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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.

Every few years it seems that hype grows around the possibilities of unbundling education. The latest fuel is the emergence of at least 14 states with education savings accounts (ESA) programs that allow families to pay for a variety of educational programs and supports from public funds.As a recent article in Education Next, where I’m an executive editor, proclaimed, “While parent-led unbundling is not a new phenomenon, the current movement has expanded so quickly that it’s been dubbed ‘the Great Unbundling’ of K–12 schooling.”But we should be cautious about such grand statements. Good theory on innovation can help us parse out the hype from what’s likely to play out.First, in favor of the argument that we will see more unbundling, despite the media’s conflation of ESAs with vouchers, there is a substantial difference between the two that can drive unbundling.A voucher allows an individual to use a set amount of funds on one specific service, in this case tuition at a private school. Think of it more like a ticket. The voucher can’t be separated into smaller, discreet parts. As a result, the consumer doesn’t have much incentive to think about things like cost-quality tradeoffs and value below the amount of the voucher. They don’t benefit from spending less than the value of the voucher. They use the voucher to get access to a school, and then it’s done.An education savings account, on the other hand, deposits funds into an account that a family controls. Like a bank account, they can use the money in a variety of ways. They don’t have to spend it all in one place. They can decide to spend on a microschool with limited offerings that costs less than the funds available in the account because they know they’ll have other funds remaining to spend on other services like tutoring, enrichment activities like music or sports, specific academic programs, or even tickets to SeaWorld akin to a school field trip. As a result, they have lots of incentive to think about cost-quality tradeoffs and to consider a broader universe of education possibilities that transcend schools. Families can theoretically even decide not to spend all the money deposited in the account in any given year and save the money for future purchases or investments in a child’s education. Much as is the case with the emerging research around income stipends such as the Chelsea Eats Program, although the funds come from a third party—in this case the government—the money now belongs to the families; they are able to break it out as they need to support their needs and specific circumstances.At the same time, just because families have the option to spend on a variety of educational services and unbundle schooling, doesn’t mean they will choose to. A good theory—the theory of interdependence and modularity—helps illustrate why. It casts cold water on the notion that this will be the “great unbundling of school” rather than a “relative unbundling.”In every industry, the early successful products and services often have an interdependent architecture—meaning that they tend to be proprietary and bundled. The reason is simple: when a technology is immature, to make the products good enough so that they will gain traction, an organization has to wrap its hands around the system architecture so that it can wring out every ounce of performance.As a technology matures, however, it eventually overshoots the raw performance that many customers need. As a result, new disruptive innovations emerge that are more modular, and customers become less willing to pay for things such as raw functionality and increased reliability. Instead, they start to prioritize the ability to customize a product to their individual needs at an affordable price. Customizing a bundled service is expensive because it forces a full redesign of the underlying system architecture, but customizing a modular offering is affordable because it is merely a matter of mixing and matching discrete parts that fit together in well-understood ways.To believe that unbundling will occur en masse, one also must believe that schools have overshot what families desire in terms of functionality and reliability.On the one hand, that’s likely what’s driving some families to cobble together a variety of educational offerings.Strange as it may sound, there are some families that are overserved by today’s schools. They don’t need the full “bundle” that many traditional schools offer: the full sets of meals, the extended hours, the broad range of classes, and the many athletic, arts, and other special offerings. They can’t possibly take full advantage of all these offerings—and they don’t want to. They instead want to customize for their children’s specific needs or interests. Imagine opting for a truly great musical education coupled with a la carte academic offerings from Outschool, or enrolling a child in a full-time virtual school so that they can prioritize their development as an athlete. Or so that they can double down on the academic program that has grabbed their interest.We were seeing more unbundled schooling offerings emerge before the pandemic, but COVID accelerated the interest in these arrangements. More families realized that they had specific preferences for their children’s schooling and have sought customized offerings.But many more families still rely on the bundle and don’t feel like schools are overshooting at all. Indeed, they feel underserved by schools, and want something better. They might want even more of the bundle—more childcare, more services, more food, more learning.More generally, because in the early years of an industry customers are willing to tolerate the product standardization that bundled offerings mandate because customization is prohibitively expensive, differences in usage patterns—and therefore customers’ individual needs—are not obvious during this stage of an industry’s evolution. People are generally willing to conform their expectations and their behavior to accommodate use of the standard product.In other words, because of our nation’s long history with schools, it’s not as obvious to most families (the demand side) or many educational suppliers (the supply side) just how to think about the progress that different students and families desire beneath the level of schools; how to present and talk about those educational offerings that transcend the context of “school”; and how to ensure that unbundled offerings still lead to a desired level of coherence such that students learn the needed levels of background knowledge necessary to advance in their academic lives and develop fully the habits that will be important to prepare them for their futures.Said differently, because most kids in America have gone to school for a long time, it’s just easy to keep talking, thinking about, and choosing schools.And that’s what it appears most families that have availed themselves of ESA options are still doing: choosing a school first, and then filling in some educational offerings around the margins.According to data from Florida’s ESA usage in 2019-20, for example, 80% of the funds were used to pay for tuition and fees, with the remaining going to instructional materials (roughly 11%), specialized services, and tutoring. That resembles the “customize the last 10 percent” approach Christy Wolfe wrote recently about when reflecting on the “Chipotlification of education.”But, as families gain more experience with an ESA and the possibilities of unbundling and opportunities for customization, behavior changes. According to a 2021 EdChoice research paper, “the longer students remain in the program, the share of ESA funds devoted to private school tuition decreases while expenditure shares increase for curriculum, instruction, tutoring, and specialized services.”In other words, as families gain a deeper understanding of their needs and get more comfortable with customizing their education, they are more willing to unbundle it appears. That also echoes Kris Comeforo of Outschool.org’s on-the-ground findings serving families in Detroit. He found that the presence of money alone in an ESA was unlikely to cause families to spend on different educational services. Information and social reassurance from those who had experienced the service were generally critical ingredients as well.My takeaway is that we shouldn’t expect an unbundling of school to happen en masse or right away. Instead, we should expect greater unbundling in schooling relative to what we’ve had. That’s a step forward for customization, given that we didn’t have much unbundling before at all.This was post first appeared on Forbes.com. Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.

Two innovators in education, Laurence Holt and Jacob Klein, have teamed together to create a market map for charting the path and impact of AI in K–12 education. The map not only charts places that new AI companies and products are entering, but also highlights where AI could make a positive impact in a not-so-subtle nudge to innovators. In this conversation, we walk through some of the big trends they see unfolding; speculate about where AI has yet to have big impact and still could; talk about some of the real risks of AI in education; and discuss how you can help Holt and Klein keep the market map up-to-date. Here's the link to the market map.As always, subscribers can listen to the podcast, watch it on YouTube, or read the transcript.Michael Horn:I'm joined by two people who've been thinking a lot about how to do this over the many years. Laurence Holt and Jacob Klein, two longtime entrepreneurs, innovators, big thinkers in education about how to create a better world for educators and the students in it. And guys, it's good to see both of you. Thanks for having this conversation. Why don't I kick it off to you as we start the conversation to just give the thumbnail sketch of how you come to the conversation even before the artificial intelligence part, just education in general, how you got into this field and sort of your backgrounds, because both of you have very entrepreneurial and innovative pathways in it, but different pathways. So, Laurence, why don't you go first?Laurence Holt:Sure. So I'm originally an engineer, software engineer, and joined Amplify, an Edtech player in Brooklyn when it was fairly small and was chief product officer there for over a decade through the entertaining ups and downs and left about two years ago to spend time with family, but also pursue some philanthropic interests and support entrepreneurs. And that has pointed me directly to AI of late.Michael Horn:Terrific, Jacob.Jacob Klein:So I've been tutoring students for many years. I was a teacher at a KIPP school briefly. I went back to school and got a master's in Learning Design Technology at the Stanford Graduate School of Education. And while I was there, I was able to start the company that became Motion Math suite of games around teaching K–8 math, especially trying to leverage new technology, which at the time was the iPhone and the iPad. We were able to grow that company and sell it eventually to Curriculum Associates, where we continued to grow our suite of math games, now called iReady Learning Games. I just left there a few months ago. I've been consulting for several companies in the AI edtech space, including Oko Labs and EdLight, and really excited for the future of this field.Michael Horn:Awesome. And you guys teamed up, you built this thing called the AI in Education Map. It's an article on Medium is sort of where it lives. But tell us what is on it, what are you tracking? And we'll get into the why and sort of those questions in a little bit. But let's start with what is it at its surface level?Laurence Holt:Sure. And if people can't, presumably you'll link it in the show notes.Michael Horn:Exactly.Laurence Holt:If you just search for Medium and AI and Education Map, people will find it. It is a map of use cases or sort of jobs to be done that can be supported by we believe can be supported by generative AI, specifically around teacher practice and teaching and learning in general, in and out of classrooms. So it is not a map of startups in the space. It includes that, but we want it to be broader than that.Michael Horn:Gotcha. Jacob, would you add anything on that description, or does that sort of capture what you think it's doing in the field, from your perspective?Jacob Klein:Well, I think starting from all the work to be done points out places where there's many companies, particularly in content generation, have already started, and there's going to be some great companies built there, but also places that we're not aware of any companies starting yet where we still think there's huge potential.Michael Horn:Yeah. So let's dig into the why, then, behind this that you created it. Laurence it occurs to me that in past efforts of technology and education, there have been various actors that have been well funded to come together to sort of try to create an edtech market map at the moment, or whatever else. It doesn't seem like this has been the case in AI so far, and you all have created this map. What was the motivation for doing so?Laurence Holt:There is just so much going on, and as you point out, a lot of it is sort of point innovations, right, smaller things that people are just trying because you can do them so rapidly. And we wanted to make sense of that for ourselves and understand what's out there, but fit it into some kind of a structure that was we thought it'd be just as a time capsule. It'd be sort of interesting to capture it in its early stages and then update it regularly and see how it develops.Michael Horn:Now, Jacob, against that line, we're going to get into the categories and the different jobs to be done or tasks that you see that AI could do in a moment. But you all have this set of risks right at the end of this, with