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

I’ll admit it. This was a pinch-me moment. Getting to interview Guy Raz—host of the top podcasts “How I Built This” and “Wow in the World” and one of the pioneers of podcasting? Count me in.This conversation went in a bunch of unexpected directions. And that’s what’s so fun about it. After all, podcasting is all about bringing audio back and turning learning into leisure. And the question Guy and his partner Mindy Thomas asked a while back was: Why not bring kids in on the fun? Guy shared how his studio, Tinkercast, is leveraging the medium to inspire and educate the next generation of problem solvers. We discussed the power of audio to capture curiosities and foster imagination, how Tinkercast is doing that in and out of the classroom, and how it can help re-engage students in building needed skills at a critical time. Enjoy!The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.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 human potential, and live a life of purpose. To help us think about those topics today, I'm really thrilled we have Guy Raz, who is widely considered one of the pioneers of podcasting. Many of you are, I'm sure, familiar with his podcasts, whether it's, How I Built This, the kids science podcast, Wow in the World, TED Radio Hour, many more, we're going to get into all of that. Guy's also a bestselling author, and he's the co-founder of two media companies, including Built It Productions and the kids and family studio, Tinkercast, which we're going to talk about today on the show. Guy, just thank you so much for being here. I confess I'm fanboy-ing a little bit at the moment, but I'm just thrilled that you're here.Guy Raz:Michael, thank you for having me on and for being a fan. That's why I do what I do because, and we can talk about this a bit later, but every show, whether it's How I Built This, or Wow in the World, or The Great Creators, is I make it in the hopes that people get joy from it and value from it. So, when I meet somebody who says they're a fan, by all means, please. I mean, it means a lot to me, and I really love it and appreciate it, because most of the time, most of the week I am in this studio behind this microphone isolated from the world. I don't actually physically interact with people who are fans very often. So, thank you for saying that. Guy’s Journey to Podcasting Michael Horn:You generally get to ask the questions, so this is a little bit of a role reversal. But I want to start there on the personal side, where you just gave us that quick entry into... Because as I said, you host a lot of podcasts. I don't think I can keep count, I don't know if you can. But I'd love you just to tell your story, because I actually don't think a lot of people hear that around how you got your start in podcasting, the shows that you're hosting now, and selfishly how you stay on top of all the work it takes to do these podcasts so well with this level of excellence.Guy Raz:Yeah. I started in podcasting when it was a backwater, back in 2011. At the time, I was at NPR, I had been at NPR since the beginning of my career as a reporter at NPR. I was a reporter at CNN. Most of my early career I was a war correspondent. I covered the Iraq War, I covered Israel, Palestine. I was in Gaza, I was in the West Bank, I was in Tel Aviv, I was all over the Middle East. I covered the Iraq War and Macedonia and Pakistan. I mean, that was my life. I was in and out of war zones for most of my career. I covered the military and the Pentagon, which is for many people who know How I Built This and don't know my background would be strange to imagine, but that really was my life. I was living in hotels wearing bulletproof vests, I still have them, dodging bullets and explosions, and that was my life before I had a family.Eventually, I was a host on All Things Considered at NPR for a few years. I would say around 2011, I started to get a little bit disillusioned with news. It felt to me like the thing that I wanted to do with my life, which was to have an impact in some way, I didn't feel like I was having the right kind of impact. I didn't feel like... By going out in the world and trying to tell stories, the hope is that you will give people information that will help them build a more nuanced view of the world. But what I discovered, and it was a very naive perspective, what I discovered is that we humans generally don't operate that way. So, I wanted to figure out a different way to have an impact.What I landed on was that news wasn't the thing that I wanted to do anymore. So, around 2011, I started to transition out, and I ended up connecting with people at TED, the TED Talks people, and they were looking to build a podcast, build on a podcast that they had started but didn't really land in the way that they had hoped. So, they asked me to basically build a show, rebuild a show, and it was called the TED Radio Hour, and I launched that in 2012. This was a backwater era in podcasting. I mean, there were relatively few podcasts, comparatively few people listening. I had gone from being in All Things Considered, with an audience of five million people to a show with a few thousand.Fast-forward, about a year, two years in, there was a podcast called Serial, and that exploded in our culture. All of a sudden, a lot of people started to discover podcasts, including TED Radio Hour, at the time which was a show about big ideas. I would interview TED... People who gave TED talks. The shows were arranged thematically, so we would talk about creativity or curiosity or how we organize our lives or the vastness of outer space. It was this interdisciplinary show where you would have, in one episode, you would literally have Sting, like a rock star, Sting, and then a neuroscientist from Johns Hopkins, and then a former prisoner and an Arctic explorer in the same episode, talking about a broadly connected theme. That show gave me an opportunity to really explore ideas.What I realized having done that, doing that show, was that it was connecting with people in a different way. So, when I was a news reporter in Iraq or Afghanistan or the West Bank or wherever I was, I didn't get the sense that I was connecting with people in a way that was making their lives better. But all of a sudden making this show, that changed all of that, because the feedback that I was getting from listeners was, "Wow. This has changed my day," or, "It's given me a different perspective on the world." Or, "Now when I look up at the stars, I realize I'm looking at the past in real time." So, that experience really launched my career in podcasting. I eventually started my own production company, called Built It Productions, and started another show called, How I Built This, which I continue to do today, which is about entrepreneurs, founders of companies.Then around the same time, with a very good friend, Mindy Thomas, started a podcast called, Wow in the World, which we launched in 2017. Along with another friend, Meredith Halpern-Ranzer, we started a kids production company. So, that was really the beginning of my career. Since that time, I continue to do, How I Built This. I no longer do TED Radio Hour. That was an NPR TED show, so eventually I stopped doing that. But it was a wonderful experience. Today I host, How I Built This and Wow in the World. I do a show called The Great Creators, where I interview celebrities, musicians and actors, Tom Hanks, Stephen Colbert, Jason Sudeikis, Jeff Tweedy, Bjork, a long list of people, about their lives, about their creative process, about their failures. I try and create a space for them to show a more relatable side of who they are. Because whether you're an actor or the founder of Starbucks or me or you, we are all characters at certain points of the day or the week or the month.What I try to do on all of my shows, my interview shows, is to show a more stripped down side of people, the side of people that people might... The part of us that we might see in the mirror. I try and show that to my listeners so they understand that, many of the people they listen to and admire are like them in very many ways. So, my hope is that when somebody hears a founder on How I Built This talk about how they built Instagram or Starbucks or Tate's Cookies or whatever brand that we do, that they can see that there's a possibility there. That if it's something that they want to do, if there's an aspiration they have, they can hear and feel that through the shows that I'm part of, that I make, in the hopes that they walk away from it feeling empowered and inspired and maybe even changed a little bit.Creating Podcasts for KidsMichael Horn:It's fascinating to hear you say that, because inspired is the word that I wrote down as you were talking. It seems like you really help lift people up to believe that they could go chase that dream. In fact, as I said, I first got to know your podcast through, How I Built This. My wife, when she was starting her company, she made all the employees in the kitchen listen to it during food prep and things of that nature. But then obviously you really got into my radar with, Wow in the World, with Mindy. I, for a while was like, "Are you sure it's the same person doing both of these things? Are you really sure?" But I guess that's one thing that you were doing in both cases, which is inspiring and lifting us up to realize what is possible. But how did you see the through line from this podcast world that's largely for adults, entrepreneurs, to kids? Those on the surface feel like very different audiences and very different shticks.Guy Raz:Like any business, Mindy and I were trying to solve a problem that we had. I met Mindy in 2014, I was listening to her show on Sirius XM. She continues to have a wonderful morning show on Sirius XM. It's a kids program, that just blew my mind when I first heard it, because I had never heard somebody communicate with kids in such a funny, respectful, quirky way, in the way that she did. I mean, I was completely blown away when I first heard it. I, one day, Tweeted about it and she saw my Tweet and she freaked out. She was a fan of the shows I was doing at the time. Eventually we met and became really good friends, and she would ask me to come on her show to talk about news events with kids. Eventually, after a year or so of doing it, we were on a hike. I said to her, I said, "Mindy," I used to live in Washington DC and we were on a hike together. I said, "Why don't we make a podcast? I make podcasts. Why don't we make our own podcast for kids?"That was really the genesis of Wow in the World. What it was was we had kids, we both have kids. Now they're teenagers, but at the time they were little. We were really concerned about how much our kids were just staring at screens all the time. We were very careful not to give them access, but the iPad or whatever it was around, they were just like... It was like a magnet. So, we started to think, could we create an alternative, a screen alternative for kids that will be as good as a video, as funny, as compelling, as entertaining as a cartoon, except it lives entirely in that kid's brain?We knew we could do that, because both of us came from audio. So, that was really the genesis of the show. The through line between How I Built This or The Great Creators, or at the time, the TED Radio Hour and other shows I've done, and Wow in the World, was very simple. It was, if you give me 20 minutes, 30 minutes, an hour of your time, I am going to respect that time so much that I promise you I won't waste it. I will work so hard to give you something in return for your time. Whether it's really great, important information, really compelling entertainment, an inspiring idea, a thought that might change your perspective or trigger your creativity. Now, I don't hit it out of the park every time. I think it's impossible. But that's our North Star. So, whatever show I do, whether it's Wow in the World or How I Built This or Great Creators, that's our goal. That's where we recalibrate all the time.Are we giving people something to take with them? We're not asking for anything except your time, which is asking a lot. But if I'm asking for your time, I have to give you something additive. I don't want to make extractive content. There's a lot of extractive content out there, especially for kids. Unboxing videos or prank videos that really just needs those eyeballs to click up the advertising revenue. That's not what we wanted to do. We wanted to make something that was so funny and so compelling that kids would ask their parents for it, but wasn't just good enough to win over the kid but it had to win over the parent. We wanted something like Pixar, where you watch a Pixar movie with your kid and you get a bunch of jokes that they don't get. We wanted to make a show that spoke to kids and parents at different levels, and that was the genesis of Wow in the World, which we started in 2016 and then launched in 2017. The rest is history. You listened with your kids, which hopefully, I think, was entertaining for you as well as for your kids.The Magic of AudioMichael Horn:You bet. It kept me awake while I drove. We successfully got to the destinations, as I like to say. But I want to jump to where you picked up on this piece of the magic of audio specifically. I'd love you to just double click on that, because I think honestly, since at least as far as I can tell, since Sesame Street, people have seen video as the way to capture kids' imaginations, tell stories for learning, because Wow in the World is fundamentally about learning at its heart after you get through and learning in the best possible way, through stories, a compelling story that captures imagination. But I think it's fair to say you were one of the first to realize, hey, we can jump away from video into audio for children again. I'd love you just to talk more about the magic of audio. You've already explained how you saw the opportunity there, but just double click on that because I think that's a very important strand.Guy Raz:So, the thing about audio is it's like... Imagine, and you'll know this Michael, because when you were a kid there weren't any cell phones and there was no Snapchat, and the only way to communicate with your friends was over a landline. I remember when I was a kid, I'd get a phone call and I would take that phone and we had a long cord, long curly cord, and I'd take that cord down the corridor as far as it would go, and I'd find a closet door and I'd get in there and I'd have a conversation in the dark with another friend, so nobody could hear me. Those were some of the most intimate and powerful. Now, of course, you're a kid, but still memorable conversations. I can still smell the smell of the kitchen, the corridor. I could see the color of that yellowed cord, that curly cord.The reason why those were so powerful is because voice transmits, human voice transmits an infinite number of cues, emotions, feelings, that we don't normally take in because our brains are so wired to process visual imagery. But if you talk to somebody who cannot see, somebody who is blind, they experience the world sometimes in a richer way because they're focused on sounds and voice, and they hear the nuance of those sounds. Now, jump to Wow in the World. Essentially, what it does and what we wanted to do from the very beginning, was to create in a black box, which is, we'll call it whatever you want, a studio, the ether, a world in which anything could happen. You don't need CGI technology, you don't need multimillion dollar editing equipment. You can create the theater of the mind.You just need a microphone and some good writing and some good sound effects, and you can build any world you want. You can go in a submarine to the core of the Earth. You can go into distant space, you can go into a black hole, you can go back in time, you can go forward in time. You can ride a giant pigeon, which we do on the show. You can do all of these things because the visual platform is inside of a kid's brain. Every kid experiences Wow in the World differently. We know, I mean, this is not our research, this is published research, that audio, it triggers certain neurological reactions in the brain, essentially builds creativity because every kid's brain is imagining the story differently. Everybody sees me differently, Mindy differently, Reggie, Dennis, the whole world on Wow in the World. Yet every single episode of that podcast is rooted in a peer reviewed scientific journal article.We go through peer reviewed scientific journal articles, New England Journal of Medicine, science, you name it, and we find stories that we believe we can make accessible to children. We literally take high science peer reviewed science, and turn it into a cartoon for the ear. So, you will learn about why the vertebrae of a thresher shark is so incredibly complex, why it's one of the only sea creatures that can flip its tail entirely over its head to attack its prey. We take this research and we make a cartoon out of it with characters, with funny storylines. So, the hunch we had and what's been proved out, is that kids really learn science when they're taken into the story with humor, with fun, with this fantasy world, and they don't even know that they're learning. They don't even know that it's a lesson in real science. So, that was our theory and our hope. Then eight years later, it's been proved. Not just from the reaction of parents, but from even some of the research we've done with teachers and some of the classroom programs we've done.Michael Horn:Very cool. It strikes me that you're building on some of the best known pieces of cognitive science research around the power of storytelling on the one hand, and then frankly from my perspective, not overloading people's sensory. When you absorb information through a visual and auditory channel, they often can work against each other. You're just saying, no. We're going to ride one of these channels to make sure it really penetrates and that it is a much deeper impression and memory, which is really what learning ultimately is, is these building of memories. How (and Why) Guy & Co. Built This: TinkerCastMichael Horn: Then you've taken those insights and you've done it inside of a company Tinkercast, which is where I want to segue to. Tell us about the company and the range of activities it does, because this is then going to transition into some of the work you're actually doing, not just in this informal learning space where we all are learning constantly, but also in the formal learning space of schools and so forth.Guy Raz:So, from the very beginning, when Meredith and Mindy and I founded the company, we wanted this to be not just a sustainable company, but a full range kids and family entertainment and educational company brand. We started with podcasts and now we make several different podcasts. Who When Wow, Wow in the World, Two What's and a Wow. We've got other shows that we are working on. We've done, How to Be An Earthling, and several other shows under the Tinkercast banner. But we've also done live events. We create hundreds and hundreds of educational lesson plans every single week, based on every episode of our shows. That's available at our website. We have done partnerships with museums. We had a van that went around the United States, a Wow museum with hands-on activities. One of the things from the very beginning that we wanted to do was a create an educational technology platform that would enable kids to really hone in and really dive into this idea of audio learning, oral learning, in a way that we believed could be really, really beneficial to virtually all kids.This is a bit of an aside, and it's not... I qualify this because I don't have the peer reviewed data to back it. But anecdotally, from the very beginning when we started Wow in the World, we would hear from parents who would say, and I mean we have heard this now thousands of times, "I have a child who has attention challenges," or, "I have a child who has some learning disabilities," or, "I have a child who will not sit still, except for Wow in the World." There's something about... We would hear this, and we do hear this all the time. At our live shows, we sometimes meet these children, where the parents will say, "My kid won't sit still for anything, but this show captures something. There's something that keeps them listening and attentive." I don't know exactly what that is, but I do know that, and there is research that shows, that when kids learn through audio content and platforms, oftentimes they can comprehend things two to three grade levels above.Now, that makes a lot of sense to me because Wow in the World essentially is speaking to kids from age three to 12. Now, when Mindy and I started the show, we didn't really exactly know, but I think in our minds we thought we were talking to eight or nine or 10 year olds. But it turns out we're talking to three to 12 year olds, sometimes 13 year olds. So, a three year old might not get all the science, but you'd be really surprised how much they actually pick up, because there is sophisticated science in the show. So, some of these findings that we know about audio learning in the classroom or however, whenever kids listen to storybooks, we know that they have a higher comprehension level than they might if they're watching or reading something. That's really been proved out. I mean, we have seen that in just the range of kids who listen to what we do.So, as I say, from the beginning of the company, we wanted be where kids are, we wanted to be everywhere where kids are, and we wanted to reach them in every way and create content that was available to every kid, wherever they are, and their parents. We didn't want it to be good for you content, but it is, it actually is additive. It is educational, it is informative, but we didn't want kids to think of us that way. We wanted kids to think of us as something really fun and funny and exciting, and something that fires their imagination. Science was like the secret thing, the secret thing that was hidden inside of it.Tinkercast in the ClassroomMichael Horn:Very cool. So, you all have taken these podcasts, or I think what you're calling pod-jects, if I'm not mistaken. So, for those who didn't follow projects but pod-jects, into schools now with the launch of TinkerClass. I'd just love to know, I mean, you have this rich and formal learning world. You have the podcasts, you have all the events that you talked about, the van around the country, this listen, wonder, tinker, make ethos that could fit into design thinking in Silicon Valley, or it can fit in this platform you've created. Now you're going into schools with TinkerClass. I'd love you to tell us what this work is going to look like, and frankly, for interested educators, we get a lot of them tuning into the show, how can they start to connect and work with you all?Guy Raz:So, TinkerClass is the result of this journey that we took from the very beginning to build an educational technology platform. It is free for educators, and you mentioned design thinking. I mean, we essentially, inspired by places like Idio, we've created this project based, but pod-ject we say because based on podcasts, learning platform. Essentially what it is is, and you can find it at TinkerClass.com or go to Tinkercast.com and there's links to it. Essentially, it enables kids to listen to an episode of our show. So, you listen and then kids begin to wonder, they work in groups, they're incentivized to work in groups, and they're incentivized to succeed as a group. So, then they begin to talk about their wonders, then they begin to tinker. So, they'll use critical thinking skills to identify questions that they want to explore. Then they'll choose one big wonder to investigate, and then they will make. So, they'll collaborate, they'll investigate, they'll plan, and then they will present their findings on this platform.An amazing result of this long journey, we got a very wonderful grant from the National Science Foundation a few years ago, to build this platform out. Now, of course, we've got hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of real science-based episodes of Wow in the World and our other programs, to populate these lesson plans with. So, it essentially enables kids to build these 21st century project-based learning skills that are so critical. We've known for a long time that if we can grow kids into adults that know how to collaborate, they are much more likely to be successful adults. Rather than kids who don't know how to work in teams and don't understand the power of success as collaborators. Success in a collaborative form is what we reward in TinkerClass.So, we've now had several thousand teachers who have signed up. We have spent a few years doing some very intensive research around how kids respond to it. We have found that it has been incredibly impactful, particularly for striving leaders. Going back to something I said earlier, we found that kids can understand things two to three grade levels above when they are using the platform, because it integrates with audio. So, it's been a really, really amazing experiment, and now it's out there in the world available for free to teachers and educators. We hope they'll take advantage of it.The Power of Podcasts to Re-engage StudentsMichael Horn:It's incredibly cool to watch the evolution of Wow in the World and everything else, from these standalone things to now connective tissue, if you will, into the schools. I'd love to hear you reflect, I'm not a big fan of the phrase, learning loss, but obviously the disengagement of youth since COVID has been a real thing. Whether it's chronic absenteeism, struggling to learn, struggling to get engaged. Interestingly enough, I suspect you probably saw, we certainly saw it in our household and other places, that kids engaged more with these... Whether it was Wow in the World, or for my kids also, Mo Willems doing his drawing during COVID and things of that nature. All these informal things really bubbled, so they were still learning. But I'm curious, as you now plug into schools that are struggling to get that engagement again and to get that learning back up, how do you think that's going to help? How do you see that helping educators and helping students either get back on track or really plug in and get excited again?Guy Raz:Look, we are facing a future where we are going to need the greatest scientists, the greatest mathematicians, the greatest thinkers, to solve the biggest challenges that we will face as a species. Probably the biggest challenge we have ever faced as a species, climate change. Our hope and our goal here is to inspire kids to think in a big way. It doesn't mean that every kid's going to become a scientist or a physicist or mathematician, and that's not necessarily our goal. But we want to inspire kids to think critically about problems, how to solve them, how to talk about them in a collaborative way. Is this going to be the magic answer to the question? I don't know. But I think that based on what we've seen in the classroom and what we've observed with kids, we think it's really possible.We think that there's a real possibility and likelihood that this kind of approach, audio first with images too, we have websites and there are some really cool images on the screen, but an audio first approach that's funny, that's accessible, that doesn't talk down to kids, that gets them excited about science in ways that is mind blowing when you see it in action. I think there's a real possibility that this could have an impact. The question is, will teachers be interested in adopting it? I hope they are. It's free, it's available, it's out there. We're not asking for anything in return except making the promise that we hope... Promise, but trying to promise, that this will inspire kids and will get them engaged around some of the big questions that one day they're going to have to answer.What’s Next for GuyMichael Horn:Driving questions is obviously another great way to get people interested in learning to build solutions. As we just wrap up here, I'm curious. You do so much inspiring of people at different stages of their lives clearly, what's next on your horizon? We've barely scratched the surface of the books, live events, games we could talk about. But as you think about your own journey, what are you excited to do next and how can listeners and viewers stay tuned, so to speak?Guy Raz:I'm really excited to grow Wow in the World, and we have some other programs, new shows that we're working on. We've got some really cool toys and games that will be coming out over the next year. We are doing some really exciting things on my grown-up show, How I Built This. One of the things that I have not done and that I will be doing more of is video, is really talking about the lessons that I have learned over many years of interviewing founders of businesses. I have over 600 of these interviews. I think many business school professors would love to have the database and the data set that I'm lucky enough to have. While all of those interviews are available for free for anybody to listen to forever, I think that many of the lessons can be shared in different ways. So, over the next year or so, I hope to really start sharing many of the lessons I've learned as an interviewer, and as somebody who studies businesses, and also kids and even celebrities, to share some of those ideas with my listeners, and hopefully viewers.Michael Horn:Love it. We will stay tuned. Guy, thank you for continuing to inspire us all. Really appreciate it.Guy Raz:Thank you so much for having me.The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.

