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Who are the “customers” of higher education—students or employers? Scott Pulsipher, President of Western Governors University, joined the Future of Education to give his take on this age-old question and discuss how colleges can achieve mutual benefit for both parties. Scott analyzed how the needs of students and employers overlap; the measures that matter to drive outcomes for both, and how to identify the skills of the future in a dynamic and fast-changing landscape. As always, subscribers can listen to the episode, 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. Topic1:08. Ensuring mutual benefit of students and employers6:11 Equipping students with the skills of the future11:01 How skill identification differs across fields15:16  Mutual benefit at WGU19:31 Deep dive on student and employer outcomes23:55 Communicating mutual benefit to other stakeholdersMichael Horn:Delighted you're joining us to continue to explore how we can build a world in which all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their potential, and live a life of purpose. And to help us do that today we have a special guest, Scott Pulsipher. He's the president of Western Governors University. For folks who've followed my work for a long time, you're probably sick of hearing of Western Governors University because I find them to be such a powerful example of disruptive innovation and competency-based learning to really make sure all learners succeed and master what they are trying to do so that they can get ahead in the workforce. So first, Scott, thanks for joining us. It's great to see you.Scott Pulsipher:Great to see you, too, Michael. It's always a privilege and a pleasure, and I certainly hope that your listeners aren't sick of hearing of WGU, but we hopefully are always providing something new and different to spur their own innovation and things that they can do to serve their students better than they currently are.Michael Horn:Well, amen to that. And they better not be sick of it, I suppose, because I'm not going to stop talking about it. So that's the other reason. But today I really want to explore this idea of mutual benefit with you. This concept that doing things that benefit others but also benefit yourself and finding these areas of overlap really actually strengthens both sides of the equation, if you will, and leads to more lasting value and progress for people. And the part of this that I want to explore is that Western Governors University, the original design wasn't just to have this incredible competency-based learning model for learners, but it was to make sure that what they were learning was aligned with what employers actually wanted. And so you all, as I recall back in the day, would have boards of employers in different sectors you worked, you'd bring them together, they would help you understand the skills and competencies required to do the different jobs, and then you all would design degree programs effectively around those competencies and make sure, of course, as I said, students are mastering the key ones. How has that work evolved over time? And how are you working specifically with employers now?Scott Pulsipher:Yeah, there is little doubt that the founders of WGU and we that are still carrying on that purpose are always trying to ensure that we're doing maybe two things. One is to help individuals change their lives for the better by helping them advance into the opportunity. But we're also wanting to ensure that those that are completing their credentials at WGU, that they are, in fact, ready for the roles and the work that is, in fact, defining the future of the sectors that we serve really well. And so to do that, actually, even, sorry… As a quick aside, that even became one of our core differentiating things is the quality and relevancy of the learning to the work, and even really the future of work. And to make that a reality, like you noted, is that from our beginning, we really have tried to partner closely with those that are representing the employer's perspective, representing the workforce, representing the trends and changes that they are seeing. And so we've always been really good at aligning with subject matter experts and employer counsels and even program level counsels. By that, what I mean is the right representatives that can help us define the learning outcomes at a credential program, at a degree program level, so that the skills that an individual has demonstrated competency in can in fact be directly ready for those roles that these employers anticipate in the future. I think that's actually, we've tried to elevate that even further, because some of the things that even those employers, those individual subject matter experts that comprise their counsels, if you will, they aren't always masters of all the data that is needed to understand not just how one role at one employer is needed, but really how the sector is changing, not just regionally, but nationally as well. And so we're taking advantage of some really powerful tools that are available today, like the Lightcast library of skills, that you can actually scrape all those roles and all those definitions and identify specific skill sets that are starting to emerge in certain job descriptions, in certain fields of study, and that we can ensure that we have a better sense then of how our subject matter experts define that or help us define it into actual curriculum outcomes. And we're always trying to make those skill connections, so there are job skills analysis surveys also help us ensure that the voice of industry is evident in our program planning and designs. I'll just give a simple example, is that when we really saw the future of healthcare, what was certainly emerging is how this coordinated care that had to exist across all the interactions that individual patient may have with a primary care physician, with a hospital or a health service provider, a health center, with even at home care, that you also knew that what was needed there was a more holistic view of an individual patient. So out of that emerged our credential programs around health services coordination, and value-based healthcare. And what were the capabilities that were needed in the individuals to do those roles really well, rather than targeted more acute care of nursing in an emergency room or something like that. And so those things emerge. Other things I think I would note today is that the reaffirmation that maybe exists around some of the skills that are more core human skillsets and how to communication and problem solving, et cetera, how do those get better articulated as to exactly what those skills look like in particular fields of study? And it's not exactly the same if you're going into accounting versus if you're going into cybersecurity versus if you're going to healthcare, because even those skills manifest differently. And so we're always making sure that how we articulate the learning outcomes are relevant to the world of work in which our graduates are entering into.Michael Horn:Super interesting to hear you say that, because something that makes sense, but frankly, a Clay Christensen saying, right, if you listen to your best customers, you focus maybe on what they want now, but maybe not where the future or where the puck is going. And so I love your answer, that you're not only taking their data and input, but also these bigger trends, these bigger pieces of work that may become important as graduates go out there. I want to stay on this topic, just and push you a little bit, which is to say that sometimes employers don't know what the skills and competencies at the heart of their successful employees are. A lot of times, their job descriptions, as you know, are littered with everything they can think of that might screen out certain people. And so they're not necessarily reliable markers of the actual work or the skills it takes to do the work well. How do you all sort of work around that? My guess, on the surface level, would be they know the technical skills pretty well, but my guess is that they struggle a little bit more on those critical thinking, problem solving habits of success, durable skills that are maybe a little harder to define or measure, but you all probably pay a lot of attention to. So how do you sort of work around that?Scott Pulsipher:Yeah, you're absolutely right. And even as my pivot into answering that, I love what you also mentioned is that sometimes the employer, as a customer, doesn't exactly know everything that's coming in the future, or they can't really think about designing the role of the future. And it reminded me of a conversation long ago that I had when I was still in consulting with heads of design and automotive, and they basically said a rather ironic statement, which is the last person you want to talk to when you're designing the future vehicle is your current customer, because often they can only innovate from their current reference of an automobile. And you're like, I think the joke even was like, if you ask them, they just say, “Hey, we need more cup holders, and can you put a bit there? Et cetera.” They aren't reinventing something. And that is often the challenge of those of us who are too close to a problem. You really have to project many years forward to say, what do you see as that future state? And if you start working backwards from that is like, what are you then identifying as the skills that are going to need it in that future space? And so to this end, is like, employers also have a difficult time articulating exactly what does problem solving look like in the context of this job field, and what does communication look like or teamwork, et cetera. And I think what we try to do is to better understand what those skills actually look like versus the technical skills. Like you mentioned, you have to ask questions like, what does good communication look like for this particular role? How collaborative is that role? Are you working cross functionally? Are you mostly within the same roles within the field? What ways do you actually have to articulate and balance even things like inquiry versus advocacy? What are the things that are there communicating about? So are there ways to actually test effective communication on a particular topical area that's relevant to the field of work? What are the tools that they're likely to use in communication? So it's not just like, hey, can you write effective emails? Actually, we have a lot of communication tools, and it includes multiple different things, even visual communication and slides and presentation formats like that, that you have to also understand those components to really see how good communication actually is effective. That same can apply to even problem solving. It's like if you're talking about an engineering problem or an algorithmic problem in computer science, like your problem solving there is, “Hey, how well do you deal with polynomial equations? And how well do you apply calculus to new problems, et cetera? That's very different than solving a financial problem or solving some kind of organizational problem. In leadership, those are different dynamics. And so even starting to surface, like, what are the variables that problem solving is going to be incorporating into that role? And those are the types of things that we're asking such that even when it comes to the skill outcomes of what could be called liberal education, you have to go one step further to say the manifestation of this in this applied field looks like this. These are the kind of tools, these are the types of topics these are the types of engagement you're going to have with your working peers, if you will, so that you can understand what statistical analysis looks like in a particular field, or you can understand what dealing with ambiguity looks like in a technical field versus in a health field. You certainly can see, like, dealing with life and death situations versus, “Hey, did my recommendation engine work correctly in a technical field? And so that's what we're trying to do so that you don't have employers just saying, “Hey, you need to be effective communicator.” Well, I think I'm an effective communicator, but what does that look like in that role?Michael Horn:Super helpful. I love these conversations because I learn so much every time I have them. And I'm curious. You started to go here, right, of what effective communication looks like in a technical field might be very different from a healthcare field, might be very different from education, where you do a lot of work. How do these types of arrangements where you're working with employers, you're working with experts in the field, how do they sort of differ depending on the field size or the employer type or who might be hiring your graduates? Are there broad rules of thumb that the work looks different in different fields?This post is sponsored by:Scott Pulsipher:There are probably certain dynamics that we certainly consider in terms of how we engage with that particular field. And one of those, as you mentioned, is a pretty obvious one, which is, what's the total scale of the workforce need here? And to some degree, this gives us a sense as to how strategic is it, for example, and I'll just bring up like a teacher preparation example, is that there's a lot of work going on in terms of how you teach math. And what does math instruction look like right now? There's some pretty healthy debates about how you increase the effectiveness of that. Speaking as a parent of six children, trying to figure out the new way they were teaching math is like, I was thoroughly confused. And so, you have to think about these even pedagogical approaches to even the subject matter within teacher preparation so that we know that the skill sets that we're helping development develop are relevant to the way in which instruction is improving. There are other dynamics there, for example, in dealing with interpersonal dynamics, there are high stakes experiences that you have with parents and their children and administrators and teachers. And so that's an example of where designing that learning environment for us at WGU meant, how do we utilize things like virtual reality or augmented reality to lower the stakes and pressure for experiences that individual students need to have before they're thrown into that more high stakes experience in the workplace. And so you can start seeing and measuring the development of ambiguous situations or dealing with interpersonal dynamics or dealing with heated matters or heated issues where there's lack of clarity about what the right answer or who the right person or which person may be in the right. These are examples that we're dealing with there, so you can be more targeted. Now, I will say that that's where we're also leveraging certain things, which is, is this something that is broadly applicable? Meaning, can we see it across all regions, in all school districts, in all schools? Something like math instruction? What's the right approach to that? And how are you developing? Or the science of reading is one of those developing areas right now. What is that looking like? What is the adoption level? What kind of expert support do we have around those dynamics so that we can ensure we're doing it now? What we have to start also seeing is, where are the large scale employers that you can actually have successful rollout with this? And are there subject matters there within those employers that we need to have at the table to also help us design? What are the criterion reference assessments? To know whether competency has been demonstrated at a student level in a particular course in a program. And that's where you do have to see, even if it's a national thing, you need to be able to see it applied specifically to an individual student in a specific circumstance. And that's where these large scale employers give us a lot of experience, a lot of input, because they also see things that scale the same way we do. So it's not with a unit volume of ten individuals. It's like, no, it's thousands of individuals. Because we do want, in at least WGU's model, we want repeatability, we want consistency, we want fairness, because in a competency-based approach, we have to know that every graduate has demonstrated that competency against the specific skill sets, because if they don't, they won't be successful at every employer, in every region, in every locale. That's what we're really trying to solve for. And that can be very different than a community college that's working with a local set of employers with a narrower scope in terms of what the specific challenges they're meeting. And that's okay. It's just a different context for us at WGU, because we do just think a larger scale while also bringing it down to a unit of one as a student.Michael Horn:Makes a ton of sense. So, I want to start to dig into the mutual benefit side of this a little bit more. And one of the famous, maybe infamous, debates in higher ed, as you know, is who is the quote, unquote customer, if you will, of a college or university? And on the one hand, the argument would go, well, employers are actually the end customer because they receive the product in terms of the graduates in the form of, obviously, the students, and they pay their salaries, which is what in turn allows students to afford, if you will, the investment of tuition and so forth. On the other hand, it's kind of obvious that students feel like the customer. They're the ones often paying. They're consuming classes, they're consuming the teaching, the support and the like. So, it would stand to reason that they're the customer. How do you think about this sort of age-old question in higher ed?Scott Pulsipher:Yeah, it's certainly one of those for us, maybe at WGU, a little bit weird, as if somehow there's some tradeoff to be made there. And maybe that's the point of the idea of mutual benefit, is that, in fact, we think that there's significant, not overlap, like congruency in some way that exists between the customer of an individual and the customer of the workforce represented in employers. That we don't see it as a dichotomous kind of thing. But having said that, we probably do think about it more in a primary, secondary kind of context, meaning that at the end of the day, at the point of decision about whether someone pursues postsecondary education, that happens at an individual level, that even the debate about education is a public good that's in a pure economic definition of a public good. It doesn't meet that threshold of this non-exclusionary, non-rival risk thing, because most of all, the benefits fundamentally accrue to the individual first and to society as a positive externality, or to employers and workforce, which is they are getting talent that they need for their workforce. However, the individual is first making the decision as to whether it's in their interest to pursue that education. And so that's where we see the individual student. That individual is the primary beneficiary of everything that we do as an institution. Now, the reason that this is not mutually exclusive with serving employers as a customer is because the very thing that benefits the employer as a customer is serving that individual really well, that there is incredible alignment between those interests. Because when you're enabling an individual to have all the skills and competencies needed to actually traverse into opportunity or to access opportunity, it's the very skills that employers need to meet the talent for their workforce to advance their processes and practices and products into the future of what they're designing for. And so there's incredible alignment of the interest there. And so having said that, we think employers are still a secondary thing to the individual, meaning that in serving the individuals first, you ultimately serve employers. If you serve employers first, you won't necessarily serve the interests of the individual who really want a self determined life. They want to have a lifetime of progress and economic mobility and optionality around the opportunities they pursue. And the key to all that is acquiring the knowledge, skill, and ability to do so. And when they do so, certainly enough, you now, as an institution, could produce a volume of graduates with the skill sets that are needed to also help employers advance their workforce. And so that's where we see that true mutual benefit working is that serving the interests of one actually helps serve the interests of the other, and therefore they're, in fact, in complete complement to one another. But having said that, we are fundamentally about changing lives for the better by creating pathways to opportunity. And that requires an intense focus on serving the individual and then ultimately serving the employers as providing them the readied and skilled talent that they need for advancing their own strategic priorities, and the workforce aligned to that.Michael Horn:So, let's maybe talk about those outcomes then, in that order, right? Students first and then the employer second, because in your impact reports that you put out annually, you measure both the satisfaction and life outcomes of the students, but you're also measuring the satisfaction and outcomes for employers. Talk to us about your results, what you've learned, why it's so important to measure both of these things. And perhaps my sense is that you doing so, you delivering for both is what has driven so much of the organic growth, the word of mouth referral, right. That has driven the growth of WGU more broadly.Scott Pulsipher:Yeah, that's right. I think this fundamental mutual benefit was even captured, I think, a study by Strada that highlighted that nearly 80% of all Americans say they pursued their highest level of education in order to support themselves and their families into the opportunity. So, they themselves were making this connection that existed between the advancing of my life means I have to acquire those skills that align me with the opportunity. And so, we know for the promise of education as a pathway to opportunity, it has to deliver that value proposition for both the individual and for the employer. And so, you're right, which is if we look at our surveys from Gallup and our partnership with them for over ten years, among our graduates, as you mentioned, like our net promoter score of our graduates is 74. Fully 95% of all of our graduates have referred a friend or colleague to WGU. That gives you a real sense that they are making an estimation that was worth the cost, that I actually had faculty that encouraged my dreams, aspirations, that I was ready for success in the opportunity I want to pursue. And that's some of the data that we have that says 77% of them say my education was worth the cost. And that's compared to a national average of 35%. We see that if you ask them even around graduates, are you thriving in all dimensions of well-being? 60% of our graduates were thriving in two or more, and I think it's consistently shown that graduates of WGU were more than twice as likely to be thriving in all five dimensions of well-being relative to their national peers. Now, on the employer side of that, you have to know whether the graduates that they're hiring are, in fact, possessing the skills and competencies needed for their job. And certainly one of the coolest indicators is that 92% of all employers say that our graduates are performing excellent or very good relative to the job. Or 99% of employers say that our WGU grads meet or exceed expectations. And fully 95% of them say that they would hire a WGU graduate again. And that's this sense that they know that they can keep coming back to WGU graduates as a source of the talent that they need into the jobs they're filling. And there's some other long-term benefits to this, Michael, I think, which is we already know how many challenges exist around the cost of education. We also know that other trends have shown the declining employer perception of the readiness of graduates across the sector for the jobs of the future. But we also know that employers are investing heavily in the development of their talent, like the individuals they have. They're trying to invest in education. They're trying to invest in training and development because they know that they have to up level the skill sets that are needed for the future. And when we're delivering on that kind of value proposition, we also see employers engaging more in funding that education, too, as an alternative to even federal financial aid programs. They want to deploy well, the money they're committing to education, benefits to those programs and pathways that they know the graduates in completing them are going to be directly aligned with the skills that they need and the jobs that they're trying to up-level their employees into. And so, we even think it has that benefit to say for an employer now making an economic considerations like “Oh, yeah. Was that worth our cost to invest in that education?” Absolutely, it is, if I know that greater than 92% of the outcome are meeting or exceeding expectations, actually exceeding expectations. So that is a great economic value proposition for employers, and I think that will continue to change even the dynamic as to how do individuals fund their education that they need.Michael Horn:Okay, so clear mutual benefit, as we wrap up here, last question, which is, how do you represent this idea of mutual benefit to the other constituencies you work with beyond the employers and students? So, specifically your faculty and other employees? Because, as you know, traditional higher ed, which you are not, but nonetheless traditional higher ed, they aren't exactly known for wanting to serve employers and students both well at the same time. So how are you all attracting the right people, educating them around the importance of serving both of these constituencies and really making the students priority one and employers following right behind?Scott Pulsipher:Yeah, you really can't serve one without serving the other. I mean, you have to serve both really well. Otherwise, your value proposition of education is the surest path to opportunity kind of falls apart. And so, it requires that, and I think you're absolutely spot on. And this may be an interesting answer to most of the listeners or the viewers here, because it does start with certain core beliefs that are at the center of, or foundational to everything that we do. And those core beliefs start with the inherent worth of every individual, and that if given the opportunity, everyone has something big to contribute their innate capacity for learning and growth. And even that phrase that we've heard, which is talent, is universal, but even if opportunity is abundant, the pathways or bridges to them are not equally universal to the talent. That also, as a core belief says, well, education is in fact, a catalyst for people to change their lives for better. It is a means to an end, meaning it helps people project or telegraph themselves into opportunity. And so for us, I think how we really communicate that mutual benefit, it started very clearly with the mission statement around, we change lives for the better by creating pathways to opportunity. That is what we are about to do. That it means that you have to deliver that value, both for the individual and for the workforce, the employers for that promise to work. The second thing is that we were really clear about our key results, and you can see that in all of our transparent outcomes, which our key results are really simple. For it to be a pathway and a promise, like, well, you got to complete it. So our first key result is completion. The second is having completed it, a better, actually result in opportunity and a great return. So you have to measure, like, are the completers of that actually achieving what they need. If you increase completion and you ensure relevancy, you're delivering on that promise. Our third key result is really important for higher ed generally and WGU specifically, is that promise has to work for everyone. So, equity is a key endeavor that we want to make sure that promise is working for everyone. What does that mean for our employees, for example? You have to be really aligned with those core beliefs. You can't elevate your worth over someone else's. You can't think that we want to serve a certain type of individual versus another, like, “Oh, no, we are about fundamentally changing lives for the better. And nothing qualified you for that work, nor nothing excluded you from that work. You are human, and therefore we endeavor to serve you.” And that's even how we try to align all of our own people and employee practices to say, you are just like our students, that you are invited to do this work to advance your own life. We also project that messaging and positioning to employers. Like, when you're really thinking about hiring and developing the talent you have, how are you actually helping them progress and grow and develop? We certainly are trying to persuade those across the sector to say, “Hey, all the investments we're making in higher education, they really should be about helping these individuals be successful.” And when we're doing that, we also know we're actually advancing workforce and therefore society and the communities that comprise that society. That's how we try to communicate that. And we do that internally across our town halls, our all hands, all of our storytelling around this, all of the alumni, one by one stories, et cetera, to where all of our culture, beliefs, and our leadership principles are effectively written and designed and practiced in a way to amplify that mutual benefit mission. And I think we're trying to be really transparent about that impact. It becomes pretty simple for us to measure, and we're really clear about who we're serving and how we try to measure that impact. And that singularity of focus, I think, becomes incredibly empowering for all the things we're trying to do.Michael Horn:Makes a ton of sense. Scott Pulsipher Western Governors University with a master class, dare I say, on mutual benefit and how you all are designing for students and employers. Really appreciate the ongoing work that you're doing and that you came on to share about it with our listeners.Scott Pulsipher:It's been really a pleasure, and we always love to tell the story of WGU and the ideas that originated and the ambition that we continue to pursue. And we certainly hope to impact the lives of every individual and doing that hundreds of thousands of times.The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Thank you for subscribing. 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Curt Ellis and Rob Harvey, Co-CEOs of FoodCorps, an AmeriCorps program that partners with schools and policymakers to build access to healthy school meals and food education, joined me discuss why good food is in fact central to the work of schools, how food education and meal choice build agency in students, and the debate on universal school meal assistance programs. As always, subscribers can listen to to the conversation, watch it 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 Topic2:28 Curt’s journey to founding FoodCorps4:43 Rob’s path to the work 9:07 Why food is central to the work of schools15:13 How food can build agency in students18:43 How FoodCorps works 22:34 The current state of food in schoolsMichael Horn:Delighted you're joining us on the show that is dedicated to building a world in which all individuals can fulfill their human potential, live a life of purpose, dig into their passions, and to help us think about that today, I'm incredibly excited to have two folks who run an organization called FoodCorps, which they're going to tell us more about. But one of them is one of my college friends, Curt Ellis, and the other is his co-CEO, Rob Harvey. So, first, without further ado, both of you welcome. It is great to see you.Rob Harvey:Thanks for having us, Michael.Michael Horn:So, Curt knows this, but those tuning in, this is incredibly exciting for me because obviously, I've been on my own journey and information gathering around the importance of nutrition as a key equation into wellness—not just health, but actually wellness and self actualization— but also in education because I think it's a critical ingredient. But I want you all to make that case for it. And let's just start at the very surface level so people can sort of ground themselves. What is FoodCorps and what are you doing with schools?Curt Ellis:Yeah. FoodCorps is a justice organization, a national nonprofit that works through a range of strategies to help schools become places where kids experience food as a daily source of health and power and joy. And we do that work through direct programming. We have a nationwide team of a couple hundred AmeriCorps members who are either working at the school level building school gardens, teaching hands on lessons about food with kids, or at the district level, where they're helping shift what's on school lunch trays to make that food more scratch-cooked, more locally sourced, more culturally affirming for the kids in that community. Then we do a lot of leadership development and power building work with our key constituents so that we can make a national movement that shifts policy at both the state and federal level. Because our dream is that by 2030, every child in this country should have access to food education, and to free, nourishing meals in school every day.Michael Horn:Anything you'd add, Rob? That's a pretty good sum there.Rob Harvey:Curt, great summary.Michael Horn:Terrific. Well, let's, let's dive into both your pathways there. And, Curt, I'll start with you just because you're the founder and I know that you left college and immediately jumped on this set of questions around our food sources more generally. Why don't you tell the audience about that and then how it led to you to founding FoodCorps?Curt Ellis:Sure. I got really interested in food as a prism where you peer into this thing and you see our nation's greatest challenges refracted. You see challenges of public health. You see racial and social injustice. You see environmental sustainability. Food really is at the center of so many of the things that matter. And I got excited about figuring out how I could contribute to what was, in the early two thousands, a kind of emergent debate around how we farm and how we feed ourselves in this country. So, with my best friend and a cousin of mine who was a filmmaker, I moved out to Iowa for a couple of years and made a film there called King Corn that told the story of a lot of what is broken in America's relationship to food. And as I was traveling around the country showing this film to folks, I visited 100 college campuses, and everywhere I went there were more and more young people showing up who were really passionate about food and saw it as the same kind of nexus of issues that matter in our time. And those young people wanted to get into careers making a difference, shifting our food system to be more just and more healthful and more sustainable. But there was no real pathway into careers in that field. And so, it was Earth Day, 2009, I was at a food justice conference in California, and I saw President Obama on a TV screen in my hotel room when I was having my morning coffee. He was signing some legislation into law that directed new resources to AmeriCorps and challenged Americorps to address some particular issues, and child well-being was one of those. And I thought, here's the chance to go start an AmeriCorps for food. And that's what we've done. Our work since then has really become rooted in justice and work that is about not just direct impact, but systems change.Michael Horn:Very good. And, Rob, tell us about your own journey there. You're obviously recently announced as the co-CEO. Tell us a little bit about your background and how you came into this organization and how this became an important issue from your perspective as well.Rob Harvey:Sure, yeah, so I enter into this work from the vantage point of an educator. I started my career teaching young folks primarily in independent day schools across New England. So schools that benefit from scratch-cooked locally sourced meals on a daily basis by chefs who are very responsive to the needs of kids, and then took a pivot in my career to serve historically black colleges in Louisville, Kentucky, before making a transition into the public charter school world, where I served in both Memphis and in East Harlem, and the throughline that entered into my life that ultimately landed me at FoodCorps was a question around the conditions of well-being. And having to ask, from the moment I arrived in Louisville serving 99% 1st generation black students who all qualify for Pell Grant, which mean they all came from lower socioeconomic context, was a question of what are the conditions of well-being that institutions and communities of learning must take seriously in order to produce young folks in the world who are global citizens, democratically advancing, justice oriented, but also just well - well in their bodies, well in their minds, well in their states of navigating deep intersectional traumas and poverties. And a part of my own personal research as I developed that question, in my mind, was going really deep with the Black Panther party and really wrapping my head around their early iterations of making sense of the food question for children through breakfast before school every day, as a lover of justice, but as a lover of well-being. And that then led me to research Dr. King's ladder work, where he was deeply committed to that intersection of classism and racism. And there was one quote in particular that he offered at a speech at the Atlanta club, where he said that he had the audacity to believe that everybody can have three meals a day for their education. And it was an anchoring moment for me that I have the audacity to believe the same thing. And then leading a network of schools through COVID, that question got crystallized in terms of its importance. And I will never forget when we shut down all of our buildings, March 12th 2020, my one year anniversary of leading that network, the first question we paused to have to wrestle with was feeding children and feeding children every single day, including children who were in the household that did not go to our schools, including family members who were in the household, who were adults, who we know were going to have economic lapses in their capacity to provide for their families. And all of that, as I was reflecting on what my next moment of impact needed to be in the world, led me to FoodCorps and led me to making sense of the fact that schools and communities of learning have a responsibility as one of the most centralized places of well-being and daily life for kids to answer that question to the best of their capacity.Michael Horn:So, Rob, just stay there for a moment, because I'm curious how you and Curt connected. Was FoodCorps in the charter schools? Did you go seek it out because you had this puzzle that you had to figure out, what's the right organization to make that impact at scale? How did you all find each other? Rob Harvey:So, the answer to those questions are no. And no, that FoodCorps was not a part of my ecosystem to be fully transparent. I had never heard of it before stumbling upon it. And I truly stumbled upon it through a friend of mine who knew the question I was holding around what I wanted to do in terms of impact. And, literally, through a LinkedIn search of my friend who said, “Yo, I see this organization is looking for a president, and you're raising some of these questions. They seem to be trying to navigate some of these same questions and give it a shot.” And literally, and Curt knows this, of all the things I was pursuing and questioning in the world, it was the only non-executive-search-led thing I decided to pursue. And here we are.The Why Behind FoodCorpsMichael Horn:Let's shift into the why behind what you all do. And I want to come at it from this vantage point, which—and, Rob, you probably hear this all the time because I suspect we know a lot of charter leaders in common in New York City, and I hear it from them a lot of times—is sort of, the schools ought to stick to their knitting, stay in their lane. Yes, there's a lot of basic needs in the world, but schools try to do too much as it is. So why, in both of your views, is food a critical part of the school equation? Let's put it that way.Rob Harvey:Yeah, I'm happy to start. So, I have heard sentiments like that many times from colleagues and even dear friends of mine. And my response has always been, we made a decision at the beginning of the creation of a public education infrastructure. For every indicator that impacts a life to be a part of our knitting. You cannot build a public based infrastructure that sits inside of community that holds lives in its care, often in more hours than the persons who gave birth or who made decisions to raise children, and then say, there are elements of those lives that are not our responsibility. And so I am a deep believer that anytime an institution, a community, sits inside of a place-based context, it is making an intentional decision to take seriously the issues of that place. So, we take seriously the issues of health, we take seriously the issues of housing, we take seriously the issues of food, because we are, in fact, choosing to care for life, at minimum, eight and a half hours a day, at maximum, sometimes 12 hours a day, more waking hours, again, than the people who either birthed and or made decisions to care for those children. And so I see it as built into the fabric of taking seriously the word public. It is a core belief of mine, which begins, you'll probably start hearing my kind of, like, black panther sentiment, that to take seriously the word public means to take seriously every element of the individual human experience that can show up in public context. And so, when we see a child who is hungry, when we see a child who lacks high quality, nourishing meals in their home, we don't have the option, nor do we have the right, the R-I-G-H-T to say that that is not within the fabric of our concern. To then produce a child who is academically and cognitively well in the world. In fact, the opposite is true. That in order to take seriously our knitting quote, unquote, we have to then say, a child will never be able to perform to their highest ability, never be able to internalize content, never be able to do critical analysis, never be able to make sense of math, never be able to do cross content connections, if, in fact, what I'm thinking about from the moment I walked in school is, oh, I will love a meal. And so we have an opportunity to say, in order to do what we actually do well, there are certain conditions that need to be like criteria, pre criteria met for that child. Have I eaten? Did I rest in a place last night that was safe enough for me to have lower anxiety levels? And do I feel like I have enough understanding of my bodily reality to be able to navigate what's put in front of me?Michael Horn:So, Curt, Rob just made basically the case that I think I often make when I have this conversation, at the end, which is if we have these other expectations for the performance and learning of children, you have to make sure that the base case is taken care of at minimum. But I think it's deeper than that. I'd love you just to expound a little bit about how food and nutrition tie into these broader areas of student health, academic performance, sense of belonging within school communities and the like. Curt Ellis:Sure, the research is clear what a child eats and whether they have enough food, and whether that food is high quality enough and supports their health and well-being, that trajectory shapes a person for their lifetime. We have a $1.4 