AI in the article itself, why did you include a section like that in what probably isn't going to be seen? People aren't coming to look for the risks. They're coming to look for the heat map, if you will. Why did you include that?Jacob Klein:Yeah, there's a very overly optimistic side of our field where every new technology, there's an excitement. This is going to transform everything. We're finally here. I was pleasantly surprised, for example, that the New York Times article on Khanmigo a few months ago took an appropriately skeptical approach. And I think you can be bullish about this technology. It's magical in a lot of ways while still looking for all the risks that have diminished the impact of other technologies in Edtech. And there's a more profound one, I think, with generative AI, which is really a redefinition of thinking and of writing and of really intellectual work that threatens or has the potential to redefine a lot of what schooling is about. So I think it's important to be aware of those risks as we go around developing and looking for yeah, and.Michael Horn:There's some pretty big heady ones in there. Atrophy of critical thinking. Right. That's a pretty heavy risk that you list there you have the null hypothesis and hallucinations, and some of those that are probably more well guessed at, if you will, by folks. But just take that one for a moment. The Atrophy of Critical Thinking, what do you mean by that specifically? And sort of what's the worry?Jacob Klein:Well, Ethan Mollick is probably the best writer on this topic. He had a good essay a couple of months ago. What does it mean when you can get a I don't know, B minus essay by clicking a button? It really raises the floor, which could be a good thing. But you could see there certainly will be quite a few students that that's really what they do. Whereas before they would maybe attempt more effort to write a good essay, now it's what ChatGPT will spit out. The AI detectors don't seem to work. So that is a real risk, is that a lot of students will use the tools, not understand how they work, not question them critically, and just not learn much.Michael Horn:Gotcha. Now, as we look at the actual categories itself, Laurence, let me turn to you on this one. You have both sort of real items and categories, and then ideas are almost it reads like wish lists of gosh, I hope someone develops this. Tell us about the different categories and how you've created them.Laurence Holt:Yeah, that's exactly right. We wanted to map what we were seeing, but also what we thought was possible, but we haven't seen yet. And so we've sort of got different colors on the map to highlight that. And that comes from a thesis that is sort of thinly veiled, which is that if we think about evidence based practices and engaging practices, the kind of thing that we write about and you write about, but that we don't see widespread in schools. I'm thinking about things like, say, role play or project based learning or competencies or just feedback for students. They're often a common theme may be that they take a lot of effort, that they either in the preparation on the teacher's part or in the execution. They're hard work in their current form. And so we began to wonder, well, what if there was an assistant teacher that could make that a lot easier still under the direction of your teacher, but essentially remove some of the obstacles in teachers days and free up time.And therefore maybe we'll see these practices suddenly becoming, or maybe gradually becoming much more widespread, and that could itself be disruptive and transformative.Michael Horn:Yeah, I want to turn to this in a moment, but I actually want to do the curveball here because, Laurence, you wrote one of the more interesting articles, I think, in Education Next, a couple of years back, if I recall, my timeline may be off and I'm probably going to surely bastardize what you wrote. But in my telling of it, you talked about how there's these findings in different streams of scientific research, in effect, where we know that individuals with different chromosomal footprints, for lack of a better word right, seem to have different learning patterns. It might explain ADHD or it might explain they might need more greater number of dopamine receptors and things of that nature, which may change the way you educate them as well. I'm just sort of curious and you could probably summarize this better than I just did, but one of the takeaways I had from that know, your average software program, it might reach one subset of those kids but probably not the other, and you need to tailor it. Is it your perspective that even in the world of AI, where a lot of know to the point Jacob made about all the hype and stuff like that, it's going to personalize, it's going to realize these categories? Is it your perspective that we're actually going to have to custom build for these different archetypes that maybe exist out there? Or will the AI be able to sort of intuit some of these underlying genetic differences that explain some of the learning differences that we sometimes don't talk about in education?Laurence Holt:Yeah. Wow, lots to unpack there. The finding is that, and it's quite an old finding in psychology that humans respond differentially to interventions and approaches and learning paths. You could imagine. In fact, researchers found a set of students who responded extremely well to an online reading tool, for instance, and others who didn't. And when I was building and Jacob were building a lot of these products, often the question was does it work or not? And what this research says is that's the wrong question. The right question is for whom does it work? And if you knew that ahead of time, then school can become more of a matching to the way you want to learn and to effective practices for you. Now, we've walked ourselves right back into the well, that sounds like a lot of work on the part of somebody problem.And so to your question about who's going to figure that out, in some senses it's quite easy to figure out. You just try things and the ones that work, you see the needle move, right. And that's what you should do more of. But it does mean that you have to make available to students several different ways of working and that can be difficult to do in one class or one school, right. Where AI, certainly we feel could help with that.Michael Horn:It's super interesting. It's just a fascinating article that I still think more people ought to dig into and wrestle with the implications of. So what have you found in terms of the categories that you've mapped so far, just a little bit about what's on the map itself.Jacob Klein:It's moving very quickly. I was really impressed with Reach Capital's latest market map, which has some connections to our own. There's a lot of content generation, lesson plan generation startups and existing players that are working in that area. There are some great companies around teacher coaching, teacher support tools, as well as grading. One company that I've worked with, Edlight, is working on the problem of feedback to student handwriting, which I think has a lot of potential to get out of just purely digital interfaces for math homework in particular. So we're seeing really a Cambrian explosion of companies and efforts within existing companies to bring AI into their products. What we haven't seen as much as Lawrence mentioned, is bringing some effective, innovative pedagogies to teachers at a lower cost both of price point and the mental cost of implementation and grading. That's some of the more exciting work, I think that can and hopefully will be done.Michael Horn:Why do you think that or other and what other areas are unexplored? But why don't you list some of the areas that are unexplored still in your mind as you look at the map? And maybe some hypotheses for why we haven't seen either what you just talked know, lower cost, easier implementation, or perhaps certain categories that remain somewhat unfilled on the map?Jacob Klein:Well, as Laurence mentioned, project-based learning, competency-based learning, some social models of learning, jigsaws, simulations, role plays that might know the capstone to a semester course, but not something that a teacher implements every week into their classroom, just because the prep time, let alone the grading time, is really difficult. So I think it's natural that companies are looking for existing models that teachers already know, that already implement and saying, we can do this much quicker. I think the next stage will be you may have tried this work occasionally, but here's a way to do it every single week for only an hour of your time. And particularly social models really interest me. There's some interesting academic work out of Dan Schwartz's lab at Stanford of teachable agents I've never seen that brought to scale. AI could help with that. There's a lot of great work in academia that hasn't been brought over commercially to education, and AI could potentially support that.Laurence Holt:So this goes to, if I can add Michael, and this is your field more than ours is whether what's going to happen in education is that AI is essentially sustaining innovations as it appears to be outside of education. The winners peer to be Google, Microsoft, the usual suspects. Will that happen in education too? And the low hanging fruit is to go to things that teachers already do, so maybe they go to teachers, pay teachers to find a lesson. Well, now I can go to one of a dozen different lesson generation free websites and do the same thing, whereas the more disruptive innovations would be enabling new models, enabling new practices. So the big question is, will that come later or not?Michael Horn:What are both of your hypotheses on this? Because I agree with your general observation that outside education largely, it seems right now and look, it could change, right? But right now it seems largely that it's been a sustaining innovation to those tech giants, right? It's not a wholesale platform that changes the cost structure and if anything, it actually increases costs. Right. It seems education seems unclear at the know. Jacob, from what you just said so far, actually, we're not seeing maybe a lot of disruptive activity because we're not seeing dramatically lower costs, greater accessibility, greater simplicity and things of that nature. What do you both like? Where do you think the dominant do you think it'll be the incumbents that really sees hold of this, or do you think we'll see a wave of startups?Laurence Holt:We're definitely seeing the wave of startups.Michael Horn:I should say startups that will disrupt. And last, I guess, should have been the question, right?Laurence Holt:Yeah, that's a different question. I think there's with education, as you know, it is not just a case of applying the technology and doing something that gets a wow, it's the user experience. It's that how do you make that part of the fabric of teaching and learning in a classroom? And that's a much higher barrier. And so I think whether some of the more innovative companies will actually be rolled up into something that adds up to being something more disruptive, I think that's all still to be seen.Michael Horn:Jacob, what about you? What's your take on where this is going to go?Jacob Klein:Yeah, I think eventually there's got to be a simplification and some kind more coherence, more integration of tools. Now you have early adopters exploring a lot of things. I mean, ChatGPT in a way is a unification of lots of different separate kind of chat, bots and previous AI tools all packed into one. But I think my sense is that we're entering an era of even more fragmentation, with the voucher states putting public money into different school models, with some of the pipeline to college pulling back and more people realizing that there's other career paths that can be really fulfilling. So I think there will be some unification, but also a long tail of more niche use cases that optimistically support more diverse learners.Michael Horn:I want to go toward one of the points that you just brought up, Jacob, in a moment around new schooling models. But first a different question, which is one of the other theories that I've had is that we're going to see a lot more learner agency in this world of AI, more tools that put the learning and the power of AI directly in the hands of students themselves. What are you seeing on the map? What are both of your takes on that possibility or not.Jacob Klein:I hope you're right. I mean, this is a golden age for kids who are autodidex. You already had Wikipedia. Now you have some pretty good virtual tutors that can guide you through material, point you to new material, challenge you. So for the kid who already feels that agency and in charge of their own learning, really the sky's the limit, even more than was true before. So that's very exciting. How do you get other kids to feel that way? Some kids need much more social structure, and I think that's where some startups have a bit of a blind spot thinking that each kid, if only given the tools, is going to direct their own learning. They need a teacher, they need a peer group, they need those social cues as to what they should be learning.That guidance. But I think AI could certainly support teachers, support counselors, support individual tutors with students to help students find that agency.Michael Horn:Laurence, what's your take on that question?Laurence Holt:Yeah, I think also that the answer to it may be in the details, in the specifics, that maybe there are areas where we will start to see some real disruption. If I were to pick a couple with the certainty of being wrong, probably. But it's the old sort of killer app idea. What's the killer app for? A Macintosh or something like that. And one of them that I'm quite excited about is feedback. Students getting more and better and faster feedback. We know that