There are new solutions for work and learning, but are we, as a society, open to shifting from the familiar to seize these opportunities? I sat down with Ryan Stowers, Executive Director of the Charles Koch Foundation, to discuss openness in the sector. We lay down a definition for openness, look at shining examples of learning innovation, and consider the risk of holding to the status quo.The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Michael Horn:Welcome to the Future of Education. I'm Michael Horn, and you are joining us at the place where we are dedicated to building a world in which all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their human potential, and live a life of purpose. There are very few people that I know who exemplify that more than the Executive Director of the Charles Koch Foundation, Ryan Stowers. He's a man who's a friend and has offered a lot of wise advice over this journey for individuals of many organizations over the years. So, Ryan, great to see you. Thanks for being here on the Future of Education.Ryan Stowers:Thanks for having me, Michael, and thanks for all that you do.Defining Openness as a Key Principle Michael Horn:No, you bet. I've been looking forward to this conversation for a while for many reasons. You all at the foundation have been working with so many entrepreneurs, educators, and employers, helping rethink, how we develop talent in this country so that all individuals can live into those ideals that I espoused up front. You know like purpose, and that businesses will also benefit in the process. So as a result, you get this bird's eye seat on all these cool journeys about how people are doing things differently from the way they've always done it. This will be the first of a series of conversations we'll get to have. I'll set the table because, over the past couple of months, I've gotten to explore a few of these principles with your grantees. The concept of mutual benefit with Scott Pulsifer of Western Governors University. And what I think you would call the broader dimensions of talents with Kathleen St. Louis Caliento of Cara Collective. I'm looking at your book that the Koch Foundation and Charles Koch Industries put out Principle Based Management. You have this other one in there called Openness - key principle. I'd love you to define what openness means to you and why it matters because it's one of those that I think on the surface, the word could mean lots of different things to lots of different people. And so it requires a little explanation.Ryan Stowers:Yeah, thanks, Michael. When I think about openness, I think the best way to define it is the free movement of ideas, resources, and people, and that generates knowledge, innovation, and opportunity. We think that's been critical to fueling progress in society, and we think it's going to continue to be important moving forward. So I think that's the best way to define it.Michael Horn:No, that's a good definition, and you couch it in that larger narrative of progress. In the context of learning and education and the workforce, what does openness sort of look like?Ryan Stowers:Yeah. And you and I have spent a lot of time on this. If you think of a system that right now, from my perspective, needs thoughtful consideration of openness, it's the work and learning ecosystem as we think of it. For so long, the focus has been on things like credit hours, seat time, and degrees, and it's not working. It's helping a select few get to the point where they can reach their potential, find purpose and meaning, and produce value for themselves and others in society. But for the most part, it's leaving millions behind, and it's setting a lot of people up for failure. So in this context, openness means, and you said this, you use the term rethink. Openness would lead us to consider that we haven't figured this out and that we should consider changing the way we think and act about work and learning to bring about better outcomes for all people with a recognition that we know how to do this. We've seen it work in other industries, we've seen it work in other spaces. We should put that kind of openness and innovation and a willingness to rethink or think outside the box to help us find better solutions for people. From our perspective, the answers are there. If we engage in this kind of openness and backing up a bit, you see it work at a societal level. A more open society is going to be one where new ideas are welcomed, where those new ideas are applied, and where progress is made. In the physical world, you see it like closed systems, they inherently stagnate and eventually fail. If you apply that to the world in which we're working, you can see how in the work and learning ecosystem, you've got more than three stakeholders, but I'm thinking of three in particular. The learner, the solution or educator, or the solution provider, and then the employer. Because so much learning occurs through work in our lives, getting all three of those stakeholders to think and act differently about how they engage in the work and learning ecosystem, I think, can bring about incredible results. So it's in that context that openness, I think, applies very much.Michael Horn:Yeah, I'm just thinking of so many things as you're talking that through, Ryan, because two of the things that hit me, I think of Glasnost in the Soviet Union, Gorbachev being like, we got to open up. We have to have new ideas. Then I think of the American entrepreneurial system over the last many decades compared to say a place like Japan. Our friend Clay Christensen would always say Japan disrupted the US economy. They played the game once, but then they had no mechanism of venture capital or laying employees off to create new companies that would come create that next wave of growth. As a society, it was relatively closed, whereas, in the US, we have some painful moments, but we keep having entrants come in and rethink and bring new ideas.Ryan Stowers:That's right.This episode is sponsored byOrganizing for OpennessMichael Horn:So it's an open society that keeps rejuvenating us over time. I guess the question is, so is it the existing organizations rethinking, or is it being open to new organizations maybe coming in and reinventing the DNA of a sector?Ryan Stowers:Yeah, I mean, I think it's going to require both. If you think of just the education system. Look at post-secondary ed right now. There are attempts. A lot of these attempts are well intended. I mean, a lot of these people are trying to help others reach their potential. Universities are, I think fundamentally they are. But if you look at the competition that new alternatives face in the post-secondary ed market, for instance, universities are getting $250,000,000,000 in subsidies to run their business. The anti-competitive forces that create an alternative to be relevant and provide a solution that will empower people are extreme. That's an example of where if we don't rethink what we're doing in the student finance and funding question, we could inadvertently create a more closed system than a more open system that would allow innovation. That would allow, to your point, new entities, new individuals, and new entrepreneurs to come into the space and try to make things better. And to have incumbents and people in the traditional space not view that as a threat, but view that as an opportunity to learn and adjust as well. So that's just one example. I think it's got to be a combination of both. The current actors being willing and open to changing the way they think and act, and then new entrepreneurs coming up with new ideas and driving and spurring that kind of innovation with the intent of creating a marketplace that reaches all learners in a highly individualized way to help them reach their potential. I think we can do this. Openness in ActionMichael Horn:So let's talk about your portfolio because you guys support so many interesting organizations. It's a compelling point you just made that both/and have to be part of this openness. Who's doing this? Well, who's doing this right, right now, that's really bringing in new ideas into the sector, exhibits that openness.Ryan Stowers:So just a couple of groups that are maybe on the side of the traditional approach. These are folks that you and I know well. We talk to a lot of these folks a lot. If you look at what Michael. Crowe's done at ASU, he's been open to considering culture change in a space that's been fairly resistant to that kind of culture change over time. Rethinking the role that the university plays in society in order to help more learners gain access to knowledge and skills they need in order to be successful. More open to bucking the one-size-fits-all kind of standardized approach to one that's more. You know, Michael would say this. I don't think Michael's figured it all out, but he's made some huge strides in doing so. Another one that comes to mind, you've interviewed him, Scott Pulsifer at Western Governors University. The fact that they take a competency-based approach to them, from figuring out where they can meet students and empower them to close the gap. To getting the knowledge and skills they need for in-demand jobs, that competency-based approach is highly innovative relative to where higher ed's been in the past. I think you're seeing the outcomes through the results that Western Governors is producing. Another couple that comes to mind that are maybe smaller and less well known but equally impactful is Reach University where they've gone in, and this is where you can bring the employer in, but they've gone into different sectors directly with groups that need to hire people, and they're not able to find people with the right skills, knowledge or aptitudes to meet the demand. So they started with K-12 teachers going into school districts and saying, hey, if we can identify dormant talent either through teaching assistants or substitute teachers who have… Some of them have 20-30 years of classroom experience, but they don't have any way to take that to the market and say it's worth anything other than giving them another role as an assistant or as a substitute. So Reach is going in and saying, how can we help that substitute teacher close the gap in a low-cost way to get them the credentials they need and then have the district recognize them as a fully trained teacher, able to run a classroom and teach students? And now they're going to nursing and manufacturing jobs. Reach University is a great example of what can happen when we take an approach based on openness and in this space coming up with a highly innovative idea that has the potential to unlock things in ways that otherwise wouldn't happen.Michael Horn:I love all three of those examples and for different reasons. I mean, the way Michael at Arizona State redefined excellence away from who you effectively exclude to how you can take anyone regardless of their starting point. How far can you take them? And then, Scott, obviously I'm a big fan of what Western Governors does with competency-based learning and fundamentally changing the measure of learning from time to actually what you've mastered. Then Reach, Mallory's,  longtime fan club of what they've created. It's interesting about the last one with Reach that required… and I guess they all do to some degree. It's certainly true for Scott and Western Governors as well. But that's an explicitly big change in terms of the connection with the businesses, the employers in this case. Her’s is school districts, but it could be companies. I guess the question is what's the downside for businesses if they don't embrace openness? Because I'm sure it can feel scary. It's upending the rules of how you have operated. Obviously, there are some great upsides in terms of dynamism and sort of innovating the future. But I can imagine a lot of the colleges or employers that maybe have hired the way that they have historically. They're like, yeah, but it's working for me.Ryan Stowers:Right.The Risks of Closing Off Michael Horn:What's the downside if they don't make the changes?Ryan Stowers:At a general level, we've seen examples of companies when they're unwilling to make changes that anyone looking at the landscape would say, hey, you need to change. So think of just out of the work and learning context for a minute. Look at Kodak, and remember, Kodak was the leader in their industry. At a time when they should have probably seen the writing on the wall, understood the landscape, and been willing to open themselves up to new ideas, new concepts, and new technologies. They shifted away from digital photography because they didn't want to threaten their profits from their film photography. And you think of the consequences of that decision. They were cataclysmic. For Kodak, they meant stagnation and eventually, ultimately failure. I think we're at a point where if you look at the US economy, you look at the number of jobs that are available and necessary in order to keep these companies moving, in order to help them produce products and services that make the world a better place, make people's lives better. Based on our current approach to talent, who and how we hire, and how we develop our people as employers. We've got a more closed system than would suggest is necessary in order to be successful in the long run. There are a lot of companies that are looking at changing the way they hire and changing how they develop their employees from a social impact standpoint. But I think what you and I are talking about is that they ought to be thinking about it from a business standpoint. For far too long, companies have relied on the proxy of degrees as telling them, for instance, what person they're finding in the marketplace and how that person is going to add value to their enterprise, their company. An over-reliance on something, sticking with the degree, in the long run, to help employers understand who they're hiring and what that person will be able to do in the company. This could be the Kodak moment for a lot of these companies because things are shifting. People are valuing things in different ways. There's so much fluctuation in the education market, the credentialing market. People are looking at skills now more than just degrees. From my perspective, they're not going far enough. How do we use technology and identify solutions that can empower employers to know exactly what they're getting when they hire somebody? Because there's a way to understand aptitudes and mindsets and gain skills and knowledge. To me, that has the ability to give a company a competitive edge in industries, especially where other companies are slower to respond in that way. To me, the answer for a lot of these companies, if they want to continue to be relevant, they'll change the way they think and act, and they'll approach all of their talent practices in a very different way. Understanding that their human capital, their talent, and their employees are the most important assets they have. Investing in them in ways that matter more to the individual, I think, is not just the right thing to do, it's going to be the competitive and smart thing to do as a business.Michael Horn:It's so interesting hearing you sort of develop that out. I get new things every time we talk about these principles. The one right there I got was actually openness, the opposite of it isn't just closed, it's a risk aversion. Right. In some ways, you often think of the HR function in a company as being very risk-averse. It's sort of the, no one got fired for hiring IBM back in the day.Ryan Stowers:That's right.Michael Horn:I like that Kodak moment language. You can almost imagine, I think, what you're arguing is you can stay with the same practices. You may have heard the Andreessen Horowitz podcast recently on Higher Ed where they were saying their companies don't just recruit from Stanford anymore because it turns out it's not a good predictor of success in the companies. So they're having to get more creative and look at different measures and assessments themselves on point because, in many ways, the degree is itself discriminatory and not very helpful to the companies. So as an HR leader, breaking out of those tried and true, quote, unquote, mindsets is important, perhaps to staying ahead of the curve, if I'm understanding you right.Ryan Stowers:Yeah, exactly. Look at some of the other problems they're facing. In addition to not being able to find enough people to fill roles, they're having a hard time retaining talent. In reality, the answer is the same. If companies will invest in people in ways where they're empowering them, where they're meeting them, where they are, we're seeing the data. I mean, paycheck and compensation matters, the commute matters, but so does purpose. So does meaning in one's career, even to the point where this younger generation seems to be willing to trade off some levels of compensation in order to find that purpose and meaning. A smart employer would tune into that aspect of the landscape and recognize that in order to stay ahead of the game, they've got to change their talent practices in order to hire the people that are going to want to contribute, to have that contribution mindset to achieving what the business wants to achieve. And I think that tweak is huge, Michael. I think it's going to matter a lot.Michael Horn:Yeah, I couldn't agree more. We're seeing the same data. As you know,  I’ve got this book that I've been working on, and the data we see on individuals trying to make progress as they switch jobs is that the paycheck, it stands in as a proxy for something.  It's a proxy for I want more respect or I have to pay daycare bills. So it's a proxy. It's not the root cause. We really need to get root causes and understand people's purpose and progress underneath it. To your point, as a whole individual, not just you at work. David Brooks had this piece recently on marriage being much more important than work for happiness. The Effect of Openness on IndividualsLet's end our conversation here with individuals. What's the upside and downside for individuals if they are or are not in places that actually support openness? What should individuals be looking for and thinking about?Ryan Stowers:Yeah, there are a couple of different ways you could talk about this. If you step back and think about openness in the workplace, think about the difference between working for a company where not just your input from day to day, whether it's making devices or transferring information or whatever your role looks like. Think about the difference between you just kind of plugging in and doing your thing, versus an environment where your supervisor or the people on your team or your employer generally respects you for what you have to bring to the table and is open to your ideas. Given your local knowledge about what you do from day to day versus anyone else in your organization, the possibility of you coming up with ways to make that better, or make that more efficient, or make it more impactful or effective, and that kind of empowerment approach internal to a company, or that kind of openness to the possibility that a leader doesn't always know everything that's best about what's going on in the company. The learner worker in this case is learning through experimentation, learning through trial and error. He or she is respected and given the chance to share his or her ideas and thoughts and know that they're impactful. That kind of empowerment and openness in the workplace creates a much better environment and one that people want to be a part of. They go to work because they find purpose.It connects up with what we were talking about a minute ago. It connects with their ability to make something bigger than themselves better and move forward. They've got a sense of ownership in that improvement. They've got a sense of ownership in that innovation. So I think it has a ton of potential to unleash things in people that, frankly, we just haven't seen in the past in ways that are much more empowering and much more effective for both the employer and the employee. This gets back to a different level of mutual benefit than I think we've seen in the past. There are employers figuring this out. There are employers doing things differently right now. I think Walmart's taken a huge step in this direction, focusing on lifelong learning, focusing on the merits of understanding who the individual employee is, what their aptitudes are, recognizing that if they invest in people in these individualized ways, they're going to be empowered and want to contribute in ways that are much more meaningful and important to the company than otherwise. I think you're going to see companies that take that approach gain a competitive edge. I met with an employer last week, Martin Ritter, who's the CEO of a Swiss-based company that makes passenger train cars. And his US operations here in Salt Lake City. He came to the US and recognized this challenge. They weren't finding talent at the level they needed to, with the right aptitudes or skills, through the traditional system. So he approached a local community college and built a program that allows juniors and seniors to come into the company, and get credentialed for what they're doing in conjunction with what they're learning through the community college, as well as what they're learning through this apprenticeship program. They're hiring people because the people are more connected to what the company is trying to do.They're more motivated to be a part of it. They were met in a way that the traditional system wouldn't have met with them. In fact, in a lot of cases, there would have been barriers preventing this level of access. So in this instance, it's an employer fundamentally being open to more risk and fundamentally changing the way he thought and acted about work and learning. That's leading to improved outcomes for hundreds of young people in the Intermountain West mostly in Salt Lake City, Utah. So it's just an example. And you're seeing this. You're seeing employers start to step up and change. And, you know, the reason they're doing that is they know that it's going to give them a competitive edge and let them be more effective. In turn, it's going to help unleash the potential in their employees and workers in people.Michael Horn:I love that case study, and it's a great place to end because it really is the win-win.  It's the positive sum as opposed to too often I think in society we sit there thinking, who's the loser in this? No, the individual benefits. The schools are certainly benefiting, and of course, the employer is in that example. Ryan, thanks for doing the work you continue to do and for joining us. We're going to find time in a few more months to catch up on what you're learning from the portfolio and continued evolution but just really appreciate it.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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So many teens are addicted to phones and social media. How can parents and educators help kids thrive in a digital world with unwritten rules, uncertain effects, and endless changes?Devorah Heitner wrote her latest book, Growing Up in Public, to help adults better play that role. I sat down with her to discuss strategies for maximizing the benefits and mitigating the risks. We also talked about whether legislation around social media is a good idea and how all this technology should or shouldn’t be used in schools. As many of you know, this is a hot topic—an an important one. People have strong hot takes on both sides. Devorah takes a realistic and practical path into the conversation that I appreciated and enjoyed learning from. Michael Horn:Welcome to the Future of Education, where we are passionate about building a world in which all individuals can develop their full human potential and live a life of purpose. To help us do that today, we have the noted author Devorah Heitner, who is the author of the new book Growing Up in Public: Coming of Age in a Digital World. Not her first book, but this is a really important one and an important moment in time where we are starting to see both the negative and positive impacts of social media. Devorah, welcome to the Future of Education. I think no one does it better than you at helping articulate, really both sides of this complicated world into which our young people are entering. So first, thank you for writing the book and welcome.Devorah Heitner:Thank you. Yeah, I'm living in this world and talking to young people every day. And if anything, I think I started over a decade ago with slightly more technology, rose-colored glasses, and now I'm more like in bifocals, but that sort of befits my age, I guess.Michael Horn:No, I like it. I like it. I mean, as you mentioned, it's not your first book. You had Screenwise as well. Talk to me about your journey into this topic, and how you've progressed. I like that analogy from rose-tinted glasses to bifocals. But just tell the audience about your own journey into this.Devorah’s Journey to the WorkDevorah Heitner:I was a college professor and very connected still to higher ed. But when I was teaching college, I had my students, I had written my master's paper on Sesame Street, and I taught classes on kids media culture, and I had my 18 to 22-year-old undergrads doing research about kids and media in the community. And they would interview third graders. In our case, I was teaching in an affluent suburb of Chicago, and I had kids interview my students, interview third graders in a working-class suburb and in their own, where the school was, which was Lake Forest in Illinois. So it was very different. What they got was that third graders are using tech in really interesting ways that were very different from their own use. And that was less than a generation. These kids could have been their siblings. A nine-year-old could be a sibling to an 18-year-old.They're certainly not a full generation apart. So that was eye-opening to me. Then I became a parent in 2009 and really witnessed a moral panic around smartphones, touch screens, tablets, and schools using tech more in k twelve and how's that going? Colleges deciding if they're going to ban cell phones in the classroom. All these conversations about, is tech killing our kids. Is it helping our kids? Is it doing both and trying to really understand what is the experience of being a young person and then an emerging adult with all of this and with growing up in public, I'm really curious about especially the pressures on young people's identities, like, how do you figure out who you are when so many people are looking at you?The benefits and drawbacks of social media 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:Yeah, it's such an interesting question because even at that age, they're trying out identities, right, and figuring it out for themselves, let alone, as you say, growing up in public, showing it in a very public-facing way. As you describe in the book, this world of social media, is obviously a big, scary place in many ways, but it also has the potential to be beneficial for kids to express themselves or find those communities. So I'd love you to just go deeper on sort of both sides of this if you will. What's the good and what's the bad? Because we're hearing a lot about that right now in the more mainstream media.Devorah Heitner:I think there's tremendous potential for young people to find and keep and deepen community online. I talked to a lot of young people who had found connections with friends on Discord and via other spaces. In the old days, it was Tumblr. Kids are good at making use of digital communities to learn things. If you even look at the sort of college forums, college confidential, it's a lot of young people informing young people about, like, well, there's a lot of drinking on this campus, or if you don't want to be in a fraternity, this might not be the place for you. And that use of digital community, whether it's information seeking, whether it's supporting a new identity, maybe if kids are coming out as LGBTQ plus, if kids are trying to figure out their mental health issues, there's a lot of good information on there and a lot of community and a lot of support, and there's just a lot of opportunity to have fun. So my own kid is a pretty avid player of a couple of games. He would kind of resist, I think, the identity of a gamer because it's not his full thing, and he doesn't want to see himself that way. But there's a couple of games he really enjoys, and he and his friends are able to play, for example, sometimes for just an hour after homework on a weeknight, which is not a time where I would want my 14-year-old going out necessarily and where kids really aren't right. Maybe if the other kids were out, I might be okay with it, actually, but we don't live in a world, at least in my community, where kids are out very much, especially during the week, and they're not hanging out in person. So this is a way for them to hang out and a way for them to connect and check in and say hi and have something fun to do that's strategic, that's intellectual. It's interesting. So I think we sometimes dismiss these forms of community because it's where the kids are. It wasn't like our experience. I did hang out with my friends in person a lot more than many kids in this generation are doing. We kind of feel bad for our kids because they don't have that. But online it can be really positive for them. I think the downsides are some of the ones that have been brought up in the hearings, but I especially worry about comparison kids comparing themselves with others. And you can really quantify your response on social media. Any of us can see how many followers we have, how many likes a post gets, and it's so easy to compare that with others. Adolescents are wired to be figuring out who they are through some of those comparisons. But there's a degree to which social media, I think, turns up that dial and can be maybe too intense or even worse maybe, than comparing with peers is comparing with sort of not real people comparing with influencers or someone who's been airbrushed or had surgery to look the way they do. So from a body image perspective, for example, that can be problematic.How parents can help kids navigate social media Michael Horn:Yeah and terrifying for parents. Let's start with them before we go to the legal landscape, if you will, and schools. Just for parents, what's your advice for how their kids can start to get the good of social media with not the bad? Do you think that there's an age at which they should or shouldn't be on these platforms? How do you help parents navigate this world?Devorah Heitner:Parents want to be thoughtful even when their kids are not on social media and don't have phones, about our own use and how we communicate. A lot of the challenge right now is that we are thumbing out our lives in front of our kids and that they're not hearing us on the phone make communication decisions. They're not hearing us realize maybe, oh, when I scroll, maybe I don't feel good. So I'm going to take a break. So we actually need to talk more with them about our own experiences of using social media, even if they laugh at us. Like my kid, I remember when the first time I experienced some sort of platform anxiety when my TEDx, this is many years ago, was shared on Upworthy, and I started noticing more views and I kept coming back to check. And of course, that's a very short-lived pleasure as any of us with any kind of experience online for our work. It's like, oh, this is fun. But it doesn't lead because you can have 4000 followers and then someone has 40,000, and then if you get to 40,000, someone else has 400,000. There's no place where you can get to with building those kinds of numbers where you're like, oh, okay, I'm good. There's enough. And certainly for those of us publishing books, there's no place where my publisher will be like, okay, Devorah, you're good.Michael Horn:You don't have to stop selling books. You're fine.Devorah Heitner:Yeah, you're all good here. So I think that sense of chasing clout, which we make fun of teenagers for something adults do, and so if we can notice that, for example, about ourselves and laugh, and my kid was laughing at me, but I was kind of like, okay, well, I can laugh with you at myself because this is kind of funny and silly and ridiculous, if we can kind of just be open to those conversations, be open to the conversations about, wait, who do we want to be in contact with in these apps? Why do you think Snapchat has streaks? Why do you think they have a map that shows you where all your friends are? Is this in everyone's interest to have this information? Is this even safe to be sharing this information? Just getting kids I think tapping, especially with adolescents, into that natural skepticism that they have so that they feel like winning is using the tools and not being used by the tools. That's what we all want when we're using digital tools. It's like, I want to use LinkedIn, but I don't want to be used by LinkedIn. I want to use TikTok, but I don't TikTok, sort of using me. Right. And it's tricky because, to a certain degree, we are the product in all these sorts of free apps. But it's like consumer ed. It's like teaching kids to notice that, oh if a gallon of milk is $5 and half a gallon of milk is $4, then a gallon is a better deal. Like, how do I feel when I scroll Instagram? If it's making me feel bad, I probably want to take a break. Maybe I don't need to completely quit because my friends are DMing me there. But maybe I don't want to be spending mindless time scrolling. Maybe I want to set a timer on myself. TikTok was the most frequently quit app of all the apps I interviewed interesting adolescents about because it was so immersive for them. Some of them just had to leave.Legislation limiting use of social media and technology for kidsMichael Horn:That's so interesting. The intentionality you're speaking about there for the parents and then by translation to the young people using this makes a lot of sense. It reminds me, I realize, because we don't get a newspaper, I'm on the phone in the mornings at the breakfast table, reading news articles, and my kids have no idea what I'm doing on the phone. So it's occurred to me that when I was growing up, I saw my dad or mom, right, reading the paper, and therefore I got interested or reading the same articles. So just that opacity of the medium seems to me a very big barrier. Obviously, then, lawmakers are now getting into this. You've seen all sorts of proposed legislation, I think the most recent… I want to get to schools in a moment because obviously, that's where I spend a lot of my time thinking about. But the big one that's gotten attention most recently is a law that would require parent permission before teenagers effectively were allowed to use social media. What do you make of proposals like this?Devorah Heitner:I think it's really tricky. I like the idea of more awareness. I want the companies to be much more responsive to complaints, and I understand why everyone's so fed up, so I just want to put that out there. I understand why parents and educators feel frustrated with these mega companies that don't seem to be that responsive to the concerns of their users around mental health and haven't been as supportive of parents and caregivers and educators. That said, I don't think there's a way. I mean, this would be like saying that you have to be 18 before you're allowed to have a dime to put in a payphone. This is the medium that all people are using to communicate. And if you're putting roadblocks to that medium, what do you say to the kid who's trying to report abuse at home? Do they still have to go to that parent? What if the problem is your parents? We have to understand that not all kids even have parents. Some kids are in a legal never-never-land and they're in between foster homes. Does that kid just never get to be on Snapchat and communicate? What if they're on the debate team and everyone's communicating on Instagram or Discord, like, they can't join because they don't have a legal guardian.I just think there's a lot of problems with it. That said, of course, in an ideal scenario, every kid would have mentors and adults who care about them, who have their best interests in mind, who could support their entry into the complex world of social media. But we don't live in that world.Michael Horn:So we have to take that reality for what it is. So then I guess that translates into the next one, which is, as you know, a lot of countries and several localities have had these suggested, or in some cases enacted bans on having cell phones in schools, period. They have the yonder pouches where they require them to go in there and you're not allowed to use them during class time. What's your take on legislation there? Or is this sort of the case that it should be more managed at the school level? How do you think about those trade-offs?Devorah Heitner:Yeah, I mean, I do think that every school knows its situation better, and I've really come around to understanding why schools are leaning into the bans much more. I mean, I talked to a group of school resource officers last summer, and they talked about rampant fights being broadcast, for example, on TikTok, where it was encouraging other kids to even come to the school to participate in violence. I get why if I'm running a school and I think there are kids who are going to get hurt or die because other kids are sharing this stuff, I would understand wanting to cut that off at the source and say, okay, if this is exacerbating the problem of fighting and even giving kids motivation to fight, what can we do to reduce that? At the same time, I think, again, every situation is different. There are many kids using their phones as assistive devices, both kids who are recorded as having differences in disabilities with a 504 and IEP, and kids who may have self-identified accommodations that they need that are helping them get through school, that maybe don't have a documented disability. There are kids who have been in unsafe situations at school that they've documented using their phone. So it's really difficult to say. And I know everyone wants the easy answer.Michael Horn:Everyone wants the magic bullet.Devorah Heitner:Yeah, but there isn't one. I do think that when I walk into a cafeteria and I see kids just in their phones and not talking with one another, I do have concerns. I want kids and young people to be able to talk. I think especially when I see that in higher ed, frankly, because I do remember closing down the dining hall with my friends and getting kicked out. Having the dining hall closed and they were like, all right, you all have to leave now. We're just sitting around talking to each other. That easy communication is something that I think, especially in this sort of late pandemic, late stage pandemic is very tough. I don't know if I would have 4 hours of conversation to have, even though I'd love to see my college friends. But would we talk for 4 hours as easily now or am I too rusty after being home on Zoom for these many years and having all my conversations be focused and on the hour, the art of especially sort of untethered conversation may be something we're losing. So to come back to what schools should do, I do think for now it makes sense for schools to individually even experiment and notice what works. It is very hard to make these kinds of policy changes. So I understand again if a school doesn't want to just try it. But one thing some of the schools I've worked with closely have done, especially if it's a k twelve school, sometimes they'll have different policies at different levels and they'll notice, wow, our middle school students are getting a lot more done in study hall because they can't have their phones. And our upper school students don't seem to be getting anything done. And I've talked about can you share that research with the upper-school students and see what they want to do. There might be kids who would opt into a yonder patch bag even if they don't sort of, if not mandated, because it’s helping them focus. And that would be a different feeling than not being trusted by the adults to make your own decision.The risks of parental oversharing on social mediaMichael Horn:That's super interesting because what you're pointing to throughout this is sort of the sense of agency that all individuals want to develop and a sense of mattering right in all of this and not dismissing that as you sort of make these well-intentioned rules at whatever level you ultimately do as a school, as a lawmaker or whatever it might be. I'm sort of curious. You have this other part in the book which relates to college, which I had not honestly thought about until I read it, but then it made all the sense in the world and I had this horrified reaction which was parents sharing their kid's college decisions in social media. It seems like parents are making a lot of faux paws themselves perhaps around sharing news that is not theirs, is the way I might say it. It occurred to me that I probably violate this I think I'm doing it less. I've sort of gone on a no kids on social media, but I'm sure I violated that when they were young as well. So I'm sort of curious how you think about that.Devorah Heitner:Well, all our families. I mean, I became a parent in 2009, so it was like right in that early Facebook years. So I also shared my kid a little bit and was not thinking as much about the future. Then as I started leaning into writing about privacy, and now I have a skeptical teenager who knows I write about privacy, so God help me if I share him now without permission, given that he knows what I do. But the college thing is such a good example because kids are sharing a lot with one another, and yet they're much more thoughtful about the audience they know. If my best friend applied early to Amherst, say, and I did, too, I know that's going to be a complex thing for us this year. And I also know the kids are confident their friendships can survive it. But they are more thoughtful about how to share that information and what to do with that information and how to process it and how to support one another, frankly, when denials happen, which is obviously so many of our kids experience and especially low these last dozen years, and I love them for that. I'm so impressed with how young people have found ways to communicate about this and have their own etiquette around it. And when their parents undermine that, it really is a problem. And it puts tremendous pressure on young people. Even talking about the visits puts a lot of pressure on young people then, because then Uncle John knows that you visited Madison and he went there and why didn't you decide to apply or whatever it is. All of that is really hard. So the less the better, I think, on that front. And taking a cue from the kids is really thinking about the audience and how people will feel.Academic monitoring and comparisonMichael Horn:It makes a ton of sense. And just having that sensitivity on all sides, as you're navigating this in the book, you also talk about how not just parents, but also schools have so many more tools to monitor children, often communicating behind their back. We know online grade books and all those things that have increased some of the helicopter parenting and other things of that nature. Just love your take at both levels. This is elementary school all the way through high school and even into college sometimes. What are the risks of these apps and what are the ones that give you concerns out there right now?Devorah Heitner:Yes, I wrote a lot in the elementary school years about a behavior-monitoring app called Class Dojo not to pick on Class Dojo. They seem like nice people, but because there's something very insidious about monitoring behavior, and especially the sort of micro choices and experiences kids have with regulation, like raising your hand or speaking out of turn, that kind of stuff. The apps use a gamification of behavior modification that really concerns me. So that level of, like, you're competing for points, it's all externalized, extrinsic rewards, and it just tends to lean into rewarding the kids who are naturally more self-regulated, which broadly in elementary school is like girls versus boys, but even more so, like, some kids versus other kids, like neurotypical kids versus non neurotypical kids, kids who had breakfast versus kids who didn't get