Education Futures

Dan Effland is the Chief of Staff & Strategy at Summit Public Schools, where he leads the continued evolution of Summit's school model. He holds a Master's in Special Education from Dominican University and a Master's in Public School Building Administration from Columbia University's Teachers College.

Before entering education, Effland spent over a decade as a professional musician in Chicago. He changed careers in his mid-thirties, teaching guitar to middle schoolers before joining Teach For America — where his cohort, mostly in their twenties, nicknamed him "Stepdad." He became a special education teacher in Chicago and then Seattle, joined Summit Public Schools in 2017, and went on to serve as Dean of Culture & Instruction at Summit Sierra and Executive Director of Summit Atlas High School in West Seattle.

He now leads Summit's innovation work: designing "Summit 3.0", an evolved school model that builds on what Summit has promised families for over two decades and responds to the demands of the AI powered era. Summit operates seven charter schools across California and Washington serving roughly 3,000 students, following its earlier "Summit 2.0" personalization model, which scaled the Summit Learning Platform to nearly 400 schools and 100,000 students nationwide. He also sits on the board of the Washington State Charter Schools Association.

In this episode, Dan talks with Svenia Busson about:

• Stripping school down to three elements — kids, outcomes, and resources — to redesign without inherited assumptions
• Why AI doesn't replace a school model, it reveals whether you actually have one
• Rebuilding Summit's model for the third time: from "college for all" to personalized learning to an AI-native design
• Treating AI as infrastructure — a data layer and knowledge graph — to dynamically match resources to students, not just as a set of tools
• Why "beliefs come first, model comes next, tools come last," and Summit's push to "create the market" for AI-native school infrastructure
• Rethinking "cheating": protecting the learning while empowering the learner in an AI-saturated classroom
• Redesigning Expeditions — two-week, ungraded, off-campus career immersions — and why "learning without walls" might be where school is headed
• Which durable skills matter more, not less, when a chatbot can write a competent essay in seconds

A former teacher now redesigning what school itself should be in the age of AI.

Mentioned in this episode: Summit Public Schools · Marshall Street Initiatives · Robin Lake / Center on Reinventing Public Education, who recommended Dan as a guest · Futre, Diane Tavenner's career-exploration platform, used by Summit juniors and seniors · Justin Reich's MIT Teaching Systems Lab, referenced from an earlier Education Futures episode

Mentioned in this episode:

Education Futures Fellowship

A six-week programme starting on September 22nd, where seven world-leading experts in developmental psychology, neuroscience, and AI child safety will share everything they know with you: educationfutures.ai/fellowship.

Dr. Sonia Tiwari is a children's media researcher based in the San Francisco Bay Area and Director of Research at Oki Pie Lab. She holds a PhD in Learning, Design, and Technology from Penn State University, along with an MFA in Animation and a BS in Film, credentials she first put to work as a character designer in the video game industry before turning to research on how children bond with characters and, more recently, AI.

At Oki Pie Lab, she runs weekly art workshops for children ages five to ten — more than 100 to date — using what she observes each week to test where AI helps kids create and where it gets in the way. Her research includes Tiwari, S. (2025). Designing Expressive Arts Workshops for Families Using AI Tools. International Journal of Designs for Learning, 16(2), 194–204, and Tiwari, S. Designing ethical AI characters for children's early learning experiences. AI Brain Child 1, 11 (2025) — built from analyzing 60 social media videos of 20 AI characters marketed to children as young as three. She consults with edtech founders — including Jules Stories, a UK-based screen-free storytelling companion — on whether their AI characters genuinely serve children's development, and in 2025 she was selected for the Falling Walls Foundation's Female Science Talents Intensive Track.

In this episode, Sonia talks with Svenia Busson about:

• Why visual design — not just language or policy — shapes how children bond with AI characters
• The psychology of "cute" character design, from Japan's Kawaii culture to Germany's Kindchenschema, and how it's used to mask age-inappropriate AI
• The "sticky chat patterns" she's studying with Dr. Jennifer Shen (Keene University) — and their cost to kids' ability to explore beyond one interest
• Her AI Character Assessment framework in AI Brain Child, built from analyzing characters marketed to ages three to eight
• Why safety needs three layers — design, family, and law — and why design alone can't fix a systemic problem
• The patchwork of AI regulation worldwide, from loophole-prone California state laws to stricter approaches across Europe
• Rating efforts underway, from Common Sense Media and Digital Promise to the kidSAFE Seal Program
• What Blake, Carter and Velloso's CHI 2026 research reveals about why teens build their own Character.AI companions

Sonia's recommendation for a future guest: Diana Joseph, CEO of the Corporate Accelerator Forum and an innovation and entrepreneurship strategist working at the intersection of AI and organizational innovation.