drives learning and we know that on average, students actually don't get much feedback. That in fact, teachers don't always set long open ended work because it's a very, very big grading exercise for them across a load of 150 students.But what if they did set more open ended questions and that students were able to get quality feedback, perhaps marshalled by the teacher, so human in the loop feedback and a chance to revise what they've worked on, which they often don't get in school today. That all seems to be within the reach of generative AI right now, and there are some people working on that. So it may be as specific as that. There's just a big lever that starts to really take off.Michael Horn:Yeah. And so obviously then my head goes when you mentioned that to we may need to create some new schooling models that can absorb that sort of change in use of time and things like that, right, with educators and students. But it also brings up another thing that I've thought a lot about, which, know, could you use AI as an enabling technology to be the kernel around which you build new school? And for know, Imagine Worldwide, right? They have their work in Malawi and Sierra Leone and places like that in Africa, literacy and numeracy and you add AI to that, it becomes much more powerful and then you start to have sort of grassroots-based communities, rethinking school, maybe around that kernel. Or Jacob, you mentioned the states with the education savings accounts, right? Very new school models that can start to pop up, potentially powered by AI perhaps in a variety of different ways. Are you all tracking that at all? What are you seeing? If so.Laurence Holt:Yeah, firstly, I think you're right that we've been talking about US education for the last 15 minutes, but actually there are other areas that could be way more receptive to innovation and low and middle income countries where the problem is often the teachers may not be there today. And so assuming we have the bandwidth, the infrastructure is available, which it is more and more, but there's still work to do, that could really be a big transformation. I think also microschools, potentially homeschooling, these are areas where it's a big lift to set up a micro school right now. And this proliferation of AI tools may make it considerably easier. But we haven't seen anything yet that is specifically sort of generative AI for microschooling. It's more the case, I think, that the whole map has got use cases on it that should give microschools a boost.Michael Horn:As we start to wind down here, the other question I want to talk about is this map is big. There's a lot of different areas. I don't even know if we've given people the full sense of just how many different categories you have on it, but you have sort of your macro categories of teacher practice, support, classroom material, evaluation and feedback, student support, and then within each of those you have more and more categories. I think we can show some video of this as this conversation goes live, but I'm just sort of curious as you step back and look at it, someone that jumps on the site, they look at the map. What are, for each of you, the most interesting or two to three most important things that come out of it in each of your views?Jacob Klein:Yeah, I think one of my main takeaways would just be the diversity of use cases. And I think eventually AI will be equivalent to just the word digital. I mean, it's just embedded in almost everything that why not? Would you include some intelligence, some generative content, some other AI in the software that you're creating? So I think eventually it becomes an invisible technology in most use cases. And also we're just at the exciting beginning. So I think it's a really exciting time in technology in general in Edtech, and I hope that we will learn from previous mistakes of other cycles of Ed tech that will insist on rigor, that we won't lose the humanity at the core of education. And I think if we do that, there will be some amazing new models and as you said, an increase in learner agency.Laurence Holt:Totally agree with all that. I think just to name a few specifics that we're excited about feedback I mentioned. I think that's just potentially an easy one to see progress on. One entrepreneur used this really interesting phrase that I love, which was modifying with rigor. There's a lot of sort of modification of curriculum that goes on out there, as we know. And sometimes it is teachers trying to find activities that they know their students can do, but that might have the unwanted side effect of reducing the rigor. So how can you modify a lesson but keep the rigor? There have been some experiments that have shown AI may be able to do that tutoring. We've seen so far a sort of one to one homework help style of tutoring, which we know is not the style of tutoring that actually gets an effect in literature.Laurence Holt:It's much more intensive and guided by the tutor. And so can we start to see that small group and social would be the last one? I'd mentioned that people think AI putting AI tools into classrooms is going to reduce the social aspect. But actually these tools can be great at managing discourse and encouraging discourse and role play and debate. So I think there's some really interesting places we could start to see evolving there. I will say we haven't seen in the last couple of months while we've been tracking this, a whole lot of new use cases. We've seen a few that will add to the map. But I think the territory has been the first wave of exploring. The territory has been pretty thorough.Michael Horn:That is interesting, right? I guess a frenetic amount of activity and maybe then people are pausing to try to figure out now where to go from here.Jacob Klein:One other thing, Michael, is just I'm very inspired by companies, AI Camp and Mindjoy being two of them, that are bringing students right to the bleeding edge of the technology, giving them the tools to start their own experimentation, not just as a consumer, but really as a co creator of some of these tools. Because often it's young students that are going to expand the map to think of new use cases, that are going to have AI natives that are going to grow up with these technologies, that are going to be able to teach us about the best use cases.Michael Horn:Really important point. I hadn't even thought about that piece of it. It weaves into the last question where you all just took us naturally as we wrap up here, which is how are you keeping this map up to date? What's the frequency? How can people help? Can they contribute to the map? Because I suspect a lot of folks, they want a view into this and they want a view that continues to evolve as others come into the space or other incumbents launch their own innovations in AI to perhaps tackle some of these use cases. How can people help?Laurence Holt:Yeah, we're working on an update for later this year and we would love help. So we were going to call on your audience, maybe to do some of the work for us. Certainly anything that people feel is missing or wrong, we would love to hear about that. Probably the easiest way is just to add a comment either to the show notes here or to the Medium article. We will track all of those.Michael Horn:Perfect. I will put that up top as well so people can make sure to keep track. But Jacob Lawrence always admire both of your activity, entrepreneurship and thought leadership, but also that you guys took the initiative to actually give some organization to what is a very fast emerging space that all of us are trying to keep track of right now and see where it's going to go. And as you said, there are some clear risks. There's some clear risk of null hypothesis that it's just going to be sort of the same old cycle hype and then settle back into the rhythms. But we all want to see something bigger and better for all students. So appreciate you both and the work you've put into this.Laurence Holt:Thank you, Michael, this was great fun and great to see you.Michael Horn:Yeah, likewise. Yeah, you bet. And for all watching, check out the map. We will provide a link to it in the show notes and you can contribute to it, as you heard. Tell them what's wrong, tell them what's right. And let's keep the conversation going. We'll be back next time on The Future Of Education. Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.

On the latest Future of Education, Louise Baigelman, the founder of startup Story Shares, joined me to discuss the reading crisis that affects not only elementary-school students, but also adolescents. For adolescent students, although they need to learn the same skill sets as elementary-school students to become strong readers, how they build those skills needs to be different. Baigelman shared her insights from teaching middle school English language learners and working with students with learning disabilities. In particular, she spoke to the challenges she had in finding appropriate books—from a content perspective—for these students. The dearth of materials these learners found engaging—while still being rigorous to the skills they needed to build—is what caused her to found Story Shares.A few choice quotes that Louise offered from our conversation that I found revealing:We've actually combined these decodable texts as chapters into a chapter book so that they feel like a YA novel, but each chapter is on a discrete sound or skill that they're practicing.andNinety-two percent of educators said they currently can't find good books to offer their students to practice if they're struggling with reading.As always, subscribers can listen to the conversation, watch it on YouTube, or read the transcript.Michael Horn:There's a real reading crisis, not just across the country, but across the world, where lots of individuals, they've progressed past third grade, where you're supposed to theoretically have learned to read and just have not developed the foundational skills to do so. To help us talk about this and to present some solutions to these problems is Louise Baigelman. She's the founder of the startup Story Shares. And Louise, first, it's great to see you, but I'm so excited to talk to you because of what you're building to really tackle what is an immense problem.Louise Baigelman:Yeah, thank you so much. I'm really excited to be here and chat with you about it. Thank you for having me.Morning WarmupMichael Horn:Yeah, absolutely. So let's launch into our morning warm up. Why don't you give folks just a sense of how you come into this question of literacy, your own background, working in education before you founded Story Shares.Louise Baigelman:Yeah, so I'm a reader and a writer by nature, and I was an English major. I went to Teach for America right from college, and I taught middle school English language learners in Lynn, north of Boston. And that was where the initial seed for Story Shares came from as far as working with students who were mature but struggling with reading and having challenges, which I'll talk more about, with finding the right books for them. And I then worked at a family foundation that was interested in that same challenge, but from a learning disabilities perspective, older students who may have dyslexia or another reason for struggling with reading and need help from there. So that was where the Story Shares came from initially.Michael Horn:Perfect. No, you had this rich background in education and describe the problem that you saw. I mean, I sort of alluded to it in the intro, but really dimensionalize what you saw on the ground when you were working with adolescent youth.Louise Baigelman:Yeah, so it was striking to me, and it still is, reading is often taught in elementary school. That's how it was created. But my students were in middle school, and they were beginning readers. So they had just moved from Haiti or the Dominican Republic, and they were 12- 13- years old in middle school, but they were reading at a 1st, 2nd, 3rd grade level. And at that point, the books that I could find to offer them to read that were on their reading level were books written for 1st, 2nd, 3rd graders. And so those were books Junie B. Jones, even Hop on Pop if you're working on the very basic levels. And my students wanted nothing to do with those stories.They were really aware of themselves and their peers and what everyone else was reading. They didn't want to have to read baby books, but the books that their peers were reading were just far above their level and way too difficult for them to access. And I was noticing the impact of their low literacy across the board. I was supporting these students in English, but also in becoming a middle school student in America and being able to succeed in science and math and social studies. And without them being able to read, they were falling behind in all of those subjects. They couldn't read the directions, but I couldn't find books to offer them while we were practicing at these skills. And so for me, without good books that they could read and want to read, it would just compound. They wouldn't read.They'd rather pretend to read a difficult book than actually read. And so their skills, they stagnated at that point. And then the ripples from there across the subjects and more broadly were dramatic. So I just wondered, isn't there a way to create a book that we could offer these students that's engaging to them, that's relevant? It's written for their age level, features, characters that look like them, more representative and inclusive, but was just more simply told, written in a more basic way so that they could scaffold up as they improved their skills.Michael Horn:I want to get to that in a moment, but I actually want to stay on this problem for a moment because I'm just sort of curious. You've probably done some work quantifying it and figuring out how big we're talking about. I assume it’s not just kids of immigrants coming into this country with English as a second language. It's pretty widespread in a shocking sort of way. Right?Louise Baigelman:Totally. And that's the other fascinating part, is there's so many different populations that for any number of reasons are struggling with reading beyond the typical age. That was compounded dramatically by COVID because any underserved population fell further behind when they didn't have a school to go to. So the Nape report card that came out in 2023 had 68% of fourth graders are not proficient in reading. 