breakfast. There's all kinds of ways and reasons why some kids are consistently more self-regulated than others. And even those kids can become quite anxious. I interviewed several parents of, for example, very typically well-behaved neurotypical girls who were kind of like this, at the edge of their seat, stressing about these apps and worrying about losing points that one time they did call out without raising their hands. And instead of seeing that as like, wow, they must have been really enthusiastic about that answer, there's this denigration. So kids get really stressed about all of this. Then I would go in the book, I trace that all the way up through the app, the Grade Books, which we can come back to in a minute. But I want to talk about Naviance with you and the other ones, Maya learning and S-C-O-I-R which I don't even know how to say it. All the apps that kids or high school students use to quantify the data, put the recommendations together, and there's tremendous convenience to having that all in one place, especially that. Plus the common app, I think, is driving some of the sort of, I would say, over-application. But the much higher numbers. I mean, you're talking to someone who applied to three colleges and I live to tell the tale, and I have a PhD in everything, right? But the number of colleges, of course, are much higher. And it's because there's so much aggregate data. But the things that concern me a lot about Naviance are, first of all, Power School owns it. So you're taking the people who have your kids' grades, they have some of this behavior data, then they also own all the stuff they put into college. That's a lot of data about someone for 16,15 years of formal education, from age potentially four to 18. A lot of personal info in there. Suspensions, expulsions, behavior data, anything a counselor may have written down. A lot of that data is just in there. I don't like it being digital and being available, even if it doesn't all get shown, for example, to the college, that raises concerns. Then how do I feel, as a college applicant, getting to… seeing my dot on the app? And I've already looked at what Maya learning looks like for my son's school, and it's kind of crushing. You see your little dot on the app, and then you see where other dots are, and there's a line. So if you're looking at a specific university where students from your child's high school have applied, or they're looking at… and one of the things my editor wouldn't let me use in the book was an article. Now I'm going to have to link to it. In your show notes was an article from a kid at a prep school. We'll decide if we can use this, but my editor is like, it's too mean. A kid at a prep school in Chicago, where I live, writing about the first day they got access to Naviance and how people cried when they saw their chances on the chart. Yeah.Michael Horn:Wow.Devorah Heitner:I mean, it was written in kind of a slightly sarcastic, slightly, you know, high school mean kind of way. So I think that's why my editor didn't like it, and I see why she didn't like it. But I thought, no, this is something people need to know, that people get on this app, and it makes them cry. I'm not saying, by the way, that we can protect kids from the realities of admission. I think people need to go in with their eyes open and also radically rethink what's so important about whatever ten or 20 name-brand schools they're so obsessed with. All of that is important. But I think there needs to be more sensitivity in how we handle that data as well. What we know, especially for students who don't have good access to counseling, is they can underreach because the data is so sobering that what you can see, and this was what was so interesting about the Dartmouth article in the New York Times the other day, is seeing with SATs, too, that with test-optional students, we're underreaching.Alternatives to monitoring appsMichael Horn:Let's. There's so many different ways we can. No, this is great. This is great. I mean, if you're okay with including this, I'd love to keep it in. But it's so interesting, because, like, a Class Dojo, for example, I know those folks. Well, I know the teachers who use them that would say that's all well and good. I'm sure that's great in theory, but gosh, it really helps me keep the class in line and they're learning more and it's so helpful. What would you tell the teacher, I guess, around what they might do instead or how they might reframe the system, in effect, that you're talking about?Devorah Heitner:Yeah, I mean, I would lean into, because I don't presume to mentor k twelve teachers. Like, I do a lot of PD, specifically around social and emotional stuff and kids' digital milestones. So I presume to talk to teachers about that. But like classroom management, I would say lean into your other professional cohorts and your principal and other people who have good experience, lean into referrals and making sure that kids who are needing special ed actually get it. Because there's a tremendous, I think, underdiagnosis and undersupport in some schools where kids aren't getting. If you're really having trouble supporting a kid's behavior, maybe there's more going on. If none of the tricks you're trying are working, maybe they need more support. And those colleagues could also be helping you. But one of the things that I learned from a teacher and actually a principal in St. Vrain, Colorado, was she doesn't allow them to use Class Dojo. She said, if you feel like you need Class Dojo, come see me and I'll sit in your class. I'll help you… you know we'll work together. So I like that level of support. I think all teachers ideally need that. They need a principal who is willing to come and help them with classroom management and mentor them, but she sees it as a sign of, like, okay, you feel like you're drowning. What can I do to support you so that you don't have to do this? Because the short-term compliance is not leading to long-term better behavior and not leading to internalized self-regulation, and it can really harm kids.I mean, the extreme examples that I gave, and I know not every teacher uses class dojo in the same way. And I do want to acknowledge it has a translation feature that's clearly positive. If you need to speak to that parent in Urdu and you can do it through class dojo, I think that's a great use of that app. The problem is things like kids getting denied recess or there's a prize for all the kids who are well-behaved and the kids who already struggle. You have to figure a kid who's struggling to self-regulate is already having a terrible time at school. Already probably doesn't like school. Then you give a party to the other kids and make those kids watch. You're talking about potentially ending someone's education trajectory early.You're increasing the likelihood that they may drop out. You're harming their self-esteem in ways that are lasting. It's not worth it. Even if you get short-term compliance out of it. It's not worth it.The effects of grading apps Michael Horn:Yeah, I couldn't agree more. As we wrap up here, it strikes me that there's a consistent theme across a lot of this, which is that sort of a zero-sum world of comparison where one gets the prize, the other doesn't, even though we're trying to develop both or social media. That's true, too. I'm comparing my likes versus yours or whatever it is that ultimately that zero-sum view as opposed to a positive-sum view of like, hey, we're all trying to be the most unique version of our best selves because the system is so built around the former as opposed to the latter. All of these apps, in some ways, they may not have created the conditions, but they're perhaps turbocharging the negative parts of that. Is that a fair way to think about it?Devorah Heitner:I think so. I think the grading apps, which we didn't really get to, where parents can just check kids' grades, it also can undermine the relationship with teachers. I think that's really important. That three-way triangle of student, teacher, parent, all of those relationships can get strained when there's too much access to information that's too frequent. We don't want too little feedback in education, but grades shouldn't be the only feedback. And maybe, I think maybe aren't the best kind of feedback. That's a whole big conversation, and I kind of like, nibbled on that in the book, but I don't want to bite it totally off the but there's that. But then it's like, what's it going to do to the relationship with the teacher? Or a high school teacher might have 180 students a day, some may have more.So even just remembering in your email etiquette, as I try to remember to do, to always put my student's name and ID number, even though I think they probably know who I am because I'm that parent and they probably do know who I am, I still feel like, let me identify myself because this person has hundreds of students in a day and just thinking about do you want to be writing to them about that zero, or do you want to wait and see what happens? Do you want to let your kid self-advocate, and figure out what they need to do? Or has the grade just not been entered yet? You're starting a feedback loop of anxiety because of a grade that hasn't been entered. So this is why some schools are closing their grade books. This is why Challenge Success is recommending limited access to them. I've just talked to a bunch of schools that don't have them, and I think that's great. But many, many schools do. Most people who work at schools or have students in school are probably encountering online grades, and the pressure from the school to check my son's school will tell me, check Canva, check Canva. That's just one of their big messages.Michael Horn:No, it makes total sense. Look, we could go in a number of different directions and keep geeking out on this, but with respect to your time and the audiences, I can't recommend the book more. Growing Up in Public: Coming of Age in a Digital World. There it is. We will flash it up as well. I think it is a great resource, like I said at the beginning, to really get at the nuance in what has become a very polarized good-bad social media. Yes-no sort of conversation.And see, there are upsides and there are a lot of risks as well that we need to bear in mind. So thank you for helping us think through it. Thank you for helping schools think through it. Thank you for helping parents and students navigate their way in something that none of us have dealt with before.Devorah Heitner:Thank 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.

On our latest episode of Class Disrupted, I interviewed Diane Tavenner about why America’s approach to math class isn’t adding up. We analyzed the outcomes produced under the status quo, considered the current system’s alignment with workforce needs, and proposed a personalized approach to teaching each student the math that is meaningful for their path—and doesn’t privilege Calculus over things like data science and statistics, but also doesn’t strip opportunities away from those who are accelerating in their studies. As always, subscribers can listen to the episode, watch it, or read the transcript below.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:Hey, Diane, how are you?Diane Tavenner:Well, I'm well, and I'm going to start with urgent priorities today. Do you have any recipes that use a lot of lemons?Michael Horn:Lemons, okay.Diane Tavenner:And it's not because we're going to make lemonade out of lemons today. It's literally after years of drought, with all the rain we've had, my lemon tree has gone insane, and I have now made curd and cakes and ice cream and ice cubes of juice. And I have run out of recipes and I still have hundreds of lemons.Michael Horn:Well, it sounds like you're in California. It sounds like you've had rain. It sounds like I remember why I miss California. And I will tell you, the only other two I will add to your list is preserved lemons for salads. And then, of course, there's an alcohol that you could make as well. But we won't go there today. Instead, we could think about all the ratios and all that stuff that goes into making it just right, because I know you've been wanting to talk about math and some of the things that you've been learning about how our school system thinks or perhaps doesn't think about math in relation to work. So I'd love you to start to unpack that.Status quo K-12 math pathways Diane Tavenner:Well, great, because it's much better that I talk about this with you than turn to the drink because math can make me feel like I want to do that sometimes. So I appreciate your willingness to have this conversation. And what is prompting it for me is, you know, I have thought about math for many years from sort of a K-12 educator perspective, but now I'm coming at it from this new direction where we're really thinking about careers and post secondary and what's getting me going on this topic is my observation of how important math is in careers and how that is really at odds with how people in K-12, I think, think about it. And so let me just lay something out and see if it makes sense to you, which is my experience in K -12 is there's a mindset there and it's a mindset among students and parents and teachers and counselors and kind of everyone who is in the system. We really focus on math almost exclusively in how it relates to college and specifically, like, how do I do what I need to do in math because it's a key to college admissions, essentially? And so the big thinking that ends up happening, especially in high schools, is if I can get all the way to calculus, it gives me a better chance of getting accepted to college. And an elite college at that, maybe into the major that I want. Taking the most challenging…if I can't get to college, taking the most challenging courses that I can in high school relative to what's offered, helps me get into college. Getting good enough grades in math helps in my GPA to get into college. Previously and maybe a little bit again now emerging, taking the SAT and the ACT and getting the best score I can helps me get into college. The point being, as you hear, it's all about getting into college. And as I think about my time in K-12, we almost were never talking about the value of the learning of the math. It was always this entry into college.Michael Horn:Yeah, it certainly matches up with my experience as well. Diane, and I know it's playing out there in California. Let's go there in a moment. But I'll just add, Jeff Selingo has made the point to me recently that all of what you just said is absolutely true. And it's a little bizarre that colleges care this much about math because most students, when they get to college, are going to take at most one math class. Now, if you're going to MIT or Caltech, maybe that's different. But for most of us, we get to college, you do your math requirement if you have one, maybe you had gen ed math, so you have to pass a test or something like that, and then most students are sort of done with it, Diane, so it's sort of bizarre how much the college and K-12 system cares about it as an entry point into admission as opposed to anything you're going to do with that track. But let's unpack what's going on in California.California’s new math framework Diane Tavenner:Yeah, this is the other piece that just has me deeply into math right now, which is I feel like California is always having a math war, but there is a renewed math war at the, you know, peaking right now. Over the last multiple years, about four years, California has been trying to, as a state, adopt a new math framework. And this framework has been very controversial. And know was first presented and everyone's outraged. And so they went back and they edited and revised. That's been going on for four years. Well, it just got approved at the state level. Still people are very upset about it. But I've been reading the coverage about it and the arguments around it, and maybe I'll just give you a couple of quotes here that I think go directly to what we're talking about. This is from the LA Times, and the quote is “Another concern of people who don't like this math framework is that many top colleges still place an emphasis on whether applicants get to calculus and how well they do in that course.” And so this is just a well-known, well-communicated expectation from colleges and universities. And what I would also say is from the most selective and elite, because you and I both know there's a small number of those. There's a huge number of colleges that are non selective - you don't need to take calculus to get into those colleges. So it's like this small number really driving the agenda for most people. That's on the one side, you've got these people angry that because we're driving every kid to college, we're not actually focused on equity and going at a slower pace, more kids able to kind of learn together and things like that. And then the flip side of that is parents who are really frustrated and worried that their kids opportunities will be limited and held back. And this actually happened in California and in San Francisco, where they decided they were not going to teach algebra in 8th grade because it wasn't fair and equitable. And so we're literally saying we're withholding learning from some kids in the name of…And on both sides, I'm like, oh, my gosh, Michael, this is not third way thinking.Michael Horn:No, not at all. I mean, it goes to the heart of, I think what frustrates both of us around these conversations is that clearly the answer to equity is not the opposite of excellence. And clearly, having a system that drives off the expectation of calculus for all doesn't make a heck of a lot of sense. And I know you've been investigating about how does math even manifest itself into these careers. So I'd love you to tell what you've been finding in that, because that may be the most interesting piece of the puzzle.The role of math in the modern workforceThe 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:Yeah. And I think that my headline here is, and we're using datasets that lots of people use, so sort of the federal government data sets around labor and statistics and jobs and careers and things like that. And so as we just dig into this and really think about the usefulness of it, my headline is…Well, let me just share with you what we're discovering. So there are approximately 923 careers in the US. And I say approximately because we do, in these data sets, believe there aren't careers that are represented in there. There are some, I will also tell you, that I had no idea were careers. So it's fascinating. It's a little bit of a game. Like, I challenge anyone to write down the number of careers you can think of 923 is quite a lot.Michael Horn:There's no way I would get there.Diane Tavenner:Yeah, 235 of those 923 literally have math as an important skill for doing that job. And these are jobs where you're going to be doing math kind of on a daily basis, doing calculations, using math in your actual work. And so just some examples of these types of careers. You're an actuary, you're a statistician, those probably seem pretty obvious. You're a sales manager, you're a personal finance advisor. And so I feel like those seem like, oh, but there are 235 careers that are using math kind of regularly. There's 573 careers, inclusive of those 235, that also have math as like, important knowledge you need for doing your job. And so you might not be doing calculations and stats every day, but when you're a pharmacist and an economist, and a wind energy engineer, and a stonemason, and a logistics engineer, and an insurance underwriter and a farmer, you need a grasp of and knowledge of math in order to effectively do your work and to be engaged in your career. The other thing I would just say about this is all these careers, these 573 careers, when I look at them and stack rank them and money isn't everything, but making a family sustaining wage is really important and a thing we aim for. These careers are highly represented in the group that makes, on average, $75,000 or more a year. So in the sort of top end, so not only math an important part of the majority of careers that are in the country in some way, shape or form, but definitely overrepresented in those where you're going to make more money. And here's maybe the punchline. Very few of these careers require any use of calculus, or quite frankly, advanced algebra even. And so most of them require just a strong grasp of real world applications of math, like statistics and fluency and basic math concepts, and confidence that you actually understand these things and practical application of them. And so I just would say this is so contrary to my experience in K-12, where almost no one is focused on math for career opportunities and success. I don't think I ever had that conversation in K-12.Michael Horn:No, that makes sense. It's interesting. It brings to mind when I wrote from Reopen to Reinvent, I joined the argument that many more people should be learning data science and statistics, rather than the algebra II into calculus path. And one of the arguments was Anthony Carnivale, who was then the director of the Center on Education and Workforce at Georgetown, had this stat in an article where just 11% of US jobs involved work that required understanding algebra II concepts, and only 6% regularly used those concepts. So a bare minority. But then you're pointing out that doesn't mean the careers don't have math at their heart. It's just not math on this calculus track, if you will, that is a relic, we should add. It's a relic of the sort of distinguishing between vocational education and the college track education, which in our mind is a boundary that should stop existing also. That's an outgrowth of all this. So where do we go, I guess, from here? If that's the reality, where do we go?Results of the status quoDiane Tavenner:Yeah, and I definitely want to get into some solutions. We never, of course, want to leave here without generating some path forward. But it might be worth staying for one more minute on what is underlying this problem because it's not just like K-12 people running around and purposely sabotaging math. I don't think that that's the objective, but I do think that our current design of our K-12 system, kind of, as we know, results in very few, let's call them mathematically literate, let alone fluent students. And I was thinking about this because we talk about reading and we talk about literacy quite a bit. And as we both know, there's a renewed focus on the science of teaching reading and literacy. And I do think as a whole society feels very convicted that everyone should be able to read and everyone should be literate. I'm not sure that that's how we think about math literacy, quite frankly. And so I think one of the things that you're just pointing to that's embedded in the system, the K-12 system we have, is if you have calculation as this destination, and you just said it, there's one pathway, then there's like this sequence of courses that you take, and really it's like every single person's on that same pathway, and it's just how far you're going to get on it in what period of time. Will you make it to algebra? Will you make it to geometry? Will you make it to algebra II? To trigonometry? It's almost like this game of like, well, where is everyone going to fall out, if you will. And this is all driven by this drive to four-year college for all, which is the thing we've been talking about a lot. And so I just think it's worth us noting that only about 8% of high school students actually take calculus. So that is the dropout rate, if you will, of math along this pathway. So I think one thing in the design we need to think about is this pathway concept. I think the second challenge is K-12 is not really connected to employers and to employment. Again, college for all, that's our focus. That's what we thought we needed to be doing. And when you're disconnected from the actual use and what people are doing, I think it's challenging. And then, Michael, there are very few teachers capable of teaching math. I think this is something we're really going to have to grapple with when I'm going through these 923 careers. You need to know a lot of math in order to teach math. And as we just showed, there's a lot of other careers where if you know math, you're going to be very competitive in those careers. They're very lucrative careers. They don't often require as much post-high school education and credentialing. And so why would you choose to be a math teacher? And I will just say math teachers for a long time have been among the very hardest to hire. There are tons of math positions that go literally unfilled every year. And I just see this problem growing and not shrinking. And so I just think those are some of the elements of the system that we need to think about solutions for if we're going to do something different here.Defining math literacy in the age of AIMichael Horn:No, that all makes sense. I'm just curious, and you may not have a take on this if I'm putting you on the spot, but how would you think about defining what is math literacy, as opposed to the completion of algebra two, trigonometry, precal, calc, if that's the old sequence. How would you define that? Or how would you think about creating a definition? Maybe that's the fairer question. And then the second part of it is, I'm just sort of curious if you have a thought of does AI change any of that? We know a lot of these large language models don't do math particularly well today, but we also assume that that will change over time. So I'm just sort of curious how that enters into your thinking or no?Diane Tavenner:Yeah, this is such a good question. Well, the first one I love, because you sort of are inviting me to think about a rubric and learning objectives, which, as you know, in my nerdy world is…Michael Horn :You geek out there.Diane Tavenner:So it's really fun. So the first logical place I think people go is, well, rather than this traditional sequence that most of us are familiar with, sort of this pre-algebra, algebra, geometry, algebra II, et cetera, you go with an integrated mass sequence. And California this is one thing that the state has tried to do in this framework, is promote a more integrated approach, which conceptually I think is maybe in the right direction, in that it does seem to be a little bit more grounded in real world applications. Like, very rarely are you getting these pure sort of subjects when you're using math in the real world. I think it breaks down in a couple of ways. One, I don't know that it is truly connected to real world application. And two, I think in the teaching of it, it's not how math teachers are trained, unless your entire system is doing this when kids are having to move, shift back and forth like it's just a mess. And it's not recognized by college, which is driving things. So I'm not sure integrated math gets us where we need to be. So how would I think about what it would mean to be math literate and math fluent? One way we could start would just be to go look at what is the math that is being done in these careers and quite frankly, in real life. I mean, I don't know about you, but being a human, you have to manage your budget and your finances. What are the real world uses of math, concepts of math, Michael Horn:And then pull back and define around that.Diane Tavenner:Yeah.Michael Horn:Interesting. Okay.Diane Tavenner:Yeah.Michael Horn:And I guess it'd be super interesting if AI starts to, in fact, change some of these professions. As you know, I'm seeing white papers come across my computer screen saying we don't need to worry about computation anymore. And I suspect there's a point where that's true, and there's a point where maybe it's not true that actually still learning these fundamental processes in the same way we do work about on phonemes and things like that are still building blocks to understanding how math is in fact functioning, even if the manipulation of equations or things like that become less important.Diane Tavenner:I had a really interesting conversation the other night with Irhum, who was on our second episode of this season related to AI about this very topic. And there's a big generational gap between us. And so he's always a little surprised about what I did in the old days. So he was saying to me, he's like, I am one of the few people where I literally use calculus in my job. So he is truly using calculus. So he's very mathematically literate and fluent, obviously at high levels. But he was advocating to me that what most people should be focusing on is statistics and data, significantly more to your exact point, and what you've been writing about, and certainly what I agree with and he was so surprised to hear my experience of doing research methods in college and statistics in college, and he's like, wait a minute, you used a calculator, and he's like, why would you do that?Michael Horn:Why wouldn't you just type into Excel?Diane Tavenner:Literally. The actual computational piece is just far less important to him. It's the conceptual understanding and the application and usage, because in his mind, we have all of these tools that do that. He's like, technology does that so much better than humans. The likelihood that a human is going to make a mistake is very, very high. It's inefficient for us to be doing that type of mathematical work. And in some ways, it's what becomes the turn off to a lot of people, I would argue.Michael Horn:Sure, 100%. I mean, when it becomes so about essentially formula manipulation, as opposed to understanding the conceptual underlying what you're, in fact doing right, it turns a lot of folks off. So that all makes sense. If we've identified the problem, we started to define how we would think about literacy and fluency in this world. We can admit we haven't nailed that yet, but sort of putting some questions out there and suggesting maybe some of this might evolve. Can we go to solutions now? Innovative solutions to our math challenges Diane Tavenner:I guess my first suggestion would know, I don't know many people in America who are super excited about the presidential campaign this year. So maybe we take that one out and we sub in a different campaign. And here would be my vote for the campaign of America is that we just need to rethink the importance of being math literate in America and why it matters to each of us. Personally, I used to work with this incredible math teacher, Megan Taylor, and she always tried to drive the point home. She's like, no one would go to a party and casually say, like, “Yeah, I'm illiterate. I can't read,” and be fine with that. And yet, all the time, people, I'm terrible at math. I can't do math. And so this notion that we have gotten comfortable as a nation, that most people are terrible and can't do math, we need a campaign in the other direction of the importance of math and the importance of us collectively being literate at it. A changing expectation. I would want you and I, as starters, to be as passionate about young people coming out math literate as we are them coming out reading, writing literate. Michael Horn:Love it. If in future episodes, we cover what presidential candidates should be saying about elections, we'll have to strike this from the record. But I agree, this would be a much more inspiring use of the next year of our national dialogue I suspect.Diane Tavenner:Indeed, that second one we've already touched on a little bit and we started to brainstorm there. But we need the math that's being taught. We just need to shift the focus, I think, in K-12 away from how is this a screener for a small number of kids into elite colleges? And how's that driving the whole system into what is the math that is meaningful and useful and used in the real world and really organizing our instruction around that? And again, we've talked about integrated math should be able to do this. Maybe it's the starting place, but it's falling short right now. It needs some work.Michael Horn:Yeah. And on this one, and this may bleed into where I think you'll probably go next. But one of the thoughts that I've had is for those individuals like Irhum who like calculus, is going to be central to what they do, I want that pathway available, but I don't want it to be the expectation that that's the only option. And I don't want it to be seen as better or worse than, I just want it to be a choice that I've made because it speaks to me, because it aligns with things that I have learned about my passions and purpose and things of that nature. And it's a considered choice as opposed to something either done to me or an option that I don't even have. Diane Tavenner:Completely, and I feel like we're going back to our roots of what we actually originally met over, which is personalization. And I think that this is probably going to be the most controversial. And I want to be really clear about what I'm saying and not saying here and the whole totality of it, but we need to totally rethink how we're teaching math from a needs outcome, but a practical perspective as well. We have technology, and AI is only going to help this. We have personalized math instruction options that are pretty darn good right now in the world that really, I would argue, can do a better job of personalizing instruction and creating a personal pathway for every single student to learn math from very young all the way through high school than what almost every math classroom in America can do. And then you add in the fact that you have to have this math classroom be as good as the next year and the next year and the next year, which is just unrealistic at this point. We need to personalize math instruction. We need to use technology to do it and that means it needs to look completely different than the way it does in school. And there are many implications to that, and we can take a minute to unpack those. But I'm guessing that you're aligned with me here on this.Michael Horn:100%. And I think it's interesting for people who hear this, they'll say, well, tracking does that. And in my mind it doesn't. Because while the opposite of tracking, putting everyone in the same thing at the same pace is not an answer, and I would totally argue against that. Tracking is a very blunt instrument on this. As we know, math is cumulative, right? So there's a certain number of power skills that translate, that are critical for learning what comes next and that branch you in different directions and so forth. And you just think about that individual and I'll just tell you a story. This happened a few years ago in Lexington, where I live, where I was talking with the father over coffee, and he was just anguishing because his then 8th grade daughter was trying to decide would she take honors geometry or regular track geometry, something like that, in the 9th grade. And I was just thinking what a terrible choice for a young person. She should just be taking math and she could move as fast or as slow as she needed to do along the skills. And then if because of the way our education system works, we needed to give it a name, afterwards we could, at the end of the year, look at what she had mastered and give it a name. But why were we forcing her to make this artificial choice that was either going to hold her back or create stress she couldn't handle and all these other things when the objective should just be learning the math. And to your point, we can do this in a personalized way. And then for people who I think may be hearing us and saying, well, that sounds really individualistic, well, great, because then I get to work in projects where I apply the math. I've worked in a group with people, but I'm not like being held back on the conceptual understanding because my neighbor is ahead or behind me at any given point in time. Diane Tavenner:We're totally aligned, Michael, and I would just add even a little bit more like, let's describe what this could literally look like in a school so people could imagine it. Imagine a young person going to school starting from kindergarten all the way through college, and they are literally in a math software technology program, probably more than one over the time. Maybe it's a small cluster of them, but they are in that program continuously for their entire K-12 education. It's adaptive. It's growing with them. There is no limit on the amount of math they can learn.Michael Horn:There's no five-week review at the beginning of fall to see where you may have or may not have remembered.Diane Tavenner:You're just making progress. You're never sort of waiting on a class or like behind on a class. They're doing that. Imagine whatever, an hour or two or three a day, whatever it needs, they're doing that work in the school building. What can the adults be doing so they're not isolated? A couple of things. One, there's a whole sort of coaching and mentoring component to supporting young people to stay in there and hang in there and reflect on what they're doing and making sure that they're growing and monitoring their progress and diagnosing what's happening, if they're falling off and celebrating when they're advancing. So there's that role and component, which is important, but it doesn't have to be done by a math teacher and a math expert. And the second piece is, and you said it, if schools are teaching the way they should be, which is they have projects that kids are engaged in where they are really heterogeneously grouped and they are real world, and they're applying these concepts, you can have exactly what the California math framework is envisioning and what San Francisco wanted, which is all these kids working together using math concepts, regardless of where they are in their development and applying the math, being in a social setting, all of those things.The obstacles to change Diane Tavenner:So that's the type of thing we're talking about. But what that requires is changes in policy, changes in the role of the teacher, changes in course offerings, changes in how the transcript reflects what kids are learning, which feels a little daunting.Michael Horn:Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of work on this, as you know, and I know that the traditional system, it's like, I mean, Clay would always say this when he would describe this Michigan manufacturing corporation case study, and he's like, there were metaphorical grooves in the floor that meant that the welding station only visited whatever station and would never go across the factory floor to see someone else over there. It was like they were just so well worn. And that's sort of where our system keeps getting stuck as well, I think. And you make sort of a change to any one of these, right? We're both pretty excited, I think, about the team teaching work that Arizona State is starting to roll across, the next education workforce stuff, but that's going to bump into something else. Or as we've talked about in this podcast, before you change seat time requirements, the Carnegie work that we've had Tim on talking about, Tim Knowles talking about, yeah, but then finance, then how you do scheduling, how you've credentialed, like all these things ripple in very complicated ways, that it's never just one simple answer.Diane Tavenner:No, well, this is your expertise now, but as we know, the big existing incumbent system doesn't really disrupt itself because something is always getting in the way. And so I do think we have to wonder, are there other ways to getting to this outcome because it's so important. And I do think this is where the rise of ESAs or educational savings account gets interesting. And especially if you combine that with what I think is an emerging opportunity for alternative methods to validate skills and knowledge. And we had some of that conversation with Tim when he was here in Carnegie and what they're doing with. But like, especially in the world of math where we have plenty of valid assessments that are valid and no one's…Michael Horn:Going to question.Diane Tavenner:Yeah. And so what happens if the campaign works and families are like, oh, I want a good career and job and I need to know math and the school is not giving me a pathway to understand and learn the math I need. So I'm going to unbundle and I'm going to use some resources to go get that somewhere else.Michael Horn:Yeah. So before we wrap up here and move on to what we're reading, this just throws me back to season one where we had this conversation of the haves and the have nots in the schools and in a place like Palo Alto where all the kids had already taken the math class before they showed up for math, you know in summer school or in their Russian school of math after school or whatever it was. And my reflection is, well, okay, I mean, that's not how I would choose to spend my kids time or my money, but let's say they did it. Could you just say, like, yeah, you've passed an assessment that shows you have mastered these math concepts. Great. Why waste your time doing the exact same thing now? Unless you didn't really master it, in which case it's more about cementing it and we should be able to. These assessments can measure that as well. And I think you're right, the ESAs…It's funny how we both have come sort of around to this view that I think it creates a really important set of alternatives that aren't just schools to rethinking a lot of these structures. And you mentioned transcripts and grading and things like that that get very complicated. But when you get out of that world and you find other ways to validate and other ways to offer, it changes a lot of the questions that you ask in some pretty fresh, exciting ways that I think become more intuitive when they're not asked from the perspective of a parent or student in the system itself.Diane Tavenner:A lot there.What we’re reading and watching  Michael Horn:That was a lot. All right, so let's get out of there. And besides thinking about math and researching all the math that will be used in careers, are you reading, listening to, watching anything outside of math? Because I don't know if you know this, we actually have someone on social media now who has created a Google Doc, apparently with all the recommendations we've given over the five seasons. No pressure, but anything good?Diane Tavenner:Oh, my God. Tracking to make sure I'm not repeating. Well, I think I may have mentioned this, Michael, but Rhett is in his last semester at Minerva. He's in London. So I'm going to head to visit him soon, and we're actually going to go up to Scotland. And I'm super interested in Scotland because there's so many interesting things there. It was one of the most literate countries at one point in time. Small, poor, yet highly literate, an enlightenment. They're really amazing thinkers. So I've just been immersing myself in Scottish history and reading, and I've sort of moved over to the fiction part of it now. So one of their most famous authors is Ian Rankin, and he has this famous detective, and all the novels take place in Scotland. And so I'm actually reading his kind of memoir, which is super fascinating right now.Michael Horn:Wow.Diane Tavenner:Yeah. How about you?Michael Horn:That'll be an interesting trip. What about me? I was thinking about this beforehand. I have not finished a book in a while, but I've just been continuing to geek out on tennis, which I think I said last time on the two-minute tennis. And so I am now completely hooked on…Andy Roddick has a new podcast called Served. I'm completely hooked on that. And then there's this new rules of tennis, sort of money ball tennis sort of thing called Fuzzy Yellow Balls. And I've been reading a video book, and as you know, I don't…Irony since we're video recording this, but I don't love watching videos generally to learn, I prefer to read, but I finally, like, I subscribed to it several months ago and then was like, oh, it's videos, and put it aside. And then I've been obsessively going through this new singles rulebook. It helped me in my match the other day, and it's been awesome, but I feel like I'm unlearning literally everything I thought was true about how you play tennis over the last few months, so it's been really cool.Diane Tavenner:You're a great model for what we should probably be doing in education.Michael Horn:There you go, disrupting everything. And with that, we'll conclude and just say thank you for joining us on 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.

