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AI is becoming one of the biggest political issues of our time. But are our political institutions, schools, and communities actually prepared for what's coming?

Jim Secreto Managing Director of Narrative Strategies, a former senior official in the Biden White House, and previously worked at the Department of Commerce. He is also a member of aiEDU's advisory board. He has spent much of his career working at the intersection of politics, technology, and public policy. 

He sat down with Alex to talk about why AI is becoming a kitchen-table issue for American voters, how growing economic anxiety and distrust of technology companies are shaping public opinion, and what the upcoming elections could mean for the future of AI regulation.

Here's what they cover:

• Politics, mentorship, and career pathways — Early experiences in political organizing, and the value of civic engagement, emerging skills, career opportunities, adaptability, and youth leadership.
• AI and the 2026 and 2028 midterm elections — How artificial intelligence is becoming a major political issue for American voters,, political polarization, populism, and technology's influence on political campaigns.
• Public opinion and growing AI skepticism — Concerns about data centers, economic insecurity, AI jobs, surveillance, environmental impacts, and technology companies.
• The politics of AI regulation — Congressional oversight, potential legislation, and the challenges of governing rapidly evolving technology.
• AI literacy and civic education — Why students need to understand both emerging technologies and their roles as informed citizens.
• AI in the classroom & educator concerns — Critical thinking, ethical questions, student engagement, and responsible AI education.
• Building public trust in AI — Why listening to communities and addressing their concerns matters more than simply promoting technology's benefits.
• AI adoption in government and the workplace — Institutional resistance, AI literacy among policymakers, and practical applications of AI tools.
• The essential role of teachers — The importance of educators, mentorship, teacher compensation, and their role in navigating technological change.

aiEDU: The AI Education Project
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Using AI can feel like a fever dream: you get the result you wanted with no idea how you got there. Dr. Grant Nelson, an ER doctor who regularly writes code with AI, has a fix, and he's working out how it applies well beyond code.

Dr. Grant Nelson is an emergency physician at Desert Regional Medical Center in Palm Springs, where he has directed emergency ultrasound since 2017, leads the clinical ultrasound fellowship, and teaches as core faculty in the emergency medicine residency. He's also a self-taught software engineer who builds his own teaching tools, including Ultrasound Director, a bedside ultrasound curriculum paired with a VR simulator, and ResQBank, where residents learn by writing board-style questions with an AI mentor. He sat down with Alex to talk about what AI is changing in medicine, and what it shouldn't be allowed to skip in learning.

Learn more about Ultrasound Director: https://www.ultrasounddirector.com 

Learn more about ResQBank: https://www.resqbank.com 

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What separates a kid who builds with AI from a kid who outsources their thinking to it? For Justin Steele, a father of four daughters, it starts with one house rule: you write the first draft. 

Justin spent a decade at Google.org, leading philanthropy across the Americas and directing nearly $700 million in grants. He left at the end of 2024, taught himself to build with AI, and has since logged roughly 5,000 hours doing it. That work became Kindora, a public benefit corporation that helps 1,300 nonprofits find funders, and Outdoorithm, the camping platform he runs with his wife, Sally. 

He sat down with Alex to talk about what it actually takes to go from AI consumer to AI builder, and why ownership is the part we keep skipping. 

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What's a better investment: a data center full of chips that expire in two years, or the people whose learning compounds across a lifetime? Chong-Hao Fu thinks the field has the answer backwards.

Chong-Hao is CEO of Leading Educators, the national nonprofit behind some of the strongest evidence we have on what actually moves the needle for kids; including being the first professional learning organization in a decade to reach Tier 1 What Works Clearinghouse status. He sat down with Alex to work through what responsible AI in schools really demands, and why the teacher keeps getting left out of the conversation.

Learn more at leadingeducators.org.

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Everyone wants a checklist for AI in schools. Carole Basile thinks that's  the wrong instinct — because the real problem isn't the technology, it's the 19th-century structure we're dropping it into.

Dr. Carole Basile is Dean of ASU's Mary Lou Fulton College for Teaching and Learning Innovation, where she's spent nearly a decade rebuilding the education workforce around teams of educators instead of one teacher alone with 25 kids. Before higher ed, she spent over a decade in the corporate world — and that organizational lens runs through everything here.