trillion economic problem in our country caused by the way we eat. And $400 billion of that is the kind of obvious stuff we point to in the world of medical care for folks who are not supported in being well. But a trillion dollars a year is lost economic productivity. It's lost potential, it's lost opportunity for kids and grownups who are out sick more at school and at work to attain less education and advance less in their careers, and who are going to be forced out of the workforce younger, with fewer of their dreams fulfilled. And that is not an individual failing by people. That is a societal failing in the systems we put around kids. And the reality is, the school system is the single greatest lever we have to make change on those issues. There are seven times more school cafeterias in America than there are McDonald's. Children spend half their waking hours and often eat half their daily calories in school. In every single community, the most important place where food and health happen is a school building. And so, we have a tremendous opportunity to start seeing food not as some kind of cost center that education stakeholders should minimize. Let's cut to the minimum amount of time for lunch. Let's cut to the minimum amount of spend on the meals, but actually see it as a value center, see it as an impact center. If we invest in food, it becomes a tool for joy and power and health and agency and belonging for kids. That is tremendously powerful. And it's a pretty extraordinary teaching tool, too. There's no better way to teach a kid than to give them that tactile, experiential chance to grapple with something they're learning in science class or math class, in a garden or cooking class, where they're actually living with it, with their variance.Food Builds Student AgencyMichael Horn:I want to circle back to that in a moment, but I want to stay on something you just said and direct this to Rob, because you mentioned agency. And so now we're starting to go beyond academic knowledge and skills and into what I like to call the habits of success and agency building in a child. A sense of agency, I think, is one of the most important things that schools can and should be doing. Rob, in your view, how does food connect to building an individual's, and, indeed, a generation's sense of agency?Rob Harvey:Yeah, absolutely. So, I agree with you. We often are using a phrase called habits of practice. And a habit of practice that we believe at FoodCorps that I believe schools also should take seriously, is a young person's ability to make sense of and therefore make decisions that impact their own lives. So, when we think about some of the higher order outcomes of schooling, the higher order outcomes of teaching and learning communities, it is, does that child have the belief within themselves that they have the knowledge, they have the tools, and they have the analysis to be able to make decisions informed by knowledge that are most meaningful to them? So, when we think about what shows up on a lunch tray, when we think about a child's sense of knowledge about where food comes from, when we think about the menu design that's happening in cafeterias, those are three opportunities at core that allows the child to be able to use their sense of agency - again born of knowledge - to determine what works for them and what they don't. And so what we care about at FoodCorps is by giving children food education, by taking them on a journey of learning. From where a carrot comes from, where and how lettuce is grown. And how that then results in a dish that is culturally affirming. A dish that gives them joy. A dish that also takes care of their physiological well-being. That child begins to navigate a world of agency in their mind. Where when they leave the corridors of their school, they have knowledge to be able to make decisions in community. Around what they will eat and what they won't eat around what they enjoy and what they don't enjoy around what gives them that sense of comfort and belonging on a plate. But it is informed by having opportunities to make those kinds of decisions in the school environment. And what I will offer is that when we think about the universal experience of agency. The thing that everybody can participate in, every single child can participate in the agency of choosing what shows up on their plate. Every single child can participate in activating that sense of internal power. Which for us is also an equity and justice lever. That when you don't have agency in so many other areas of your life. Namely, if you're black or brown, born in densely metropolitan urban communities, but you have agency to decide what you eat on a daily basis, it is one of the greatest senses of joy and power that we believe food can instill. For young people who know quite well where they don't have agency in the rest of their lives, that I can at least stake my individual power in my cafeteria on a daily basis, twice a day, for what shows up on my plate. That's an amazing sense of power being unlocked.The Nuts and Bolts of the WorkMichael Horn:It's so interesting, and it's often actually so different from the way we think about kids. And what power they do have over their food choices often in households, unfortunately. I love that take on it, Curt. Let's talk a little bit about the work itself. And what you all are doing in FoodCorps to make a dent in the ways that you all have been talking about. How many schools are you in? What are those programs like? What does it look like to grow the food in maybe an urban school, and the life cycle of not just growing and then eating but learning through those gardens. Get us a little more concrete in the “what.” Curt Ellis:So, FoodCorps serves, at our direct level, a couple hundred schools and districts across 17 states. Our work in those places is either or both of school-level work where we're helping put in place great hands-on food education for kids that advances mastery through food literacy, work that advances agency through the kind of things Rob's talking about, getting kids involved in reshaping the menu, giving kids the skills they need to grow food that then can show up in their schools, and belonging. Because we work to help kids have an experience of food in school that lifts up and celebrates the beautiful cultures that are present in that particular place. That's our school-level work. Our district level work is really about supporting menu change. We embed AmeriCorps members within school nutrition teams where they help districts make the conversion to scratch cooking, make the conversion to having more locally sourced, farm direct, minimally processed fresh fruits and vegetables coming in, and make the shift to student driven, culturally affirming menus by doing recipe development and making sure the link between things that are getting tested or voted on by kids then get shown up at large scale in school lunch menus. That direct impact work is all organized around the multi-year goals of our school and district partners. We really see ourselves as being in service of what the local vision is for how food education and great nourishing meals in school can be advanced from that direct impact work. We do a lot of leadership development work, in particular work with FoodCorps alums, with children and families and caregivers to help them find and exercise more of their agency around food in school. And with BIPOC school nutrition leaders, we convene a really extraordinary network called FOLCS, Food Operators and Leaders of Color in schools who's an intergenerational peer mentoring space and creative space for visionary and entrepreneurial school nutrition leaders to advance in their careers and bring fresh thinking to their communities. Then we do a lot of policy work. It's both state level, in places where FoodCorps is the right organization to lead in that work or federal level. And our policy goals are really organized around making school meals free for every student and then elevating what those school meals look like through support for scratch cooking. So, we advocate for additional funding for cafeteria infrastructure and school kitchen infrastructure. Local sourcing, so we in Connecticut just got a great win through the coalition we're a part of there that introduces local purchasing incentives. So, if schools and districts are buying food from local farms, they get some additional resourcing to do that and bring that beautiful, fresh, healthy food into schools. And we invest in the food education workforce and the school nutrition workforce. From a policy standpoint, all of those add up to a future where we believe every kid can and should have free, nourishing meals in school and access to hands on food education.Michael Horn:Gotcha. And so, I think the natural question then is, as you started to segue into some of the policy work and establishing the conditions for what you do, is, what is the state like? How would you characterize it - beyond the direct schools and districts you are supporting - how would you characterize the state of food and nutrition education in schools across the country? And maybe, Rob, a question for you out of that is the state of understanding of leaders of these districts and systems, of the importance of this lever and component of a child's well-being.Curt Ellis:I'll start by naming three underlying dynamics that I think are in play. And then we'd love to hear from Rob. I think there has been progress in very significant ways what we've seen in school meals since the kind of low point of the 1980s when decreased funding for school meal programs very significantly, declaring ketchup a vegetable, moving everything to be heat-and-serve kind of operation. We've seen the rise of a lot of really beautiful practices, farm to school practices, school garden practices, scratch cooking on the rise. So, progress is, part one, that march of progress is really real and happening and should be celebrated. Part two is it's a time of real pressure. School leaders are, of course, under extraordinary pressure to regain the academic ground that was lost during the pandemic. And that often is resulting in things like shorter lunch periods or less time for experiential learning in school gardens or a divestment of meal quality at a time when inflation and labor shortages are putting a lot of pressure on what schools and districts can serve to kids. And then the third element is potential. There is amazing work happening in state-level policy right now, in particular, that is unlocking free school meals for children across eight states at this point, and more getting ready to line up for that expansion and really exciting investments in things like California is doing basically a wholesale conversion to scratch cooking right now. Like really extraordinary investment in professional development for school nutrition professionals so that they can cook fresh, healthy meals using fresh, local ingredients. So those are the three things I'd lift up. Progress and pressure and potential all kind of crashing together right now.Michael Horn:Rob, as you start to answer what leaders recognition of those levers is, I'd love you to also just dig into one part of what Curt just said, which is, and I see this, too, where a school leader will say, or district will say, gee, we got to have shorter lunch periods because that's what's going to get math learning back. Or, gee, it's not just, frankly, food, right? I'll see. Gee, you were acting out, therefore I'm taking your recess away. And that impacts movement and physical health in my mind. How does that connection play out? How are leaders learning about this? Are they learning about the importance of these elements?Rob Harvey:Yes, it's a great question. And what I am finding in conversations with colleagues is that answer is why that on average, most school leaders, particularly those who are operating schools in contexts that have deep literacy gaps, have deep opportunity gaps, are not prioritizing food education and prioritizing the food experience, and in part born of their own trauma, of expectation, of accountability built into the state and built into federal resourcing. And so, to some degree, I have great grace and understanding for school leaders who are struggling to figure out how to prioritize food ed amidst a set of competing priorities. When you have to submit your annual report card to the state authorizer or to the accrediting body, then nowhere on that report card does it say, how's food education happening with your 10,000 kids? And because you don't have to answer that question, but you do have to make a case of how you are demonstrating literacy gains and demonstrating math gains in order to not risk the school, school leaders are immensely stuck. And so what happens is we wind up relying on, and therefore defaulting to very conventional notions that time equates to progress, right? That if we cut this to add more time to math and students will all of a sudden learn more, versus a posture I took when I was leading schools, which is, it is not amount of time in isolation, but it is, in fact, practices that are happening. So if we lean into bodies of knowledge that we know about science, of reading, we know that we don't actually need a two hour block for an effective internalization to happen around literacy, that we can give a child 40 minutes to eat and enjoy community with their colleagues and with their friends and still see demonstrated gains. I'm a firm believer, though, that what it will take is it will take a set of school leaders to be willing to make the risk to go see another model. And oftentimes, one of the very things that prevents school leaders from being able to take this journey is low social exposure, is that when you don't have the visibility of exposure, that two things can in fact be true at the same time. Then your consciousness gets stuck in the cycle of trauma. But there are so many leaders and school leaders who I will name who have taken the risk. And when I talked to them, most of them said I was visiting a school and I saw children playing in the garden and I realized I wanted my kids to have the same thing. Or I was talking to a colleague at a conference and I heard that they had just built a hydroponic farm in one of their unused classrooms. And I decided I want my children to be able to see fresh fruit and vegetables growing in a classroom. And so, we have an opportunity to continue to increase exposure through conversations like this and others where school leaders can in fact give themselves the spaciousness to pause and ask, can something else in fact be true? Is there an alternative way for me to take this journey with my young people? And then lastly, to what you raised up about like recess and others, because we have increasing intersecting traumas, namely post a COVID world, we are seeing more and more schools default to more body policing methods that take away senses of joy and power and agency for children. And again, these reactions are reactions born of a set of leaders who are often up against the wall every day with a set of questions and a set of demands that transcend their expertise area. And so, it requires high social exposure, it requires deep conversational engagement with alternative methods, and it requires work like FoodCorps to show up and show teachers and to show administrators and to show district leaders we have an alternative that can do multiple things at one time, that can be both a literacy moment for your young people and a hands-on moment, and a joy filled moment, and a moment of agency. Oh, and a moment of mastery and a family engagement moment, and a math moment all in one lesson. And that becomes a great unlock.Are Universal School Meals a Good Idea?Michael Horn:I love so much of that. I'm going to dig in a little bit here, too, because I feel like what I'm learning is I love the way you give empathy and understanding for why this is occurring. And the importance of high social exposure seems a critical element so that we can change the narrative of instead of these allocations of time being in competition with each other in some sort of sense of zero sum, instead we say, actually, good food and nutrition works toward your reading and math goals. Good food and nutrition, actually, by the way, especially when born in a scratch kitchen where you're designing menus and things of that nature, is going to give you an exposure to language and literacy that is going to improve you in the long run. It's going to more science opportunities that's going to improve your literacy as well. I mean, that's a whole other conversation. The cutting of social studies and science in favor of larger reading and math blocks. When we know literacy, after you learn how to read, becomes knowledge, which means all the other areas. So, it's so much I love here. I guess I want to end with both of you in terms of the policy piece that you touched on and the curiosity I guess I have there is twofold. And just because I've kept you both over what I said I would, I'll try to combine it, which is always dangerous. But I'm curious. One of my perspectives seems to be sometimes we've put into place policies that seem good toward valuing good local sources of food and have unintended consequences. Sometimes I'm curious for you just to sort of name what you've seen in that area and what a more helpful policy framework or orientation might be so that we can sort of end on principles. And I guess the second one, you've mentioned this a couple times, Curt, about the universality piece of this. Eight states, I think you named - Massachusetts is one of them, where I am - to go to universal school meals and the like. And I'm just sort of curious, the tradeoffs there, because it struck me - just to be direct, kids in my household have a lot of resources going toward their meals and nutrition and education and others don't. And so I'm just sort of curious, the tradeoffs between, or the logic for universality versus more targeted for those who maybe need the resources the most. And I'm just sort of curious how you both think about that.Curt Ellis:I started on the tradeoffs piece because I think the logic framing you offered makes more sense to me than the tradeoffs framing. That's because the value of making school meals free for every child is that it fundamentally changes the role of food in school. It goes from being some kind of service that is offered to kids who qualify or something we charge other kids for. It goes from being a business that is in the business of trying to make money to being a part of the educational experience. It is a part of what every school can then provide to every child is a shared and communal experience, gathering around the table, breaking bread, and finding common ground. That's a powerful thing that we deeply need in this country, and we need it to start in our schools.Rob Harvey:Yeah, I second that. And I continue to hold where I opened up, which is that when we think about the dimensions of classism that have continued in public context, when you remove the mind that those kids need it and my kids don't, you also lower the stakes by saying, what does it look like to say that this value of a nourishing meal is in fact the place where income stops being a marker of difference in a context that is meant to be public and communal in the first place? So, let's build a community that is built on public ideals and democratic concepts. But let's also keep one factor in place that reminds children on a regular basis of the class that they are not a part of, because these folks can pay. Let's just make sure that it's universal for these sets of children. It in fact increases to some degree. This is the counter logic right of isms and phobias. It actually increases my sensibility of being on the underclass of a thing when it is free for me and people who share my economic reality. But I have friends who pay for it regularly, and therefore there is still something that divides us fundamentally twice a day, versus in this context, I go home knowing my point of difference. I go home having to live through my ism. But in this context, in this community, I actually get the freedom of liberation to not be reminded for at least 8 hours that something does in fact divide us. That that is in fact one of the highest embodiments of the democratic ideal. That can we create the conditions for people to transcend the isms that we know they have to carry in their daily lives outside of this place? Can we at least give them the opportunity to lower that sense of trauma for 8 hours a day while they're in community with their friends?Michael Horn:I think that's a really beautiful place to leave the conversation. Rob, Curt, really appreciate you joining me, doing what you're doing for kids and communities in schools all across the country, and the continued work that FoodCorps will do. Thanks so much for being with me.Rob Harvey:Thanks, Michael, for having us.Curt Ellis:Thanks, Michael.The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.

Timothy Knowles, President of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, joins Diane and Michael to discuss how this historic foundation looks to drive the future of American education. On K–12, they discuss why Carnegie has partnered with ETS and why they are seeking to assess a broader array of skills—not just focus on the standards that are already assessed. They also dive into Carnegie’s push to undo the Carnegie Unit and move toward a competency-based system. Knowles also shares details on the Foundation’s efforts to prioritize social and economic mobility in higher ed by changing how they classify colleges and universities.  As always, subscribers can listen, watch 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 Topic2:45. Background on the Carnegie Foundation7:30  Tim’s journey to the work 10:19 Partnership with ETS to measure new education outcomes24:35 Moving beyond the Carnegie unit toward a competency-based system31:11 Classification of higher ed institutions36:25 The Carnegie Postsecondary CommissionDiane Tavenner:Hey Michael.Michael Horn:Hey Diane.Diane Tavenner:Well, we are fully in the holiday season at this point, and I'm super curious. A couple of clips away from the big part of COVID, are you noticing or experiencing anything different this year?Michael Horn:Oh, yes, we are. We are hosting constantly, it seems. We have had one of my kids’ entire class and all their friends over. We've had parties galore, and it seems like it's never going to stop. We're going to do it apparently straight through New Year's. So that feels like a big difference. As you know, we've been renovating our house. That's basically done. COVID basically done. Knock on wood that there's nothing else coming. And so there we are. And here we are in this, our fifth season, still working through some of the sticky issues in K-12  education, all the way into how it impacts higher education and lifelong learning, frankly, and trying to give people a different vantage point on how to think about these intractable—historically—issues. And I guess the last thing to say is, as listeners know, this year we're doing a lot more guests, a little less of Diane, Michael, a little bit more of people out there doing some really interesting work. And today you have invited a guest, Diane, who is doing a lot of interesting work. Diane Tavenner:That could not be more true, Michael. It is my great pleasure to have invited Tim Knowles here today to be with us. He's the president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning. And as you know, I am really privileged to sit on the board of that foundation. And so I have a really front row seat to the ambitious agenda that the foundation is undertaking. So much of what Tim and the team are seeking to tackle relates to the topics that you and I have been talking about on all of these seasons here, on Class Disrupted. And so I just thought it would be really fun to go back and dig into some of those, like, seat time, competency-based learning, assessment, accountability, but through the lens of a really historic foundation that has a really ambitious, modern agenda and has had really profound impacts on our schools that I don't think most people realize or understand. And so I'm super excited for this conversation. Tim, welcome.Timothy Knowles:Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.Michael Horn:Yeah, well, we're incredibly excited. I was really thrilled when Diane told me she was going to extend the invite. And before we dive into the work that you're doing now that Diane just alluded to, I know that the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning has a long and pretty storied history. Can you tell us a little bit about the organization and why it has mattered to K-12 education in this country?Timothy Knowles:Sure. So, Carnegie Foundation is 120 years old and it's been instrumental to a wide range of educational things. The first thing it did, literally the first thing it did was create TIA, now TIA CREF, the largest retirement fund for teachers, professors, and people working across the social sector. It then created the pesky Carnegie Unit, or the Course Credit, the bedrock currency of our educational economy, which I expect we might get into a little bit further. And it's done other important things through its history. It created Pell Grants, it created standards for engineering, law, medicine, and schools of education. And more recently, it introduced improvement science, known colloquially as continuous improvement, to the education sector. But big picture, it's an institution which has, or I like to think of it as an institution which has, looking around the corner in its DNA. It's identifying levers to press, to improve both the quality of K-12 and the post-secondary sector, to incubate things, and to bring them to life at a scale that's persuasive. And today our stake is firmly in the ground for first-generation underrepresented and low-income young people nationwide.Diane Tavenner:Well, and that is one of the many reasons that I really appreciate being able to be on the board and be a small part of what Tim and the team are working on. The only thing that I would add is I was really surprised to learn when I joined the board that it's the first nonprofit in America. It was enacted by Congress and became the first nonprofit in America. So, many of us who work in education, I think, take nonprofit entities and organizations for granted. And here's the founding member of that team. So just a really fascinating, long, long history.Timothy Knowles:I look really good for 120, don't I?Michael Horn:Better every day.Diane Tavenner:Interestingly, for how old it is…Are you president number eleven?Timothy Knowles:Ten. Diane Tavenner:I mean, not a lot of presidents.Michael Horn:That's impressive.Diane Tavenner:Tim, you just alluded to it. For the last stretch of time under the previous president, because you've been here at the Foundation for a couple of years now, the Foundation was really focused on improvement science. And one of the interesting elements of this Foundation is that the current president really gets to define, has the full latitude to define the agenda. And so under Tony Bryk, that's when I joined and when a whole vibrant improvement science community really formed. You're continuing that. You believe deeply in improvement science and have a long history of it as a method for how we do our work, but then have layered this really ambitious agenda on top. I want to start with one of those meta outcomes. There's a few of them that you're driving to, and that is to accelerate social and economic mobility and achieve equity across the educational sector. And you just alluded to this. Earlier in this season, we had Todd Rose on the podcast and he shared a number of findings that suggest that a majority of Americans are really starting to question the ROI of four-year college and even our K-12 education system.And that they have this perception that education has become the end goal versus sort of a means to achieving a good life, economic security, freedom, however you want to say that. And this big outcome that you're talking about seems to be in tune with the sentiments of the American public, if you will. So will you talk to us about why this big meta outcome is important to the foundation and honestly, what you think can be done about it?Timothy Knowles:So I'm going to start with a sort of personal reflection about that. My first job as a teacher was teaching Southern African history in Botswana, and it was before apartheid fell. And so by day I taught a fundamentally emancipatory history curriculum, and by evening and by weekend, I was involved more directly in what was then known simply as the Struggle. I had the opportunity about 25 years later to visit South Africa, which I hadn't traveled to, when it was free. And I met with artists and activists and clergy like Desmond Tutu involved on the ground in the Struggle. And to a person, literally to a person, they said it was teachers, students, and professors who broke the back of apartheid. From a personal perspective, if educators were responsible for that, our work here to accelerate economic and social mobility and achieve equity seems eminently doable. I guess I would also say personally that I want to live in a nation and I want young people to live in a nation. Whether you grew up on Navajo Nation or in rural Appalachia or in the South Side of Chicago, you have the opportunity, legitimate opportunity, to lead a healthy and dignified life. I'm much less interested in arguments about the particular kind of school you attend public, private, charter, home school, or the time it takes to finish high school or a postsecondary degree. I care much more about how to build systems that enable millions more young people to possess the knowledge and skills that they need to lead purposeful lives. I know for your listeners, there are some out there who are going to be persuaded more by data about why social and economic mobility matter. There was a study, just to cite one study, there was a study by the Federal Reserve in Boston and economists from Duke and the New School. It was called the color of money. And they looked at the net worth of families living across a range of American cities by race. And the average white family's net worth was $247,000. The average Puerto Rican family's net worth was $3,020. And the average non-immigrant black family's net worth is $8. To be clear, I'm not suggesting education is not a powerful engine of economic mobility. We know it is. What I am suggesting, and where Carnegie is putting our stake, is that it could be a much, much more powerful one.Michael Horn:Just, I mean your own personal story and how you come to this is inspiring. Tim, the few times we've gotten to connect at different conferences and so forth, hearing you speak about it always touches a chord, I think, for those listening. And obviously you just alluded to how you all now want to make sure that the system evolves and really creates a lot more opportunity for a lot of individuals. And I think that relates to a big partnership that has been in the news quite a bit lately, which is this partnership with ETS, the Educational Testing Service. Can you tell us about what you're trying to do and why?Timothy Knowles:First of all, I don't think assessment is a singular answer to serving young people better. Young people need to love school. They need to be engaged. They need to feel challenged and pressed. They need to learn hard things and relevant things. They need to experience learning, not just enact learning. So I don't think we're going to assess our way to a better place. However, there are a set of skills that we know matter, that we know predict success in life, in the workplace and in the schoolhouse, and yet we haven't paid them as much attention as we might. And their skills affective behavioral, cognitive skills like persistence, communication, critical thinking, creative thinking, collaboration. We think they deserve more attention, not at the expense of reading or algebra or history. Disciplinary knowledge really matters, and you can't think critically without something to think about. But we think these skills in particular need to be elevated. We also know that these skills are developed in all kinds of contexts, both in the schoolhouse and outside, that many young people who demonstrate them, they're too often invisible or illegible to postsecondary institutions, and to employers, and even to students and parents themselves. So just by way of an example of what I'm talking about, if I'm growing up in rural Indiana and I work for 2 hours every morning on my family farm, and then I get to high school at 7:30, every day on time. I have a 98% attendance rate. I do my homework on time, I get B's or better, and then I have a job after school or on the weekends. Taken together, those skills, in my view, would represent persistence and they should be made visible to students themselves, certainly to educators and to postsecondary education institutions and employers. So if I was to state Michael, really simply, what we're trying to do with ETS, we're trying to build a set of tools that will provide insight into key predictive skills that the education sector has neglected. I don't think teachers have neglected these skills, and I could say more about that. I think they know that these skills matter. But we want to build tools that will capture evidence of learning also wherever it takes place. And to make those insights visible and legible to students and parents, actionable for teachers, and useful for postsecondary institutions and employers. That's at the heart of this.Michael Horn:That's super helpful. Diane may jump in as well because she's been working in these domains for a long time. I guess I'm curious when I hear you say that, from my perspective, critical thinking, creativity, things like that, there are a set of skills that can be applied in different domains, but being a good critical thinker is in a domain, right? It doesn't necessarily cross unless you have domain knowledge. So I'm sort of curious how you square that circle with something like the example you used, perseverance, which I would put, in Diane's language, the habits of success, different from skills, which might be a set of artifacts across lots of different domains to show those habits. And so I'm sort of curious, are you thinking of them all as the same set of assessments that will capture these? Or how do you distinguish some skills that sit within academic standards perhaps, or academic domains, let me say, versus those that maybe are a collective evidence across lots of bodies of work?Timothy Knowles:That's a great question. And frankly, is the work that we are doing right now is to figure this out in terms of which skills are we really going to draw on disciplinary knowledge? Which skills are we going to draw on extant data that may exist like the kid in Indiana I just described? And which skills actually do we need to build tools for from the ground up that we may not have a nuanced enough set of tools to measure, for example, collaboration or working with others? So do you need to build game-based or scenario-based tools that would help you, give you visibility in terms of how someone is developing on that arc? But it's a very good question and clearly, whether it's critical thinking or even persistence, you don't want to divorce that from content and from subject matter. You learn a great deal about young people in terms of their persistence based on their approach to complicated problems and hard problems and how they go about solving them. So this isn't divorced from disciplinary knowledge in that sense by any means. I think in terms of assessments, first of all, I should say the aim was not to take on the American assessment industry and all the politics that go with it and try to introduce an incrementally better set of disciplinary assessments that feels like that would be sort of a Common Core redux. And I think we saw that play out pretty clearly and we saw where dividends were paid and where they weren't. So, I think really the intention here is to identify competencies that we know matter that predict success that are developed in all kinds of contexts and create a set of tools that won't look or feel like traditional assessments and push the educational sector to attend to a richer array of outcomes. Another important thing that I think is worth pointing out, which actually makes me optimistic about this, perhaps more optimistic than I should be. There's something, as you both know, but maybe not all your listeners know, that is sweeping the nation in the form of these things called portraits of a graduate, or portraits of learner. States and school systems and schools have been developing them, engaging lots of stakeholders, basically asking, who do we want our young people to be? What do we want them to be able to do? So colleagues from ETS analyzed as many as they could find. This is one of the wonderful things about being partnered with ETS. I feel like I have 3000 new employees I can ask to do things. But they analyzed all of these portraits, and there were about eight to ten core skills that Americans say they want young people to possess upon completion of K-12. It's almost as though - and this resonates, Diane, with some of your work - but it's almost as though there's an invisible consensus about the core purpose of schooling. Kind of a river running through our nation, whether in red places or blue places, in cities, in rural areas, about what we want our young people, who we want our young people to be. That's hopeful to me. So if we can help the other thing that people say about the portraits, if you speak to them candidly, is A) They haven't changed anything, like we haven't actually changed what's going on on the ground, even though we put a lot of energy into it, and B) We have no way of measuring these things. That, to me, represents an opportunity in the US, right now, that I think is worth plumbing.Michael Horn:I've just learned a tremendous amount from you, and I had a takeaway that I think I haven't had from the press stories on this, which is, in essence, you're not trying to do what we recommend you never do in disruptive innovation, which is to try to leapfrog the incumbents with a better assessment or a better this widget whatever, but instead go to the areas of non-consumption where the alternative is nothing. And you're right. I see the same thing in the portraits of graduate, which is there's no teeth. There's no way to measure or represent or have an asset based framing around these things because there's nothing to measure them. So you're going there. I think maybe the second question is less mine and more what I think a lot of people are wondering, which is why partner with ETS on this? Because they have a reputation in different quarters and different ways, as you know. Timothy Knowles: That is a completely fair question, Michael. And I know you both know as well as I do that most assessment companies across the world are grappling with what their future will look like and are seeing, quote, market share evaporate really quickly. Standalone assessments that bring schools to a screeching halt for two weeks in May and are not predictive of very much, I hope are not going to be part of the equation for the long term. And yet those very assessment companies, including ETS, have made an incredible business based on that design. ETS is clear-eyed about that, in my view. They hired a new CEO, Amit Sevak, who is exceptionally clear-eyed about. And one of the magnetic forces, from my perspective, was they have the capacity to build for scale. I don't, Carnegie doesn't. We're a small organization. When I introduced to the board the idea of focusing on the future of learning, which is really the aim here, is to get at learning. One of our board members, who is a very well regarded scholar of assessment, said, well, what about the future of assessment? And at the time I thought, we really don't have the capacity to build credible, reliable, valid tools to do some of this work. Then, Amit, who I'd known prior to ETS, joined ETS, and I thought there was an opportunity that led to a year's worth of conversations about whether they are willing to really try to innovate and in essence create a separate entity within ETS, but with its own walls and autonomy to build a new set of tools that would attend to these skills, that would think about assessment in very different ways and that would be focused on the insights that were generated, not focused on the test as it were. So that's why ETS. Now, to be fair, again, I think the test for us is can we build something different? Is it going to be useful to young people? Is it going to be useful to parents, to teachers? I think we can, but I know we won't know unless we try. That sounds slightly glib, but I think it's true. Like we have to take a shot at broadening the picture of what we say is important for young people. It bears probably saying that we met recently as part of this work with the 50 teachers of the year from across the country, from each state, and introduced the work to them. And literally there were some teachers in the room in tears and I was like, “Why?” But they were saying, bring it. This is the work we want to do. This is in essence the work that parents know we should do. And this is why we started to teach in the first place. That's my short answer to “Why ETS?” We have enough elegant examples that live around the edges of our profession. Everybody in this sector can point to elegant examples of competency-based learning that haven't scaled. So we need to think about - if we're serious about tipping or using this tipping moment - we have to figure out how to enact at a broader scale than we have tried to historically. Diane Tavenner: I will just add here because I hear the critiques, just like you, and the questions. And I will just add from a personal experience, I think you might know this, Michael, and Tim, you certainly do, that several years ago, Summit actually partnered with a startup assessment company that was doing these exact types of assessments. So I know they're possible, I know that they can be done. And then, of course, as a startup company, they got acquired and employers valued and wanted these types of assessments and they couldn't stay in K-12 where the market was so competitive and unreliable, etc. And that was such a disappointment to me because I saw such the possibility of those types of assessments and how they could be used and that they really were possible. And so it feels like this is where the sort of solidness and the expansiveness of ETS, perhaps, enables us to move forward. And I would just add a fun fact, which is I don't think relevant, but ETS is yet another entity that the Carnegie Foundation created and then spun out, Timothy Knowles: We did - 75 years ago Diane Tavenner: Tim, you have started alluding to this already because these things are all connected and linked, but you said assessment is just a small part of it. And when you first started, it wasn't even a thing that you were thinking that we needed to do, because what you're really setting out to do is sort of build this architecture that produces what you call reliably engaging, equitable, experiential and effective learning experiences for all young people, every single one of them. And I think that those words, those concepts describe the type of learning that Michael and I are talking about all the time, that we are advocating for, that we believe in. So beyond assessment, what does that architecture look like? What else is happening to try to bring this to life?Timothy Knowles:Here, we need to move away from models of schooling singularly dependent on the Carnegie Unit or the credit hour. It was established in 1906 to standardize an utterly unstandardized educational sector. So