Tutoring has been a favorite intervention among school systems looking to get their students back on track after the pandemic. But not all programs are created equal. Results have been uneven at best.I sat down with the Alan Safran and AJ Gutierrez of Saga Education, a nonprofit that has been supporting schools to get tutoring right since long before the pandemic. We discussed the evolution of their model, what it will take to weave tutoring into the fabric of schools, sustaining programs after federal COVID funds are depleted, and the role of AI in the future of tutoring. As always, subscribers can listen to the podcast, watch the video, or read the transcript below.The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Michael Horn:Welcome to the Future of Education. I'm Michael Horn, and you are joining the show where we are dedicated to building a world in which all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their human potential and live a life of purpose. And here to help us think about that are two co-founders of Saga Education. We have Alan Safran and AJ Gutierrez. Alan serves as the CEO and AJ is the Chief Policy and Public Affairs officer. But as we'll hear, Saga has been at this work of tutoring long before the pandemic made it a trendy topic. I remember meeting with both of them outside of Porter Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts. We had a great conversation about all the things that they were learning about how you do tutoring well, how you start to think about scale and a lot of the questions that were on their minds.So, Alan, AJ, great to see you. Thanks for coming back and educating me once more.Alan Safran: Yeah, great to see you again.AJ Gutierrez: Yeah, it's great to be here, too. And usually after meeting us for the first time, people don't want anything to do with us. So I'm actually surprised and excited to be here.Saga’s founding story Michael Horn: When you reached out, I was like, yes, I need an update. I want to know what's going on, but fill our audience in first. And Alan, I'll start with you. What's the founding story behind Saga Education? Because it has an interesting origin story that is perhaps not what most people think of when they think of tutoring.Alan Safran: We go back to Aristotle and Socrates thinking about individual tutorial, but a little more modern. I was Executive Director of the Match charter school in Boston. AJ was a 9th grader when I first met him at that school, and Mike Goldstein was the founder. And Mike had the idea, look, kids are coming to school like AJ and his classmates, many of them three years behind grade level. What do you do when you're a normal school with a normal schedule, with normal classrooms? You can't do it. A teacher, no matter how heroic, has a hard time differentiating in a class, say, at 9th grade, where there's an 8th grade differential between some kids coming in like six years beyond grade level and other kids coming in two years ahead. It's impossible. The burden we put on teachers.What the expectation is for teachers to reach grade level skills is impossible. So how do you structurally address that? So Mike had the idea, let's build a dorm in our building. Bingo. Let's recruit tutors from around the country, like Teach for America recruits teachers. Let's recruit tutors. He said, what I think of the idea, I thought it was crazy. But then we worked together. We started it in 2004 and within a few years we had a reputation.The US Department of Ed said we were in the top seven charter schools in the country. And the results for kids like AJ were remarkable. And my own story is I come from two public school teachers, so I long have had in my blood this desire to get justice for kids. It's a phrase not often used for teaching, but getting justice for kids whom the system has not provided enough for. For me, that's a big theme of my life. And AJ's origin story is even more interesting than that.AJ’s journey through and back to SagaMichael Horn: AJ, why don't you give yours and how you go from a 9th grade student, the beneficiary of this tutoring model, to starting an organization to think about tutoring more widespread, not just in match education.AJ Gutierrez:It's certainly been an extraordinary experience for me, just working alongside Alan, who's known me since I was a 9th grade student and he was my chess coach. For me, it's such a pleasure to bring a model that had such an impact on my life to lives of students internationally, not just in the United States. We've had some exciting work and research done in the Netherlands, for example. But as Alan mentioned, it was really game changing for me. When I was entering 9th grade, I was really disconnected from school as a c minus c plus student. I grew up with a single mother with three kids. And for the people who are listening, who are parents, you know how hard it is to keep up with day to day. Can you imagine working multiple jobs and trying to stay connected to what's going on in school? And that's exactly what's happened with my mother.And every year just got harder and harder. And so when I attended Match, I had a chance to work with the tutor, it was really game changing for me. But as I look back at that experience, I don't really think about it from an accelerated learning perspective, although that was really important. But the opportunity to really connect with someone in a meaningful way who knew my name, who knew my birthday, who communicated with my mom, was so amazing to me. And for my tutor, getting to know his life story and really discovering there's just so much that we had in common was really important to me. So it matched. As Alan mentioned, it had a lot of traction, success. Some other charter schools replicated the model and we had a chance to work to see if we could bring this model into traditional district school settings.And that was at the early stage of my career in education and I was kind of thrown into the frying pan because the first time we tried to replicate this work was in Lawrence, Massachusetts, when it was under school receivership. So the state took over the district due to academic performance reasons. And at that moment, it was the greatest turnaround in high school math in Massachusetts state history on the local state exam in terms of what they call the student growth percentile. So that was a really great indication that we could be onto something here. And roughly around that time in 2011, the University of Chicago Education Lab was conducting randomized control research studies on a social cognitive behavioral therapy program called becoming a man, which was the catalyst for My Brother's Keeper initiative for President Obama. And they wanted to see if you can couple this cognitive behavioral therapy with really intensive tutoring. And so we work with them as part of several randomized control research studies, which was, at the time, really encouraging. It was one of the most significant academic gains I've seen that's been rigorously evaluated in US public education.You could double or triple math learning compared to students who didn't receive tutoring. We started Saga to continue, explore how we can develop and scale this approach. I mean, everyone knows tutoring is a great way to help kids. What's the first thing you do once your child starts falling behind academically? You get a tutor for them. And so the question is, like, how do we give access to this type of resource to families and students who wouldn't otherwise have had access to it? And so, as we try different models and permutations, try and understand the impact through rigorous randomized trials like the gold standard for research.Scaling the early model and adding live online Michael Horn:So stay on that for a moment, because you've done a ton of research, as you mentioned, through the various iterations, you've had. The base Saga model, and I know you've iterated it in recent years, but coming into the pandemic, the base model that you all had, describe what that actually looked like from a student and tutor perspective in terms of the time, relationship, and number of other students may be with them or not, and so forth. Just let's be super clear about what this looked like.The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Alan Safran:Let me take that. So the base model had two permutations I'm going to highlight. One was the classic, the Coke classic. One tutor across two kids, live in a classroom, no technology, build relationships, have the kid in front of you every day of the year. It's a period on the class schedule, in the 9th grade schedule taken out of an elective period, or for some other time. And that was it. That got the results of the University of Chicago published from the 2013 to 15 study of 0.26 standard deviations, which is up to two years of extra learning. Up to two and a half years of extra learning in one year.That was the base model. We varied that before the pandemic and had a tutor across from four kids. Now they weren't tutoring four, they're tutoring two. The other two were working on an adaptive practice tool like Matthia or Alex or Khan, something practice. They tried to get the tutor's attention. Tutor said, look, you'll have me tomorrow because the next day the kids on the platform will get the live. Kids on the live will get the platform. The idea of that cocktail was use the relationship of lifetime to motivate the kids to take the tech time seriously.And if they take the tech practice time seriously, they generate data that's useful to the tutor in the live time. So we went to that model. University of Chicago also evaluated that recently published results, same effectiveness at about 60% of the cost. So we were already driving down price. Keep maintaining impact. And even before the pandemic, we had a third flavor, which was live online tutoring. College Board challenges said, look, you should look at live online. We don't know why.[We] said we'll look at it. We did an RCT in Chicago and New York and showed exciting, dramatic results for just 20 hours of dosage in a live online environment. So Dave Coleman, the CEO of College Board then and still was perspicacious. I don't think he knew that COVID was coming, but he knew something was real about live online. Wanted us to test it and we found it pretty valid and it's going to be important to the future of tutoring.Michael Horn:Stay on that for a moment. The live online, because I think that's where we'll just say, like, the pandemic took off. Everyone got excited about tutoring as an answer to all of the challenges, whatever you want to call them. The learning that was lost out on during that time and online was a big part of it. A lot of those, as we know, have not delivered. So when you say live online, what are the features of those? I think you said 20 hours a week or something like that. I'm not sure what you just said, but tell us features like how much time are we really talking? Is it the same person every single time? What are the features? How many other students, et cetera?Alan Safran:Yeah, so I should clarify, when we say live online, we mean a live human tutor. By the way, we talk about AI and bots in that, but for now, it's live human tutor interacting with a kid in the vertical environment of a platform as opposed to the horizontal table that we sat at in person world. So we did live online trial. It was 20 hours of dosage in that trial with the college board on the SAT, but now live online that we do in New York City. It's our model. In Chicago, some of our schools and others of our schools, it is at the same pace, same frequency. It's a class on your schedule. Whether it's one day a week or every other day, it's a class on your schedule.Your tutor comes into your platform live, and you build a relationship with that tutor. The ratio is roughly the same. The training of the tutor is the same. The qualifications of the tutor is same. The labor force, though, is dramatically bigger than the ones you could find down the street from the school. That's why I have written a piece with Bob Runze, head of Chiefs for Change, recently in EdWeek, that said, look, the labor issue is going to be a big limiter to the potential to scale tutoring to what we think are the necessary focus, which is 3 million kids. We need 100,000 tutors to do that. Live online will open up that pool.You can either draw a circle around a district school with like 20 miles if you want to have neighborhood live online, or you can go nationwide. You can go global if you want it. But let's say nationwide, the pool is so big that you'll be able to be selective in the tutors you hire. So on average, with a bigger funnel, the quality of tutors hired through live online will be better on average than the ones you can find in person locally. We think it's a piece of the future of education, in particular of tutoring.Michael Horn:Super interesting. Let me just make sure I got this straight. When you've studied it, are you still seeing, I think you said point two six standard deviations. Are you still seeing something like that?Alan Safran: We don't have an RCT on live online yet. We have some quasi experimental results on live online. We have our own internal measures that we actually have measured because we run programs now in four cities. It's not a big part of what Saga does. What Saga really does is help states and district to build their capacity. But in our four cities, we have some live online models and some in person. We've compared them on our internal measures. Very little degradation in student outcomes.Hard outcomes like academic soft outcomes like student engagement and student belonging, and much higher tutor satisfaction in the online environment, which leads to tutor retention and less attrition so very encouraging. Early signs in live online. We're going to get a quasi-experimental design out of New York City with Jim Kemple of NYU's center analyzing propensity, matching set analysis retrospectively and current year, and I'm looking forward to the results of that. I'm optimistic that lava line is pretty good. It'll get better as we do it over time and as the country is starting to do it in some states like New Mexico and some districts like Ector County, Texas, which I visited just recently, it can be effective. It's got to have some key elements though.Elements of high-impact tutoringMichael Horn:Okay, so let's talk about that then. AJ, turning to you, because we talk a lot about high dosage tutoring or high impact tutoring, there's different phrases right for it. What are the critical non negotiables that you all have discerned that need to be there for the tutoring to be effective?AJ Gutierrez:Yeah, many of the people listening to this right now are probably wondering what we mean when we say high impact tutoring. And usually when you think about tutoring, it's like homework help or after school. What we're trying to do is encourage people to think differently about it, where it's just part of the fabric of school design, where it's part of the regular school day, it's integrated to what's going on, it's aligned with what classroom instruction is. The tutor works with his or her student consistently throughout the year, maybe two to three times a week. Do you best keep those parents consistent and you provide coaching and ongoing feedback to tutors the same way we have those expectations for our teachers. And Phil, when Saga in the early days in our thinking around this, we were so fired up about the research, we're like, yeah, we're going to serve 20,000 students directly. We're going to keep growing. Pandemic comes along, flips k twelve education on its head.We're really eager, but we just noticed there's just a dramatic need. And after having conversations with folks at the Bill of Melinda Gates foundation and Overdeck Family Foundation, we just recognized that given the need, we can't possibly scale to serve this directly. And our thinking really started to shift from the spirit of trying to replicate to a much more practical approach for scaling evidence based programs that's focused around adaptation. And what we're trying to do is empower schools and districts to implement high impact tutoring on their own. So what is it that we can do to provide them the resources, tools, technical assistance so that they can do that and trying to understand whether districts can do this effectively on their own, what student outcomes look like, what are the steps necessary to transfer what we know to be best practices to districts? And what we've discovered is that high impact tutoring really is a framework, it isn't a model. And there's a lot of opportunities to play around with different concepts, including thinking about ways you could integrate artificial intelligence to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of tutors. And there's so much that is worthy of exploration and I think we're excited to be part of the exploration. And lots of other merging organizations also are thinking about this issue and we're going to continue to share those insights.The University of Chicago has a large-scale randomized trial in multiple school districts. Right now there are about 16,000 students who are part of this RCT with aspirations for this to increase even more. And it'll be the largest randomized trial on tutoring that's ever been conducted nationwide. And the early data on that is really encouraging and suggests that districts can do this. And that's really good news from a scale perspective, because if we can make this part of the fabric of school design at critical growth years, you don't have to provide a tutor for every single student, every grade. You maybe can create the conditions where as part of the K-12 experience, maybe students can have one or two years of really intensive personalized support to keep on track for graduation.Weaving tutoring into the fabric of schoolsMichael Horn:So I want to stay on this. We'll go to the technology and AI toward the end, I want to come back to that. But what you just said, that you are now increasingly playing really a support function in the ecosystem to make sure that districts, states, schools are putting the right conditions in place so that whatever model or form of high impact tutoring that they put into place, that it'll be effective, that they can be confident that it's actually going to help students make progress in line with what they hope. Just say a little bit more about what that work actually looks like. And does that mean you're helping districts or schools pick out which tutor provider to work with? What does that actually look like? AJ, let's stay with you. And then, Alan, I'm going to flip in a moment to what this looks like in the school design itself, but I want to stay like at the level of support and helping them stand up these programs. What does that really look like?AJ Gutierrez:Well, Alan's like Mr. Miyagi right now. It's like wax on wax off, with the district leaders, I mean, that's something we're exploring now, what does it really take to help districts get this right? And we're really excited about that. It's really tricky. It's really complicated. And the interesting thing is, what we're trying to figure out is with Saga, we can gain as much as, like two and a half years of math growth. But even if a district could get half of that or a quarter of that, I mean, that's still game changing and that's still really exciting. And so I think part of the work is really providing hands-on support with program design and implementation, giving them access to things like our curriculum.Some of the technologies we're using help them think about, how do you schedule this in the regular school day? What is providing training for the managers of the tutors? Providing the training for the tutors checks for fidelity, observing the tutors and providing feedback, just to name a few of the ways we're providing support to.Scaling through customizability Michael Horn: No, that's super helpful. Okay, Alan, I'm going to turn to you here because I think the first time we met, I was like, yes, finally, someone's thinking about bringing the best of tutoring and scaling it. Because as I think about it, from a disruptive innovation standpoint, as you know, disruptive innovations get their start in areas of non consumption. And by my estimates, some 80% of students weren't getting the tutoring that they needed when they needed in this country for different things. And so you seem to have started to come up with some secret sauces that allow us to scale this more and more right online, one to four alternate days, different things like that. How do we start to weave this now into the design of schools themselves? Because, as you know, my passion has been how do we make schools places that can truly personalize in the right ways for an individual child whenever they need it, as opposed to thinking that they all need the same thing on the same day just because they have the same birth year.Alan Safran:Yeah.Michael Horn: So what does that look like?Alan Safran: Yeah, I'm better on this over a couple of beers and wine, but I'll try to condense it to a couple of minutes without the alcohol. So it's hard. It's a big battleship out there, the American public school system, 55 million kids turning that around really hard. So you got to get buy in. Buy in will come locally when people locally...And this starts with parents, by the way, I think. Parents, the major secret sauce here. Parents of kids who got tutoring in these Covid years and are at risk of losing tutoring for their next child who's coming up the pipeline, parents of multiple kids become a secret force to drive tutoring's continuation.So turn the battleship around. You've got to get buy in from parents. You've got to get buy in from teachers. Fairfax County, Virginia, great example of this. They came to us, a group called J. Pallet of Cambridge introduced us. We went to them, said, look, we'd like to help you. They hired a district wide coordinator, terrific guy named Joe Ash, and he said, look, we want to do this, but I want to go slow.I want to hire a principal who knows the work. The schools know him. He'll go school by school. Get principal, buy in. Give him a month to talk to the teachers, like, work it out, get the buy in. That's number one. You get buy in, then you start it small. Matt Kraft has said, start slow to get big.You got to start tutoring slow to get good. There have been example[s] of starting big that still get results. Big city in America. But the better strategy. They started with one school in Fairfax. They have 130 now in a two year period. So start slow, get buy in, show results, show excitement. Now, I visited Fairfax, Orange County, Florida, Hector County, Texas, in recent weeks.Now, the teachers say, I can't live without this. And here's what happened. The buy in comes not from getting a vendor necessarily. They don't know. They don't know the tutors. They don't know how they're selected. But maybe have the district put the tutors, whatever they are, whether they're district hired or vendor hired, into the teacher's classroom. The big worry, I think, by teachers here is that tutors are going to, we've heard this earlier, tutor is going to replace you in your jobs.Well, no. Tutors are there to do two things which very few interventions accomplish. They support hardworking teachers who need help in differentiating and personalizing, and they support kids who are not getting their needs met because of the lack of structure that allows for teachers to personalize. So tutoring is an intervention that serves both the most important constituencies in education, which are the kids and their teachers. Building into the classroom is what Fairfax did, Orange county did, and it's not what we did. Talk about adaptation. Our model is not being replicated. We're not looking, as AJ said, for our model to be replicated.We're looking for the framework, the framework as AJ described it. But let them vary it. Like, let them go to a different pool of tutors. They're going to part-time tutors. We tend to have full-time tutors. They're going to build it as part of the classroom. We tend to be our own classroom. A thousand flowers can bloom here.But the way to turn this battleship around to scale this is to solve the time, people and money factors. We have answers to that. But initially to get the buy in from the people on the ground, that it's not being imposed on them, that they're going to have choices in the model here. But there are some key conditions that we know will lead to a better likelihood of success.The cardinal sins of tutoring implementationMichael Horn:When the practices have gone off, what are the cardinal sins, to your point? And I couldn't agree more. Start small to go big. That's not always been the way of districts.Alan Safran:Right. Well, they're balancing the urgency of now, the fear surge.Michael Horn:They're balancing urgency of now, equity. There's a lot of things for sure, but when you say that, just what are the cardinal mistakes besides the we started all at once or something like that.Alan Safran:There's three. There have been three. We saw. One is they've asked their own teachers to do the tutoring. Teachers are broke...Their backs are breaking. Now even offering them $30, $40, $50 an hour to buy out their planning time, and I've seen this in a big city in America, is a disastrous pathway. It will break the back of teachers.They will not succeed and it's not sustainable. Second big mistake was hiring, putting tutoring after school and on demand. That's not tutoring, that's just homework help. Like there's a company called paper. They're out of school time. They're offering the most. They say it's the most equitable because all kids can access will. Very few kids do access it? The ones who do or tend to be more motivated.And we want to access the kids support the kids who are coming to school and meeting us halfway by showing, going up who are far behind grade level, not the kids who are highly motivated, whose parents could otherwise pay for it. So doing it out of school time, homework help was the second cardinal sin. The third is again, like just going too fast, too soon. But the way they decided to go fast, in many cases, knowing the labor force was limited, they said, look, ten to one, we'll be tutoring ten kids per tutor. Texas has that as a statute. There's some states that have five to one as part of the stats. That's wrong. Ten to one is not tutoring.You're not going to find the pool of people who can handle ten kids at a time. You could find people. This is one of the great conclusions by the University of Chicago. The skills that it takes to be a tutor of one, two, three, or four kids are far different from the skills of tutoring class of 25 or 30. When you make a ten to one or five to one, you create a conditions in which the tutor is not going to succeed and then the initiative is not going to succeed, and then kids are not going to succeed, and we've failed. In another ed reform initiative, you got to start it with ratios of tutor to kids that are manageable by that labor force, not go to one to ten. I understand why it was a way to save money and to reduce the number of laborers you need, but it's not tutoring.Sustaining funding for tutoring programsMichael Horn:Got it. That's super helpful. One more question on this, because you mentioned money as part of the equation, and obviously the thing that I think a lot of people have been worried about is federal funding that came in in the wake of COVID that a lot of it has gone to tutoring. We know it's drying up. So where does the money come from to be able to continue to support this on an ongoing basis?Alan Safran:Yeah, there's one more painful way, which is to repurpose what schools already get. Schools get lots of federal funds, about 5% of the budget, but it's about 1000 per pupil, steady state title one for schools that are serving high poverty kids, that's certainly enough money to provide a high impact tutoring program of quality. So repurposing some Title I dollars for the subset of kids that we say in grade three who need help getting over the literacy bar, and in grade eight or nine who need help getting over the algebra 1 bar. District has huge pool. Take a piece of it, fund tutoring efforts there. That's hard because they've got to unfund what they're already spending. Title one dollars are on. That's the harder one.The easier one is find new federal funds that are replacements for the departing federal funds. The two best sources of that will fund the labor force at 80% of the cost of tutoring is on labor. The tutors, AmeriCorps, state commissions for Americorps have money. They distribute it every year. It's an application process, and they have made a priority of looking for high quality tutoring programs to fund. So a district can become an Americorps partner or a vendor can become an AmeriCorps partner. It becomes a subsidy for the cost of the wage.Nearly all the cost of the wage of a tutor will be covered by federal AmeriCorps funds. The money is there. The second piece of federal funding is federal work study college undergraduates. Here's a set of kids who receive financial aid, subset of kids in college who receive work study as part of their financial aid, separate from grants or loans. They get a work study, have to work for the money. The college gets federal work study dollars. It's been around for 25 years. They fund the kids to get jobs in the community.And one of the priorities now of the federal work study office is tutoring programs. So if you're a district, say, look, I want 20 kids from the local college down the street or 30 kids from the local community college down the street. If they're getting federal work study dollars, it'll subsidize 50% to 90% of the wage of those tutors. The tutors will get good money, say $20 an hour for a college undergrad, maybe 25. The college could subsidize 90% of that if the district negotiates hard. And we did that back in Boston in 2002, we had MIT saying, look, we're doing 90%. Harvard said they do 75. I said to Harvard, look, MIT is doing 90.Okay, Harvard did 90. So you create a little competitiveness that only works in neighborhoods where if you're going live in person, you've got colleges to tap from. If you're rural America, again, you're going to have to go live online. But again, with colleges in rural America to become a source of labor subsidized by federal work study. So we think it's existing funds, federal title I funds, new federal funds, Americor and work study. And the final piece is just rethinking what a school does. You've written a book called from reopen. To reinvent, schools need to reinvent what is school.School doesn't have to be only teachers. A class of 25. Throughout the day, it can be different set of people, adults working with kids. ASU, Arizona State is doing great thinking on this. Brent Bannon, I recommend him for his work. But a pool of tutors, who supports teachers and actually, the payoff here is financial. The return on investment is financial. You hold on to kids at grade three, literate kids, they graduated a four times graduation rate nine years later.You hold on to kids to pass algebra one. They graduated a four times graduation three years later. And since school, local and state funding is tied to kids who are enrolled in your school, if you've lost them as a dropout at the end of grade nine, you've lost three years of their future funding, $45,000. Invest 1000 of your title. One dollars at grade nine to get some insurance that more of those kids will graduate. You've made the correct financial decision. That has a better ROI than anything else studied.The role of AI in tutoring Michael Horn: Super interesting. Okay, as we start to wrap up here, AJ, you talked about technology. You mentioned AI. Alan, you talked about how if you pair technology alongside of the tutoring and create this reinforcement loop, what are y'all imagining right now? Could be on the horizon. Obviously, Khanmigo captured a lot of imaginations. I will tell you, Sal gave me an early license on it. I put one of my kids on it when she was home sick from school one day last year, and she was coding by the end of the day, it was pretty cool to watch. But what are you all dreaming up? Is an appropriate use of these technologies coming on the horizon to boost the sorts of effects you're seeing? Oh, AJ, you're muted.There you go.AJ Gutierrez:It's a super exciting time we're in, in education with the dawn of artificial intelligence. And there was a really interesting McKinsey study where they looked at consultants on the lower end of the bell curve, giving them access to AI. And at the end of the day, those consultants actually outperform some of the most know McKinsey consultants. And I think a big takeaway from that is that these types of technologies can supercharge human beings, and so now becomes more important than ever, I think making sure that people have access and know how to use these tools effectively, because it could exacerbate inequities if only a subset of our population knows how to use them effectively. But with that in mind, I think these types of technologies can supercharge our tutors. I can imagine a really interesting study on combining tutoring with Congo and what kind of outcomes you can get. Maybe a tutor can serve more students. Maybe it could be more prescriptive in providing guidance to tutors on how to be effective.Maybe it reduces the amount of prep time it takes. And so these are some of the things that are worthy of exploration that we're really excited about. The most sophisticated AI project we're working on right now is in partnership with the University of Colorado School of Mines, where we're looking at developing a scalable way to provide ongoing coaching for tutors. And from our perspective, that Saga is really the secret sauce, I think, for success. And this technology can provide coaching and feedback just as effectively as an expert observer on a set of instructional strategies. And we think that's a really great way to supplement ongoing coaching. And what it does is look at the discourse that's taking on has affective analysis of different emotional states of students and what's really causing engagement, what kind of moves that tutors are doing that they're leading to understanding. And so that type of information, I think, could help us get a sense pretty quickly the quality of tutoring that's happening, but also be really prescriptive in how we support tutors.And so that's some of the ways in which we're excited about how these technologies can really transform how we think about the scale of this type of resource so we can support more students.Michael Horn:Very cool, Alan. AJ, thanks for the continued work and rigor you're putting behind the work to make sure that what we do is actually helping students make progress. Appreciate you both. And in a couple years, when you have some more insights on how technology further changes or doesn't this game. Either way, whatever you learn, love you to come back on and inform the audience.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.