68%. So more than two thirds of students hit fourth grade not being able to read on grade level. And at that point, it gets worse every year because not only are there not instruction models and even teachers trained in supporting those students at the middle school and high school level, but also there aren't books for them to read that are relevant for them. So 68%, it includes students, English Language learners, it's students with learning differences, low income communities where they haven't been exposed to the right instruction early on, wow a significant number of students.Michael Horn:And just to make that clear, when you're talking about these learning challenges at fourth grade, they're basically testing things like phonics and phonemic awareness and decoding. We're not even talking about comprehension and background knowledge being the problem here. This is very foundational skill level reading that this is picking up. Is that right?Louise Baigelman:It is, but it's actually part of the spectrum in a sense of reading challenges and even delays. Essentially, a student at a fourth grade level or an 8th grade level could be a struggling reader for any number of reasons. It's the decoding and the phonics. If they miss that piece. Some students mastered that, but they haven't built the background knowledge and fluency. They can read you something, but they can't tell you what happened in that story. They're not making those connections while they're reading or their fluency. Their challenge to actually work through the words is getting in the way of their comprehension.So our goal, and we can talk about the solution piece, but is to actually have wherever you are on that reading journey, if you're behind having opportunities.Work CycleMichael Horn:To address it, well, it's a perfect shift. So let's get into the work cycle as the second segment of the show and let's talk about the solution that you built, Story Shares, and what you're aiming to do through that solution.Louise Baigelman:Yeah. So Story Shares is a solution based on engagement to really connect with those students beyond the third grade that are not yet reading proficiently and providing them with content so books and things to read that are relevant and engaging and readable for them, but also supporting teachers and opportunities for how do you really inspire independent reading practice at any different level? How do you find the right books, the choices that will actually make a student feel empowered to want to read. And so Story Shares initially started as a writing contest, where we wanted to see could we provide some incentives and awareness of this audience, some guidance and tools for authors and teachers around the world to create books to write stories, but to use some pretty straightforward principles to make them just more readable for students who don't yet have those core strengths. And so the first contest we did was super successful. We ended up with hundreds of submissions and did a bunch of pilot testing and got really great feedback on those best stories from the classroom. And we then expanded upon that and done several contests where we've managed to get thousands of stories from over 150 countries around the world from really diverse global authors. And they use our writing platform, which actually gives them some feedback on reading level as they're writing. So it'll let them know if that word was really way too challenging, you might want to but it also just says things like write shorter sentences, shorter chapters, shorter paragraphs, if you use words that are a little bit more graspable.And we've just compiled this amazing collection of stories that we then have transitioned to think about how do we refine the best one? We curate them, of course. We get so many stories but we find that about 30% of them are on target enough to kind of put through our process. And so now we publish them and tag them so that you can go into this library collection and say, I want a story for a 9th grader but at a first grade level and find all those choices that meet that intersection.Michael Horn:Let's break it down even a little bit more, because I think one of the books that you showed me when we talked a few months ago was, if I'm remembering correctly, it was about someone who maybe is learning digraphs, right? Ch and Th and stuff like that. Right. These basic sounds, if I'm remembering correctly. And so you basically could say, like you said, 9th-grade level, maybe this sort of ethnic background or this sort of set of interests or whatever, and find a reader tailored to that skill that I'm actually building, but that is in a way that's topical and interesting to me. Is that how granular we're talking?Louise Baigelman:Yeah. So it's this brand new initiative that we're so excited about, which is thinking about those students who've gotten beyond the third grade, and they really need the foundational skills. They need focused science of reading, aligned instruction on these different phonemes and graph names and how they build on each other in a scope and sequence. And what we discovered is that through this author community that has contributed to our library, so many of them are educators, and a lot of them are actually wills and trained educators, and they are Dyslexia specialists. And so we were able to create some guidance. Again, you don't want to have to offer a Bob book to a 9th grader, right? My son is in first grade, and he's already kind of like past the Bob book, so but how do you give a book that has discrete sounds that would be engaging to an older student? And so what we came up with, and the guidance that we provide to our authors, is we feature teenage characters. We use photographs, full color photographs instead of kind of line drawings so that they look more like a graphic novel that maybe your peer is reading. We've actually combined these decodable texts as chapters into a chapter book so that they feel like a YA novel, but each chapter is on a discrete sound or skill that they're practicing.And then each book is in a series where they go along a scope and sequence that aligns with some of the most used ones, but for older students. And our writers are able to take that and then create these amazing books that we then have to align a little bit more closely on our side. But we have our first set that just came out last week, and we're really getting amazing feedback, so congrats on that.SpecialsMichael Horn:Tell us as we switch into our specials, tell us more about this series that you've just launched and give us a little bit of a feel for it because it sounds pretty enticing and I can see why I haven't learned my basic phonemes or whatever. Sticking me in front of some sort of first grade reader or decodable is not going to really get me excited. In fact, I might be embarrassed and then sort of tune out to school. I assume embarrassment and social pressure is a big part of what you're combating. Tell us about this new series to tackle that.Louise Baigelman:Yeah, so that is exactly right. We're really addressing that effective piece of I want to have something to read, in addition to having the books really meet the needs of the skills. So we had so many conversations as we were starting to work with more schools and libraries and distributors to schools and libraries, where people were saying, what we really need is decodable texts for middle school and high school students, even late elementary ones, that they would want to read. And several people said, but it would be impossible to make a decodable text for an older student.Michael Horn:Actually, stay on that for a second. Why would they say that? Why hasn't this been done? Why isn't there another solution out there for this?Louise Baigelman:Yeah, I spent a lot of time thinking about that question. It's tricky to use few words and tell a good story, and I think that's one of the reasons people thought it was impossible. How could you make it engaging for teens if you're only allowed to have a few words on a page? I think also, just more broadly, there's this really exciting new push for the science of reading where we're realizing if we can teach things systematically early on, that we can set students up for literacy success. And that's a shift in and of itself. And so there's so much going into that. But the problem is that there's been so many students who've gone past that point without it that there's this other part we haven't yet. I think it's just that we haven't quite yet turned our attention to of how do you apply the science of reading to the beyond third grade piece? It's the intervention side, so it is tricky, but on the other hand, it's simple in a way. When you start to think about how do you address it? Well, you definitely don't want a circle guy.Right? Again, they have a total place, but.Michael Horn:It's not for the team.Louise Baigelman:What about a photograph? Right. Or how about they love to text? Like, we have one whole book that's in this series where it's actually like chat bubbles, where they're engaging that way and there's graphic novel components. We know what teens like. It's just that we haven't yet somehow married the two. Yeah.Michael Horn:And so you're doing this you've launched this series right. To tackle that. I cut you off before, but keep telling us more about it. Yeah.Louise Baigelman:So we felt like it was a good challenge to take on an important time to do so and started playing with just first making some prototypes. Could we sort of address that? And then we created this model for our authors, reached out to the ones that we knew already were educators with some good expertise, and we've just produced this first series. It was honestly a bigger undertaking than we initially thought, just because there's so many different scopes and sequences out there and thinking about how do you make it both meaningful practice that will really be something teachers can use, but also something that students want to read. But we've landed in this amazing place, and we actually just have run a pilot study for a few weeks now where we don't have the post survey results yet. But the presurvey, it's about just sort of 50 educators, 92% of them said they currently can't find good books to offer their students to practice if they're struggling with reading.Michael Horn:Wow.Louise Baigelman:So that feels dramatic to us. And again, solvable with some focus on the issue, congratulations.Michael Horn:But that sounds like some secret sauce that you've actually created in terms of getting the content and the skill, building and marrying them together in a way that's engaging but still instructional and perhaps not something anyone could go do, if I'm reading you correctly.Louise Baigelman:Yeah. Thank you. It's kind of this combination of the model we had before for Hilo text and this new shift that makes so much sense so that you can meet those students even before they are able to read Hilo.Michael Horn:Got it. So stay with us for a moment. Now, you've launched this. Who are you working with in terms of schools and educators? Like, who's using these materials? What are you learning out in the field? Are there some good stories that sort of demonstrate impact or good results that you have to share?Louise Baigelman:Yeah, absolutely. We have some great partnerships with all sorts of schools. So we provide our books and our digital library on a school level, classroom level, district level, and then we also work with distributor partners, libraries, and then actually Ed Tech, curriculum provider partners who also are looking for texts that can fit into the curriculum they're creating. We have a really cool new partnership with Denver Public Schools through the Carmel Hill Fund where they are actually really focused on independent reading for students at any level. And so we're doing a big pilot. We're providing a lot of books there. We have recently been hearing the most from special education classrooms, teachers who are really eager to find these kinds of books. And we also have a lot of Yale teachers working with the stories.One of my favorite sort of pieces of feedback recently is from a teacher who said that she has students who they're always kind of a challenge during any time where there is independent reading because they don't have books. To read, and they end up kind of messing around and that she offered them one of the story shares books and one of these students read for a whole block. And then afterwards, he nudged his friend and said, you have to read this one. And then he went to the teacher and said, can I find other books like this?Michael Horn:That's a good win.Louise Baigelman:Full cycle.Closing TimeMichael Horn:Yeah, that's a good win. That's a good win. Okay, let's shift into closing time. As we wrap up here. Where are the future directions for where you go with this?Louise Baigelman:Yeah, so as I mentioned, there's this larger problem around. Not only do we need better books that meet students where they are and also engage them, we also need to think about literacy for the older grades now that we have such a huge proportion of students who aren't yet able to use reading to then do everything else they need it for. So how do we think about literacy? PD for teachers that are working with those older students who were meant to teach science in 9th grade, but now they have to also teach reading? How do we think about