it was a great plan in 1906. But since 1906, we've learned a great deal from learning scientists and cognitive psychologists, neuroscientists about what knowledge is and how it's acquired. So we need learning modalities that are truly competency or mastery based, whatever the language you want to use, that allow young people to solve real problems, that support experiential education, that enable them to work with mentors and experts and peers. The problem is not that we don't know what this looks like. We do. Again, we can all point at examples of it. The problem is we haven't figured out how to bring it to life at a scale that's persuasive. Thing one for me is building, in essence, existence proofs and networks of existence proofs and amplifying and elevating them because this work is happening in ways that will generate momentum and attention. And I think we're in an interesting moment where I've talked to 18 or 20 states in the last four months. State leaders, state chiefs, governors, they're interested in how do we move to competency-based systems. There's are opportunity windows open at the school system and state level, I think, post-pandemic that we have to leverage. And part of it is about cracking the Carnegie unit. Second thing I'd say is, and you may laugh me out of the podcast, which might be a first to be laughed out, but we need to think hard about learning experiences or curricula. And I know people feel like they've been down the curricular road before, but the tools and supports for teachers and students have to be taken into more careful consideration. The problem with the wave after wave of standards and accountability efforts over the last 40 years, and this is completely oversimplified, is that we thought if we cranked up the standards and tested for them on the back end, that somehow magically in the middle, the work that students and teachers would do every day would change. And I think the sort of governance reforms that led to charter schools were not that dissimilar. The theory being if we provided schools with flexibility and autonomy over hiring and money and use of time and governance, somehow the stuff that kids did every day would shift and we didn't see that really occur. Part of the architecture demands building learning experiences for young people across disciplines, which are course-based, which are unit-based, which can come in different sizes to use that language, are much more engaging, much more experiential equitable and effective. So first thing is the Carnegie unit. Second thing is actually what gets taught. And the third thing is policy. The Carnegie unit has infiltrated much of our state-level policy, and I think we just assume that perhaps the states provide waivers so people can do what they want. Well they don't. Seat time is the rule. That is the rule. Mastery or competency is not the rule. 990 hours of instructional time per annum, or some variation on 990 is the requirement for the vast majority of states. I'm a fan of guardrails, so I understand the argument that, “Well, you want to be careful about removing the guardrails.” But I'm not a fan of guardrails that don't acknowledge what we've actually learned about learning over the last hundred years. And that's the peril with this singular devotion to the conflation of time and learning. In my view, there's a set of policy opportunities, if I was going to frame it in a more asset-based way, that I see. And there's an appetite. And again, red states, blue states, both are interested. This is oversimplified, but I think the majority of the more conservative states that I talk to are interested in employment and access to jobs for young people who may otherwise leave their state. In the blue states, the interest is more about access and opportunity. But I think both are the same in this case, they're fundamentally the same. Access and opportunity is really about employment, is really about social and economic mobility. I think there's some more common ground, despite the kind of thrum of our national political discourse.Michael Horn:I think you're right. And I get super excited when you start talking about replacing this time-based unit - from the foundation that put it in place - with something much more meaningful and meaty. And it's not surprising to me when I hear you - I want to use the word preaching - about this wisdom that you had to go and that you have. Timothy Knowles: OuchMichael Horn: Well, I want to yell “Preach!” But when I hear you say, “We ended up having to go to assessment,” that makes sense to me, because you have to replace the unit of time with something that is measuring progress in a different way. And so that makes sense. Now to switch gears completely, though, another part of the work -  you've got your tentacles in a lot - another part of the work that you all do, and something that Diane and I have been talking a lot about on the show, is higher education, of course. And you all have a profound impact about how we think of the categorization of colleges and universities in this country. And you've made some big moves to change that. For our listeners that are less steeped in higher ed, can you tell us what the Carnegie classifications are in the first place, why they matter, why they have mattered, perhaps in the way that was not intended, and what you're doing now with them to change those incentives?The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Timothy Knowles:One of the things we do is we classify every postsecondary institution in the nation, almost all of them. There's some that don't submit data to the federal government, and so we don't classify those, but something like 4500 institutions, we classify. Many of your listeners or some of your listeners may have heard of one of these classifications “research one” or “R1”  classifications that comes from us. That spawned an arms race in terms of higher ed institutions aspiring to be R1 institutions and designated R1. Not just because of the One, but because the federal government follows it up with vast tranches of capital, of public capital. So there are real incentives to become an R1 that led to this arms race. So when I arrived at the foundation, the classifications had basically been spun off and had gone through very modest changes for 50 years. So since I got there, we've brought the classification…I've invented a new term, it's called spinning on. We spun it back on and we brought them in house. Now with our partner, the American Council on Education, we're trying to reimagine them from the ground up. So in 2025, all postsecondary institutions in the country will be classified in new ways. There's lots of vectors of the work here, but one thing that I'm particularly excited about, and I hope will resonate with the kind of work we're interested in on the K-12 side is developing a classification focused on the extent to which postsecondary institutions are engines of social and economic mobility. So every higher ed institution in the country will receive an economic mobility classification. So classification is distinct from a ranking. We're not of the view that you can distinguish in credible ways between an institute number 599 and 600 on a list. Classifications are groups of institutions. So like institutions, in that sense, we're less interested in naming names and creating another rank order. The primary aim here is to learn what institutions are doing to effectively accelerate social and economic mobility, to develop public policy that supports it. And just as R1s have been the recipients of large tranches of public capital, to drive public capital to those institutions that are accelerating economic mobility. So that's that body of work. It's fascinating because the big world doesn't know much about it, but the higher ed world pays extraordinarily close attention to it. So two weeks ago I had a conference call with 1500 higher education leaders. That's a third of them, or something close, which suggests how closely they're paying attention. So we want to draw attention to one of the things that I think makes America and higher education great, which is the extent to which they're actually making improvements in terms of young people from low-income backgrounds, first-generation young people, and underrepresented young people in particular.Diane Tavenner:Yeah, it's really fascinating. It's so interesting that a tool like that is visible to everyone. I mean, so many of the national rankings are based in part, like, if you look at their formulas, the beginning of the formula is this classification. So we all see it, but we don't understand where it comes from. Super hopeful about the potential impact there. Okay, I have to squeeze one more thing in here before. This is like the speed round. But when I was in grad school, I learned about the Committee of Ten and the profound impact that they had. I've talked on this show about this before - Michael and I have talked about this - about how they really defined what the order and sequence of high school curricula was and put the sciences in order, alphabetically biology. So we did it that way for a really long time. You have launched something called the Carnegie Postsecondary Commission. So people should not be surprised to know there was a relationship with the foundation and that old committee. So you've launched a new commission. Tell us about it quickly.Timothy Knowles:So sure. The Committee of Ten was founded in 1892. It was chaired by a guy called Charles Elliott, who was the president of Harvard at the time. Interestingly, and I didn't actually know this until recently, Charles Elliott was charged by Andrew Carnegie to establish the foundation that I'm responsible for. So the congressional order that says we better create a nonprofit for this thing, the first signature on that congressional order is Charles Elliot. So it's a very tangled web that we live and weave. So the postsecondary commission is a group of not ten, but seventeen K-12 and postsecondary leaders. My hope is that they become the Committee of Ten for this century that will be thinking hard again about the question of mobility and how we create not just K-12 and post secondary systems, but systems that might even become much more blurred. So K-16, K-to-work systems that are going to not try to reach consensus as a group, and they all signed up with this agreement. The aim is not consensus. The aim is to develop action papers that will provoke both thinking and policy, certainly, but then to help shape the work of the foundation, particularly on the post secondary side for the next decade for what I hope is my tenure. It's a commission with institutional engine underneath it. It's an extraordinary group of people. I won't name them, but I would urge anybody who's interested to go and look at our website and meet them because they are almost, to a person, first generation leaders who are doing exceptional things ranging from running large public systems to small colleges to K-12 systems serving young people who depend on the quality of school the most. It's an extraordinary group. We just convened earlier last month, and the world should get ready.Michael Horn:Well, with that tease, why don't we leave the conversation there from a work perspective, but before people tune out, Tim, you're joining us. Diane and I have this end of show segment where we talk about things we're reading or watching, and we try to make them not about our work. We don't always succeed, but we try. So can we ask you what's on your watching,reading, listening list?Diane Tavenner:Sure.Timothy Knowles:I have a weird tradition. I read poetry from December 1 to the New Year because it makes me think differently. So, I'm right now, who am I reading? Haki Maributi, South Side of Chicago poet. Gwendolyn Brooks and W.H. Auden, not a South Side poet, so a mixture. But I find it takes me out of my day job and makes me think about the world and people and what I'm here for in different ways.Michael Horn:I love this because poetry is one of those things I always wish there was time for. I never know how to fit it in. You may have just given an idea for not just me. So, Diane, what's on your list?Diane Tavenner:I'm going to go a little bit different this week. Coming off a time period where we had lots of family and fun friends around, I did a jigsaw puzzle this past weekend. Some special guests dropped in and helped put a few pieces in. It was so much fun. Makes your brain think differently. Very social. So that's my whatever enjoyment of choice this week. How about you, Michael?Michael Horn:I love that. That feels very COVID, I will tell you that, but I love it. Mine, I will go, I just finished the first season of The Morning Show with Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Aniston and have moved into season two and really enjoying it. It's a complicated set of storylines that follow a little too closely, like real life in 2019–20 and so forth. And we're getting into the COVID period right now, but it makes you think, it makes you laugh, it makes you cry, and it's enjoyable. So that's where I've been. And we'll wrap it there. Tim, huge thank you for joining us, talking through all the initiatives that you all are doing at Carnegie. And for all of us, we will stay tuned. And for all of those listening, we'll see you next time on Class Disrupted.The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.

AI expert and Minerva University senior Irhum Shafkat joins me and Diane Tavenner to discuss where AI has been, where it’s going, and the rate at which it’s moving. We also discuss the many forms the technology takes, its implications for humanity, and, of course, its applications in education—as told by a student. As always, subscribers can listen to the conversation, watch it, or read it 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.1:48—Introducing Irhum3:54—Irhum’s Reflections on Minerva 7:03—Defining AI11:16—Recent Iterations of AI 12:47—Intersection of AI and Humanity 17:24—The Pace of AI21:43—AI from the Student Perspective25:12—Thinking Beyond Chatbots31:17—The Opportunity for Creating Education Tools using AI40:10—Recommendations Diane Tavenner:Michael, you've just spent a week at the happiest place on Earth, and I must admit, I'm a little bit jealous.Michael Horn:For those who may be confused about what the happiest place on Earth is, it's Disney World. I was just there with my kids. First time for them. It was a blast. Diane, you know what? I came away with a few takeaways, but one of them was the excellence at scale. Disney has 74,000 employees in that park. And almost every single one of them - it's probably like 73,500 of them - are just dedicated to making your experience better than the last person you just interacted with. And it's astounding – however they have managed to do that. So it was a blast. Thank you for asking. But we're not here to talk about my vacation, although that might be fun. Instead, we're looking to continue to dive into some of these sticky questions around K-12 Education. Help people see different ways through what has often been pitted as zero-sum battles between the adults in the room and try to think through how we can unleash student progress and prepare them for the world into which they're entering. And obviously a question that exploded into both of our minds starting last year, Diane was the topic of AI. And, as opposed to the Metaverse, it is still the topic du jour. It is still what everyone is wondering about: artificial intelligence, what do we do with it, and so forth. And you have been teasing me that you have the perfect guest to help us think about this in some novel ways. Take it from here, Diane.Diane Tavenner:Well, I have indeed been doing that. You're right. AI so far has a longer shelf life. So we'll see how long that lasts. It's my great pleasure to introduce you to Irhum. And Irhum and I first met a few years ago when he was a freshman at Minerva University. He was coming from Bangladesh to that global university. He's now a senior. He spent the last two summers as an intern at Google X here, just about a mile away from where I live. And at Google X, he's really been focused on large language model, aka AI, research. And you've been hearing about Irhum from me and all of our conversations we've been having for quite some time, Michael. So, what you know is that I've learned a ton from him about AI. And one of the things I love about talking AI with Irhum is that even though he has a ton of knowledge, and, for example, he writes a popular technical blog about AI that I have looked at, and I can't even decipher a sentence of it. So, highly technical, deep knowledge. But he also is a system thinker, and he cares deeply about how technology is used, how AI is used, and what it means for our society. And so he's willing to and able to talk with people like me, lay people like me, and help me understand that and engage in a good conversation. And for our purposes, I think, most importantly, Irhum is 20, and it's so critical to be in dialogue with people in this generation. I think we give a lot of lip service in education to the consumers, if you will, or the students, and then we don't involve them in our dialogue. And so, I'm just really grateful that he's here and you all get to meet. And so, welcome, Irhum.Michael Horn:Irhum, it is so good to have you here. Diane has been teasing this for a while, so thank you for joining us. Before we dive into the AI topic itself, I would just love to hear, through your words -  because I've heard it a little bit through Diane's - but I'd love to hear and the audience would love to hear about your journey to Minerva University, your journey to diving into topics of AI. And really, how has that school experience specifically been? Like, what has worked? What hasn't?Irhum Shafkat:Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. Let's just get into it. I'm one of those people who the standard school system was just not designed for, rather frankly. I grew up inside the national school system back in Bangladesh, up to fourth grade, essentially, and it just wasn't designed with someone like me in mind. We're talking an institution with 50 person classrooms, teachers barely able to give anyone attention. And the school system is geared to make you pass a university entrance exam, and if you do that, you've done it, you've succeeded. And my mindset often was, like, I joked that I was learning full-time and going to school on the side. The way I saw it in my mind, that's amazing. And I'd say the only reason my path worked out the way it did is because when I was in finishing up middle school, entering high school, so, like, eight to nine grades, like that window, the Internet just rapidly proliferated across the entire country within a couple months. Short couple of months, essentially. You went from not a lot of people using the net to a lot of people using the Internet. And I was one of those people, and I was like, “Oh my God, it's not that I don't like math, it's that I don't understand it.” And there's a difference between those two things. And I was one of those people. Like, Khan Academy was quite literally designed for me. I'd log onto that thing and I was like, “Oh my God, I actually understand math,” and I can teach myself math. I can succeed at it. And the impression that it left me with is that technology is really opened up. The Internet, in particular, is like one of those frontier technologies that just opened up learning to anybody who could access it and go through the right set of tools needed to learn things, like Khan Academy being one of them. And I guess that's the mindset I'm seeing this new generation of technologies in AI, too. I wonder who else is going to be using them the way I did and learn something new that their environment wouldn't otherwise allow them to. I suppose I kept teaching myself things, and that's kind of, I guess, partly how I ended up at Minerva is because I wanted a non-traditional university education because the traditional high school education clearly wasn't a fit for me at all. And Minerva was like, “Come here, we won't bore you with lectures. Our professors barely get to speak for more than five minutes in class. It's all students just talking to each other and learning from each other. And I was like, “Sign me up.”Diane Tavenner:Well, and Irham, that curiosity that you are describing in yourself is, I think, one of the things that led you to discover AI long before most of us discovered it. And you discovered it on the Internet. You discovered it by reading papers and sort of following these blog posts while you were teaching yourself. And so, I don't think it was a surprise for you when it burst onto the scene, because you knew what was coming and where it was coming from. And yet, I think that the world's reaction has been interesting. And so, you sent me a quote the other day. You texted me a quote about AI that had us both laughing pretty hysterically, probably because it feels very true. And so, I'm going to share that quote, which is, “Artificial intelligence is like teenage sex. Everyone talks about it. Nobody really knows how to do it. Everyone thinks everyone else is doing it, so everyone claims they are doing it.” Let's just start by figuring out what people are actually doing. If anything, this is sort of a ridiculous question, but can you just explain AI to us and why it's suddenly this big deal that it feels like it just spontaneously arrived in 2023?Irhum Shafkat:I guess there are like three big terms that we should go over when we say AI because it just means so many things. Like AI is such a vague, hard thing to define. But I guess the way I see it is anything that's just right beyond the edge of what's computationally possible right now. Because once it becomes possible, people kind of stop thinking about it as AI.Diane Tavenner:Interesting.Irhum Shafkat:Okay, other people would have their own definitions, but I feel like that's like, what's historically been true. Once something becomes possible, it almost feels like it's no longer AI. What has been more recent, though, is how we keep pushing different tier. Like, if it was the 90s, for example, when Kasparov played with Deep Blue, the chess-playing engine. That thing was like a massive, highly sophisticated program with millions of logical rules. That's what's different. What happened over the last ten years is we really pivoted towards machine learning, and specifically a branch of it called deep learning, which allowed us to use really simple algorithms on enormous amounts of data. We're talking several thousand lifetimes worth of data. When you were talking about training a language model, for example, and ginormous amounts of compute to push all that data through a very simple algorithm. And that's what changed in that it turns out really simple algorithms work extremely well when you have a large enough compute budget and enough data to pass through them. And the instantiation that everyone really captured the imagination is against a narrower part of machine learning still is called large language models. The large being like, they're much larger than models for historical language models, in the sense that, at their core, you give them a piece of text, and they just play a guessing game. We're like, okay, so what's the next word? And if you keep predicting the next word over and over, you form entire sentences, paragraphs, entire documents that way.Diane Tavenner:So it sounds like, basically, I'm going to bring it back to education really quickly, Michael. Like AI as you're describing it, Irhum, is this concept we have in education and learning, which is I plus one. So it's like where you are just a little bit harder than what you can do, and that's like your zone of proximal development, like where you best learn. So, it sounds like AI is in that space. It's like what we can do plus a little bit more is what keeps pushing us forward, basically, on everything that's written on the Internet with simple formulas.The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Irhum Shafkat:Yeah, I guess what captured the imagination is, I think, language in particular, because ChatGPT came out sometime last December, and that, again, took everybody by surprise, essentially. But the thing is, image generation models like Dali Two and stable diffusion were out earlier that summer, and they're built on basically the same technology, given a ginormous amount of data, produced more samples that look like something that came from the data distribution. I had this with friends, especially outside of computer science, where I show them these generated images, and they're like, yeah, I thought computers could already do that. What's special about them? And I'm like, oh, my God, it's like generating a panda in a spacesuit on Mars.Diane Tavenner:And they're like, yeah.Irhum Shafkat:I thought Photoshop already does that.Michael Horn:So interesting.Irhum Shafkat:Whereas with language, language feels…I would almost say people see a conversational interface and almost by de facto assign intelligent attributes to it. Now, this is not to say that it's all smoke and mirrors. Like, these are remarkably practical technologies that I genuinely think are going to change a lot of what we do today, as we'll explain. But at their core, I think there's at least part of the fact that humans genuinely see language differently than other modalities, because, in part, it is unique to us - that we know of at least.Michael Horn:It's really interesting, though, because the implication of that, it seems, is that part of this isn't just the power of what's been built, but also our reaction to what's been built. And I think then the corollary, something Diane and I have talked a lot about is, like, right now, you're seeing very polar opposite reactions to AI. Either it's the utopian thing that's going to bring about this glorious future where resources are not scarce and everyone will be fine etc. Or it's very dystopian, and you see a lot of the - I'm going to insert my own belief for a moment here - but a lot of the technology leaders that have developed this being like, it could be dystopian, it could take over the world. As I hear you describing it, it doesn't quite sound like either of those is right. It's like the next step. So, I'd love you to put this in a human context, then, of what does it mean about the roles, particularly as we think about the future of work that humans will play with AI, or how human AI maybe is itself or isn't? How do you think about the intersection with humanity?Irhum Shafkat:When I think about the future, one tool I borrow from a former colleague, Nick Foster, who was, I think, head of design at Google X. He would introduce this concept of thinking about the future not as a thing you're approaching, but almost like a cone of many possible outcomes. There is the probable, which is like the current set of outcomes that seem like really probable, but the probable is not the possible. Like, the possible set of features is much larger. And right now, I think we run a real risk of kind of just not seeing the technology for what it is. It's a tool that we could actively shape into a future we want. And instead of trying to imagine it through that lens, we're almost like we're kind of giving up and we're like, yeah, it's going to take over the world or something. It's going to be bad. Oh, well, it's almost like we're sleepwalking towards an outcome to a degree. I see it genuinely as, a technology, a tool. And, yeah, it's up to us to decide what integration of that into our society looks like, but it's a tool.Michael Horn:Do you think part of that is because some of the people behind the coding are also surprised by the outcomes that it produces? And, like, gee, I didn't know it could do that. And so they're sort of showing, to your point about this weird passivity that we all seem to be displaying, that maybe it's because they, too seem surprised by some of its capabilities. And so that is surprising the laypeople like me and Diane, and not to mention the people who aren't even playing with it yet.Irhum Shafkat:So, I think it's important what we've seen over the last ten years, but really, the last four, I would say, with scaling really taking off, is when models get larger, they have more capabilities. Like a model from three years ago. No, I'd say a little longer. Maybe four or five, if you go to the joke and ask it to explain it, it wouldn't be able to do that. It would struggle. But if you ask ChatGPT now, like, “Hey, here's a joke that my teenage son wrote, I don't get it. Can you explain it to me? “ It's going to do a pretty decent job at it.So, one of the things that came with scale is like, capabilities emerge. But the thing that surprises researchers is, I think I saw this analogy on a paper by Sam Bauman, but it's almost like buying a mystery box. I think you buy a larger box, there's going to be some kind of new capabilities in there, but we don't know what they're going to be until we open up that box. So, I guess that's where a lot of surprise, even from researchers, come from. That said, I will push back on that a little in that there has been really genuine and serious work done in the last two years where we're really trying to figure out. We're like throwing the whole internet at this thing. There's actually a lot of things going on in there and that these capabilities are not actually as surprising as we think they are. Like joke explanation. At the start when it came out, we were like, “Oh my God, this thing can explain jokes.” But then when you dug into the data deep enough, you're like, there are tons of websites on the Internet that exist for you to dumb down a joke and explain how it works. So, it didn't appear out of completely nowhere. The fact that it works on new jokes that are hopefully original and it's still capable of explaining them is still cool, but it didn't come out of absolutely nowhere.Diane Tavenner:Irhum, you just started giving us some time frames and timelines, and you're sort of, in your mind calculating ten years, four years, two years. I just want to note that ten years ago, you were ten years old, but, okay, we'll set that aside for a moment. But as you were using those timelines, one of the things that comes up a lot for people is that this feels like it's going so fast. If you didn't even understand what was happening in this world, and then suddenly chat GPT came on the scene. You probably didn't look at it in December because you were busy. But then in the new year, suddenly the whole world's talking about ChatGPT, and you log on, and then it just seems like every day something new is coming and faster. And I talk to people who just are like, “I can't keep up.” It's only been a couple of months, and it feels like it's just spinning so fast and beyond our control. Is that true? How do you think about that timing, and how do you think about keeping up? How can we conceptualize that, especially as educators?Irhum Shafkat:Well, for what it's worth, even researchers have trouble keeping up these days with the sheer amount of papers coming out left, right and center. It's hard. That said, and I'll say it is genuinely surprising, the pace at which GPT, in particular, took off, because these models had existed, the model they're building off of GBD Three that had existed since 2020. We're talking around the pandemic start period. They just put a chat interface on top of it, and that really seemed to take off. I remember reading news articles and even OpenAI seemed, like, surprised that just putting on a chat interface on top of a technology that had lying around for three years caused it to really take off that way. And even I was surprised because, again, I was in Taipei in the spring, and Taiwan in the spring, and I remember being on the Taiwan high-speed rail, and I'm seeing someone else use ChatGPT on the train next to me. And I was like, wow, this thing is taking up a lot faster than I realized. But it's important to understand that when I say again that ChatGPT 3 had been lying around for three years before they put a chat interface on top of it. And again, this should not underscore the fact that these models are going to get larger, probably more capable, but it should also ground you in two things. One, the specific burst of innovation we saw in this year in particular had been building up for a bit. Essentially, it's almost like a pressure valve went off when they put a chat interface on top of it. The other thing, and this is the thing that I wish people would discuss more often, is that it's not just that the models got larger and we trained them on more of the internet. It's also that we start paying a lot of money to get a lot of humans to label a lot of this data so that you could fine tune what the behavior of these models are. You see, when GPT3 was trained in about 2020 or so, it's what we call a base model. It does exactly one thing. You give it a piece of text, and it produces a completion similar to the text data it saw when it was being trained, which would be raw internet data. And it has a tendency to go off the rails because the Internet is full of people who say not very nice things to each other. What changed was the sheer amount of human data collection that went in during that time frame and that this large model was adjusted over to tame its behavior, teach its skills, such as what explaining a joke even is, and all those things. We could talk about that a little bit more. But the big connection being that the jump we saw in those three years is that of a technology that had already existed, that we really learned to adjust better. But we already burned through that innovation once. It's unlikely we're going to see another leap on the same scale of learning how to use supervised human fine tuning again, because that innovation has now already existed and is already baked into it.Michael Horn:That's fascinating. It's something I hadn't understood before either, which is to say that in essence, if I understand you right, obviously the code base continues to evolve for GPT4 and so forth. But in effect, I think what you're saying is the user interface and how we interact with it is what actually changed, like the skin of how humans interact with the code base. I think it leads us to where we love to talk on this podcast, which is the uses in education and how it's going to impact that. And obviously, I'll give you the hall pass if you will. You're not an educator. We're not asking you to opine in some way that puts you in a position you're not. But you are a student right now at a cutting-edge university, constantly thinking about pedagogy. And so, I'm curious, from the student perspective, what excites you at the moment about AI in education?Irhum Shafkat:I think shrinking the learning feedback loop is the way I would put it. I'm a systems thinker and I use the lens of feedback loop a lot. And whenever you shrink a feedback loop from, say, learning something, like maybe getting a feedback. What I say by feedback loop in education is like, you write a paper, your professor takes maybe two weeks to get it back to you, and you get almost like a signal, like, “Hey, you got these things right. You don't get these things quite right, though.” What happens when you shrink that from two weeks to a couple of minutes or maybe a couple of seconds? It's not just shrinking a number, it's changing how you interact, how your learning experience evolves. And I think it's nice to connect this back to my middle school years. I think the reason I ended up in math and programming in particular is because those two things have really short feedback loops. In programming in particular, if you write bad code, your compiler just screams that. It's like, “Hey, you're trying to add a number to a set of words, it's not going to work.” And you get like really short, tight feedback loops to keep trying your code over and over again until it succeeds. That's not true with learning English. With learning English, you write a paper, you wait a week for your professor or teacher to get it back to you. You maybe pick up something and try again next time. And I would say at least part of the reason I ended up picking math and programming is, again, I didn't have that many great resources in terms of teaching, teachers who could really help me out. So, I naturally gravitated towards things that I would be able to really quickly iterate on: math and programming. Whereas those things - English, the sciences even - I would argue broadly, are not on those same lines. But what then changes with AI, is like, you now have a chatbot, that it doesn't have to be a chatbot. It could be far more than that, really. You just have a computational tool that can actively critique your writing as you're writing it out. You're like, “Hey, what are some ways I could have done this better?” They're like, “Yeah, you're using these passive wordy phrases. Maybe you shouldn't be doing that.” And you're like, “Why shouldn't I be doing that? Because it makes it harder for other people to read.” And instead of waiting a week for that to happen, you get fed that feedback in real time, and you have another iteration ready, and you then ask it again, “Hey, how could I do it even better?” That loop shrinks significantly.Diane Tavenner:That's fascinating. And I think it's also what we, Michael and I, have been working on personalized learning, or whatever you want to call it, for a decade plus at this point. And that is certainly one of the promises of personalized learning, is that tight feedback loop. So you're staying in the learning, and it isn't delayed. It's contextualized, and it's in the moment and immediate. It's more tutor if you will. That's why many people have put so much energy into that. And you have now said a couple of things. One ChatGPT, putting this skin on their product, which is essentially a chat bot. Like, you talk with this bot or this window. And then also this potential of what you just described, like the feedback coming a chat bot, if you will. And in my experience, most people, when they think about the uses of AI, are thinking along these lines. Like, that is what they think is there's going to be someone, whether it's a little avatar or a box or something, that's like sort of chatting with me, and that's kind of how AI is going to play out. I know that you sort of get a little exasperated when that's all people can imagine. What else might be possible help us expand our thinking a little bit beyond just this sort of chatting?Irhum Shafkat:I think right now we're at the phase when the iPhone would have been sometime in 2007. I'm not really qualified to comment on that because I would have been what?Michael Horn:Don't worry about it.Irhum Shafkat:But at least from my understanding of that time period, apps were a new thing. People didn't really know how to fully utilize them. And the first set of apps were kind of like window gag. And I was like, people were building those? Like, a flashlight app where instead of turning on your phone's flashlight, it just showed a flashlight on the screen.Michael Horn:I downloaded one of those. So, it's true.Irhum Shafkat:So, I feel like we're in that era for these language processing technologies right now, in that we have a brand new tool. We're not entirely sure what using that looks like. And returning back to the quote Diane quoted with the enterprise, I feel like not nearly as many people are asking, “How does this help us solve our problems better?” And a lot more people are asking, like, “How do I put this into my product so my board of directors is happy?”Diane Tavenner:Yeah. So, the idea being like, what legitimate problems do I have, and can I use this to solve them? And that's where where a useful app - not a flashlight - is going to come from.Irhum Shafkat:With chatbots in particular. Chatbots became the first big use case. So, everyone's like, well, this seems to work. Let's make my own chat bot, but, like, slightly different. And I think it's just so unimaginative. But the other thing with chat bots is that they have really bad what we call affordances in design. And affordance is something that almost cues you into how to use something. Like, when you see a handle on a door, you're like, “Oh, this is the thing I grab.” Then, let me ask you, if you had to choose between a big cancel button that cancels your flight that you don't want to go on, versus dealing with a chatbot to cancel your flight, which one would you pick?Diane Tavenner:Yes. And you have showed me this and demonstrated this to me. A single button like that is so much more useful. If you know the thing that I'm going to do versus making me talk to it and explain it where something's inevitably going to go wrong.Irhum Shafkat:These technologies are so nascent right now, and what people really need to appreciate is that you need to design them in ways where you almost expect they're going to produce some unrelated, unpleasant output somewhere along the process. So, it's almost like a liability if you're giving a user an open box to type anything they possibly want. And it's not just a liability; it also just makes the user, again, it doesn't give the user any affordances. They see a blank box. Like, again, if you need an English tutor bot, you could just as easily have a couple of buttons that could summarize, remove jargon, sorry, highlight jargon, or introduce a couple of buttons that cover a couple of use cases that a standard ninth through twelfth grader may want to use so that they can refine their writing better. Don't give them an open-ended box where they don't even know what to ask for help in.Diane Tavenner:And would that still be using AI, those buttons?Irhum Shafkat:I mean, behind the scenes? At the end of the day, any implementation of these things that you've looked at is a role play engine. If you have interacted with one of these airline processing, like if they use a language, they're using large language models. Behind the scenes, there's only two bits that anyone else modifies. Once you have the model, which is you have a dialogue preamble, which is almost like a script someone else writes as like you are now about to role play a dialogue, you are about to assist a user with cancel with their airline queries. And then the actual dialogue that happens, all people do when they're creating a new implementation of them is that they switch out the preamble with something else. I'm just saying you can write a preamble for each of those buttons. Essentially, if the button is like, hey, you highlight jargon, then you're like, okay, you are about to role play a bot that takes in some English text and returns the exact spans of text that are abnormally jargony for the writing of a nine to twelve grader. You as the developer should be writing that script because you are the one who knows what this person needs to be using. You shouldn't leave it up to the user to be writing their own scripts, essentially. For the most part, unless it's like a very specific use case where you wouldn't want the user to be writing that, but don't treat it as the default one, which we for some reason do.Michael Horn:So, it's super interesting, the implications on education. And I have a couple of takeaways here and I want to test them by you and then get your reaction. So, the first one is on the flashlight app analogy. I think the implication is that if the iPhone, or in this case OpenAI, is ultimately going to very easily incorporate the thing that you've thought of in their own roadmap, your sort of idea is not going to last very long on its own, right? The reason there were these apps is like there was not a button to do your own flashlight or change colors or things like that. And so, they built these apps and then very quickly iPhone realizes, hey, we can just add a quick little button. But I think the second implication is as you start to think about the user experience and come up with these prompts that a user might want to go through so that