Where did you turn for help in deciding what you wanted to do when you grew up? For more and more students, CareerVillage.org, an online platform that connects high schoolers to advice from real-world professionals, is serving as a trusted guide in navigating their career paths. I sat down with the nonprofit’s founder, Jared Chung, to discuss how they are sourcing and delivering career advice; developing AI that enables the scale needed to address the massive need; and ensuring the reliability, transparency, and accessibility of their services through their growth and innovation. I was particularly struck by some of the intersections with the book I’m working on to help people find their next job, which you’ll be hearing more about in the coming weeks. As always, subscribers can listen or watch the conversation or read the transcript below.The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Time Topic00:54. The story behind Career Village03:48 Career Village’s scale and services 09:31 How end users engage with the platform11:25 The AI Career Coach 16:44 User reactions of the new AI18:59 Ensuring the quality and transparency of the AI, from source data to end product 26:18. Building access through scale and ensuring equity29:36. The promise of the AI Career Coach and where to learn moreMichael Horn: Welcome to the Future of Education. I'm Michael Horn, and you are joining us on the show where we are dedicated to building a world in which all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their potential, and live a life of purpose. And part of that, of course, is really navigating the world and transitions from education into career and making sure that you're finding something that really helps you make progress, not just in the jobs that you hold, but in your life. And it's consistent with the purpose that you have. And to help us think about that, today we have Jared Chung. He is the founder and executive director of Careervillage.org, which we're about to hear a lot more about. So, Jared, welcome. It's great to see you.Jared Chung:Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.Michael Horn:I'm excited to learn about what you all are doing. I know you have a number of initiatives in AI and elsewhere that are very cutting-edge. But before we get into that, just level set us all what is Careervillage.org, and what's your founding story behind it?Jared Chung: Careervillage.org is a nonprofit organization based here in the United States that helps people prepare for careers. And we do that using technology. We do that using people, the power of people. And importantly, we do it at a very large scale. And the reason we focus on scale is that the scale of the need is massive. The number of people who need support, advice, guidance, and information to prepare for their first or next career move is nearly ubiquitous. So, we focus on scale. The origin story, I think that it's almost such a universal mission. Everybody finds in it something that speaks to a part of their lived experience or the communities that they're in. For me, I, as a young person, was very career-oriented because I cared about financial stability for myself, and for my family. When I was in education, I knew that I wanted to get a job after an education that was going to allow me to put food on the table. And that was pretty much my only calculus at that time. I got very lucky to have some people in my life who served as mentors for me to help me navigate my way into college, help me ask questions that I was able to get answered about careers and help me navigate my way in my first job. So, when I started my first job, I turned back and was mentoring and advising young people, volunteering with nonprofit organizations and youth development, and helping young people prepare for careers. So that's kind of what brought me into this work and just frankly, I just love it. Being able to talk to a young person about careers, talk to an adult who's looking to make a career switch, it's so unifying. It's like such a window to connect with people and such a great service, and I think that was what draws me, has always drawn me into this work. But our staff is drawn into this work for a variety of other reasons. Sometimes because they are immigrants to the country and had to navigate the labor market, sometimes because they had experiences in their lives where they felt that they needed to get into an occupation where they weren't well represented and didn't know how exactly to get started. I think that each of us brings something unique to the mission, but it's really unifying.Career Village’s scale and servicesMichael Horn:No, that's super helpful. Now, you mentioned scale, so give us a sense, I guess a little bit of a lightning round here, right? Give us a sense of what kind of scale are we talking about. I know from your website this isn't just like sort of one-off mentoring conversation.Jared Chung:No, not at all. The first thing I should say is that Career Village, as you mentioned, offers multiple services. And if you take those services, and we've been doing it now for 12 years, if you look over the long arc of our existence and the services that we offer and add them all up, what you'd find is that we have reached millions of people with career information advice. The latest count is, I think over 7 million people engaged in this in one way or another, either as a learner or as someone who is giving career information or advice to a learner, mostly in the United States. But we have had beneficiaries in virtually every country on earth. I think the last count was 190 different countries where we've had people coming to access the career information that we are putting out. So, when we talk about scale, we are talking about millions of people and we know that even that, although we're very proud, hundreds of millions of people need this service at any given moment. We still very much ask ourselves the question, how can we continue to expand the scale of our services to match the scale of the need? How end users engage with the platformMichael Horn:Yeah for the book that I'm working on right now, our estimate is that in any given year a billion people worldwide are switching jobs. So, no question about it. I'm curious, how are students engaging in it from the top? What's the biggest pain points that they come to you all with and how are you reaching the students? Is this a direct-to-consumer or is this something you're working with colleges, universities, and high schools around?Jared Chung:Yeah. Well, I think traditionally Career Village has been most known… I think we're most known for one product and one service in particular, which is an online career Q&A platform. This is our standout performer, and on that platform, learners come in and can ask any question about any career. And we have now over 150,000 people who are working professionals from all walks of life who answer those questions on the web platform. So, a classic Internet Q&A forum, but really tailored for this particular purpose. And the platform is really, really good at doing this. The community is really good at doing this. They answer questions quickly. You get multiple answers per question. The quality of the answers is really high. And the community is also incredibly accommodating of wherever the learner may be in their journey. So, they may be asking a very sort of what you might think of as an entry-level question, a basic exploration question. They also might be asking a very advanced question comparing particular credentials that they might want to get, or how they might go about improving a cover letter or other topics. I think that the thing I do want to highlight is that the breadth of questions people have is so massive that it can become hard sometimes to say, well, what's the main use case? Because there really isn't one. We get such a huge breadth of occupational interest. There are some spikes, like TV careers, programmers, doctors, nurses, and lawyers. You get some spikes in those areas, but there's such a long tail of occupational interest. And I think that's one of the things we've learned that I want to communicate broadly to the sector, is that if you only provide support for particular occupational verticals, you're going to miss a lot of students who are in the very long tail of occupational interest that you don't support. So being able to say any question about any career is an important promise to be able to make to a learner.Michael Horn:Yeah. The service you're providing, frankly…We have this nine-step process we've been writing through, and part of it is helping people flesh out, as you were basically alluding to, divergent prototypes for what they could do with that next job. And one of the biggest things is understanding what do people actually do in those jobs and how does it line up with the things that bring me energy and the skills that I have. This is a great platform, it strikes me, for that engagement.Jared Chung: Among the most common archetypes of questions is walk me through a day in the life of insert occupation. How will my life be different how will my experience be different if I'm an ER nurse or a pediatric nurse? What might my day be like if I'm an auto mechanic versus if I'm doing some other occupation? So, it's super, super common. To some extent, learners would like to hear that from first-person narrative. And that's one of the reasons why I think that this online platform with a large community behind it has had such success.Michael Horn:No, that makes a lot of sense. So, last question before we switch to the AI piece of this. That is, I imagine, turbocharging all of this. I'm just curious, how are you reaching the students? Is this direct? They find you. This has become a big community, obviously, or do you work with schools to access the students and help give them the support that they need?Jared Chung:Yeah, we've worked with schools, educational, and nonprofit organizations since day one. We started off in classrooms providing this program and service. However, after a couple of years of building up the Q&A content, the direct-to-learner online audience started to really balloon and at some point, eclipsed the population that was coming in through a classroom. And that's continued to this day, where the vast majority of the people that we reach with the online Q&A platform are actually finding us on their own, either on Google or LinkedIn or social media. Sometimes when they are actively searching for the answer to a career question could be Thursday night, they're on their cell phone at home. It's not a happy moment, it's an anxious moment, wondering something about the job that they're looking to get into and searching the Internet. It's hit or miss of whether you'll find something good. And often they will find Career Village. That is the step that brings them into the community. If we earn their trust and create a welcoming space. The direct-to-learner channel has really become by far the largest channel for that particular service.The AI Career CoachMichael Horn:Very cool. So now you've launched this AI career coach. Tell us what that is all about. How does it complement what you're doing and what does it allow you to do that maybe you weren't before?Jared Chung:Yeah, listeners probably have at this point heard AI attached to everything in the world. I think what I'd say is this use case is so perfect for large language models in the current era of AI. And I really believe that personalization is one of AI, and education, I think is one of the real shining spots of AI. I'm not an AI promoter like the whole world should have AI everything. I'm not like that. But I do think in education, personalization is so valuable and AI really allows us to scale that. We are seeing huge impacts of using AI in the field of career development. I’ll give a little bit of history. We started the AI career coach project really, like pretty much right at the beginning of 2023. So, we moved pretty quickly on it. And I think the reason for that is that we have been already using machine learning in our community for quite a while for sometimes simple things like automatically categorizing content or flagging things. But pretty quickly we realized that as a text-based online platform, a lot of the operational stuff that we were helping our advisors with could be supported with large language models to give them extra tips to make their content more comprehensive or to offer them some grammar checks or spelling check, things like that. We started to play around with that and then pretty quickly realized that we could do so much more. We went out to put large language models right in front of some of our users and just immediately saw that some of the things that learners want to get practice with, like a mock interview or writing a cover letter or things like that, could be instantly available with large language models. So, we started the AI career coach project. And really what it's trying to do is to be the world's greatest career coach. Instantly accessible but working in collaboration with the educators who are already supporting the learner. And I think that part is really important. It's a chat-based, real-time chat application. You go in as a learner and you pick off of a menu of activities that have been predefined and pre-optimized to be helpful to you in your career journey, and you engage in those chats. And the coach is bringing in third-party resources. It's doing monitoring and quality control, but then also it's integrated into the work that your guidance counselor or your teacher or your program leader is already doing with you. They can see what kind of activities you're doing. They can get tips from the coach on areas where they can support you in your next step. They can assign activities to you, and it serves as almost an assistant to them to give them more time to spend their energy doing the stuff they really want to do, which is one-to-one work with the learners.Michael Horn:Very cool. So, if I'm understanding you correctly, I as a student might find this resource, but then the real magic is I connect it to the team around me who's supporting me, guiding me in my college, career, whatever choices. And they're also getting feedback or reports about me. In some ways, you become almost a network hub with this AI in the middle, just giving insights or prodding or feedback, whatever's required to the different parties that are supporting that student.Jared Chung:I'd say yes, however, very intentionally, not in the middle, very intentionally. It's a three-party collaboration.Michael Horn:Got it.Jared Chung: Even to the extent where we're looking at potentially actually having the chat not be between just the learner and the coach but giving the ability for the educator to be in the chat as well. I think what we've learned from the testing of the career coach so far has been that learners don't want to just get help from a person or just get help from an AI. They want to have that real integrated hybrid. They want both because there are times when you want to go to a trusted person to talk about certain things and times when you want to get that instant dialogue and sort of safe space exploration that you can get from chatting with an AI. We're really leaning into not in between, not in the middle, but it's a space where there's this three-party collaboration happening.Michael Horn:Very cool. So, have you found people excited about this? Are they skeptical? You mentioned AI cheerleading. Jared Chung:Right off the bat.Michael Horn:They’re excited right off the bat?Jared Chung: Right off the, well, I'll say the learners right off the bat. The benefits of personalization, literally day one of testing. And just to give some context, I mentioned that we started the project very early in 2023. We went into beta testing with real students in real classrooms back in, I want to say, July of 2023. Everything moves so fast these days, that it's kind of hard to remember, but I'll just tell those who are listening, that was pretty early. There was very little AI large language model chat going on in classroom settings. Right on the very first day, I was in a school library for a summer school program watching 70 high school students using the coach. That morning, their counselor had given them all a mock interview worksheet, and they had all answered the same five or six questions. They go on to the AI career coach platform that we built, and each of them gets their own customized mock interview that's customized to their particular career interest. You could just see how much they appreciated that personalization right off the bat. And since then, we've had tons of iteration. You have to make sure that if you're making a chat-based application it's really easy to read. You can have too much text or too little. There was a point when it was too fast. It was generating text too quickly. The learners were getting intimidated. We wrote in lines of code just to slow it down a little bit. So, there's a lot of this kind of fine-tuning that we've been doing over the course of many months in partnership with schools and nonprofit organizations. Over 20 schools and nonprofit organizations have been part of the testing to get ready for where we are now, which is coming up on the public release, where anybody in the world can just sign up for it and any educational institution can roll it out with their learners.Michael Horn: So that's exciting. You've been in beta for a while, coming out full release soon. Is this built on top of OpenAI's Chat GPT, or is this something that's proprietary to you all? Where have you built this on top?Jared Chung: The way you have to make these applications these days is deeply layered, and you have to use multiple large language models. So, this is not just a wrapper on OpenAI's Chat GPT. This is a system that is multi multi-large language model. It's an AI agent that's going through lots of steps. It uses third-party data at various points. I don't know for the technical folks who are listening, that uses retrieval augmented generation to give the AI agent access to verifiable information to improve accuracy. It has to use lots of models because you have to make sure that you're using the right model for the right step, and you can't rely upon any single model for that.Ensuring the quality and transparencyMichael Horn: I think the other… You said that learners are excited about this. They don't have questions about its form factor. But quality advice, as you know, is something not to be taken lightly. I mean, something that I've talked a lot about is it's fine for Netflix or Amazon to use an AI model that's based on percentages, because if they recommend a squash racket and you don't play squash, very little harm done. In the world of education and careers, the harm can be much more significant. So how do you think about making sure this isn't misleading people or undermining their confidence or something like that?Jared Chung: We've been thinking about the quality of advice and appropriateness of content ever since the very beginning of Career Village because we have been running this large-scale online crowdsourcing platform. We've built extensive systems for monitoring and moderating career advice written by people for a very long time. It's one of the reasons why I think I'm particularly excited that we are working on the AI career coach is that we have such a history of being thoughtful about these things. I think in an AI context you have particular challenges. Number one, the volume of content is massive. So, we've had to really take all of our monitoring and moderation systems and scale them up to deal with just orders of magnitude more content. The second thing that's really important is, in addition to the factor you mentioned, which is quality, and accuracy, those factors, in addition to that, in an AI context, it's also super important to be thinking about things like bias, and explicit or implicit things like inclusiveness. You need to think about whether the AI application is doing hallucination of any kind and transparency around that. In fact, there's a huge list of things that have to be checked. So a lot of our attention has been on the monitoring and moderation system, and we built this system that is a two-tiered system where the first tier has a series, a very comprehensive set of automated checks that have to happen before the content is essentially greenlit to go to the learner. And it's checking for, again, a wide variety of things. Then you have to have a second tier, which is human oversight, sometimes trained career village staff members, sometimes experts who are qualified to look at that first tier and say, is it doing a good job? And what do we need to do to make sure that it does an even better job to be able to handle the volume of content? And then you also have to set norms with your learners. You have to be transparent. You are not chatting with a human being here. You're talking to a computer program. We're very consistent about that, especially with the younger learners. We have to be clear, this is a computer program, and there are limitations to what it can do, but also to the educators in the mix as well, to make sure that they understand what these systems are capable of right now. One of the things we learned at the very beginning is a lot of young people are going to end up chatting with the AI career coach as their first time chatting with an AI. And that means in some cases, we need to offer a supplemental AI literacy curriculum that people can do as a prerequisite to even being able to go into the platform. We picked that up very early in testing, so a lot of work has had to go into that. And it's one of the reasons why. I think one of our key insights here is that even though making a system like this can seem intimidating, we'd say actually at this point, making a chatbot is actually pretty easy. But making a system that's really using responsible AI principles in practice, that is actually the really hard part.Michael Horn: Well, that makes a ton of sense. I want to stay on something because you talked about all the different models you're using and blending to create this. And I assume that the fact that you have massive amounts of real conversations on the platform creates a great data pool or data lake into which to train the AI and use some of the checks. I imagine that you've come up with real people before as well.Jared Chung: Yeah, absolutely. And I think the key there is to know in that chain of thought that has to happen. When a learner initiates an activity, they initiate a mock interview or they initiate network 101 chat, for example. At each step, the AI application is going through a series of chain of thought processes that involve multiple large language models. Some of those have to be deeply steeped in career advice. Some of those are doing a very simple thing and don't need that kind of specificity. So, I think you have to be, from an engineering standpoint, you have to be attentive to which steps of that chain of thought require which learnings and context. And it's one of the reasons why we're really happy to have these twelve years so far and counting of really high-quality career advice content to help inform the AI career coach. And I think these things will work together. Ideally, you want to see that a learner at times, they want to go to an AI application and get a real-time chat, and at other times they want to go to the community, and they want to ask that question, what was your job like yesterday? And they seek that first-person narrative. And I think we need to be offering both of those to learners.Michael Horn: Got you. Now, I'm sure people listening are saying, wow, they're a nonprofit. How does the business model work for this so that you can support all these connections, both the personal and the mentors as well as a tool like AI career coach?Jared Chung: Yeah, this is not easy work to do. I'll just say tremendous credit to the Career Village staff, which is an extraordinary staff, a small staff, very, very talented people who are building, like, let's be clear, this small nonprofit organization building a cutting-edge AI application that's being deployed in the wild. This is really important and hard work to do. And there are two commitments that we've made. One commitment we've made is that for individuals who just want to sign up for themselves, we believe this should be free. And as a nonprofit organization, we have had great success going to philanthropy to make sure that they understand the value of this kind of service for individuals. And we're committed to continuing to go to philanthropy to get the funding needed to continue to support the individuals so it can be free for them, for institutions, we've made the second commitment. While we do ask institutions to get licenses to use it at large scale, if an institution is unable to pay a license, then we also are earmarking a significant budget to subsidize, or even sometimes in certain cases, make it free for those institutions. I'm going to try to stretch that as far as we can to make sure that this is as equitable access as possible. And just to give context, we're talking about single-digit dollars per learner per year. It's very low cost. But even at that level, if you look at an international audience, there are going to be places where even a single digit US dollars per learner per year is prohibitive. And we think that access to a tool this fundamental needs to be as broad as possible.Michael Horn: Gotcha. Now the AI career coach, as students are engaging with it, I'm sure a lot of folks have been reading AI can be expensive, too. This isn't just like a marginal cost of zero, right?Jared Chung: It's not a marginal cost of zero very much. We feel that for sure. You have to be very cognizant of the cost of AI applications. They're very different from traditional web applications in terms of cost structure.Michael Horn: Yeah, but compared to, I guess, the alternative, which is every single individual finding someone to give them a mock interview or something like that, or to give them coaching on their resume or whatever it might be, it sounds like that's the comparison set that has led you to say, if we care about scale and equity, this is worth that trade-off, if I'm understanding.Jared Chung: That's exactly right, the return… If you're going to take a very sort of purely financial look at this thing, what's the return on investment of having an AI-based supplemental career coach tool? And the ROI is super massive, especially if the return we're talking about, by the way, is learner outcomes.Michael Horn: That strikes me as the most interesting part of this. I know from talking to a lot of individuals who work in the college career coaching and counseling space, for example, those offices tend, as you know, to be extremely understaffed. They are often on the back end of a student's journey, not on the front end when they're thinking about courses and internships and networking. I'm curious. It strikes me that the more you develop the AI, the more it can be part of a companion almost to a student, not just when they're having the conversation with a counselor, but much, much earlier as they think about courses. What might I do this summer? On and on and on. How big does this vision get from your perspective?Jared Chung: How can we support those teams with the cavalry charge to help them deal to… Do a great job with the huge caseloads that they're often asked to support, and the huge number of people they're often asked to support? And I think that's kind of the approach we're taking, is let's bolster that team and have the coach serve in that role. It should be great when it's one-on-one with an individual who just wants the help themselves. And it should be fantastic when you're using it as an individual in an educational setting where it's supplementing the work of a counselor or instructor.Michael Horn: That's a great, inspiring place to leave it. Jared, thanks so much. We will look eagerly as a career coach gets launched into the wild and for the masses. Please check it out.Jared Chung: Yeah, careervillage.org. And if you want to go, check out the AI career coach itself: Aicareercoach.org.Michael Horn: Aicareercoach.org everyone check it out. Jared, thanks so much for joining us on the Future of Education.Jared Chung: Thank you for the opportunity and the work you do.The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.

