ASU+GSV Summit

Recorded live at the 2026 ASU+GSV Summit in San Diego, this session featured Jorge Elorza, CEO at Democrats for Education Reform; Ashley Berner, Director at the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy; Lindsay Fryer, President and Founding Principal at Lodestone DC; Corey DeAngelis, Visiting Fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research; and Robert Enlow, President and CEO at EdChoice.

The speakers explored how choice had become politically charged, but did not need to be. They convened leaders from across the spectrum to ask a sharper question: where could stakeholders align around what worked for kids — and the families who knew them best? The session examined areas of fusion already emerging across systems, as parents exercised greater agency and demanded more responsive, high-quality options.

As federal education tax credits entered the national conversation, panelists discussed how states, districts, and providers faced a new layer of opportunity and complexity. They explored how these policies could be navigated responsibly to expand access for all students while strengthening public systems.

This conversation focused on moving beyond labels to shape innovative, durable solutions together. The session highlighted this moment as an opportunity for leaders across differing perspectives to center students and families while building practical, effective approaches that respond to evolving educational needs.

Recorded live at the 2026 ASU+GSV Summit in San Diego, this session featured Deirdre Quarnstrom, Vice President of Education at Microsoft Corporation; Pierre Lagrange, CEO at Mrs Wordsmith; Aaron Feuer, CEO and Co-Founder at Panorama Education; Angélica Infante-Green, Commissioner of Education at the Rhode Island Department of Education (RIDE); and Jenny Anderson, Author, Speaker, Journalist, and representative of the Center for Flourishing Teen.

The speakers examined how schools have been facing an engagement crisis that showed up everywhere, from chronic absenteeism and declining motivation to fractured attention and growing student disconnection. They explored how AI-powered tools and digital learning environments have been reshaping how young people focus, create, and experience school, making engagement not just a classroom challenge, but a systems challenge.

This session brought together learning science, system leadership, and product innovation to examine engagement as an ecosystem. Panelists explored what research revealed about motivation, belonging, and attention in digitally saturated environments; how technology could either erode or strengthen those drivers; and what school systems were seeing when engagement broke down at scale.

From statewide absenteeism trends to classroom-level design choices, speakers shared how districts and developers were rethinking learning experiences to restore relevance, agency, and meaningful challenge. The conversation connected theory to practice by asking how schools could use AI and digital tools responsibly while rebuilding the human conditions that make students want to show up, persist, and learn. This was a conversation about re-engaging a generation, not through a single solution, but through aligned science, design, and leadership in an AI-shaped world.

Recorded live at the 2026 ASU+GSV Summit in San Diego, this session featured Mark Angel, Co-Founder and CEO at Amira Learning Inc.; Dacia Toll, Co-CEO at Coursemojo; Jasmine Walker, Director at The Center for Outcomes Based Contracting; McKenzie Snow, Director at Iowa Department of Education; and Christina Grant, Executive Director at the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University.

The speakers explored what happened when districts stopped buying products and started building outcome-driven partnerships. They discussed a new contracting model where funding followed impact, accountability was shared, and student learning sat at the center of every decision. Instead of transactional, à la carte purchasing, these models tied a meaningful portion of funding to student outcomes and made districts and providers jointly responsible for results, implementation, and continuous improvement.

The session unpacked what became possible when accountability was shared. Panelists examined how outcome-aligned partnerships drove stronger implementation fidelity, helped ensure students received the right dosage of support, and delivered higher levels of student engagement than traditional procurement approaches. They also explored how these models supported fiscal transparency, focused resources on students with the greatest needs, and allowed systems to course-correct in real time. The conversation probed whether moving from an à la carte mindset to fully integrated, outcome-aligned partnerships was essential to sustaining measurable change in K–12, and what it took to make these models work at scale.

Recorded live at the 2026 ASU+GSV Summit in San Diego, this session featured Tammy Wincup, CEO at Securly; Richard Culatta, CEO at ISTE+ASCD; Curtis Lewis, Founder and President at Boldly Moving Education Ahead (BMEA); Solome Tibebu, President at Behavioral Health Tech; and Aaliyah A. Samuel, Education Consultant.

Speakers explored how today’s students are growing up in a radically different environment shaped by constant connectivity, AI-powered tools, digital surveillance, and intensifying mental health pressures. They discussed how these shifts are expanding the role of schools beyond traditional education, requiring broader, more integrated safety nets that combine mental health support, social-emotional learning, digital citizenship, online safety, and emerging AI safeguards. The conversation highlighted how education and technology leaders are working to address new risks thoughtfully—without overcorrecting—by balancing protection with trust, safety with student agency, and offline wellbeing with online resilience to better support the whole child in an increasingly complex digital age.

Recorded live at the 2026 ASU+GSV Summit in San Diego, this session featured Molly Nagler, Head of Learning at Moderna; Gordon Trujillo, Vice President, Enterprise Learning & Development at DaVita; Austin Ashley, Head of Digital Learning at Bain Academy, Bain & Company; Joshua Clark, Chief Learning Officer at IBM; and Al Dea, Founder at The Edge of Work.