interweaving it across disciplines within the curriculum, so that the social studies teacher has ways to support the struggling reader in order to access that text on whatever topic they're studying? We're thinking about. Yeah. How do we really look at this beyond third grade reading intervention such that we can start transforming those trajectories for the students who have been falling behind?Michael Horn:I'd love to hear what kind of feedback you get from that. Right. Because I can imagine you've just raised a really good point. Right. Like the 9th grade teacher doesn't matter their subject area, whether it's English, social studies, math, whatever. They have not been trained in how to teach the science of reading. That's not been part of their educational pathway. They're not trained for it.They've been trained to deliver the content, presumably, or work with students in learning the content in their particular course. So how do you crack that nut? Because they have to sort of be all hands on deck, right?Louise Baigelman:Well, it's really one of the biggest challenges right now for it, is we weren't thinking about teaching reading at that point. So there's a couple of pieces, if you can think about it as an interdisciplinary literacy is in every subject, and background knowledge, as we know, is one of the core pieces to reading proficiency. If we can start thinking about it as interconnected, that in social studies, they're doing this and it relates to this topic. And in Ela, they're reading a book that also uses the same vocabulary, and so it's reinforcing it, and then in science as well. And you have practice texts for each of those pieces because there's the instruction side, but there's also the practice side. You've just learned a skill or you've learned something. Now go deeper or go stronger and if you don't have the right level practice text, you can't either. So if we can start thinking about it in a little bit more of an integrated way and providing some of those teachers who now do have to think about literacy with some of the tricks and tips to use, then yeah, start moving that needle.Michael Horn:No, that's exciting. That's exciting. And I think that's such a good point, which is that after you've sort of learned how to read, that background knowledge becomes so important and it all becomes very interwoven, as you said, integrated. Right. And so we have to think about every subject, really, as part of reading instruction. Not just that ela block, but it's literally I mean, even arts, music, that's all part of building one's background knowledge to be able to access more complex texts across a wider range, right, of exactly. Yeah. So how do folks that maybe are intrigued this first time they're hearing of Story shares? How do they get in touch? How do they follow what you're doing? How do they maybe put in some orders for some series of books if they want? How does that all work?Louise Baigelman:Yeah, so our website is storyshares.org, and you can visit there. There's a teacher portal where it also has the direct links for ordering books and getting in touch with us. If you want to place larger orders, you can always reach out to me directly. My email is Louise@storyshares.org work, but, yeah, we're really excited about building partnerships with more schools and educators, so we'd love to get in touch with anyone.Michael Horn:Louise, thank you for doing this work. Appreciate it. Fascinating to get to know story shares better. And for all of you tuning in, we'll be back. Next time on The Future of Education. Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.

Over the years, I’ve spoken to many of the leaders of a variety of microschools. In my conversation with Luis Brito E Faro, we explore the vision behind Brave Generation Academy, a microschool with its roots in Portugal but hubs all over the world just two years into its existence. The microschool network is serving roughly 1,000 students today with locations in South Africa, Namibia, Mozambique, Kenya, India, and now the United States as well. They serve not only students in 6th through 12th grade, but also students pursuing higher education online. And more plans are in the works. We talked about the day-in-the-life of a student, as well as the freedom and flexibility to pursue a student’s passions they offer—and how they knit together their extreme personalization with the importance of community.As always, subscribers can listen to the conversation, watch it, or read the transcript below.Michael Horn:I'm Michael Horn, and welcome to the show where we are dedicated to building a world in which all individuals can build their passions and fulfill their human potential. And to help us think about that very topic today, we have Luis Brito Faro. He's one of the founders of Brave Generation Academy. Luis, it's great to meet you and great to have this conversation.Luis Brito E Faro:It's awesome to be here, Michael. Thank you so oh, well, thank you.Michael Horn:I mean, look, you're coming to us from Portugal today and I want to dive right into the morning warm up because you are one of the co founders of Brave Generation Academy. Before I give my spiel on what I think Brave Generation Academy, why don't we just go from your own voice telling us what is the schooling network you've set up?Luis Brito E Faro:Absolutely. So we're a network of microschools. We serve learners from 6th grade and above up to masters actually. So we already have a university BGA for adults. We use a self-directed learning approach so our learners can set their own goals and define the pace that they study. And we basically have three pillars knowledge, which is the academic side. So the subjects that you sit, or the bachelor's that you're taking the curriculum that you're doing. Skills, which are the technical or soft skills that you want to develop and grow and improve about yourself. And then community, which is how to use those skills for the well being of the community, for the well being of those around you. This conceptually speaking, this is our model. Yeah.Michael Horn:Very cool. Well, we're going to dig more into it in a moment, but when did you guys get started? How long you been in operation?Luis Brito E Faro:So, informally we started in late 2020, but our official launch was in September of 2021 in Portugal with about ten hubs. We call them hubs.Michael Horn:Ten hubs off the bat. So you've been in operation then maybe just shy of a couple of years, it sounds like, officially. How many students do you serve today?Luis Brito E Faro:I guess so right now we are at about 800 students and we're going to 1000 in September. Most of them based in Portugal, most of them 6th grade to twelfth grade, but already with a few with BGA for adults. And then we are in other countries. We are in South Africa, Namibia. Mozambique, Kenya. The US. And then in India as well.Michael Horn:Wow, that's quite the geographic spread. At each hub, how many students are at a given hub?Luis Brito E Faro:So the average is 30 or better even. The maximum capacity is 32 with the learning coaches. Some hubs go a little bit over that, some hubs go a little bit under that number.Michael Horn:Got you. And it sounds like the microschools are located worldwide, but I didn't realize you guys are offering a university education as well. How did you get that accredited so quickly?Luis Brito E Faro:So we partner up with universities that were already doing an online course, already had the platform, but lack the feet on the ground, lack the hubs, lack the learning coaches, the skills and community, just brave the theoretical part of it. So we partner with a platform that has partnerships with universities such as the University of Bolton. So we offer computer science, business management, education by Cambridge and sports management as well. Those are our four bachelors as well, with upskilling and reskilling, but this is more for the labor force.Michael Horn:That's super interesting. So, if I understand it correctly, basically there's a university that has an online program and you say, let us be your brick and mortar hub on the ground to create a community around it. Let's shift into our second segment work cycle, start to dig a little bit deeper into the what's the philosophy, if you will, behind Brave Generation Academy?Luis Brito E Faro:Yeah. So we have know, and starting with our founder, Tim, he saw that his kids had really little time to experiment and to really figure out what were their passions. So we started coming up with a model that would be able to create a space where learners could be themselves, where learners could fail. Try understand if that's what they really like, and throughout that process, actually develop the skills that we talk about nowadays so much. Those buzzwords of 21st century skills flexibility, adaptability, setting goals and so on. We believe that has to be done organically, experimentally, not with PowerPoints. Theory can support that. But they actually have to go through the struggle process. And that's how we came up with how that's our know help learners find their passions, become motivated and take their own initiative.Michael Horn:It makes a ton of sense. It sounds like Tim experienced the struggle with his own kids. Was this in Portugal or where was this?Luis Brito E Faro:So just a little bit about Tim. Tim is a serial entrepreneur. He has no background in education. His parents are Portuguese, but he was raised in South Africa. Eventually he moved up to Portugal. He had his kids in a really good international private school, but every day OK, how was school? It was okay. What did you learn? Same as you did. And he actually had the chance. Tim and his family, they do this every three or four years. They do this trip around. Sometimes they did like coast to coast in the US. They went to Mongolia and Russia. To Australia. They do this big trip. So he has to take his kids out of school temporarily. And he used to take a tutor with him and his kids, and he would see that they were actually really excited about learning and they had time to do things they liked and so on. And then during the pandemic, that became even more evident when they were together at home. So he saw a chance as an entrepreneur. He saw an opportunity. He saw a problem and an opportunity. So he took his two boys out. He has two boys and a little girl. He took the two boys out. They were the guinea pigs. He left the girl in school for a little longer in case he screwed up. But he worked out fine.Michael Horn:That's great. What's your own background to join him in this?Luis Brito E Faro:Yeah. So by study I'm a mechanical engineer. I studied mechanical engineering with a major in thermal energies and renewable energies. I never actually wanted to be an engineer. I just wanted the problem solving and the critical thinking. I was never a fan of school. I obeyed, so I followed the rules. But I had many discussions with my teachers about how things were done. But what really made me fall in love with education was that I played rugby all my life. So I played until I was like 21, 22. Then I stopped to go abroad for a year. And when I came back, I became a coach. And growing up, I was really lucky to have really good mentors and coaches in rugby, in life generally. So I could apply that and I could give back and I could be on the other side and I could see the impact that having a mentor and having someone trying to again create this space, have a tool. For me, rugby was a tool to try to raise these teenagers. I saw the impact that I could have in their lives and that made me really passionate about it. And that's how I met Tim as well, because Tim is also a really big fan of rugby. So I was coaching the under 16 and his eldest son was playing under 16, so I went to play against him, his club, St. Julian's, and they ended up just crashing. Just terrible loss for us. I will never forget that loss. But in rugby you always shake hands, you always have a beer afterwards. So I met Tim and from that moment on I started following him and so on. And eventually I saw him posting about PGA whilst it was still his kids. And I quit my job within a couple of weeks and started opening the first few hubs.Michael Horn:Wow, that's quite a story. It's interesting. One of my favorite friends in the podcast and innovation world is Aidan McCullen, and he also has a rugby background. Maybe it's something about you all that causes you to ask good questions. But tell me one more thing before I get into curriculum questions, which is, who are the families and students signing up for this? Right. 