Ryan Craig joined me once again to talk about his new book Apprentice Nation—this time as a part of Class Disrupted with Diane Tavenner. As a school leader who for years led the charge for college-for-all but has changed her mind in recent years, Diane had lots of questions for Ryan about how K–12 educators should think about apprenticeships and alternative pathways for high school students.Given I’ve recently sent out a transcript of another conversation with Ryan, rather than produce the whole transcript from Diane and my conversation with him, below are some key excerpts from the conversation that I think are illuminating. And, as always, subscribers can watch the video or listen to the podcast.I’m also thrilled to offer my paid subscribers a chance to win a copy of Ryan’s book, Apprentice Nation! Five lucky paid subscribers will get a free copy just by entering your information here. I’ll notify you if you win.The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Time Topic2:45 Defining apprenticeship5:49 The current state of apprenticeship in the U.S.8:25 The role of apprenticeship in an increasingly automated world 13:05 How K-12 educators can move away from the “college or bust” paradigm16:22 Refuting claims that apprenticeship creates hierarchical post-secondary funnels18:02 Reducing operational obstacles to accessing apprenticeship  28:33 Apprenticeship’s opponents 32:49 The lack of incentives for employers to develop apprenticeships 35:23 Achieving scale 37:20 Reasons for optimism 40:00 Book and show recommendations Diane Tavenner:Ryan, what you are sharing is I've spent the last 20 plus years in K-12 education in high schools, really for decades, focusing on ensuring all of our students were accepted to a four-year college. I thought that was the right thing to do and the thing that was going to lift them, especially serving mostly first-generation college-going students. And then what you described is what we started to see in our own data, that if they made it through [college], they were underemployed on the back end, they were carrying significant amounts of debt, and depending on what program or major they went into, it really mattered [for] what their prospects looked like outside. And many of these students don't have the social networks to gain the experience that you're talking about as being so valuable. And so I guess one of the questions I have as a recovering college-for-all K-12 educator is what do you think people like me should be doing right now in the high school space, particularly what are the top one or two things that we could do to start shifting in the right direction?Ryan Craig:Yeah, well, look, I think CTE and career discovery at the high school and even middle school level are a casualty of this sort of college-for-all mentality. We've really allowed it to wither on the vine. I did a piece a couple of months ago about the fact that the sort of AP honors industrial complex, with its higher GPA, college is the only pathway. You sort of have to take those courses and you have to take that path, which leaves no room for…CTE kind of withers on the vine in that case. But I get it right. If there aren't alternatives for your college, then what's the point of career discovery at the high school? So it is sort of a chicken or the egg problem. I'm very focused on how do we build out that post high school infrastructure of earn-and-learn pathways so we can kind of get to where we are in the UK now, which is, this last fall, for the first time, graduating high school students in the UK could look at the UCAS portal, which is kind of the common app of the UK, and see listed alongside all the university programs, all the apprenticeship options. It's in one portal, in one place, and they can look with their guidance counselor and they can say, “Okay, here are some real earn and learn options that I might pursue.” Here are some tuition-based options I might pursue. So that's the ultimate goal. But I think beginning to work on CTE and career discovery. I did a profile of the superintendent in Winchester, Virginia that Ted Dintersmith introduced me to, who just is doing an incredible job of really elevating CTE and almost making it mandatory that every student has to pursue a CTE pathway. And so I think then we need to prime the pump both on the supply side and the demand at the high school level.Diane: So, Ryan, I want to stay with that just for a moment, because I think part of the narrative that we often hear when people are skeptical of the non-four-year college pathway is - and I can't count the number of times I've been on a panel with college presidents, of course, being the ones to say this -  “Well, the people that are clamoring the loudest for alternatives to college are those who are going to send their kids to college.” And so they have this real skepticism that it's for them, but not for me. Why are you relegating them, if you will, to something lower? In Apprentice Nation, you make a pretty compelling counterargument around the data on this, but I'd love you to just walk us through that a little bit more. And part of this, I acknowledge, is we only have 500,000 apprenticeships in this country. There's not really a dataset in this country to sort of play with, but walk us through it.Ryan Craig: Yeah, look, I just think that's inaccurate. I mean, I hear every week from a charter school organization that is focused on how do we help build new, how do we facilitate pathways, how do we build a sort of plus-two transition program to something other than college? Because like you, Diane, they see their students graduating and either not completing or completing and graduating into underemployment, so it's clearly not working for everyone. So, I don't buy that argument.Diane: We had a group of interns in my new company, and so we actually asked them to do this little experiment. They're high school students, and we gave them 100 apprenticeships in California that theoretically they should be eligible for as they graduate from high school. The apprenticeships are open to 18+, and we asked them to try to figure out how they could apply to and if they had a chance at these apprenticeships. And so of the 100…It was mind boggling. This is not a friendly process at all. They go to the website. There's usually like a phone number or an email that they have to call or email, just a cold email that they have to send. So they email 100. They only get responses from a third of 100. Out of 100, only 30 responses. And many of them were redirecting them back to look at the website, which is circular because the website says to email these people. And when they actually talked to people, they were often told “It says 18, but we don't really want 18 year olds.” And so I'm just curious. It seems like we have a lot of work to do, so much work.Ryan Craig: Experience, so many things there. So, first of all, I don't know what list they were using, but if they were to use the most authoritative list out there, which is the federal Department of Labor Rapids database of registered apprenticeship programs, they'd be in for a disappointment because I use that database as the basis for the appendix in my book, which is a directory of apprenticeship programs outside the building and construction trades. Not to say that those aren't good apprenticeships, but the point of the book is: “We're actually doing okay in the building trades. How do we expand apprenticeships beyond the building trades?” So there are about 6000 apprenticeship programs in the US in the Rapids database that are not in the construction trades. And so I asked the question, well, how many of those are actually real? Meaning where I could apply for a job as an apprentice tomorrow and I'd be considered because they're actually hiring apprentices. And so we went through that whole list and of those 6000, only 200 are real. The rest of them are what I call paper apprenticeship programs, which are primarily a kind of relic of how we've been funding apprenticeship programs at the federal level. So one reason we're doing so poorly is that the federal government, while they've increased apprenticeship funding over the last decade and they've been actually trying to fund intermediaries, which is one of the key points of the book, which is that employers don't do these things on their own. Colleges don't do them on their own. They're usually set up and run by intermediary groups. Like in Germany, it's chambers of commerce that do most of the work of setting up and running these programs. In the building trades, it's unions who are doing it. So the question is, who are those intermediaries going to be? So, the Department of Labor has tried to identify and fund intermediaries, but of course they've been funding groups that are really good at applying for Department of Labor grants, namely workforce boards and community colleges who get these five or $10 million grants. And then here's what they do. They develop the curriculum for the formal training, the related technical instruction, RTI component of the apprenticeship. They register the program and then they sit on their hands and wait for an employer to come along and say, “Wow, if only I could find curriculum for the RTI, I'd launch my own apprenticeship program.” But of course, that's the easy part of apprenticeship. The hard part is convincing an employer to hire and pay a worker who's not going to be productive for a period of time. And all the other stuff too, the mentoring and the recruiting and serving as the employer of record, all that stuff. So as a result, that's how you get from 6000 down to 200. But then even if they're reaching the 200 who are actually hiring you're absolutely right. Apprenticeships are not designed sort of post-high school right now, largely, I think, just because there's so few of them. So every time you actually launch an apprentice, a cohort of apprentices, and I can say this is at achieve, what we do is we buy companies and sectors where there's a talent gap in tech and healthcare, and we build apprenticeship programs into those companies so they become talent engines for their talent starved sectors. And I can tell you that every time we launch a cohort, we have 100, 200, 300 applicants for every seat in the cohort, which is so much as we would like to make them available to 18-year-olds. It's hard for an 18-year-old to compete with a 23- or 24-year-old who's applying for that apprenticeship program. We're probably going to hire that 23- or 24-year-old. And this is one of my pet peeves, which is that if you talk to the philanthropies, the big philanthropies who are involved in apprenticeship today, and I'm not sure, well, maybe I'll name names. Gates Foundation, they actually don't care about apprenticeship. Broadly, all they care about is youth apprenticeship, which is for kids in high school, which sounds good, but the hard part is, if you can't convince an employer to hire a 24-year-old apprentice, you're never going to convince them to hire a 16- or 17-year-old who's still in high school. That's like an order of magnitude more difficult to do. And so we need to focus on building the apprenticeship infrastructure we need for regular role apprenticeships before we begin focusing on what are called youth apprenticeship programs. So, yeah, the system is not set up today post-high school. And a big reason is we're just not funding it like in the UK. At their peak, they were spending four or five billion pounds a year on apprenticeship, which, based on the size of the US economy, would be more like $40 billion a year. We've been spending less than one hundredth of that. So, if we've been spending $400 million a year, that's even a smaller fraction of what we spend on a tuition-based post-secondary education. That's one thousandth what we spend on. So it's one hundredth of what we should be spending on apprenticeship. It's one thousandth of what we do spend. And if you compare the funding that an apprentice receives, the public funding that an apprentice receives, compared to a college student, for every dollar of taxpayer support that apprentice is receiving, a college student receives $50. Those ratios are just way off. Every other developed country is like an order of magnitude or more. In the UK, it's two orders of magnitude higher on earn and learn an apprenticeship than we are. And what does that do? Well, it makes a big difference because it allows intermediaries to market and sell apprenticeship programs to employers, which is what's needed. So, in the UK, you have apprenticeship service providers like Multiverse who can go to big companies and say, we'll set up and run an apprenticeship program for you. And it's totally turnkey. All you need to do is put this apprentice on your payroll at the reduced apprentice wage. And that sounds pretty good, but everything that Multiverse does is covered by the government here. Multiverse does the same thing. When they go to a US employer, they say, oh, but it's going to cost you $15,000 per apprentice in program fees because there's no funding associated with apprenticeship. And so you may say, well, what about the $400 million that we're spending? That's not going to intermediaries like Multiverse. It's going to community colleges and workforce boards who aren't currently building apprenticeship programs. Part of the problem is that we viewed apprenticeship as just another workforce development or training program, and we've lumped it in with all these other training programs, most of which are pretty ineffective, and other countries don't do that. Other countries have a separate funding mechanism for apprenticeship because they recognize they're different, they're jobs. They're jobs first, and they start with an employer willing to hire an apprentice. So a lot of what the book is about is sort of policy fixes for this. Unfortunately, a month after the book came out, the Department of Labor came out with their fancy new apprenticeship regulations, which is 800 pages of new hoops that employers would have to jump through in order to register an apprenticeship program with no incentives whatsoever to do so, which is just the opposite of what needs to happen. We need to streamline apprenticeship registration, focus on the things that matter. Is it a good job? Does it have career progression associated with it and actually provide funding for it?Diane Tavenner: I read your recent piece on those regulations, and I will confess that I had a moment where I was like, oh my gosh, this feels exactly like my charter school experience, where we started in the right place, where we create schools that serve kids, name the outcome that you're going to get, and that's what you're held accountable to. But over time, we have been regulated and reregulated and back to sort of the old system. And I was reading your piece about this 800-page set of regulation. I was like, this feels exactly like what I experienced as someone who was trying to do this in the charter sector. And it made me wonder. There's always interest groups. And look, I was reading through what you summarized. I get why they want people to do all these protective things and whatnot, not for bad reasons, but you have to balance the risk and you have to be thoughtful. Who are the blockers who's contributing to these 800 pages?Ryan Craig: Yeah, these are building and construction unions who would very much like to keep apprenticeship as their own little sort of private thing for the most part. And it's bureaucrats who have never worked in the private sector and actually don't know what's involved in convincing an employer to hire an apprentice. There aren't really…I mean, part of the problem is, up until last year, with the creation of Apprenticeships for America, which is this new trade association of apprenticeship intermediaries, there had been no voice for employers of apprentices. So we're working hard on that, but that's what's necessary, and we need to get the folks like the business roundtable and Chamber of Commerce in this discussion. So I'm confident that these regulations are not going to have the force of law as currently proposed, but they're just going the wrong direction. So there's a lot of work to do here. And it's so important to think of a country where we could have as many earn and learn options as we have tuition-based options. I think that it's a big reason why we have such social and political sort of discontent. You have almost half the country who sort of sees this bright, shining digital economy, but feels like these jobs are out of reach because they're told that they need to run the gauntlet of a four year degree, which can be five or six years in many cases, and with no guarantee of any employment outcome. And they just feel like it's unaffordable and unrealistic and life's going to get in the way, so why bother? And as I toured around the country talking about my book in the fall, I would start my talks with talking about what I call the song of the summer last summer, which was Rich Men North of Richmond, by Oliver Anthony, where basically he's complaining about his crappy job. And that's sort of what they. The only jobs available are these bad jobs that are breaking my back with no career progression available. And we need to address that. And it's such an obvious political benefit for the Democratic Party. I don't understand why the Democrats don't become the party of earn and learn and apprenticeship. They're not going to lose support among the university educated at this point. But we desperately need to support it, and obviously that's where the other side is getting their momentum from.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.

Diane Tavenner and I interviewed Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, a cognitive scientist, researcher, and author focused on intelligence, creativity, and human potential on our latest episode of Class Disrupted. This is the second time Scott’s appeared on one of my podcasts (see here with Ian Rowe). But this time we got to delve much deeper into Scott’s various interests and lines of work. Together we discussed the importance of placing all students—not just those who are in gifted or special education programs—at the center of their learning. Scott also brought nuance to popular concepts like growth mindset in education psychology, reflected on how the notion of intelligence became taboo, and illustrated the importance of seeing the middle way and other sides of issues.As always, subscribers can watch or listen to the conversation or read the transcript below.The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Time Topic3:52  The importance of human-centered education5:52 Defining self-actualization7:45 Creating a “gifted education” for every student12:38 Adding nuance in the application of “grit” and “growth mindset” 16:29 The role of context and implementation20:58  Talent and Intelligence26:49 The willingness to see nuance and have your mind changed32:39 Media recommendations and the Amazing Dr. ScottDiane Tavenner:I missed you a lot last episode. It's good to have you back, and I appreciate that you continue to carry and balance a lot, so it's good to be here with you.Michael Horn:Yeah, it's good to be back in conversation with you. I was really sad to miss the last conversation for multiple reasons, but this conversation was one I was really excited to be in, and so I did not want to miss it. And it's also good to be back in a routine, because routines are important, but this conversation in particular, I think, is going to be really stimulating.Diane Tavenner:Yeah, routines are so important. One of the many things I learned from my undergraduate degree in psychology, which is in many ways the foundation for how I think about learning and teaching and education. And so today, I am equally excited for the conversation we're going to have with one of my favorite psychologists in the world, Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman. In addition to authoring nearly a dozen books and writing a really insightful and useful newsletter that I would recommend to everyone, he hosts the most popular psychology podcast called the Psychology Podcast, and he's the founder of the Center for Human Potential, which says a lot about who he is and what he believes in. And they offer courses and opportunities to learn self-actualization coaching, which is something I'm sure we'll get into in a few minutes, what that means and why it's important. I could go on and on about Scott's resume, but I want to actually get in and talk with him. So let me just say, what's important for me, beyond all of that, is just his care and focus on doing work that actually impacts people's lives and is meaningful and relevant, and in particular in schools and with young people. And so that is where we connected over a decade ago, I think, or somewhere around there.Diane Tavenner:And his work has deeply influenced me and my work. So super grateful to have him here. And I know, Michael, you feel equally strong.Michael Horn:Yeah. Well, Scott, I won't keep singing your praises too long, but I want to do a little bit more adulation, because among all the things that Diane just mentioned, I also appreciate how, in social media, you are able to strike a nuanced balance in a medium that does not appreciate nuance, and yet you're able to be popular still. And that's something we care about deeply in this conversation. Like Diane and I are always trying to find the nuance. We're always trying to find third ways between polarized viewpoints. And I know we're going to tackle some big topics today in not nearly the time that they deserve, from self-actualization to growth mindset to intelligence. But I just always appreciate how you tackle these topics, and you move beyond the average into the nuance so seamlessly. So, Scott, I will stop being a total fanboy, but just really excited to see you guys.Scott Barry Kaufman:It is such an honor to be here. I love you guys, and I feel like I need to invite you two on my podcast someday.The importance of human-centered educationDiane Tavenner:Well, we're happy to do that. And so let's open the conversation with something that I love, which is, you wrote a manifesto. I think a lot of people think about writing a manifesto, but you actually wrote one. This isn't just any manifesto. It's a manifesto on human-centered education.Scott Barry Kaufman:Yeah.Diane Tavenner:And so let's just start there. Tell us about your beliefs, which I think really go to the core of what is the purpose of education, which is something Michael and I talk about all the time.Scott Barry Kaufman:Yeah. Thank you so much for bringing that up. I think I'm unwaveringly humanistic in my, like, I really am unflappable about this. All around me, I'll see non humanistic approaches, and I just try not to get caught up in the vortex of those tsunamis. I stay in my own path. I really believe firmly that all students should be treated as human first. And it's a very simple principle that has very deep implications. Yet it is mind-bogglingly not the central principle of education. There's such a focus on results first, or whatever it be now. It's not SAT now because SAT has been banned everywhere. But they're still thinking about, well, what other results should we look to? It's still results focused in a sort of standardized way. They just move the goalpost from one standardized goalpost to another, to come up with a metaphor that doesn't make any sense. But anyway, you knew what I meant. So I just think that that frustrates me, because I think there's so much greater potential that students have. They can display to us if we treat them as a whole person and we view sort of a needs-based approach where we recognize that to be human comes with certain basic needs as well as growth needs. I don't think either security needs or growth needs are being met in schools. And then it is a legitimate question, what should be in the purview of education. And I think that's an interesting question, too, but I would argue the human part belongs, somewhat at least.Defining self-actualizationDiane Tavenner:Yeah, I think Michael's going to take us more in that direction in a moment. But before we go there, is it useful to just sort of define self-actualization. Like, what does that mean to you? And how should we…And I know you have a beautiful metaphor that you use, but I think that would be helpful to folks.Scott Barry Kaufman:Oh, sure. Absolutely. So there are other buzzwords that are popular these days, like happiness and achievement are the two biggest ones I see over and over again in the education world. But I think self-actualization has a different flavor. It sort of vibrates on a different frequency than either happiness or achievement. It's something else. It's not a word that's used much these days. It was used a lot in the pot-smoking sixties. And I'm trying to put it on a scientific foundation for anyone who will listen to me. I'm trying to put it on the science of self-actualization. And show that we can measure certain characteristics that bring us closer to realizing the best within us, sort of our highest potential, our unique creative potential. And that's really all. I think of it as. What is your unique creative contribution or unique creative potential? It's not as flowery and spiritual sounding as it sounds. That's all I mean, and that is something different, though, than happiness and achievement. You can actually be realizing your unique creative potential. And have a lot of meaning in your life, but not particularly feel happy a lot. And we need to teach people that's okay. You know, we have a lot of young people who are obsessed with just feeling good all the time and are colossal assholes to know.Michael Horn:No, but it's so interesting to hear you say that, Scott. And your writing on this has been so foundational to my thinking about it. And I'd love you to just translate that, because I think you gave a good overview of sort of what not to optimize for in education. And maybe started to hint at, you know, if we're thinking about the unique contributions of each individual as a human being. So, what, in your mind, might that look like from the experiences? And we can stay broad strokes, but just thinking about young kids in elementary school through middle and high school, I imagine it changes over time. What are the sorts of experiences that you think school ought to have for students?Creating a “gifted education” for every studentScott Barry Kaufman:Yeah, great question. So I come at a lot of this through the pathway of trying to reconceptualize gifted education and special education. So let me just say my roots in this. My first book over a decade ago was called Ungifted: Intelligence Redefined. Where I argued for reconceptualization of human intelligence. I called it the theory of personal intelligence. Now I'm calling it the theory of self-actualizing intelligence because that's more in line with everything I'm doing right now. But that's really what I was arguing for, was saying, like, look, we treat these gifted kids as though they're the only ones capable or not they're capable. They're the only ones who would benefit from enrichment. It's like, what? A lot of them aren't even benefiting from whatever the “enrichment” they're giving in gifted education classes, which is nothing very valuable to even the gifted kids. But I really think that there's also this false dichotomy we have that you're either learning disabled on one hand or gifted on the other hand, or you're in this third category, mainstream education, where you're just supposed to fly by the seat of your pants. That's it. You got nothing special, you got no excuses. I think that's just like, wow, what a weird system we have in K-12, where that's the way the world looks. And I really believe, in terms of experiences, I think we can democratize a lot of the spirit of how we treat gifted kids, but democratize that towards everyone. But we view it through the lens not of achievement. We view gifted kids as though their goal is to then go out and create Facebook, like that's their only purpose, or to get in Harvard and then pay back the endowment someday. But I feel like people are worth more than that as humans. And democratizing gifted education in a way where the lens of self-actualization for everyone, I think, just completely changes the goalpost, because every student viewed through the lens of self-actualization, you'd treat them the same way in terms of experiences. Maybe the experience would be different, but in terms of the sort of flavor of the experience is that we try to emphasize project-based learning. I mean, this is…Diane's, no stranger to a lot of the experiences I'm going to mention right now, being a legend when it comes to creating just these kinds of experiences. I remember when Diane gave me a tutorial in the Facebook headquarters. I don't know if I'm allowed to say that. I don't know if that was like a top-secret meeting, but you can edit that out if I wasn't allowed to say that. But just individualizing things - in a way where this may sound a little “woo-woo” - but honoring the sacredness of each child's unique self-actualization journey is something really special. And why do we only honor that if you're, quote, gifted, and then we don't even really honor that. What we do is we put so much pressure on you to perform and be gifted. “Oh, you're gifted now be gifted.” And then a lot of these…Then there's a whole field of gifted education on underachieving gifted students, which I think is a ridiculous term in itself. I've argued that we need to get rid of the word underachieving because then that implies that there are ungifted kids who are overachieving. And I'm like, what the hell does that mean? Biological opposites. There's just so much. I don't know. I feel like I'm a little quirky. I'm a little odd. I just see things differently. But this is just the way I see it. It's ridiculous the kind of system we set up. And I do think we can create experiences that give a vitality or an aliveness not just to school but to life.Adding nuance in the application of ‘grit’ and ‘growth mindset’Diane Tavenner:Yeah. So much of what you're saying, Scott. I think, I'm sure people who know what we talk about and are connecting that to the work that I do, they'll see it in what you're saying. We use some different words. We use personalization and things like that. But this idea that each individual human has their own, they're a unique human that will develop into this world. And if we help them develop, they're going to make a contribution. And none of us know what that is. And it will be very, if we do it well, it will be widely varied. Right. And that's the beauty of the world and the human experience. Another thing that I incorporate a lot into my work - or have over the years - is this idea of growth mindset and this concept. And you've done some really fascinating interviews recently with Carol Dweck, and you're doing some writing about this. And as Michael said, one of the things that often happens to practitioners is we hear these competing ideas from the science and then we don't know what to make of it. And I don't think that's where you're going here with growth mindset. You have some really interesting comments, but I don't think you're saying throw the baby out with the bathwater. Help us get the nuance of growth mindset that we should be understanding.Scott Barry Kaufman:I think I can get right to the core of the nuance there with a quote from Maslow: “What's not worth doing is not worth doing well.” And that just explains my whole critique of growth mindset theory. But still, of course, not throwing the baby out with the bathwater. What tends to happen is that wonderful researchers - I consider them my friends, like Angela Duckworth and Carol Dweck - they will do a lot of hard-earned research and will present a construct, but then educators will treat it like it's the greatest thing since sliced bread and will apply it indiscriminately to everything without any appreciation of context. I saw it happen not just with growth mindset, but I saw it happen with grit. It's just like, “Oh my God, you have entire schools that are now around grit. Grit is the only thing that matters in the school.” And it's like, why is grit the only thing that matters? I don't think Angela would ever say that. Angela is a wonderfully nuanced human, and she would never argue that. It's just ridiculous how much we can focus so much on. And so I think blind grit, as I've called it, or blind growth mindset…You can have growth mindset, mindset up the wazoo for things that aren't right for you, and then why should we be rewarding that? You applied your growth mindset to that? I make the distinction between growth mindset and growth motivation. In my self-actualization program, we really focus on growth motivation. We really don't talk about growth mindset at all because I think that can come from a growth motivation when you are intrinsically motivated to grow in a certain direction based on what is really right for you or right for your soul. Again, sorry, pardon me if I sound woo woo here, but I do think there is something. There's a capital self soul, whatever the meditation people far before psychology ever existed, as a field pointed out, when you're really, really in touch with that, you can't help but have a growth mindset. That's like an outcome of a growth motivation. But when you lead with growth mindset without the soul involved, I don't think that's anything to be applauded.Michael Horn:Super interesting, Scott, because hearing you say that reminds me also of sort of the research around motivation more generally. It’s not just your belief in, “Can I accomplish the goal?” it's the “Is it a goal worth accomplishing?” And to me, and not to some other person, but to me. And so it sounds like it comes from there. The other thing I've taken from some of your conversations, and I want to try this out on you and see if it makes sense, is in one of the conversations you had with Carol, she did and you did talk about how she could have like a low dosage intervention, a 45 minutes or a couple of times sort of tutorial, if you will, on growth mindset. And it could produce – I’m going to mess it up - but I think a 0.15 standard deviation of impact. And she's like, this is a huge thing. But then I think your observation was that it could be undermined by other characteristics, like if the teacher didn't really believe in growth…And I'll try to use growth motivation for this conversation. Or something I think a lot about is that the system often undermines these views of growth. So in a time-based education system or a zero-sum education system, I can tell you all about growth mindset or growth motivation all I want. But at the end of the day, if at the end of a three-week unit, we all move on to the next one, regardless of the effort you've put in, regardless of learning, and I label you a C student, or something, I've just shot in the foot everything I was preaching in my 45-minute intervention. And so in some ways, the environment, I think, deeply undermines any of these things, intentionally or unintentionally. But maybe I'm misunderstanding you. I sort of wanted to paint that scenario and get you to react.The role of context and implementationScott Barry Kaufman:Context matters. And in the more recent updated papers that Carol has written, to be fair to Carol, she makes that very clear. I have a Substack newsletter and I did a really deep, deep reference list with a deep dive. Yeah, it's really nerdy. I wanted to lay it all out there to show I don't have an agenda. I think that's something that's a little bit quirky about me. Is that with any of this, I don't have an agenda. I have beliefs based on evidence. But I can always be changed and my beliefs can change. Although I did, earlier, say “I firmly believe.” I do firmly believe things, but even those can be changed. But when you look at the full research literature in the past five years on growth mindset, everyone agrees: context matters. Everyone agrees. When we're not talking about you're trying to sell a best-selling book and the publicity machine isn't behind it…The publicity machine doesn't care at all about the truth. It cares about what it cares…It has its own goals. The publicity ecosystem has its own goals. But if your goal is truth, everyone agrees. If you read Carol's response to the critics…I posted a paper that her David Yeager, I think that's his name, David Yeager, who's also a star superstar in this world. Really heartfelt. He has a really heartfelt love of this work. He does. And he really wants to help others. And I've talked to him. And so I can say that to be the case, he's a big influencer.Diane Tavenner:Of my work as well.Scott Barry Kaufman:Amazing. Yeah. I have nothing but massive respect for all these people, but I am a nerd. At the end of the day, I really want to know the truth. I don't like BS. I don't like a lot of fat around things. I want to be like, no what is the data? And everyone agrees, when they wrote their response paper to the critics, they agreed. In the response paper, they said underserved populations tend to benefit more from