they're not guessing what they're putting into that open ended box, that the opportunity for educators might be to start to build around these different use cases, that if I'm understanding you correctly, perhaps OpenAI is not going to develop all these different use cases and so forth. But instead, the opportunity might be for educators to build on top of their code to develop these sorts of things that help get the problems solved that they and their students are actually trying to solve. But I'm curious where that line ends, and if you see it differently.Irhum Shafkat:It’s not a clear hard line. What's on open AI's roadmap? I don't know, but I guess it ties back into what your company is. If your company is trying to add value to people's lives, that really means sitting down is like, “Oh, am I just going to write a wrapper that takes in a PDF and allows you to just chat with it?” I mean, those all kind of went the way of the dinosaurs last week when OpenAI just integrated like, hey, you can drop a PDF into our thing. But if you really try to aim for deep integration, OpenAI has. I'm making claims here, I don't know for sure, but I would imagine they don't have a deep understanding of the K-12 education system, nor would they be necessarily interested in that, because that doesn't seem to be what their goal right now is, which is to make bigger and better version of these models that are more generally capable. What they're counting on is that other people take these models and integrate them throughout the rest of the economy. And that's where other people come in, and that's where K-12 educators come in, because they are the ones who have a better understanding of what these buttons need to be, what they want their students to be learning at the end of the.Michael Horn:Love it.Diane Tavenner:What's coming to me, Michael, is, on our last episode, we talked with Todd Rose, who wrote the End of Average. That is, in my mind, the foundation of a lot of personalized learning. And one of, I think, the misconceptions people have, or the swings. Education loves to swing the pendulum as we go from totally teacher directed, controlling every second of every bit of learning, and we swing all the way over to like, basically go teach yourself. We're just going to throw you out in the wild and at some level just throwing people into a chat bot of a large language model is throwing them into the wild. And so, what I hear you saying, Irhum, is we need the in-between. There's a real role for educators to narrow. It's not like the whole world personalization is. There's 12345 ways of doing something and we can narrow down to that and create a much more personalized experience that is curated by expert educators. And we should be looking for that. Happy in between.Irhum Shafkat:I mean, again, it's been so fascinating seeing these chat bots interact with the education system and kind of wreak havoc. Honestly, to a degree where professors taking stances on everything from like we should go back to making everyone write things by hand, by the way, please don't do that. They are an opportunity. Here's the thing: the factory model of the education system we have where people just go through it, do these problems, hopefully learn something by doing said problems. We don't need to know they're learning the thing. We just need to know if they're doing the thing. They have like a high school diploma. That was going to come to an end because that's already been out. Like that's already ill preparing people for the jobs of today. For a while now, these models, they're not bringing about something that wasn't going to happen. They've just sped it up, essentially, because students already again ask why a student would actually go out of their way to get an essay that I created by these things if they genuinely believed in their own education that hey, if I do this thing I'll learn something new and that will be helpful in the future. They probably wouldn't. So why do they feel disillusioned? Because they know deep inside that what they're learning in their high school is not going to actually prepare them for the world. And you need to actually deal with that disillusionment. And on the counter, I think these models provide an excellent way to actually start tackling that disillusionment by educators seeing themselves almost as designers, as what people need to be learning. I use the example of the door handle because it seems like a simple object. It really isn't. If you've ever been in a hotel with one of those weird, poorly designed shower knobs, you know how much bad design can mess up your day. And when good design works it's almost invisible. Like you don't even notice a shower knob when it actually works. And I think that's what good educational software using these will almost look like the students won't even realize how seamless it feels, like they press a button that tells them, hey, this is the jargon you're using. Here's why it's bad for you. Here's an explanation how you could do it better this time. It should feel seamless and they should feel less disillusioned because they feel like, “Oh my God, I'm actually learning something.”Michael Horn:Here, so I want to stay just as we wrap up here. And one last question before we go to our sort of bonus round, if you will, of stuff outside of education, which is you just painted a good picture, I think, of how the education system has reacted in very nervous, let's call it ways to this advent of it, because it has immediately sort of thrown into question so many of these tired practices that it holds on to. And I guess the corollary question I'm curious about, I've heard a lot of students, let me frame this a little bit more. I've heard a lot of students say, Professor X, you're thinking a lot about what is the assignment and how am I going to catch you from cheating, but you're spending a lot less time thinking about what do. I need to learn to be prepared for this world in which AI is going to be underpinning basically everything I could possibly go do in a career? And so, I guess the question I'm curious, from your perspective is, as you look at these traditional factory model education systems, what's something that they should start teaching students that they don't perhaps today? And what's something maybe that they should lose that they continue to hold on to?Irhum Shafkat:I mean, honestly, I don't want to sound like a shill for Minerva, but I am going to. I think freshman year, I had never written a full-length essay prior to freshman year in English, and I was kind of really lost, honestly. But one thing that really stood out is, like, my professor spent so much time just breaking down the act of writing into what does it mean like to have a thesis? What does it mean for a thesis to be arguable and substantive instead of something everybody universally agrees with? Because if everybody agrees with what you're writing, you don't need to write it. Really breaking down the act of writing into these atomic skills that I keep finding myself using even at the tail end of college now, in senior year. I think that is the kind of thing we're going to need to do, is like actually asking ourselves like, this is an instrument, a tool we've built, that we administer to our students in the hopes that they learn something. Does this tool actually do the thing it advertises? It does but a lot of the time it just doesn't. And we just kind of need to be honest about that because, again, it's a lot like, again, the ChatGPT moment in some sense. But also for education, it's been building up like a pressure valve, and that pressure valve kind of just went off in the last year. Wow.Diane Tavenner:Well, we could talk for a long time, but that might be the place to land it today. But before we let you go, we always like to, at the end, just mind for what we're reading, watching, listening to outside of our day to day work.Michael Horn:Do you have any time for that as a student?Irhum Shafkat:Can I talk about a video game?Michael Horn:Yeah, that's great.Irhum Shafkat:I've been playing a lot of Super Mario Wonder, which is like the new Mario Brothers game from Nintendo. It is fun. It is really the best way to describe it. A lot of media really enjoys being dark and gritty and mature or whatever. Nintendo is like, we're going to make a game that's unashamedly fun and bright and colorful and just playful. And they've been doing that for the better part of, I don't even know, like 30, 40 years now. And they've kind of just stuck to it as a core principle. And I kind of just admire their ability to really set a mission for themselves, which is make things that make people find joyful and fun and actually just stick to it for the better part of half century.Michael Horn:Oh, I love that one. Diane, what about you?Diane Tavenner:Well, we're going to look kind of boring following that one. I'm going to go to the dark, gritty world. I just finished reading the book How Civil Wars Start and How to Stop Them by Barbara F. Walter. I will just say seven of the eight chapters do an excellent job of diagnosing the problem, and it's pretty terrifying. And I do think we should know it. Chapter Eight, where the solutions come in, was not compelling to me, and so it feels like there's work for us to do.Michael Horn:And I guess I will say I'm in a similarly dark place, maybe, Diane, because I read the Art of War by Sun Tzu. So go figure. Everyone can figure out where our headspace is. But I finished it before Disney. I had tried to read it a couple times before, and this time I made it through, which is setting me up now for reading Klossovitz, which is where I am now. Grinding through is the right verb, I think. But on that note, Irhum, thank you so much for joining us and making a fraught topic - but a topic with a lot of hyperventilation - really accessible and exciting and giving us a window into where this could be going. Really appreciate you being here with us on class disrupted.And for all of those listening, thank you so much for joining us. 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.

Ryan Craig joined me to talk about his third book, Apprentice Nation: How the “Earn and Learn” Alternative to Higher Education Will Create a Stronger and Fairer America. In our conversation, Craig walked me through what it would take to move apprenticeship beyond the trades and into the broader American workforce. We compared the American apprenticeship system to those of other countries—with a deep dive on Germany, the UK, and Australia. And we discussed the roles of private companies, governments, and intermediary organizations in growing this centuries-old workforce development practice within the modern postsecondary ecosystem. As always, subscribers can listen to the conversation, watch it 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.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, something we are clearly not living up to today. And to help us unpack some of that and perhaps present a brighter picture of what the future could be is my longtime friend in the space, Ryan Craig. Ryan is the author of a new book, Apprentice Nation: How the Earn and Learn Alternative to Higher Education Will Create a Stronger and Fairer America. Ryan, first, it's good to see you. Welcome.Ryan Craig:Hey, good to see you.Michael Horn:Yeah, I love it because I’ve got your book right here on the shelf. It's not just collecting dust. It's actually prominently displayed. I'll leave it up there for folks as well so that they can see. But you wrote this great, entertaining book, but I'd love you to actually take a step back because people who don't know, you've obviously led a private equity firm in education, Achieve Partners, formerly University Ventures Fund, for years. I want to sort of get a sense of the plot also because in your book career, which is the other part of your identity - you have three books - you've gone from sort of the great unbundling of higher ed to faster and cheaper alternatives to higher ed. And now your latest book is the earn-and-learn alternative. So I'd love you to just sort of step back and take us through your own journey and arc to this point, like the problem that you're trying to solve for, why the iterations, and why landing at the moment with apprenticeships.Ryan Craig:This is the last book in the trilogy. So, this is the book where we defeat Sauron. Very excited for that. So, yeah, it's been a journey for sure. I started my career 25 years ago working for a hard charging Executive Vice Provost at Columbia University named Michael Crowe. And the effort there was to try to do innovative things online with the most traditional of universities. And I have gone from there to building large online universities and helping to build all sorts of innovative companies that partner with universities to help them do any number of things. But really sort of post Great Recession. Looking at the employment numbers that we were seeing for new graduates, recent graduates, just surprisingly stubborn underemployment, unemployment, and then obviously coupled with an affordability crisis that continues to this day to the point that the only major narrative in federal higher education policy over the last two and a half years has been loan forgiveness, which is a completely backwards looking policy, not forward looking. And so, I and my firm began to focus more and more on the employment side, moving to alternative pathways to employment: boot camps. And that was the sort of second book, A New You: Faster and Cheaper Alternatives to College. And that book is kind of a guided tour of these new alternative pathways to getting a good first job. And in that book, I talked a little bit about apprenticeship, but in the five years since, it's become clear to me that there are hundreds of sectors in the economy where there are massive talent gaps, where employers cannot find talent and frankly, aren't hiring talent. And conversely, young people who are seeking to launch careers just cannot find a way in effectively. We don't have these pathways.And that's a result of a skills gap where colleges and universities just aren't training, aren't providing education or training on the specific skills that employers are seeking, primarily digital skills, platform skills, and the sort of business knowledge that they're expecting. In the book, I talk about how a college degree 50 years ago was pretty much all you needed to get a good first job because, think of Don Draper and Madman, that maverickhead. What did you actually need to be hired there?Michael Horn:Well, that's a big question.Ryan Craig:You needed the macro-credential. You needed the ability to survive a three-martini lunch with Don Draper. You needed this get along ability that you kind of can get from college experience, but no specific skills. So, college is still doing a good job preparing young people for jobs, but they're the jobs of the 20th century, not the 21st century. So 21st century entry-level jobs are asking for discrete combinations of technical skills, platform skills, business knowledge that makes it very difficult. And on top of that, you have this experience gap, which is growing, which I think is best illustrated in cybersecurity, where entry level jobs now in cybersecurity ask for certifications that require three years of experience. So, how do you solve that riddle? And AI is going to make it worse because think about your first good job. I think back to mine. Easily half of my time was spent doing menial grunt work as I was kind of learning what the heck I was supposed to be doing. And that was kind of the bargain that you made with your employers. But that bargain is going to be broken because employers are soon going to expect that all of that work is going to be done, all that menial grunt work is going to be done by AI. And they're going to expect their entry level workers to be doing higher value work from the get-go. And that higher value work is not going to be possible without having some real experience in the space. It's just not. So basically, all jobs are going to go the way of cybersecurity jobs, where an entry-level job is kind of an oxymoron. And so, the only answer, therefore, has to be that we need to be able to build experience, real relevant work experience, into the educational pathway.So, by the time you're trying to get that good first job. You have real relevant experience in the field you're trying to get. And one way is internships. Internship is real work experience that you're doing for a limited period of time as part of an academic program or during your academic program. Another way is work-integrated learning, which is you're integrating real projects from real employers into coursework, probably as capstone projects over the course of your degree program. But the gold standard, the best way to do it is an apprenticeship because an apprenticeship, by definition, is a job. It's a full-time job with built in training and career pathways. And so, I think that the way most people, most young people, whether they be out of high school, out of community colleges, out of bachelor’s degree programs, or out of graduate and professional programs, will launch their careers in a decade, will be through some kind of apprenticeship program.You're going to need it. And then the question is, well, how do we build it? First of all, do we have the apprenticeship infrastructure today to do that? And the answer, not surprisingly, is no, not even close. And then the question becomes, well, how do we build it? How do we do it? And that's really what the book is about. And then the Book goes on to talk about what the country will look like when we do have that apprenticeship infrastructure.Michael Horn:Yeah, so let's go a little bit deeper first on the apprenticeship piece and what is an apprentice because there's sort of a back to the future element of it. Frankly, this is me for a second, I think of that more broadly as the history or the journey of education reform that we're on. We've gone to one-to-many classrooms from the one-room schoolhouse and tutoring… We need to go back to that sort of personalization. Apprenticeships went out of vogue; they should come back into vogue. You can sort of tell this narrative around a lot. But what is an apprentice and what are some of the big misconceptions around it? In the book, you list some of the fields that people stereotype as being apprenticeship heavy, but sort of broadly speaking, what are some of those misconceptions about what is an apprentice?Ryan Craig:Yeah, sure, so you're absolutely right. It's back to the future. Paul Revere was an apprentice. George Washington was an apprentice. Ben Franklin was an apprentice. But it's been a while. It's been a minute. We've been sort of on this college-for-all journey, really since World War II and really since the 60s. College has been the only socially acceptable pathway to economic mobility in this country. So, we've spent that time investing in establishing this vast post-secondary education infrastructure, which I sometimes call a tuition-based, debt-based infrastructure, as opposed to an earn and learn infrastructure. And what's fascinating is you look at other countries, they have a much more balanced approach. There's a tuition based pathway and then there's an earn-to-learn pathway. We really don't have that. One reason, as you say, are the misconceptions. One big one is that apprenticeship is for plumbers and welders and roofers. And that is true insofar as 70% of the current apprentices in the US are in the construction trades. So, it's the one sector of apprenticeship that's thriving and has been thriving. So, it's not wrong. But the point is that apprenticeship will work and work very well in tech and financial services and healthcare and logistics, and other countries have proven that it does. The other big misconception is that an apprenticeship is somehow just like any other training program or educational program. It is not. An apprenticeship is a job. It's a full-time job, which means there's an employer that is hiring the apprentice. That's how an apprenticeship starts. An employer is willing to hire an apprentice, which is not as easy as it sounds because an apprentice, by definition, is someone who doesn't know how to do the job yet, doesn't have the skills to do the job. Most employers today, that's anathema to them. They want someone who's going to be productive from day one. So that's the rub there. And the challenge is that most of the people who are focused on apprenticeship and these issues come out of the world of education and training. And think of it like any other education or training program. There's a training element of it. There's an on-the-job training element. There's a formal classroom or what's called related technical instruction element of it. But you got to put the job horse before the training cart here. This is a job. And the hard part and how you build the infrastructure is you have to figure out how you're going to incentivize employers to hire workers who are, by definition, going to be unproductive for 3, 6, 12, 18 months - not easy to do. Other countries have figured it out.Michael Horn:I want to go to what the incentives look like in a moment, but I want to stick with this point that you just made around other countries doing it well right now. And you made this really, I think, compelling point about how it's different from sort of an education first program. This starts with the job. It's not like a nine-week internship or something like that. It's a job. Maybe it's a couple of years, but it's sort of an undefined time, often. And then, as you said, it's on-the-job training. So, the education component fits into the job as opposed to the way internship or projects work, which is the learning by doing fitting into the education. So, it really flips that around. And then you talk in the book a lot about how the model for where the United States should be going should be much more like the United Kingdom or Australia rather than say, Germany. Help us understand this, and unpack it, and understand why America is so far behind. Well, you can include Germany in that, all of those other countries.Ryan Craig:Yeah, look, if I had a nickel for every time I read an article about some state junket going over to Germany to eat the schnitzel and drink the Riesling, I'd be able to afford a few bottles of Riesling. Germany is worth looking at because, in terms of apprentices as a percentage of the workforce, we're at 0.3%. Germany is 15 times better than us, so they're at about 4.5% apprentices as a percentage of the workforce. So, worth looking at, but impossible to emulate what they've done. And here's why: so, the first lesson is that Germany is not successful because BMW and Adidas are more benevolent or farsighted than US employers. They're just as focused on the near-term and the next quarter and on ensuring that they've got productive employees as US employers. Nowhere is apprenticeship flourishing because employers, by and large, are creating apprenticeships or hiring apprentices themselves. Apprenticeships flourish because there are what we call intermediaries who do the heavy lifting of setting up and running these programs. And that's sort of a hard thing to fathom, but they can be for-profit companies, they can be nonprofit organizations, they can be public agencies, they can be unions. But what they do is intermediaries perform one or more of the functions that an employer would need to perform were they to set up and run their own apprenticeship program. So, it's essentially doing the heavy lifting for the employer. The heaviest lift, of course, as I said, is hiring and paying this unproductive worker for a period of time. In the US, in the construction trades, it's unions, for the most part, who are doing that heavy lifting of setting up and running these apprenticeship programs in plumbing and welding and roofing and so forth. In Germany, it's these powerful large Chambers of Commerce who do that in conjunction with unions. And in fact, their role, both of their roles in setting up and running apprenticeship programs for employers is actually written into law. So that's one thing that we're not going to replicate here. The other thing we're not going to replicate here is that we don't have that same sort of Chamber of Commerce apparatus. So, for example, in Munich, there are 400,000 members of the Munich Chamber of Commerce. Why? Because if you're a sole proprietor in Munich, you are required by law to join the Munich Chamber of Commerce and therefore you're subject to everything the Chamber of Commerce wants you to do, like participating in their apprenticeship program. So, it's not replicable what they're doing. It's interesting, but the principle of it is, who are the intermediaries that we can incentivize? It's not going to be Chambers of Commerce, we don't have them. It's not going to be unions in tech and financial services and healthcare. Who could it be? So, 20, 30 years ago, the UK and Australia were very similar to the US on apprenticeship. They had small apprenticeship sectors, almost all in construction. And today, those countries are eight times better than we are on apprenticeship. So, we're at 0.3, they're at 2.4% of the workforce. How did they do it? Well, they recognized that they needed to incentivize intermediaries to do this work, and they funded it. They did it in a couple of ways. One is they funded the training component of the apprenticeship, in some cases overfunded it. So, they would incentivize training companies, staffing companies, to get into the business of setting up and running apprenticeship programs, and most important, knocking on the doors of employers offering to set up and run these programs for them. In the UK today, there are about 1200 intermediaries, which, based on the US economy, would translate into something like 8,000 intermediaries in the US today. We have about 150 in the US today, so a fraction of what we need. The other thing the UK did was pay-for-performance or formula-based funding for apprenticeship intermediaries. For every apprentice hired and trained and placed, these intermediaries would get paid. We don't have that kind of funding at all in the US. So, Australia is a very similar story. And the result is similar. Two lessons from that. One is that we have not been funding nearly enough. If you actually compare the amount we spend year over year on the post-secondary education or tuition- based debt-based infrastructure that we have to what we're spending on earn-and-learn apprenticeship infrastructure, it's 500 billion annually for tuition-based and under 400 million for earn-and-learn. So, over 1,000 to one ratio if you compare how much public support a given apprentice receives relative to a given college student, so total federal and state tax dollars, for every dollar that apprentice receives, it's $50 for the college student. So, I don't know whether the right ratio is one to one, two to one, five to one, or ten to one, but it sure ain't 50 to one or 1,000 to one. So, we haven't been funding it nearly enough. And then the other point is that we've been funding it wrong because to the extent we've been funding it, the Department of Labor in Washington has been giving out grants, trying to essentially pick winners among intermediaries, saying, "Oh, we think this intermediary will develop a successful apprenticeship program." The problem is, who's applying for those grants? Mostly community colleges and workforce boards, who on a scale of intermediaries, are really only doing a handful of things - what I'd call low intervention intermediaries, as opposed to high intervention intermediaries that would be turnkey like the ones we see in the UK and Australia, including critically employing that apprentice and paying their wage until they become productive. So,  in the US, 90% of these grants have gone to community colleges and workforce boards who are doing a couple of things. They're developing curriculum for the hypothetical apprenticeship program. They're registering the program. Maybe they're buying some equipment that they can use in the college and they're kind of sitting on their hands waiting for an employer to come along and asking them to use their curriculum for their apprenticeship program. But that's not how apprenticeship programs scale. Employers aren't going to come knocking on the community college door. The intermediary needs to go knocking on the employer door, offering to set up and run the program and make it seamless or almost turnkey for the employer. That's what we've seen in the UK. To the point that in the UK, you won't find a large or mid-sized company that hasn't been approached by half a dozen apprenticeship intermediaries. They know what this is. So, if they haven't launched an apprenticeship program, they've at least considered it. At this point in the US, you'd be hard pressed to find any employer that's been approached by an apprenticeship intermediary.Michael Horn:Right, and I just want to stay on this high versus low intervention apprenticeship intermediary because it's a major point in your book. And it strikes me that I left the Book feeling like the low intervention intermediaries in effect, outside of registering the apprenticeship, they're not really offering apprenticeships. What they're doing is giving the education program and hoping that they find an employer who will offer the apprenticeship, in reality. And then they'll sort of come alongside them and grease the wheels, if you will, to make it registered and so forth. But they're really just still providing education. Whereas it struck me that the high intervention intermediaries, they were the apprenticeship like they are hiring the people. Yes, they're also registering it, but essentially they're acting as a temp agency in a lot of cases in partnership with the employer.Ryan Craig:You hit the nail on the head. And here's the scale of the problem. So, for the directory in the back of the book, there's a directory of apprenticeship programs outside the construction trades. Not to diminish the apprenticeships in construction, they're great, but the whole point of the book is that apprenticeship should be beneficial and needed outside construction across the economy. So, we looked at all the apprenticeship programs listed in the Department of Labor, what's called the Rapids Database, which is the database listing all registered apprenticeship programs. So, there are 6,000 of them outside construction. How many of those 6,000 programs are actual real apprenticeship programs where you could get hired tomorrow as an apprentice, as opposed to what I call paper apprenticeship programs, which are apprenticeship programs that exist on paper. There's curriculum, they've been registered, there's no one actually hiring apprentices. So, of the 6,000 listed, 200 are real, 5,800 are paper apprenticeships.Michael Horn:Wow, that's a daunting ratio. Okay, so let's get into the policy piece of this because you just made the point that we've underfunded it, but not just that, that we actually have to rather than grant funding, which is sort of your classic input-based subsidization.Ryan Craig:Imagine if we grant-funded college where they basically issued grants to 100 colleges and everyone else had to kind of make do as opposed to what we do in college and how we built this massive post-secondary education infrastructure, which is formula-based funding. The funding flows with the student.Michael Horn:But you're saying something else additional here, which is, “It should be funding based on the outcome per the individual because you have a performance component, like, that It results in a job,” if I'm understanding correctly.Ryan Craig:Well, again, it has to be because an apprenticeship is a job. The training doesn't start until you're hired. If you're in a training program and you're not being paid or receiving a W-2, it's not an apprenticeship program. It might be a pre-apprenticeship program, which is, I guess, a thing. It's a pathway leading to a job. But the moment you get hired is the moment that your apprenticeship will start.Michael Horn:So, I want to unpack this payment piece a little bit more, though, because you make the point in the book that employers, despite many people's beliefs, are not job agencies. That's not their job. Their job is to create something of value for people that they buy and then that returns value to those who have put up the capital right, for the business to begin with, presumably.Ryan Craig:Even in the book I start talking about employers, then I correct myself saying, well, let's stop talking about them as employers because that's not how they think… That's not how they think about themselves. If they can reduce their human capital and deliver the same service, that's a win for them. So, then you have this high intervention intermediary coming along and saying, "We'll take some of the risk off of you as the company, and we'll hire." And there's some reduction of risk there, and it creates this try-before-you-buy scenario because then the company, I'll change the language to your point, can hire the apprentices that were productive by the end of a couple of year program into the company. So, tell us more about what the government money would actually fund, besides the fact that I guess these hive intervention intermediates are not coming along. And there's obviously like an inequality in the amount of money that title four accredited colleges get versus apprenticeships, which is basically none. And I guess the question I'm asking is would the problem be equally fixed if we just took money away from the colleges and you're saying, "Well, that's nice, but it's never going to happen, so that's why we need to fund apprenticeships." Or is there something more fundamental going on?Look, I think apprenticeship is about to have a moment in this country and we're seeing massive growth already in the absence of public support for it. I mean, my firm, as you know, Achieve Partners, our workforce fund, what we do is we buy business services companies in sectors where there's a massive talent gap, like cybersecurity, healthcare IT, Salesforce, Workday, and we build large apprenticeship programs in these companies so that they become talent engines for their sectors. And in sort of high value sectors where the talent gap is massive, you can do it without a subsidy. Absolutely. We've proven that. It's great, we're doing very well with it. But the number of fields where there is a talent gap where you require a subsidy to make it work is much larger. So, there's only a fraction. We're kind of skimming the highest value opportunities here, but most fields would actually really benefit from having a program. And the only way you make it happen is by incentivizing a well-positioned intermediary, be it a staffing company, a nonprofit, an industry association, to actually build that infrastructure that's necessary to get these apprenticeship programs started. So that's how you do it. The subsidy is never going to pay for the whole thing. It's certainly not going to ever pay for the apprentices’ wages. That's not the intention. The companies obviously are going to have skin in the game, whether the employer is the intermediary or the end employer. The point is you really incentivize,you begin to get the flywheel spinning on this apprenticeship infrastructure that's needed by bringing big staffing companies like Adeco, and Allegiance and Manpower, getting them to launch apprenticeship service provider arms, serving their tens of thousands of clients. "We can do this for you too. Oh, really? What does that involve? Well, here's what we do and you only have to do this. That's interesting. Let's talk about launching an apprenticeship program." That's what needs to happen.Michael HornGot you. And so, the funding is really helping provide some of the training underlying the job itself. It sounds like, for places where the supply demand, if you will, of qualified workers for needed jobs is a little less out of whack, such that maybe companies are just poaching from each other this sort of gets...Ryan Craig:Or just simply where it's not as high a value and the end employer is not willing to pay more than $35,000 or $40,000 a year for that entry level worker to start. You'd never be able to make that work and pay someone living wage as an apprentice without a subsidy.Michael Horn:That makes sense. Let me ask you another question because this is maybe my hobby horse, but everyone talks about skills-based hiring. As I look at it, one of my big observations is, outside of the technical skills and you've mentioned them: the digital skills, et cetera, employers don't really know what critical thinking and communication and all those buzzwords mean. And so, when they're talking about this, I'm super skeptical we ever really get to a skills-based hiring of that taxonomy. The thing that sort of made me second guess that, however, was in your book, and I don't have it quite right, but I think it was in the UK, there was this job description where it was much more precise than your average LinkedIn job description around what they were looking for. And my guess is that the reason that they can do that is because they're looking at people in the apprenticeship and what they're actually doing and building skills for, and then they can just describe the set of tasks as opposed to skills that they're doing and then like, hey, this is the job. And so it's much more articulate. And then frankly, the apprenticeship providers, the higher intervention intermediaries, they can come along and be like, “Oh yeah, when you're facilitating that, or whatever that's called, this skill and that's how we build it.”Ryan Craig:Well, that's right. Look, American companies, not employers, are really good at outsourcing.Michael Horn:I'll get better at that, I promise.Ryan Craig:Yeah, they're really good at outsourcing. And entry-level hiring is a very specific skill. Maybe I shouldn't use the word skill, capability, that not every employer is going to be good at. Google should probably have capabilities in terms of ascertaining what entry level programmers, coders should look like. But is Google going to have capability determining what an entry-level HR admin looks like? Probably not. And so, I think intermediaries are going to do a better job of that.Michael Horn:All right, last question as we wrap up, because I've kept you longer than I promised I would. But it's been an interesting conversation, and I will just tell everyone, buy the book, because there's, like, a lot more policy implications and regulations that need to be rethought that are biasing against some smart things and things of that nature in the book. But the last question on my side is like, I'd love you to think about or describe maybe what a fairer system ultimately would look like because it occurs to me that on the individual side, what we call students today, but would be employees in an apprenticeship world, a lot of those individuals, they don't actually know what they want to do. And so, the apprenticeship model seems to me to work really well for those that have some clarity around what gives them energy, what their skills are, what they're good at, etc. And so, I'm just sort of curious what you think the balance will be like. What do you envision? Or is this frankly, like, we need K-12 education to do a heck of a lot better job of helping people build senses of what their careers might be much earlier. And that's like, really where this needs to go to level.Ryan Craig:That's a great last question. Let me just start by saying the inequity is a product of what I call asymmetric information, where today we have this high school to college to work orthodoxy. And we're expecting young people prior to getting a good first job at the age of 18 or 20 or 22 to be making a decision as to what accredited post-secondary institution they should apply to and what program and take on tens or in some cases hundreds of thousands of dollars of student loan debt. And we know what the completion rates are, we know what the underemployment rates are. So, we see the outcomes there. And it's a result of asymmetric information because colleges, if they don't know that Michael Horn applying to this program, is not going to achieve a positive outcome, they ought to know because they've seen 100 of you come through over the years with your scores and grades and profile and so forth. So, it's kind of like the market for used cars and we regulate that for a reason. So how do we solve that? Well, the Biden administration is taking one approach, which is just disclose more, require them, or even require students to sign a waiver saying like, “I've been apprised of this, and I'm still enrolling in this program.” That's one way to do it. A better way, I think, is to make sure, or at least give students the option rather than the sole option being pay tuition, take on debt. What if we had as many earn-and-learn pathways, as many apprenticeship programs as we had large colleges and universities? What if we had as many apprentice jobs as there are seats in freshman colleges and universities? What if, and this has just happened in the UK now, this fall, for the first time, when you apply the common app in the UK - which is called UCAS - when you log into UCAS, you see apprenticeship programs listed alongside all the university programs that are available. And so, you can imagine in a world like that, you'd have lots more students pursuing earn-and-learn pathways where they would be better informed about their interests, their capabilities, before being asked to make perhaps the biggest investment they're going to make in their life short of a home. I think that's a good idea.And what's the downside of that? The downside is maybe someone pursues an apprenticeship program, works for a couple of years, gets paid, learns their capability, decides they want to do something totally different. Are they worse off than they were before? No. But the same thing is probably not true of someone who enrolls in a degree program, takes on $50,000 of debt, doesn't complete the program, they are worse off than they were before, or even graduates, and doesn't figure out how to get a good job. So, I think that's the equity issue that we're talking about. An apprentice nation is one that really provides choice to you. And that's what the book is really about: how we establish a more balanced approach to career launch in this country. We've had one approach. We are more imbalanced than any other developed country in the world in having this sort of maniacal, sole focus on tuition-based, debt-based pathway to getting a good first job. An apprentice nation would be one where we have a real choice. And again, apprenticeships aren't just for high school grads. There will be some, but they're going to be for community college grads, college grads at a professional graduate schools. Because, again, getting a good first job is going to get harder, not easier, as technology and AI develop.Michael Horn:Well, this would pay off for students, taxpayers and society. Maybe not colleges, but that's okay.Ryan Craig:Well, it's funny you say that. I've been giving talks around the country and the only challenges I've been getting have been from tenured faculty at colleges and universities. But I have to say, politically, this is something that I think Democrats and Republicans can get behind. Well, again, I'm not saying we should be spending $500 billion a year on it, but if you look at what the UK has been spending, they were at their peak, they were spending, I think, 4 billion a year. So, ten times what we're spending today for an economy which is significantly smaller.Michael Horn:Yeah. Ryan, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for writing the book, Apprentice Nation. Everyone, check it out and keep pushing, keep creating. 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. Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.