1000 students in two years time. That is serious growth for a microschool network. Who are these families jumping in because COVID is behind us, right? So who are making these just choices?Luis Brito E Faro:And on top of it, this was done in a very conservative country where we're not accredited by the government, and the parents know that. So we're expecting that when we get accredited, that NABO will probably double. So these people it's a wide spectrum. So we have people coming from both homeschooling, portuguese homeschoolers, expats, public schooling. So we have kids coming from Portuguese public school, we have private schools. We have a wide spectrum, 50 50 in terms of international and Portuguese, at least in Portugal, that's where our majority of students are. About 90% of them are in Portugal, but they're coming from every background in terms of goals. I think what they want is for their kids just to be happy and just to have a purpose when they wake up. I think that's one of the best things that the parent can see is just their kid just waking up with a purpose for their day. And this is what the self directed model does for a kid, which is to take ownership over their lives. And people like to have responsibility, like to have ownership. The biggest cause of anxiety is normally lack of action, and normally you have lack of action because you don't have ownership over what you're doing, or you lack it. And that's what we give the kids.Michael Horn:No, that makes a ton of sense and helpful in filling it out also. And it'll be fascinating to watch the accreditation come, I guess, and see that doubling. So let's switch to our third block, the specials, and get into the curriculum and so forth. Tell us about what the curriculum you've chosen and how you move through the academic knowledge, the skill building, and community.Luis Brito E Faro:Yeah, so we started with the British international curriculum because it was a good balance between an accredited, well structured curriculum. Cambridge IGCSE is an a levels. Every university in the world pretty much accepts it. In the US. You have the Ace diploma, which gives you college credits similar to the AP. And it's flexible in the sense that you pretty much don't have mandatory subjects. You can pick whichever subjects you like, so you can do physics, and you can do arts and design. For example, in Portugal, this isn't know, you have to pick an area, and then you stick with it, and you.Michael Horn:Can only do on actually, hold on 1 second there. I just want to make sure I pull that apart. So in the British curriculum, the students are getting a lot of choice to say, I want to specialize in x, whereas in Portugal, they have to do this well-rounded thing, and they get less choice. Is that the distinction?Luis Brito E Faro:Yeah. So, for example, in Portugal, you reach the 10th grade, and you have to either pick the three major areas are science and technology, and that makes you pick physics and chemistry, which is a single subject in Portugal. And then you can pick between biology and geology or which is also a single subject, or geometry, like descriptive geometry. I think would be the translation, which is basically like technical drawing. And then you pick economics. And within economics you have to do economics and then you pick between history or geography and then you have arts and then you have humanities which is more focused like in law and history and so on. And then obviously you have the core subjects which is mathematics, mathematics, portuguese philosophy. You have some core subjects whilst in the A levels you reach the 11th grade. Then you normally pick three subjects, that's the minimum and normally between three and four. And you can do whatever you want to do depending on what you want to do after you finish high school. So if it is a university, you pick them depending on what university asks you to sit.Michael Horn:Got you. And is the curriculum online or how do you offer it to students?Luis Brito E Faro:So initially we partner up with an existing platform, but we ended up developing most of the curriculum. So we hired our own, what we call them the course managers, who are the subject matter experts. So the learning coaches are not experts in any subject. They have a very diverse background. They can be engineers, they can be artists, they can be PE teachers. They're focused on teaching how to learn, not what to learn. The course managers are focused in teaching what to learn. So they're the ones developing the curriculum then. But a really important thing to say is that for us at PGA we see ourselves as an ecosystem where other organizations can just plug in. So for example, we also started offering the American Curriculum, which is offered by a charter online school from Wisconsin. And now going to Florida, we're probably going to start offering also the Florida Virtual State School. We have some kids doing a Swedish platform. So what we want is we want to have several know picture a kid coming into a store, we have several hats and the kid picks the one that fits him the best. That's how we see it.Michael Horn:Got you. So walk us through a day in the life then, of what that student is. If I think about the course of a day or a week, what does it look like for a student?Luis Brito E Faro:Yeah. So for people to visualize it, our hubs tend to be in we try to put it always have these flagships hubs where they're in really nice areas of the town where the kids can just cycle there or walk there and have tons of services around because we like to leverage the resources that exist in the community. So if a kid wants to play tennis for him to go to the community. If a kid wants to do arts, to find an art studio or a music studio and he does all of those activities in the community so that everybody wins. So our hubs are really simple spaces. Think of like a co working space, 1500 sqft bathrooms, focus room for them to do deep sessions of work, a relaxed zone and little kitchen for them to relax and eat lunch and so on. And the rest is pretty much collaborative space. So tables facing each other, peer to peer work like a proper co working space. It's open 08:00 A.m. To 06:00 P.m. 30 learners more or less two learning coaches and the learners do their own schedule. So let's pretend that I'm a learner. Let's say that I'm a surfer and I want to be a data scientist for example. Okay? That's something I enjoy doing. I want to do it. So I'll come to the hub on Monday I'll arrive, I'll say like I will arrive maybe 09:00 A.m., that would be my time. I will already have an appointed time to sit down with my learning coach to do my weekly meeting where I sit down with a learning coach and I present to him my plan for the week. So I'll be showing my learning coach. Okay today I'm going to be doing this and this topic of history and English and maths. Tomorrow I'm going to be doing science or physics or whatever it is and I show him the plan according to my timeline. So we have a tool that calculates how many topics do I have to accomplish each day in order to finish the course in time taking into account my goals. So everybody's going at their own pace. We never close by the way. We're always open throughout the year. We only close two weeks in Christmas, one week in Easter. So I show you my weekly checklist, my plan for the week and that embraces the academy, these goals that I was just telling you about but also the skills and community. So for skills it will be surf. So I will tell him that on Tuesday I'm actually not coming in the morning because the waves are going to be really good. So I'm going to be surfing in the morning Tuesday and Thursday. And then a couple of weeks back I actually told my learning coach that I want to be a data scientist. So he found me a job shadowing so a person for me to go and spend a couple of hours in the company with them so that I could understand what a data scientist does. And I was also recommended a roadmap of massive online open courses to do and challenges that nowadays you go online, you have Google courses, you have IBM courses, you have the best company in the world offering the courses that you should be doing. So Wednesday I'm going to be doing academics and I'm going to be doing a little bit of data science as well. And then Friday we have a hub activity where everybody is bringing food related to the country where they come from. So our hubs have ten different nationalities, 15 different nationalities. So our learning coaches like to create this type of hub activities. So we're going to have a lunch, hub lunch together and this is going to be my week. And then maybe Thursday comes and the waves change and I end up going to the hub in the morning and go surfing in the afternoon. Who knows?Michael Horn:So you have that flexibility. How does it work if you got 30 students there? A couple of them are maybe taking the Wisconsin curriculum, the majority are doing the Cambridge curriculum, few others are doing the Swedish. We're all doing different things right now. How do we get opportunities to collaborate and sort of enjoy each other's company even though we're doing very different academy plans?Luis Brito E Faro:Yeah. So we have to go beyond the academics. So I'm going to give you a practical example. Once I was in this hub and I was talking to a learner, trying to see what were her passions and so on. And firstly she wasn't reluctant. I think she wasn't really understanding the question because she thought I was talking only about academics. So she said that she didn't really like anything special. But then I started digging in, peeling the layers and she said, no, I actually do clay work. I work with clay pottery. I do pottery. I said, okay. That's awesome. So I started talking about that and eventually she did a workshop of pottery for the other kids in the hub. So she taught all of the kids to do pottery and now in the hub they have little sculptures of what to do. And we do this with everything, with sports, with arts. We always have kids that have their special talents and it's really important for them to have something that they feel that they are good at. And this is the magical thing about not having a constrained curriculum, which is everybody will have something that they'll be good at, which will boost their confidence, develop their social skills and so on. Then the learning coach will spend more time with the learner, taking into account the ratio that he has. I think it was I did his math a while ago, it was something like it's crazy. It's something like a week to three months. You'll spend more time with a learner in one week than the traditional teacher will spend.Michael Horn:Oh wow.Luis Brito E Faro:So you really get to know the learner, really get to know really the basis of the performance of the learning coach is the relationship that he has with the learner. Understand the vulnerabilities, the goals, the strengths, the weaknesses and so on. And then he'll manage the hub taking that into account.Michael Horn:Very cool. So let's go into our last segment, closing time. How do you make this work economically? What are the costs? How does this all hang together?Luis Brito E Faro:Yeah, so we're basically a profit for purpose. So we have to be sustainable because we don't want to be dependent on anyone else. But we can make it work because it's a very simple model. We keep the hub at 30 kids, two learning coaches and you manage hub by hub. So what ends up happening? For example in the US. Our fees are about $850 basis a month per month. Okay, that's just over $10,000 a year. And we can make it work. Obviously, you know, some hubs then we have a big scholarship. So we have about 30% of our kids are on scholarships. So some hubs have to take the hit whilst others balance it out. But we're actually much cheaper than in terms of logistics because think of a big school. You have the canteen, you have the football field, you have the labs, you have such a big staff with us. Very simple, very lean. And you just leverage what already exists. You don't have to build a new football field. There's one next door. Just use it.Michael Horn:Yeah, so that's what I was going to ask then. So they're paying essentially for the coaches, maybe the curricular access and the hub upkeep that 1500 sqft. But my sailing or my surfing or rugby or whatever else, right? That's stuff that I pay for and do outside even though it's connected into school, is that the way to think about it?Luis Brito E Faro:Yeah, exactly. So a part of the activities will be paid by the learners. But we actually have a lot of, for example, workshops and talks and all of the internships there the learning coaches and we from a central perspective, BJ central, we are the ones finding that. So that's also a big, big part of the learners experience that we offer.Michael Horn:Gotcha. Gotcha. Super helpful. Okay, so if I'm watching this, I want to find out more. How should folks do that?Luis Brito E Faro:So www.bravegenerationacademy.com, that's our website. That's the easiest way to go. Our instagram. Same thing. YouTube channel. So we have a big documentary series that came out with we have testimonials. We have a day in the life of a learner. We have a lot of content for people to check and we have a video of a hub. What does a hub look like? So people will really be able to see it through their own eyes.Michael Horn:Very cool. And so you've mentioned Florida a couple of times. Sounds like you're already in Wisconsin. Maybe if I'm reading it right.Luis Brito E Faro:But only with the curriculum. Okay, in Wisconsin.Michael Horn:All right, so what's next? Where's the vision? Where are you guys going with this in the US? Where can we expect it? I suspect some states are going to be wondering, families, how do I we.Luis Brito E Faro:Have two ways of going about it. We have our proactive expansion, but we also have reactive in the sense of a lot of times we open hubs and this is why we open also so aggressively is that we have a family saying, look, I love to have a hub in my city. And we say, okay, I need ten kids to open a hub for it to be financially sustainable. With ten kids, we break even. So help me find a space. Refer to me a learning coach so that they can go through our training program and we open the hub. So from then we can be opening in California and Texas, wherever it is, proactively. We're going to be focusing more in Florida and South Florida. Right now we're in Boca Raton. We want to go up to West Palm Beach, Fort Lauderdale, Miami and so on. So if anyone listening is interested in having a hub, just reach out because we're going to make it happen and we are really fast in making it.Michael Horn:Very cool. Very cool. Hey, Luis, thank you for coming on and telling us about what you all are starting at Brave Generation Academy. I mean, this microschool network sounds like something to keep an eye on and a lot of folks are going to want to check out.Luis Brito E Faro:Thank you so much, Michael. I really, really enjoy it. Thank you for your time and keep.Michael Horn:It yeah, no, absolutely. And you guys keep it up, keep reinventing schooling. And for all you tuning in, thank you for joining the future of education. We'll be back next time. Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.

