpha and 2hr Learning come at this question from a different angle—not just with its branding, but also with its acceptance of traditional measures like test scores. I learned a lot from the conversation, and I look forward to hearing your thoughts as well.Michael Horn:Welcome to the Future of Education. I'm Michael Horne, and you are at the show where we are dedicated to building a world in which all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their potential, and live a life of purpose. And to help us think about that today, I'm tremendously excited because I've been hearing, I think everywhere, reading everywhere about the school and then school network and now app and a whole bunch of things called alpha schools. And we have the co founder herself, Mackenzie Price, and we're going to get to hear all about it and get a picture of it firsthand. So, Mackenzie, thank you so much for joining me. I can't wait for this conversation.Mackenzie Price:Well, Michael, I'm so thrilled to be here. I was really excited when I got this invitation. Mackenzie’s Journey to Founding Alpha SchoolsMichael Horn:So I can't wait for us to have a great conversation about where the future of education is headed, because I think you're helping shape it. And so I want to hear more about that. So let's dive into it. What is Alpha schools? What's the story behind it?Mackenzie Price:Yeah, well, I will start at a little bit of the beginning, which is in 2014. I had some background in working on some education initiatives, but I don't think there's anything like being a mom to really bring those bear claws out and say, we need something better. So I have two daughters that are now 18 and 16 years old. But when it was time for them to go to school, we sent them down the street to our local public school. My husband and I are both products of public school education. So for us, that was kind of what we were going to do. But very quickly, I found myself getting frustrated with the lack of ability for much personalization or adaptation to happen for where my kids were. And I would say, after about two and a half years, my oldest daughter and I were having a conversation one day, and she said, mom, I don't want to go to school tomorrow.And I looked at her and I was like, what do you mean? You love school. And she looked at me and she goes, school is so boring. And I just had this light bulb moment of like, this is a kid who was one of those tailor made, goody two shoe good little girls who was, like, meant to go to school and love school. And in two and a half years, the system had kind of taken this kid and just wiped away that passion. And I'd been really involved in the school district that my kids were at. And I talked to administration. And they said, mackenzie, I understand your issues and your frustrations, but this is like trying to steer the Titanic, and it's just too hard. And that was my cue that we got to do something else.For me, it wasn't about going to private school over public. It was about, we need a new model of education. And I looked around and I didn't really see anything that was going to address the concerns I had. So I kind of said, I guess we need to start this ourselves. I found a couple other partners who were willing to go forge ahead with this. And we started in a house with 16 kids. And from the beginning, we used adaptive apps for doing learning so that kids could receive kind of a personalized, go at your own pace education. And then that was opening up the afternoon.And at that point, we focused on public speaking and entrepreneurship. Fast forward ten years, and we have alpha schools. We've got campuses in Austin, Texas, Brownsville, Texas. We've just announced that we're opening a campus in Miami, and then we're launching multiple other schools that are all based on the idea of what I call two hour learning, which is really the thought that, you know, parents, your kids don't need to spend 6 hours sitting in class in order to crush academics. They can learn very efficiently and to mastery in 2 hours. And of course, that opens up the question of, like, what do you spend the rest of the day doing? Because I can tell you one thing, Michael. Parents don't want their kids coming home after 2 hours. Right? They want more than that.And so what we've done is we've created an environment where kids get to spend the rest of the day focusing on life skill development. And it's been great. And I've got a senior in high school now. So when she finally found out she got into her first-choice college, she looked at me and said, okay, Mom, I can officially say thank you for putting me in your weird school, because it's paid off. You know, it's.Michael Horn:That's amazing. I love an entrepreneur solving their own problem and by extension, so many other problems. I'm laughing as you're telling the story for two reasons. One, I feel like I'm living a mirror existence in some ways. I had written, obviously, about all this stuff for years, and then I thought, well, I'll, you know, I'll help turn my school district. We met with a similar set of answers, and, we found an existing school for my daughters. But it's so interesting to hear the coin of entrepreneurship there. I'm also laughing because during the pandemic, Diane Tavner and I have this Class Disrupted podcast, and we said, homeschool families have figured this out in two hours.What do you use the rest of the time for? And we had the exact same answer. She calls it habits of success. You call it life skills development. So I just love that we all sort of reach the same conclusion as you start to put this stuff into action. I'd love to hear a little bit more, because are you based in Austin, Texas? Like, there are Acton Academies that have similar philosophies? I think so. I'd love to hear more about why start something as opposed to maybe go to other existing options.Mackenzie Price:Yeah, we are based in Austin, and Acton Academy has been a really phenomenal model. Jeff and Laura Sandifur have been really true pioneers in the alt ed space. So they were very inspirational. And actually, when I was first looking around, their school was so full that, you know, there was no hope of getting in. They had a long waitlist, and we ended up working with a guide that had been trained out of Acton Academy for the school that we started. So a lot of similarities, and I think it's an interesting point you bring up, Michael, which is some of these ideas that we toss around, like the idea of personalized learning, the idea of, you know, kids being able to develop life skills. They're not crazy novels, you know, oh, my gosh, what is this? What are these people talking about? However, when we think about our education system, nothing has been done to address those concerns. Right? And we try these little, tiny, you know, take a bucket of water and try to empty the ocean, you know, solving problems, theories for this.But it's time for us to really change. And COVID was very helpful in helping wake people up to realize, gosh, the way my kid is spending their day in school is not all that great. And then, of course, the results we've seen post-COVID have been so atrocious. And, of course, instead of catching up, kids are falling further behind, which has been a great thing for understanding that there is so much room for disruption in education, and it's time for us to make that happen. So that's one of the things I focus a lot of my attention on, is getting parents to understand that they can and should expect a better and different experience than the one they had.Communicating Alpha School’s BenefitsThe Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Michael Horn:So tell me more about that, because that seems like COVID, as you said, was a catalyzing event for a lot of families and kids realizing we don't have to settle for this. We're seeing a lot more choices out there in the landscape, and yet we're also seeing families slip back sort of into the status quo and so forth. How are you catalyzing people to find alpha schools? How are you getting them excited about 2-hour learning and then all of the rich work that you can do with the rest of the time as your point is making, is that why you're opening so many schools, because the demand is just there or what does that look like as more people find out and you convince them you can do this?Mackenzie Price:Yeah, I think COVID provided an opportunity where again, parents got to to see inside what their school was doing and they often weren't happy about it. Then on top of it, there was so much politicization of whatever that is. There was a lot of politics that went with going back to school. And we were pretty fortunate because our school philosophy is very much, hey, we're here to do two things. We're here to teach your kid great academics and learn twice as fast in only 2 hours. We're here to teach life skills. And by the way, your kid's going to love school, which should be expected, right? I love talking to kids that I meet and I'll ask them, do you like school? And most of the time they say, not really. Or if they say, yeah, I like school, I'll say, what's, what do you like best about school? And you know, 95% of the time the answer is pe, lunch, recess, my friends.Michael Horn:Right.Mackenzie Price:And to me I'm like, that is such a bummer. We want kids to love the process of learning and becoming critical thinkers and gaining new skills and being challenged. And so what we tend to attract are parents who are also willing to be a little bit more innovative. And they're able to say, yeah, I think my kids should expect a different experience than what we all grew up doing. Right. And the experience we've had. And one of the things that's really interesting about what I love about our model, we don't test kids and admit them based on if they're doing a certain level, we'll take a kid wherever they're at because we know that by providing this AI tutor and adaptive learning, we can raise a kid. So we commit that within two years we'll have kids 90th percentile or above, which I wholeheartedly believe that by 8th grade every kid should be able to be 90th percentile or above in their core subjects.Unlike so many traditional school experiences where kids kind of get put in a trajectory, and it's like, oh, my kid's kind of an average student, and that's just what they're going to be. And so we get great results. But like in Brownsville, for example, our Brownsville campus, about half of our students come from families with median incomes of less than $40,000 a year. We have about two-thirds of our students are neurodivergent. Generally, a lot of those kids come in under the 25th percentile. For example, our second-grade math class in January 2023 was at the 31st percentile. One year later, on January 24, they were at 84th percentile. And that's the power of providing this one-to-one learning experience.We can raise the floor of what's possible for kids and explode the ceiling off of what's possible, so that those kids who are able to move at a quicker pace are, you know, the sky's the limit, right? And they do that all so much more efficiently and in less time that then we get to focus on the things that we as parents really want our kids to be able to have. Right? Developing empathy, learning how to communicate, you know, expanding those critical thinking skills. I think that's what we want for our future citizens.EdTech, AI, and the 2-Hour Learning ModelMichael Horn:Okay, so this is amazing because you basically, by having a mastery based, personalized approach, you're making sure kids hit those marks. And to your point, everyone can be successful. Unbelievable results. Talk to us about, what is that like? Where is that AI tutor from? What are the apps you're using? What does that two-hour block look like? And how are kids engaging in it?Mackenzie Price:Yeah, well, as far as the 2-hour learning program goes, it is a mix of a few things. We use some third-party adaptive apps that everyone's got access to. Alex, edit that one, please. We use a few different apps that people would know of things like Alex Khan Academy, Ixl, Grammarly, Newsela, you know, a lot of apps that are out there in the world. We've also created some of our own apps, particularly for our younger students, kindergarten, and first grade, where the math and reading apps haven't been quite as strong. And, one of the things we found in the last ten years is that not all apps are equal, and not all apps are equal in every subject, at every level.Michael Horn:Right?Mackenzie Price:And so part of what we've been able to figure out is at what stage in a kid's k through twelve educational journey is this app really good at teaching this particular subject? And then it's time to move to a different app, or this app works really well, for students who are learning this type of way, and then what we've done and where I'd say AI innovation has come from is we built an AI tutorial that guides kids through this process because unfortunately, edtech has not been that holy grail solution that everyone hoped it would be when it was introduced about ten years ago. You unfortunately can't hand a kid an iPad and, you know, an app and say, let me know when you graduated high school. Right? They'll do all kinds of things. They'll do everything from not even looking at the app to what we call anti-patterns. They'll topic shop, or as soon as something starts getting hard, they'll back out of it, right? Or they won't read the explanations when they get a question wrong. And so what our AI tutor has done is really guide kids to be able to learn how to efficiently use the apps. We also have up the mastery level so that kids are truly, truly doing that. And then we're using constant data in order to find out, like, is this kid taking too long to answer these questions? And if so, is it because they're struggling with this particular concept, or is there a hole from maybe previous, you know, knowledge that they need to get? The other beauty of AI is that what we're able to kind of combine is three things.The curriculum that we need to teach, the knowledge tree of that specific individual student, and their interests. So you might have a kid who is needing to learn fractions, and he's struggling, and he loves Dungeons and Dragons, and he can now roll a dice game to learn fractions with a Dungeons and Dragons theme, right? And so we're able to kind of cater the learning experience to a kid's interests. You know, we'll see this with some of our young readers. You know, if you're a first-grade student reading at an 8th-grade level, that doesn't necessarily mean you need to be reading 8th-grade content. These kids still want to be, you know, reading about butterflies and, you know, fairies. And so how do we up the Lexile level but keep the content the right way? And that's one of the places where AI has just done an incredible job for that. But the other key to this, and again, the reason that edtech hasn't been this, this magic solution is that it's only 10% of what creates a great learner. 90% of it, in my opinion, is you have to have a motivated student.Right? And that's part of the reason that when you're putting Ed tech in a classroom and said, hey, go spend 15 minutes a few times a week working on this app. You know, it doesn't really help. We're still dealing with the fundamental teacher in front of a classroom model where kids are all put in the same kind of pace. You have certainly heard that story a million times, and your audience has, too. But we got to find that motivational model that works. And for us, it's that time that opens up for the rest of the day to go do really fun activities. And we have schools, you know, alpha school was the first school that was started, and that school, we do general life skills workshops that are just really fun and exciting. But we're also launching schools.We have a sports academy that's launching this fall. Where would you guess it? Kids get to do athletics and PE and sports all afternoon. We have an esports academy for middle school students where we use esports and gaming to teach life skills. And then we also have a GT school that's launching this fall where kids will be doing more academically rigorous workshops in the afternoon as well. So you can imagine a world. And this is always a question I'll ask you, Michael. If you were able to do all of your academics in 2 hours a day, what would you have done with the rest of your day? Right. And that's always an interesting question.Ask adults, like, what would you have done with that time? And that's what I think we need to be building on in the future is, what are those core skills that we teach kids in order to be great critical thinkers? And then what opportunities does that open up for?Metrics for Mastery and the Role of AdultsMichael Horn:The rest of this is so cool. And I want to get more into that second block in a moment before we leave that first block, that 2 hours, one quick geek out question, then one slightly deeper one. I think the geek out question is, how do you measure mastery? Like, when you say they're, you know, 25th percentile, they grew to 84th percentile. What's the instrument you're using to measure?Mackenzie Price:Yeah, we're big fans of standardized testing, so we use map testing, and I think that's different from a lot of alternative models. It's so important to have data and understanding. And part of the reason standardized testing has gotten such a bad rap is that schools don't do anything with the results of their tests other than just get a report card. Right. But what you can do is when we take our map tests and we're able to say, okay, here are the many pages of information about what our student knows and what they don't know, and we plug that into our AI system, and then go fill those holes. That's where we can get mastery. And so, like at Alpha school this year, across the board, our kids are learning 2.6 times faster than the rest of the country according to map tests. Our top two-thirds are learning 3.6 times faster, and our top 20% are learning six and a half times faster.And that's part of the reason that I don't care if a student comes in and they're in the 10th percentile. I know I can get them up, you know, and they can. They can get to where they're above the 90th percentile, you know, in the period of a couple of years. This is truly, I think, what's going to be the great equalizer for education, and it's scalable. You know, one thing that I didn't mention, we don't have academic teachers. We have no teachers teaching. Our kids are fully learning via this AI tutor. Now, what we do have, and it is absolutely critical to our model, is we have adults in the building that we call guides, and their sole job is to provide motivational and emotional support to these students, to help them get connected with their why and get excited about what they're doing, help them overcome challenges when they reach them.And that's what a lot of the rest of the day is.Creating Coherence Across SubjectsMichael Horn:It's interesting because I think you do a great job as you explain this. Yes, the knowledge of a student, their background, and experiences that matter. So that sort of checks off the core knowledge camp of the world, if you will. Then you say, and the teacher doesn't have to be the sage on the stage. There's still the guide on the side. Right? So, we can have both of these philosophies in the same camp, if you will, as long as we do it in this mastery-based, personalized way that you've constructed. I guess that gets to the one other question. I'd love you just to sort of think through with me, which is one of the critiques I sometimes hear about.I don't know if I'd call it a playlist approach what you're doing, but sort of, you know, piecing together. Right. This app is best at teaching this. This one is teaching that we might lose connective tissue or coherence between the ways we teach history or social studies or science or things like that. How do you all get these things to sort of speak the same language, for lack of a better phrase, and create that coherence?Mackenzie Price:Well, one of the things that we do is, again, when we're asking kids to get to mastery level on each app, and we have them run through a couple of apps, right? So if they, if they do a first app and they're doing, you know, the math here, you know, 5th-grade math in one app, and then they go to another app and they're doing 5th-grade math, first of all, anything that they've mastered, they'll immediately test out of, right? And so we're understanding that they've got complete completion there, and then anything that they've missed, you know, they're able to learn back. One of the things that's really interesting, is we'll have students come in who are new to our school. You know, we had a, we had a girl who came in as an 8th grader, and she'd been a straight student at her old school, and her parents said she's a fabulous math student and she's great. And, you know, she should be ahead. And so we want her going into, you know, into algebra and 8th grade, you know, she should be a year ahead. And we said, well, we want to just help her understand, like, see where she's really at. And they're like, no, no, we know where she's at. She got straight a's in her last class, and she should be in algebra.And so we do something called a hundred for 100. And we'll say to kids, all right, here's what we're gonna do. You can get 100% on a Texas star test. We'll give you dollar 100, right? And these kids are like, whoa, a $100 is great. And we said, and here's what it is. You can pick whatever grade you want on the SAR test. And suddenly that kid who's like, I'm in 8th grade student was like, well, you know, can I take a 2nd grade test? It's like, well, not second grade. Let's go to fourth grade.And what's interesting is they'll go and they'll take that 4th grade test, and lo and behold, they won't have gotten 100% on it, right? And suddenly it helps the parents and the student go, oh, maybe I'm missing some, like, 4th grade concepts. But then we go and we fill in those holes, and that's done really quickly, right? It's easy to go, you know, to catch up pretty soon. Let's go to fifth grade, 6th grade, 7th grade, 8th grade, and you can get a really complete picture of what a student knows. And then when we're using these different apps and testing to understand what a kid has. Where we see this at the high school level is our students are still taking the AP curriculum that traditional high schools are offering. They're scoring well on those AP exams. They're getting, I think 94% of our students got fours or fives, which is pretty unheard of sats. You know, the average SAT score of our senior class this year is 1476, which is insane, because, again, you know, shocker of all shockers, when you learn a mastery, you actually, you know.Michael Horn:I was gonna say, it doesn't matter the modality so much at the point in which you're demonstrating it, you just demonstrate whatever's in front of you.Mackenzie Price:Exactly. And then, you know, our guides are able to jump in and work with the kids to start talking about the project-based side of workshops, which is where you really get that great experience. You know, I believe that, you know, again, you have to have k through eight. Common core knowledge is essential in order to be a critical thinker. But, you know, in today's world, it's no longer just about reading and writing and arithmetic. It's about the four c's, communication, creativity, collaboration, and critical thinking. And that's when our guides come around with our students, and they can make a lot of what they've learned really come alive through this life skill development. You know, an example of that with one of our high school students.He is great at physics, and he's learned all of his physics via apps, but he's also a nationally-ranked water skier, he and his guide sit down and they talk about how they can think about physics and use physics to improve his water skiing time. And that's the kind of magic that really comes alive for a student when they're. They're using their physics two knowledge, you know, to figure out how to get a, you know, a better angle on their. On their water ski time. Right. And. And that's when I think we develop a more holistic. You know, I hate using buzzwords like holistic, but it's. It's a great time for bringing all of that knowledge together.Following Passions and Developing GritMichael Horn:Well, and you build, transfer, obviously, from... We've just done it in the academic setting to a real-world setting, which almost never happens, as, you know, in schools. So let's dig into that second big, for lack of a phrase block where you're really doing those life skills. You're developing them through projects. What does that look like for the community, for an individual student, and for the guides?Mackenzie Price:Yeah. So the guide's job again… What I would say, you know, teachers in general when they get into the teaching industry, they do it so they can positively impact, you know, young people. They don't necessarily do it so that they can, you know, create lesson plans and grade homework. So our guides are really spending that time getting connected with kids to understand what they like and what they're excited about. And so I'll give you an example of that. We have a student who loves birds, you know, super into ornithology and loves bird watching. And so he has become an expert on that.He's built a second brain in order to know everything about birds. He's reached out to experts in the field. So he's learning communication skills. He's been able to interview some really amazing people. And one thing we find is that adults are always really excited to help ambitious kids, right? So this kid's eleven years old and he reaches out and says, hey, I'd love to have a conversation about some of the research you're doing based on what I've read. And, you know, the professor, you know, says, sure, I'd love to have that, that conversation. For our youngest kids in, you know, kindergarten, first grade, they're doing everything from learning to swim in the deep ends, you know, and getting that kind of a workshop to starting to code. Doing this, we have a great program where kids are doing self driving cars.So they're learning coding, they're doing it as a team and, you know, they're getting things. Another one that our second and third graders do, they do a Harvard business school simulation with a sneaker factory.How to do this. And I always love when these parents will call me and they'll say, it is so funny to see my eight year old come home from school and be like, I gotta figure out how to get my shipping costs down. You know, my profit margins are just not, not high enough. And I think I'm going to have to start using shipping containers instead of airplane freight. But then that's going to cause a problem with my time for inventory. And you're like, that's when an eight year old learning, you know, a Harvard business school simulation is so awesome. The other thing we do in these workshops is we have what we call a test to pass. So it's the idea of like if you're trying to teach a life skill, like, for example, grit, you know, this idea of sticking to something even when it's hard, you know, you don't just hand the kids the book by Angela Duckworth and say, read this book and write a report on it, and that will show you no grit.So what we do is we hold a triathlon, and at the end of the six week session, what the kids have to be able to do is they have to be able to solve a Rubik's cube. They have to be able to juggle three items for 30 seconds, and then they have to run a half mile. And what's interesting is at the beginning of this session, when we introduce this triathlon, you know, you'll have kids go, oh, I can't do x, y or z. I'm never going to be able to run a half mile or I'm not going to be able to do this. And so we teach them growth mindset, like the magical power of yet you may not be able to do it yet, but if you practice and learn how to learn and get back up and fail and all that stuff, then at the end of six weeks, when these kids are doing their triathlon and they're succeeding, that shows like, hey, these kids have grit, right? They've spent time becoming experts, learning how to learn, you know, again, doing all of those life skills. And so a lot of our guides time is spent implementing and working with these kids on these really fun workshops.Day in the Life at Alpha SchoolsMichael Horn:Wow. So help us break down in terms of, like, how much of that you know. So you've done your 2-hour learning. You're getting to dive into these projects of interest. How long do you do that daily? Do you see kids staying afterward because they're so excited that they want to keep going? Is this something that's more permeable than that? Like, what does that, what does it look like? It sounds like you might even have professionals coming into the environment to help create these projects and so forth. So that's pretty cool. Absolutely.Mackenzie Price:We do.Michael Horn:Yeah. Give us a story, a day in the life, if you will, of one kid doing this.Mackenzie Price:So, yeah, in the morning, our students come in and they do a limitless launch. It's kind of like think Tony Robbins for kids, where the group comes together and they're getting excited. They're planning their goals that they have for the day and how those align with their goals for the week and for the session. And then they go into their two hour learning block. We basically do it in kind of Pomodoro sessions of 25 minutes. They get breaks in between sometimes those breaks for our youngest learners, they might be do ten minutes of work and then you do a 32nd Taylor Swift dance party with your guide and get back into it and the guides, again, are able to work with these kids to help create these self driven learners. They're learning how to use the apps effectively. They're learning how to manage their time and their attention.They get to have lunch, and then in the afternoon is when we dive in all these workshops. So, you know, they're basically getting, you know, two and a half to 3 hours worth of workshop time each day. And then at the high school level, what this turns into is kids have the time to go work on what we call kind of an ambitious masterpiece project. So that could be anything from. We had a student who raised $350,000 and built a mountain bike park in Texas. He's done great job. We have a student who got really interested in cancer and epigenetics. She just released a documentary called Cancer Foodborne Illness on X.It's last I looked, has 4.2 million views, and she's been getting national press as a result of it. And this is what you think about. One of our fundamental beliefs is that kids are limitless, and they're constantly being underrated about what's possible for them to do. Kids can do incredible things when they're given the mentorship and, you know, the guidance and the time to go go work on that.So we see that with our high school students get to do really big projects. But, you know, even our middle school students.One of the checks that we have. We call it a check as part of a check chart, but they've got to be able to raise $10,000 in capital for a business. And we had, you know, a few students this past year who were able to raise money to create a self-help kind of mental health book that they used expert advice, but written for teen girls by teen girls. And, you know, these are the things that are exciting. K through eight, we don't have homework. And so what we do find, though, is a lot of times, kids want to work ahead of time, right? They want to do more, and they're excited about the things they're doing. Fundamentally, again, our first commitment is love of school. We survey our students to find out, do you love school, and would you rather go to school or go on vacation. And that second one isn't quite as high as the love of school, but it is really crazy high. I think it was, like 63% the last time we measured it. They would rather go to school than go on vacation.Cost of AttendingMichael Horn:Well, you've created an environment where they can be successful and they can have fun with friends while being successful. So it seems like you have the twin ingredients to motivation. There's just as we start to wrap up here, like, what's the tuition to go to a school like this? What does that look like?Mackenzie Price:Yeah. So we've been working on figuring out how we can best scale this and get this out to as many kids as possible. So we sort of started with the Tesla business model. Alpha school is sort of the very, very high end Rolls Royce version of private schools. Our tuition is about $40,000 a year. We have financial aid and about 75% of our students are on some sort of financial aid, but they are getting that super high end experience. The schools that we're rolling out this fall are going to be at about a $25,000 price point. And then we're working on getting some charter options. And if we can get charter access, of course that will become free for students.We're also launching a homeschool program and that's going to get a lower point. So, you know, our goal right now is, you know, we believe in the next five years we're going to be able to get our two hour learning academic program down to like $1,000 a year per kid, which would be amazing. It's not there yet. It's about $10,000 currently per year per student. However, what we're seeing, and two hour learning can also be implemented in other schools.You know, if someone wanted to start a school off two hour learning or convert, you know, to that, it can be done. There's a way to do that. You are, of course, fundamentally, though, transforming the model of the day, and you're also fundamentally transforming the role of the teacher.Transforming the Traditional High School ExperienceMichael Horn:So, Mackenzie, one of the questions I often get, or pushbacks, is, this sounds great. Maybe I'll do it for, I mean, it's why Montessori is pretty popular, you know, in early years, but gets less so as you go into high school is, gee, there's prom and sports and band and all these things that my kid sort of wants to be a part of. I get it. On the one hand, like, when I think about my high school experience, the classes were, eh. But I really love the spirit of being involved in all those other things. It sounds to me, though, like you're perhaps more than other schools positioned to tackle this because as you said, you can take that core and then have a sports focused school. You can have a music focused school. You could have, like, these different flavors, if you will, and tackle this.So I just love you to comment on that and tell you know, am I off base here? Am I miss reading, or how do. How do high school families, I mean, you're in Texas, after all, where this is sort of like, you know, this is a big part of the thinking for high school. How do they react to that and how are you all positioned to handle it?Mackenzie Price:Yeah, I think everyone has an idea of what they believe the school experience should be like, and often it's based on what their experience was like. And even the parts that they didn't like, they'll. They'll kind of say, well, I turned out okay. So, you know, what. What we did was good. And I remember when I first got ready to start the school back in 2014, I was doing a lot of reading, and one of the books I read was unschooling rules. And one of the things it said was, we get so used to, like, well, there's certain things that you just got to go through, the rite of passage that you have to go through.And I it helped me rethink about, like, well, is everything we do really, you know, you have to do it. So what I've figured out in the schools that we run now is, let's take the best of those things. So our school does have a prom, you know, but our school also gets to do these really crazy experiences that, you know, a lot of schools don't get, right. So we've added other things there for you. Take the idea of music. We don't have a marching band, but what we do have is kids who are really phenomenal musicians, who are able to go in and record their own album.And have the experience of getting to do that. We have one student who's a high school sophomore, and she is passionate about music and singing Broadway musicals. And when you ask her, what do you like to do? She's like, I love Broadway musicals. I like to listen to that. And she is building the first musical that she's trying to get on Broadway that is going to be entirely created and made by teens for teens. And so some of the experiences that she's getting and the mentorship that she's getting from people on Broadway and also negotiating contracts and dealing with attorneys, she's getting a lot of that social experience that we like. We also have a lot of kids who are athletes, who are, you know, able to go focus on their horseback riding or their swimming outside of school. I will absolutely say, though, if you want to be the quarterback on the local, you know, Texas football team, Alpha High School is not going to be the right school for you.Michael Horn:Right.Mackenzie Price:But if you want to be able to have, you know, a k through eight experience where you're not an over scheduled kid who's having to, you know, you know, go to school all day, then do homework and go to, go to the baseball practice and instead have afternoons to focus on athletics, you know, that's a great thing to get to do. So when I think about a lot of those traditional experiences that we believe kids should have, some of them, I would argue, are not worth as much weight as we think they really were. And some of them can be transformed into really amazing experiences that are, that our students have. So we find also, you know, socialization, this word socialization is something that always comes up and says, well, what about kids who they need socialization? And I look at it and I say, how much socialization is a kid really getting by, sitting in class all day, mostly being quiet? And again, I understand that there's a lot of classrooms and a lot of teachers who are trying to have more engagement in their classrooms. But still, the bottom line is you are sitting in class and there's, you know, 20 plus kids and one teacher, whereas these kids are having to, you know, work in teams and connect with people and, you know, they're having a lot more interaction with, with adults.Michael Horn:Right.Mackenzie Price:And other kids. That, I think, is where a lot of the really rich socialization comes from. So we find that, you know, very few of our students, you know, miss that traditional experience, with the exception of sports, is a big one.Michael Horn:Got it. Well, amen to so much of what you're doing. And I have this diagram now written on my notes, academics plus life skills. And then I have a big heart around it because of the love that you have built in your school communities among the students you serve. Mackenzie, thank you so much for being with us and for all of you following keep posted on the expansion of alpha schools two-hour learning. I am certainly hoping you all come to Massachusetts in the somewhat near future. Hint, hint.Mackenzie Price:We're working on it. Thank you so much for having me, Michael. It's been a pleasure. And I love getting to hear all of the topics that you present on your podcast on a regular basis.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.