growth mindset interventions than upper-class rich people. And you look at the little nuances, teacher effectiveness matters. Like, you can have a terrible teacher teaching growth mindset, and that's not as effective an intervention than a good teacher. So you start adding in these really important nuances and it adds up to a much more nuanced picture.Talent and intelligenceMichael Horn:Let's go to the other topic that you've spent a lot of time on researching: intelligence. You've done a lot of work on the construct of intelligence and general IQ and such. And at least in my experience, educators are often uncomfortable with the notion that a general IQ or something like that might exist. And of course, there's lots of other works around intelligence. There's Howard Gardner's multiple intelligences. There's stuff on emotional intelligence, Peter Salovey, others. And some people will then throw arrows at those folks. I think for our audience, it would be useful for you to give a bit of a landscape around the research around intelligence and what are the implications for educators here.Scott Barry Kaufman:I mean, how much time do you have?Michael Horn:We’ll let you stretch out a little bit.Scott Barry Kaufman:Yeah, I'm a little bit on the Asperger spectrum, so if you get me started on a passion topic, I can't stop talking. So this is particularly…While everyone else was dating in grad school, I was in the library, literally going through every book in the intelligence book section. So I'm obsessed with that question you asked. Well, Robert Sternberg, for instance, he was my advisor in grad school.Michael Horn :Oh, wow.Scott Barry Kaufman:And I was accepted to work with Howard Gardner as well at Harvard. So I had to make that choice. Do I work with Robert Sternberg or Howard Gardner? No offense to Howard Gardner, I chose to be in a psychology department as opposed to a school of education. But they both influenced me greatly when I was an undergraduate and I was reading their works because I really felt like it rang true that there is something, there is more to intelligence than what's measured on IQ tests. And that to me was a very important insight. They both differ in what that “more” is, but they both argue that IQ tests are missing out on a lot of what it is to be intelligent. I would argue that it misses out a lot of what it means to be human. And that's a little bit of a different argument. That's sort of the direction I've gone in that's different than both of them just giving you a sort of context. And where do I sit in this whole thing? Yeah. So they really focus on extending the abilities, right? Both of them. It's abilities they're extending, but I'm trying to extend beyond ability to passion and to the domain of motivation. So that was my...I hope people view that as a contribution to the field of intelligence and the field of gifted education. I reported on a statistic over a decade ago that boggled my mind. [Out of] almost every gifted education program in the country, only one considers motivation an important part of the identification process for giftedness. And so that blew my mind because talent and motivation, to me, are inextricably intertwined. Ability and motivated, whatever you want to call it, talent, ability, intelligence, whatever the heck you want to call it, they are so inextricably intertwined. A lot of pop books like to say talent is overrated. You could sell a lot of copies of books [with that]. If you say talent is overrated, I think talent is underrated. And what I mean by that…Maybe I'll write the book someday: Talent Is Underrated. I actually am thinking about that. It sounds cheeky. And someone might say, “Well, how, Scott? Wait. How could you say that? Aren't you making the argument? What?” My argument is that, no, talent is really important, but in a different way than people think. I don't believe that it should be threatening to others if someone has an innate talent. I think that we should have a school system where everyone's unique talents and its linkages to their own motivations and goals are appreciated. And we're not anywhere near that. We're cutting SAT programs. We're terrified of talent in the name of. “Don't open up this can in the name of equity.” We've said excellence just doesn't matter at all. I believe you can have equity and excellence. Don't get me wrong. I'm not a monster, but I'm just saying it's like everyone's one way or the other in their thinking these days, and we need more of a “both and” way of thinking. I think that excellence has fallen by the wayside in this. We're terrified to admit that intelligence matters or that there are talents. I would rather broaden the notion of talent to include motivation but not get rid of or ignore talent as a concept that's important or intelligence as a concept that's important. There are obvious individual differences in various dimensions, and you can sweep them under the rug as much as you want to in the name of equity and say, like, “Oh, everyone is exactly the same. We're communism.” But no matter how hard you try to do that, good luck. People's soul is still going to yearn for expression no matter what you do.Diane Tavenner:Something that's coming up for me right now is, I know we're getting to a place where we probably need to close, but, Scott, you've touched on it a bunch.Scott Barry Kaufman:It got me started.Diane Tavenner:It feels like it's okay to share. One of the things that I think the two of us have connected on over the years is a sort of common experience as children in education. For me personally, I may have touched on this before, but I was tested for special education, and I was denied access to gifted programs, and that then put me in that middle mainstream that you're talking about. Tons of context was missing. I was in a home that was physically and emotionally abusive, and there was all this stuff going on. And to your point, inside of me as a little girl, I knew that I was highly motivated. There’s things of me that needed to be expressed and come out and always felt like they were sort of hampered or blocked by the system. And I got lucky along the way that a few people believed in me in ways. And I know you have a very similar story that we have really resonated...that influences how we see education in the system and the purpose of it. And so I just feel like that's coming out. We're just scratching the surface of how it comes out in your work and your willingness to be nuanced and to not sort of just accept these big concepts and have a polarized conversation, but actually dig in on what the implications and what they mean at deeper levels.Scott Barry Kaufman:Absolutely. I just tweeted something just a couple of minutes ago - not…minutes before our interview, that'd be awkward – [that] said, while extremists certainly think they are the most knowledgeable in the room, there's a new massive worldwide study across 44 different nations that found that moderates are actually the most knowledgeable about politics. But I think that this applies to anything - educators as well. I think that the loudest voice in the room isn't necessarily the most knowledgeable.The willingness to see nuance and have your mind changedDiane Tavenner :So many things for us to take away. But I think the one that I really want to focus in on as we wrap is your willingness to have your mind changed. So to hold strong perceptions and opinions about what you're doing today, but then being open to what the evidence is going to say and what more you can learn.Scott Barry Kaufman:I'll give you an example of that real quick. I went into the field thinking I was taking down IQ. Gardner, Stern[berg], that was my starting place. And carving my own unique space has been a journey because I started to do traditional IQ research with Nicholas McIntosh at University of Cambridge, published articles on IQ with IQ test constructors, like, sort of went to the dark side, of what I had originally viewed as the dark side, and realized that there is a lot of nuance to this stuff. The field of human intelligence is actually a really rich, interesting, exciting field. The genetics, the neuroscience, the interactions between genetics and the environment and even lead and how much that can affect environmental factors, epigenetic expressions. It's such a rich, rich field. And then to just make some blanket statements like “IQ bad,” I don't know. What will they say is good? IQ bad - what's good? I don't know. What's the opposite of IQ? “Being dumb, good.” Let's promote dumbness in society now. I think that there just is a lot of…But that's one example, anyway, of how my mind changed over the years, because I did start off thinking in a simplistic way and my own approach. Now, I literally said, talent is underrated. I said that. Scott Barry Kaufman said that. I would never have said that when I started off in my career. There was a book, I think it was called Talent Is Overrated. Yeah, that's actually the title of the book, and that was one of my bibles, along with Howard Gardner's book and Sternberg's book. And so that would have been my sort of proselytizing to everyone is that talent's overrated. ”We need to ignore talent.” And my nuance is that I'm saying, “No, actually, I think we can hold in our mind multiple things at once that talent really exists.” I watched this five-year-old prodigy playing Rockmanoff on YouTube the other day. Well, you want to say, “Let's cancel any program to help nurture that kid, because we're all…With enough grit, with enough growth mindset…Michael Horn:We can all do that.Scott Barry Kaufman:We can all do that? Like, no, no, we can't. Sorry.Michael Horn:Wow.Scott Barry Kaufman:Do you know what I'm saying?Diane Tavenner:I totally know what you're saying. And the only thing I would add on to it, and then I'll turn it over to Michael to bring us home, is, I believe there's something in every single human. There is talent in every single human, and that's what we should be searching for and enabling to come out, because we just have such a limited view on what is valued and what talent is. And so the companion to that is the expansion of appreciation and definition of talent.Scott Barry Kaufman:Well, that's it. You nailed it. I think we're all on the same page.Media recommendations and the Amazing Dr. ScottMichael Horn:I think that's right. And I love taking that from this conversation. It's more helping the individual express what's meaningful to them and how they can make a contribution to the broader society. So, Scott, as we wrap up, Diane and I have little tradition where we give folks a little bit of a window into things we're watching for pleasure or reading for pleasure, whatever. It might be, often not related to work. Sometimes it is related to work, because Diane and I are nerds, and I love that about you. It's hard for us to strip that away. So, yeah, if we could put you on the spot, what's something you're writing or, excuse me, listening to? Watching? Reading?Scott Barry Kaufman:Sure. So I'm absolutely obsessed right now with the field of mentalism, which is a subset of magic. And I practice now about 8 hours a day. And I created an Instagram. I'm the amazing Dr. Scott.Michael Horn:Okay, we'll follow.Scott Barry Kaufman:A year or two from now, look out. I want to actually maybe move into doing some gigs and things. I'm going to set up a table on the beach path here in Santa Monica. I can read your mind. I think it's a nice fusion of my psychology background. Anyway, that's what I'm into. Yeah.Michael Horn:Diane, what about you?Diane Tavenner:Well, I'm going to change up today, because this conversation has brought back to me a short story that I've read many times that is just so related to what we're talking about. It's a Kurt Vonnegut short story called Harrison Bergeron. And if you haven't read it, it just epitomizes what we're talking about in this conversation. So highly recommend. Very provocative and interesting. How about you, Michael?Michael Horn:Very cool. Well, I confess I've been in such a state of mind with my family. Scott, my father-in-law passed away, so he was mildly on the Asperger's spectrum as well, and had all these handwriting patents and recognition. He would read people's personalities through their handwriting. Really fun stuff.Scott Barry Kaufman:I love this guy.Michael Horn:Amazing individual helped build the initial Thinkpad by IBM. But as a result, though, I've been unable to read or watch much the last few weeks. And so I've been going deep on just Australian Open tennis because that's my happy place. And as a result, the Two-Minute Tennis channel on YouTube because I've been reconstructing my backhand. And even though I haven't been able to play as much as I wanted to, little two-minute tips here just to sort of allow me to get better at that. So it's not magic or mentalism, but this has been my little escape. So for folks who are also avid tennis players, subscribe to the Two-Minute Tennis channel, but also subscribe to Scott's podcast, the psychology podcast. And Scott, thanks for joining us. And all of you listening, thanks for joining us, as always, on Class Disrupted.The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.

More and more parents are taking charge of their children’s education through homeschooling.  Manisha Snoyer’s podcast and online homeschooling community, Teach Your Kids, is seeking to empower parents with the guidance, tools, and network they need to thrive as educators for their children. She joined the Future of Education to discuss her work, dispel misconceptions about homeschooling, and consider the future of this growing trend. I was intrigued to explore her observations that, through modularity, families can pull apart socialization, childcare, and the learning itself to make the benefits of homeschooling much more accessible. As always, subscribers can listen to the audio, watch the video, or read the transcript.The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Time Topic1:16 Manisha’s journey into education6:25 The value provided by Teach Your Kids13:30 Dispelling misconceptions about homeshooling15:57 Mastery learning in homeschooling18:00 The future of homeschooling 20:09 Homeschooling and childcare 21:45 How to engage with Teach Your KidsMichael Horn:Welcome to the Future of Education, where we are dedicated to building a world in which all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their potential and live a life of purpose. And to help us think through that journey today we have Manisha Snoyer, who has worked with several thousand families and students providing teaching, tutoring, education and more. And she's the CEO and founder of Teach Your Kids, which is a podcast and online homeschooling community. And we're going to hear a lot more about that in just a moment. But its mission is to really change the way families engage in homeschooling and make the customization inherent in the choice to homeschool much more accessible to many, many more individuals. So, with that as prelude, Manisha, it's good to see you. Thanks so much for joining us.Manisha Snoyer: It's so great to see you. I feel like we connected almost ten years ago and it's so wonderful to be having our first face-to-face conversation right here with everybody else.Michael Horn:I was thinking the same thing, and I would love you to just tell your own journey into education because as you mentioned, you and I met well before the pandemic. I remember very well when you were developing an earlier startup, Cottage Class which was on the bleeding edge, I think, of the microschool movement. But tell us in your words your own journey into education and homeschooling.Manisha Snoyer:I would be very happy to. And I was actually just thinking about this today because I know there are a lot of exercises around writing out your life purpose and your vision and mission for your life. But I really feel like I fell into this territory completely by accident and almost never chose it in a way. So, I was pounding the pavement as an actress in New York City in the early 2000s and needed a way to make a living. And everyone in my family is a teacher, so I kind of reluctantly became a tutor because that seemed like the easiest thing to do. And before long, not making an income in acting, I found that I had taught over 3,000 children in 18 subjects in every kind of learning environment you could imagine in three different countries. And so, including teaching at some of the most elite private schools in New York City, because I was also a substitute teacher and some of the, I guess you could say, worst public schools and everything in between, including I had a three-month stint as the music teacher at P.S. 29, which is one of the most wonderful public schools in Brooklyn. And after several years of doing this, I really started to feel deep in my soul that our education system was broken at every level, from these $60,000 a year schools to even the best of the best in the public education department, but with a lot of really amazing teachers who wanted to do the best they could and just had so much knowledge and expertise. And through thinking about this, I discovered that there was this incredible homeschooling movement. And just to take it a step back, I felt like I needed to quit acting and focus on this problem because, at the same time, I was getting very concerned about climate change. And I discovered that actually giving access to education is one of the best ways that you can fight climate change, help people get out of poverty, equal rights, human rights, all the issues I care about. So my initial idea was, okay, there's all these amazing teachers, but the system is really broken. So let's just have teachers start their own schools. So I was an Airbnb host at the time, and I kind of liked this legal gray area that Airbnb had and found an analogy in these homeschool co-ops that were springing up all over Brooklyn. And I'm thinking, okay, this is really like all you need is a teacher, a space, a group of students. There are these parents creating microschools and homeschool co-ops. If you do it under 3 hours a day for preschoolers and two or three days a week for homeschoolers, you could get around all the legislation around schooling. I suddenly was building a tech startup. I mean, it was the most random thing. I knew nothing about technology besides being a person who uses it. But I did know a lot about being an Airbnb host. So ultimately, one of the founders of Airbnb invested in me and was a great mentor. And I went through Techstars, and we started all these wonderful homeschool co-ops in Brooklyn. But I just felt like there was something that was not quite working. And as I looked more deeply into the homeschooling movement, what I realized is that these families had created a way to build an incredibly curated education for their children that was cost effective for them and that was incredibly enriching socially, emotionally and academically. And in essence, had built a new education system. So a couple years into that, I started talking to Eric Ries, who wrote The Lean Startup and is really interested in homeschooling. And we decided together to start this new company that was specifically focused on helping families homeschool. And so we've been working together for four years, and it's been really an amazing ride. The pandemic broke out right after we launched the company. So we kind of pivoted and built this nonprofit that helped over 100,000 families who were forced into homeschooling and were able to identify the main needs there. And today, what it is is an online homeschooling community and a podcast. And families can use our curriculum planner to find high quality secular learning materials based on 200 different children's archetypes that I've identified. And we really offer a lot of information and support because what I've identified is that one of the hardest things is for parents to have that confidence that they can be their child's teacher. It really requires a paradigm shift, so I'm putting a lot of my focus there.Michael Horn:Super fascinating. And I remember our conversations when you were doing what I called the AirBnB of homeschooling, something that I think I had written the line in a couple articles as a throwaway, and then you were like, I'm actually doing this. And it seems current, though, in the work you're doing, which is to essentially make this DIY education much more accessible to many more people. And from the outside, it looks like—and this is my characterization, so I'd love you to push back if I have it wrong—but Teach Your Kids, in some ways, it feels like it's like a facilitated exchange. It's a way to organize the hundreds and hundreds of options out there in terms of curriculum, classes, friends and caregiving, teachers, assessments, support, to make it far easier to sort of snap these different Lego blocks, if you will, together to create that personalized education. How does that feel?Manisha Snoyer:Absolutely. I mean, the way I see it is as a modular approach to education. So there are all these resources that are out there and that are emerging. But for a parent, it can feel totally overwhelming. So you might not know. For example, my focus has been largely on the secular homeschooling community, and a lot of curricula are religious, but they don't say that they're religious, or they might say that they embrace neutral science because they don't want to offend anybody. But that's actually not an evidence-based approach to science. And a lot of religious people would like an evidence-based approach to science because it's compatible with a lot of religious beliefs. And so what I've done in the past, people have just scanned through tens of thousands of comments in homeschooling groups and tried to find what's the best fit for their child. And what I've done is I've talked to hundreds of parents and scanned through these tens of thousands of groups and tried the curriculum myself to help identify which curriculum will actually help students and also how to find tutors. But really important, and I don't want to ignore this, is just helping parents have the confidence that they can do it, because I find that once people get going, they're really off to their races. But this idea that a parent could help their child learn is so radical still. And so that's the real shift that I'm trying to help happen. Michael Horn:It's so interesting because it was the first lady, Barbara Bush, right, that long ago said the parent is the child's first teacher, and yet we sort of keep running from that in some ways. But you mentioned secular homeschooling. Obviously, and it's no longer new to note that that's the biggest and fastest growing portion of schooling in the United States. Homeschooling obviously is the fastest segment, and it's largely driven by secular homeschooling in particular, that the complexion of homeschooling has changed over the last two decades, let's say. And I'm just sort of curious because we also see in surveys that for many families, they're like, “I would love a homeschooling experience or a hybrid homeschooling experience.” Just a few days at home, maybe a couple of days outside. And yet it seems that it remains aspirational for many families and out of reach. So I guess you also have this notion of modularizing, to use your word, that I love. It's from our theories, so I love it. Socialization from childcare and the learning itself, to also make this more accessible, I'd love you independent of the confidence questions, sort of the practical questions of childcare and learning and things of that nature, just to sort of talk about what does it mean to decouple these things and how would that work?Manisha Snoyer:Absolutely. So my opinion, as you know, is that school is trying to do socialization, childcare and education, and as a result, they're doing all pretty poorly. And that's been my experience as a teacher. So when we start with socialization, what we see is single-age classrooms, children having to wake up extremely early, as early as 05:00 a.m. to go to school, which is completely out of line with research on sleep. They cannot learn, and if they're lucky, 35 minutes of recess, and kindergartners who deeply need that playtime and the wandering mind time to develop cognitively are just not getting enough recess to learn. And so what I say to parents in terms of socialization is what's great about homeschooling is you can curate the social experience that you want for your child, rather than that being enforced on you. And what does your child need? They need to spend a lot of time with you because parents really underestimate that attachment. That's how children form healthy attachments, is through a healthy attachment to their parent. And that is created by quality time together, which is harder than ever in this day and age of cell phones and distractions. So socialization one, and people are starting to realize that there are so many extraordinary homeschooling groups around the world. And as the homeschooling movement grows, more and more groups form. So it's kind of the network effects of that. So that's socialization. And then childcare, I think the first important thing to realize is that school provides 08:00 a.m. to 03:00 p.m. childcare nine months of a year. That doesn't make sense for a working family. And with the rise of remote, flexible work, that's not the kind of childcare parents need. So with homeschooling, you can curate the childcare that works for your family. Maybe your child is really independent and you can work remotely while they kind of work on their projects. There's lots of great techniques like strewing, where you thoughtfully lay out objects and tasks for children to choose. It can be a little bit easier with siblings or not. It can be harder with younger children. You can also hire a nanny or do a childcare swap. And what's really critical to know is that the average homeschooling parent is just as likely to be poor or near poor than the average parent in traditional school. So the census data has that fact. And the fastest growing group of homeschoolers is black families. That population has grown 5X, and it's a lot of single moms who are driving the show. So they've found alternative solutions for their childcare that work better for them. They're doing swaps with other families. They're going to home school co-ops or micro schools. And sometimes it is a sacrifice, but other times maybe they're switching their career and becoming entrepreneurs, and the childcare is even better. And then there's the whole question of summer. So I really think that a lot of people feel like childcare is a blocker. But if you get a little bit creative, you can build an even better childcare situation for your family when you're homeschooling.Michael Horn:So it's interesting because I think you already just shattered one of the myths of homeschooling, which is that it exclusively happens at home, which is not the case. Homeschooling families in fact live homeschooling. It's in co-ops, it's in micro schools, it's with other families, it's in hybrid homeschooling arrangements. It's in these childcare swaps, all sorts of arrangements. The big thing, it seems to me, and I'd love your take on this, is that the point is that the parent has a much stronger role in intentionally designing these different elements and making the determinations of when are they with me, and when are they with someone else,  what is that environment like, what is that curriculum like, are they being met where they are and things of that nature. Manisha Snoyer:Absolutely. And I would like to clarify that when I talk about homeschooling, I'm specifically talking about a group of primarily secular homeschooling parents who are using a highly curated approach to their children's education. There are still a lot of families who are doing traditional homeschooling around the kitchen table from nine to three, recreating school at home, who are doing online school 6 hours a day. But what interests me is this growing movement of people who are curating their children's education from what I call modular learning. And typically what I like to say to parents is make sure you have at least one to 2 hours of one on one mastery learning and three to 4 hours of self-directed learning. Because if you don't have those core modules, you're really not getting the benefits out of homeschooling. And I think I get concerned sometimes when parents are trying to outsource too much and they're not taking advantage of the incredible benefit of family engagement and learning and free time. There's just so much research that supports this mind wandering and this creative time to play and explore. It's so healthy for kids. And I think it's a big mistake when parents decide to fill up that time with activities and tutors. So, generally, I say start with one or 2 hours of mastery learning, family engagement, big blocks of self-directed learning, and then you can layer in classes, co-ops, skill shares. I mean, there's just so much great skill sharing in the homeschooling community, volunteer opportunities, practical life at home. But yeah, absolutely. It's not school at home, it's school out in the universe.Michael Horn:Makes a ton of sense. Stay with the mastery learning for a moment and just double click on… because I think the other blocks will make sense to people. They can sort of imagine what those might be. The mastery learning, what does that look like for the families with whom you work?Manisha Snoyer:That's such an important question. And I think that this mastery learning is one of the biggest reasons some of these tech moguls you hear about are so excited about homeschooling. So for people who don't know what mastery learning is, there was an educational philosopher named Benjamin Bloom at MIT, and he did some studies which showed that children who learned in a mastery based approach, which means learning at their own pace and with the support of a tutor, did 90% better than children who were learning in a traditional group setting. And that was regardless of whether the tutor was trained as a teacher or not. So we know this as tutors. I mean, it's obvious kids learn so much faster. And so the mastery learning is just this time when your child can either work independently or with your support, learning as quickly or as slowly as they want. And so what it might look like, I always tell parents, choose an hour to when your child is really fresh. If they're in elementary school or second grade, it might not need to be 2 hours. Just an hour is fine. And do half math and half either English Language Arts or some kind of all in one curriculum.Michael Horn:Got you.Manisha Snoyer:And make sure they get that really focused time in. It doesn't have to look like you teaching them. It can be them learning with the material and your support, and it only takes one or 2 hours a day. And when they're able to do this mastery learning, when they're most fresh, well nourished, engaged with that loving support of the parent. I mean, our kids just go through the entire K through 8th grade math curriculum in six months. It's so fast.Michael Horn:Wow.Manisha Snoyer:And if you choose the right curriculum for your child, they will really soar.Michael Horn:So let me ask you this, which is, we've talked a lot about the growth of homeschooling, the growth of secular homeschooling, the growth of homeschooling among segments that historically people hadn't thought homeschooled. Black mothers, often single parent households and the like. I'm just sort of curious where you see this going, because if you look at the trends, it obviously greatly accelerated during COVID and if you still hold that constant, it's the fastest growing. But it slipped back a little bit in the last twelve months. Where do you think this homeschooling trend is going to go over the next few years? Like we come back in five years talking how many families are doing it? What are the different arrangements? Is it similar to now, is it much bigger? Is it much smaller? Where do you think this is all going?Manisha Snoyer:So, first of all, I'm convinced that this modular approach to education is going to be the form of education all around the world, because it just makes more practical sense for children to have that one-on-one tutoring time. It's much more cost effective than a microschool when parents are teaching their own kids. And as this movement continues to grow, the question of socialization becomes less and less and less. So it has those network effects. In terms of what it looks like in five years, I think we're going to start to see more and more clusters in big cities. The problem is, I really don't think public education is going to improve very much. I just don't think that this is a system that's built to get stronger. And what we saw in Covid is that the system just completely fell apart. And so because of that, I think it will also influence the homeschooling movement, and it will continue to grow and grow. And as these new tools and technologies emerge, it will also help support the learning. I mean, the big question still is childcare, which is a question from zero to five, which is a question for after school. And it's my hope and prayer that our government will start to wake up and give more support to parents with the childcare piece. But that remains unknown.Michael Horn:Well, let's stay on that for just as we start to wrap up here, the conversation on the childcare piece, because it sounds like what you'd be recommending, though, is not more money to the traditional public system that might provide nine months of childcare. That's, frankly, probably only 09:00 a.m. To 01:00 p.m. Or something like that. When you're talking about kids that little, but instead it sounds like you're talking maybe a subsidy directly to the parents themselves that they would choose where and when and things of that nature. But I don't want to put words in your mouth. I'm just sort of curious, or I'm very curious how you would design this support for families to make all these other modular forms of education more accessible to them.Manisha Snoyer:Well, I really love what's happening in Arizona where families are getting a voucher to homeschool their children as they see fit. I think we are going to have to think about accountability in homeschooling, but I don't think that that necessarily should be too difficult. There's a MAP growth test that kids can take. And frankly, rather than providing more accountability. I would always suggest providing more support. A lot of the families that are homeschooling have children who have diagnosed as special needs, so they've reached a breaking point. Children with autism, ADHD, dyslexia, and those students are benefiting from special services at school. So if those students can continue to benefit from special services while learning at home, if they can attend childcare centers, it will really help a lot of families be doing this.Michael Horn:Terrific. Okay, as we wrap up, last question for those who want to learn more about Teach Your Kids want to get part of the community. What should they do? Where can they find you? How can they be part of the podcast and sort of the broader network and community that you're creating?Manisha Snoyer:Thank you so much for asking that question, Michael. So they can visit teachyourkidspod.com and sign up to join our community. We have a Substack, and you can join as a free member and just get notifications about new podcast episodes. Or you can pay every month, I think $15. And then you get access to our online WhatsApp groups, and you can ask other parents for advice and also get 25% off our online clubs. So it's pretty easy to sign up, and I'm always happy to answer questions, especially the most challenging and controversial ones. I'm sure we have ideas and support for you for whatever it might be, from childcare to making friends to finding the perfect curriculum for your child.Michael Horn:That makes a ton of sense. And that's neat that you're also providing the WhatsApp group and so forth, because we had outschool.org’s Chris Comaforo come on the show a few months back, and his big finding from the education savings accounts that you referenced earlier was that it wasn't just the money that was important. It was also trusted information from fellow parents that would really activate parents from all walks of life to use the dollars for their kids, which is probably what you're finding in these groups.Manisha Snoyer:100% and I know we're wrapping up, but I want to say that we are more isolated than ever. And it's not just kids that need friends. Parents really need friends to help raise their children. And I think our parents have been able to make very meaningful and deep friendships through our groups, and that's been a lifesaver for them.Michael Horn:Well, Manisha Snoyer, thank you so much for building this community for all of us and for Teach Your Kids, and thank you so much for joining us on the show.Manisha Snoyer:Thank you so much for your great work and your research. And it's an honor to be here. Thank you so much for having me.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.