Mentioned in this episode:

Education Futures Fellowship

A six-week programme starting on September 22nd, where seven world-leading experts in developmental psychology, neuroscience, and AI child safety will share everything they know with you: educationfutures.ai/fellowship.

Ian Cho graduated from St. Mark's School in Southborough, Massachusetts, and heads to Yale University this fall to study cognitive science. Frustrated that AI had quietly become a "taboo subject" wrapped in cheating anxiety, he founded what is now called Sailing (Student AI Literacy Interscholastic Navigator Group), a peer-led initiative that gives students across schools a space to talk openly about how they use AI and the policies governing it. Outside of Sailing, Ian builds his own AI-powered tools, including productivity apps that pause a Pomodoro timer whenever he looks away from his desk.

Ingrid Namala is entering her fourth and final year at St. Mark's School, where she plans to study neuroscience. She joined Sailing shortly after Ian launched it and now co-leads the group, having presented her own research on the history of generative AI and prompting technique at Sailing's first interscholastic symposium alongside a student from another school. Much of her advocacy centers on protecting academic integrity and destigmatizing honest conversations between students and teachers about when and how AI should be used.

Inspired by AI Co-Lab, the teacher network launched by their teacher Maureen Russo Rodríguez, they grew Sailing into a virtual community spanning more than fifteen schools, running hybrid symposiums, "four corners" debates, and informal salons between students and faculty.

In this episode, Ian and Ingrid talk with Svenia Busson about:

• Sailing (sailingedu.org) — how a "taboo" subject became a peer-led dialogue across 15+ schools
• The Chinese Room thought experiment — and what it reveals about outsourcing understanding to AI
• The hidden toll of unequal AI use — academic integrity, trust, and the students left behind
• Reimagining assessment — in-class writing, oral exams, and whether it's "the death of the essay"
• Why the brain needs friction — reframing struggle as a skill worth protecting, not a bug to eliminate
• The craft of prompting — from lazy fragments to elaborate, metacognitive prompts, and staying polite with AI
• The case against banning AI for under-21s — literacy over prohibition
• AI, authenticity, and the future of work — why staying human might be the real advantage

Mentioned in this episode:

Education Futures Fellowship

A six-week programme starting on September 22nd, where seven world-leading experts in developmental psychology, neuroscience, and AI child safety will share everything they know with you: educationfutures.ai/fellowship.

Dr. Rukmini Banerji is one of the world's most influential figures in grassroots education. Trained as an economist — a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and a PhD from the University of Chicago — she chose classroom-level work over academia, returning to India in 1996 to join Pratham, one of the world's largest education NGOs, where she served for over a decade as CEO before recently stepping into the role of Senior Advisor.

In 2005 she launched the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER), the citizen-led household survey that has demonstrated, year after year, a hard truth: going to school is not the same as learning. She also pioneered Pratham's Teaching at the Right Level (TaRL) approach — grouping children by what they can actually do rather than their age — now used across India and adapted in parts of Africa and Asia. For this body of work she was awarded the 2021 Yidan Prize for Education Development, the world's highest education accolade.

Today she is bringing that same rigor to AI. Pratham has partnered with Anthropic to deploy a Claude-powered "Anytime Testing Machine" (ATM) — an assessment tool that grades handwritten student work and generates curriculum-aligned questions, with teachers reviewing AI feedback before it reaches learners. First adapted for over 5,000 women in Pratham's Second Chance program, it is now piloting across 20 schools with plans to reach 100 by the end of 2026.