In partnership with the Navajo nation, Aspire Ability is getting tribe members plugged into opportunity. How are they doing it? Investments in digital infrastructure + innovative workforce solutions are a big part of the answer.I sat down with Aspire Ability’s CEO, John Mott, and head of policy, Moroni Benally to learn how the nonprofit is building access to good jobs through remote work. We discussed connecting necessary stakeholders across sectors, the importance of precise skills training, and the downstream benefits of employment. And we talked about how none of the moves they’ve made would have been possible except for a real bottoms-up approach that rooted them on the ground and in the community.Michael Horn:Welcome to the Future of Education, the show where we are dedicated to a world in which all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their potential, and live a life of purpose. To help us think through those qualities today and those aspirations… I'm tremendously excited for our two guests. One of whom I've known for several years, he's none other than Jon Mott, currently the founder and CEO of Aspire Ability. Jon, good to see you.Jon Mott:Good to see you. Thanks for having us.Michael Horn:Absolutely. And the other is a new friend, Moroni Benally. He is a community manager at Aspire Ability, living with the Navajo Nation and supporting the work of Aspire Ability there. We will talk more about that shortly. But Moroni, welcome. Thanks for joining us.Moroni Benally:Thank you, Michael.The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Aspire Ability’s Founding Story and Approach to the WorkMichael Horn:Yeah, you bet. So let's get into it. Jon, start with you. Just give us the founding story behind Aspire Ability, your journey to founding it, and what you all do now there.Jon Mott:Yeah, I've been in higher ed and adult ed and corporate ed for my whole career across working at Brigham Young University, corporations like TD Ameritrade, and edtech companies like learning objects. About five years ago, having gone through all of these different versions of trying to help people get to better career paths, it just kind of struck me. My training and background is as a political scientist. So I've just been thinking about this as a systemic problem. You've got job seekers, employers, education providers, and they don't connect. So that was the whole purpose of Aspire Ability, to try to get better connections primarily between employers and education providers to make sure that educational programs actually aligned with jobs in the job market. We've been working on that in a variety of different ways over the last five years. And, over the last year and a half, two years, we've been focused on working on that problem in a specific community. If you try to change all of that for the whole world all at once, not gonna happen... But if you can work with a community where you can say, okay, in this case, it's with the Navajo Nation, saying, okay, we know who the employers are, we know there are two tribal colleges, we know who the job seekers are. Let's work on getting the jobs more clearly defined so that the schools can provide upscaling paths. Then we can message that to job seekers and get a better alignment between what are often disconnected points in a three-sided market.Michael Horn:Yeah, so let's stay with that. Jon, before we go to the Navajo Nation, and Moroni, before I bring you in, I'm just curious because that approach you just talked about sounds like what the sponsor of this series, the Charles Koch Foundation, and I know a big sponsor of yours, the Charles Koch Foundation, would talk about—this principle of bottoms-up, really solving the problem in a specific area rather than imagining a top-down, one-size-fits-all way about it. So just talk to us about what you've learned and what this work really looks like, engaging these three very different stakeholders in what's really a community talent marketplace.Jon Mott:Yeah, absolutely. There's been tremendous work done by lots of our colleagues and friends and people we know in this space to create taxonomies of jobs—what are the skills required for job A, job B? And that's really important foundational work in this space. But what we've discovered is, when you get to a specific job at a specific company, these taxonomies in the sky all of a sudden don't matter. It's like, okay, that's nice to know what a cybersecurity analyst is in general practice, but what about here at my financial services company? One of the keys has been getting to the last mile or the last hundred feet. What does it mean—what skills or proficiency level for those skills are required for this job at this company, maybe even on this team within that company? It's that hyper-localization of skills mapping that's become really critical. And then on the flip side of that, how do you help schools see that yes, there is a core foundation of skills for every job or career path, but then there are—you do need to provide some way to at least expose people to, okay, there's cybersecurity, but here's how it's different in fintech versus healthcare versus education, and really helping people make that last mile connection to a job.Michael Horn:Just to stay with you for one more moment on that. It sounds like you probably have to get pretty deep with the companies then, because they might not know the answer to that, I'm assuming.Jon Mott:100%. You know, we worked with a very, very large company that everybody would recognize the name. They had five postings for the same job at the same time on the same team that were all different. Because what happens? Hiring managers write the job postings, HR puts them up, they get interviewees to come in. But if the company itself can't agree on what the job is, it's pretty hard to tell the school, hey, here's what we need. So we do dig in deep, looking at the documentation for the job, but then talking to stakeholders, talking to incumbents, really helping the employer get aligned around, yes, we agree, this is what the set of knowledge, skills, and abilities are required for this job. And here's how we're going to measure those consistently every 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.Bringing the Navajo Nation and Aspire Ability TogetherMichael Horn:That's really interesting because the assessment piece of that is tricky. So Moroni, let me bring you in here, because I'd love to get deeper on, you know, let's do the case study, right? What does this work look like in the Navajo Nation and how did the work come about?Moroni Benally:Yeah, let's give some background on the Navajo Nation. There are about 175,000 members living on the reservation in Arizona, Mexico, and Utah, but about 400,000 across the country. On the reservation, there's about 50% unemployment and underemployment. We've seen numbers as low as 10% and numbers as high as 78%. And so that's the beginning of, part of the problems we're encountering is just sort of the lack of data. And so these are our best estimates that have gone around. Numerous federal constraints over land, which impedes development and access to housing, private sector, and healthcare. Every year, around 3,000 high school graduates leave the reservation needing jobs, but there aren't jobs. There aren't many jobs on the reservation. Not enough to keep up with what's needed. In addition, one of the other impediments is the lack of housing. So right now in the Navajo Nation, probably half of the people across the Navajo nation do not have a house of their own. Lots of multi-generational housing and so it's over overcrowded. In order to bring back a workforce up to at least this point, to get everyone housed, the Navajo nation needs to build about 35,000 houses just to meet what is currently the demand in the naval nation as of right now. There's a lot of these issues going around, unemployment.In addition, there are all these other problems that are associated with those in the lower socioeconomic class. A lot of their substance abuse and mental health problems. There's also problems with infrastructure, long distances, people don't have access to transportation. It's a lot of things going on.  So at the time, how we ended up in the Navajo Nation, I was a graduate student of Jon's at BYU a number of years ago. Yeah. Like Jon, I focused on public policy, finishing up my PhD at the University of Washington in Seattle in public policy.So sort of taking this broad public policy view of, like, what's happening in the Navajo Nation. I was working, as a policy worker for a tribal coalition around sexual assault, and domestic violence. I was working on behalf of tribes with the legislature, and federal government on policies around that. One of the issues with domestic violence that we had talked about was oftentimes a victim of domestic violence can't leave that situation, in part because they don't have a job. That there are financial constraints, and so they can't find a job. That's more pronounced in rural areas.At that point, Jon and I had talked about that, and we had approached one of the tribal colleges about using Aspire Ability's strategy plan platform application to address that need within that domestic violence community across the Navajo Nation. That was the beginning.Jon Mott:I'll just add. This was at the height of COVID. There are a lot of people who were victims of domestic violence, they were now at home all day with their abuser.Michael Horn:So they can't escape due to the lack of employment and lockdowns.Jon Mott:Right. So that's really where I reached out to Moroni and said, man, you know… because we've stayed in touch over the years and we've been thinking of ways that we could collaborate. There is a crisis right now. Is there something we can do here?Moroni Benally:Jon and I discussed the situation, and I relocated from Seattle back to the reservation in late 2020 or 2021. I was surprised to find broadband infrastructure had reached my remote area, allowing me to work from home. This prompted us to leverage the Navajo Nation's ARPA funds for broadband expansion, facilitating job creation and overcoming federal constraints. We collaborated closely with the Navajo Nation president's office to initiate these efforts.Jon and I talked a bit. I moved to Seattle to do some work, and I came home I think it was, November or December of 2020 or 2021, to the reservation from Seattle. My part of the reservation, that didn't have much infrastructure, was lit up with Internet broadband. I came home, and I thought, oh, my goodness, I can work from home. So I moved home from Seattle to the middle of the Navajo Nation and started working full time with Jon. At that point, we thought, well, Navajo Nation had all this ARPA money, billions of dollars. They had allocated some 500 million for broadband expansion across the Navajo Nation.And it came to the incredibly rural place that I live, and that's where we sort of…Jon  Mott:What is it you like to say? You're two hours away from a cheeseburger?Moroni Benally:Exactly. So at that point, we thought we could take advantage and leverage this to leapfrog over federal constraints and bring jobs with low capital costs. That was the idea, and that's where we began jumping in within the Navajo Nation. As a result, we've been working in coordination with the Navajo Nation president's office.We've been collaborating with the Navajo Nation Tribal Council. They're finalizing an appropriation package to support our efforts across the Navajo Nation.We partnered with tribal colleges, various communities, tribally owned enterprises, private sector companies, and high schools serving Navajo people. We've built a broad coalition and are cooperating with the Navajo Nation on their Navajo Nation Workforce Transformation Initiative. This aims to shift the Navajo Nation towards credential and skill-based hiring.Jon Mott:I'd like to quickly add that one of our key allies in this process has been Delegate Carl Slater, a member of the Navajo Council, who has championed our project. But one of the things that we heard loud and clear at the very beginning was, please don't be like all of those other organizations that come in and just try to get some of our money, do a 3 to 6-month project, claim victory, and leave. We knew and, as you know, Moroni and I are policy geeks. We knew that this was not going to be something that you could fix in half a year. Moroni and I planned this as a three to five-year project, and we're 16-18 months into it. if you think about the flywheel effect, you know, we've gotten the flywheel to start moving.You can imagine how new and just different this concept is for the employers, and the schools. To get them moving in this direction of thinking about skills-based hiring, and skills-based education. So a lot of the groundwork lane has been around some of those key concepts and ideas.This conversation is sponsored by:The Impact of Improved Digital InfrastructureMichael Horn:I want to reflect on a couple of points before I ask my question. Firstly, your focus on individuals in domestic abuse situations echoes a key finding in our research on why people pursue more education or switch jobs—it often involves escaping difficult circumstances. Secondly, Moroni, your approach to broadband infrastructure reminds me of Clay Christensen's concept of disruption through non-consumption. Essentially, you've created an enabling technology that leapfrogs traditional limitations. I'd like you to elaborate on this. Specifically, which companies are these individuals now able to work with? How does this improved infrastructure aid in escaping domestic abuse situations by reducing the need to travel? People might wonder what this looks like on the ground—how having a job can help someone in a difficult situation. I’ll let whichever one of you who want to take that jump in.Jon Mott:You want to go first.Moroni Benally:You may know a bit more about the first part of the question than me.Jon Mott:I mean, we won't get into all of the minutiae of what it's like to try to roll out a multi…Michael Horn:Yeah. Don't worry about the logistics.Jon Mott:Moroni is a prime example. He was not able to live on the reservation and work in the field that he was educated to work in and have the impact he’s having before there was broadband. Now he can do that. So if that's the germ of an idea or an opportunity, as broadband rolls out, what we're doing is we're saying, okay, what are the jobs that currently exist on the reservation that can be done hybrid or remotely? There are some of these jobs that have been chronically vacant just because for whatever reason, the employers can't find people who are qualified today for that job. So we're going to these, Moroni mentioned these tribal enterprises. There are businesses essentially, that are owned by the tribe. So there's a gaming and tourism enterprise. There's a tribal enterprise around housing. So we've gone to those entities and said, okay, what are the jobs? We talked about digging deep and mapping the jobs. We've done that. One, for example, is the Navajo Housing Authority which has hundreds of millions of dollars of housing money. They have had, I think it's 25 construction project manager jobs vacant for a couple of years. And, until those jobs are filled, they can't spend this money on housing. So we've mapped those jobs. Now, those jobs are probably hybrid jobs. Some days I could work at home, some days I'm going to, as a construction project manager, I'm going to have to be out and about. But it just unlocks the door to a new set of employees or potential employees for these jobs that didn't exist before.And I would also add, it also opens up the opportunity for remote education. So, yeah, I want to be a construction project manager. Not only could I potentially do that job remotely or in a hybrid way, but I can do my upskilling remotely as opposed to driving a couple hours each way every day.Michael Horn:Well, and that's really interesting because then that's also helping fill that demand, I imagine, for 35,000 more houses that you were mentioning as well.Jon Mott: And that's exactly why we focused on that job first because it did have kind of this potential domino effect.The Role of Employment in Addressing Domestic AbuseMichael Horn:There's a lot of research, like Efosa Jomo's work, emphasizing the importance of creating local jobs for community development. Moroni, let's dive into this. How does having a job or being on track to get one help with domestic challenges that someone may be locked in?Moroni Benally:Let's back up a bit with what Aspire Ability has proposed and worked on with the colleges, providing wraparound services like mental health support and childcare. Navajo Technical University offers these to staff and students. Part of our proposal is tapping into these resources for working individuals. When a person receives training and can work from home, they earn an income that enables them to break free financially from their abuser. What they call  financial abuse, I think, is they're able to break away because they're no longer reliant on that person. And they have then the capacity of other options to find other housing to live in. What that also does is that has an impact on crime. It enables the police officers to focus their attention on other things that need to happen. So there's all these down-the-stream consequences. One of the more significant economic consequences for the Navajo Nation is that for every dollar that is made in the Navajo Nation that a Navajo citizen like me makes. 30% stays on the Navajo Nation and 70% leaks off to these border towns. In part because of all of this underdevelopment and the constraints around it. One of the other downstream effects is that the person who was in that situation can leave that situation. But at the same time, 30% of her spending is now spent in the Navajo Nation, which contributes directly back to the Navajo Nation. That's one extra person spending an additional 30% of their income in the Navajo Nation. We've done some estimates about the potential impact of what 50 employees at $45,000 a year in the Navajo Nation would have.There are significant consequences and returns for the Navajo Nation in multiple way. But the downstream consequences of positive outcomes for leaving a domestic violence situation is it breaks that cycle of trauma for generations. The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.What Has Aspire Ability Learned in the ProcessMichael Horn:Super interesting. I'm curious about the economic implications. How do these initiatives contribute to addressing the housing demand you mentioned earlier?Jon Mott:One of the things that we started trying to wrap our hands around very early on was how many vacant jobs are there on the reservation? Because nobody knew. The kind of conventional wisdom was, well, the jobs that do exist are government jobs or public school or Indian health services jobs. That was largely the perspective. We couldn't go to Burning Glass or, you know, Monster because there wasn't a geographic job board for the reservation. We actually had to create one and do a census of what jobs exist. It turns out there are about nine, was our last count, about 3,500 jobs vacant on the reservation, and about half of them are private sector. That has kind of blown people's minds. They're like, oh, wow, we had no idea. So now we're able to look at the distribution of jobs across those and start helping create a strategic plan for the schools to say, oh, it looks like we need project managers, not just here, but across multiple industries. Let's start being strategic about deploying continuing ED and professional education resources. That's, that's one example we just wouldn't have known unless we dug in on that.Michael Horn:Moroni, you get the last word on what you've learned.Moroni Benally:Going off of what Jon talked about, despite my familiarity with the Navajo Nation, I was surprised by the lack of labor market data collection by Navajo government entities. Our job board has become the first informal data collection mechanism for labor data in the Navajo Nation. Another surprise was the slow tempo of decision-making within the government. Not that they're bad, it's just that they've lacked the training, they've lacked the direction. So as a result of that, it moves very, very, very slow. Then you mix in the local concept of time and their notion that, oh, if we miss this round, it'll come back again next year, so don't worry about it Jon Mott:The very problem we're talking about. Many of, what you call, mid-level management jobs in the Navajo government are vacant. So the people who do have jobs, one of the reasons things are slow is because they're doing 27 things at once.Michael Horn:Not a formula for success. That's a lot on someone.Moroni Benally:Yeah. So for me, I was surprised, even though I grew up here. I worked with Navajo Nation, in multiple roles, and I was a bureaucrat for many years and served in the president's cabinet. I was the head of the natural resources, so I thought I knew bureaucracy until I got to the private sector and tried to engage it on that side, which is a whole different ballgame for me.Michael Horn:Both of you, are just tremendous. Thanks for the work you're doing. I'm just struck by the vertical integration you've had to do into places you never would have guessed.  Just by being on the ground and starting to fill some of these essential parts of the picture, and what you've built. But Moroni, Jon, and Aspire Ability, thanks for the work you're doing in the Navajo Nation, and thanks for joining us on Future of Education.The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.