Diane and I looked back on the past three episodes of Class Disrupted’s fifth season through the lens of disruption. We discussed the future of AI education tools; considered the opportunities and challenges as the Carnegie Foundation embarks on creating innovative new assessments with ETS; and highlighted how Americans’ ideas of a success are changing and what that means for schools. As always, subscribers can listen to the audio, watch the video below, or read the transcript.The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Time Topic3:10 Designing useful AI education tools 4:40 The many jobs schools try to do13:59 Potential impacts of Carnegie Foundation’s more holistic assessments26:43 America’s changing definition of success36.44 Book and TV recommendations Diane Tavenner:Hey, Michael.Michael Horn:Hey, Diane. I know you have had a hectic last few weeks, but I still have been excited to catch up with you as we say goodbye to 2023. That still doesn't sound right coming off the tongue. And I'm hoping that the pneumonia cases in China that are starting to be reported are not portending something worse for 2024. But here we are.Diane Tavenner:Oh, Michael. Pneumonia in China. I don't even know what you're talking about. I don't want to know what you're talking.Michael Horn:Don't look it up.Diane Tavenner:I've been heads down. Wow. That makes me realize that we started this podcast during the pandemic, sort of the beginning, the height of the pandemic, and I can't believe we're in our fifth season. And I kind of feel like we're starting to see some opportunities that haven't been there for the last few years. And so I really hope pneumonia is not on our way because our kids and our system and our country really need us to be rethinking how we're doing school. For us this season, to that end, we’ve just been talking to some really interesting people and people who we think are kind of pushing our thinking and everyone's thinking and the work forward. And so that's been amazing. But one of the things I'm realizing is I'm craving the opportunity for us to just talk and process and think about what they're saying. So I'm hoping that we can do that today.Michael Horn:A good plan. And hopefully our listeners are excited for the same because that's what we're going to do: use today's session to step back and think about the last three conversations that we've had with Todd Rose, Irhum, Shafkat, hopefully I pronounced that correctly, and Tim Knowles, so that we can reflect on a lot of the points that they made and how they stretched our thinking and how they might intersect with each other and, frankly, ask each other any questions that we have as we march into the new year.Diane Tavenner:Yeah, that just is crazy. And I always have a lot of questions. So I'm excited to talk with you about this. But one of the things I noticed, Michael, when I think back across the last three conversations is there is an undercurrent of disruption in all of those. It's maybe more than an undercurrent, quite frankly. And while I will acknowledge that people in education don't really like the word disruption, they don't like it in reference to schools and education. And I get that. But I think it's useful to say it here, because when I say disruption, I'm referring to the work that you study and you write about and you talk about, and quite frankly, a lot of the work that I have done in my career, because innovation doesn't come without disruption. Those two things sort of come hand in hand. And so I think we need to be mindful, but we also can't be afraid to talk about what is really happening and needed.Michael Horn:I want to return to that theme as we go through today, but let's start where you just left, which is afraid and fear, and I think a lot of fear is being sparked by AI. And so would love to dig into the conversation as a starting point, if you're good with it, with Irhum, because my big takeaway from that was that the art of building valuable tools in education will firstly be based on a deeper understanding of what large language models the current AI phenomenon that has people's imagination, but really understanding what they can and can't do when you train them appropriately. And then second, and I think this is maybe reassuring for educators, I hope it is, the actual real life use cases in schools are the other thing you really need to understand. And what I took away from it was when you have both of those things, then you can create robust tools with presets in essence - that's sort of my word - but think scripted buttons instead of wide-open chats that you put a lot on the individual that support the things that you're trying to accomplish. And not only can that be more efficient, but it can also be much more valuable and efficacious. And I think it can lend toward a real purposeful use of AI, which is what I think we should all be hoping for. What did you take away from it, and how does that add up?Diane Tavenner:Yeah, well, I want to linger on the combination of your two points together because I think this is a persistent issue in education and I've been thinking about it a ton. I think we've acknowledged this a lot. Education is one of the few industries that has been relatively unchanged by modern technological advances. And I'm not talking like printing press modern advances, clearly that had a significant impact, but that was a while ago now. And so I'm talking software, personal computing, and now AI obviously. The big question is why. Why is education sort of untouched or unfazed when everyone else is really impacted by these advances? And one of the things that I've been noticing over the last six months in being out of the direct working of and leading of schools is just how complicated schools are. And my beloved former board chair would call that a BGO, a blinding glimpse of the obvious.  So there's that. But I think it's hit me pretty profoundly, kind of in two ways now that I'm leading a company that is focused on education, but not running a whole school or a whole system. You know that I'm a student of leadership, and I have studied and practiced for a very long time, and I love learning about it. And one of sort of the universally accepted truths in leadership is that an organization can only focus on, like, one, two, maybe three things at a time, and that's really stretching it. And really, the best organizations have that sort of laser focus. And for 20 years, I tried really hard to live that as truly as possible in schools. But the reality is that in a school, if we only had one or two priorities, we would literally be shut down. Like, schools have so many obligations and responsibilities just to keep the doors open. It's not real to think that they only have one or two priorities. And you can play all these sort of Jedi mind tricks, if you will, and say, we're prioritizing here, but the reality is you're doing all of these other things that ultimately take priority because they're compliance oriented or they're legally mandated or all of those things. And so to pretend that those are not priorities really is not authentic. And so it's just really hit me to be leading an organization now that truly can have only one priority and what that actually means in terms of our ability to focus and to innovate and to really integrate new technologies and advances and think about how to use them in powerful and meaningful ways. And so I'm just thinking a lot about, and we come back to this theme a lot, like, can we expect of schools what I think everyone expects of them, which is to be these innovative places that are going to redesign and sort of remodel themselves using modern technology, AI in particular. It just feels like such a heavy, heavy lift. I'm dancing around this because I'm nervous about where this line of thinking takes me. And I think it's also important that we have this conversation.Michael Horn:Yeah. Reflecting on that, I guess I have a couple thoughts. One, our friend Paul Peterson, the professor at Harvard, who's studied and written a lot about education in schools, he has this line in his book, Saving Schools. I think that's the title of it, where he talks about, it's a very economist sort of view of the world where he says, like, one of the big things that creates innovation in the world is when organizations shift tasks to their end consumer. And the example he has is like Walmart. As opposed to a department store back in the day where you would have someone follow you around and curate the experience with you, like your shopper. Walmart's basically like, “Diane, you walk in there, figure it out. It's all on the shelves, but it's on you.”Diane Tavenner:Well, now you even check yourself out, right?Michael Horn:That's a very good point. Look at the Amazon stores. And Whole Foods and stuff like that. And I think it's interesting in terms of education, because if we're serious about building agency and learners, actually having them take over things is actually good, like, that's a goal, right? I think so. A second thought I had is on the do one thing well in my head right now when you say that is Mallory Dwinnell, who's the chancellor, as you know, of Reach university. And I've been with her a few times in the last few months, and she knows Reach University exists to do one thing and one thing only, and it's trained teachers in rural contexts. And as a result, they're able to be incredibly focused and optimized and so forth. When I zoom up from that a little bit, one of the lines that we've had - because I don't know the answer to your question, so I'm going to use theory here - through a jobs to be done perspective, the way we've said it is organizations can only really be good at one job to be done. So, for example, like Ikea, it's not that they do low-cost furniture, it's that they're really good at helping you do the job of, like, I need to furnish this apartment today when I move into a new city, right. And everything is built around that. They do lots and lots of things, but that's the job to be done, and they integrate around that. And I guess my reflection on that is, and I love your take on this, is that schools, as you know, we've been asking them to do multiple jobs. Like when we analyze this through why people switch schools, we've now done this with micro-schools, independent schools and charter schools. We see that there are four reasons or jobs to be done that cause people to change schools. And the design of those are pretty radically different depending on what job it is to get it done. And so I guess I wonder, to your point, have we just been forcing schools to do all the jobs and therefore they stink at all of them. And they're pulling against each other and maybe like moving back to a smaller-size school where we allow individuals to choose not based on race, politics, or other unsavory characteristics, but based on job to be done. Like what's the progress you're trying to make? Might that help us a little bit? I'll give you my other thought in a moment, but I just want you to react there.Diane Tavenner:Yeah. And what you're making me think about is - this wasn't the current conversation we had with Todd Rose a few episodes ago - but certainly the body of his work, which is the introductory body, and you did The End of Average, which is why do we think that everyone needs the same thing. We're in this race where everyone's trying to be exactly the same, only a little bit better than everyone else on a very narrow set of things. And I think what you're offering is schools could have different purposes and look really different. And why is that bad or wrong? And the thing that's coming up for me and what you're saying though is the approach you're taking is that the school's actually primary purpose is to serve their students and their families. And here my experience is that's not who they're serving. When I talk about compliance and legality and all of those things, there's a whole bunch of other people that end up stack ranking above parents and students. And that is the fundamental - well, there's so many - but that feels like a fundamental challenge.Michael Horn:I'm going to point us to something really uncomfortable. But this is why I think some of these new school designs that are fundamentally focused on the learners and the parents are probably a really important force in education because they're not confused about who they're serving. And I think my hope would be that it helps districts wake up and be able to do the same sorts of things. But TBD on that one, I guess.Diane Tavenner:Yeah, districts, states, policy.Michael Horn:A lot of layers, right? Yeah, it's a lot of layers. So let's maybe leave that conversation there. I have other thoughts, but I think that's a good provocative place to leave it for the moment.Diane Tavenner:Yeah, I agree with you because there's another provocative space we can go. When we talked to Tim Knowles from the Carnegie foundation, he of course brought up one of my favorite topics, assessment and the promise of assessment to sort of enable a lot of what we talk about, which is competency-based and personalized and talk about student autonomy and self-direction and all of those things. Because if individuals can show what they know in valid and reliable ways, that frees up the space of how they actually learned that and how they know it and gives us a lot of different options and possibilities there. And if we're measuring things that are more directly related to valuable work people do in the world, that should both better prepare people and help clarify what things are valuable to teach and learn. And so I'm so curious. I know you went into that conversation like a little bit…Michael Horn:I'm nervous. I want them to really succeed. But I love both of your points. And I loved the broader conversation, as you know, with Tim. I left with a much clearer idea of what the partnership with ETS is trying to do and why. And I feel like when he anchored it in the why, it just helped so much. And I left with a deeper understanding of, to that end, why they're not tackling assessments for the learning standards as they exist today and are already in place, because there's so many players that do that, rightly or more wrongly, but nevertheless, there and then I left with an understanding of why they are tackling these cognitive skills and habits of success. To use your language, Diane, not Tim's. And I like that the effort is demand driven. I think that's really important. There's some grassroots nature of it in the sense that, as Tim pointed out, all of these states, both red and blue, are building portraits of a graduate that at least pay lip service to the notion of developing students with agency and executive functioning skills and critical thinking on and on. But as he pointed out, they're kind of empty promises because those states have no way at the moment to measure these skills or habits or assess whether they're delivering. And so I like that Carnegie and ETS could be an answer to that problem where there really is none at the moment. And I think my questions from that, that sort of follow on for it, are one, or I guess, thoughts more broadly. And I have five of them. I'll do three maybe and then let you jump in. How about that? Okay. One, I really like the approach from a disruptive innovation angle, as I mentioned, because it tackles non-consumption, where the alternative is nothing at all at the moment. They are competing against nothing, rather than going headfirst into this heavy space of formative, summative interim assessment providers, and they can really define something. The performance bar in some sense is simple. All it has to do is be better than nothing. I said it earlier. Second, I think that they are chasing what seems like real demand. That's good. It's not top down. I hope we keep it that way and don't force something on people. And third, I think from a worry perspective, and this is going to contradict number one a little bit, but disruptive innovation, I think the theory suggests over and over again that you should tackle the simplest problems first. And I guess my concern is that figuring out how to assess these skills and habits in a way that is accepted outside of the school networks that exist doesn't feel simple to know. Your point that they can learn it anywhere and we're going to assess it. I know you've done this at Summit, but that's one network. And Carnegie is now trying to assess across a student's life, not just in school. That seems really complex and complicated to me, even if all the bar is is better than nothing. And so I guess I hope I'm wrong, but it's a question that I have coming out of the conversation.Diane Tavenner:I'm curious to pick your brain on that one a little bit about what constitutes simple, because it seems like what you're saying is the complexity might be coming from all these different contexts and things like that, less the actual assessment itself. And so I'm wondering, this is a little selfish too, as I think about trying to build a product that is in a space where there is non-consumption. I would argue there's non-consumption right now, but it's certainly not simple what we're trying to do at some level. But maybe it is. So what's simple mean?Michael Horn:Yeah, I have to think through this more obviously. I guess my thought is, right, just to go again to disruptive innovation, the first application for the transistors weren't computers and incredible consumer electronics products. They were simple hearing aids that just enabled some hearing. Steel. You take mini mills, they first did rebar, right, stuff that would show up in concrete, not finely finished, beautiful products. So maybe it's the case that they can find their niche there. I just think it's going to have to be sort of the simplest applications first of demonstrating these skills rather than taking on all the complexity at once and not trying to maybe, and I'm thinking out loud here, not trying to maybe bill it as like the, “Oh, we figured out how to measure perseverance across all domains and locations and et cetera, et cetera.”Diane Tavenner:Yeah, and maybe it's something like, I mean, you're referring back to some of the work that we did when I was at summit with some startup partners and, for example, we just were building one sort of easy simulation that felt like an hour of video game playing to students, but really was able to say, like, “Look, this student seems to indicate higher levels of the ability to collaborate to solve a more complex problem, which for an employer was super useful information.” And so maybe something more, I would call them quick and dirty assessments like that that aren't about taking a whole assessment schema, but are like, if that helps an employer trust and believe that that potential employee is capable of a skill, maybe that's what simple looks like in this particular case.Michael Horn:I like that. I can imagine a second one which might be simply looking at student effort in school, right? Do they struggle in math? And then they keep at it. And so we see perseverance in mathematics, right? I could imagine sort of simple, not survey based, but more like observational based assessments maybe as well, I don't know.Diane Tavenner:Fascinating, but it's narrow and zeroed in on a particular thing that might be meaningful in the world but doesn't have to like…Michael Horn:To boil the ocean from day one, I think. I think that's exactly right. And that's maybe the way to think about it. Like, let's take some bite-sized pieces. I guess it bleeds into the other two thoughts I had. I really do like the way that they're connecting this to academic domains and content knowledge. I think I'd be concerned if they weren't. And here's my “and” I think they would benefit from taking a page from Summit and breaking out the skills or the cognitive skills versus the habits of success in the ways that you all did. Because they are different, and I suspect the approach to measuring them is different. Now, I grant you, from a public relations perspective, that might involve some education and some complicated messaging, but I think it would also be helpful for those of us in the field who are like, “Hey, agency is different from critical thinking in science.” Or whatever it might be. And then I guess the last thought I had is, I do still wonder…I love that he's tackling this for all the reasons that he said. And I don't know if it pulls us away from the Carnegie Unit of time, because at some point we do still need to help say, “Hey, this student has mastered these sets of learning standards or progressions or whatever, and therefore can move on.” And so maybe their role becomes sort of an arbiter of what is valid and reliable alternative forms of assessment, rather than trying to be the assessor itself. But it does seem to me like you have to solve the “Hey, I'm a student in math or I'm a student in ELA or I'm a student in civics or whatever it is.” And by the way, I don't know that it has to be every academic domain, but that there's some way to sort of say like, “Yeah, if you master these bite-sized assessments or show this project or whatever else, that's a good demonstration.” And therefore you can mark mastery of that as opposed to “Gee, sit in the seat for another year.”Diane Tavenner:Yeah, that's interesting. Two quick thoughts that are coming up for me. One is that seems like such a good historical role that that foundation has played where they start something and they kind of figure it out because they can, but then they don't own it and keep it. It moves out. You know, Tim in our conversation mentioned a whole bunch of different things that were actually started by Carnegie – including ETS – that spun out and continues to do the work. And the foundation then kind of moves on to putting some resources behind the initial thinking around. So that feels like a good potential role that they're playing. I'm going to say something that I think is going to shock you, which is because you know how much I hate the Carnegie Unit and the measurement of time and think it is just so ruining everything. But I will admit that in my new work, I have been really looking at post-high school young people, young adults, and how they figure out pathways besides a straight to four-year college pathway. And one of the things I have encountered is time really matters to them, like how long is it going to take me to get a credential or a certificate or a degree or whatnot? Because that's a real calculation and factor in their lives. And to my great disappointment, we still have the Carnegie Unit, but it's no longer representative of a common unit of time. And so you go from college, mostly community college, to community college, and they all have these credits which are based on the Carnegie Unit, but they're all measuring different amounts of time and sometimes even within the same institution. And so the one potentially useful job for this unit is not even usable anymore to the user, and it actually can be misleading.Michael Horn:Wow. Okay, so that's fascinating. I'll let you transition us to Todd in a second. But one quick thought is I do think rate matters through these different things that we expect. It's one of the reasons I think Joel Rose's work at New Classrooms has always been so interesting because they have this notion of, they probably call it something different now, but it was originally par. Like, how many times or days does it take for a student to learn a particular concept? And you're sort of above par or below par. You all at summit had the. Are you on track? Ahead of track. And so I do think it's not, that time is not relevant. And Paul LeBlanc makes this point beautifully in his writing, which is, frankly, those who have low incomes, they have the biggest deficit of all, which is not just money, it's time poverty. And so that's a very relevant number, and it's not a number that the Carnegie unit helps us with at all. And in fact, it disadvantages them further I think.Diane Tavenner:Yeah. Well, note to me and to others that time, we can't just totally do away with time as we really try to rethink this, that it is, as you point out, an important factor, and we need to think about that. So, learn something every day. Michael, I was having this super interesting conversation with the parents of a Gen Zer, and they're particularly interesting because they also have two millennial children, and they feel like there's a real difference between the two. That's a different conversation. But they were in their sort of conversation, talking about how their perception that their Gen Z daughter has really got a different definition of success than they do, than is familiar to them, and that they understand. And this is causing some tension. And I shared Todd's work that he shared with us, and I was, you know, I think you've got your finger on the pulse of what's happening in America according to Todd's work, which is there is an evolving, changing definition of success. And the response I got back was, well, if you're someone who hasn't been reading that work, it can be a very jarring experience. I just thought it was such an interesting grounding of what Todd was talking about and what that actually means in families and across generations. And I don't know that I want to go here, but we're at a moment in time where there's just societally so much anger and angst and division. And it did make me wonder if this generational divide along these lines might be underneath some of that. So I'm curious what you think, what you thought about Todd's…Michael Horn:Wow. As always, I'm so impressed with Todd. But just to stay where you were. And then I have a question for you, I do think, and I'll go here, because obviously the Israel-Palestine stuff has really been on my mind, as you know. And I'm going down rabbit holes every single day on it. I've been really struck by how, when you provide some basic level of education to younger people, all of a sudden phrases that they thought were innocuous, they realize, “Oh, that might be really harmful in a way I hadn't understood before.” And so I guess my thought is, I think we have to hear and honor from where they're coming because there's some real good there in terms of, like, if they're resetting definitions of success. And that doesn't mean we as educators should back off grounding them in some of the things that we know to help inform that conversation. And that's sort of our role, I think. Not sort of - that is our role. David Gergen always loves saying education literally means lead forth. And that's how I might think about it here. But let me ask you a different question - you may want to reengage with that one - but let me ask you a different question, which is you said disruptive innovation pervades all three. I get the first two, and I think our audience do. I'd love to hear your thinking on how this one does as well.Diane Tavenner:Well, thanks for keeping me honest, as you always do. And I might loop back because this might just be too rich of a week in the news to pass by. Okay, so I did say it was a theme across all three. This might be a stretch, but this is sort of how I was thinking about it. I think we're living in an era that we are moving out of. And I think this changing definition of success is related, where education has sort of been perceived as the end, if you will, versus the means. And for, I think, most of our nation's history, which is not that long, but still, education was a means to an end. And one of the things I think we're hearing from younger generation, especially coming out of the pandemic, is like, and this is related to their disillusionment with higher ed. And a lot of what Tod was talking about is like, I need a job. I need a career. I need to be able to support my family. I need to have a life. I don't want to go into debt. I don't want to get a degree that gets me a job that doesn't actually pay for itself. And I don't know that they use ROI, but there's not an ROI on what my education is. And so, if we take that, and I think that suggests a shift to what you're doing in education, what really matters is what you're learning and the skills you're building. And that I think necessitates pretty disruptive changes in our learning models and our schools and the experience. And again, these are the things we're always advocating for. But I think this takes us back to the root of why we're advocating for it, because I think you and I actually are embracing that changing definition of success. And I'll speak for myself, it's also hard because I have benefited from the old definition and that was an undercurrent of that conversation I was having with these parents who have been very successful by conventional definitions, and that's hard to let go of. And that some of that tension underlying these conversations with younger folks. And I will connect it back because I just can't resist. Who knows? By the time we release this, this might be all over and done, but we are sitting right in the moment where I can't help but say it. Three top university presidents were called to Congress to testify. I will note that they were all women. And the vast majority of top 50 presidents are not women, they are men. So I'm curious about that. But that's a separate side story. One has already resigned for her comments. The second is under massive pressure. There’s so much going on here in this whole conversation. But for me, the interesting pieces, and I think it's tying back to what you were just talking about, which is what is the role of an institution that is designed to educate young people? I think at the heart of why people, there's so many reasons why they were unhappy with what the president said. But one of them is where's your responsibility to actually take a stand and guide and mentor and do exactly what you just said, Michael? Educate them about the things they don't know about because, yeah, they're brilliant and they're young, but they don't know a whole bunch of stuff yet. And that's our job. And so where are you in that equation, I think is the question that's being called of those educators.Michael Horn:No, that is brilliant. It reminds me, a friend of mine, Gunner Councilman, used to always say students are much more like clients than customers. And his distinction was that clients are often wrong. It's your job as the organization is to guide them. And whereas we have the saying the customer is always right. That's not really true with students. And so I think that's interesting. On the second one, another point you made about the changing sort of framework of education where for a while a place where I went, Harvard, was seen as like success. That was the destination, if you will. And that was a big finding, as you know, from my Choosing College book was how many individuals were like, they wanted to get into the top college for its own sake. They had no sense of what came afterwards. It was just like that was the prize. A lot of admissions officers did not like that that was the prize. But that's how they thought about it. And we just did a Future U podcast recording with a couple folks from Wake Technical Community College and Portland State. And one of them made the point that increasingly people see college as a station, not a destination. I thought that was a really good language to sort of capture this shift. And I guess finally I'll say, I see your point. Like disruptive innovations fundamentally, in the words of the theory, change the Y axis of performance, as we like to say in Wonkland. So in normal speak, it just means that the way we think about performance changes, like what we measure and value, and that's what disruptive innovations fundamentally do. And frankly, traditional organizations really struggle with those changes because they've organized, to your much earlier point about how schools are complicated places, they've organized themselves around one set of things that we have measured and valued, and disruption tends to change that in line with new individuals that haven't been served. So I take your point. It's a really interesting one. Maybe let's leave this conversation here for now, because I think it makes for a juicy ‘24 as we go in. But as we wrap up, let's just sort of round out the 2023 year. It occurs to me, by the way, in future years, maybe we'll look back at our year and name some of our top reads and things that we've watched. But I am not in the mood for that at the moment. I will be totally honest. So I'm just sort of curious what's on your TV at the moment or your bedside table that you're reading at the moment?Diane Tavenner:Yeah, well, I will definitely answer that, and I will just say, I'm so glad we had this conversation because I have so many questions for us to explore in the new year and so many people popping in my mind that I really want to talk to now based on this conversation. So I'm very excited to hang up here and then start brainstorming with you for the new year. So I think you had this moment, too. When we interviewed Tim and asked him this question, he said that between December 1 and January 1 he always reads poetry. And I think we both were like, whoa. And so I took that as an invitation and have been reading - this summer I got to meet a poet, David Wyatt - and I've been reading some of his poems and pieces, and he's got this one, I'm going to mess up the title, but where he takes words and he just really has a whole contemplation on the meaning of that word that is just like, so mind shifting. And so that's been really fun. And on my bedside table. How about you?Michael Horn:That's good. And good for you to actually follow the advice. I have not because in classic sort of efficiency mode, I'm like, but there are a few other books I need to read first. So that said, I've put aside Klossovitz for the moment. It’s just I've not made the progress that perhaps I had hoped for and have delved into a few different books, one of which I finished over the weekend. And it's called Writing for Busy Readers: Communicate More Effectively in the Real World. It's by a friend at Harvard, Todd Rogers, and another professor or member of the community, Jessica Lasky-Fink. And it's a good, quick read and some good tips as I'm finishing up my next book on helping people better navigate the job market. And so, I will say their big messages, not surprising, are less is more. And so, with that wish, maybe for brevity, levity, clarity and charity in the new year, I'll just say, thank you, Diane. And thank you to all of those tuning in for joining us on Class Disrupted.The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.