With just under 10 acquisitions in the last 5 years, PowerSchool has been active in transforming itself from a student information systems company to an integrated education company that works across the day and lifecycle of K–12 students and educators. What’s more, the company turned heads in June with its announcement that it was partnering with Microsoft to integrate AI into its PowerSchool Performance Matters and PowerSchool LearningNav products to empower educators in delivering transformative personalized-learning pathways for students. In this conversation with its CEO Hardeep Gulati and Chief Product Officer Marcy Daniel, they detail where PowerSchool is going with its AI plans—and just how much they think they can make productive personalization a reality for students and educators. There were lots of notable parts of the conversation, but I’ll highlight this one from Hardeep:There could be a lot of good use of supplemental tutoring and supplemental content and they can go to Khan Academy and they can go to Excel and other systems, but they're only doing that 1 hour in a week. If we really want to improve achievement, we’ve got to actually do that within the context of [students’] day-to-day learning. And that's really a unique opportunity for PowerSchool because we are where they are doing their homework, we are the system where they're getting the homework and we can now personalize the entire homework within that context.As always, subscribers can listen to the conversation above, watch it below at YouTube, or read the transcript. Michael Horn:Welcome to the Future of Education. I'm Michael Horn and this is the show where we are dedicated to helping the world build education systems where every individual can build their passions and fulfill their human potential. And I am delighted because we don't often get to be in-person when we have these conversations, but the folks at PowerSchool have graciously allowed me to be one of the keynotes at their conference here in Orlando, Florida. And so they've made available the CEO Hardeep Gulati and the Chief Product Officer, Marcy Daniel. And it's just really good to be with you all in person. Thanks so much for doing this sit down.Hardeep Gulati:Thanks, Michael. Great to have you here, especially for somebody who really talks and has so much written about the things which we are really focused on, not just on the competency-based learning and other elements. You have really helped us show them the way in terms of the innovation. And thank you for taking the time to actually be at our user conference.Morning WarmupMichael Horn:Oh, you bet. So, I mean, this is honestly a delight for me. And we often when we have these conversations, divide them up in four segments. We get our morning warm up, we go into our work cycle, we have some specials and then closing time so Hardeep you get to kick us off on the morning warmup. I think a lot of people, when they think about PowerSchool, they think of it as an SIS provider, student information systems, right. The origins in some ways, but from my perspective, it seems like you guys have grown into so much more, a much more complete set of solutions. And now obviously, you're a publicly traded company. It's a very different setting from maybe a decade ago. So in your words, how do you describe what PowerSchool is and what it's evolved to be?Hardeep Gulati:Yeah. Thank you. And as I was sharing with you in the hallway, the PowerSchool journey has been a phenomenal journey.Michael Horn:Right.Hardeep Gulati:We've been around more than 25 years. We've always known to be the student information system leader, and we are still today almost more than 21 million students, which is almost one-third of the North American school districts leverage our SIS. But we are a lot more than that now. In fact, in the last eight years, we have grown from an SIS to a full end-to-end platform. All the different elements of student information cloud build on our SIS, but also our Personalized Learning cloud with Schoology, which again has more than 50 million students assessment and curriculum. We have our Student Success cloud with MTSS and behavior and special ed support. We have our Workforce Effectiveness and Workforce Recruitment cloud to help, really help school districts not just recruit teachers and onboard them, but also helping them with their professional development and then we take all the way into even the student workforce development? How do we really help with our Naviance product, with our college career readiness? So we now reach actually 50 million students. Almost 80% of the North American school districts actually leverage some of our capabilities. So we are really now a more holistic provider for all the different things the school districts might need.Michael Horn:So it's holistic. It's end to end, from back end to front end, and from really early learning all the way into college, essentially. That's quite a reach. Against that backdrop, obviously, artificial intelligence, I don't need to tell you, is an incredibly hot topic in education. It's something we're going to get into a little bit more in the details. But I guess I want to do sort of bigger picture because it's such a hot topic right now. As you think about all of those things that PowerSchool is doing, how do you think about the vision for artificial intelligence with the roadmap that you have for Power School in the long run?Hardeep Gulati:As you said, this is so much of a hot topic and you now see everybody getting onto the bandwagon. But actually, if you look at our vision eight years back when I joined, one of the first things, when we talked to our customers and majority of the customer, we asked them, what is your biggest problem, right? And a lot of them pretty much said, hey, fragmentation, I've got all these different systems, I can't really improve student outcomes. And asked the second question to them, okay, tell me your nirvana. What is the one thing if we are able to do? And ultimately, if you have a clean, say, no limit budget, if you can do and say, I want to be able to personalize education for every child. We actually set up our vision and mission almost eight years back on that personalized education. But we did know that to build personalized education, you need to be the system of record, which thankfully with coming from an SIS word, we already are the system of record for all these school districts. You also need to be the system of engagement. Your parents, students, teachers need to be in your system to be able to truly personalize education within the context of their everyday learning. So that's allowed us to really bring tools like Schoology, like performance matter assessment, like special education, like Naviance, like the teacher professional development all into our tool to really be that comprehensive system that we can understand everything. What's happening with the student, what's happening in the classroom, what's happening with the teacher, all those elements. Then allow us to really build our personalization our data strategy and bring AI to help give those insights all the way into personalizing the actual education and learning itself. So we have been marching this vision, but great to see now the technology and the metascalers are actually helping us. Hyperscalers are actually helping us through accelerate our roadmap even further. So we're very excited about some of the innovation. Now we are really able to accelerate, and we'll happy to share more about that.Work CycleMichael Horn:Yeah, well, let's get right into those details and shift to our work cycle. We're going to bring Marcy into the conversation because obviously PowerSchool had this big announcement about embedding generative AI into a few of PowerSchool's teaching tools themselves. So why don't you level set us on what was the announcement specifically and what should we expect coming?Marcy Daniel:Thanks, Michael. So, I mean, really, our announcement was about a collaboration that we're doing with Microsoft with their OpenAI tools. And the first place that we're starting is really with generative AI and how you can use it with an assessment or check for learning understanding. And we have two core tools, performance Matters Assessment and then also our Learning NAV, which is a tailored or personalized learning pathway that you can use. And in both those environments, what we are doing is enabling the teacher to quickly develop a formative assessment in really minutes to be able to leverage that in those core workflows that she has.Michael Horn:Wow. And I love, by the way, I should say this up front, my own bias. I love that you all are focusing on the assessment piece of this because I hear for so many years I've heard all this conversation around personalizing learning. I've obviously driven a lot of the conversation and if you want to do that, you need to know where the student is and they're learning without the assessment. What are you actually basing that off of? So I love that you're leaning into that. And I guess that's where I want to go next, which is for educators who maybe they're hearing a lot of the hype and buzz right around AI, and maybe they feel, like it's a cool technology in search of a problem, or it's causing problems because, gosh, it's complicating my own assessments that I've had out there. They're cheating, whatever it might be. I guess say it a little bit more succinctly, like, what are you trying to solve for educators and what can they expect as these tools get embedded with AI?Marcy Daniel:So, I mean, I think what we're looking at is how do we apply AI to core workflows, things that teachers do every day, and really how we can save them time at the end of the day. You mentioned assessments used in a lot of different ways, but it's used pretty much every day for a teacher to understand they might do an exit ticket once they teach a unit or a plan that day, what did they get? What did they not get? And so if we can enable them to take something that normally takes an hour, an hour and a half to put together, like a five question assessment, we can give them a tool to just generate based on a particular standard, a particular grade, a particular topic, even contextually a particular, maybe interest or theme area that goes with another lesson plan they're doing that takes something down to really just a matter of minutes that they can then incorporate into their plan immediately. So I think it's because it's used so high frequency that it was very attractive for us to immediately put that into Performance Matters assessment to be able to generate that assessment in a matter of minutes.Hardeep Gulati:Wow.Michael Horn:So take us through sort of what this looks like in the course of a teacher's day. And either of you can jump in here. But I'm a teacher, I've got my students. Is this something that I'm generating after school when I would be lesson planning in the old days? Is this something that I'm watching students do independent work and I can create that assessment? What do I need to change in my classroom to make this really work for me? How is that going to look?Hardeep Gulati:I can start at Marcy and feel free. I think the way I always tell the team is think about it's. Like, let's pick the examples of how other industries have taken advantage of AI. Let's take about the car industry, right, which automated driving my Tesla. Right. Think about the initial lane change warnings. Right? That's where it started. And then went into, hey, I'll keep you in the lane. Then to almost give me your directions and I'll help you navigate there. And even I can navigate your complex path within a city. Well, our AI path is very much similar. We started today with already in the last couple of years we have branched ATRIS based on AI. So we have a lot of districts who take advantage within our data analytics platform, different attributes to be able to come with address modeling so we can actually tell them these kids might get at risk based on these factors. So that way you can provide the right support intervention. So we are giving them those warnings with the things what Marcy talked about, giving them tools to help them stay