In this episode: 

• Why "embracing AI" at ASU means building human relationships, not replacing them
• The metacognitive data we've never had before — and the ethical obligation that comes with seeing it
• Why there's no teacher shortage, only a shortage of people who'll do an impossible job
• "Principled innovation": the what-should-we-build framework ASU started in 2016, before the AI wave
• Why the AI-cheating panic is a signal to redesign assessments, not police students
• The curriculum-company business model AI is quietly threatening — and the "Spotify moment" for textbooks
• Using AI for possibility thinking — expanding what a team can imagine, not handing over the answers
• Why K-12 keeps modeling itself on universities instead of on how the world actually works

Dr. Carole Basile — Mary Lou Fulton College for Teaching and Learning Innovation, Arizona State University: https://education.asu.edu

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Andy Rotherham has spent 25 years advising the education sector — co-founding Bellwether, serving in the Clinton administration and on the Virginia Board of Education, and writing Eduwonk. He's also clear about something that's become unfashionable to say plainly: he's a skeptic of how AI will be used in schools, even as he takes the technology dead seriously. That distinction runs through this whole conversation with Alex.

They sit with the hard tensions instead of resolving them too quickly. Why is the most valuable thing a student can do still "learn something about something"? Why does Andy now think telling his kids to learn to code may have been wrong and what does that uncertainty mean for everyone else? What happens to a generation that got social media, a year of closed schools, an AI-disrupted job market, and now AI companions that behave like the "perfect friend"? And what's his real worry about schools: not that AI replaces teachers, but that we hand kids the shortcuts before they ever learn to do the work the right way. It's a measured, occasionally contrarian conversation for anyone trying to think clearly past the hype.

Read Andy at eduwonk.com and find Bellwether's AI work at bellwether.org.

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Sarah Morgenthau runs the "I Have A Dream" Foundation; Michael Barrett has helped govern it from the Board while serving as a trustee at the University of Pennsylvania. Between them they make a grounded case: the technology is changing fast, but the thing that actually improves a kid's life hasn't changed at all: a long-term relationship with someone who keeps showing up.

Across the conversation they get specific about what that looks like in practice: wraparound services in Title I schools, AI Dream Labs that put real hardware in students' hands, a mock interview that ended in tears, and an honest reckoning with whether "go to college" is still the right advice. The throughline is a refusal to accept that a kid's circumstances should decide their future — and a 45-year bet that long-term relationships are what change it. 

"I Have A Dream" Foundation
https://www.ihaveadreamfoundation.org

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Wim Sweldens has watched technology remake itself for forty years — Bell Labs, mobile networks, and now Kiswe, the interactive live-streaming company he co-founded. The last time he felt anything like this moment was 1991, when a colleague told him "everything that's not on the internet doesn't exist." His answer to this one is AIQ: a way of measuring not how smart AI is, but how well humans navigate its jagged edge — the boundary where a model brilliant at one task fails absurdly at a nearly identical one. The unsettling part: that edge moves daily, which means your AIQ falls every day you don't work at it.

Alex and Wim trace what that means for how we learn and work: the math teacher (Wim's father) who let students bring calculators in exchange for a harder exam, the engineers at Kiswe who now throw away code because the English specification is the source of truth, the test agent that cheated by reading the code it was supposed to test, and why "the point of a teacher is not to transfer knowledge, but to transfer understanding.”

Wim Sweldens is co-founder of Kiswe: https://www.kiswe.com
Wim's writing on AIQ: https://substack.com/@wimsweldens 

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Two decades of working on school improvement — at High Tech High, at Chicago Public Schools, at the Gates Foundation, and now through her own consulting practice — have left Jennifer Husbands with a fairly direct view of why AI adoption in schools is going the way it's going. The technology isn't the problem. The problem is that the US invests less in teacher learning time than almost any peer system, and you cannot ask people to change their behavior in a setting that gives them no room to learn.

In this conversation she lays out what she's hearing from funders right now (humility, anxiety, and a quiet retrenchment from K-12 that she thinks is happening at the worst possible moment), why she believes the district is the only unit of change that actually scales, what role coaching and teacher-to-teacher networks have to play, and why she keeps coming back to the idea that AI is a tool, not a solution. Alex also opens the episode by walking her through a live vibe coding demo — a useful prelude to the broader conversation about how fast the underlying technology is now moving.

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Robin Lake has been studying public education from the systems level for more than thirty years. Her diagnosis is sharper than most: we built a school system for an average student who doesn't exist, and we keep placing kids in special education because general classrooms have run out of tools to support them.

This conversation works through what CRPE has been finding in its AI research — the widening gap between suburban and rural/urban districts on AI literacy, why most early-adopter schools are still "tinkering," and the "wicked opportunities" the field is underplaying — and then turns into something rarer: a live demo, with Robin in the role of designer, building a tool she wishes had existed when her own twice-exceptional son was in school. It's also the most honest conversation we've had on the show about what schools should actually be asking of ed tech, versus what ed tech keeps trying to sell them.

Robin Lake directs the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) and writes the Think Forward Substack. crpe.org

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