This fast-paced show & tell session, MC’d by Al Dea, featured learning leaders sharing real examples of how they were integrating AI into their organizations. The speakers crowdsourced the emerging AI enterprise learning leader playbook, offering practical insights into how enterprise learning functions were applying AI across diverse organizational contexts.

Recorded live at the 2026 ASU+GSV Summit in San Diego, this session featured Alex Laurs, Chief Learning and Development Officer at Ernst & Young; Janelle Simmonds, Global Enablement Lead, Future Workforce Strategy at Siemens Digital Industries Software; Jenny Dearborn, Chief People & Enterprise Excellence Officer at Greenfield Global; Todd Minor, Global Learning Leader, Microsoft Customer & Partner Solutions at Microsoft Corporation; and Julia Stiglitz, CEO and Co-Founder at Uplimit.

The speakers discussed how learning organizations have taken many forms—from internal L&D to customer education and hybrid enablement—while the mandate has increasingly remained the same: build skills effectively, at scale, and with measurable impact. As AI reshaped how learning was designed, delivered, and embedded into work, this session surfaced lessons that emerged when audiences, operating models, and practices intersected. The discussion showed how workforce leaders could translate insights across contexts to drive meaningful skill-building, performance, and impact in a fused learning ecosystem.

Recorded live at the 2026 ASU+GSV Summit in San Diego, this session featured Chad Laines, Instructional Technology Specialist at ABC Unified School District; James Donovan, Head of Learning and Cognitive Outcomes Research at OpenAI; Melissa Loble, Chief Academic Officer at Instructure; Sandra Liu Huang, President at Learning Commons; and Ben Kornell, Co-Founder at Edtech Insiders.

The speakers discussed the proliferation of AI tools in education, examining why the sector has become crowded with applications that promise transformation but often fail to earn the trust of teachers and students who use them daily. They explored how shallow implementations can contribute to classroom clutter rather than meaningful learning gains.

The panel emphasized how thoughtful design, transparency, and alignment with learning science can distinguish truly transformative tools from those that simply automate existing practices. The session challenged the edtech sector to prioritize pedagogical integrity and user agency over rapid deployment, ultimately setting a higher standard for what belongs in educators’ and students’ essential toolkit.

Recorded live at the 2026 ASU+GSV Summit in San Diego, this session featured Alex Peng, President & CFO at TAL Education Group; Jamie Candee, President & CEO at Edmentum; Julie Lammers, President & CEO at Britebound; Matthew Mugo Fields, President, Integrated Platform at HMH; Tyrone Holmes, Chief Impact Officer at Curriculum Associates; and Michelle Caffrey, Staff Writer at EdWeek Market Brief.

The speakers discussed how, in a rapidly shifting EdTech landscape, established organizations carry the responsibility of balancing at-scale reliability with cutting-edge transformation. They explored how, for legacy players, the AI era presents an opportunity to deepen a long-standing story of classroom impact while navigating the complexities of modernizing the systems schools rely on every day.

The panel examined the concept of “innovation of stewardship,” emphasizing that achieving meaningful, large-scale impact requires a strong commitment to implementation fidelity and research-based evidence. The session also highlighted how these leaders are integrating emerging technologies while preserving the essential human relationships and trust at the core of effective teaching.

Recorded live at the 2026 ASU+GSV Summit in San Diego, this session featured Gavin Cooney, Founder & CEO at Learnosity; Dr. Kristen DiCerbo, Chief Learning Officer at Khan Academy; Dr. Patrick Gittisriboongul, Superintendent at Lynwood Unified School District; Steve Kromer, President at Cambium Assessment, a Cambium Learning Group brand; and Dr. Korah Wiley, Senior Director of EdTech R&D at Digital Promise Global.

The speakers discussed how AI is fundamentally reshaping how learning is defined and measured. They explored how emerging technologies make it possible to analyze not only what students know, but how they think, create, and problem-solve—challenging long-standing models of assessment.

The panel examined how multimodal signals such as speech, sketching, and written reasoning can provide richer insights into learning processes over time, and how new tools can move assessment beyond a single moment or score. The session also considered what it looks like when assessment becomes more continuous, contextual, and personalized, while emphasizing the importance of ensuring these innovations remain valid, equitable, and instructionally meaningful at scale.

Recorded live at the 2026 ASU+GSV Summit in San Diego, this session featured Andrew Goldman, EVP HMH Labs at HMH Inc; Arman Jaffer, Founder & CEO at Brisk Teaching; Jeff Scheur, Founder & CEO at NoRedInk; Jiani Hou, Principal at Think Academy (US Online); Dr. Sherri Wilson, Director of Innovative Learning at Broward County Public Schools; and Emma Dorn, Senior Knowledge Expert at McKinsey & Company.

The speakers discussed how current AI platforms have made teaching easier, while emphasizing that these tools represent only the beginning of what’s possible. They explored the next generation of AI in K–12, focusing on intelligent agents that can plan, adapt, and take action within the learning environment.

The session examined what happens when AI evolves from assisting teachers to collaborating with them, highlighting how these systems could reshape instruction, decision-making, and classroom dynamics as they become more autonomous and integrated into everyday teaching practices.