in the lane. We are helping teachers come up with the lesson plans, come up with the questions, as well as guide the student to on a mastery that here's the things which actually might help you. The piece where we are actually taking this one step further is now almost taking to automate it to their directions. So this is where how do we put AI in that whole thing from end-to-end flow, where let's take one of the biggest areas where the learning happens every day, which is homework. Let's personalize the homework itself. That's something homework hasn't changed. Simple mythology has been doing for 100 rows a year, but every child struggles and has their different needs, but yet we measure them with the same homework. We also, if you think about it, and I have done this. A lot of data around this is that number of kids in North America who actually spend more than an hour of supplemental learning outside homework are very few. So if we really want to improve the achievement gap, we got to actually make the homework itself personalized. There could be a lot of good use of supplemental tutoring and supplemental content and they can go to Khan Academy and they can go to Excel and other systems, but they're only doing that 1 hour in a week. If we really want to improve achievement, we got to actually do that within the context of their day-to-day learning. And that's really a unique opportunity for Power School because we are where they are doing their homework, we are system where they're getting the homework and we can now personalize the entire homework within that context. Now there is here, which is now the actual scenarios are a lot more complex. You look at a lot of different behavior aspects, their career pathways, how do we now incorporate that into their homework itself? So we're not measuring every kid by the same mastery. We actually want to factor that kid's passion, that kid's career path, that kid's goal and bring that learning into it. So we're not measuring the same thing and deal with the environment for that child. And that's where things like our Naviance and other pieces come into the picture and helping even take that one step further and provide a full personalized learning pathways. So we're really kind know doing that now as Marcy were mentioning, actually it really helps the teacher. Sometimes people are scared to your point is like hey, this is going to take teachers away. Actually not. I take the same example of an automatic car. It's not taking the role of the driver if I'm shuffling my kids to the stuff. It's not that the automated car means I'm going to send my kids to go by themselves. I would still be in the car. But now rather than the tedious task of driving, I'm actually engaging with my kids and family. Well, that's what now we're equipping teachers with those automated tools to now actually focus on the engagement rather than actually have to worry about the mundane task of homework and collecting that to know where the kids are. So it really actually allows our teachers to teach and focus on the teaching. So it's augmenting the teachers and really into their day to day learning.Michael Horn:It's powerful because I think for years we've talked about technology really powering those human moments and making it a much more human to human connection which frankly a lot of schools, traditional classrooms are actually not all that much. So if you're lecturing to a large mass of undifferentiated sort of lessons to them. But the other piece that I just want to pick up on there that you mentioned that I think is quite interesting is when you think about sort of connecting that into Naviance and those career or college pathways? If I'm hearing you all correctly, it sounds like you could start to say, like, hey, Michael, you're really excited about this career field or this set of skills or whatever else. Why don't you learn algebra? In the context of this? We're going to generate problems that show you the relevance. Am I catching where you're going with this?Hardeep Gulati:You're absolutely right. It actually lets them not just do the competency and masteries on the different standards or what the lesson plans or the curriculum is. It actually takes that one step further to start building life skills, collaboration skills, other things which the kid is passionate about. So we are really focusing and developing the whole child and helping them achieve their true journey of their career goal.Michael Horn:That's really neat. So, Marcy, this is rolling out this fall, right? So what should educators expect as they come back to their classrooms in August and September?Marcy Daniel:Yeah, so they should expect we're rolling out into a beta or a pilot format. This fall is really where you normally log in and you have to create items, and that has a big task associated with it. Now you just press a button, hit generative item and it automatically creates those items. You can select them and put them directly on assessment and use that. You asked before, is this in class? I think it could be in class. I think because it's so easy to generate them, I think you could do your exit ticket literally after you taught your lesson. Have kids, take it. I think the other part that's really exciting and you started touching on this is that you could really personalize it for every student. Let's say you have 25 students in your class. You know what their interests are because we are connected to the college and career readiness, you could really start tailoring that experience because you've cut down the amount of time that it takes to do it.Closing TimeMichael Horn:Wow. So as we go into closing time, if you will, Hardeep, I guess the question I have for you is that we're all excited about this. There's a lot of folks who are nervous about AI in general, AI in education specifically. What do you think about those risks and what do you say to those who are maybe nervous to embrace AI in the classroom?Hardeep Gulati:No, I completely know where people are coming from, especially coming out of this pandemic and the crisis after crisis on certain engagement and to outcomes to teacher know, we almost are, hey, we want a breather. But in reality, with the generative AI, we are already facing another challenge. I shared in my keynote, Google just shared earlier this week about the stats on ChatGPT. If you look at the search, homework was the second highest category of search on ChatGPT. So how people are doing homework today is anyway getting disrupted because those same questions without kids actually taking advantage of ChatGPT is not going to really be any more feasible. So teachers and school districts have to evolve. Even they can look at banning as much, but they still have to evolve. And what we are seeing is actually a lot of our thought leader districts are actually trying to get ahead of that and they are figuring out how you take advantage and actually rethink about the homework itself to be able to factor that it's actually a lot more different interactive. And to your point, I think we are taking these steps, we are building these components, we are launching the item generation and lesson plan so that allows teachers to create better personalized lesson plans and pathways. But as we work with them and look at how we can actually help them rethink about homework into the next year and think about even broader than competency-based learning into their career pathways, we have opportunity to partner with school districts to really drive that and stay ahead of it. And as I said, it's not to replace teacher, it's actually, as Marcy said, it actually gives time back in the hand of teacher so they can actually focus on teaching, which is what they love and that's why they're in the profession to begin with. So it actually really takes all that administrative aspects and automates a lot of the company. The other concern I think I do hear about is equity element. Does this actually help equity or actually makes it worse? It's very important that we do address the access problem, right? And this doesn't take the address the access issue, but as we have seen, there has been a lot of investments over Pandemic when with ESSER money to address the access issue, but just that giving more hardware doesn't solve the equity problem. What we have seen that to address the equity problem truly and we have seen equity problem does get worse actually through the Pandemic. We actually need technologies like this at scale, which can really help it but address the equity at scale problem. And I think again, the partnerships and rolling into the right way allows us to stay ahead of it rather than making it worse.Michael Horn:You went where I wanted to do, where I wanted to go for the last question on this question of equity. And so I'll phrase it this way because you mentioned some of the districts that have banned ChatGPT or AI and things of that nature. And I guess my take and I'd love you both to reflect just briefly as we wrap up here, my take has been that when you ban AI from your school systems or whatever else, or ChatGPT or whatever, it is that, in effect, you're saying to those students who have access outside of school and at home and so forth good for you. Go wild. But those of you who don't, too bad. And that seems to me deeply inequitable. How would you respond to that take? Do you have a different way of thinking about it?Hardeep Gulati:Go ahead.Marcy Daniel:Yeah, I totally agree. I think districts that struggled with do we ban it, do we embrace it? I think that they're starting to come around to the fact that we do have to embrace it. It's here. And I think one of the things that I have found fascinating as I've talked to districts is that they are finding unique ways to use it and it does drive more equity than it does disparity. If they can work with their communities to understand those things. And to your point, students that maybe not have access to computers and things like that outside of the classroom, it actually starts opening an entire new world for them. And so I think that there was a speaker on one of our earlier panels today that said he was familiar with both sides of that coin and that as he's worked with districts, is fully embracing on moving people over into the empowerment camp of AI for districts overall.Hardeep Gulati:No, I would completely agree with Marcy. And what I would just say is know it's important for us as a technology providers to actually partner with people like yourself, the districts who really do this and educate the right way. This is our fundamental opportunity and it's a pivotal moment to actually help us x rate a lot of the things we've always wanted to do, the competency based learning. A lot of districts have struggled. How do you do that? Well, this actually gives you a path to do that. It's also important this addresses the teacher burnout problem. Let's give the tools to the teacher which helps them actually take a lot of that work out of their hands and we can actually improve it. It also helps us address the personalized learning and engagement problem. Let's help support each child. And then also let's not just focus on achievement, let's focus on the whole child. So let's give them all the other things that helps us. So it is a journey, it's a lot of different elements. We're actually even partnering with organizations like Code to even have initiatives like teach AI. So we want to actually teach even AI, not just to schools from professional development perspective, how they take advantage, but actually how they can actually introduce to the kids as well. Because I think that allows us to really take advantage of really helping use this as a transformational moment. And we're very excited about the unique opportunity we have to actually support. We're really excited about all the work going on in the industry. But as we can kind of really integrate all that into the day to day learning and really help where learning and engagement is happening in the power school systems for 80% of the North American school districts, we have a unique opportunity to really partner and help them with this journey. Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.