Sustainable, transformational, outstanding, and permissionless. Each year, the Center for Education Reform (CER) awards the Yass Prize to the school that best embodies these four characteristics. I sat down with CER’s Jeanne Allen (check out her Forza...for Education Substack) and Anthony Brock, the Founder and Head of School at this year’s winner, Valiant Cross Academy. We discussed Valiant Cross’s personalized, holistic, and career-focused approach; their plans for spreading the benefits of their model; and how the Yass Prize will help. I left with a lot of new insights from this conversation—and hope you do 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.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 get to talk to two individuals who have put that work at the core of what they've been doing for years. I am tremendously excited about this. First up, we have my longtime friend. She's the founder and CEO of the Center for Education Reform. She's none other than Jeanne Allen.Of course, she has launched the Yass Prize for sustainable, transformational, outstanding, and permissionless education. We're going to hear a lot about that and more. But first, Jeanne, so good to have you here.Jeanne Allen:Thanks, Michael. Great to be here.Michael Horn:Absolutely. We also have Anthony Brock, who is the Co-founder and Executive Director of the Valiant Cross Academy, which sits in the heart of downtown Montgomery, Alabama. Anthony and I have already established that I owe him a visit at some point to those parts, but it's a private school with a Christian emphasis that serves males in the 6th through 12th grades. We're going to hear a lot more about it. But Anthony, notably, you all just won the Yass Prize, so welcome and congratulations.Anthony Brock:Absolutely. Thank you so much. Honored to be here. Honored to be the current winner of the Yass Prize. Very interested in the conversation. Thanks for having me.The Principles and Purpose of the Yass PrizeMichael Horn:You bet. I'm excited to have you here because if you win that prize, that means you're doing a lot. We're going to hear more about that, but Jeanne, let's start with you. Just thinking about the Yass Prize. I'm sure some of the listeners who tune into this podcast will know of it, but I'm sure some won't.We, of course, have had some past winners on the show. I'd love to hear from you why this prize is so important right now? These principles of the S.T.O.P. principles: sustainable, transformational, outstanding, and permissionless. Why are those so important and enduring right now?Jeanne Allen:Thank you, Michael. I'd like to say that we spent about 30 years at the Center for Education Reform building and demanding that we open up the opportunities for parents, students, and teachers to have access to better opportunities, and new ways of doing business. What we all realized very quickly, even though some of us knew it instinctually for a while, once we created that demand, and once that demand was also augmented and amplified by things like COVID-19, the supply wasn't big enough. We went on a hunt for some organizations that we thought would be temporarily supporting and showing the way for all sorts of other schools to deliver for students post that awful time in history. What we found is that there were thousands of organizations out there that had already been creating, not just during COVID but before, creating new and different opportunities that wanted and needed a way to not scale, but to be recognized for what they were doing. They don't go to those conferences and seminars that everybody else goes to. They don't have time. They're doing the work.Michael Horn :They're actually doing the work.Jeanne Allen:Yeah, they're doing the work. They don't read what we read because we're all so myopic. It's all we do. We found out that they needed encouragement, they needed a support network. Obviously, money is a huge driver, but what they want is also this information and the movement that came when we began to put them together. The Yass Prize is now not just on the hunt for a handful, but we seek to find, reward, and celebrate education providers of every sector, regardless of profit motive or whatever, that STOP for education.Valiant Cross’ Road to the YassMichael Horn:That's super helpful. Putting it in the context of the supply-demand imbalance in the country, I think is important because people tend not to think about the supply side of this very much. I think you're right. Anthony, I want to bring you into the conversation because I'm curious on your end, what led you…What steps led you to decide, hey, we're going to apply for this prize? This is something that could help us and elevate us.Anthony Brock:Yeah, well, one of the things recently, Michael, I've been talking to a lot of people here in Alabama about is you need to attempt to apply. Don't think that with the work you're doing, it's not worthy, because this time last year, I had no idea that we would even have the opportunity. Like she just said, we're busy doing the work and it felt good to be appreciated. I think I realized how enormous this prize was when I arrived in Cleveland, and I was a little shell-shocked when I walked in because I was just not used to it. I've been a public school educator since 1999. My brother and I started Valiant Cross in 20. Well, in 2014, we did a proof-of-concept year, and in 2015 we launched a school. I'm used to just the run-of-the-mill conferences that teachers go to. The same old, same old, and when I get here and I'm around all these new educational innovators across the country, my vision has been changed forever.Everybody talks about the 1 million, which is great. Please, believe me, that's great. We needed that. However, just the social capital that I've been able to build through being a part of this Yass prize, you can't put a number on it. We started Valiant Cross in 2015 and I would always encourage everybody to apply for this award. The Impact of the Prize for Valiant Cross and Those to Follow Michael Horn:Stay on that for a moment, because it's interesting to hear you say the social capital that you got from this. I imagine that means everything from the networks of people that can support the work, to getting ideas from other schools that are doing interesting things, to even perhaps being inspired to try out things that you never had considered. Like, what does that mean to you? What are the benefits of that social capital that you gain access to?Anthony Brock:Sure. I'm an artist by trade also so I'm a visionary. I'm an artist. I never even wanted to be a head of school. I just wanted to cultivate spaces where young people can thrive and learn. When I became a part of this cohort of Yass Prize finalists and semifinalists, it was full of just the most brilliant, innovative people you've ever seen before.When you think about permissionless, sad to say, I've been almost in a shell thinking, the work we're doing, we don't want too many people to see it. Because they may come in and say, hey, you can't do this. You can't do that. However, now I'm with a group of people who are saying, no, you need to do more. You can do more. Go forward with whatever that vision is that God has put before you, which for us is educating African American young men. We're in Montgomery, Alabama, the birthplace of the civil rights movement. We're right across from Doctor King's church, the only church he pastored. We’re right up the street from Rosa Parks bus stop. So why do we have to operate inside of a box when so much change came from Dexter Avenue, like the birthplace of the civil rights movement? So now it's, what more can we add to what we're doing with these young men? All our young men, we've had two graduating classes.They're all either at a four-year college or they're at a trade or vocational school. They're in the military. We have a few who've just joined the workforce right out of high school just through some of the offerings, which we can go into as much as you want. It's just exciting to be on this call and I want to say this, whatever it is that God put in your heart, it's a reason and a reason that he put it there. I'm so happy that I listened to that first call, which was to start school, and that second call, which was to apply for the Yass Prize as well.Michael Horn:It's powerful because Jeanne, we travel around the country speaking at all sorts of testimonies in capitals around the country and so forth. What Anthony just said is the truth. Which is that a lot of the most innovative schools have been taught to sort of duck and cover because they don't know when they're going to get shot for doing something that is outside the box that kids need but doesn't fit inside the narrow walls of what we've been told school looks like.  It sounds like maybe this prize starts to give them not just permission to do the educating, but permission to talk about it and inspire even more school leaders and school types, that you're going to build a legacy, almost a family tree, if you will. Anthony, out of this, how do you see that part of it, Jeanne?The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Jeanne Allen:Well, I will say that I think it's also done the same for advocates, researchers, and people who work in the field because they're able to put their heads up and expose what they're doing. They can share and build awareness about what they're doing, which I can say on Anthony's behalf and others, nobody thinks they're doing great things. I mean, it was extraordinary to talk to them during the process, look at their application, or ask questions. At one point in time during the process, as we're whittling down from quarterfinalists to semifinalists, we do interviews with everybody like this. I'd say, well, tell me more about why you're doing such breakout things. And they're like, am I doing amazing things? I mean, I've never met so many, as Anthony said, thoughtful, brilliant, open-minded people who wanted to be sponges. To be honest with you, I'm used to being around a bunch of people who think they know everything. I will also admit candidly that we get into that. I get into that, oh, I already know this is happening. I know it's happening in Alabama. I don't have to go to Alabama. Someone will tell me if I have to know something. Well, the fact of the matter is, when you see the work that organizations like Valiant Cross are doing. Or Melanin Village and Princeton. All around the country, or any number of the groups that are in the cohort that didn't make it in, that are still extraordinary. Then you see it and look at who they're helping, look at what's happening around them, and then you say, why is everyone ignoring them? So, we went to Valiant Cross. We do these road shows after our awards each year, and we did the announcement of the 24 Yass prize at Anthony's school in January.And the governor, who knows about them, had never been there, and she came that day. But why hadn't she been there? She's three blocks away. It's not her fault, necessarily. Maybe we didn't invite her. Maybe there was no reason. But then again, it is her fault, right? I love her, but let's be honest. I mean, I don't know enough to love her, but why wasn't she and her people right there across the street from Martin Luther King's church? I think to the extent that we're all thinking that someone's going to tell us something good is happening is now we're making it much more of a requirement that anyone in this work start looking at under places. Don't just show up at conferences and think you're going to meet everyone you're supposed to meet, because probably, likely the people, at those conferences aren't nearly as cool as the people doing the work.Anthony Brock:Yes. One thing we forgot to add also is right across the street is the Alabama Education Association, which is a very strong teacher union in the state of Alabama. They sit right across the street as well to add to the irony.Providing a Career-Connected EducationMichael Horn:We love irony here. We'll leave it at that, but let's get into the work itself and what the school looks like. Anthony, start to give us an understanding of what you've been doing that stands apart. And I guess I want to start at maybe a higher level before we get into this, what the day of the life of a student looks like. As I understand it, you all have been intentional about preparing students for the careers of tomorrow. That means computing, e-gaming, robotics, and more. What does that look like in action? How do you pick these careers? What's the role of partners in that? What does this part of it look like?Anthony Brock:Yeah, that's a great question. We are in meetings right now with my leadership team to even custom make that more. When you think about the permissionless part. We have decided to not only have career tracks that we have already, but we also have Cisco networking. Of course, we have dual enrollment with some local universities. We have barbering, we have welding. But now we are interested in putting all our 11th graders on track. The next step to that is to find out what each one of them wants to do by their 10th-grade year and custom-make everybody. The IEP in a traditional school is an individualized education plan, but we're going to try to have that.We will have that for each one of our young men going forward. If you want to be an attorney, if you want to be a police officer, whatever it is, we're going to custom-make that. That thought process would not have been my thought process right now if I had not seen so many other innovative models. We got to get them out of the classrooms that we've had them in up to this point from 7:30 to 3:15. So not only has the Yass Prize allowed us to take a step back and pat ourselves on the back for the work we're doing, but it's also made us say, hey, let's keep thinking. Let's keep pushing the mark a lot.The biggest part of Valiant Cross, which I always have to mention the importance of the fact that in Montgomery we have 200,000 residents, and we're averaging about 70 to 75 homicides a year. The most meaningful work we're doing is taking these African American boys and we're giving them hope. That's what we pride ourselves in telling them. Not just telling them but telling them and showing them that we love them, we're going to walk through whatever it is they want to do. If it's college, if it's a military, we want to see them to and through those areas as well. We've created a support system like none other for these young men. It's the amazing work that my staff does every day.The Valiant Cross ModelMichael Horn:There's so much there to love. The way you make these individuals feel that and show them that they matter and that their dreams count is powerful. I want to get into then, the actual educational model itself, because I understand you're doing a bunch of innovative things here. We know, Jeanne referenced COVID. We know that the readiness level of students is, frankly, all over the map at the moment as they come into these experiences. We also know that there's been renewed interest across the country in differentiating instruction, tutoring, and all the things.My understanding is that you all have been successful in that personalization. You called it customization just now in terms of incorporating tutoring and doing a bunch of stuff like that. I'd love you to just talk about what that model looks like. What does a student's experience look like, and what are tips for all the other schools that, frankly, have been struggling to get the tutoring piece right that they could learn from you?Anthony Brock:Yeah. Well, the most important thing is the adults that you have in the building. Being a private school, we have the opportunity to sit down with an adult and become a career counselor. Like Steve Perry always says, and say, hey, this is not the place for you. If you're not here for young people, it's not going to work. Basically, Michael, our teachers are staying after hours. They're coming early in the morning to tutor. We also partner with a local tutoring company here in Montgomery, and they provide tutoring through our young men throughout the day. We have a 15 to 1 or less ratio for all our young people in the school.The next step to that is we're going to be adding a teacher aide in each classroom to help with instruction as well. We just went through a round of applicants, and it's booming at the scenes. By the way, Miss Allen, it's like never before. We have so many young people who are trying to come to school, and it's because they want that individualized touch. Our teachers are going to basketball games, and this is basic stuff, right? But they're doing the basic things at a high level. We're going to basketball games after school with our young people. We're going to church with them. Last week, I got a call to take them to this new whitewater rafting place in Montgomery. I don't have to ask for permission to do any of that.When you build that relationship with these young people, a lot of them come with thick discipline files, they come with IEPs. A lot of them are behind two or three grade levels when they get there. So everybody's saying, how in the world are you guys doing this? When they come in and see all the young men working, it's about love and high expectations. That's the secret sauce of Valiant Cross Academy. It's about customizing what each one is going to do by their 11th-grade year. The connectivity is the most important part. If young people, especially African American males, feel the connected part that we give them at Valiant Cross, they seem to thrive. We've also created an African American male experience museum at our school.All of them, all the artwork and the pictures throughout the building, mimics them. There's culturally relevant teaching going on. We believe that if they have a strong sense of who they are in God and who they are personally, then they're going to succeed in life.Jeanne Allen:I also have to jump in, Michael, if it's okay to say something that you've often talked about. Even things that are basic can be innovative because they're not being done anymore or in the same way. Being able to think about each individual student every day and what they happen to need is important. When we were there, I'll just add one other thing I noticed, which I love about your educational model, Anthony. You guys were talking about in the hallways, we were walking and touring a couple of different kids and what was happening with them. These are things, again, great schools do this, but we prevent them from doing it by putting too many strings on them and not rewarding it. I walked into every class, and there was music, and the teacher had a headset, but there was different music in every class. And so finally, I had forgotten to ask him, and we saw him recently, and he said, there's data that shows that these students will let you tell them. It was fascinating how much people were paying attention and engaged, and the teacher was calling them out also, by the way.So, she's got the music. She got the headset. They're doing something, and there's a way that she gets them and pulls them out of what they're doing to reflect. Talk about that, Anthony.Anthony Brock:Yes. We do a two-week teacher training on that. The teacher is on stage at Valiant Cross. We don't have traditional desks, so you have to be in shape, first of all. But, yeah, they do have the headsets. They have the music. There are a lot of studies around musical education and what it activates in the brain for young people. We've customized playlists for each classroom.So, you're getting a different feel, a different vibe, even the way the classroom looks. I didn't go into, when you talk about innovation, Chuck Robbins, who is the national CEO for Cisco Networking. He spoke at our fundraiser last year and he came, and he gave us $500,000 for our programming credential networking program that we have at our high school as well. Every young man has the opportunity to do that. We've partnered with the Redtail Scholarship Foundation. We have about eight to ten of our young men right now. Some have already completed it, but we have about eight to ten in the cohort now working on their pilot's license. Only 2% of African American males are pilots.And again, we have the barbering credential. A lot of them leave every day to go to Trenum State Technical College to get different trades. Whether it's welding, we have one working on the CDL license. So, there is a lot of innovation going on, but to me, because of the passion that I have for it. My dad passed away in 2022. He was an educator, principal, and pastor as well. A lot of that is just naturally who we are. You want to see young people. If you want what's best for young people, there's nothing that you won't do for them.So that's why the Yass prize has helped as well because I'm someone who has an open ear. So, when I'm around, I'm a sponge. If it's a best practice that another member of the cohort is doing, I'm going to try to take it. I'm going to use it. I've been talking to Keith Brooks about working with Black and Latino males, and so we're looking at possibly, hopefully, partnering to bring that down here to Montgomery as well. I would love to start a center for urban education where you can come and learn some culturally relevant pedagogy.Michael Horn:Wow, that's powerful stuff. That music sounds amazing. And there was just, I saw research coming out around how actually, when we're also in music with each other, we start to synchronize and cooperate, and it's sort of something inside of us, innate, right. Where we want to work with each other, and it makes us more open to ideas and cooperation and building on each other.Anthony Brock:Sure. Absolutely. The other part is, that you have to look at the national suspension rates in different states for African American males is pretty high. So, we have an environment of culturally relevant restorative practices as well. We do circles. If they get in any type of trouble, which may just be talking at the wrong time, everything is structured, it's organized chaos in the building. I'll just say that because it may look like things are out of whack sometimes, but we do that to get them up and moving. We do not like to suspend anyone because that's what, oftentimes, young men are used to people giving up on them.I need you in the seat, and I need you learning. I need you engaged. A lot of that is what takes place on a daily basis. It takes an act of Congress to get suspended at Valiant Cross.The Valiant Cross DifferenceMichael Horn:Wow. One of the things that occurs to me, hearing you talk is you're a little bit like the fish that doesn't realize it's in water. Cause that's just the milieu in which you're swimming. And so, Jeanne, I love from your perspective, you look at the list of semifinalists and finalists for the Yas prize. They are incredibly inspirational. They're all amazing. What made the work that Anthony and his school doing stand out, from your perspective, what was it that, wow, yes. This is the one that's going to win this $1 million Yass prize.Jeanne Allen:After they went through all the judging and consistently came out on top for a variety of different reasons, commentary and scores, you just look and you go, sustainable. Talk about policy. They can operate because they're in a state where there is some, at that time, some small scholarship program. Now, a larger one that's been set up to help schools like that, help so students don't have to go beg. He doesn't have to go beg for funds from everybody, or at least less so transformational. All the things he just described. Outstanding. You talk about students in his area that are getting shot. They're coming from homes where you don't know what they had the night before or the week before or what they're going home to. Yet the education is outstanding across the board and permissionless. You just say the plight of black men in America and the fact that there's someone doing something about that, that wants to do more, learn more, go bigger places, do different things. The sky is your kind of limit. It really kind of all added up. We could say again that Anthony's amazing, Valiant Cross is amazing, and Valiant Cross is the winner. But there are a lot of organizations that fit, and there's something about people who go through the process, stick with the process, and make the argument that we're always shocked when they all come together.We're like, oh, my gosh. We had no idea they'd be like this. I mean, they get to the accelerator, Michael. What you participated in and they start, hey, can I get your number? That was interesting. I thought that. Wow, I didn't know you went through that. It is that social capital and that networking. We all take it for granted because we're in it every day. But they've made us better people and they've made us think differently and better about our jobs, our work, our goals, and our strategies. And frankly, more accountable because we want to make sure they succeed.Michael Horn:Wow. Anthony. My understanding is that winning this is going to allow you all to expand to even more men, black men in Montgomery. You're going to be able to add an elementary school, grades K-5. You're going to be able to start to expand to different states, I think. Talk to us about what this is going to enable you to do and what we can expect in the years ahead from expansion.Anthony Brock:Sure. The first thing was, again, the elementary school. We announced the same day that we announced the Yass application that we are opening up our new kindergarten. We're in the process now of finalizing a building which is also on the civil rights trail. We're trying to keep that same model going. That'll open up this fall. We're visiting Jackson, Mississippi, next month. That's one of the places that we're very interested in.I'm interested in other places, in Montgomery, I mean, in Alabama as well. I'm interested in Tuskegee, obviously, because of the work that Booker T. Washington did that was transformational back in 1800’s. The other part was, I spoke about possibly creating a center for urban education where we can recruit more black male teachers. Most black boys, they grow up from kindergarten through 12th grade, and they do not see anyone that looks like them. So just to have that person and that representation in the classroom will be huge. Also being a center where others can come train, you know, you may not be a black male teacher or black female.You may be a white teacher who wants to just come learn to train. How do I teach these young people that are in front of me? How can I relate to them? Those are a few of the things, a few of the areas that we're looking at and also, which I have not spoken to Miss Allen about. We are also launching a new literacy center here in Montgomery. We have started building out a new literacy center that will combat tutoring, I mean, mentoring, and the literacy rate over in West Montgomery, which is where a lot of these young people come from. That will allow us to impact way more young people, male and female, than just Valiant Cross Academy. A lot of exciting things, and I'm a full-time college student as well, but we're getting it all in.Michael Horn:Are you really?Anthony Brock:Yes. I'm working on my doctorate right now and I'm in my dissertation phase, so just keep me in your prayers.The Effects of State Policy Michael Horn:I will. I don't wish that process on anyone if I'm being totally honest. I'm just curious. So let's shift to policy because you both have brought it up now a couple of times, and I think this is a nice place to maybe wrap because as you know, Alabama's governor recently signed the Choose Act creating education savings accounts in Alabama. $7,000 per pupil starting in 2025. Jeanne, what do you anticipate this is going to do for innovation and education in the state of Alabama?Jeanne Allen:It's definitely going to encourage more people and more groups to expand, to offer students an opportunity. I wish it were bigger. I understand politics and people have to start smaller. But when you look at the numbers in Montgomery and elsewhere across states like Alabama, every state, frankly, we could blow it open. It's all right, we'll get there. But what it really does say more than anything else, is money should follow students. We're not going to rely on private organizations to have to raise money to fund scholarships. Why are we making people jump through hoops when public funding is available for these students who are no longer in the traditional public schools, who aren't serving them? What it does for opportunity and innovation is it allows people to appreciate and recognize that these elements are critical to students.It shouldn't matter where you go to school, money should follow kids.Michael Horn:Anthony, more broadly, and if you want to comment on this as well, great. More broadly, as you think about the education policy context, how it's impacted the work you do in Alabama and the students you serve. As well as how you think about expansion into other states. You just mentioned Mississippi. I'm sort of curious, how do you think about education policy context from what it's allowed you to do and what it might enable you to do as you think about other states?Anthony Brock:Sure. Well, the first thing that comes into play when you think about scaling to other states is how are we going to fund the school? Quite frankly, that's how we have to spend almost 50% to 60% of our time right now. The new AESA has passed. The School Choice Act. All these things are allowing us to be able to put our focus where it needs to be, which is on young people. Who better than the parent to determine what's the best place for my kids? I know I'm able to do that because your zip code should not determine where you go to school. I'm excited about it. I think the status quo in education is what's dumbed down education so much because we're not competitive enough.So it should not be a threat to anyone. If you're educating young people at a high level, you should welcome this. You should not be afraid of young people leaving your school either.Anthony and Jeanne’s Outlook for the FutureMichael Horn:Love it. As we just wrap here, so much is singing to me on what you're doing, Anthony. I just love reflections from both of you about where this all goes, how we keep building this movement, how we keep building up supply to match the demand of these learners. As you both mentioned, in places like Montgomery that are clamoring for something else, what are the next steps ahead? Jeanne, why don't you go first, and then, Anthony, you can get the final word.Jeanne Allen:I think looking at schools not only like Valiant Cross but all the other kinds of organizations that are innovating and trying to meet students where they are, regardless of space and place. Whether they're micro-schools, private, charter, online, blended, or some name that we don't even know, it's essential that we bottle and market the excitement and the exuberance that's out there right now for making change. What I see today, more than ever before is a pent-up demand that is dying to get out amongst so many more diverse players in every kind of genre that want to get together. That's critical. It's no longer about politics. It's no longer about, I mean, it is for some people, but for the people involved. They are thousands strong in every state and they could completely take over if they just put their minds to it.Michael Horn:Anthony, final word.Anthony Brock:My final word is, again, I'm thankful for being on this call. Thank you to the Yass Prize for creating an environment for best practices, and schools that are doing things that are outside of the box. I really appreciate that because it gives us all the place. You almost felt like you were an outlier for a while. Or the tipping point, not to quote too many Malcolm Gladwell books, but that's my guy. But, you know, that's what it feels like. I think I look at the Yass Prize as an outlier, and I think that everyone needs to just join and become a part of it. I would like to see people who are, you know, traditional schools, public schools.I would like to see more of them, to just open up their ears and see what they are talking about. They're talking about kids. Remove the policy. Remove everything else from it. We're talking about kids. I love it because everything I've heard since I've become a part of this movement is what's best for kids. They're celebrating organizations that are for kids. So thank you.Michael Horn:Hey, I'm just thankful for both of you, the work that you're opening up, the work that you're doing on a daily basis. I’m really appreciative of you joining the Future of Education and making sure that each child, each student can make progress because that's what it's about at the end of the day.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.