Many schools struggle to create their master schedule each year. With dropping enrollments and a looming fiscal cliff, how schools use their teachers and classrooms will be even harder. I sat down with Paymon Rouhaniford, CEO of the startup Timely, to discuss how their tool can help schools schedule smarter and allow schools to focus on their highest priorities. As always, subscribers can listen, watch 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 Topic4:44 Timely’s origins6:53 Elevating priorities with Timely8:08 Camden as a case study 15:50 Unlocking possibilities with zero-based budgeting18:11 The “how” of Timely20:35 Adding complex criteria to the model22:48 Budgeting post-ESSERMichael Horn:To help us think about some of the steps we can take to build a world in which all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their potential, and live a life of purpose, particularly as districts are staring at a fiscal cliff right in the face right now, is Paymon Rouhanifard. Paymon, it's so good to see you because we've talked the last few times on the phone, but not actually on video, so it's good to see you. Thanks for joining us.Paymon Rouhanifard:Thanks for having me.Michael Horn:So before we get into the company you've started, Timely, and some of the early successes that you've had and help our audience understand the problem. I’d just love you to talk about your own journey of educational entrepreneurship, and the work you've done in education and how you come to this current challenge and opportunity that you're seeking to help educators with.Paymon Rouhanifard:Yeah, it all really starts from lived experience. And so, I started my career as a 6th-grade teacher in New York City, drew some connections between what was happening inside of my school in West Harlem and the decisions the central office was making and wanted to be a part of those more systems-level solutions. And that led to a career working inside of districts. And so, I was in the Bloomberg administration working for Chancellor Joel Klein. We got termed out. I crossed the river into New Jersey, where I worked in Newark public schools, and ultimately became the superintendent of Camden, New Jersey. And Camden was a really formative experience. It was a school district that was put under state control right at the time I got appointed. I was the first superintendent appointed subsequent to that very fateful decision, and I was the 13th superintendent in the prior 20 years. So, there's just a lot of turmoil, a lot of turnover and confusion. And that experience, and I describe it as the best job I've ever had that I never want to have again, deeply shaped the work I'm doing today. And so immediately after I did that for five years, immediately after that experience, I started a nonprofit called Propel America, which is in a different space, but it speaks to a major pain point we felt in Camden, which is we increased the college matriculation rate, we changed the college going culture in Camden. There's a four year college pennant hanging in every classroom and hallway. I’m deeply proud of that fact, and at the same time, I saw a massive uptick in stopouts—students leaving traditional higher ed and entering the labor market with debt and little additional earning ability. And so,  Propel America kind of drives a solution in that chasm of a challenge. And this is one I know you know quite well, kind of various hats you wear, Michael. We created a model called “jobs-first higher education,” which was intended to basically get young people into a living-wage job, but also the ability to get college credit so they could stack into a higher degree. So I did that for a few years, and then Timely. In Timely, the road goes back again to Camden. It was actually a board meeting I went to at the start of our first or second school year, and there were a lot of angry teachers in the room and some students and some parents. And I learned that we didn't stick the landing for scheduling. We didn't get scheduling right for one of our high schools, and students were in the cafeteria. There was a lot of confusion at the school, and I got under the hood of scheduling. First time, I was truly accountable for scheduling. And what I learned then was…I had sort of three aha moments. This obviously connects to Timely. The first was I couldn't believe how freaking hard scheduling was and just how complicated of a problem it is to solve. The second was I couldn't believe how few tools and solutions there were. So, there was really no sophisticated answer to the challenges that we were confronting. And so we were using Google Sheets and whiteboards and bulletin paper. And then third, just what a missed opportunity it was. Scheduling sits at this incredible intersection of the student and teacher experience, innovative staffing and budget solutions, and yet here we are, just, like, mousing around Google Sheets and whiteboarding our way to a schedule. And so that led me to this realization over time after I had left the Superintendency, that scheduling shouldn't have to be this process you suffer through and endure, but it should actually enable your core priorities.Michael Horn:Sorry, I'm just like still, there's so many places we could go in this conversation, because Propel America and the solution you built there, I think, was really ahead of its time in many ways. I'm just thinking also of all of the school districts now coming to this realization of, frankly, the lackluster results that so many colleges are getting for their students right. Even when they get them to college, as you started to do in Camden, and sort of what a visionary company that was. And it strikes me the Timely is much the same as you say it right. Like, the biggest use or sort of how we can impact the lives of students is through the use of time and people in ways that better get know the progress that they need to get done. So, let's dig deeper on what Timely is, then, against that problem that you observed in Camden when you were superintendent.Paymon Rouhanifard:Yeah. Our belief is that the master schedule should be the beating heart of a school. The way you use time and resources is as paramount of a decision as one can make as a systems leader, as a school-based leader. And instead, right now, the reality for most school leaders and for district administrators is you're just suffering through this process. You're just trying to get to the finish line. And generally, the starting point for most folks who are responsible for scheduling, they just roll over last year's schedule, which is understandable because there's a huge disincentive to recreate your schedule again because of how complicated it is. And when you're rolling over the schedule, that's how you can inadvertently calcify both inefficiencies and inequities. And so, the idea behind Timely is you should create a schedule that's aligned to your priorities, that enable your priorities, be they academic, budget and staffing. And to do that, you need a really sophisticated tool, a sophisticated set of supports, and there just really aren't many out there.Michael Horn:So how do you start with those? Because the big question there, right, is priorities and a school being clear about what those are. I can't tell you the number of district superintendents I meet with, and they're like, “These are our 20 priorities”. And I'm like, “If you have 20 priorities, you have none.” So how do you really help a district and their leadership team first figure out what is the core thing that we need to focus on?The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Paymon Rouhanifard:It varies completely district to district, CMO to CMO. One of our beliefs at Timely is that we should be there to operationalize one's hopes and dreams. So, it's just worth stating outright. We are an implementation tool. We're not a strategy consulting shop to help them define those priorities. We'll give input and we'll tell them, “Hey, look, I'm seeing 25 different priorities and you may want to cull it.” And so, there is that sort of sounding board in problem solving, but ultimately we're there to operationalize hopes and dreams and happy to make that more concrete, whether it's the case study we just put out or another example. But you're exactly right that this is sort of inherent to the challenge, that sometimes there are more problems being called out that they're trying to solve than they can actually solve.Michael Horn:Well, let's go just where you suggested then. Let's take a case study where a district you've worked in and I'll let you choose the one and just sort of talk to us through how you helped align the use of time and resources with the priorities that they actually held.Paymon Rouhanifard:Yeah, so our largest pilot partner, so last year we wrapped up a pilot working with 17 schools spanning three districts across three states. The largest of those partners, Lubbock ISD in the panhandle of Texas represented 14 of those 17 schools, so they have nine middle schools and five high schools. And so, Lubbock came into scheduling with one overarching challenge, which is they had experienced and are still experiencing declining enrollment. And so, the budget pressures created by that and also the fact ESSER funds are expiring and you touched on the fiscal cliff at the top of this conversation that's exacerbating those budget pressures. And so, they wanted to begin the first year of a multi-year process to essentially confront that challenge and to use their words to right size the district. And at the same time, they had some core academic priorities. At the top of that list was middle school performance. And so, they had been really struggling, particularly in core subject areas with middle school performance. And then the second item, in terms of academic priorities, was to enable better supports to students with disabilities. Even as their overall enrollment had been declining roughly about 10% over the last five years, their students with disabilities, their special education populations were increasing during that time. And so, they wanted to figure out a way to dedicate greater resources and support to those special populations. So, enter Timely. And we did some light analysis, and they led a lot of this themselves, but ultimately the core exercise was how can we create a master schedule across those 14 schools that built a bottoms-up schedule that essentially helped enable those priorities. And I'll just tell you the headline and we can go from there. So, across those 14 schools, they identified 37 positions that they could eliminate through vacancies created by attrition. And so that is to say, no single teacher was laid off, there was no reduction in force, no one was let go. And those 37 positions, in terms of the savings that created $2.2 million to use their budget dollars, 37 positions. Where we live in Massachusetts, that would be close to $4 million, but in Lubbock, $2.2 million. And they could then take the $2.2 million and invest it toward those academic priorities. So, they created block schedules for their middle schools, which required hiring additional core subject area teachers. And then they hired approximately, I want to say, at least ten additional special population instructors, so teachers to serve students with disabilities in addition to additional professional learning opportunities for those staff members. And so, yeah, the headline was they unlocked these resources because of the inefficiencies that are embedded in scheduling to enable those core academic priorities.Michael Horn:So, let's go deeper on this then, because that's a big headline, and if I'm understanding you correctly so maybe I'll state it and then you correct it and unpack it further, it sounds like as opposed to just taking for granted maybe previously they had a seven-period or eight-period day or something like that in the middle school. With your tool, they're able to build from the bottom up what's the right allocation of time for students across different subject areas? Build a schedule starting from that, and then say, okay, actually, we have these open positions. We don't need to hire for those. And we're going to take that savings that we realize from not hiring those and instead hire teachers and the priorities that we actually have, which is around these core subjects in middle school. And so, we're going to essentially be able to reallocate dollars to the things that we really care about and really need to deliver on that we haven't been. How does that measure up and how does that look in the process that you guys have created in the product itself?Paymon Rouhanifard:You captured that really well. And so, in terms of how did that play out? Their target average class size stayed the same from last school year to what they were hoping to create this school year, which I think is really important and interesting to call out. And what they learned through scheduling with us. And part of what we're passionate about in terms of helping other decision makers at districts or charter management organizations realize, is by using the scheduling process, you can identify where you have a mismatch of resources, where you might have inconsistent teacher loads and class sizes across schools. Because again, that common practice is you're just rolling over your schedule, which teachers are returning, and you're sort of in cruise control, right. By building a bottoms-up schedule that's based on student course requests, what are students asking for? What do students need? You can actually ultimately not only deliver better outcomes for students by virtue of a higher percentage of students that get their course request fulfilled, you can not only save hundreds of hours of time through just an easier process, and using a tool and a team of educators to support you, but you can identify those inefficiencies by just creating more consistent allocation or some intentional approach to more equitably allocate resources to schools. But what we almost always see is there's just a lot of randomness in the way decisions are made to allocate resources. There's a lot of times and this is all well intentioned, right, a squeaky wheel. The school leader that's really good at advocating for resources at their school and has maybe a lot of political power, whatever the case might be, and you end up having these inconsistencies that can really create inefficiencies.Michael Horn:So, I remember the famous Marguerite Rosa, I can't remember the name of the book right now, but she has this book on school finance, right? And I remember one of the case studies being something like, you think your core priorities are, say math and reading, but in fact, when we look at your budget on a per pupil basis, and you realize that it's like seven students for the cheerleading teacher or something like that, that you're actually really allocating the most money to cheerleading and that actually maybe is a stronger statement of what your actual strategy is rather than what you profess to want to be focusing on. How much of that are you finding where people are like, whoa, you mean I'm doing that? I had no idea.Paymon Rouhanifard:Well, I do think the fiscal cliff and the realities for some districts - I don't want to say all of them are falling into this trap - but where they have used one-time money to plug recurring expenses, I do think they're now being confronted by these realities. They're looking at their athletics budgets and other budgets that speak to a different set of priorities than the ones they profess and the ones that are in their strategic plans that they're sharing out at their school board meetings.Michael Horn:Yeah, and often, right, strategy is what you actually do, not what you say. So, you're helping them reset that. And it feels like that grounds up process, again, if I'm understanding, is sort of like a zero-based budgeting approach as opposed to just what did we do last year? We're going to add 5% or subtract 5% or whatever it might be, adjust on the margins. You're really building up. If districts start to do this work with Timely, I'm just sort of curious how imaginative it could get. In the sense that I heard a friend, Alex Hernandez once say schools, I think, don't realize how much freedom they're giving up when they just start with that master schedule and assume that that's a given, that when you rethink that, you can really reimagine time and space in some dramatically different ways - and the use of staff. How creative do you think you might see districts start to get if they start to build from that bottoms up as your tool starts to take them through?Paymon Rouhanifard:Well, I think ultimately the possibilities with scheduling are endless. And by the way, I love Alex. I'm not surprised that he said that. And that's a lovely anecdote. To the extent a school or a district wants to see their middle and high schools go through some sort of redesign process, that in itself is such a daunting task to consider scheduling through Google Sheets and Whiteboards. And so, you could completely rethink not just your bell schedule, but just the way your school is designed and operates, and scheduling ultimately ends up being the key disincentive to go through a process like that, to kind of rethink your values or just kind of operationalize the values that were already there. And so, the possibilities are really endless. You can introduce dual enrollment. You can recreate the structures in place that have prohibited your students to be able to access higher level coursework or certain experiences outside of the school. So, again, our job at Timely is not to come in and tell them how to do that and what exactly those priorities should be, but to give them a tool that can allow them to explore all of those possibilities and to ultimately enable those possibilities.Michael Horn:Very cool. So, we've spent a bunch of time on the why. I'm going to come back to the why at the very end and sort of what you can imagine, but I want to spend a little bit of time on the how. Like, how does this tool really do something different from other tools out there on the market. I think a lot of people will say, yeah, I hear you on the Google spreadsheets, but I also have my master scheduling, whatever thing I've used for 20 years. How does the work…how do you ingest these priorities, look at what they're doing now, and build something different? How does the tool actually accomplish this?Paymon Rouhanifard:Yeah, the solution is two parts. Part one is a software application. And the important element of the software we've created is we're using optimization technology. And optimization technology, you see it in the healthcare system with hospitals and nursing schedules. You see it logistics, companies, transportation, etc. As tends to be true with education, we lag a little bit in adopting certain elements of technology. And so, the optimization technology helps put the puzzle together and take a lot of the guesswork out of the educator's hand. And so that's really important. But also, it's paired with critical support from a team of former educators, people who have built schedules before. So, I'm not the only person on the team that has worked inside of schools and districts. And we've got former directors of operations from charters who have built schedules, folks who have worked inside of district schools building schedules. And so, our ambition was not to create a piece of software and hand it over to schools and walk away. That's not the impact we're seeking to have in the world. We actually think it's really important to have that layer of support. And the reason for that is it's one thing to teach someone to use a piece of software to build a schedule, but it's another to support them, to build the best possible schedule that is aligned to their priorities, that enables their priorities. And so, there's a lot of troubleshooting and problem solving as you're pulling certain levers. What does that mean by way of outcomes? What are the sort of benefits and tradeoffs of various constraints you put in to get to a schedule that optimizes ultimately for the percentage of students who get a full schedule Michael Horn:And when you're doing those constraints because obviously tradeoffs, I imagine, is the art of this. Not everyone gets the perfect thing, but I guess you're probably trying to make sure that they get an acceptable solution at minimum and then build the optimization from there. How does a district think about the tradeoffs that they're willing to make when something comes up and they say, gosh this or that? I do have to make a choice.Paymon Rouhanifard:Yeah, I'll give you a couple of examples to make that more concrete. So, one time we built a schedule with a school, and we saw that nearly 100% of the students got a full schedule, which is pretty unheard of. So, our target is 90% or higher. And when I was working in Camden Public Schools using hand tools, we would get about 65% to 75% of students fully scheduled and then you have to hand place the rest and it's a very time intensive process and we anecdotally 65% to 75% for your first run, fairly common. And so, with this school we hit well north of 90%, close to 100%. We looked at it a little further and we realized the teachers, on average, were switching classrooms twice a day and that was a lot to ask of the teachers. So, we introduced a new constraint that minimized the amount of classroom hopping for teachers, and that brought the percentage of students fully scheduled down modestly and that was the right tradeoff for that school to make. Another example would be we want to make sure every teacher has one prep, but we also want to ensure that there's a PLC on top of that, but can we actually pull that off? And this is like the status quo today where it's such a disincentive to create one schedule, yet alone two.So to slog your way to comparing two schedules is very challenging. But with us, you can run one scenario with the teacher prep requirement of one, and then the second one where you added a second teacher prep as a PLC as a common prep, and you can just compare and contrast what those outcomes look like. And so, each scenario is saved so that you can understand the benefits and tradeoffs.Michael Horn:Gotcha. Very cool. So last question for me, I guess, returning to the why piece of this, which we teased at the beginning, the fiscal cliff coming as ESSER funding runs out on districts, we'll see if there's some sort of extension, but presumably most of them are going to have fewer dollars than they've had in the next few school years. I'd love you to just sort of dimensionalize how the districts you're working with are thinking about that challenge because I imagine there's a lot of fear. Like all of a sudden, “Oh my gosh, who are we going to have to cut back?” And so how does a tool like yours come into that environment and say, we can help you manage that and you don't have to backtrack on your priorities, you can actually make progress. Paymon Rouhanifard:Well, I think a lot of times the initial reaction is one of surprise, if not skepticism and then they spend a little bit more time understanding the solution and the challenges they're facing and seeing a sense of possibility. It's not often that you can present to someone the possibility of finding budget savings, but as a rising tide that lifts all boats, that doesn't necessarily come with hard tradeoffs. On the other side of that, I'll just also add it's also possible that some districts and some schools have fewer efficiencies, or inefficiencies I should say, that are identified. But generally speaking, across a larger number of schools, there are those pockets. And so, what that means is certain schools may end up actually adding staff, while other schools may end up sort of losing some of the resources that were previously allocated. And so that exercise is one that's iterative and it requires a lot of cross functional coordination within a school district. But I do just want to point out that it's not like across every school you find the same amount of inefficiencies. It's more just across the system, they can be discoverable.Michael Horn:Got you. That makes a lot of sense. So, as we wrap up here, how do folks find out more about Timely and is there anything else I should have asked that you want to jump in on and help people understand.Paymon Rouhanifard:They can learn more by going to timelyschools.com.ge  We would love more people to read the case study we just released about Lubbock ISD. We're going to be out there at various events talking about the Lubbock story, and I just so appreciate the time. I know we covered a lot.Michael Horn:Look, it's an incredibly important problem. It's an incredibly pressing time for districts to tackle it rather than just make the, “Oh, we have fewer dollars, we're just going to do the vertical chop down the line right.” To be thoughtful as they make those cuts so that students don't sacrifice. So, I'm glad you're doing the work you are, Paymon, and everyone can check out what you're doing at Timely, and just so appreciate you being here.Paymon Rouhanifard:Thanks again 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.