Federal policy has immense power to influence incentives in higher ed. What can be done to better align them toward value and access?On the heels of my conversation with Phil Hill that posted last week, I sat down with Preston Cooper, Senior Fellow at The Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity (on Substack at FREOPP Highlights), to talk through the effect of enacted—as well as the potential of proposed—policies coming out of the executive and legislative branches. We tackled a series of topics: income-driven repayment, outcomes-driven measures, accreditation reforms, and the opportunity for bipartisanship.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 dedicated to creating a world in which all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their potential, and live a life of purpose. To help us think through this is one of my favorite writers and analysts about higher education. A terrific thinker on smart policy to really put the power in individual's hands and focus on outcomes, reducing costs and the like for higher education. None other than Preston Cooper. He's a senior fellow at the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, focusing on the economics of higher education. Preston, first thank you for joining us. I've been absolutely loving your writing and I will confess the biggest challenge for me in prepping for this was deciding on where to spend our time because you've been writing about so many different interesting strands of how higher ed should and is changing at the moment.Preston Cooper:Well, thank you very much for having me, Michael, and thank you so much for the kind words about my work. I'm excited to dig into it with you.Income-driven student loan repaymentMichael Horn:Yeah, absolutely. Let's start off with the doozy. You're fresh off publishing this analysis where you found that a lot of the income driven repayment plans that are intended to help individuals, spare them in essence from defaulting on their student loans. That these actually backfire when the federal government is pushing individuals into these plans. I confess that was a total head-scratcher for me when I first read the headlines. I'd love you to break down what's happening and why and what's a better way forward if it's not these income driven repayment plans.Preston Cooper:It's a great question. I'll start by explaining what exactly income driven repayment is. If you have a federal student loan, you can enroll in these repayment plans, IDR plans, income driven repayment plans that allow you to tie your loan payments to your income. After a certain number of years of making payments on these IDR plans, you can get your remaining balance forgiven. It can be a fairly good deal for students in principle. Some students, if their incomes are low enough, are even able to qualify for a $0 monthly payment on the income driven repayment plans. About a third of borrowers during the time period that we're talking about here, which was 2018 - 2019, qualified for that $0 payment. The study that you referenced was done by a couple of economists who were affiliated with the US Department of Education and had access to a treasure trove of data that pros like us basically can't have access to.We actually didn't know this before they took a look at the data. Basically what they did was they looked at those borrowers who qualified for $0 payments, so they didn't have to pay anything towards their loans because their incomes were low enough and they compared those borrowers to borrowers who were also on IDR, but whose incomes were slightly higher. They had to make very small but positive payments. They found that in the first year, those borrowers were enrolled in IDR. They had a big drop in delinquency rates as you would expect, if you have a $0 payment, you can't become delinquent on your loans. But after a year, something interesting happened, a lot of those borrowers became disengaged with the student loan system. They didn't enroll in auto debit, so their payments weren't automatically taken out of their accounts and often they forgot to recertify their participation in IDR.If you want to be an IDR, you have to recertify every year, so the federal government knows what your income is and knows that you want to continue participating in the IDR plan. They found that borrowers who had that initial $0 monthly payment about 12 months after they first enrolled in IDR, had this huge spike in delinquency and they were more likely to become delinquent on their loans than borrowers who never had a $0 monthly payment. Which is a really wild finding that a $0 monthly payment is supposed to protect you from becoming delinquent on your loans. But it turns out that in the long run, borrowers who qualified for that $0 monthly payment were more likely to fall behind on their loans, more likely to face those adverse consequences such as a buildup of interest and potentially getting a hit on their credit scores that come with a student loan delinquency.Michael Horn:Wow. Totally unintuitive. What would a better path forward in your mind look like? How would you modify these income-driven repayment plans?Preston Cooper:I think that IDR is still an important safety net for borrowers. Sometimes life happens, things don't work out, and your student loan payment might be too high relative to your income. I think it's important to have a safety net there, but I think that this experiment with $0 monthly payments has proven to be a failure. What I would propose is even if borrowers are fairly low income, require a very small monthly payment, say just $25 a month, so that they keep getting into the habit of paying back their loans even if it's a very small amount. That way they don't become disengaged with the system. They remember they have this obligation that they need to continue meeting if they're going to have these loans. Also so that they don't necessarily have a big buildup of interest because they haven't been making payments on their loans.Unfortunately, I think policy is kind of going in the wrong direction. The Biden administration about a year ago announced this big expansion of income driven repayment plans so that many more borrowers are going to qualify for a $0 monthly payment. Some of the preliminary data show that over half of borrowers who were enrolled in the Biden administration's new IDR plan are going to qualify for that $0 monthly payment. It's possible that that might increase delinquency rates in the long run because all those borrowers might simply become disengaged from the student loan system and not get into the habit of paying back their loans. I'm very concerned that this kind of well-intentioned expansion of IDR will end up backfiring on the borrowers it's supposed to benefit.Debt forgiveness repackaged? Michael Horn:Absolutely fascinating. But it connects, I suppose to another part of the plot, if you will, which is of course the Biden administration was not stymied, say by the Supreme Court ruling saying that their student loan forgiveness plan was not legal. Instead, they've continued to try what you might call creative ways to cancel student debt. So, they might say, well, this is correct, but who cares because we don't think student debt should be a thing. Period. They've continued to try some different ways to get around this as I understand it, sending out some letters saying your student debt is canceled. Can you just bring us up to speed on where we are and what you expect to happen there?The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Preston Cooper:Absolutely. There's a number of different irons in the fire that the Biden administration has right now with respect to student loan forgiveness. Number one is the new income driven repayment plan that I mentioned a few minutes ago. Another kind of lower-profile effort to forgive student loans, which hasn't gotten quite as much media attention, is the second attempt. At one time, student loan forgiveness used a different legal authority than the Biden administration originally relied on for the loan forgiveness program that was struck down by the Supreme Court. So, they're relying on something called the Higher Education Act. They say, okay, well the Supreme Court said this other law that we relied on to forgive student debt, that's not going to fly. So, we're going to try again. We're going to use a different legal authority to use as a fig leaf for student debt cancellation.They've been going through the process that they need to go through in order to try and propose something on student loan forgiveness here.  It looks like we're getting close to a final plan that they may formally propose over the next few weeks or months. Essentially what they want to do here is they want to say, if you're a borrower who is experiencing hardship, we are going to give ourselves the power to forgive your student loans. But what does hardship mean? I'm not sure they entirely know, but that's not going to stop them from trying. Basically, they say, we're going to take all these factors about you into account. Whether you received a Pell Grant, whether you finished college, a whole bunch of different factors, 17 different factors, they have a whole list. They're going to put that into a black box model, which is not accessible to the public.They're just going to pour all those factors into a model and out of that model is going to spit out an answer. Are you going to default on your loans in the next two years? If that answer is yes, then they're going to give themselves the power to forgive your loans. That's basically it. It's not necessarily a transparent process. They're going to put a bunch of factors into a model. It's not accessible to the public, and that model is going to say, you have the power to forgive student debt. I think this is problematic for a couple of reasons. Number one, I don't think they have any more legal authority here to forgive student debt than they did two years ago when they originally announced the loan forgiveness plan that the Supreme Court struck down. Number two, if this black box model is not accessible to the public and everybody who they say is going to default is going to get the loans forgiven, how are we ever actually going to test if that's an effective model? If you get your loans forgiven and you can't default on that, your loans. We can't really see if the model was effective at predicting your distress, your hardship. So, I am kind of very skeptical of this. I think that this is just an excuse to kind of forgive student loans on mass but give more of a scientific sheen to the way they're going about loan forgiveness than they may have approached it the first time.Michael Horn:Do you think we'll see another challenge in the courts as a result of all this, or is that path not as available this time around?Preston Cooper:I think it's fairly likely we'll see a court challenge to this as well. I mean, the same basic logic applies. The Biden administration has assumed itself a huge amount of power to forgive student debt for millions of borrowers with a taxpayer bill that could potentially run into the hundreds of billions. I think you have the same basic arguments that the state governments will probably sue over this as they did the last time. They'll say, this is clearly a major questions doctrine case. The Congress has to step in and say something. If you're dealing with dollar amounts that are just this big, the executive can't deal with those dollar amounts on his own. I suspect we will see another court challenge. It's probably going to take a while for that to make its way through the court. We may not have an answer right away, but I expect that we will eventually see the Supreme Court, or potentially a lower court, strike this down as clearly unconstitutional clearly goes against the spirit of the Supreme Court's ruling last June.The College Cost Reduction Act Michael Horn:Gotcha. So, if that's on the executive side of the house, if you will, let's go to the other side of the house. The house itself and the Republicans there came out with this College Cost Reduction Act, which has a lot to like in my view, in the proposed legislation free up. You all had this exclusive look, I believe, at how the legislation would affect colleges and universities nationwide because it has this carrot-and-stick approach in it, which I'll let you describe. But I want to give this headline because it was so interesting to me. You found that public community colleges, particularly those with strong vocational programs, would receive nearly $2 billion per year in direct aid if this legislation passed. The bill is essentially rewarding these schools for their low prices, high socioeconomic diversity, as well as the fact that they largely don't rely, interestingly enough given the past conversation, on federal student loans. So, I found this striking because community colleges more generally, they're not places that get great outcomes in terms of completion rates or transfer and things of that nature, it seems very in line with the Biden administration's hope for community colleges getting money through other means. So, I'm just curious what is going on here in this policy?Preston Cooper:It's a great question. I'll start by kind of describing the carrot and stick approach in the legislation that you referred to. Let's start with the stick. Congressional Republicans are very concerned about the fact that a lot of students who use federal student loans to pay for their education don't earn enough to pay back those loans in full. We see a lot of people relying on IDR who are not paying back their loans, and who are getting the loans forgiven. We see a lot of people defaulting on their loans. So basically, what they want to do is make the colleges co-sign a portion of those loans. So, if the student either requires assistance to pay back their loans through an income driven repayment plan or doesn't pay back their loans at all, defaults all their loans. The legislation would require the colleges where the students went to compensate taxpayers for a portion of those losses that the taxpayers suffered because the loans went bad.The goal here is to align incentives between the colleges and the students basically to say, if you're a college, you're charging way too much. Your students are taking on way too much debt relative to what they're earning after graduation, we're going to penalize you for that. So, you're either going to have to lower your prices to bring them in line with what you're graduates are earning, or you're going to have to figure out ways to make your education more valuable in the labor market so that your students earn more and that justifies the high prices that they're paying for your education. This raises a ton of money, obviously, because suddenly colleges rather than taxpayers are the ones who are suffering the losses on these student loans. And they plow a lot of that money into a new, what I call a performance grant program for colleges.It's not just community college colleges that are eligible. All colleges who are participating in the federal loan program are eligible for these performance bonuses. These performance bonuses are given out based on a formula that takes into account how many low-income students you enroll, how good are your graduation rates, what are your students earning after graduation, and are you keeping your prices low. We kind of crunched the numbers on this, figuring out which colleges would benefit from these performance grants. It turns out community colleges do well. One big reason is that they have relatively low prices, and they have a lot of low-income students. Their outcomes are not necessarily great, the graduation rates leave something to be desired in the community college sector ditto with earnings. But I think it creates some incentives for community colleges to improve those outcomes because suddenly the community college can qualify for a potentially much bigger grant from the federal government if it invests in programs with a very high return on investments and if it invests in interventions to make sure more of those students get across the finish line.So, we see, especially community colleges with a strong vocational and technical focus, community colleges, which you're focusing on the trades, getting graduates into very high-wage jobs, those colleges do well out of this performance bonus program.  We see that if this legislation were enacted, a lot of community colleges, particularly if they have good outcomes, could do very well. And schools that are relying very heavily on the federal student loan program and don't have great outcomes, could take a major financial hit from that.Outcomes-driven measures in TexasMichael Horn:This isn’t just theory, it occurs to me because you've seen this very thing play out in Texas, correct?Preston Cooper:That's right, yes. There's a college here in Texas called Texas State Technical College. And the state about 10 years ago kind of did something a little bit similar to what Republicans want to do at the national level. They said, for this technical college, we're going to overhaul the funding formula. So, you're no longer just getting an appropriation for how many butts you have in seats. Your funding from the state government is going to be based on what your graduates earn. We're basically going to give you a set percentage of your graduates' wages. This changed the incentives for the school so suddenly they can get more funding from the state government if they have better outcomes if their graduates go on to higher wage jobs. The community college essentially closed down some programs that were not paying off well for students and opened a bunch of new programs or expanded existing programs that did have a much better track record. It turns out the number of students they were serving went up, the average wages of graduates went up and their funding from the state government went up. So, it was a real winner for the college, but they had to be given the right incentives to make the changes they needed to make in order to serve students better.CCRA’s implications for private non-profitsMichael Horn:Incentives around outcomes matter. Fancy that. What was fascinating is that the story is quite different though for elite private universities.  I want to quote what you wrote here because you said, that despite their vaunted reputations, many graduates of these schools do not earn enough to pay back the loans that they took out to afford the school's exorbitant tuition prices. This is especially true for top schools that have pricey master's degree programs of questionable economic value for the revenue. You estimated that elite private nonprofits would pay almost 2 billion per year. Sort of the opposite of the windfall, if you will, for the community colleges in penalties under the Republicans' plan. The biggest loser would be the University of Southern California USC, which would have to pay nearly $170 million annually if it continued with business as usual. So, help us unpack what's going on here. USC. Sure. They're everyone's poster child for bad behavior at the moment, but how about Harvard? Are they going to be paying money back to the federal government as well?Preston Cooper:A lot of schools that have pretty high prices and rely heavily on the federal student loan program could potentially be facing a really big bill. I want to emphasize, that it's the reliance on federal student loans that is the real killer for some of these schools. So USC to take that example, almost 1% of the new student loans issued in the United States every year just goes to USC. They're so reliant on the federal student loan program, and a big part of the reason for that is they offer master's degree programs. They charge over a hundred thousand dollars for say, a master's in social work. And the amounts that people are earning after graduation just simply are not enough to justify those debt burdens. So right now they can kind of get away with it largely because of safety net programs in the federal student loan program, like income driven repayment, which usually means students do not repay the loans they took out to fund their education at USC in full, but somebody's got to pay the bill for that.And right now, it's taxpayers paying the bill. So the Republican proposal would say colleges are going to have to start footing a portion of that bill. So, USC, because it has all these programs where the debt is simply not justified by the earnings, could potentially pay a very large penalty under the Republican legislation. I believe the number is about 170 million per year. That's business as usual. But I think what a lot of the Republicans who authored this bill would say is that it's not necessarily about punishing USC, it's about changing the incentives to make sure USC does better by its students. We don't want USC to pay $170 million per year. What we want USC to do is to reduce its reliance on the federal student loan program, and bring down its prices so students don't have to pay quite as much to some of these programs that simply charge too much and don't have the earnings outcomes to justify it. Make USC a better school that does right by its students, and they won't have to pay that $170 million penalty. They continue with business as usual, though they're going to have to pay for it.Outcomes-driven measures in Biden’s planMichael Horn:Gotcha. I love it because that's a dynamic way to think about policy. It changes the marketplace incentives and actors rationally start to change what they do as a result. It circles back, I think, to the Biden administration because there are some ways to compare approaches here, right? USC, as I mentioned earlier, is sort of everyone's poster child, but especially theirs for everything that's gone wrong in higher ed in some respects. They talk about the bad contracts with online program management companies, and high-priced online master's degrees that you mentioned in fields like social work that don't get great earnings. On the other side, you've got the admission scandals at USC, you name it, they have it. The Biden administration has gone after some of this by revising the regs around third-party servicers. We might see them tackle the bundled services exemption with rev shares.You've got the negotiated rulemaking that's going after online education more generally with state reciprocity and stuff like that. But they're also taking this approach that on the surface at least feels more outcomes oriented like the Republican plan to have institutions have skin in the game. And that's around the rewriting of the gainful employment regs. If I'm not mistaken, I think those regs have now been rewritten something like four times in the last 12 years, I think.  You've done a lot of writing and thinking about gainful employment. How should we think about these contrasting approaches, gainful employment, looking at the loans people owe, and making judgments about programs versus risk sharing? Are there merits to both? Are there detriments to one or the other? What's your perspective on these approaches?Preston Cooper:It's a great question. So, to start with gainful employment, so what the Biden administration wants to do on gainful employment is they have a two-pronged test here. One, they look at each program that receives federal funding, how high is your student's debt burden relative to their earnings? And number two, are your students earning more than the typical high school graduates? And if you don't pass both of those tests, then you get kicked out of the federal student loan program. There is one massive, massive caveat to that though, which is that they only applied the gainful employment rule to for-profit colleges and career programs. So actually, places like USC, which as you said is kind of the poster child for malfeasance and higher education, they're going to be exempt from gainful employment. So that $115,000 master's degree in social work that leads to earnings of $40,000 or something like that, where students are never going to be able to pay back their loans without government assistance, that program would not be held accountable by gainful employment.I think that's just a massive, massive blind spot in the rules that they were very obsessed with kind of targeting the for-profit college industry where there have been many legitimate problems there. I'm not defending them at all, but I think that means we can't simply ignore the problems that exist at nonprofits like USC because often they're not serving students well either, or they have a lot of these bad outcomes that the gainful employment rule completely ignores. That being said, I am kind of heartened at the focus on outcomes in that rule. I think I'm less of a fan of rules that are trying to go after third-party servicers or state authorization reciprocity agreements because I think if you can make an OPM work if you can make an online master of social work, if you can make that payoff for students, I don't particularly care that it's an online degree. I don't particularly care if you offered it with an OPM. What I care about is are your students’ getting earnings, and getting jobs that justify the debt they took on. No matter how you get to that point, as long as you can get to that point, I'm pretty agnostic as to the method you used to do it, but we have to make sure that the outcomes are there.The opportunity for bipartisanshipMichael Horn:Yeah, look, that mirrors my thinking as well. It seems like the focus should be on the outcomes, not micromanaging the inputs, which frankly is going to restrict innovation and favor incumbents in all sorts of weird ways from other fields. You certainly would conclude. I guess I'm curious about your perspective as a watcher of all this, does this create a bipartisan opportunity perhaps for some collaboration and compromise, at least given the recognition, hey, gainful employment, maybe it doesn't get all the actors we should risk sharing. Maybe we want to tweak that somehow. Is there some room between them for the two parties to come together and get some forward progress, maybe actually get legislation rather than just reg rewriting?Preston Cooper:It's a great question. It's something that I think about a lot. I think in principle, there's a lot of scope for potentially a grand bargain on this. I do think that both Democrats and Republicans recognize that there are big swaths of higher education that are federally funded and don't necessarily deliver on their promise. I think in principle, there's scope for an agreement there. I think it runs up against a number of practical hurdles starting with the fact that basically every member of Congress has a college in their district and some of those colleges don't do well. And some of those colleges might get penalized under any kind of reasonable risk-sharing or accountability framework. And so I think once you start getting to this practical consideration, some of the bipartisan consensus that makes sense in principle starts to fall apart. And that's why I think the carrot-and-stick approach of the Republican plan is pretty valuable because it's not necessarily just taking away from higher education, it's also benefiting a number of colleges that are doing right by their students. So members can go back to their districts and say, Hey, this community college is doing pretty well and they're actually going to get a bonus from this. And so I think that's to make this politically feasible, that's what's going to have to happen. We'll see whether the Republican plan can get any traction among Democrats right now. The Democrats have been pretty in lockstep opposed to it, but we'll see. It might be a good starting point for [a] potential grand bargain.Rethinking accreditationMichael Horn:The future. Super interesting. So last piece of this, the College Cost Reduction Act also had this part that hasn't gotten a lot of attention around rethinking accreditation. And this might be a place for also bipartisan compromise because the way that the bill at least would propose is that you could have states creating what they call Q AEs, quality assurance entities, which is actually something borrowed a terminology borrowed from the Obama Administration's Department of Education in 2015. That would basically be new. I'd love your take on if you see this as an area for compromise, but also why introducing more accrediting agencies or defacto, I guess, accrediting agencies, why would this improve the state of affairs? Because it's not necessarily meaning that they wouldn't be membership organizations or that they would operate under different rules or anything like that. So what's the theory of action of introducing more accreditors or quality assurance entities?Preston Cooper:I think one massive issue that we face in higher education right now is there's a real dearth of competition, which means there's a real dearth of innovation. 95% of current traditional age college students attend a school that was started more than 40 years ago. There's simply not a lot of new entrants into higher education and not at the scale that can really provide competitive pressure to actually improve the state of affairs and higher education. And I think that's what those provisions of the college Cost Reduction Act are trying to get at. They recognize that a big problem here is the accreditors. So we have seven historically regional accreditors, which basically are the gatekeepers for new institutions seeking federal student aid and sometimes seeking just permission to operate. And those accreditors aren't necessarily friendly to new institutions. They're not necessarily friendly to innovation. Sometimes they'll just look at, if you want to start a new school, are you doing everything exactly the way other schools are doing it?So that doesn't really add any value there. Leave much space for innovation. So the Republican proposal would allow some new institutions to kind of get around the established accreditation cartel. They'd still be held accountable, but they could be held accountable by the state governments, not necessarily by accreditation agencies, by allowing states to either create or designate these new quality assurance entities that would be able to approve new colleges or existing colleges for the purposes of access to Title IV federal financial aid. That's Pell Grants and student loans. And so this could inject some competition into the higher ed sector if suddenly new institutions with a new way of doing things with potentially a more cost effective model or potentially a model that might get better outcomes if those new institutions suddenly have an easier path into the market that could put some real competitive pressure on incumbent institutions to try and improve their outcomes, lower their prices do better by their students. Now naturally, there have to be some safeguards there, and I think the bill has some appropriate safeguards to make sure we're not just approving fly by night or scam institutions to get taxpayer dollars. But I think the goal there is to create more competitive pressure in the higher education market. And I think that's a very laudable and a very needed goal that they're trying to accomplish.Michael Horn:In other words, part of the argument is that the University of Austin, Texas is the Minerva. Universities reach universities. There's a handful of others, college Unbound, et cetera. Those are almost the anomalies that prove the rule that it's really hard to start up a new accredited higher ed institution. And we needed better gateway, in essence, to facilitate a lot more startups coming into the market.Preston Cooper:That's right. I have a magazine article about the University of Austin coming out soon, and when I was talking to them, one recurring theme was this is just a very drawn out process to start a new university. It's almost a year to get permission from the state government. It can be four to six years to get permission from the accreditor in order to operate. We've got to hire all these people who know how to navigate the bureaucracy, and I have no doubt that they're going to be able to do it. They've got $200 million behind them. They've got a bunch of big names, they've got a bunch of experts in navigating the accreditation bureaucracy. But if you're not the University of Austin and you don't have $200 million behind you, that's going to be a really steep hill for you to climb if you want to start a new university. And so they are the exception that proves the rule. They will probably be able to start a new college, and I wish them the best of luck. I think that their model's intriguing and it could be very successful, but we need more than just a handful of new colleges. We need large scale entry into the market to provide real competitive pressure to the established institutions, which up until now have been able to coast.Michael Horn:Super interesting. Preston, thanks for taking us through this rundown of all things intrigue and proposals and machinations behind the federal machine that creates a lot of the incentive structure for the very rational as a result behavior that we see in institutions in higher ed. Really appreciate you bringing the wisdom here on the future of education.Preston Cooper:Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to have a conversation with you.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.

What’s the impact of the current federal higher ed. regulation regime on online education? That’s the question I addressed in my conversation with education technology consultant and industry analyst Phil Hill. We discussed the current administration’s effort to gut inter-state accreditation reciprocity agreements and its impacts on online universities serving students across state lines. We also discuss the Department’s third-party servicer regulations, gainful employment measures, and the importance of finding a bipartisan path forward. This is the first of two conversations exploring the impact of the current regulations and policy proposals in higher education. Don’t miss my conversation with Preston Cooper next week. 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 dedicated to creating 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, we have a terrific guest, Phil Hill. For those of you that tune into my other podcast Future U., you will know Phil because he's been a guest before, but he is an education technology consultant. He's an industry analyst extraordinaire at Phil Hill and Associates. He writes the terrific newsletter and blog “On Ed Tech.” That's the name. It's “On Ed Tech.” Please subscribe. It is an absolute must-read to understand not just the major trends in Ed Tech, but also higher education more generally. I learn so much every time I read it and every time I talk to him. Phil, thank you so much for being here. I really appreciate it. I can't wait to learn from you this time.Phil Hill :Well, thank you very much, and with that intro, I think we should wrap up the show. Just leave it at that.Michael Horn:It's all downhill for you from here, right?Phil Hill:Yeah, I appreciate it.Is the Department of Ed. Targeting Online Education?Michael Horn:No, in all seriousness though, I think we're going to learn a lot. And obviously for those that know you were on our Future U. show. You anchored our 101 deep dive on OPMs—online program management companies—and the impact that they're having on higher education more generally. Now we're in a moment where OPMs are perhaps struggling and we may get more into that. You've argued persuasively, I think that revenue sharing and OPMs are perhaps not dead. Even more provocatively, and where I want to go right now, you and your colleague, Glenda Morgan have written that this current Department of Education under the Biden administration is trying to target online education more generally. In other words, this isn't just about OPMs. This isn't even just about for-profit universities. This is about online learning period. That's striking because roughly 54% of students, as of fall of 2022, 54% of students are taking at least one online course. And that's to say nothing of the broader world outside of accredited higher ed, where adults tune in regularly to learn from YouTube, LinkedIn Learning, Coursera, Udemy, Pluralsight, you name it. So, I would love to know just what's behind this assertion that this Department of Education is targeting online education?Phil Hill:Sure. Before I do that, I will say it's sort of amusing starting out with this framing because Morgan, she goes by her last name. She wrote a post recently, two months ago called Online is the Target that encapsulated this idea. At the time she wrote it, there was a little bit of me saying, okay, so you're finally catching up and realizing some basics. But you're a great writer, so let's see what you come up with. So I initially had sort of a dismissive tone to it, but then she put out the article and it's called Online is the Target. You'll see it if you search it online. And it was profound. Sometimes I get so deep in the weeds and finding out what's happening that her post really helped me step back and say, wow, this really is completely obvious that the regulatory activity is not just saying online education at nonprofit institutions getting hit as unintended consequences, but it actually is the target itself.And what we're seeing this year is making it crystal clear. So I love talking about that because I think it's so significant. It affects so much more than the OPM market. It obviously goes well past the for-profit industry. But I mean, I guess just to get started, what's being apparent, what's apparent now and was a parent of Oregon a couple months ago is the fact that if you look at the regulatory activity last year, so much of it was around gainful employment, which targets mostly for-profit schools, but also certificates seeking programs at nonprofits, TPS, guidance expansion, third party servicer and bundled services, things that were explicitly going after for-profits or OPMs. If you look at what's happening today, now you're getting into things such as we want to gut the state authorization reciprocity agreement, and let's just go into that for a little bit of detail and help explain it.Think of it as a driver's license that imagine if you had to drive across country and you needed to make sure that if you're going the route that I'm about to go, by the way, I need to get, yeah, I have a driver's license from Arizona, but I also have to have permission to drive in Nebraska and Kentucky and elsewhere. Well, it would be very painful and it would really prevent mobility and the ability to actually drive around the country freely. So we have reciprocity with driver's licenses so that my Arizona license goes anywhere in the us. This is happening for online education through a reciprocity agreement. The Obama administration said, you have to get authorized in each state where your students reside even if you're online. Well, that is chaotic, particularly for schools with a smaller online presence. The reciprocity agreement was an agreement between states that made it realistic for online programs to actually do that.Like Southern New Hampshire that has hundreds of thousands of students, trust me, they have an army of compliance officers. They're getting authorized, they're following it. But your everyday university that has a few online things, they're the ones who really need reciprocity. Well, we have an agreement and it's really helping in the market, the current set of negotiated rulemaking that's happening right now. The Department of Ed very clearly wants to gut the reciprocity agreement and say, no, you have to go back to the way we were before and actually get authorized in every single state. Well, now if you have a small program, that means there's a lot of online stuff that you're either going to not do the online program or you're going to say, we can't enroll students from these states. We just can't. It's unrealistic. And the primary institutions that are going to get hit are going to be nonprofit institutions with smaller online programs. So that's one specific example that really flavors what we're seeing and why. The argument is it's online education itself that's being targeted as a problematic practice or something deserving of much more scrutiny than campus based education. So I don't know if I directly answered your question.Impact of Regulations on Small CollegesMichael Horn:It's really interesting around state reciprocity and the regulatory burden that we'll create for colleges and universities. And look, you're right, obviously like a Southern New Hampshire University, 250,000 students are so unenrolled, they've got lots of money, lots of people that they can throw at this to make sure that they are registered properly in each and every state and make sure students can continue to enroll and so forth. But you mentioned the private college, and I'd just love to pick at that for a moment to understand it better because we know that for the most part, most students who enroll online, they're doing so 50 to 75 miles from where they live. So for that small college that has an online program, how many students are they really enrolling out of state? Isn't that more of those national players, the Arizona states, the Western governors universities, the Southern New Hampshires? Aren't those the ones that are really enrolling students from state to state and therefore can handle this? Or is this going to impact small colleges for other reasons?The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Phil Hill:Sure. And just to clarify, I don't think it's just small colleges. I think it's even large colleges and universities with small online programs. And I mean, you're bringing up a great point. The majority of students reside within 50 to 75 miles of their online program. So what's likely to happen is they will for the first time, certainly naturally, really for the first time, they're going to have to pay attention to it. So they're going to have to figure out what's going to happen. They're going to have to say, well, where do you reside and can we register in this state and get authorized in this state? And so what's most likely going to happen is they will have to say, if I'm in Illinois and I have a smaller program, Illinois, we're here, we're authorized. I'm only going to allow students from Wisconsin and Indiana and Iowa, Iowa commonly known as Western Chicago to be within this program. And outside of that, we cannot allow students to come in. So I think that's going to inhibit their growth. That's going to reduce choices for students, and it's probably also going to add costs. You have bureaucratic burden, so it'll be more difficult to create new online programs. That's my guess of what the impact will be.Third-Party Servicer Regulations Michael Horn:No, that's really helpful. Thank you. And it's interesting, obviously because that increases regulatory burden on colleges and universities. And then there's been this other provision that the department has done through third party servicer regulations, and you were really the one that raised the alarm bell on this, but to remind folks, the Department of Education was expected to regulate revenue sharing agreements to really go after OPMs, and they instead went much farther. Essentially, they took a reg that had applied to vendors that were handling financial aid money and so forth and said, now we're going to ask colleges to make sure that any vendor you're working with in instruction and student support and information systems and on and on, we're going to make sure that they have audits, that they're put through a whole host of restrictions and so forth. Big expansion of federal power, big expansion of bureaucracy and regulation. And as I said, you raised the alarm on this, the administration stepped back from it, and now you said you don't expect something further until April of ‘24. So shortly after this comes out. I'm just curious, is this still your point of view and what do you expect them to do?Phil Hill:Well, I've changed my mind on the projections of where it is, but just to step back, one thing I would say that's a little bit different there, there was a clear target in that case that was very much crafted as a mechanism for the Department of Ed to regulate the OPM companies particularly, or mostly those who do rev share agreements. And it just happened to have unintended consequences across the market,Michael Horn:Collateral damage. And they didn't care.Phil Hill:Well, yeah, they didn't care. But how deliberate was that? Because when you say regulatory burden, it's not just like, okay, we have regulations. You have to go through a lot of pain. There's a power dynamic going involved. There's a thing of we want to be the arbiters of what's allowable and what's not allowable across the board. So there's a deliberate, we want to shift the power from states to the federal government that I think has some deliberate things. I think what was unintended were the negative consequences were people haven't thought it through. The big through line, I would say between all of these is the Department of Education and the activists, most of them funded or partially funded by the Arnold Ventures Foundation. It's a consumer protection mindset. Their fundamental axiomatic belief is that most bad things that are happening are because of bad actors and therefore to help students, we need to find those bad actors and reign them in. And so everything is seen through that lens, that's through line, that's going throughout there. And so at the time with TPS, it was, well, if we're noble because we're reigning in rev share the fact that we have a little collateral damage, oh, no big deal. I don't think they realized how big the collateral damage was until there was such a public outcry on, do you realize what's happening? I really don't think they understood that fully.Michael Horn:That's super interesting.Phil Hill:But it's always that there's a consumer protection mindset. And then as I said, the big changes this year, it's become so much more apparent that part of the definition of bad actor includes not all online programs, but online programs are so susceptible to bad actors that we need to target that area because that's where most bad things happen. So that's the true line is the consumer protection mindset.Michael Horn:And so the assumptions seems to be, if I'm following you correctly, that if you're online, you're probably doing something predatory, right? You've got a bad actor here, and so you need a set of, in essence regulations that's going to in effect get in the way before we hurt students, right? It's going to block, and we're not doing this by looking at outcomes or looking at the programs. We're really looking to regulate the inner workings of how you register with states, how you enter into your contracts with different private providers, all the sort of micromanaging and effect of how you actually set up the operations themselves.Phil Hill:Yes, and I would add to that, go back to the reciprocity. What the effect of gutting reciprocity does is it enables individual state and the attorneys general in those states to take legal action to help do this. So that's another very big side of how this administration handles regulation. It's sort of a multi-front campaign, and so they want to enable states to take action such as the state of California taking action on Ashford University. And so that's what they want to maximize is the opportunity not just for the federal government, but for the states to actually take action. There's part I didn't answer before. Back in the fall, I was predicting that they pulled back TPS guidance, as you said, I was predicting at the time that they wouldn't do it this year because of the election because it's so unpopular. I was wrong. They are pretty much going for broke on so many new regulations. They're not taking a let's be cautious during an election year approach. So the soonest we'll get new TPS guidance will be April, and that's based on court documents where they had to state to a judge where their plans were. Of course, it's possible they'll keep kicking the can down the road and it won't actually come out, but it could come out as soon as April or May of this year, a revised set of TPS guidance.Michael Horn:Maybe you don't know, but do you expect that it's going to be more narrowly confined find to focus on the OPMs through the third party service regulations, or might they walk back completely and say, Hey, we're going to go after the dear colleague bundled services 2011 letter that really made rev share legal, if you will. Obviously OPMs had been around before then, but this in effect gave them safe harbor. What's your expectation of what they'll actually do here?Phil Hill:Well, first of all, to their credit, they pulled back on some of the things that were ridiculous, such as if you follow make everybody, most of EdTech follow third party servicer guidelines. You have the auditing, which you mentioned, but you also have the thing of no foreign companies, no non-US companies.Michael Horn:Which seemed to violate treaties.Phil Hill:Oh yeah. Yes. And so they pulled back on that. So it's not going to have that type of arrangement. It's going to be they explicitly wrote stuff that would make the LMS companies be liable for this. I expect that if they get new guidance, it will target not just OPM, anybody who's doing revshare and who's doing marketing and student recruitment support of a school, I think that's going to be the scope of what they come out with if they do it. Now, the bundled services exception, which enables rev share OPMs, that's tied to it, but it won't be directly addressed by the guidance where it's tied, is politically, and I realize I got to be careful how I'm saying this, but it's consistent with what I'm seeing, but there's a little bit of a coordinated campaign. There needs to be an answer because at this point, they have not added regulations against OPMs.They tried it with TPS guidance, they had to pull it back. Bundled services exception. They keep talking about it, but they haven't released it. Well, if I'm on Senator Warren's staff, I've been pressuring the Department of Ed take action on OPMs. You have to say, as of today, they haven't. And so I think that one or the other is going to have to be done just for the political pressure reasons this year. And so part of the forecasting, it's figuring out which is more likely or both. I think it would be difficult for the Department of Ed to just do what I originally predicted back in November, which is kick the can until after the election. I don't think they could do that. So the tie in is political, not regulatory, really.Gainful Employment Measures Michael Horn:These politics are so interesting because as you said, you would expect them to not do something in a presidential election year, but because of senators in their own party, the pressure from them, there's more interest in them doing something and so forth. And that consumer protection mindset, I get it. It's to sort of catch the bad actors by micromanaging in some sense inputs. But then they've got this other element that they've done that feels more outcome oriented, at least on the surface. And that's gainful employment, which has actually gone through this is like its fourth revision I think in the last 12 or so years. And now the department has added two elements. In essence as I understand it. The first is this earning premium. Basically our graduated students, are they earning more than high school graduates in a particular state? And then they have the FVT, the financial value transparency, which again, as I understand it applies to all programs regardless of tax status or type and basically would create a disclosure for programs that are failing gainful employment regs. I would love to know what's going on here In your mind, you've been critical of these regulations as I understand that as well. So why,Phil Hill:And I'll try to explain, at least start out with sort of what I think they're trying to achieve and sort of the rationale behind it. So gainful employment was much narrower back during the Obama administration. They had two rounds for different reasons. Court cases drove them to do it, but that only said it was for-profit, any degree program or certificate program or certificate programs, career programs at nonprofit schools. When they added that got defeated and in a lawsuit. And then by 2019 it was rescinded, it got reintroduced with the two scope items you just mentioned the earnings premium and the FVT. To their credit, one of the big complaints about gainful employment is why are you attacking just for profits? That's not fair. If we're going to hold people accountable, why don't we do it across the board? Financial value transparency applies to, well, it applies to every degree seeking program in the us, whatever school you are, if your program in any way accepts federal financial aid, you have to report the data and it's going to be publicized.So that's why they call it transparency. And it's across the board, it's equal opportunity now. It's got a provision in there about if you fail it after two years, you have to force students to sign an acknowledgement that, Hey, I'm signing up for a failing program before they get awarded any financial aid. So that's going to harm enrollment. So I think the rationale there is pretty clear we need to hold everybody accountable. So on the surface, that's a very good argument. I think the biggest problem with that is the people behind it assume the data is much further along and much more accurate and consistent than it actually is, and they're not taking into account edge cases, poor data and stuff like that. And so we're going to have a lot of unintended consequence. The earnings premium, and I just saw the Department of Ed official describe this on a recent webinar with the Association of Institutional Researchers, sorry, and the department ed guy described it.He said, we realize there are programs that where students come out with low debt, but we think they're still poorly performing programs because the earnings of students coming out is not that high. So we want to also go after them even if they have low debt for students coming out. That's the impetus behind the earnings premium expansion, the core gainable employment that's closer to what it was back in the Obama administration. But these two new pieces, I think that's the, well, I've heard it come from the department that's the rationale for them to do both of those expansions.Michael Horn:I just love you to double click on that because so is the real issue that the data is not what you expect to see and sort of what's the problem with that?Phil Hill:Let me describe the concern. Overusing bad data assumptions first, the concern is, and the reason that I care about this and so many people I know care about it, is if you trace the logic through and whether you believe that there's systematic discrimination in the US or not between male and female, let's go with that. Females on average make lower wages than males. That's in the data. So forget your politics, it's data. Well, if you aggregate your comparison of here's what a typical high school graduate would make and you ignore some simple demographics such as race area of the state and stuff like that, then you end up making it more difficult in this case for females because their baseline doesn't account for the fact that they tend to make less than males. So you might have a female where their earnings would be higher by taking this program, but they get penalized because that's not accounted for in the way they define the data for the rules.And there's a myriad examples of that, the net effect, and I've heard people say this in conferences. You know what the safest play is? Just admit white males. That is the safest way to stay clean with the new regulations. Now we know that's not what the Department of Education wants, but as you trace it through, that's going to be the impact. And Morgan wrote about this with law schools and it was a similar type thing. A lot of those, because law schools tend to have very high tuition and debt, a lot of them will fail these regulations and force students to sign this acknowledgement. You're going to a failing program, and we've talked to numerous people, there's going to be pressure to play it safe, which means it's going to harm disadvantaged groups. So that's what I mean. And there are many different examples in there on where the, but it's almost not just poor data, but poor assumptions about that data and what it can do. That's the reason that I and many other people have been critical of what's happening.Finding Bipartisan MiddlegroundMichael Horn:It's really interesting. So your standpoint in essence isn't that we don't need measures focused on outcomes over inputs, but really that what would be your approach forward?Phil Hill:Well, I mean there's a little bit of a leading question there. Outcomes is obviously a key thing. Don't just say what theoretically might happen. Actually find out where students are getting harmed and that's where you focus your regulations and then don't make up things saying, well, they have low debt, but let me add somebody else something else just so I can catch something. I think that I would be cautious, I would be less aggressive in how far you advance regulations at each stage so that you can get the data and then you get buy-in and then you can move it forward. Here's the ironic thing. Most people I know, and most people such as myself who are very critical of what the Department of Ed is doing, we actually share the same goals. We would like to see student debt reduced. We would like to see opportunities for multiple students, whether it's schools or whoever.If there is bad behavior, we would like to see that address by regulation and not just let it slip through the cracks. So there's actually a lot of agreement on goals, and I think there's a possibility to get there. Now, here's an ironic mark. It just came out I think today, if not yesterday. There was an OP-ed by one of the executives from Arnold Ventures, who's one of the main sources behind these moves recommending calling. I think it was a real clear politics that was published Kelly Ree. But she was saying, here's the opportunity for the Biden administration to work across the aisle, find the areas where we agree and actually make things happen. And so they called out. So for example, here's an interesting fact. The save act, which is being advanced by Republicans in the house, there is some interesting commonality. They believe in collecting data on programs and making it public and holding colleges accountable for it.Well, there's a huge amount of overlap between that and what we're doing with financial value transparency. So if I were in charge of the Department of Ed, I would actually follow what Kelly Re's op-Ed said today, and I would say, Hey, let's find the overlap of what you're pushing with financial value, transparency. We're not going to, neither side's going to get both things, but let's advance the ball and do it in a way that listens to feedback. When people say watch out, there's unintended consequences. So I would be boring. I would be more cautious of my approach.Michael Horn:I gotcha. So it's more of a let's take measured steps forward, get the research, get the data, iterate, learn, move forward. There's some room for bipartisanship there and sort of this incremental approach as opposed to big foul strokes that may have unintended consequences.Phil Hill:And I agree, they're definitely a poster child or I call them a bellwether if you want to see what's going to hit other companies look at 2U, good and bad. One thing to clarify, their current pain is very much driven by the financial markets. The end of effectively zero interest rates that mark the 2010s, and they amassed way too much debt without the ability to pay for it. I actually have been doing deeper research. I haven't written my next post, but here's the key. They are saying we have enough liquidity to make it through this crisis. It's not a liquidity problem. They have cash, they're operating, it's fine. It's a maturity problem. Their debt matures in January of 2025, and they could not pay for that without refinancing. So the nature of the crisis is the status quo leads to bankruptcy. Now, bankruptcy doesn't mean out of business.We can't support programs. We saw this with Cengage a decade ago when they went bankrupts longer than that, bankruptcy means we're going to restructure, we're going to have to work with debt holders, see how much they get. It's going to be a multi-year legal process, and it's part of a turnaround. Now, what 2U wants to do is say, no, we want to actually refinance that debt fairly soon so that the crisis is over. The problem is it's a very difficult market to do that in because of interest rates and multiple reasons. So they're attempting a turnaround. So what I expect over the next year is either they are able to find a way to refinance their debt, and you'll read all about it. They'll make it very public. They'll pull a rabbit out of the hat, or they'll do an excellent job depending on how you want to describe it, or they're going to go bankrupt.And if they're going to go bankrupt, they will be still operating, but they're going to be restructuring the company in that. Now, I suspect strongly, and I've said in my articles, one of the ways to do this is you sell parts off. And I don't think they can sell the edX. It's too integrated into their strategy of lowering marketing costs as a platform. Yeah, boot camps, what they bought with trilogy boot camps are facing some really hard times, which might mean you can't get much money if you sold that off, but it also means, well, let's stop losing money from them. I don't know. If I were running things, that's the part I would look at, but you are likely to see part of restructuring. It's not just layoffs. It will be, let's sell this part of the business and focus. And so I think that's part of what you're going to see moving forward.But you've got to watch it because if it's going to get dangerous, if they get into the fall time and haven't refinanced yet, because even if they're able to, now schools only have a couple months runway until their partner might go bankrupt, doesn't mean they're going out of business, but there's a risk management and a risk profile that institutions can take. So that's the thing to watch this year, refinance or bankruptcy. And then the big question either way, how does that impact how well they are working with schools? And so the question then wouldn't be for me, it would be go to their university partners and ask them, how's your program doing? Are you getting service? That's going to be the key question this year. Now what's going? But I think it's crucial to note it's that financial market that's driving this chaos, this financial crisis that they're in right now. So there's so much happening in higher ed changing it, and that's another element that's out there. It's not all regulation, it's not all enrollment. It's also the financial markets as well.Thoughts on OPMs Michael Horn:Alright, well before we wrap up here, we have just a couple more minutes. I think let's just finish with some thoughts on OPMs because you've written a lot about 2U and the challenges that they are currently facing. Talk to me about what's going on there with 2U and what do you expect to happen to them?Phil Hill:Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so there are multiple that gets back to where this company, for better or worse, so often is the poster child or the bellwether. So they might be going through it in a public way this year, and it's interesting to watch, but part of the reason it's interesting to watch is it tells us a lot about what other ed tech companies are going through. So you is so much a bellwether showing how there are multiple mega trends that are impacting higher education right now. It's regulation, it's enrollment, it's financial markets, it's the loss of confidence in higher ed and the real challenges, higher ed universities, colleges, but also the ed tech ecosystem. They've got to deal with all that. So the changes that we're seeing right now, those are sort of the macro trends or mega trends that are driving so much of it. So it keeps your job and my job interesting this year.Michael Horn:Well, Phil, if 2U is a bellwether for OPMs and maybe online education more generally, I think you can be our bellwether for all of this, helping us navigate and figure out these times. So just really appreciate you joining us on the future of education to help us think through a lot of important issues impacting what higher education is going to look like in the future.Phil Hill:Well, thank you. I really enjoyed our talk as usual.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.