Todd Rose rejoined me and Diane Tavenner to talk about compelling new research findings on what Americans do and don't want from their schools, institutions and lives. Spoiler alert: They are rejecting fame, fortune and higher education as markers of success. Their focus instead is on community and financial security. Along with Diane, I enjoyed diving in to this conversation with Todd to explore what this might mean for schools. As always, subscribers can listen to the conversation, watch it 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.Diane Tavenner:Hey, Michael.Michael Horn:Hey, Diane.Diane Tavenner:We got to spend a lot of time together last week in person, which is always so much fun, and on a panel together, which made me feel like we're at a good launching place to dive into some really meaty issues this season as we're back.Michael Horn:Indeed, and we raised a little havoc together, which is sort of our norm, if you will. When we started this podcast back in COVID, we really wanted to help parents and educators rethink some of the fundamental tenets of education as they were scrambling to do all forms of virtual and hybrid learning and then moving forward, really continue to question some of the holy grails of the education system and present some third ways through it. So, it continues to be interesting. And last week, with you in person, was a heck of a lot of fun to push the audience as well.Diane Tavenner:It really was. And we talk about this, but I kind of can't believe we're in our fifth season already, but super excited this season to be going back and talking about topics that really impact K-12, but not just K-12. I think we might do a little bit of expansion this year. We want to talk about schools that are reinventing and doing great, sort of innovative type of things, but we also want to get into some of the thorny issues, like we always do because we like to be a little bit provocative, but we want to bring our classic third way approach to those things. And we're also going to focus a lot on how K-12 sits in a bigger ecosystem. Our job is to prepare people for life. And so, what does that mean and how does that intersect with the world and work and college and more?Michael Horn:Yeah, well, you wrote an entire book, of course, about preparing people not just for school, but for actual life called Prepared. And so, in that theme, I think it fits right in with what we've sort of always been doing. But we're also planning, as folks know, to have a lot more guests this year. And to that end, longtime listeners may recall that in season one, in the height of the pandemic, we welcomed to the podcast early on, Todd Rose. And Todd helped introduce this framework of helping move the education system really from a zero-sum one to a positive sum one. Frankly, I ripped that off shamelessly, gave him credit, but ripped it off shamelessly in my book From Reopen to Reinvent. And then we followed it up last season, of course, by really dissecting the question of what is a meritocracy, what is the goal? And a big conclusion, I think we both came away with from those conversations was that the goal of the education system can't be the single destination point or a single metric. Individuals and their goals and their circumstances, they are way too varied for that sort of simplicity.And that's a good thing, actually. And one conclusion that came out of that was that this college for all goal that the system has really come to embrace over the previous few decades was not setting up large numbers of individuals for success. It wasn't helping them build their passions, fulfill their potential, live a life of purpose. But I've had a question out of that, which is we, you and I and maybe some of our listeners, may have concluded that this college for all goal doesn't make sense. But has the general populace at large, Diane?Diane Tavenner:Well, Michael, this is a very good reason to bring Todd back to the show because he's got some real insights there and we're about to dive into them. But for those who don't know, Todd's, the co-founder and CEO of Populace. He's a bestselling author. And you have heard me say multiple times that if you have not read his books, drop everything, run out, and read them. Specifically, The End of Average, which I think is just mind blowing. And there's Collective Illusions as well. And what we're really going to focus on today is a new study that has come out from Populace titled “Americans Reject Fame, Fortune, and Higher Ed as Markers of Success, Seek Community and Financial Security.” And we will link that in the show notes. But as part of that study, they have released a success index, which really helps to distill what Americans really think success is. And I personally am just so excited about this conversation. Todd is a dear friend and mentor, and I'm so excited to talk about this. So, welcome. We're thrilled to have you here with us again and hoping you can just tell us a little bit about this study.Todd Rose:Yeah, well, great to be back and good to see the two of you. You said this earlier, at the end of the day, thinking about the kind of lives people want to live. We entered this study mainly because I have another pet peeve. I have a bunch of pet peeves, as you know. So, I'm trying to go after all of them, which is, I think we've lost the plot on the American Dream and people of good faith have turned it into economic mobility as the definition. Certainly, you know, economic mobility matters in the sense that the absence of it is certainly a barrier to The American Dream. But we got a little worried when you start thinking removing the barrier is the same as achieving the dream, we might be in trouble. James Russell Adams, who coined the term, The American Dream, during the Great Depression, actually was clear about it. It's about being able to aspire to a view of success that you define and feel like you have a fair shot at achieving, not held back by arbitrary obstacles. First of all, we were interested in how does the American public think about the American dream. And what we found is, overwhelmingly, the majority of Americans still see it as achieving on their definition of success, but they think everybody thinks it's just about economic mobility. So, it's like, okay, well if it's about achieving your view of success, then we need to know more about what you mean by a successful life. And as you know, we use these private opinion methods that get around social desirability effects but also tradeoffs. When you say something like a successful life, you can't have everything. Just like in education, you can't be everything to everybody. What are your priorities? And so. we use the methodologies that force real world complex tradeoffs.Pretty excited about that. Here’s what I was shocked by: so, we had 61 tradeoff priorities for what people could mean by a successful life. And, private opinion, I've been surprised a number of times, but in this one I just could not believe a number of things. So, we can kind of dig in. First, when you think about letting people define for themselves what a successful life is, I think some of us get worried like “Oh, people are going to be selfish, it's going to be this free for all. Like everybody goes after their own. No one cares about community, no one cares about each other.” Well, that's just not what you find in private. For example, in the top ten tradeoff priorities, so much of it is about a meaningful life and that meaningful life involves other people. For example, the number one tradeoff priority was wanting to do work that has a positive impact on other people. When left to your own devices, you care about having an impact on other people. There are things like financial security in there, but of course financial security is not the same thing as economic mobility.They want to be able to have kids, they want to have a secure retirement, they want to do a number of things that don’t require that they go out of state to chase a job and get out of community. So, the couple of things like that, the broader focus on meaning and purpose and community. The other thing that will kind of blow your mind is, in private, the role of character. It was just remarkable. Every single character attribute, every single one ranked significantly higher than all status attributes. Things like being a decent person, it just matters to people for their view success. And yet everything that signals status is a bottom dweller - everything. But then when we ask people, well, what do you think most people would say? You get a completely different picture. They think everyone cares about status, no one cares about character. So, we're under these collective illusions. But I have some other things that are, I think, worth talking about. But let's get to the education piece because this was probably the most surprising thing to me because again, this is about the life you want to live, not specifically about education. Well, we had in there the sort of traditional things that you could go after, like skilled trade, four-year college diploma, advanced degree, things like that. The college diploma, which if you think about it, was really one of the three markers of the American dream for probably the last 50, 60, 70 years.Diane Tavenner:Literally the golden ticket that people wantTodd Rose:Yeah. It has plummeted now. It is now ranked 54th out of 61 in tradeoff priorities for a successful life. And you'd think, well, maybe it's just because college is not as valuable and now you got to go get even more education, but even getting an advanced degree is only ranked two spots higher. What I thought was the funniest thing is that this idea of a skilled trade, plumber HVAC stuff like this where you make good money and you do good work and actually do help people, was, in private, ranked 15th. So, in private now, the idea of having a skilled trade is viewed as a better marker of a successful life than a college diploma. Now, what I thought was hilarious is even people like me that have these fancy advanced degrees, even people with advanced degrees would rank getting a certificate in a skilled trade as an indicator of success more than going to college. Nobody thinks that this is a marker of success anymore.Michael Horn:Wow, it says a lot, Todd, about sort of the change of what desirability is. I mean, I think a lot of people in K-12 schools are struggling with this reality of like, "Oh, but if I say college isn't your destination, am I somehow giving something less desirable?" And what the research is suggesting is, “No, this is actually prestigious and these other pathways have real merit and value.”Todd Rose:Well, this is the thing you think about where K-12 is right now. We care a lot about sort of paradigms and paradigm shifts in society, and education is smack dab in a paradigm crisis where you think about what's being upended simultaneously, not only the process by which we educate - getting away from the standardized stuff which we've talked about - but the very purpose of education itself is up for grabs. And it's hard. I feel really badly for teachers who are doing the best they can in an institution that is no longer delivering the kind of outcomes that people privately desire, and they're not even doing a very good job of delivering the things we don't want because of the process by which we do it. So, it's very tricky. But if you think about it, it's like recognizing that we're leaving an era of what I would call the end of compliance culture. We've been living under a paradigm of paternalism ever since Frederick Taylor. And as you all know, that's my nemesis. He did more damage to American democracy than anybody, I think. But we gave up self-determination, more bottom-up approaches, where people had more control over their lives, for top-down efficiency. And look, we definitely got something for it. That's for sure. But I think what you're seeing in the American public is the sort of rebirth of the desire to claim that self-determination, that they want control of their lives back. They just do. And some of that's manifesting very destructively. And I think that people that care about education realize that the days of telling people what a good education is and forcing them into your vision for that, that's over. You think about our job; it’s to help cultivate young people to live meaningful lives, make a contribution, have a credible next step, as Diane always talks about. It's not rocket science. It's not easy, but what I worry about, and I don't mean to sound too hyperbolic, but when people no longer want the outcome of an institution, they don't trust it, they will not fight for it. And I worry that unless we recognize what's really going on here and start responding to what people want, I think we are putting at risk the very concept of public education. Like, why should I care? Why should I let my tax money go to these things when I don't even want 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.Michael Horn:Yeah, I want to circle back to that implication because I think there's a lot we could pull apart there about a lot of the assumptions underpinning what we've been doing, frankly, and what we should move to and so forth. I want you to just back up just a little bit and talk about the methodology a bit more behind the study because you mentioned these tradeoffs. You know our mutual friend Bob Moesta, who we have in common, famously showed that a lot of surveys sort of miss the underlying complexity of what's going on in people's lives. First, because, frankly, they use language that means one thing to the surveyors and means something totally different to the respondents. But second, that people will say one thing, “Oh, I want this over that in a vacuum,” But when you observe actual behavior, it tells us something different. So, I'd love you to unpack how you attempt to get around that because your methodology is different.Todd Rose:Yeah, this is great. Nobody lets me talk about the methodology, so thank you. And we didn't invent it, so I can praise it since it's not ours. In this case, to your point, there are a couple of things that we do to get what I believe is a pretty accurate view of people's private priorities. The first, to Bob's point about language, it really does matter. Like in this one, 61 different attributes that comes from focus groups, interviews, desk, research of what goes into a successful life. And then each one of those attributes, well, how do you talk about it? Well, we will actually build, for each one, there'll be five or six ways that it's talked about, and then we do a separate survey where we will say, “Do you care about this? If so, which of these do you prefer?” Like, which one do you think best captures it? And we bias every single attribute to its most aspirational version. And that's one way to not put your finger on the scale or your thumb on the scale of ways you talk about it. We also test for loadedness and stuff like that. Okay, so beyond that, with no tradeoffs, people say yes to everything. “Are you kidding me? I'll take everything.” So, the way this methodology works, which is really clever, and by the way, same methodology Apple uses to decide the combination of features that go into an iPhone. If I just ask you, do you want an OLED screen? Of course I do. But do you want that more than a cheaper phone? Do you want that more than a longer battery life? Then that's a little more complicated. And most people don't get to see the full range of tradeoffs that they could make, whether it's in education or their life. So this methodology is pretty clever. So you take those 61 attributes and rather than just directly asking you about any one of them, when you're taking the survey, what you'll see on the screen is “Hey, there's two people: person A, person B. Which one of these two people is closer to your view of a successful person?” And what it does is randomly grabs five or six attributes from the pool for person A, randomly grabs, say, six attributes for person B. That's all you know, and you're like, “Well, this person's rich, but this person does stuff that has a positive impact on people. I'll choose person B.” And you do it over and over again. And what's nice about that is over time, we're going to trade off every attribute against every other attribute. But any one time, you don't really know. Like, let's say you're like, “Oh, I shouldn't say I like being rich,” but sometimes being rich will be paired with being a good person or being engaged in your community. And so, you can't really game it. And so, what you get as a result is this rank order trade off priorities. And not just rank order, but we can allocate what's called share of preference. Like, let's say being rich was the most important thing to you. Well, out of 100%, how much does that eat up of your view of success? So, we do that, and then we always ask them to build the same answers for what they think most Americans think. So, we're building a personal tradeoff priority for you and also your perception of the majority of Americans. And then finally, after we're done with that, we go through every attribute and ask people whether they believe they're currently achieving that attribute or not. So, we can also just see what do you aspire to? What are you succeeding at, what are we struggling with?Diane Tavenner:Fascinating. Can I jump in here, Michael because a couple things are happening for me? One, you're saying some mind-blowing things that have real impacts for people: teachers, school leaders, parents, students, etc. And two, I think you're making the case that we should trust what you're saying, that there's good methodology here and so we should not just dismiss this even though there are some potentially uncomfortable truths for those of us who are in the system and leading schools innovating on schools, etc. And so, I want to turn to those folks for a moment because I think what you're sharing about the system, Todd, is illuminating what a lot of people are feeling and experiencing right now. Schools are really angsty places to be. It was horrible during COVID as we all know, but even as we move a little bit further away from that, there are still places where people are fighting a lot and they're angry and they're frustrated and kids aren't engaged. And there are all these battles about “Do we do away with social media or phones?” or “How do we get them to be back engaged when, in reality, they're just really bored?” And what I think you're saying is that they know that what we're offering them isn't purposeful and meaningful and meeting their needs. They know it somewhere inside and so they're not bought into it. And I think the same goes with parents. If you talk privately with school leaders and teachers, they're going to tell you right now the parents are literally killing them. And it's not all the parents, but it's a sizable number. And I think maybe we're getting to the motivations of these folks right now and the experience they're having. Does that resonate? Does that make sense based on what you're seeing? What do you think about that?Todd Rose:Yeah, it does. And the thing is, it's like just recognize this isn't going away, and that’s okay. Look, it's not bad that people want to aspire to something more than the materialism that was promised in the industrial age, right? It's not bad that what they want is their child to have a life of meaning and purpose, to be happy, not just be successful by society's standards. And as Michael said earlier, it's not bad that we want different things. And in the success index, we found that no two people are the same. It's just crazy how individual we are. And that's not bad because the truth is, back to the zero-sum stuff, if we narrow success down to the same exact thing that's not shareable that we all can't participate in, then we are truly competitors with each other. And so, you can talk all you want about a cooperative, collaborative society, but that's just not true. Somebody has to lose. The mere fact that our ultimate aspirations differ means that we can carve out our paths and make contributions, and that individuality can be a source of genuine benefit for everybody. We're just not used to dealing with it. And I would say my biggest concern is that once people want something different and they're not getting it, and, at the same time, the sort of paternalism at the heart of all of our institutions - but including education - is already wrinkling them, We've got some stuff coming, just to jump around, next year on resentment in America. it is shocking how resentful we are, and it's largely about being controlled. And so, I think education, if it doesn't wake up and realize what's changing, risks further becoming the lightning rod for all of this angst and failed aspiration. And that's why I said I worry that it puts at risk the very concept of public education. The flip side is we don't have to have every answer right now, but if parents and the public believe that they're being listened to, really believe that where I drop my kid off, they might not be perfect, but they are actually trying to get this right, then they will give you a lot of leeway because even people that want something different still would much prefer that the public education system as they know it respond. It's scary when you have to start doing it on your own. So they would love that. You have a huge advantage if you get this right.But the other thing is that right now, parents in general, they're under a massive collective illusion. They don't realize that other people want the same things that they want now. So, they tend to think I'll just be frustrated over here, if I have the money, I'll go get it in a private solution. But that doesn't last for very long. Second biggest problem is even when they know other people want it, they have a hard time connecting the dots. Where are the exemplars? What do I point to? We need a lot more of those summits, these things where it's like “I shouldn't have to know every detail about what goes into preparing my kid for the life that I want them to live if I can point to the brand, if I can point to things...” so I feel like we either get to be on the side of the American public and say you deserve to have an education system that realizes your highest aspirations or we will be the people literally standing between them and their child's future. That is not a good place to be.Michael Horn:No. I'm curious, Todd, I think this points to something that Diane and I ended last season on about the importance of listening with deep empathy when parents are coming into the school head's office and having all manner of pressure complaints, rudeness, whatever it might be, but deep empathy and listening. But I guess I want to go into what I think is a natural implication of some of what you're saying and push us because when Diane and I were on this panel last week together - I was moderating, she was actually providing content of interest - but one of the tensions that I think broke out into this, it was a big conversation about the rise of education savings accounts and micro-schools and the next frontier, if you will, of school choice beyond charter schools that had been the last few decades. And one of the big conversations that was being pushed is “Well, what's the marker of quality? How do we know that we're not leaving kids behind?” And I know you, like us, have pointed out lots of problems with the standardized test regime, if you will, but I guess the version of the question - I won't name their names - but that a couple of people came up to me and Diane afterwards and were like, “How do I ensure that this group of kids are getting screwed, in effect, because they're not getting what they deserve, and they're actually getting these chances at opportunity?” And so, I'm just sort of curious, where do you feel like this pulls us? I think Diane and I feel like it pulls us to a level of pluralism we haven't actually seen before. But how do we think about value and quality against that, number one. And number two, how does that shift your definition, or does it shift your definition, of what is public education?Todd Rose:Yeah, so first of all, to that question, it certainly does. I think we've made a mistake. Look, I think public education may be the single greatest achievement of democracy. Seriously, the commitment to the mass education of children and what that unlocked, we should not underestimate just how valuable that has been and take it for granted. So, we don't want to lose that: the commitment of the public to educate children. Because I do not want to go back to a place where only rich people get a good education. I don't see education as a strictly private matter, but there are democracies all around the world where pluralism is the name of the game. We have confused government schools with public education. That's one way to do it, but it is not the only way. And I would say, from my view, I try to stay as agnostic as possible in terms of how we get this done. And I think what I'm not willing to compromise on is: I believe that in a democracy, institutions serve the people. The people do not serve the institution. And so, it is incumbent on the education system to understand the needs of its consumer. Frankly, I don't mean to make that free market. Look, parents have a right to have a say in what their kid learns and what it's for. It's absurd that we think that that's not true. And there are other stakeholders too. But at the end of the day, I think it's fair to say, “Well, wait, there might be some bad options.” Well, yeah, that definitely happens. Two things to that: Let's not pretend that the incumbent system is doing a whiz bang job right now. I mean, come on, I won't beat that. Second, there are ways to make sure. There's almost malfeasance, like Trump University or something like that. Fraud is one thing, but I think what's lurking behind a lot of those questions, even if they're well intended, is the sense that I still know best. I still know best what's good for you and your kid and what happens if you choose something that I don't approve of. And I think that every parent wants their kid to have the basics academically. So it's not like suddenly most parents are like, “We don't care if my kid learns to read.” So, it's not like they're not going to want that. I would say this, you're going to get a long way in pluralism when you realize we're not calling for a lack of accountability. It's just the fundamental question is “To whom is the system accountable?” And the incumbent system is accountable upwards. Schools are accountable to the superintendent. I could care less about that. That is the wrong kind of accountability. I believe that the system is accountable to parents. It is accountable to the taxpayer to deliver on the things that they want in the way that they want it done. And if you think about that, then it's like, okay, great. I think every parent cares their kids learning basic academics. How do we measure that? How do we put that? Fine. Will some people make choices you don't like? Yes. Will some even make bad choices? Probably. What we should be doing is ensuring we create the feedback loops that make those, number one, those decisions not fatal to the kid’s education. And second, that we all learn, right? So, when we thought something might work, and it didn't really work, that knowledge gets infused into the system, so we all learn from that mistake. Right? And so, I just feel like we should take these ideas seriously. We should be worried about it, so it doesn't become a free for all. But that should never be something that stops us from realizing what the public actually wants. And work in service of delivering that.Diane Tavenner:I could talk to you for two more hours right now, so I might have to come and visit and/or you'll come back a couple of times. What I know Michael and I are going to do this season is take so many of the nuggets you have just given us and blow them out and think about them bigger. So, I'm going to control myself right now and not dive into all the million things going through my head, which is like I've shifted seats, as you know now, and moved out of a system seat and into developing a tool and a product that is directly serving students and parents. And that mindset shift is tremendous. It's a fundamentally different way of looking at things and I think it's what you're talking about here. The system actually needs to completely shift their mindset about who they're serving and why, and it has to focus on the students and the parents and listen to them and hear what they're saying because they're yelling pretty loud, and I don't think they feel like we're hearing them yet, and I think for good reason. And so, Michael, I don't know if you want to…Michael Horn:No, I think that's a good place to sort of wrap up the thoughts. But, Todd, one thing we do in the show before we let people go is we ask just for a book advice or a TV show that you've watched recently. We're totally putting you on the spot. And I'll totally admit that I'm doing this because I haven't finished any books since I last talked to Diane. So, I need you to fill something in. But it can be outside of education, outside of your work, just something that you've read recentlyTodd Rose:Well, I'm pulling up my Kindle on my phone so I can tell you what I'm reading.Michael Horn:That is perfect. And then you'll add to all of our reading lists.Todd Rose:I read multiple books at the same time because I get bored too easily. I'm going to try to pull up the ones that aren't the wonky ones that no one's going to care about. I think this is probably a little too topical, but that Peace to End All Peace, which is about the creation of the Middle East. If you just want to have a deep understanding of how we got here, that's been pretty profound. And in terms of TV, I’ve gone back to British television, which I just love, and I've been rewatching The Thick of It. So, it's the guy that produced Veep and it was the original one. So, it's about British policy. So funny.Diane Tavenner:I'm just going to let you know that you originally were pestering me to watch The Bear, which was good, rightfully so. I just recently finished the second season of The Bear, which is, in my view, extraordinary TV. Like some of the best hours of TV. And I will just say quickly that there is an episode, I think it's called The Holiday or something like that, and it's an hour long, one of the most intense hours of TV. And for my husband and I, it was like our experiences brought to life in a really intense and somewhat therapeutic way to learn that we weren't alone. So I will just tie this back to collective illusions. It's interesting what we keep to ourselves versus what we share. And I personally believe that if we could all just be a little bit more honest and open and vulnerable with the people around us that we would be moving towards a better world. And so, I hope, Todd, that that's one thing that you do is help people realize “Don't keep it secret what you're feeling, because collectively, if we know about it, we can actually do something about it and find community and resonance with each other.”Todd Rose:I'll just say to that point, odds are they actually agree with you. And so, we're keeping quiet for no reason. The last thing I just want to say in closing is, if you look at the tradeoff priorities the American public has, one of the things that blew my mind and something we can do something about is that the idea of being actively engaged in your community was a top ten priority for every single demographic, every single one. It's also the lowest achieved attribute of all top ten attributes. More people reported being debt free than engaged in their community at the level they want to. So, we have this sense of our civil society sort of breaking down and that maybe people just don't care anymore, and it's not true. They want to be engaged in their communities. And I think that as we think about, for me, where we're headed, as we go to the 250th anniversary of our country, thinking not just about these esoteric ideas, but actually back to our roots, what it means to be American is to get in the game, to do work in your community, so we've got a lot of work coming on that, and I just think those kind of things will get us back into conversation, back into being honest with each other. And I think it's not the solution to everything, but I just don't see how we solve our problems when we're keeping quiet about the things that matter most to us.Michael Horn:Todd it's a wonderful place to leave it. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much for shedding light on the fact that to use another book reference, we don't want to be bowling alone anymore. Just deeply appreciate the work that you continue to do. We'll continue to follow, and we would like to have you back on at some point. So, thank you for joining us and for all of you listening, thanks 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.

Back for Season 5, Michael and Diane catch up on their summers and book reading, Diane’s new entrepreneurial venture, PointB, the season ahead—and then offer some hot takes on the reading wars and Lucy Caulkins, four-year college-for-all, and education jargon. As always, subscribers can listen to the conversation, watch it at YouTube, 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.Diane Tavenner:Hey, Michael.Michael Horn:Hey, Diane. We are back. It's been a little while.Diane Tavenner:It's been more than a minute, for sure. It is really good to be here with you and in a little bit of a new space and new time.Michael Horn:Indeed, indeed. And we should say most people are accustomed, I think, at this point, to us starting at the beginning of the academic year, which traditionally, or not traditionally, unfortunately tends to happen end of August, early September. But, Diane, you have some big news, like, you're no longer on an academic calendar, so everyone knew you were stepping down from Summit after 20 years. Tell us what you're doing now as we enter this fifth season.Diane Tavenner:Well, Michael, I'm so glad to be back in conversation. I have missed it a lot, the rhythm of it. And what you're pointing out is this idea that for the first time in my entire life, I did not have a back to school experience. And I'll be honest, that has been an anchor point for me for my whole life. That sort of sets the schedule for the fall. So here we are. It's a little bit later, but I'm learning to be fluid with that time because I am not in schools anymore. I have co founded a new company called Point of Beginning, and we are working on a product called Point B, and it's a technology product that is really focused on helping students and right now, high school students.But I think eventually, potentially younger students figure out and this probably won't come as a shocker to a lot of people if you've been listening for a few years, figure out their purpose and what a pathway towards fulfillment will be post-high school. And while that can certainly be inclusive of four year college, we want to really focus on and expand the other possible pathways that exist for people, to help them, discover them, explore them, create their own vision for what that will look like, figure out how to make good choices, and then enact those pathways. And so we're about three months in about a week away from the first version of the product being tested by real people and in a real startup.Michael Horn:That's exciting, Diane. So I have a couple reflections, but before we have those, my Point B, like, how do people find it on the Web? Learn about what you're doing. I assume there's going to be some schools that are like, do we get to sign up so our students can use this?Diane Tavenner:Well, it's super early, but you can always reach out to me. You can find us on the Web at mypointb.org, and you can start to check out what's happening there. Sign up for updates if you're interested, and, of course, reach out to me. We want to talk with, work with anyone and everyone. And so if this is an area of interest or passion, I hope you will reach out and I hope we're going to get a lot of opportunities to sort of touch on these subjects that are so fascinating over the course of this season. Michael, because I do think this season's a little bit different. I think we're going to do some throwbacks to Season 1, but also a little bit different. So do you want to just talk a little bit about what's happening? I will say off the top, one of the things that's different is we will have video this year. I missed that memo. So you can see I didn't really dress up for you today, but I'll try to look better going forward. But what else is different?Michael Horn:Yeah, no, I'm glad you prompted us on that because folks who have been listening to this for now in our fifth season are going to say, gee, there's some differences that I noticed. One, we're on video, we're coming to you from the Future of Education channel. But all that means is that you can find us in more places. So it's still Class Disrupted, still Diane and Michael having conversations, although we're going to have a lot more guests helping us drive the conversations this particular year. We'll get more to that in a little bit. But the Future of Education, as you know, is this other conversations that I started a few years back and it's something that broadcasts on MarketScale, it broadcasts on YouTube, it broadcasts through my Substack newsletter. But if you've been listening to us through The74, if you've been listening to us through wherever you listen to podcasts, whether that's Apple, Google, whatever Spotify, I don't know where else people listen to podcasts, I am, but those are some of the big ones, right? You can still do that. You'll still find us at Class Disrupted.Nothing has changed on that front. It's just a few other avenues for us to get to connect with listeners and hopefully get some feedback, get some conversation started because we are all about listening and trying to find different pathways through education. And what I love about what you're doing at PointB is to me it touches on what I think is increasingly people are recognizing as like one of the central issues of education, which is it's not just the academic knowledge and skills. Yes, those are important, but they need to be in fulfillment of something and we have left a generation of individuals at the moment without having a real sense of purpose. And I think it shows up in our mental health stats. I think it shows up in the challenges we have around post secondary completion. I think it shows up in the challenges we have for employers to find employees that are psyched to be there and ready to be productive and contribute. And I think it prevails throughout is just there's a lot of people adrift Diane, so I love that you're tackling this and that, as you said, we're going to get know, beat up different angles of what it means to chart that pathway and purpose over this season.Not as a shameless plug for my pointB, but really just to really get at this issue that I think is so undergirding so much of what we do. I think it's great that we're going to get to dig into this.Diane Tavenner:Well, one of the gifts of this transition, Michael, has been the ability to just really go back and be a learner in so many different ways. And one of the things I've been eager to catch up with you about is what you've been reading this summer, because that's always a big part of our conversations. And I feel like, oh, my gosh, we'll go each week, we'll talk about what we're reading, but there's this whole backlog right now. And so I'm really curious what you've been reading, what you've been learning. As I know my list, which is quite long, was very related to the transition. And I went kind of deep in areas of personal health and transition health and things like that as I kind of reflect on 20 years and you don't always take care of yourself. And there's these moments of reflection of like, how can I kind of catch up on that? I also did some deep diving on organizations and businesses and how when you get to start fresh, what do I want to bring forward, what do I want to do differently? What's the modern stuff there? And so those are some fun books, like Farther, Faster, and Far Less Drama, Janice and Jason Fraser and 10X Is Easier Than 2X, which is a term I'm kind of allergic to in Silicon Valley, but I actually read [the book] and got a lot of value from it. That's Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy. I'm going to get that wrong. Atomic Habits by James Clear as I changed my entire life. How do I have the routines and the habits that are really supporting how I want to be living? And then some other I finally felt like in a place where I could kind of reflect on the pandemic. And so Premonition by Michael Lewis, which is a fast-paced and fascinating and a story I wish I had known all these seasons, quite frankly. So that was really interesting. And we continue to be in tough times. And so also digging into How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them by Barbara Walter.Michael Horn:Wow.Diane Tavenner:That’s some of my list. How about you? What is on your list?Michael Horn:You've, gosh, you've gotten to read some interesting books. Here are mine. I'll be curious what your take is. I'll try to spin an arc of it, but mine, as you know, I had finally started to get into Harry Potter with my kids. So we have now completed the full set of Harry Potter books. I have read every single one. Number four, and the last one are my favorite. I thought they were the best written of them all, so that was super fun.I did have this moment of pang, Diane, because, as you know, my kids recently turned nine, and I had this moment when I finished the 7th Harry Potter book. I was like this, like 90% likelihood this may be the last book I read out loud with my kids, right? And to be fair, one of them had already opted out, like she had read them all without me and gotten ahead, and one of them was nice and held on for my sake at my slow pace. So we got through all those Harry Potter books, and then I personally, because they're nine, was going deep on what does it mean when they're teenagers? And so Lisa Damour has been in my ear constantly over the last few months with her collection of three books, which I highly recommend. The most recent one is about The Emotional Lives of Teenagers in general. The first two are about girls raising girls who are teenagers. So she's terrific. It's been really helpful. And it does strike me a lot of the parenting advice is all really the same at the end of the day, but it actually helps to hear it in different modalities and formats and hear it again every three months or so.So that was great. And then, of course, I had my history kick still going in the background. So I finished just before we started recording this, actually, a couple of days ago, the Ron Chernow biography of Ulysses S. Grant, which is a terrific book if you want to get angry about the South's actions during Reconstruction after the Civil War. I learned a ton from it. Just really interesting about the development of him also as a leader and sort of how his values came out over time and like a really reticent hated to speak, for example, even while he was president, but then he traveled around the world after he was president and became quite a public speaker. And so just development and learning, right, as themes throughout all this.Diane Tavenner:Interesting.Michael Horn:So it's fun, Diane.Diane Tavenner:That is really fun. And I will just say that your girls are nine. My son is 21. For those who've been following our kids sort of growing up over these years. And I have sort of welcomed a second son to our family who's also in that age group, so hopefully we'll get a chance to talk about him. But Rhett, who I talk about here sometimes as something to potentially look forward to, Michael, he is writing an alternative history novel, right? So it's really fun. And so I'm getting to read and talk with him and brainstorm with him about that, which is pretty awesome.And it goes back to the founding of the US. And he's got some interesting alternative narratives there. So I'm like, back into kind of those founding family founder, founding Father stories.Michael Horn:Families, yeah. Yeah. That's awesome.Diane Tavenner:And families.Michael Horn:Well, being in being in Lexington, Massachusetts, and having just taken my family to Williamsburg, Virginia, where as a kid, I went every single spring break. Diane but my kids had never been there. And so my brothers, my parents, they all descended on Williamsburg, and we had an old family reunion and lots of nostalgia. But I was really impressed with how the place has updated its language and the way it talks about a lot of people in a lot of different roles who now, to be fair, I think when I was a kid, my kids were far more interested in the restoration and talking to the characters than I remember ever being as a kid. I remember just being not that let's put it that way as a kid, but it was a heck of a lot of fun. So I'll be very curious to read.Diane Tavenner:Yeah, well, his angle is, what if we didn't just have Founding Fathers? What if there was actually a founding mother at the Constitutional Congress? What might be?Michael Horn:Different question. It's a good question. So before we wrap up and before we preview what's going to be the next episode, let's do just a few hot takes, if you will, because I've been burning on a few issues, sort of gnawing at me, and, you know, I've been sending you texts like, can we please talk about so I want to do this now. And so I've got a couple for you. You probably have one or two for me.Diane Tavenner:I do.Michael Horn:Awesome. The one I want to go into is we've covered, obviously, the reading wars on this podcast and sort of the ignoring, I would say, of the evidence right. Of how certain people need phonics and phonemic awareness to learn how to read and to decode. Right. And sort of what that's done. And you've made the point like, this should not be a problem we have in our country. Everybody should be able to learn how to read at this point. So I was listening to the Daily, the New York Times podcast, their coverage of it, and Michael Barbaro, classmate of mine at Yale, he and I worked very closely on the newspaper together.And so I was listening to his version of sort of about Lucy Caulkins and sort of the history behind that and things of that nature. And what occurred to me was she and Fountas and Pinnell and all those people, they really messed people up with the Three Cueing method and all these things that sort of gave short shrift to teaching people to really learn how to decode. But they also had some really good things in there. And I guess I just had this moment of know, we've talked about how we're not thrilled with banning curriculum and stuff like that. And I guess I had this pit in my stomach, Diane, where I was like, Writer's Workshop is something that's a staple of the Lucy Caulkins curriculum. Right. And I don't know. I'd love your take as an educator, because I'm not one.I just learn a lot about this space. But my take is, if the child doesn't know their letters and can't do any sounding out Writers Workshop, you're layering something over a novice learner that probably doesn't make a heck of a lot of sense. But once you have any ability to decode and do these stuff, even if it's not spelled right, I think there's probably a lot of value in having Writers Workshop to be able to like the purpose of writing is right? And to be able to spin these stories or respond to prompts or react to things that you've read aloud in class or whatever else. And the discussion format of the Writers Workshop and the ability to edit your peers work and things of that nature. It strikes me, Diane, that that's something like, we really wouldn't want to throw out the baby with the bathwater there, but I'm just sort of curious. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe Writers Workshop is like, this terrible thing, and I'm just not understanding.The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Diane Tavenner:No. I have gotten a lot of joy from the passion of your texts that have been coming through over the summer about this. So it's so fun to be back in conversation. Here's what I would say. And as a former English teacher, as, you know, generally higher level middle and high school, but I was a reading instructor, too, for preschool through adults for a period of time, and this is where nuance is so important. And when we get into these battles and these wars, we lose the nuance, and we do throw the baby out with the bathwater. As an English teacher, writers workshops are among one of the most powerful tools and activities you can use, I believe. And I think most great English teachers believe that, too, and use them incredibly well, even with younger children, as you're talking about.And so what I hope does not happen is that people just hear anything that's been associated with these non-scientific methods and ban them, if you will. And I think this connects to another thing you've been talking about, which is, like, jargon in our work and how we use it. So you'll get to that in a moment. But no. Writers Workshops enable the practice of an extraordinary suite of skills that are really important that even young kids can start to practice. And it's a tool that can be used all the way up I mean, it is all the way up into professional circles. And so we should most certainly hold on to writers workshops. We should know what we're doing.We should be critical and disciplined and apply the science and all of those things, but they should not be banned, for sure.Michael Horn:Okay. All right. Well, I feel a little bit better. You have a hot take first before I go on my second one.Diane Tavenner:Jargon well, I mean, here's what the conversation that's happening everywhere I turn right now in my networks and communities. And that is that the data is going to come out. We're going to see yet another year of, I believe, decline in four year college enrollment. And so that's several years. And we're not seeing the bounce back that I think people thought would happen after. COVID there's a bigger trend that is at play here. And I think what I'm hearing is people who like me, who have spent the last 20 years really focused on four-year college for all kids. They know that this has to be questioned, that this is maybe not the strategy for everyone going forward.We need to be thinking about different pathways. They know it's fraught. They don't even know how to talk to their communities about it. I keep hearing people are like, I don't know how to start that conversation, let alone do something about it. And of course, my worry is that we have to be doing something right now, and if we can't even talk about it, there is an issue. So this is top of mind for me and I think has huge implications for high schools, for sure, in America, which we've been pounding away for years now, about how they need to be redesigned. There's a lot of stuff going on out there. It's a really interesting moment in time.Michael Horn:Yeah, that's super interesting. Just a quick reflection on it is I was talking to Scott Pulsipher recently, the president of Western Governors University, and for those that don't know, it's an online, competency-based university. And as he likes to say, we didn't invent competency-based education. No, you didn't. But I think they're the first players to do so at such scale that they do. And they had 230,000 enrollments in the last academic year that just completed Diane. And they now have I'm going to mess this up, but it's like 340 or 350,000 alums in their 23-year history. And just to put that in perspective, Harvard University has 400,000 alums.And it was interesting because they're an online, competency-based institution, $4,000 for every six months. So low cost. Students complete the bachelor's in an average of two and a half years. And he was just saying for the learners that come to them, which historically were adult learners, but increasingly, by the way, now 12%, I think, of their population, something like that, is 18- to 24-year olds. That's changing. Right. He said, for them, education is not the end. It is a means to a better life. Right.And so I guess that's my reflection there is, I think, part of starting that conversation is like, what's the end? What are you trying to prepare for? And framing education as that vehicle as opposed to the oh, the purpose is college. Right? Because that's a pretty empty purpose once.Diane Tavenner:You get through it, right, and what we've all discovered or are discovering. Yeah, certainly lots on that one to dig in over the course of the year.Michael Horn:We're going to revisit that a few times, I suspect. All right, last one for me. You alluded to it a moment ago, which is jargon. And it comes directly out of this, though, conversation of the reading instruction and things of that nature, because I guess my reflection, Emily Oster, who's reading I love, or writing I love, she had this great piece recently about a harrowing incident for her. She got in an accident running on the road and she got hit by a biker and went to the ER and she was listening to all the doctors talking in jargon around her. And she said, sometimes jargon is sort of parodied, but it actually serves a really important purpose, which is it allows people to shortcut conversation and professionals in a field to very quickly communicate with each other to more efficiently get work done, she said. Now it can also alienate people outside of you and make them feel dumb, which then makes them feel like they don't understand and then a whole bunch of downstream effects of that, which is not good. But used well within the field, like in an emergency situation, it really short circuits right to the purpose and helps, in her case get the treatment that she needed to have. And so I guess my reflection was we also have a lot of jargon in education and I think the reading wars, in quotes, I can do this now because people can see me video, sorry for those listening to the audio, but we use a lot of jargon in education to try to signal certain things. But the problem within education, at least my reflection, and I'm curious, your take, is that we don't all mean the same thing by the words. We all have vastly different definitions. And so we'll have these fights like constructivists versus behaviorists. Or someone will be like, oh, we're an inquiry-based school, or we're a project-based learning school. Or direct instruction and let's just go back to the reading thing. There is direct instruction in that example, right, of teaching someone phonics and phonemic awareness. There is inquiry, I suppose, on the question what you're going to write about in Writers Workshop. There might even be hopefully a project with a performance at the end, like the actual completing right. There's some constructivist, there's some behaviorist. It's all a little bit right. And we set up these progressive education versus classical. We have these words, A, we don't know the definitions, but like, most of what we're doing is pulling from the right amount to get the right effect for the kid to help advance them. And so I just find a lot of these buzz phrases, at best counterproductive, but also potentially quite misleading, Diane, because we think we're saying the same thing when we are in communication and we're all just talking past each other. But I'd love your reflections.Diane Tavenner:I've had this experience hundreds of times over the last 20 years. I distinctly remember being on a panel at one point and having this conversation about the word knowledge versus skills. Yeah, that's another one levels and there is not a shared definition of that. And so people use those things interchangeably and they're different when you're talking about designing schools and learning experiences, et cetera, and it completely derailing any sort of meaningful understanding of what each other's are saying and therefore ability to move forward. So it's a very significant issue.Michael Horn:Yeah, well, I guess my hope for schools is that we just start maybe doing more of the plain English thing so that parents know what we're talking about and then maybe we'll know what we're talking about as well and communicate better with each other.Diane Tavenner:Well that's a good let's leave it there. Maybe this season to try to be.Michael Horn:Yeah, that is a good question.Diane Tavenner:As possible. I like that one. And you sort of mentioned at the top. But as we kind of wrap up this first welcome back session and look forward, I think we're both really excited for more interesting guests and people to talk to this year. And one of our favorite people is going to kick us off in our next episode. So we are excited to bring back Todd Rose. He joined us in season one and he's been doing a ton of fascinating work over the last few years. It's so relevant to everything we talk about and broader and so we're going to have a great conversation with him.Michael Horn:Yeah, I can't wait. And it goes directly, I think, to the hot take you had around. If it's not four-year college, what are we preparing students for? Because what his research recently has shown is that everyone thinks that everyone else is aiming at four year college, but that's actually not the goal for a lot of the individuals themselves. And we'll talk about how he does that research, what he's found success actually means to individual families on the ground. I think it's going to be a terrific conversation to help set what should be a really exciting set of explorations for us and for our audience this season.Diane Tavenner:On Class Disrupted. Well, I can't wait. Michael and I'm so glad to be back with you and until next time, thanks 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.

Why don't career services work at colleges? For those in higher ed, the answers are often well known, but for those who don't work in higher ed—particularly students and families—they just assume a college's career services should… help them get a job. Yet these offices aren't all that good at doing so for the most part. My guests, Mike Goldstein and Geordie Brackin, explain why—and add a few reasons to the list that other researchers haven't pointed to before. And then they suggest a way to move forward, which departs from the solutions most people have offered to fixing career services. Their solution revolves around some real talk—being honest about where a student's experience will or won't help them out—and to understand deeply a student's circumstances, struggle to get a job, and desire for progress so that a mentor can help them make progress. Subscribers can check out our conversation to help unlock far more people's potential by listening to the podcast, watching the YouTube video, or reading 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.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 that's far from what we have today, needless to say. And it's a critical reason why my guest in today's show argue that if we're just not being truthful, frankly, to first-gen students, particularly as they enroll in college, about what it takes to really enter into a productive career. And they are highly critical of the career services offices at a lot of colleges. And they suggest some ways that they would do it differently that don't necessarily match with what a lot of the research has been. And it's a super intriguing set of findings that they have. And they are the founders of a really intriguing organization called 1Up Career Coaching. And we have today with us none other than the director of 1Up Career Coaching, Geordie Brackin, who's a co founder of it as well, and then the other co founder who's now also an advisor to 1Up Career Coaching and a serial entrepreneur in the education space, my friend Mike Goldstein. Mike, Geordie, it is great to see you both.Geordie Brackin:Thanks, Michael.Michael Horn:So you all have this fascinating new report and we'll get into what 1Up itself is in a moment. But this report that you've put out and the title is called peeling the “College Career Services Office Onion: Why They Are Terrible and What to Do About It.” And then you have this asterisk where you say that they're terrible for any college student with low social capital, particularly first-gen students. So that's the framing that you have come into this. And Geordie, before we dig into this report now, tell us what 1Up Career Coaching is and how you're coming into the conversation. And then, Mike, I'll ask you a similar question.Mike Goldstein:Sure.Geordie Brackin:So we come to the conversation from the question of social mobility. So 1Up Career Coaching is a small nonprofit that does two things. We do direct coaching for first generation college graduates who are stuck in their job search. They've landed a job, but they're unhappy in that job, and we provide direct coaching to those people to help them find better jobs that pay more and that make them much happier. And then second, we try and publish the lessons that we've learned through that direct coaching.Michael Horn:Now, Mike, tell us, of course, how you came to this work. You've obviously, as I mentioned, up top, been a serial entrepreneur in the world of education. You founded match charter schools, for example. You've had a number of interesting roles in a lot of interesting organizations internationally as well. What was the question that puzzled you that caused you to found this organization and then dig into this research we're about to talk about?Mike Goldstein:So Michael, as you know, there's sort of these two tribes of people in terms of how they understand colleges and what they really do in real life for different types of people. So I think for many years I worked in space of education, but I was in the naive tribe. And I think when you live in the Naive tribe, you sort of say, hey, you can say to a bunch of people that are from poor families, listen, you're not on track necessarily to get the best K–12 education. But if you can change that part and you can persist through high school and do really well and kind of achieve, then you can get on this path called college. You can be the first in your family to graduate from college and you'll get out of poverty. So I was in that naive tribe when I started Match Charter School, along with a lot of other people in the education reform movement.And you know, and your listeners know pretty well, a lot of that turns out to be far less true than had been commonly believed. And even today I think the general narrative remains this overwhelming college is good for you even if you're a fairly marginal student, and it's going to help you do better economically. What I was seeing anecdotally from our own charter school was a lot of alumni that did exactly what we asked of them. They persisted in high school, they did well, they go through college, they graduate and we're like yay, and then we check in like a year, two years, three years later, and they're stuck in these dead end jobs. And then when I try to raise this with some other charter founder colleagues in this kind of education reform group, it felt like a very inconvenient story. The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Mike Goldstein: Nobody wanted to talk about not just the fact that big charter networks like KIPP and small one-offs like Match and other non charter ed reforms not only have a bunch of kids who start college and don't finish, that was the problem that people were willing to discuss. But there was this other big cohort of people that were finishing college and yet felt stuck in life. And so I asked Geordie if he'd be willing, could we work together on a project to try to figure out what's going on here and how fixable is it at the individual level? Can you help somebody who comes to you and says, I'm 22, I'm a college graduate and I'm stuck and I have a crappy job and I've been applying and nobody ever calls me back.Michael Horn:So this obviously gives birth then to 1Up to start and do this highly individual work with people who perhaps did not attend a duet or a hybrid college that gets that coaching support. And obviously duet is something that came out of the Match Charter schools that you founded. But this organization and this set of insights also led to this research, the report that I referenced earlier. And in the report, you have this terrific set of opening lines, essentially, where you basically say, like, hey, look, you're a high school counselor talking to the first gen student, and you're trying to help them understand what to expect when they arrive at college. And you're like, you've got your dorm room, and guess what? That's where you sleep, and you have your dining hall. And guess what? Just like, what it's called? That's where you eat, and you have a library, and there are, like, books there, and it's where you do studying. You have your infirmary, and guess what? You go there for medical services. So basically, these things all mean what they say.And then you say, and I'll quote from the report, you'll see this building called Career Center, and you'll assume that it will be functional just like all the other buildings. It will help you find a career or at least a job upon graduation. And in that, you are profoundly mistaken. This is the only building on campus that doesn't come close to doing what it says in the front door. And so then it's basically this big broadside that you all introduce on Career Services offices. And I think for a lot of us on the inside of higher education, this isn't all that new. It's not that surprisingly, but your big contention is, hey, if you're a first-gen student, you really do not know this. It's widely accepted by people like me that Career Services doesn't work.But for you as a student, you have no idea. And so while it's true that a lot of ink has been spilled on this argument that career centers just aren't that good, in your research, you fall back on a few of these reports to really make the case. And so first you fall back on the Strada Report they did called Bridging the Gap. And so I'd love you to lay it out there. Like, what did they find that's wrong with the Career Center? And then we'll turn to, did they get the complete picture or not? In a moment, but let's just sort of lay the foundation for the critique against the Career Center and have you jump in.Mike Goldstein:Mike I'm happy. I just remember with the Strada report. So for us in doing this, we're like, look, we don't want to reinvent the wheel. Some really good scholarly teams have kind of looked at this problem of career centers, and we just want to backdraft off of the work they've already done. Strada had a couple phrases that were memorable. One was slow as molasses was one. Another one was college career centers are, quote unquote, somewhere below parking as an administrative priority of the university, meaning this is, like, really on the low list. It's just an afterthought of an institution.So I think their critique was sort of, what do sophisticated people inside of colleges say about their own career centers if you give them a little bit of truth serum. And I think another key idea in that Strada Report is that people are just sort of left to chance. You're not coherently. You're a liberal arts student, and you're majoring in sociology, but you're not going to be a sociologist. Maybe you're going to go work for an ad agency. Maybe you're going to go work in finance. Maybe you're going to have something that has nothing how would you find a profession? Strada's point is that it's purely left to chance. They're not engaging with people to say, you're very likely to get a job that has nothing to do with your major, which, by the way, is something that Geordie routinely finds is a confused point among many college graduates.They incorrectly anchor their major with the job they should have, even though somebody with higher social capital might be like, look, it's arbitrary that you chose to major in political science. That was just something to do to pass the time while you went through college. It's not like you should be a political scientist or you have to work in politics, but that's not obvious to a lot of actual college grads who have those majors, as you know.Michael Horn:So, Mike, you just nailed the case there, so that's all good. And you basically say, okay, so this is sort of well understood across the space. And then I would add there's also research that shows, like, career services on average spend, like, total of $90,000, which is a small drop in the bucket right. Of a college operating budget. So they're not even putting much effort into outfitting these centers. But you say some of the basic research that Strada did sort of they got the picture a little bit wrong. So if you pulled upon it from the foundations of the research, I'd love you to talk now about your critiques of the research or where maybe they have the story a little bit. Mike, why don't you take this as well?Mike Goldstein:All right. I think Strada's take had something to do with, oh, students need career related skills. There's this function of college that should be skill building, and it's those skills that they take into the workplace, which to us seemed true. We gave the example of computer science. It's true. The skills that you learn as a computer science major are transferable, but the skills that you learn as a political science major are not particularly know. The fact that you understand Egypt's political system and you can compare it to Argentina, it's like, what's the skill per se that you've learned how to compare two things? So it just seems like silly narrative that's just barely coherent enough that it would allow the colleges to claim this goes, michael, to the book you wrote about Choosing College. Mike, the colleges are trying to say, we do a whole bunch of different jobs.And one of those jobs is moving you up in your career. And even though a lot of the majors don't in any meaningful way get you ready for a career at all, they don't want to say that out loud and strata to us didn't really go there.Michael Horn:Now, I just want to harp on this a little bit, and you can push me if you would say this differently, but I think a lot of times they or others will say, well, in college you learn how to communicate, you learn how to write, you learn like, critical thinking or problem solving or whatever. And I think part of your point, if I'm understanding the argument, is that if you're doing that in computer science, great, it's domain specific, it's obviously going to transfer. But your 15-page paper or whatever that you wrote in political science that probably has actually very little to do with what communication might look like in, say, a marketing role or like in an analyst role in a company or whatever it might be in the world of work. That those skills are not as obviously transferable as people might think they are. And communication, problem solving, et cetera, is actually going to be a lot more domain specific and probably learned on the job, in fact. And maybe what you learned in high school along those lines is actually going to be more relevant in certain cases than what you're learning in college around it. Is that a fair encapsulation of what you're saying there?Mike Goldstein:I think that's a great encapsulation, Michael, of what we're seeing. It's like we're just cutting through the crap here where the chance that you're going to use this type of skill that actually played out in a liberal arts class in any type of entry level real life job is vanishingly small. So that's not the right path here. That's not what's going to help these huge numbers of college grads that are staying poor to get unlocked. It's not going to be some kind of increased skill play.Michael Horn:So then you go on to your second argument, if you will, which is based on the Ryan Craig critique of career services. And just I'll note we're going to have Ryan on the show first because he has a terrific new book coming out called Apprentice Nation, which I'm excited to talk to him about. But in his critique of career services, historically, he says we should abolish career services, which, Mike, if I'm understanding correctly, you have some sympathy with. So what is his basic argument? And Geordie, why don't you take this?Mike Goldstein:The main point he takes on is this software called Handshake. And Geordie, you should just talk about one of your clients just as an example and how they interact with this dominant college career counseling software called Handshake.Geordie Brackin:We talk to a lot of people who work in career services. They're all very nice people. But Michael, like you mentioned they're pretty understaffed. And so this new tech player has come in called Handshake, which is an online job board. They partner with universities, and they essentially outsource the job boards for colleges. So a student comes into the Career Services Center, they say, hey, I want to get a job in Dei. And the Career Services counselor says, great, log into your Handshake account and see what jobs there are on Dei and apply through Handshake. So essentially, they're just sort of a referral service to encourage students to go back in through Handshake.So one of my earliest clients here in, you know, she's valedictorian of her high school class, she gets a full ride to University of Pennsylvania. She goes into Penn's Career Services office and says, hey, I do want to get a job in DEI. They send her to Handshake, and then for a couple of months, she just spins her wheels because there's nothing directly related to what she wants to do in the portal of Handshake. And so what she ends up applying for are a bunch of marketing jobs that are vaguely of interest, but they're mainly commission based. And she applies for the very few DEI jobs that are in there, but they're not truly entry-level jobs. And so when I meet Faith, she says, yeah, I've been job searching for a couple of months. I have 40 applications out there. I literally have had zero interviews.And so it's this bypassing of responsibility, and we see that office just sort of passing the buck over to this ed tech player.Michael Horn:So Ryan's argument, if I remember, is also sort of like, okay, Career Services, it's not going to fill this need. Right. And you all have basically described why that is, but he says maybe it's the case that actually the academic courses and professors themselves should perhaps play a more active role, and we shouldn't even be asking Career Services to do this in the first place. Right? His basic argument, I think, is that we should be integrating more real work projects and courses and things of that nature. And you basically say, theoretically, that makes a lot of sense, but there's some actually very real practical issues with it. So maybe just lay that out. Like, where does the theory make sense and where are the issues? Mike, why don't you take yeah, I.Mike Goldstein:Mean, look, I think this guy, to me is a remarkable guy. Glad you're going to have him on the show. I mean, such an interesting character. And I think he can sort of appreciate how handshake, as an investment, may know done well, and yet he sees as an absolute black hole where he says, the dark side of handshake's success, like you're saying, michael, is that it's blocking this big change that needs to happen. Because he calls it theater. It's fake helping people get jobs. It's this hand wavy thing that universities can do. Oh, parents are like, do you help the kids get jobs one day? And they're like, yes, our software has a billion different job listings and the kids will find all these opportunities.And if you log in, you might see a kajillion jobs listed there in real life, the chances of throughput into real jobs for low social capital kids who are just sort of like regular liberal arts majors and not elite econ majors who would have gotten jobs anyway, it's really low. So Ryan Craig correctly says handshake is not only theater, but it blocks the university from just owning this. And then Ryan goes on to say, and this is where we're like, dude, we're with you, but I don't know if this can really work. He wants the professors so that he would say, okay, Michael Horn, professor Peruvian literature like here of the most absurd.Michael Horn:Thing you can come up with.Mike Goldstein:Like take these five kids, by the way, Michael. Professor Michael, you've never had a real job. You've only ever been in academia. You've also never hired and fired people. So you don't really have a good vibe for the little things that would turn on or off an employer, the ways they might be looking for clues, how they're trying to arbitrage the thousand different resumes and cover letters that they get to figure out who might fit within their organization. So these are people with zero real life grasp of how the world works. And then there just happens to be a lot of these professors at university. So our friendly critique back to Ryan was ryan, we just don't know that that's something that seems even a good idea.Even if you were able, like morally, you're right, the professor should have to own this job because they're part of this institutional pinky promise at least that says you're going to get a pretty decent job after you come out of here. Unless you really mess things up and they're part of that institution, they should own it. On the other side, I just don't think they're capable of doing the type of counseling that Geordie does. And by the way, I think in our report, I know, Michael, you're about to get into this. This is sort of the number one thing. The difference between the type of work that Geordie does and what these college careers counselors say that they're doing is Geordie is speaking very freely to people. It's like, hey, you say you want help with getting a job and that you're frustrated. Do I have your permission, 22 year old, to speak unfettered, to just tell you exactly what the employer is really thinking about you? And it might not be pretty.They might think that your degree is a big fat zero, first of all. So you shouldn't walk in there like that's some a big accomplishment. You might think so and that might be meaningful to you and that might be true. But if the employer doesn't think so. You need to know that I'm going to tell you that. And I think that piece of it would likely translate to these professors who in all these different types of surveys, say they already, as a cohort, feel scared to speak their minds in many situations. Right. You have all this literature about do students and faculty on university campuses feel they can speak their mind without fear? Well, if you're that professor of Peruvian literature, you're supposed to help some 22 year old get a job, and you have to tell them, by the way, their college degree might be worth a lot less than they had been believing, or that their amount of effort needs to be increased by a factor of ten.Like, get off your freaking butt right now if you want to get a job. Remember, I'm only speaking freely because you told me you wanted me to. What I'm telling you right now is, like, you're very unlikely to end up with a job at the level of effort you're putting into the know. You'd have to get really lucky. All these kinds of unpleasant things that Geordie has to tell people, because if nobody tells them that, they just end up not following through in the right way and then not ending up with a good job.Michael Horn:Stay with this for a moment. And Geordie, I'd love to hear from you on this because you basically say that there are three other problems with career Services that we generally don't talk. So I'd love you to articulate sort of what's wrong with the approaches that we have and part of the solution that Mike just started to allude to, which is basically, if I understand you correctly, much more straight talk and being honest, but I'd love you to lay that out for us. What are the other problems that aren't being talked about and what is the real solution going to start to look like to help first gen students navigate and get that first job?Mike Goldstein:Yeah.Geordie Brackin:So remember, we came to this quest trying to meet young people who were frustrated in their job. They were first in their family to get a college degree. They had landed a job, but they were frustrated in the job they got, and they were actively doing things to try and change their situation. They were applying to dozens of jobs and either not getting interviews or not getting offers, and they were earning less than $40,000 a year. Those were the young people I talked to. And what I found was that there's just a deep misunderstanding of what the job search is. What is the actual path on a job search? What does it take to actually get a good job? And all these young people had gone through career services. They had gone through those offices.They had met with Career Services counselors who had reviewed their resume or given them things that maybe they should include in a cover letter, and still they were actively applying, and they were not getting interviews, and they weren't getting good jobs. And so those were the people that was my quest is, how do I meet these young people? How do I help move them in a short amount of time into a better job that pays on average $10,000 more per year, and move them into a job that just makes them happier? Typically, when a client comes to me, they're in a job and they rate their job satisfaction as like a three or four out of ten. How do we move them into a job where they're rating their job an eight or nine out of ten? They're optimistic, they're excited to go to work, and they feel like the degree was worth it, all that work was worth it. And I think a big part of that is no one is being honest with them about what the job search process actually is, what are the different components? How much time does it take? What should they say and shouldn't they say? And I think just in digging in deep and understanding why they were stuck, I'm then able to help them make progress in that area.Michael Horn:So I want to stay with this because this is really interesting to me on a couple of fronts. Like, number one, it echoes a lot of the hidden curriculum stuff that we talk about in K-12 education, where there's this whole hidden curriculum that first gen students have no idea about, right? They don't get exposed to at home, and they'll struggle. People from underrepresented backgrounds in particular, they don't realize that it's sort of assumed that you know this stuff and they don't actually know it. And that's sort of what you're saying here, right? Like, there's this actual way you get jobs, which is not through the job boards. It's not just like applying blindly on Indeed.com or monster or wherever you are. And so that's one thing I would love you to unpack a little bit. And then second, the language that you just used is very jobs to be done esque, which is basically, as I'm talking to you as an individual, let me understand where your struggle actually is and unblock that so that you can make progress. And in making progress, I think what I hear you saying is not only will I get you more money, but I'll probably land you in a job that actually matches your excitement level, like matches where you're going to be passionate about something.It'll help you do something in line with your purpose and things of that nature that you never even thought you were allowed to consider in this job search and that you were allowed to marry up. Like work being in sync with who you are as an individual and where you are right now in your life. So I just threw a bunch of words at you, but I'd love you to unpack that a little bit more, because both the hidden part of it and the progress and satisfaction piece of it seemed really salient and very different from how we typically talk about helping individuals get their first jobs from college to career. So, Geordie, why don't you start? And then, Mike, I'm sure you're going to have stuff to fill in right after.Geordie Brackin:Yes, Michael, I'm absolutely nodding my head along, like, jobs to be absolutely you know, the job to be done for career services is not being done very well. It's not serving first generation college students, helping them land jobs where they can earn a living wage, and they feel happy going to work each day. The faster we can be honest about that, the better. Secondly, I think talking about the hidden curriculum of the job search, again, you can be a great worker, but bad at the actual job search, because the job search is a pretty distinct, very different process than actually just being a good worker who shows up on time and is collegial to their colleagues and does good work and works hard. The job search process is this multiple month process that has its own hidden rules, hidden curriculum, hidden language. And so over the last two years of coaching more than 80 young people and moving them from existing job into much better job, that pays on average, more than $10,000 more per year, and that they're way happier with, we've seen sort of patterns emerge again and again. And Mike and I have started calling them the Four Horsemen of the job Search apocalypse. And the Four Horsemen are the repeated blockers that keep young people from landing a good job.And it's what we believe career service is not really being truthful and honest about about what it takes to land a good job. And so by working with all these clients, we sort of see these repeated patterns happen again and again and again. But often the Four Horsemen are working together. But ultimately, as they work together, it's resulting in the same thing. A young person applying to dozens of jobs, not getting interviews, not getting offers, and stuck, but feeling motivated to change.Michael Horn:Now, what are those Four Horsemen that you're talking about? I love you to name them, because that's fascinating.Mike Goldstein:Yeah. So let's see. The first one I think we call Search sabotage. And what we see happening is people who literally don't know the right things to type into these different search engines that would reveal different jobs. They don't realize how important it is to actually read the job description. And what clients tell us is, oh, I thought that was like, the boilerplate type of thing, when you get, like, an insurance claim and they give you, like, 27 pages and you know, you're supposed to read to the end, and we're like, no, job descriptions are different. You're supposed to read them. And it helps.You understand? Would you actually want to do this job if it were offered to you? Because it kind of tells you what you'll be doing all day. And so just knowing that that is an important part of the process is one part of the first horseman. The other is then Geordie reads with them and he is decoding with them. They're like, it says you're supposed to do X, Y and Z. What does that even mean in normal person language? And Geordie will be like, my interpretation is this is what you would do all day. And then the person's like, either that sounds pretty good or no, no, let's not do that one. And so Geordie's clients consistently say this is the first time in their job search ever that they've really had anything more than literally the title of the job to understand what they might be doing. Therefore, it's no surprise they might end up in jobs that they find unfulfilling.And of course, on the employer side of it, they're also frustrated, right, because they're hiring people that are not a fit. So I think that was one within that. There's another thing we call something like, what is it? One click hell or something. We're trying to tell people. And again, Michael Horn it's sort of crazy. We're like when you click on handshake, or indeed to apply, but you're basically an undistinguished college senior or recent grad, your application is going straight to the waste basket. Those 40 applications are literally like zero value. There's no way you are going to get in that way because there's other people that have your credentials that are applying in a very different way through the side door and you're just like, you have no chance.But again, nobody has decoded this for the recent grad because there are other online things like dating apps that actually work. You can click on 40 people and three of them say, hey, would you like to have a date? Or whatever they're up to. I think we're all aged out of whatever is happening. But they're like, this kind of works. There's a lot of apps that do kind of work when you do a one click. This is an area where the one click is basically a towering lie. Unless you have achieved a fairly elite status in your career, which obviously is entry level people, none of them have. So I think that's know one of those.Geordie, what is Mike another I think incoherent individuality is another one we've said where the story just doesn't add up. You're an employer. You say, tell me about yourself. What you want to hear is like, what you studied and what you interned in, your general areas of interest. They somehow come together and a lot of times his clients are in their first rough draft of, let's say, interview prep. It's just not a coherent story of like, why would you want this job? And they don't understand how important it is to just pick a few things from your true story, but that come together. It's like cooking, right? Like the things have to comp, the flavors have to complement each other. Again, nobody has decoded this transparently for people.And so part of that goes into the fake handshake story. If it were true that you could just tell everybody through one click everything they needed to know, you shouldn't need to create a custom cover letter and then have a different story for your interview on Monday that's different from your different job interview on Thursday. So some of the meta here understandably confuses all of these people.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:That makes a ton of sense and I guess I'm super interested on this on another level. As I mentioned, I'm writing my next book on how to help people get their next job, how to hire their next job and the role that they'll have. So this plays on multiple levels what you're finding, and it mirrors a lot of what we've seen as we've coached individuals to help them switch jobs as well. Now, the people we're working with are already in the workforce, but the last piece of this, I guess, is I'm curious what you all have learned about having these straight up conversations with individuals. Are they receptive? Are they able to hear it? Do they want the truth? And what does that look like on the ground?Geordie Brackin:Yeah, I think overwhelmingly, the reaction has been, oh, my gosh, thank you so much for telling me this. Thank you for being honest about what was holding me back, because I'm meeting 23, 24 year olds who have gone through high school, they've gone through college, first in their family to get a college degree, and yet they haven't landed in a good job. So they're starting to have this self doubt and this pessimism creep in. And so when I'm able to do a practice interview OK, Michael, you have a big interview tomorrow. Let's spend a couple hours doing a practice interview. I'm going to lob you questions. I'm going to give you hard hitting feedback that's just honest and truthful and specific so that you can correct it and then we'll try it again. Overwhelming.The reaction is, thank you so much. Why did no one ever tell me this? Why did no one ever tell me this is how you prepare for a big job interview? Or Why did no one ever tell me that when I ramble for ten minutes answering the question, tell me about yourself, that people start to roll their eyes and sort of mentally check me off the list as not being a viable candidate. And so I think when we ask permission and they grant permission, it's then this huge unlocking moment and it's just sort of gratitude that someone is making visible for them these small little things that were keeping them from making progress.Mike Goldstein:Michael here, it's a good point for me because I think Geordie does all the work in this, right? Like, we think about stuff together, but he's the guy who actually does all the work. I'm sure you can identify with the different roles here at different points in your career of who was doing what. Geordie does all the work. And so I can say as an observer to Geordie's work, we started this, and our first effort, Michael, was, let's find 30 people and then see if within three months, Geordie can just change their job status. No upskilling, no news. Can he grab them from where they are? I'm frustrated. I can't find a job all the way to they've received and accepted and negotiated a new contract with a new job. Jordan went 30 for 30 in that work. Like, got every single one. And you know me, your listeners don't, but you do. I'm like an understated. I'm like, Where's the randomized control trial that proves this? I'm a pessimist. I'm a curmudgeon. So while I will say, hey, who not? And we're not making grand claims about the scalability of this, I'm just saying this particular guy who's on your podcast named Geordie is really friggin good at this, and he's able to unlock people pretty quickly. And of course they friggin'love it because they're self identified as I'm frustrated. What do I not understand about job? That's their overwhelming sense.So three months later, they have this enormous sense of happiness, giddiness, even, and relief. And Michael, I'll say the most moving part of this for me as an observer, is overwhelmingly, if they were the first in their family to go to college and then they get a shit job after college, they feel like a massive disappointment. It goes from May graduation the whole family is celebrating, to, like, October, where mom is like, what are you are you not trying? Why can't you get a job? And this overwhelming sense of discomfort, anxiety, fail. Like, I'm letting everybody down. It's not just that they're mike. I'm not personally happy with the job. It's more like they feel like they've gone from the highest point of family pride to, like, they're letting down the whole family. And so when you can get them back on their feet and confident again and they're doing something where they're like, yay, it's time to go to work, I'm psyched.That's very powerful. And Geordie’s been consistent about unlocking that. So he did the first 30, and then we decided, all right, that was a weird job market when you did those 30. That was the moment of the labor market was really favorable to job seekers. I wondered, what will he do over the last year where the job market kind of bounced back a little bit, became a little bit more balanced. Not easy for every recent college grad to just wave their hand and get a job. And he just finished going 50 for 50. So he just wrapped up his second cohort of people.So, again, that stuff depends. Michael I guess the other thing that I just don't want to gloss over, we're not after fake easy solutions. There's a lot of elegance and nuance to Geordie’s work, and he's part psychologist. He's got to pick up people's confidence that feel like failures at that moment in their lives. He's got to be really bold and insightful in his critique of them, and he's got to coach them up really quick and pull off all of those. And so I'll just give you a small example where I don't think the average career counselor is doing this. There was one young woman who her dream thing was to get a job in a museum because she'd studied stuff that would make sense for museum art and things like that, art history. And she got a lead.She got an opportunity to interview at one of the smaller museums in Philly. So she had applied, but she didn't know the museum. Right. It wasn't like the Philadelphia Museum of Art. And so Geordie’s like, whoa, checks the clock. Like, when's your interview? The interview is like 24 hours away or whatever it is. It's like, coming up really quick. Geordie’s like, listen, I'm going to Venmo you $30.What you got to do right now, drop what you're doing, get over to that museum, tour it so that when you're in the interview, you need to be able to comfortably say, hey, you don't have to say, I was just here yesterday. You just have to show that you have an understanding of what they do. It's going to make a big difference because you have to understand, right after they usher you out the door, they're going to have somebody just like you who may have a competitive advantage over you. We need to equalize that. And that's the kind of like, what you would do. Michael as a dad with your own kid. That's the kind of stuff I think Geordie is often doing. He's not saying Mike a very cautious, like, hey, maybe this is something he's just like, whoa, stop the presses.Get off your butt right now. Let's get you in an Uber. You got to get there by closing time so you can tour the museum, so you're going to be good in the interview. That's the kind of energy that I think people need to make up for what they have not gotten out of their college experience if they're going to succeed in the job market.Michael Horn:Yeah, that makes a ton of sense, and it's a great way to wrap this all up for us. Mike, Geordie, thank you so much for being here again. The nonprofit you all have founded and Geordie is running again, is one up Career Coaching. And the report is the College Career Services Office onion why they are terrible and what to do about it. Mike, Geordie, thank you so, so much for joining me. And we'll be back next time on The Future of Education. Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.