As mentioned last week, Diane Tavenner, Stacey Childress, and I recorded two episodes reacting to the three-part podcast that a16z venture capitalists Marc Andreseen and Ben Horowitz recorded on higher education. In this second episode, we reacted to the venture capitalists’ proposed solutions for higher education. This was also a juicy conversation, and we look forward to your thoughts!The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Diane Tavenner:Hey, Michael. Hey, Stacey.Stacey Childress:Hello.Diane Tavenner:Well, we are doing something for the first time here on Class Disrupted. We are recording a two-part podcast. And so here we are in part two. We've got the amazing Stacey Childress with us for this experiment, and she's hanging in there. She came back for number two. So, as a reminder, here is what we're up to. The three of us all listen to a very lengthy multi-part podcast by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, very successful and respected VCs and entrepreneurs. And their podcast broke down the problems with higher education and the solutions as they sort of saw them and proposed them. And then also had a third session on questions from X, Twitter, whatever you want to call that thing. So lots of people told us we had to listen to what they were saying, and we did. And then, quite frankly, we really felt compelled to join in this really important discussion. We were super grateful they were having it. We felt like we could add some things. And so in our last episode, we tackled the problem that they had laid out in their first episode. So we did that in our first and really broke down what they got right, what they missed, what some things we had some quibbles with. And today we want to flip to their solution. So, kind of mirroring their approach.Michael Horn:Yeah. And suffice to say, I think we had a lot we liked in the problems that they identified, some nuance that we tried to add to their conversation to set us up, I think, for a more productive set of solutions. And again, the disclosure that we're all on the board of Minerva University, and we kind of think that we might be an interesting solution to some of the problems that they posed. But with that as sort of prelude, I think let's just jump right in. They offered a bunch of solutions as they went down the bundle of their twelve. They talked a lot about how you could unbundle and rebundle a lot. I thought that was an insightful framing as you think about solutions to these operations and these real valuable functions that places play. So, Diane, where would you like to dive in?The benefits of centering teachingDiane Tavenner:Well, for me, Michael, the solution episode is where things really got spicy. And you know that really isn't a surprise. I often find that people are really good at breaking down and dissecting problems, but they often don't offer very satisfying or promising solutions, especially when you're talking about big, complex systems problems. And so I'm not surprised that I wasn't feeling satisfied in that episode. And in fact, I feel like I've made this complaint about a lot of the books that I've recommended on this podcast. So it's not that there's not value in there, but I definitely have some disappointment with the solutions that Marc and Ben proposed and that lots of other people propose, especially when you get into education. And so I guess where I want to start is, let's just go through some of them, and I pulled a bunch of them out and I'm curious what you all think about them. And so let me just start on the positive, what I agreed with, and we talked a lot about this in the first episode, so don't have to spend a lot of time here. But I actually agreed with their solution, that one of the things that colleges and universities need to do is focus on educating students and refocus, reignite their purpose around that. And in doing so, they should be able to reduce administrative overhead. And so they talked a lot about how in a number of universities, there are reports now that there are literally more administrative people than there are students, which kind of, to any person sounds insane. And I think we know that to actually be true know they have a perception of cost ballooning. Michael, you gave us some real nuance around that in the last episode, so we can take that or leave that. But this ballooning, this lack of focus, contributes to a lack of direct service to students, and we should just literally, dramatically reduce admin and in doing so, reduce cost. And so I'm curious what you guys think. The last thing I will just say quickly before I turn it to you is I do believe this is something we've done at Minerva. Minerva has prioritized student learning, the student experience. The three of us, as trustees know for a fact that the admin is quite lean and that cost structure is significantly leaner as well. So I do think we have at least one proof point that it can be done.Michael Horn:Yeah. Stacey, why don't you jump in first? And this is the format we'll follow for people listening. Diane's going to go through her list. Stacey, and I will react bullet by bullet, so to speak. So go ahead, Stacey.Stacey Childress:Yeah. On this one about refocusing on students, I would say refocusing on the purpose of the time in the program, whether that's two years, three years, four years, because I think you could play with timing as an innovation potentially. But while we're here together, learning much more, focus on purpose and helping young people expand their opportunity set. To me, it can be an early function of a higher ed experience in your first year or two where you're able to get better, clearer insight into a path or multiple paths that you may or may not have come in thinking that's the path you're on. Now. For lots of kids, they just come right in and go, and that's fine, but lots of them don't. And so just like thinking about what's really the purpose of the first year, what's really the purpose of that bridge from first to second year, what are we trying to help make sure students get to the middle of their second year at end of their third semester, kind of knowing about themselves, knowing about what comes next and what needs to happen. Just really kind of think of that backwards mapping. If we're headed here, how would we think about what needs to happen from the beginning to get there? And I just don't think that's happening anymore. So I liked the idea that it might be possible for institutions that want to really focus themselves on student development and acceleration to rethink the way the experience works without having to add a ton of costs and in fact, probably be able to reduce costs if they really streamlined around that purpose, therefore that value prop, therefore that experience that needs to be created and managed over time. So they didn't exactly suggest that. But I do think from a solution standpoint, I think there's real power there. And we said that with Minerva, we've got more of that mindset, but we were able to design it from the beginning that way. Or we weren't. I wasn't. I wasn't there at the very beginning, but not too long after. But that's the purpose at Minerva, and we're organized around it and can constantly get better at it, for sure. But we're organized around it. And I think it's a thing that existing institutions could move to. It doesn't seem impossible. It seems really hard, and it would take some time. But I think we have some examples of the improvement of some credentialing. I'm most familiar with it around master's programs, but I think that actually gives me a little bit of hope that you could think differently about the experience in ways that doesn't require you to blow up everything but does create opportunities to redesign at the kind of major/degree level. I don't know. I think it's possible and desirable.Michael Horn:Yeah, that's super interesting. I like also how you said it, Stacey, which is, regardless of what the universities do, they need to focus around a purpose. And so for some institutions, I will be delighted if they say it's research, because I think that's a very important societal function that's different from the one we've chosen at Minerva, which is fundamentally students. I think doing so on either end, I think, will reduce administrative overhead and cost bloat. I think you need that clarity. I will say the second add to you all that I think maybe, I don't know that it's a disagreement, but it follows from where you were going, Stacey, which is like, I don't think it's quite student centered. I think it's student purpose. And so, meaning, if we're backward mapping from, we want these individuals to go out into the employment world and society and be able to contribute, what does it. And I think it's a slight addendum to the student centered language only in the sense that you could argue that the opulent dining halls and residential palaces and so forth of colleges are very student centered in a weird kind of way. But I think it's because they've treated students as customers as opposed to clients. And my distinction there is simply, like, the customer is always right with a client, you kind of got to nudge them and help them because you're helping develop them. And so that's my one sort of maybe controversial nuance. But I think we should have teaching institutions, they shouldn't try to do research, and we should have far fewer research institutions. But I still want some of them.Diane Tavenner:I love that distinction, Michael. And it's so interesting how I think about this kind of as an insider and then a parent perspective, in that I actually, as a parent, see those sort of, let's call them resort style or luxury resort universities as detrimental to the development of people in the 18 to 25 range. And so I don't ever see that as a positive. But you're right. That's what some, especially elite families want. And that's like driving things. So super interesting. I will just say that Minerva is the opposite of that. As we both know, it really is designed to help develop young emerging adults and their skills. And it's really impressive on this front.Michael Horn:And they've done that backward mapping that Stacey just described in excruciating, incredible, awesome detail.Stacey Childress:Brilliant.Diversification of purpose and opportunitiesThe Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Diane Tavenner:Yep. Okay, so the second solution that I agree with, and here's where I'm really going to practice some grace, because I don't really think they said it the way that I would. But anyway, they seem to believe that it would be really healthy to have different universities and different departments within universities offering really different opportunities and appealing to different people and interests and passions and skills. I think they say that repeatedly, and I believe that that's really something they care about. And I 100% sign on to and agree with that. I'm super excited about that. Right now. We have one flavor and they're all vanilla. And how could we have some really different types of offerings? However, in that conversation, they got all caught up in DEI and politically hot topics. And so their discussion of it was kind of bumbly and in some cases came across as sort of biased and stereotypical. We unpacked that a lot on the last episode, so I'm not going to go back there. So instead, what I'm going to try to do is say what I think they would sign on to, given what I tried to hear through what they were talking about, which is what I would call the Todd Rose approach. And Michael and I have talked to Todd a couple times on the podcast, but basically, he really advocates for the end of average, which in his research and work suggests that what we're promoting in university admissions right now is everyone driving towards being on a very small number of measures, the same as everyone, only better. So it's like, we're all going to be good at these three things, and now I'm just going to try to get better than you versus recognizing that the world needs whatever, hundreds, thousands of different things and that different people bring those different... And we would be so much better served if we were cultivating all that diversity of talent and expertise and interest, and if we had a collective university system that was really enabling and doing that. And so I think they were trying to zoom out to that systems level and say, wouldn't that would be ideal? And I want to throw it to you all, because I do think this concept of like, imagine if students were applying to colleges not because of their ranking in U.S. News and World Reports or wherever we're getting it these days, but because it was really a good fit for them personally. I mean, that's the ideal that I think Ben and Marc would sign on to. I think society would benefit from, and I think it would, gosh, just be so much healthier for our young people and our country.Michael Horn:I love where you just landed, Diane, because to me, it took them a while to get there, which I think is what you're saying. But I think that was the underlying essence, which is that they were saying it's not just Math and English Language Arts that matter. If you're an awesome musician, there should be a way to show that. And then I think it would make it easier, frankly, for colleges to differentiate, which is the art of strategy. Colleges don't like differentiating right now, to your point, the opposite of strategy. That's part of the problem. But they had this, I think, somewhat bizarrely said, SAT should be infinitely scored. I kind of agree with it. Like, if you're really good at math, I'd love to see how high you can get. And I want lots of other performance measures that you could showcase your talents on to show who you are. And you're going to have this jagged profile at the end of the day. And I think that's. Again, I'm not sure that they said it that way, but I think that's what they fundamentally were driving at, and I'd love to see it. If you get out of the SAT as IQ test, I think you can make that leap a lot easier. And then it gets exciting, and I think, Stacey, and I'll throw it to you here, I think it also gets around in the longer run. This point you were raising in the last episode that we're actually not ready to leave the SAT, because when we do, it actually becomes worse and more biased toward people who have lots of wealth to develop essays and projects and go on saving the whales and blah, blah, blah. Like things that we're not sure were about that we're trying to optimize.Stacey Childress:For, as I used to say, not really my issue. I'm glad somebody cares about that. I do like the whales. It's not really my issue. Listen, I am all in on, as, you know, on jagged profiles, both as just a concept and as a common sense approach to how the world actually works. And again, I think that's a lot of what they got right, both in diagnosis and solutioning, or at least feeding into potential solutions, is there aren't enough choices. There are 4,000 institutions, but Diane, to your point, there are a handful or maybe four or five handfuls that are really kind of driving what good is supposed to look like, whether that's right or wrong, and then all the other ones trying to kind of look the best they can against that standard. I actually would be cautious about any one institution, no matter how large or small, how financially healthy or not. I'll be cautious about saying, do more programs, like, proliferate programs. Michael, like, you have spent some time both advising and teaching at the Harvard Graduate School of Ed Education in the last few years. And I think one really smart thing they've done is fewer programs. You know, let's have fewer of these. And so you can make more sense out of what a degree from Harvard Graduate School of Education means at the end of it, because you didn't have, however, I mean, there were literally like 42 paths or something, and it's down in the teens now. It's like a big step forward. And so I wouldn't suggest more. I would suggest more in aggregate. Right. And so to your point, Diane, what opportunity does it create for institutions to find their place in the ecosystem on the few things they can just be world class in, even if they're a smaller institution kind of in the middle of the country, someplace in a charming town, but not a destination spot. But they get really good at a few paths and us developing ways at the system level to let kids know about those young people, know about those options, these different places that you might go. And then the jagged profile, like, if you can have some services emerge for matching jagged profiles to institutions where you don't have to be one particular profile to do well there. But if you kind of fall in these ways, this is a way to continue to develop on these criteria you want to work on or if you want to look, the guys on the podcast saw college as a way out of being a bus boy and doing dishes when they were 17 or 18. Right. And so I don't want my jagged profile to be steady state, mostly filled in with things I'm interested in as a teenager and bus boy. But I do want some sense of where I am at that age and where I might want to push in if I'm interested in some other things. I mean, I want sports. So how does the ecosystem develop in ways that allows for, I'll just call it the supply of opportunities to be there in a very vibrant and differentiated set of options and some way of finding those options with a little bit of intelligence as a student and as a family about my student’s jagged profile. Right. I don't want my jagged profile to be driven by some of my immutable characteristics, like race and gender and presumptions about what I might like or not like based on that. But, yeah, I'm different from you, Diane, and from you, Michael. We've had a lot of things in common and a lot of things that are different from one another. And we always have. Everyone does.Certifying competence and personalizing through curriculumMichael Horn:Diane, can I, can I just one quick build off of that because it reminded me of two things. One, I loved it how the implication of what Stacey just said would solve the administrative overhead problem that you started with. Diane. I disagreed with their solution of just slash half the administration. You can't, as long as the bundle is what it is. And it's not a go back to operating like how you were in year 2000 because the world has changed. It's incredibly naive. And so that part of it, I think, where you just went with that, Stacey, is right. The other piece of this that just occurred to me is if you truly get good at the jagged profile piece, then a part I was in total agreement with Ben on was one of the biggest solutions, I think was starting the credentialing thing, if you will. That was actually certifying competence. And I think my conclusion, I've written a whole paper about this, about how we're never going to get to competency-based education unless there are these independent entities that are there to verify competency and mastery. And in practice, it's really hard to do. Like, we have all these one offs, right? Google, Microsoft, they don't stand in for the bundle. Once you get into the less rules based stuff, we get worse and worse at it. And so I guess I would just say if we solved it on the front end. Diane, I'm curious what you think, but we actually might build into something that could solve it on the back end. And that would actually lower the price, I think, of higher ed.Diane Tavenner:Yeah. Like, I'm bursting with things right now. So I'm going to do three things all here at once. One, I want to just add on to this, I think, this is a really important conversation. So here's what I would offer as a counterintuitive solution to what we've just been talking about that I know is true in the K-12 sector. So people think that in order to offer more choice and more personalization, that you have to do it in big structural ways. You have to add, like, a new major. You have to add a new school of something. You have to add, add, add. It's not true. The way you actually do it and reduce at the same time is in how you're designing those programs to be significantly more personalized, significantly more differentiated. So you're actually solving the problem of the horrible pedagogy.Stacey Childress:Right.Diane Tavenner:And you're not expanding the structure of the university. Now, this is so nerdy. Like, if you don't design education and whatnot, you would never know that this is how you do this. But Minerva is a perfect example. They literally have five majors, five degrees. That's it. Name me another university that only has five degrees. They've just exploded. But within those degrees, the experience is so hands-on, so project based, so differentiated that you can. People are really matching up. And so I think, actually, the path forward on that.Stacey Childress:It's super fascinating. And it is counterintuitive, because you're solving the scale system problem at the unit level. Right. At the unit of the learner and the learner experience. And it actually doesn't add overhead. It helps trim. It's fascinating.Diane Tavenner:It's my favorite kind of solution, which is, I call the kitchen tool solution. I have a small kitchen. I'm a big cook. I can't have that many tools. They have to do multiple jobs. So I love it as a kitchen tool solution. Michael, you also took us. So there's some other things we agree with which we might get back to, but I'm going to take us into the disagree, because you sort of led us there to this fixing the outgoing credential problem, which, look, I think we all agree there's a lot of disruption happening in society right now about these credentials. Right. And it's really unclear where they are, because last time I checked, all the elite employers are still hiring people from Stanford and Harvard. So that's super real. But you led us into their solution, and this might have been one of the most mind boggling proposals. And it falls into a category that's very natural for people, is when they don't know what to do, they think you need to do something different. They go back to something versus forward. And what Ben and Marc did was go back to the concept that in order to fix the credentialing problem and the lack of, we should start grading on a curve again. And I almost lost it, you guys. I had to take a break at that moment because that is the dumbest idea I've heard in a really long time. It's a horrible idea.Michael Horn:Nice of you to bring the nuance, Diane.Diane Tavenner:Quite frankly, they broke it down why it was a horrible idea. So I'll leave that to them. What is a good idea, and that's what we all talk about and what the three of us are driving for is competency, mastery based assessment and learning. And it's what you're pointing to, Michael. First of all, I just want people to understand this is a real thing. It's true. It's possible. There are competency based assessments that are valid and are reliable. More and more coming available every day. And in fact, one of the big problems is a lot of institutions don't use them. So we would have way more of these in the market if people were actually using them. And I say this because I built a whole system that does competency based learning and assessments. And now we had Tim Knowles on the podcast earlier this year, like, this is Carnegie Foundation for Advancement of Teaching and Learning and their partnership with ETS is all about this. So let us not believe that these things aren't possible and don't exist. They are and they do. And we as consumers have to start demanding them, buying them, using them, making them better.Michael Horn:Yeah, I mean, here was the big irony, right, which was, I totally agree with everything you just said, Diane, and I agree with them that the incentives currently suck, right. In terms of why there's great inflation and their credentialing idea. That's where you can go, right? Like we're going to have a way to prove mastery and we're going to say, yes, you got it. No, you got to keep working. Or you as an individual can say, maybe this isn't my bag. And that's okay. At this level, I think to learn what you really want and you're not going to make claims of, I got a C on this because I showed up and I turned it in and what, 30% all those…I'm totally 1000%... I thought the irony was that the credentialing idea that Ben wants to invest in, I think is an answer to this. I will add, I do not think that existing institutions, I know that many hundreds of them, are saying that they are launching competency based programs. I do not believe that most of them are going to be competency based. I do not believe that they are able to untether from the credit hour and move fundamentally to learning for the reason you just said, Diane, they're not using these assessments. They're not fundamentally able to move to a world in which learning is the currency rather than time. And I think this is where you have to have a third party credentialer and a new ecosystem of the Western Governor's Universities, the Southern New Hampshire Universities, et cetera, filled around them. Stacey?Stacey Childress:Yeah. Yes. I'm not going to yet take the bait on the discrete grading curve thing. I'll come back to that. I'm going to stay right here.Michael Horn:You were at the Harvard Business School where you had to.The role of employers in advancing competency-based gradingStacey Childress:I'm coming back to it. I'm coming back. I'm going to come back to it because I love this conversation or this thread. Supply can't continue to develop, proliferate, deepen, innovate without sufficient demand for the type of thing Is what you're saying, Diane. And so this assessment problem, it's more than an assessment problem, but it's an assessment infrastructure that supports a new learning model. That gets us to mastery based, competency based, enables us to do personalization more meaningfully. And this is where I think there was a miss on the solutions part, not about a specific solution, because I love the credentialing idea. We need a few of those. I think Ben and Marc pushing the onus of, or not the onus, but the point of leverage over to others to drive these reforms, I think, is short sighted because they have more power than maybe they acknowledged, and certainly as part of a business ecosystem in the country, have an enormous amount of power as employers to require something different of existing institutions and therefore open up opportunities for new institutions to emerge. New models to emerge. And they can do that, by the way they will and won't hire. And I know that's challenging because they need this flux of new talent every year, and they plan for it to be able to operate their models. But unless employers, it's a hypothesis, but I think unless employers really pressure the institutions that are currently credentialing students to do something different, it's not going to happen. Like, even the third party credentialer has a hard time taking off if the educational models actually don't prepare students well to demonstrate competency in the third party credentialing protocols. I think because it's a market challenge. Even though we're talking about higher ed and big chunk of it is nonprofit, it's still a market. And the output of the system is talent. There's a market for talent. Who's driving that market for talent? On the consumer, the buyer side is companies, and they're going to have to exert way more organized pressure than they do now. And I think it's absolutely doable. And look, there's a lot of one, I think I appreciate about just the podcast in general was they didn't really take the bait on super woke versus woke versus non woke. There were some allusions to it and stuff like that, which were fine. But there are employers making noises right now about who they will and won't hire based on current attitudes, behaviors, speech. And I don't love that, but I don't hate it. Okay. Employers can do that. Well, if they can do that, they can do this. They can do what we're talking about, which is a much longer term, more systemic way to really increase quality, overall quality of learning, quality of the signaling, quality of the incoming talent pool. And so like, yeah, businesses, let's get organized around hiring and not hiring based on some things that actually really matter fundamentally for the health of the economy, for human flourishing, et cetera, et cetera.Unbundling the role of the professor Diane Tavenner:This point about the power of the employers is in the section in my mind of what they sort of overlooked or their blind spot. And I think it comes to people, we often forget the power that we have. I'd love to come back to that a little bit on another example, but I want to stick here because one of their other solutions was to fix grade inflation. And this was like a solution that was so that they could make the credential more valuable and the value proposition. So it was sort of this adjacent solution to what we've been talking about. I will say they got into this whole conversation about adjunct professors versus tenure professors and all of this stuff about whatever. It was a little bit confusing. Here's what I would say about…I feel like fixing great inflation kind of misses the point here. I think the actual solution that they would be looking for and want is unbundle the role of the professor in higher ed, because that's actually the problem that's at the root of the issue. We see this in K-12 teachers have too many hats they have to wear. They're supposed to teach the kids, they're supposed to coach them, they're supposed to mentor them, they're supposed to counsel them, and they have to evaluate their work performance, and they have to recommend those. Mackle and I have talked about this for years. Those roles are in conflict. There's an inherent conflict in there. We're asking these people to play these two roles and then getting mad at them when they are trying to promote kids that they are deeply invested in and care about. And so I would say for that and many, many reasons, they love unbundling. I think they should drop down a level and say, like, how do we unbundle the role of the professor in higher ed? We've sort of failed miserably so far at doing this in K-12, but maybe it's more possible at higher ed. And I think this speaks to your idea of Michael, like, disaggregating the research piece. I just think there's so much opportunity on unbundling the role of professors.Michael Horn:Well, and I won't ding them for not knowing this, but this is exactly what Western Governor's University has done. They have unbundled the role of the faculty member. They have five different roles for faculty members. Life coach, course coach, instructional designer, I’m missing one, and assessment. And they're all separate. And it's one of the reasons I wonder, Western Governor's University has set up WGU labs. Might all of the expertise that they have developed in assessing competency, because they are a competency based institution, be something that they can spin out so other people can start building toward it and start to do this even more? Diane, I think it's a great. I'm totally with you.Stacey Childress:Totally.The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Evaluating tutoring as an alternativeDiane Tavenner:Let me grab another one that I disagreed with, because once I get this one off my chest, then I think I'll feel okay. Which is one of their solutions was, and they sort of said it a little bit, like off the cuff, tongue in cheek a little. But we're pretty serious about it was like, look, if universities are charging $70,000 a year in tuition, if that's the price tag of a university, you could literally hire a full-time tutor. It would tutor your young person, know Socrates and Aristotle and sort of in that old one to one tutoring model. And they spent a lot of time talking about a study that we all know very, very well, a study done by Ben Bloom that showed the power of one to one tutoring. It's true. It's a real study we all care about. And I think they really lost a lot of nuance around that study and what it actually showed. And for me, a couple of things that were problematic on just the very technical side. You can't hire a tutor for $70,000 a year that is going to be Aristotle like, that is insane. And as business people, that's crazy. Please. So that business model doesn't work. And the second thing that really baffled me in the solution was their complete failure to think about scale here. We can't even find enough teachers in America. How in the world do we think we're going to scale one to one tutoring, even if we had the resources to do that? It makes no sense now. They were talking about, like, combos of AI, et cetera. Fine. I would say tutoring is not a solution to the problem of higher ed. It's certainly something we should be thinking about working on using as a tool in our tool belt, but it's not a solution.Michael Horn:I'll just say plus one. Go ahead, Stacey.Stacey Childress:Listen, I literally thought I'd gotten in a time machine and gone back to 2010 when we all started kind of professionally, really moving in the same direction when Bloom's study was the hot topic and kind of the talisman. This is the model for personalized learning. The two sigma problem is Bloom showed it's possible with mastery based one to one tutoring, which is a thing. Mastery based tutoring, like, it's a very specific model of pedagogy, which is a thing they miss, I think missed. So the two sigma problem is, how do we do this at scale? And they made a very good point. We all know what it's like. We all know the impact that one great teacher can have. And it's just a devilish problem to try to make a million great teachers, right? That's the challenge on the human front. And Michael, I know you and I share a perspective on this, like, Bloom's methodology, like, overstates effect size by. It took me a while to get there on my path over the last 14 or 15 years, but effect size is overstated. Algorithmic approaches to trying to get the technology to mimic that type of tutoring just really hasn't panned out. Lots have tried again. Hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars of philanthropy and venture capital into that problem or goal. AI might put us on different footing there. You could really imagine something more akin in some domains to a mastery based model of individual support for young people that could approximate maybe some of the results. I don't know about you, Michael, but I'm skeptical of the two sigma, the 98th percentile result, moving kids at the 50th percentile reliably to the 98th percentile at scale. I think I'd take half that. If I could get 50% to 75th percentile in a reliable and affordable way, I think I'd be all in on that. What I don't think is that it is a single solution. It's always been my problem with this conversation about tutoring, which is it a thing that we're going to do on the side because other things aren't working. And so therefore, let's do one on one tutoring and that works for some kids and not others. And yeah, now we need 15 million great mastery based tutors who can each support three kids instead of just 3 million teachers that we already don't know how to do. So it starts to get at that challenge. But what I will say is what always continues to motivate me about the Bloom insight, whatever the effect size is, whatever the model is, whatever the scalability challenges are, it's twofold. One is isn't that really what we want education to be, regardless of how we actually operationalize it, whether it's Aristotle and Socrates today, but really some version of ChatGPT probably not going to happen, maybe not even all that desirable or through some other I'll just use the word bundle, even though I don't mean it in the way they were talking about some other basket of experiences that allow for the personalization you were talking about earlier, Diane, which technology can help and support, but isn't a point solution for it. I guess that's the thing to break out of, like when you see, well, one to one tutoring, and no matter what, it reliably shows this. And if we could just do that. I did think that listen, it was a cheeky aside that they made kind of as a joke, and it did make me laugh. But here's I mean, I do think this is a good push when we do get to the moment that there are as many administrators and faculty as there are students. And this is true in some institutions that the three of us know, love and give a lot of credit for helping us accelerate toward the wonderful lives we're leading. Now you start to say, can we really not afford it? Yeah, because maybe we can afford it. We're just not spending on it. And maybe the model isn't really one to one, but maybe it is one to one in terms of headcount. And then you've got this unbundling idea, Diane, that you were proposing and that I know Michael has talked a lot about unbundling the role of the instructor, the professor. So then you still have the same number of people, and maybe the cost model stays similar, but it's worth it. It's way more effective. It's way more productive because for the same amount of money, you're getting a 75th percentile result instead of a 50th percentile result. If we could just use the inspiration of the blue model, not say, let's try to replicate it exactly, but what might it push us to re-examine about the current structure and what might be possible if we weren't so wedded to the operational model that we have.Diane Tavenner:We could go.Michael Horn:I'm just nodding. I think this is a good point. I will say the irony I thought was they said nothing in education scales except for the Benjamin Bloom thing. And it was like, anyway, I've gone through my list.Stacey Childress:The problem is that it doesn't scale.Startup competitors in higher edDiane Tavenner:Let me just say quickly, because I think we're going to all be in agreement on this. As VCs, it was interesting that they were surprisingly skeptical of startup competitors. So competitors in the space that could be universities, if you will, new startup competitors. And they cited their major skepticism around what they call the accreditation cartel, which is not surprising because VCs kind of don't like regulated industries. For good reason, I think. I just would say quickly, I think they missed Minerva here. Minerva is literally a startup against the space that they're talking about. So we should just say that out loud. I would also say that…Stacey Childress:They did mention it.Diane Tavenner:They did mention it.Stacey Childress:Yeah. They didn't talk…Diane Tavenner:In a separate place. I just want us to know there are some really key people doing some work on accreditation that, if it's successful, I think will matter a lot. So we should just know that that's happening. And if folks are interested in that, I think there's people doing that, number one. Number two, who knows if it will pass in our federal legislation. But there's some work around enabling Pell grants. So these are grants for low income students to do shorter term credentials, which could get really interesting around different types of competitors.Michael Horn:Yeah, but I would agree with them here because I think as it stands right now, to launch Minerva took like $100 million to launch UATX took some godly sum of money. College, Unbound, Reach University, Quantic School of Business and Technology. They're almost the exceptions that prove the rule at present. And I think supply is so limited that that partially explains why costs have gone up writ large over the last many decades. And it is really hard to start something outside the system like the short term Pell you just referenced that is locked to accredited institutions. It is like a whole set of institutions aren't going to be able to use it. And so it is really hard to start something outside the system because you're competing with something that does get a subsidy and you don't. We at Minerva were accredited, but we've chosen not to accept that subsidy to this point. I think that's been the right decision, but I'm just saying it's created barriers to entry such that I think all the coding boot camps and apprenticeships and other promising sort of stabs at this have struggled. And so I actually thought their point was right. And I'll just name it like if Stig Lesley, our friend, colleague, his postsecondary commission accreditor does get through, I do think it changes the game. And that's probably where you're going with this, Diane. But I think at status quo, Ben and Marc nailed this I would say.Diane Tavenner:Don't disagree. And certainly my experience for 20 years in the K-12 environment as a charter school operator and is consistent with the rightful fears there. And as I look about at what sort of, even if initially wasn't blocked, what's kind of washed away over the time, it's a real fear.Stacey Childress:Yeah. I wonder, just kind of on this startup as kind of some version of a bundle, which is, I think what they're saying, right. It's like a competitive institution that has some version of the bundle. I wonder, Michael, is there some pseudo non consumption at a big enough scale happening in the Marketplace? So some of these kids we talked about, or some of these types of student profiles that we talked about earlier, that the current setup just does not work for and creates this enormous debt load and stuff. Maybe if you're not, Minerva's charter is to compete with elite institutions, as are some of these others we've referenced. But maybe there's more opportunity, if you really got clear about a student profile or two that is currently not being served at all or being served so badly that it puts them as worse than underserved, like negatively served, that there may be some opening for. Because maybe that kind of place, I guess the finances are still an issue, but what kind of credential does it need if it's got good partnerships with some set of employers or a couple of industries, for instance.Michael Horn:Maybe this is a cool place for us to wrap because I think to that point, Stacey, this goes back to the quote at the very beginning of the first episode that Ben led with on the quote unquote scam. What I might say is you got sort of two options here. One, you have an employer driven model, which looks a lot like apprenticeships, which Diane and I have gotten very excited about as an alternative. And it's learner centered, but it's actually employer centered as well. And that to me is the two things that actually I would anchor on in the new system, and I think it would get those incentives right, to your point. And number two, I think the other option is we're seeing players fill the non consumption. They're the Western Governor's Universities. They are the Southern New Hampshire Universities.Stacey Childress:Good point.Michael Horn:And then my co-host on my other podcast, Future U, says, well, why aren't more people pouring into this ginormous adult learning opportunity? And I think the reason is because we've said for profit, you can't play. And capital, as you know, likes to go where there will be a return. But number two, the incentives really suck for for-profit right now because they're incentivized to enroll. And we've seen that movie play out. And so that's the other piece of this, which is I would love to see the accredited players have skin in the game so that if your students don't get good paying jobs and are going to default on debt, that they have some penalty for that. Then you could open up the capital markets and then start to scale some different looking players against this because we'd be focused on the outcomes at the end of the day.Media recommendations Diane Tavenner:I love that, Michael. I agree. It's a really good place to wrap. We could continue talking about this for a really long time. I suspect 3 hours were offline. Maybe we should turn to, we didn't do this on the first episode, but we should do it here because we were listening to that podcast, Stacey. We always do what are you watching, listening to, reading, hopefully outside of, quote, business.Stacey Childress:Well, one thing I'm watching and listening to is spring training. So baseball's back. We're in full swing of spring training in Florida and Arizona, and so I'm drawing attention to there. But then I'm also listening to a novel called the Covenant of Water by Abraham Varghese, which I had not…I know it's been around a while, but I am totally into... It's like one of those multigenerational stories that I love. It spans 70 years, from 1900 to 1977. The author is actually the Vice Chair of Medicine at Stanford Medical School. So he's a doctor and writes fiction. And so there's like a ton of amazing stuff about the evolution of medical practice during those years. I'm loving. I'm on like chapter 19 of 87, and I'm so glad that there's that much left of it. That's how much I'm loving it. Yeah. So I totally recommend it. If you haven't read it, that's awesome.Michael Horn:Diane, what about you?Diane Tavenner:Well, I have read it and love, love it. So that's an awesome one. So folks who've been listening know that I'm on my way to visit my son in Scotland here pretty soon, and we've got an upcoming trip. And so in my quest to continue to learn about that area, I'm actually reading Adam Smith's the Wealth of Nations and David Hume's A Treaty on Human Nature. Please do not laugh at me. Sometimes it's important to read the primary sources I tried to mean. So when we were talking Aristotle and Socrates and stuff, I had to laugh a little and the human nature and the growth mindset. But I think what's more interesting is at the same time, I'm playing with a new AI application, like I know we all are, that supports sort of learning journeys for people like me who aren't trying to get a credential but are trying to learn. And I'm having a conversation with it about these readings, and it's giving me projects and quizzes and all sorts of ways to learn and interact with the material. It's pretty fascinating. How about you, Michael?Michael Horn:That's awesome. I have a few different directions I could go because I'm still on the tennis kick to parallel Stacey's baseball, but that's not where I'm going. Last night...So this is someone could figure out when we're recording these episodes. But last night we went to the Somerville movie theater, which is one of these old-fashioned movie theaters, to hear an author speak. Her name is Kelly Yang. She lives in the LA area. She's originally from China. She immigrated here when she was like five or six or something like that. And she's written many children's books, and my kids had read them, one or two of them. We left with like eight of them. She has a YA novel as well, but the one that I was reading was finally seen, which was what they had read. I'm literally like every chapter, I'm like sobbing. Now, that was not their reaction, but it works on many levels, I guess, is the point. And then her new book that she is launching, and that's why everyone filled a theater last night is called finally heard, which is the sequel to finally seen. And evidently it's about the perils of social media through the story of an immigrant family. And so it's all about how to be happy and extraordinary, which, as she said last night, can often compete against each other in our lives. I've been reading so much John Haidt that I was so thrilled that a children's book author would tackle this topic in a really fun, enjoyable narrative. I'm excited to read it once I finish the first book. But with that said, a huge thank you to our friend Stacey. Thank you for joining us, Stacey.Stacey Childress:Thanks for having me.Michael Horn:I will add a huge thank you to Marc and Ben for devoting so much time and thought to the challenges in higher ed, sparking our two reactions. And I hope that they'll listen to this, and I hope that they will take it in the spirit in which we are offered, which is really building on the foundation that they have laid for a really critical conversation for society, because, as they said, universities have all these warts, and they do all these important things at the same time. And we can hold both of that in our head at the same time. And just a last thank you to all of our listeners for staying with us on this longer journey than usual. But we hope we'll see you next time on Class Disrupted. The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. 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At the beginning of the year, venture capitalists Marc Andreseen and Ben Horowitz of a16z published three episodes diagnosing the problems with higher education, offering solutions, and then answering questions. Six hours of audio on higher education is no small undertaking! Diane Tavenner and I were intrigued with the takes and wanted to react to them, deepen some of the analysis, and suggest some places where we felt they didn’t get things quite right. To help us, we welcomed Stacey Childress, Senior Advisor on Education at McKinsey, to the podcast for two episodes. In this first episode, we reacted to Marc and Ben’s diagnosis of the problems with higher education. Can’t wait to hear your reactions!The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Diane Tavenner:Hey, Michael.Michael Horn:Hey, Diane. Introducing the two-part seriesDiane Tavenner:Michael, we've both been listening to another podcast, and it's causing us all sorts of emotions. I have to admit, I laughed out loud at a few of the texts you sent me because we were both on a bit of a roller coaster while listening to the three-part, six-hour series of the Ben and Marc show on the topic of higher education. For those who don't know, we suspect it might be a lot of people who listen to class disrupted and are kind of from our education world, Ben Horowitz and Marc Andreessen are currently very successful venture capitalists at a firm called a16z. They founded that firm and lead it. They were both really successful entrepreneurs, they each come from software and technology backgrounds. Their firm has a really successful podcast, and then the two of them get together and chat about hot topics on this other Ben and Marc show. From what we can tell, this is a really popular show, especially among young entrepreneurs and folks in Silicon Valley. So they recorded these episodes about higher ed in January, almost immediately, we both started hearing from all sorts of people that we had to listen. And so we did. Things haven't been the same since. No, in all seriousness, there are at least two big opportunities that I think their conversation presents. Michael, I think you have some perspectives here as well. The first one is, for me at least, to practice what we've been trying to promote on our podcast for five seasons, and what I think we both deeply believe in, which is third-way solutions. Which implies that we don't fall victim to polarized positions and taking sides, but rather we really mine for nuance and extend grace to people in an effort to find win versus win-lose solutions. Especially to problems that we really care about. So that's the first one, and that's a thing I want to practice today. And then the second is simply to bring things we care about to a much larger audience and a more diverse audience. We can fall victim to only talking to ourselves in education. And I think we are both just honestly thrilled that Marc and Ben are talking about something we care very deeply about, and that tons of people who follow them are really engaged with the topic and thinking about how to rethink higher ed to better serve students in society. So that's just a huge opportunity.Michael Horn:Yeah. Look, I think you framed this well, Diane. I like the approach and the excitement that we have and that anyone would dedicate 6 hours to higher education, to education in general, coming from the backgrounds that they both do. I think that's a net-net positive. So, taking all that, we're going to do a response, in effect, to these 6 hours, and we're going to do it in two parts. So today's episode is going to focus on the first part of the podcast that Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, Marc and Ben, if we may, released.  They dissected the problems facing higher education from what they called a systems point of view, and we'll talk more about what that means. We're going to now try to stay away from what they got into in the second podcast, which is when they started to go deep into solutions to what they saw as the problems. And yes, if you're listening, you're probably guessing it. We're going to do this in two parts. So the second episode for us will be mirroring their second episode, where they started to get into solutions. I don't think we'll get into the Q&A third episode that they did too much ourselves. We're going to do our best to be systematic. But I'll also say up front, they had nearly 4 hours of content in just these two shows. We are not trying to replicate that part of the performance, but we will try to bring the same level of nuance at least that we attempt to do in all of our other shows.Welcoming Stacey Diane Tavenner:Michael, I really appreciate the caveat, because they covered a lot of ground, and so we'll do our best to make our conversation accessible and meaningful, even if you haven't listened to Marc and Ben. At the same time, we also want to build on what they laid down if you have heard them. So hopefully, for those of us nerds in education, we're going to try to differentiate as best we can here. It's a pretty big task, and so we decided we needed some expert help. Michael and fortunately we have a very good friend who's the perfect person to help us think critically about the problems that higher ed today and the way its present form presents and to unpack solutions. So I personally am so excited to introduce our guest, Stacey Childress. Many of you will know Stacey, but for those who don't, Stacey has a very long list of experiences and accomplishments. So I won't go into all of them, but I will share a few that are relevant to the discussion today.So let's start with the fact that early in her career, Stacey was a classroom teacher. She's also spent about a decade as a software entrepreneur, founder, and leader. So right there, she's bridging two worlds that are critical today. She then became a faculty member at the Harvard Business School, where she studied entrepreneurial activity in public education. She wrote three books, tons of case studies, and articles. She was a very popular teacher who won awards from her students and the dean. If any of you have ever run into one of her students, you know how popular she is. She's followed that up as the CEO of the New Schools Venture Fund and Eridaf, which is a whole new research entity that they help to incubate and spin out. And just more importantly, Stacey's one of the smartest people I know, period and in education. She sees the big picture and can break it down like no one else. Everything I told you takes a backseat to the fact that, in my view, she does what she does because she cares so deeply about kids, and that's what drives everything. I’ve had the privilege of working with Stacey on lots of things for many years and have experienced firsthand how her heart drives her work to make things better for young people. So welcome, my friend. We are so grateful that you've joined us for this, what we think is a really important conversation.Stacey Childress:Yeah. Thank you so much, Diana and Michael, for inviting me. It's great to be here and really looking forward to the conversation.Michael Horn:Never say that till you're done with us, Stacey. Stacey Childress:Thank you?Michael Horn:Well I should say I was one of those students, so I'll add that. In addition to having known each other for years, and being friends, we should also just disclose, I suppose is the right word, that we all serve on the board of directors with each other. It's not just any board of directors. It's the board of directors of a new university, Minerva University, that I suspect we may end up concluding in the second episode tackles some of the problems that Marc and Ben outlined in their podcasts. I just want that to be transparent front and center, because we're not only going to come to this conversation as three individuals with expertise in education but also as three trustees who are wearing that hat, and are trying to rethink some of the fundamental tenets of higher education. So with that outline, with that out of the way, if you will let's dive in. In the first question, which I think is a pretty fundamental one, because in the first podcast, and Diane you helped pull this out. They lead in with Ben saying a very provocative line, and the quote is this. “We as a society are running a scam and ripping off a huge percentage of our young people with the clear expectation that they are going to get a higher quality job and being able to pay for college. But that is absolutely not the case.” So that sort of sets the tone for how they are tackling the problems facing higher ed. Diane, maybe I'll have you kick us off here rather than throw Stacey into the deep end. I'd love your take on Ben's first hot take if you will, but then maybe also frame it as a general gut reaction, perhaps, to their first show, where they delve into and diagnose the problems as they see it with higher ed.Reactions to Ben and Marc’s framing of higher ed’s problems Diane Tavenner:Michael, I think it's a really interesting place to start. It's literally where they start, and it's like a fascinating place for us to enter the conversation. Let me start by saying I wouldn't use the word scam because it implies ill intent. Being one of the people who's sort of in the system that is behind that comment, I know that I don't have ill intent. I know that most of the people I know don't have ill intent. So I wouldn't use the word scam. And at the very same time, I do think the evidence points to the truth of Ben's statement. Honestly, for me, that sums up the tension I feel in this opening teaser statement and throughout the entire 6 hours of the podcast.So this quote really does a good job representing it. I directionally agree with so much of what they talk about. I think they really capture so much of the feeling and the thinking and the conversation. I'm really challenged by how they say a lot of things because they can seem, and I don't think I'm being overly sensitive here. I think they can seem at times careless with their language and what they're saying and biased. We're all biased, obviously, but I think that really comes through. And so they're kind of how challenges me. What I would say is they get a few really important things very wrong. Given how many people listen and learn from them, that feels like, in the best case scenario, a missed opportunity and in the worst case, a setback for addressing a problem that I think we agree on and it seems like we all want to fix. So I'm thrilled that we're having this conversation and so many people are engaged because we need the entire country to feel compelled to transform education in America. And hopefully that gives a sense of like when we talked about a roller coaster in the opening. That's the feeling of the roller coaster of emotion I had while I was listening. Then I would just note one other really important element of their conversation, which is for the vast majority of the podcast, they're talking about elite universities and elite students and learners. While they don't say it explicitly, well they do a couple of times, but for the most part they don't. It's really important to note that what they're describing is really about highly selective schools. It's not a surprise. It's what they know. It's what they've been through. It's the people they know. But I think we all have to hold on and remember that there are 4,000 ish colleges and universities in America, and only a very small number of them are highly selective or even selective. So this focus on the elites is important because it's indicative of how our country thinks about higher ed and talks about higher ed. It's one of the big problems we have, because what ends up happening is a small number of elite institutions end up driving much of what happens in K-12 all the way through higher ed. It's really the tail wagging the dog and I think they embodied that in their conversation. So it's very real, but it's also something we need to be aware of.Michael Horn:Great way to set the table. We're not always going to agree on this, but I think this is like framing a lot of the mood of this. Stacey, let me invite you in here and sort of your reactions to the podcast. Also on Diane’s thoughts and that quote that they lead off with.Stacey Childress:Yeah, well, let me say I enjoyed all 6 hours of the podcast. I had a little less of the roller coaster feeling you guys are describing, but maybe because I wasn't in a text thread with friends who were listening at the same time. Like you guys, I did have areas I really agreed with and areas I was puzzled by and agreed with less. But listen, I liked it so much, I stretched it into 8 hours. I mean, talk about nerd because I went back and listened to the second episode twice. Here's why. I have enormous respect for what Marc and Ben have created in the world, both as entrepreneurs. I mean, the way we experience the web today is in large part because of the foundation they laid back with mosaic and then Netscape. And just the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of entrepreneurs that they've helped create new things through their venture capital firm. So I was super jazzed to listen to their ideas for solutions and entrepreneurial opportunities that kind of match the problem statements they came up with. And you know me, that's what gets me excited. What can we do? What are those opportunities, especially entrepreneurial opportunities? I agreed with a lot of what they said in both of those episodes, first and second, and liked a lot of it. But I think they had some misses. Diane, you mentioned you felt like there were some things they missed. As I thought about it, I came to this idea that some of the misses might have a common cause or problem, which is, not surprisingly, they were often painting with a very broad brush. So a very broad, correct, but broad problem statement. So when you jump to solutions from that, it can be hard. So I thought their conversation would have benefited from some more, I'll just call it granularity. So I'll give you my big example of that, which is this value prop idea, Michael, that you started us with here. Ben's quote, which is value prop's broken. College is more expensive than ever. Students are taking on more debt than ever because it's widely available and super cheap. And then all the other bad things that happen. Value props broken, okay, that's in the popular consciousness right now. There's kind of general agreement on that. Also the value prop is actually not broken for some students. It's actually still working for a pretty significant segment of students, and it's not working for lots of different segments of students. So I think the more interesting question is who is it not working for and why? And therefore, what? So one example of who it's not working for. Students who aren't quite sure what they want to do, they go to the college that they match with, overmatch, under match, or it's just right. Then they end up in some degree plan that they didn't really think through and didn't get a lot of help with. They rack up all the debt for all the semesters, and then they end up with this degree. They may have learned some stuff, but the degree doesn't have any value in the job Marcet or not much value. So they end up wandering around underemployed, not earning what they should. That is a problem. It's a pretty significant segment of students for whom that's true. Well, that's a problem that kind of suggests all kinds of interesting potential solutions and entrepreneurial opportunities or institutional reforms, however you want to look at it. That doesn't really work in broad strokes, but would work for that segment. Another segment is students who go to college for a semester or three or five, they're taking on debt all along the way, and then life happens. For whatever set of reasons, and it's different for different kids, they don't finish. So they've got 20% of the debt, or 50% of the debt, or maybe 80% of the debt of the whole thing, and they've got nothing. In fact, they might have less than nothing, because at a very critical moment in their transition from adolescence to adulthood, they didn't make the most of a very significant opportunity. They started something and didn't finish. And maybe it's not fair, but life's not fair, and that's now something that has happened. So that's a different set of problems. You could start to think about solutions… So to say, value props are broken, let's think of solutions. Provocative, interesting, whatever. But if we really want to make progress, we really want to get traction and have some actual product Marcet fit for things we might create, having a better understanding is, I think, super important. I think that was a bit of a miss. Let me say one more quick thing, because we may or may not come back to this. There was this thing that kept building for me through the first couple of episodes, and again, I was loving it. I was driving through most of it. I had a couple of long car trips. So if I make steering wheel motions while I'm telling these stories, that's why. I got the sense maybe halfway through the second episode, it kind of crystallized for me. I wasn't sure if Ben and Marc have a developmental view of human beings. In particular young people, or more of a fixed view of well, they are as we find them so now what. Versus, especially for kids, there was a stretch where they, I'm going to paraphrase, it was kind of like, all right, people are different. Yeah, that's true. Young people are different from one another and that difference is largely shaped by when you're 16, 17, 18 it's largely shaped by your experiences up to that point. Kind of your family, your community, the culture you're part of and I mean that's just who you are. So now that you're coming to college, why would we make you be an engineer if what you're really immersed in is music? I was really all in with kids are different, they're coming from different places, they have different interests and skills when they approach the doorway, the threshold of college. So now what do we do with that and how might we make things better? Then it was like, don't make musicians engineers. I mean, again, I'm being provocative myself here but it made me wonder. I think there was plenty of evidence throughout, that they actually do take a developmental view of people and of themselves. There was just enough of these comments and anecdotes and that really matters. It's an assumption worth examining. Maybe you don't really hold it, but if there's some version of it that you're used to operating on and then you start entering solutions and potential entrepreneurial opportunities, boy, that could go sideways pretty quickly. So I think that showed up a few times but that's my example of it.Michael Horn:Those are great, Stacey. I think already you’re bringing some nuance to the conversation. It's interesting. I think I'm probably closer to you than Diane, maybe on my reactions to this. We're going to try to hold on to the solutions one. That was where I had more of a struggle and I started texting Diane more. There's some errors that I want to get into. I felt like I was more on the bandwagon with the growth developmental view versus a sort of fixed view. I agree that is something that sits there throughout the couple episodes. I felt like Diane's right that some of the things that they expressed, and we're going to get into this more, were not the best way to express it. They had this underlying view of human difference and leaning into your unique value that is very Todd Rose that I liked. And I think this is what Diane's speaking about, is that it spoke against, all the value of college is maybe in who gets admitted which is more about the elite schools and not the rest of it. So I guess where I came in… That gets into the nuance you just painted, Stacey, about different schools get different outcomes. Different students get different outcomes and so forth. I guess from my perspective, starting with Ben's quote, I heard the frustration in his voice. I think it's indicative of the mood of the country. I think there's a lot of reasons to be upset at it because the incentives fundamentally underlying federal policy and spending have not been around the outcomes. They've been around just getting the students in the seats. I think you hear so much anger and frustration, like, why are we spending so much effort to forgive student debt. Why didn't it work? But I think the other side of this is, If you still graduate from college, on average, not for everyone but on average, this is a good value proposition. Like it's all for most individuals. So that's sort of point 1. Point 2 is roughly 38% of students don't graduate from college within six years. You take on debt and you don't graduate. That is a very crummy value proposition.They don't get the value. As we're recording this, there was just a big spread in the Wall Street Journal about this over the weekend. There's a huge number who are underemployed when they graduate from college. What they mean by that is they take a job that does not require the degree that they just earned. There's considerable evidence that if your first job is one that does not require the degree, by job number five, you're still in a track that does not. That's not, okay. So that is where I think Ben's quote is right on. And we don't want to confuse the point that if you're a low income student and you get into an elite college or university, you better go. I will say the other one, and this is a sympathy one from me for them.I think it's really freaking hard to talk about higher ed in a coherent way. Look, I'm the disruptive guy, you know? Your office was next to Clay Christensen, Stacey. He got painted with this brush all the time. Everyone thinks that we have decided that all colleges and universities are going to disappear five years ago, and it didn't, therefore, we were wrong. As you all know, I don't think Harvard and Yale and Stanford are going anywhere. I do think a lot of schools are going somewhere. We're recording this on a day where Cambridge College just announced it's merging with Bay Path University in Massachusetts. It's just the latest, frankly, in England. So both of these things can be true.It is really hard though. In my writing about higher ed, I struggle with this all the time. To talk about which segment am I talking about right now. So I'm empathetic to that. I'll just throw out a few stats because I think it might be interesting to folks. 59 colleges in the country out of roughly 4000 admit fewer than 25% of students. That's it. When we're talking about selective schools, that's it. I will defend Marc and Ben on this a little bit. I don't think they're only talking about elite higher ed because Marc’s alma mater, University of Illinois, I think is like 59% selectivity. So it's a little bit broader. But I think what they are fundamentally talking about is the roughly slightly under 30% of students today who we would have called traditional back in the day. What I mean by that is that they're residential, they're full time, they're aged 18 to 24, they're not holding a job while they're in college. That's a shrinking part of the pie. And they sort of make that point, but then they don't fully wrestle, I think, with what that means. So it's not just elite exclusive, but really more that residential, quote unquote traditional experience. I'll say the other thing is, and we'll get more into this, I do think they're also talking largely about research based universities. We talk about how that's important. They're not really talking about community colleges or online schools or schools that focus over teaching. I think you nailed it, Stacey. This is why it's important to get below the average because your solutions will be very different depending on what segment you're talking about. Maybe I'll pause there for a second before I ask the next question I have in case you all want to… alright no.Diane Tavenner:No, Diane's like, okay, I think we should get into it. It's great. I actually think collectively everything the three of us have said really sets the experience that I was having in listening. And I'm excited to talk about how they framed the problem, which I think is really interesting.The roles of higher education institutionsThe 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:Yeah. So let's do that. Because at the outset of the show, and to frame that problem or problems, Marc posits that there are twelve core functions of a university. And I want to list them here because this was the framing for their diagnosis. And I thought there were some novel parts of this from my perspective. Number one, he had credentialing agency. So the degrees. Number two, the courses, the education that you take. Number three, they called it the research bureau. Number four, the policy think tank. Five, moral instruction. We'll talk more about that, I suspect. Six, they had the social reformer, which I don't think actually would have been something that maybe people would have pointed to a decade ago. But with the current news around Deni and a lot of the fervor over that topic at the moment, this is very big. I think right now, the 7th one they had was immigration agency. And so just to explain it for folks, basically the notion that higher ed is an attractor of international students, many of whom pay full freight and help make the business models work for these places. Number eight, they had sports league. Number nine, they had the hedge fund, which referred to the endowments. And I'm just going to caveat this up front, very few institutions have big endowments. Okay.Diane Tavenner:And they did acknowledge that later on.Michael Horn:But, yeah, number ten, they had adult daycare, which points to the residential point that they were talking about, that segment. Number eleven, they had the dating site, which also points to the residential piece of this. And then twelve, they had the lobbying firm, which I think referred to the fact that government funding actually sits underneath a lot of the higher ed business model in ways that I don't think are widely appreciated. And so it was an interesting set of points. So I think the question here is, in your view, if those are the twelve areas that they outlined, what would you have taken out? What would you add? What nuance would you add? What they get right. And for this one, Stacey, let's start with you.Stacey Childress:Yeah, well, listen, I like that they took a systemic approach like that, and that they took an operational approach. They call those operational areas or areas of operation. And I do think it helped in a good way, kind of categorize the complexity of these institutions. And I'll give them a little bit of praise for that because that doesn't just stay at the surface level and treat everything as kind of a black box. Like, let's break it out. What are these different roles or operational functions that happen in universities? And you asked what would we may take out or add to the twelve. Surprisingly, I wouldn't take out any of them. People who know me know I hate long lists. Like, I make fun of them. If a top ten list is good. Some people think a top 72 list is good, and so then you just say everything you can think of. And so I can be really hard on long lists, but I actually tried to break this one and felt like it was pretty good. You might be able to consolidate a couple of them, but in general it's a good list. But what I found myself doing, especially during the first episode, the problem identification and analysis was twelve is still a lot. So how might we prioritize these? And if we were to prioritize them based on what, to what end? And so I was like hungry for a pull up that was about purpose or maybe purposes, creating what value for whom? And then can you kind of bundle into some prioritization groupings, the different functions, but in general, I liked them all a lot. I know we'll get into this purpose question and whether you prioritize the student or some other actors, and can you design around that? But before we started thinking about how to talk about it, my in the moment reaction to the list was, I think this is good. Also. I think this is good, but I don't know which one would I put on the top three, because you cannot prioritize at the same level of attention and resources. Twelve things. And so I was thinking about that in terms of what I, well, before I say what I might add, you kind of called out the moral instruction and social reformer, Michael, and my reaction to those good. When they was listing them off. Oh, good, yes, let's talk about those. And then when we got to their discussion of them in the first episode, I felt like their categorization was super thin, maybe is the right word to describe it, like moral instruction. Just again, from a developmental standpoint, the years of 14 or 15 through age, 25 or 26, is like prime time for developing moral reasoning. And we can like that or not like that, but it's actually true. So if you've got tens of thousands of young people being adult, babysat on college campuses and you're not attending to moral reasoning, at least I think that's a big miss and quite frankly, kind of impossible. So if you're not doing it on purpose, it's happening. And so I heard their critique of what is happening and agree with it. I think random professors trying to impose their personal moral framework on young people. So advocacy disguised as teaching, I don't like it. I worked hard not to do it in any context, especially in the university context. It's hard to never do it, but I worked hard at not doing it. And so as an alternative to wild, wild west and what seems to be sort of what a default dogma and groupthink that ends up emerging. I'd rather a purposeful consideration of what might moral instruction mean if it weren't imposing a set of values, if it were instead attending to what we know kind of our inputs into healthy moral reasoning as we enter kind of mid adulthood. And then social reformer, we will talk about the DEI. I thought it was, again, shallow, or I don't mean shallow like dumb or craven, but like thin to only talk about DEI in that category. Because I do think. I think we have pretty some. We have agreement on this call. I think we have pretty broad agreement in society that education, including higher education, can be a real engine for social mobility for young people. And in that way it is engaging in a type of social reform which is the class structures as we have them, or it's at least possible for them to be permeable, right? And that education, like, it's the story of my life. None of my grandparents finished high school. None