For over 30 years, Cara Collective has worked directly with individuals experiencing a number of barriers to employment work through their challenges, invest in their development, and get great jobs. They've also worked with employers to help them rethink their hiring procedures so that they don't miss hidden gems in their communities for any number of reasons. In this conversation, Kathleen St. Louis Caliento, the president and CEO of Cara Collective, shares her personal story to this role, the work of Cara Collective, and the stunning success they've had for over 8,000 individuals in helping place them not just in 13,000 jobs, but in jobs where they are more likely to persist and do work that matches their own sense of purpose. We explore what they've learned, how they've sharpened their process, their outcomes, and more. As always, subscribers can listen to the episode, watch it below, or read the transcript.Michael Horn:Welcome to the Future of Education, the show where we are dedicated to building a world in which all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their human potential, and live a life of purpose. And to help us advance that, today we have a great guest, Kathleen St. Louis Caliento. She's the president and CEO of Cara Collective, where she's been since 2021. She and I got to be on a panel together at the ASU-GSV Innovation Summit around the future of learning and work. And Kathleen, it is great to have you here. Great to see you.Kathleen St. Louis Caliento:It's so great to see you again, Michael. Thanks so much for having me.Michael:Yeah, you bet. So first, let's dive in. Tell me about the work that you do that CARA Collective does. How do you describe what the organization itself is?Kathleen:Absolutely. What I like to say is CARA Collective is an organization that helps people find themselves and then find jobs. We are a Chicago-based workforce development organization with a national footprint. And we have served over 8,000 individuals in helping to place them in 13,000 jobs. We understand the barriers, the particular barriers that many of our participants face, homelessness, poverty, health, child care, formerly incarcerated. And those are the barriers that often, unfortunately, keep them from employment. At the same time, we know that they are incredibly talented, and they have either found us because of a misstep, misfortune, or injustice, as we know prevails, unfortunately, in our society. And so the goal really is to figure out a way to help them, as I said, find themselves and find jobs. So Cara Collective is really comprised of four entities in the way that we do that. The first is Cara, which is our personal and professional training program. That's where we provide these workplace competencies to help them prepare for jobs. But also what's sometimes even harder is those social-emotional competencies, right? So we have workshops that are called Love and Forgiveness, and helping people truly understand what it means to rid themselves of some of the baggage, some of the myths, some of the narratives that they've been told their entire lives. And so those are the things that those personal and professional training workshops that truly help them get prepared for the workspace. As part of that, we provide these supportive services because, again, as we know, our folks are facing significant barriers to employment. And so connecting them to resources that help them address housing, homelessness, their health care, child care, if they have record expungements that need to take place as well. So those are the things that we're helping them with in terms of background services. Then we have two social enterprises because we recognize the need for some of our participants to truly begin to build their resumes back up. And some of them had significant gaps in their work history or facing particular records and backgrounds that were not being taken on by some employers. And so giving them those reps through some social enterprises. Our first, CleanSlate, is an external beautification company. And we work with social service districts, chambers of commerce, neighborhood organizations to help beautify the city of Chicago and its neighboring areas. In addition, Connex is our mission-driven staffing firm. That's where we work with employers who are looking for that temporary, sometimes temporary to permanent positions that we help to place our folks in. And then finally, the work of Cara Plus is our expansion. That's our expansion arm. We do a few things there. Number one, we work with other workforce development organizations like ourselves to think about best practices and how to continue to multiply their impacts, working with employers and their job seekers as well. But we also work with employers to think about what it means to truly be inclusive in their employment practices. So providing them supports as they're thinking about everything along the talent continuum from hiring, sourcing, and hiring to developing and retaining, in fact. And so that's the work of Cara Plus. The final piece that they do there is affiliation. That's where we work with local organizations who are looking to lift up workforce development programs and help them build those in their local communities. So really, really proud of the work that we're doing, the impact that we're seeing. Again, as I mentioned, the number of folks that we serve, but also retention is important for us. So a big measure of our success is that our folks are staying on the job longer than most folks. So our retention rate right now hovers between 65 and 70% for one year, same firm retention, which is really incredible, especially when you think about the national average being typically around 50 or lower percent.Michael:Wow. That's a huge number, just to say it, especially for these people facing these barriers in their lives that have held them back historically. I'll also say, wow, I love the integrated nature of what you all have built, not just the support in terms of skills or social emotional, but then we're going to help you with that first job in effect. We're going to help work with the employers to change policies that maybe have held back people like you that they didn't even realize that they were missing this talent historically and so forth. I want to get into more of that in a moment, but I want to actually just stay on you for a moment, your own path into this role, because you've had a really interesting career path as well. And I think people would benefit from hearing some of that conviction as well.Kathleen:Sure. Sure. And I think people who sort of know my background at first are sometimes surprised or interested that I've landed in the role that I am. But once you actually stop and think about the trajectory, it makes a ton of sense. So humble beginnings and roots, you know, daughter of Haitian immigrants who came classic American dream story to find a better life for their for their children. And and and unfortunately, often face the kinds of lack of access, lack of opportunity and inequity that many immigrants face in this country. And so, you know, they struggled themselves in terms of making sure that we had the right educational opportunities and in their own and being recognized for their own professional assets and what they could do. And so that's always been a driver for me thinking about the road, the tough road that my parents had. But even where I've faced some of that, some of that myself. And so the majority of my career, because my father was always about education, truly pushing education. And he would say something to me that was actually a little harsh that I've mentioned before, which is, you know, you're black and you're a woman. Unfortunately, you're not going to be taken seriously by anyone unless you have an education. And so that was really kind of like you got these two strikes against you. This is what's going to be the great equalizer for you. So do what you need to do to sort of get yourself where you need to be. And for him, that was truly education, which then doesn't surprise anybody that I ended up getting my doctorate from Columbia University in science education. But that truly led me down a road of education reform. And so it's really around thinking about education reform and educational equity. And the work that I did was various types of equity. How do we provide folks who didn't have access to data about their own children's performance, helping them understand what that what those data meant? Right. How do we work in Chicago to make sure that this every school has highly qualified teachers and principals leading in those schools? And so that kind of work, when you think about it, there are themes of access, equity, opportunity that continue to sort of run through those themes and through those through those experiences. And as I continue to move on through that educational equity work, I thought myself doing more education to career. So helping companies recognize the talent that was coming up through education that may not know that their job was an opportunity. So when I was working with a young boy, you know, from the south side of Chicago, who's interested in math, knowing that he could do work at a company like KPMG exists, right. And that's an opportunity for him. And so really helping them build bridge those mentorships and helping the young folks understand the power of their own possibility. And so that was truly those those last couple of roles were really around that kind of education to career space. And so that now we find myself I find myself squarely in that in that career workforce development space, which, again, when you think about the social determinants, education, health, employment, these are inextricably linked. And so it's really not much of a stretch. It's really more about the what I was trying to do. It didn't really matter how I was doing it.This conversation was sponsored by:Michael:No, it makes a ton of sense. And it's inspiring to hear the story and then how that's translated to the here and now. And I want to dig in because you talked about, you know, your first answer, the full integrated nature of all that you're doing. But as you said, you know, that starts with a lot of deep work, right, with each individual, each job seeker. And so I'd love to know, you know, the skilling and so forth like that's part of it. But I'd also love you to talk about, like, what are the conversations and interactions look like at the individual level? Like what's that process? You talked about the best practices and so forth. What's that process that you've developed to take them through on their own journey?Kathleen:Yeah, absolutely. And so, as I've mentioned, you know, we've had we've had more than 30 years in Chicago leading this work in workforce development, working with folks that have experienced a number of barriers to employment. And so when I think about the impact that we've been able to have, it truly is meeting people where they are, right. And so the way we know that no one's journey out of poverty is the same, which is why from day one of working with us, they meet with our admissions team. We begin to understand who are they? What are the challenges that they're trying to overcome? Where have they been? What are the stories that they've told themselves, right? What are the what are the what are the untruths that they believe about who they are and what their what their possibilities and limitations are? And start to think about what role that we can play in helping them achieve and realize their dreams. You know, community is such a core value in terms of who we are. And we were founded on that belief of it takes a community to lift someone up and out of poverty when they're experiencing particularly such a low point, which, by the way, is often an unknown piece. But that's the origin of our name. Right. So many folks often think that Cara means is an acronym. And it's a fact, in fact, an old Gaelic word, old Irish word for friend, because we know that everyone needs a friend when they are at their lowest point. And at Cara, we we we talk about community and how important that is. And so our job really is to walk alongside each individual. So, again, from the beginning of our recruitment team, we're talking to them about what their needs are. And from that, from the beginning, we're connecting them to those resources that I mentioned earlier in terms of housing, child care, health, et cetera. They move on that into the training program that I mentioned, that personal and professional development training is a foundation series where they're truly just understanding some of the workplace competencies, but also understanding who they are as a person. And then once they've gone through that, which is about a four week program, they then move into what we call our leadership program. And they're really starting to think about more and then they become what we call send out eligible. So they are ready to be put in front of a an employer. They've demonstrated those the five competencies, training, excuse me, teamwork, timeliness, professionalism, conflict resolution and communication. So those are the five that we work with companies that say these are the skills that we want folks coming in with other things that we can teach. But these are the skills that are going to be important to us. So once they've demonstrated that, we then work with the over 70 employee employment partners that we have to find that right person. And it really does help when we understand who our participants are from the individual perspective, because then we can put them in that right spot. And so that's that's that's their journey with us. And in fact, you know, many folks think that once we place them, their work with us is in our work with them is over. But in fact, you don't graduate graduate from Kara once you get the job. We actually stay with you for another year. So we provide individual coaches to each of our job seekers for up to for a year into that that first job, because we know that once they get that first job, their problems don't suddenly disappear. So how do we ensure that they have someone, they have a network and a community that they can fall back on when we need them, when they are needed the most?The Myth of AverageMichael:Something you just said sparked something for me, which is that, you know, there's this aspect of your program, you've been working with individuals at the individual level, right, for decades now as an organization. So you've been able to do a lot of continuous improvement. But you also said no individual, right, is in the exact same circumstances, like there's some tailoring to that individual's needs. So you've been literally working at the level of what I would call N of 1, as opposed to like average effects, right? You see the average, but you're actually able to identify the individual circumstances and so forth. And so my instinct is that you're sort of able to get below the best practices or average effects right at a population level and say, like, actually, you know, we've seen this individual, like we understand their circumstance. And we can have a deep sense of what causes them to maybe struggle in their workplace or conversely, sort of how do we help them thrive to be able to live a life of purpose and fulfill their potential? And so I guess my hypothesis is that you've been able to change how you approach people based on identifying these individual circumstances and patterns over time that maybe wouldn't be apparent at a macro level if I'm an economist, you know, collecting a big data set and sort of looking across the population, maybe that's wrong. But that's sort of the instinct I have. And so you can correct me if I'm wrong, number one. But if I'm right, I'm just sort of curious how the organization use this end of one data and specific circumstances to really improve the individual interactions and success rates over time.Kathleen:Absolutely. You know, and I love the way that you're thinking about that and framing that question, because, you know, it's sort of two sides of the same of the same point in that, yes, there's this idea of this end of one and we know that everyone has their own individual story. And I think understanding and hearing multiple stories over time, you also you also generate some themes and some trends. Right. And so and so I think that I'll say a couple of things. One, ensuring that we have the ongoing individualized feedback from our participants is key so that we provide opportunities for them to provide us feedback at multiple steps throughout the process from that, you know, from our from the intake perspective, intake point right at the beginning to, you know, a week or so into a few weeks after they've completed the program to a couple of months after they've gotten their first job and so on and so forth. And so having a better understanding of are we actually, in fact, meeting the needs of our participants is critical. Another example is what something that we talk often about at CareCollective is this idea of transformation, helping really our our jobseekers transform their lives. And you can't do that top down and you can't do that outside in. Right. That's got to be coming from the people who know themselves the best that say these are my goals and dreams. These are the things that I'm trying to achieve. And so one of the things that we work hard at is helping our jobseekers develop and define goals that they want to achieve for themselves. Right. So so this idea of, you know, and of what it might be that, you know, one person says they want to finish that they want to open a bank account and one person might say that if they want to have their first apartment, both of those are financially driven. Right. And so we might bucket those to say that we have folks who are interested in thinking about their financial a financial goal that they want to achieve. But that looks different depending on the person that you're talking to. Right. You might have somebody who says, you know, I want to go for a different job in my in my current career or I want to, you know, finish my my degree so I can have different skills that are opening up for something else. That's kind of thinking about career advancement in some way, shape or form, perhaps coming at it different ways, but really thinking about it in different ways. And so having folks drive that is important, is important for us. So so those are those are the few things that I would say we think about as we think about, you know, so how do we use this and want to actually help us do our work much more impactfully?Michael:I love that answer. And it's actually interesting. I didn't expect it to go this direction, but it's mirroring the book that I'm working on right now about how to help people switch jobs. And one of the things we constantly hear, right, is they'll say, oh, I want more money in my next role. And we unpack that with them. Like, what does that actually mean? Is it about because, like, you want to be better respected? Is it because you have to afford child care and like child care is expensive? Is it because you're trying to save for your retirement and like be able to step back at some point? Right. And the answer to each of those questions, that why underneath money actually points you in very different solutions once you understand sort of that deeper why. So I love that you're sort of able right to go down that journey with the individual and really help understand what is what is best for you, which might be different from best from someone else that you're working with, if I'm understanding correctly.Kathleen:Absolutely. Absolutely right. That's absolutely right. And I love that you're you know, I think that we often talk about also just you're making me think about this idea. And I think we've already been brought it up in the panel that we're in. But this idea of dignity of choice. Right. And so it's something that we think about often at Care Collective, because one of the things that we don't ever want to appear to be doing is forcing people to be thankful for any job. Right. And so this idea of what are your dreams? What are your aspirations? Right. So that that question of you kind of double clicking and saying, why is it that you actually want more money? What is it that you're actually trying to achieve? Going double clicking is so important for someone to be seen and to feel as if they do have dignity in terms of charting their future.Michael:I want to geek out on this one more bit with you, because I'm curious, like how you help people to even articulate those dreams sometimes? Because sometimes like people, you know, you mentioned about the individual doesn't know what KPMG is. I always say you've heard me say it. I grew up in Washington, D.C. I didn't know that engineering was like a possible pathway in the world. Right. I thought that was like a train conductor or something. So, like, how do you help them articulate a dream that they may not fully understand themselves or have the social capital to be able to articulate?Kathleen:That's such a great question. And it's a balance, right, because we could be so excited and say, no, you really want this job. And it's like, is that really their dream? Right. I have a colleague who talks often about how to ensure that we are offering opportunities to our participants that that stand beyond food, files and floors. Right. And that's sort of a gross oversimplification of these entry level roles that we know exist and that many of our job seekers go into. And to me, probably the biggest way to do that is to offer them exposure and opportunity. Right. And so you didn't know what an engineer was until you knew what an engineer was. Right. And when they see the diversity. So for us, it's our responsibility to ensure that we have the diversity of industry in terms of the employers that we're working with, but also in terms of pathways that we provide, skilling or training and that we're in preparation for in terms of our job seekers. And so it truly is that exposure. It's the knowledge, it's the awareness and that that leads to equity, because if someone knows that this is an opportunity and a possibility, they might go for it. Right. And so it's helping them understand and see something that they might not have seen.Flipping Supply and Demand in the Labor MarketMichael:Fascinating. So let's flip to the other side of the equation now, because as you mentioned up front, you're not just working with the individual job seekers. You're also connecting their demand to the supply. And I know I'm talking about this differently from for most, I suspect, when you talk to labor economists, they're like, no, the, you know, the employers of the demand side and the people or the supply, the human capital, from my lens, like I think of it like no individuals are demanding progress in their lives. They get to hire that next job. It's that element of choice that you just talked about. So I suspect it matches a little bit of what you're talking about. But when you talk to those suppliers of jobs, otherwise known as employers, how do you help them move beyond, you know, those applicant tracking systems and the filters and the biases, right, that are sprinkled throughout their processes that would, you know, that otherwise they'll miss the hidden talent that's right in their communities.Kathleen:Yeah, absolutely. And that bears repeating. Right. Each year we know companies miss out on thousands of motivated job seekers and employees due to just their own internal processes. And these processes are ones that prevent folks from joining and at the bar and staying at particular firms. Right. So losing this kind of talent, we know, costs companies millions of dollars annually. But it can be these are fixable problems. These are fixable problems. And so this is truly a big focus of the work that we do with our Care Plus arm that I mentioned earlier and through specifically through our Inclusion Action Lab one is one specific way there. We've worked with more than 30 companies to date nationally and really helping them rethink everything from how they recruit, what's on their job descriptions, what might even be the platform those job descriptions are placed on to hiring policies and how they're retaining to thinking about how whether or not managers who are supervising untapped talent are well are trained adequately to be able to provide the kinds of support and guidance and development that untapped talent who might find themselves in environments that are new for them, making sure that they have the resources and tools necessary as well. Otherwise, we know that they're, again, missing out on a big piece of the population. So, you know, what we have found, which is which is really wonderful, is that more than 90 percent of the folks who've attended our Inclusion Action Labs have actually identified shifts to their job requirements or hiring processes or other practices that they engage in to either attract or retain untapped talent. One global firm, in fact, reported that they were able to hire more than 100 additional people annually because of shifts that they made in their job requirements. So, again, we know that these are fixable problems. And I often say that it's not I don't I don't find that it is a matter of will. I think it's often a matter of way. Right. And so where do I start? Where do I begin? How do I even start to think about this? Right. And if you're not used to going to diverse places to find that talent, you know, how do we help you get there? And so that's really the work that we do in helping to shift some of the mindsets.Michael:Yeah. So that seems like such an interesting point, right? It's not will, it's way. And because and you just have the data to back it up. But it seems like so many employers right now are dropping degree requirements. Several years ago, it was, you know, banning the box around marking if you'd been incarcerated. Right. And things of that nature. And yet, like the needle hadn't fully moved. And I think what you're saying is like, well, that's because, like, yeah, the intentions are great, but they have to do more in the process. Like there's more work to be done that we know can be done to actually change those outcomes.Kathleen:Absolutely. And it's absolutely right. That's absolutely right. I was at an event recently where the chief human resources officer talked about a couple of things that they did. One was right. They wrote a little disclaimer at the end of each of their job descriptions that said something along the lines, slightly paraphrasing, but it was something along the lines of, you know, research shows us that women and people of color often are unlike or least likely to apply for a job where they don't feel like they check all of the boxes. If you don't feel like you check all the boxes, but this is something that interests you, we encourage you to apply for this role anyway. And just like that is just so powerful to read. Right. And to think about that, you're saying I don't have to check all the boxes, whereas this was my thought going into this of like, I can't do this. I don't have all these requirements. And to provide that kind of push and nudge to somebody who might have been on the fence anyway to apply for something to say, OK, maybe I'll go for it is incredible. So it's just thinking about, you know, small shifts, again, that are so possible that would open up the aperture in ways that we that we haven't seen.Fulfilling PurposeMichael:Terrific stuff. Last question, as we start to wrap up here, which is, you know, from my perspective, you're not just in the job placement business. Right. And you've said it yourself, like that may be the product, but it's much larger than that by placing these individuals in a job. And as you said, you're not just placing them like you're putting them in a place where they're going to succeed. They're going to retain. Right. Crazy, you know, much higher rates than we otherwise would see. It seems to me you're really helping them make progress, meaningful progress in their lives, you know, claim their dignity, helping them fulfill purpose. Can you just speak to what that looks like and how perhaps job placement becomes an entryway into something larger, both for the job seekers and employers themselves?Kathleen:Absolutely. You know, and that's the exact right phrase is to help folks claim their dignity. You know, I think I described it earlier as helping them find themselves and then find jobs because that's just as critical and just as important. And we often, as I mentioned, think about that dignity of choice in a job and what that does to someone's confidence in their ability to say, maybe I can go for that next thing now and that they do have the right to choose their own career. And so that pride in creating your own path and creating your career creates that ripple effect in your family, in your community. And you inspire others. I'm thinking of a young woman, Bridget, who is just an incredible force. She's quite the firecracker if you meet her. She's been a member of our community for more than a decade. She's worked in Cara, worked in her Cara place for seven years, but she ended up leaving it in 2020. We all know what happened in the world then. But she returned to us back in about two years later, ready to work, ready to do her next opportunity. Her personality, her determination, her skills honestly would have made her best fit for any job. But she wasn't getting those opportunities on her own, which is what brought her back to us. She was persistent in truly looking for the job that she wanted. And I remember her saying to me, you know, I hope my coaches don't get mad at me because I know they're wanting me to go to some of these interviews, but that's not what I want. I know what I want, Ms. Kathleen, is what she would tell me. And today she is in that role. She's in that role that she wants. It's actually at Deloitte and she is thriving. We've received such positive feedback from her supervisors. I get notes about what she's doing there every day. And she's celebrated actually her year, what we call the Great Wall. So once you've made your year, you get on a plaque. We invite supervisors back, the participants and the job seekers back to celebrate that they've lasted in this role for a year. So, you know, her story really shows us there's true power in that dignity and being able to choose your own career path. And we know that when you focus on transforming individuals, you transform their families. You, in turn, help transform those communities that have been historically disinvested in. So this is a ripple effect that we're that we're continuing to see and one that we're we're incredibly proud of.Michael:Very cool. Transforming individuals, family trees, communities, employers. Very cool work, Kathleen. I'm very thankful that Stand Together brought us together for this conversation a couple times now. Thanks so much for the work that you all are doing. Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.