of them. My parents finished high school, but they did not go to college. But they made sure my sisters and I all could and kind of the rest is history. There are clear, accelerant benefit to the higher education I and my sisters and now my nieces are receiving. And that's kind of a social reform of sorts. And I think it's important to think through where that's working and not working. And as a design question, what might we do similar and different to what we're doing? And we got mired in the DEI conversation, which I do hope we talk about, because I do want to unpack it. But anyway, so thin categories, I would add major regional employer. I think sometimes we miss or forget that for a lot of these institutions, including the large and not so large state systems and other kinds of private colleges, just because of where they end up locating, they end up being one of the largest sources of middle and working class jobs in geographic regions, like they're a hub of the local economy. And when you start to talk about we're cutting at 20% or 50% and we're going after administrative costs, it's probably not the director level people that are getting cut. It's like the assistance, the administrative assistants and folks who work in the operations plant and that kind of thing. And so it doesn't necessarily mean you shouldn't take on administrative costs. I agree you should, but I think not acknowledging that in addition to all the other roles it plays in most communities where these institutions exist, they are a major, if not the largest employer. So that was the thing. I would probably add and think through the implications of great set of points.Michael Horn:Diane, why don't you jump in?Diane Tavenner:Yeah, I love that last point. And reminder about the regional employer. I didn't think about it until Stacey brought it up, and it's profound in terms of communities that these institutions are in. I just want to underline, highlight, exclamation point, what Stacey said about the moral instructor piece being fairly limited or thin. I think that maybe came because they drew on the universities, as many of them being originally founded as religious institutions, which seems really sort of somewhat disconnected from where we are today. It feels like there were some big gaps there in historical development and yes, about human development, the age range, et cetera. I was thinking about the language choice of social reform, and another way you could frame that whole category is just like, are we promoting and supporting the american dream? And that's going to appeal to some people in our polarized society, like social reform, some like the american dream. It's two sides of the same coin, in my view. In terms of my thoughts about the list, similar to Stacey, well, I had never thought about those particular buckets. And so it was provocative in a really thoughtful way. I was doing this side by side comparison of how I would think about k twelve institutions and higher ed and what's the difference? And do those buckets line up or not? That's probably a different episode, but it helped me kind of think through them. Plus, I was layering in our experience at Minerva, which is really interesting because Minerva is a modern university, very young, designed to address a lot of what Marc and Ben are talking about. And so many of these buckets are really absent from Minerva's operations. And the focus truly is on students, and I will know to steal sort of their punchline. I do think Marc and Ben make a compelling case that universities should, they believe universities should be focusing first and foremost on students, which I think is at least totally aligned with how I think we see the world anyway. So I was using those sort of experiences as I was thinking about their list, and again, couldn't poke a lot of holes in it and didn't really want to leave anything out. I did think adult daycare was interesting because we talk a lot about it in k twelve. We call it custodial care, but I hadn't made the direct connection to higher Ed, and maybe it's their sort of provocative title or naming of it that really makes us think that way. But it made me realize and think about the dramatically different experiences 18 year olds are having in our country when they go to a residential, sort of country club style four year college experience versus those who are literally going directly into work. Many of them will meet at home with families taking on huge responsibilities. And so there's just these really polar, disparate experiences, which is fascinating to me and connects back, I think, to what Stacey's talking about of like, we really need to segment and think about who's not being served more than this broad brush approach. And then I would know. They didn't spend a lot of time on the dating site element of it. I didn't get the sense that they personally dated a lot. So maybe that was it. But I will just say, and sadly, I think my experience is not that different from a lot of people, but I was raised to go to college by my mother to find a husband. And I'm old, but I'm not that old. And so that's just, I think, very real and prevalent. Yeah, interesting category. The one I would think about adding is what about something along the lines of like, Marceting, brand management and development, winning elite ranks and awards? It seems to me that universities are spending an extraordinary amount of time and resource on.Stacey Childress:So that's the only thing like reputation building and management. Yeah. That's interesting.Michael Horn:Yeah. Super provocative one, Diane, because when I think about that, I think of it as an outgrowth of some of these functions, but you're right, it's taken on its own life. Indeed, the story of northeastern university becoming a top 25 university is manipulating the US news world rankings like an outward, cynical, completely straightforward way to become a top 25 university.Diane Tavenner:Well, and my alma mater, University of Southern California, is maybe one of the first that really did employed enrollment management to this end, et cetera.Michael Horn:Yeah, it's a really good point. I will say, stacy, also, to your point about how there was sort of a lack of prioritization of the twelve, I think to some degree it actually wove into Marc and Ben's point, which is that there's so many different stakeholders here that that's why it's really hard to manage these institutions. I do happen to think that there is one of these that sort of rises above the others on these campuses, but we'll get into that in a moment. I will say, overall, I like how they pulled this apart. I've always thought and written about it somewhat differently. Mine has been that colleges and universities are essentially running three incompatible business models. And I suspect I'll get into the implications of that later. But the three I've always listed in the bundle are, number one, research, which I would view is what I call a solution shop business. Basically, we throw a bunch of stuff at a problem. We have lots of experts working on it. We don't know if there's going to be an outcome here or not. Some of it pays off, some of it doesn't. Right? But we hope so. Okay. The second is what I call the teaching. And they treat, colleges and universities treat this as a value adding process business. We ship in this class of students, I deliver the content, I ship them out the other side. And yeah, I'll leave it there for the moment. And then the third is what I call the social network, which is really a facilitated network business. It's people who participate in the network not for its own sake, but because they're getting some other value out of it. And my sense is that this is the one that Marc and Ben missed the biggest because, and I think it's a huge one because yes, they have the dating site and the credentialing function, but those emerge from the college's role in building social capital. And colleges are the original social network. I mean, Facebook started out by replacing the print Facebook on the Harvard college campus. And to me, a lot of these things, it's not just the social capital in your class or with the four years that are co living with you at that point. It's really across years. It's really why elite higher ed, in my judgment, the value is their exclusivity because you're part of the tribe. Human beings as social, we like tribes, we like comparisons. And so I think that's the big one that I would say I felt was missing from the list, even if it glimmers of, it sort of appeared.Stacey Childress:Yeah, I think that makes sense, Michael? Yeah. We can unpack some of the aspects of that social network that might come into play as you're thinking about solutioning towards better outcomes on some of these other dimensions, I think is really interesting idea. And I like your three buckets a lot. They're a little more manageable for me.Michael Horn:I think in threes, right. Is that better or worse?Stacey Childress:Right.Where they got it rightMichael Horn:But broadly, it sounds like we don't hate their list. We think that they got with some nuance that broadly speaking, it's pretty provocative and makes some sense. And I guess of that they diagnosed problems in each of those twelve. What in your views did they get right? And before we do the wrong, let's start with the right. Stacey, what would you give them the check Marc on.Stacey Childress:Yeah, I mean, I've alluded to probably most of these already, so I'll just tick them off. Like the value prop analysis that we talked about. Like, I'm not sure they're 100% right on all of the components of what's driving the problem there, but that actually doesn't matter. I think that they're right that for many segments of students, way too many. It's just not working. The promise doesn't live. The outcome doesn't live up to the know. I think they got right know just kind of appreciated both their take. Know some of your take, Michael, on the structural, like the economic structure of the field that's driving so many of these problems and how interdependent the different variables are and how difficult they are to disentangle and address independently. And I think they got that right. And of course that drives part of the value prop problem, but is a problem of its own. And I felt like they just kind of nailed that analysis as it relates to relatively well resourced schools. I think they missed, as we were talking about already some this other big segment of schools, the credentialing signaling function. Like, I'm glad they spent some time on that. There's some signaling about attending, as I referred to earlier, most of the signaling is on getting in and then also finishing. Unless you're Marc Zuckerberg, right? Unless you're Bill Gates or Marc Zuckerberg, where quitting is sort of your badge, like for everybody else, it's the getting in signal. And then I got through it. Signal that's so important. And Michael, as you I think so, pointed out so well a couple seconds ago, it's the first job, and more like it matters a lot for first job and second job, third job, fifth job. But it matters for a lot of other things that the signal is not just about fitness or readiness for a particular entry level position. It's also about who you belong with. And I think in that sense, there's enormous power and huge challenge that we ascribe so much signal or so much value to that signal. And it's real, it's shorthand for lots of stuff. And I have personally benefited from it. I am aware of the benefits of this signal, of where I got my graduate degree right, and it's enormous. While there were some things I disagreed with or a couple of things I disagreed with and some things that made me wonder and think hard about, which is good, I actually agreed with a lot of their DEI analysis, which may be a surprise to you guys and maybe a surprise to some listeners. So let me say why? What I think they got really right, and I think Ben really carried the ball, know, carried the torch here. The discussion about diversity, equity and inclusion needs to be grounded in some sort of purpose and outcome that we are aiming toward. And in this domain, our organizations, any organization, and in higher ed institutions, it's got to be anchored in talent. What is the talent we're trying to track to pursue? What opportunity or what opportunity sets? And how do we think about our channels into pools of talent that might not be naturally historically or naturally connected to us already? And how do we dig those channels, cultivate them, maintain them and make them matter? How do we create a climate and a culture of learning and community and dissent and learning where people want to be, people from different backgrounds that get to the threshold can find their way to thriving in our community? It doesn't happen by accident. And I think, as they well pointed out, that sometimes if you're only going for the box, checking in terms of characteristics and you're not doing the hard work of what happens when everybody gets together, that's a real problem. And I think we find ourselves in a moment where that's happening in many places. You got to do the hard work of removing any implicit or explicit bias that might, your admissions processes for students and your hiring processes for faculty might be laden with these biases that you just are unexamined and can be tweaked to make it more possible if you've got the great pipeline to see what you want on the other end of it without having to engineer quotas, right? I just think they're absolutely right about that. So let me just kind of sum it up and say when DEI programs, most of them are probably started with. I think we're starting with good intentions, maybe not all. I think most of them probably are. But when the design process makes its way into a self perpetuating bureaucracy that's in charge of it, that then has as its main function, because it's what bureaucracies are good at, compliance and control box checking, policing. That's where it goes wrong. And I think too many places are demonstrating what it looks like when it goes wrong. Not every place. I think Ben gave a great example of how they thought about a DEI strategy. They didn't call it that, but a talent strategy that prioritized diversity, equity and inclusion, even if they didn't use those terms to build the firm they've built. And that's a great example. Three of us have examples, too that we could name, and I won't. But it can go very wrong and in many places has, and I do not fault them in any way for being, I'll just say what courageous enough to actually have that conversation and say, here's what they see happening in some places. Now, again, I have some disagreements with the way they approached some of the conversation and where they ended up on a couple of things. We can talk about that later. But I thought that analysis of not in general Nadei program is inevitably going to get there. But, man, it sure can get there if you're not really clear about what you're doing and why. So I'll stop preaching.Michael Horn:No, that's a great set of thoughts, Diane.Diane Tavenner:Well, I will just say I really like Stacey's points and wish to be associated with them. I will just add to what I thought were big and important points that they made again and again that I really think are at the heart of the problem, the first being, and you alluded to this, Stacey, but the purpose focus of universities is currently so many of them not, I mean, really the rule versus the exception, quite frankly, is to not be focused on educating young adults and preparing them to launch into successful careers. And we talk constantly about the importance of k twelve having institutions having clear purpose. And our bias is that they must be educating young people to successfully prepare and launch into an early adulthood. And here's the next level. And they're not focused on that. And so I think that they just really hammered this point over and over and over again. And I really think it was at the foundation of what they were talking about and doing that feels really key to me and I really appreciate them for it. I think what they got to is universities have far too many competing purposes and they have far too many constituents in a very elaborate bundle of what they're doing that's evolved over time. And so to me, that was the big macro takeaway there in terms of the problem definition. I agree with it at the high. Well, let me just say, as you know, Michael, this season I've been reflecting a lot on the simplicity of running a company versus the school system. And I would say this is the perspective, obviously, that Ben and Marc bring. That is their experience and their expertise. And it really is very true to know businesses are more focused, they have fewer priorities, they focus their constituents, and we do not do that in education for good reasons and lots of things. But there's a real contrast there.Michael Horn:So those are my key that all lands for me. Stacey. I'll just quickly say maybe you're surprised. The de nine points you just made all lands with me as well. And I was largely sympathetic on the way that, again, there's some places where you want to set it that way. But I was largely feeling like, yeah, you got the big headlines and currents. Right. This is what I've been experiencing on the Harvard campus the last semester and a half. As a faculty member, I'll say, as a jewish faculty. So I think that was right. And, Diane, I also agree with you. They, I think, correctly say student ain't the central focus. Right. And that there's many stakeholders and the right one isn't being prioritized. I'll have a hot take of how to frame that. That'll be a little bit different from student centered later. So you all can yell at me then. But at the moment, I would argue it's largely the media. Sorry, the faculty, which I think is consistent with their view. And then they have some head nods to the media driving that a little bit as well. I'll quickly run down them research. They talk deeply about the replication crisis and that it's probably worse than we realize with a lot of fraud going on. That's consistent with what I'm hearing as well. Most of the research that gets produced isn't read. Much of it isn't useful. That's consistent with what I see. I agree with them. The incentives, I think, are really bad in the academy around this at the moment, around the publisher, parish incentives and tenure, and the federal government role in all this is stuff that I'd heard a little bit about. But actually, what they brought to it was somewhat new to me and made some sense. It was interesting, in any event, credentialing and know again the value of the admissions for lead, higher ed. And the piece of paper saying you graduate. Yeah, I agree with what you said there, Stacey. Sports league. This isn't true for every institution, obviously, but I do agree with Ben that for those places that are running big sports operations, it is corrupt and immoral at this point. And I have a major problem with it as well. And I like college sports, but I think we got to make some changes. Hedge fund. I appreciated the nuance that they brought to this one. It wasn't one of these, but look at the endowments. They should be able to afford everything. They were properly nuanced. The operating budgets of these places are huge. If you were allowed to spend every single dollar, you would wind through that endowment really quickly. Number one. Number two, most of the dollars are dedicated to certain causes or faculty positions or whatever else, and you can't just sort of spend it on area of greatest need. Immigration agency. I never, ever would have phrased it the way that they did, but I don't think that they were wrong on it. And then just last one, the growth of costs because of the bundle and the administrative overhead, being a big driver of it, in my judgment, they got this fundamentally right as well. Obviously, DEI is a portion of that. But I think fundamentally, when you run such a complex operation with pieces that don't necessarily go together to manage those pieces and be successful, administrative overhead rises. That's not just in colleges and universities.Stacey Childress:Right.Points of disagreementMichael Horn:That's everywhere. Right. The more product lines you have, administrative overhead rises. And so I think that's driving a lot of this. I thought it resonated. I might have been, well, we can talk about solutions later to that. Okay. But I'll leave it there and say if that's what they got right, let's get to the juicy stuff of maybe the important nuance that perhaps got lost or what they got wrong. We've already alluded to some of this, so we don't. But where would you want to take this?Stacey Childress:Yeah, let me name a couple of things. Michael, like you said, we've already sort of referenced, or at least I have. I think we all have some of the things. You know, Diane, you said a few minutes ago this thing about what we would love for the purpose of universities to be right is getting kids that next phase of launching towards successful adulthood, human flourishing. Right. Young people who are ready to thrive throughout their lives, live a good life, take care of their families, all of that. And they got that right. But there was this weird, maybe that's too. For Jordan, there was a strange thing, again, breadcrumbs throughout the first episode, a little bit in the second, where the assumptions seem to be that all too often, colleges are forcing kids into career and life paths that they don't want to be on. And I just don't think there's nearly enough forethought and. And structure and focus on helping kids pick anything totally. Well, let's be clear.Diane Tavenner:I'm starting a new company because we're just not doing this.Stacey Childress:Right anywhere. Right. There's like this side trip about Russia or Soviet Union create leading, kind of getting to gender parity in. Scientists and engineers were both same number or same proportion of men and women, which solved a problem that we still struggle with for people who care about that. And I was like, oh, this is interesting. Let's see where they go with this and where they ended up going with it was. It probably kept a lot of women from doing the things they would have preferred to be doing rather than being a scientist or an engineer. And I was like, I mean, maybe, I don't know.It could be. I kind of laughed and felt weird and all of that. But I guess the general point is, even though they did say got right, should be more focused on centered around students. What I felt they got wrong, sometimes explicitly and often implicitly, was over crediting the institutions for having some mechanism for helping kids move across paths that they might be interested in, so much so that they might be forcing them into pick ones that they were going to make a lot of money and hate.Diane Tavenner:I totally agree with you. I mean, higher Ed is, in my view, highly disconnected from careers and employment. And so it was very bizarre. Similarly interesting to me. And I think one place that they got wrong and one place that I was feeling a lot of emotion as they were talking was they seem to really like IQ tests, and they seem to think that the SAT is essentially an IQ test. And they find the move away from such tests really problematic in terms of the admissions process for colleges and universities, which we established at the top of that episode, is actually a very few number of them that are using those things to select. But here's what I would say. I just think there was a ton of nuance that was lost in their conversation. So let me just share a couple of things. For starters, the SAT isn't equivalent to an IQ test, at least in its current form, and just even at a superficial level, because you can study for it and you can literally raise and improve your scores with practice. And so by definition, it's not an IQ test for that reason. And this is a really critical nuance for folks like us, because we see very clearly how much the financial status of your parents gets conflated with the intelligence or giftedness. When people fail to recognize that this is a test, it's not a pure identifier of the smart kids, which it felt like Ben and Marc really seemed to want and think it is and was in this kind of nostalgic way, like identifying these unidentified, brilliant people out there. And not to say that we haven't all heard a story of that. Right? So they exist. I just don't think it's a systematic thing. I would also just add that the creators of the IQ tests, as I understand their positions and whatnot, and those who work on them, and honestly we just finished talking with Scott Barry Kaufman recently about this. They express real danger in using it as a screener for employment opportunities and things like that. And in fact, this is exactly what SBK was talking about. He's like, I went in to study these tests because I thought they were evil and discovered that they're not evil because there are real correlations and things that he didn't expect. But you have to be so thoughtful of how you're using them and take real care with them. And I felt like that was lost in kind of how they were sort of wistfully wanting to use them. And I will also just add that Marc and Ben seemed to be less than impressed with the actual education happening in universities. And so they talked a lot about the value being the selection on the front end, and then employers four years later using the signaling credential. I forget, what was the word that Marc kept like, that you completed? It wasn't persistence, but it was something like that.Stacey Childress:Conscientiousness, maybe.Diane Tavenner:It's true. It's true. But I was misty, like, wait, what's.Stacey Childress:Happening for in between adult daycare?Diane Tavenner:Right? And then they said this funny thing where they're like, we really need the colleges to do this. Or they implied this because we, as employers, can't give IQ tests because it's illegal. And so we need you to sort of screen for us. I was like, that was bizarre. I just feel like there was a lot wrong and confusing in that entire line of the conversation, which took up more space than I would have thought it would have taken up. And this is where I'm going to loop back to the points you all were making earlier about what I would call growth mindset. And do they believe that humans developed or is intelligence fixed? We're actually going back to some of the early philosophers that they've cited, and at some point, we'll get into one to one tutoring and how they were thinking we should be like Aristotle and Socrates. But I think it's a perfect example of.I don't know exactly where they stand on growth mindset. It wasn't clear to me, because a lot of the things they said sort of represented a fixed mindset view of humans. But then they have these real growth mindset parts. And so that's probably very know. Humans are. We're not one or the other. We flow in and out of those two states. Yeah, let me just leave that there.Michael Horn:Let's pause on the sat thing for a moment. Stacey, I think you have some thoughts on that. And then, Diane, maybe let's circle back rest of your.Stacey Childress:Like, I'm conflicted in this SAT conversation. Not like formally conflicted, but I feel conflicted. Not just in this conversation, like in any conversation about SAT or ACT or standardized tests of any kind, when we talk about them as a threshold marker of readiness. Look, I don't think those tests are perfect. In fact, they're way not perfect. Right. They're far from it. For all the reasons you said, Diane, and I won't repeat them all.I'm also a big fan of all the new forms of assessment that are coming into being and use. We can call modern forms of assessment that are more focused on what you're learning, like how you're progressing along a set of competencies, maybe from novice to mastery, or however you think about it, and kind of embedded in a learning environment rather than stop and take a test. I'm a big fan, as you guys know, of all of those. I have invested in lots of them that didn't pan out and some that are still in the works. And so I might be about to lose my badge of personalized, competency based forward thinking, but I just think we have to be realistic about what we're asking, what we're hoping for. When we ask a constituency like top tier employers like Marc and Ben are, and they represent lots of them, right, in their companies and in their colleagues at other venture capital firms and similar professional services firms, they have long seen those kinds of instruments as an indicator of something. Now, to your point, Diane, kind of agree they're not quite getting the nuance sense of what they do and don't tell you, but at least it was something that seemed independent in third party. And if we're saying you're wrong about those, don't even use those.We don't really have the thing to replace it with yet. Let me say it differently. We don't have the ecosystem to replace it with yet. We've got a lot of really interesting things happening, some things that are actually way far along, but none of which are totally market ready for broad, scalable, valid use that are also already adopted at scale. And so the alternative to don't use this thing that's wildly imperfect, but that you like, instead use nothing for a while while we figure this other stuff out. I actually think that's what they're really. Maybe I'm giving them too much credit. I think that's what they're really expressing as a frustration, not, I have to have an IQ test or give me the SAT because it does all the things it does and it's an IQ test.I think they're saying, I need something like, if you're taking those away, you got to give me something that validates what the threshold level of skills, abilities, competencies, ability to learn, ability to grow are, which I think is a little ironic since we're wondering about their growth mindset, belief. But so that's like, I'm not for or against standardized testing in the broadest sense. I have real challenges with them. And I also just from a change management standpoint, especially at the sector level or at the societal level, we can't just say, those don't work, stop using them. We'll get back to you in five or ten years and tens of billions of dollars later in investment when we have the things that replace it. So I think that my sense is that's part of what we were hearing from them. I don't know. Yeah.Diane Tavenner:What do you think about this, Michael? And I'm just going to say that they've had an impact on us because we're over the hour, Marc. I don't think we've ever recorded an episode that's over an hour.Michael Horn:No, I know. I've been watching that. So for those who are listening when.Stacey Childress:We keep this, if you're still listening.Michael Horn:You'Re still listening, we apologize. But on the SAT point, I don't want to get into the solution piece of it because I think there's an interesting strand here you could follow. But I will say my biggest frustration with the problems episode was where Diane was as well on the IQ point. But I will say what I found interesting about it and why I was so excited to keep listening is I think it's a very interesting window into how employers and companies are thinking. Totally is one of those places where interpretation can become reality. Right. If this is how they interpret the world, it could be right or wrong. But if they walk away from it because it doesn't matter now, I think they would argue back at us and say, well, high school grades are not helping people distinguish anyone because of grade inflation and et cetera, et cetera, I think they're right on that. I think there needs to be some objective measure to Stacey's point, third party measure. And I don't think the reason companies are dropping degree requirements has anything at all to do with the fact that colleges are walking away from the SAT. Those are totally independent phenomenon. And as we'll talk about, yes, employers are turning away from degrees on the front end, but they are still actually, in fact, hiring based on them, because HR managers are different from ceos. And they never got fired hiring IBM, and they never got fired for hiring someone with a. Like, the PR release on the companies is very different from the reality how people are still. I guess that's the other piece about it that I'd say. One other thing I'd love to point out before we start to wrap on this episode, which is they talked a lot about the increase in tuition, well, outpacing inflation. I don't actually think that's the story, because if you look at the last 15 years, if you look at list tuition, they're right. But if you look at net tuition, meaning after discounts and scholarships, it's not correct. Like, it's actually relatively flat over the last 15 years. And what I think is really going on is that spending, so, like, the cost structure of these places that is going up and up and up. It's why there was a whole decade of launching overpriced online master's degrees that made huge profit to basically hold up the other parts of the bundle. And then everyone of my higher ed friends say, michael, online is not lower cost. You're wrong on disruption. I'm like, no, because it's in a business model that's failing. Right. I think that was a very big thing that they missed, is that it's not tuition, it's the costs. And the reason the costs are going under is because of the are going up. Like this is one, the bundle, but two, it's because they're also trying to improve the. So, you know, when Stanford adds the high class dining facility, or actually I should say it the other way, right? Stacey, when Harvard Business School adds Spangler, Stanford Business School better respond, right? And so when one place adds the student success function or the DEI support or whatever, it is like, hey, the diversification of students, we got to support them. You better bet other places better respond. So it's the fact that these places have negative economies of scale. The administrative overhead keeps going up because of the bundle, it's expensive to manage and that they are trying to improve in their current paradigm of improvement, which we've all say we're not sure that they're improving against the right things, but that's sort of what's driving the fundamental cost structure that I think is out of whack is what I would say.Diane Tavenner:Yeah, makes sense. That makes sense a lot. I think we've covered a lot of ground, maybe as we do our listeners a favor and start to wrap here. I think one thing that really I spent a lot of time thinking about afterwards is with my, you know, educational systems leader hat on. One of the, my, one of my very first early board members, like Silicon Valley person said to me was like, look, if you are not as an organization or company or an entity growing, you're dying. Like there's only two states. You're growing or you're dying. And so one of the questions I kept thinking about is, what does it mean to grow as a university if you aren't increasing the number of students you serve? And maybe their argument is that all the universities should constantly be increasing the number of students they serve. And I think we would all engage around a conversation like that potentially. But if that's not real and true, how do you stay in growth mode without growing the number of kids you're serving? And so I wonder is that what has happened over universities, which are some of the oldest institutions in our society, fairly young society, but nonetheless, some of the oldest ones. And is that why they are such complex bundles with so many constituents, is because that was how they were growing, so they wouldn't.Michael Horn:No, I think that's really interesting. I think it points Diane to, again, a bunch of the colleges, elite colleges over the last 15 years have added to their class. Yale added 200 students per class. It cost half a billion dollars to do in capex.Diane Tavenner:Wow.Michael Horn:These places have negative economies of scale. And so I think you're right. That pours over into administration. It pours into research. I'll make the provocative statement. I'm glad that there's some institutions that are research first, but I think they should advertise themselves as such and not try to be all things to all people on the other part of the spectrum.Diane Tavenner:That's probably a good lead into because you've led us towards solutions. So let's wrap here and then.Michael Horn:Perfect place to stop anyone with what we've been reading or watching because you know what we've been listening to. And so we're going to stop there. And Stacey, thank you for joining us on this first.Diane Tavenner:Absolutely.Michael Horn:Stay tuned. Don't go far. We're going to have you back on our next episode. Thank you all for bearing with us and engaging with us on this episode 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.