In this episode, Rukmini talks with Svenia Busson about:

• Why she left economics for the classroom — and how "big ambition and not much money" shaped Pratham's community-driven model
• The origin of Teaching at the Right Level — teach the child where they are, not where the curriculum says they should be
• What ASER has revealed every year since 2005 — that enrollment and learning are two very different things
• Pratham's partnership with Anthropic and the Claude-powered "Anytime Testing Machine" — and why human oversight is non-negotiable
• The gap between what edtech companies want to sell and what the ground actually needs — "technology rains on you, then you're expected to use it"
• Assessing learning in the age of AI — why the process (the questions a student asks) matters more than the final essay
• Why middle school (ages 10–14) is education's next great frontier — and why the 15-year-old of 2031 must look different from the one of 2026

Mentioned in this episode:

Education Futures Fellowship

A six-week programme starting on September 22nd, where seven world-leading experts in developmental psychology, neuroscience, and AI child safety will share everything they know with you: educationfutures.ai/fellowship.

Christine Braun is the Chief Creative Officer of Cresconova, the education charity behind Cresconova Labs, a hands-on studio for ages 8–16 in Chelsea, London. She holds a BFA from the University of the Arts and a Master of Artisanry from the University of Massachusetts, a grounding in material-making that runs through everything she's built since.

Her path began with founding Robots for Kids Too, a hands-on robotics company she and her husband ran in Vermont after homeschooling her own gifted son, before she went on to manage the Innovation Lab at The Nueva School in Silicon Valley, one of the country's leading schools for gifted learners. She later directed Harvard's REEF Makerspace at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, working to break down the silos between academic disciplines, and served as an Adjunct Professor of Engineering at the University of San Francisco. She won the 2020 Lemelson-MIT Excite Award for invention education and mentored on Disney+'s Shop Class. Today, as CCO of Cresconova, she shapes the creative vision behind both Cresconova Global (online, ages 6–11) and Cresconova Labs, the organization's new in-person studio.

In this episode, Christine talks with Svenia Busson about:

• Her path from sculpture and furniture design to founding a robotics company for her own gifted son
• What "design thinking" really means inside The Nueva School's Innovation Lab
• Building Harvard's REEF Makerspace to break down the walls between academic disciplines
• The difference between "gifted" and "inspired" students — and why Cresconova doesn't test for talent
• Cresconova's Inquiry, Systems Thinking, Design Thinking framework — and how it scales from age 5 to 18
• The "human-to-AI interaction" protocol: question, frame, unpack, own, iterate
• Why she believes AI expands creativity rather than threatening the maker tradition
• Why students turn to AI instead of trusted adults — and the role shame plays in that shift

(Christine also recommended Stephanie Couch, Executive Director of the Lemelson-MIT Program, as a future guest.)

Mentioned in this episode:

Education Futures Fellowship

A six-week programme starting on September 22nd, where seven world-leading experts in developmental psychology, neuroscience, and AI child safety will share everything they know with you: educationfutures.ai/fellowship.

Gouri Gupta is Senior Project Director for EdTech at Central Square Foundation (CSF), one of India's leading education nonprofits, based in New Delhi, where she has led the EdTech portfolio for nearly a decade. A Chartered Accountant (rank holder) and IIM Bangalore MBA, she began her career at the Boston Consulting Group before helping build the National Skill Development Corporation, a Government of India public-private partnership tackling skilling at national scale.

At CSF, Gouri has turned EdTech from scattered pilots into system-level infrastructure for children in low-income India. She co-built EdTech Tulna, a quality-standards index developed with IIT Bombay that has shaped roughly $173M in government procurement across 21,000+ schools; leads the LiftEd accelerator supporting eight solutions reaching over 3 million children; and launched AI Samarth, India's first AI-literacy curriculum framework, built with IIT Madras and Google.org, targeting 5 million students, teachers, and parents. Her team also runs TicTacLearn (200M+ video plays) and the Bharat Survey for EdTech, a first-of-its-kind household study of technology use in low-income India.

In this episode, Gouri talks with Svenia Busson about:

• The two ways AI actually moves the needle — powering proven EdTech (Chimple, RocketLearn, ThinkZone) and creating experiences like teacher coaching, tutoring, and assessment that weren't possible before
• Why CSF acts as an ecosystem enabler rather than a product builder — supply shaping, evidence generation, and government adoption
• Hard evidence from the ground — Chimple's 0.3 SD gain in an RCT, ConveGenius, and an AI teacher-coaching pilot in Uttar Pradesh
• The Indic-language gap — why AI being two-to-five years behind on India's 22 official languages could widen inequity, and what AI4Bharat and Bodhi AI are doing about it
• What AI in a government classroom really looks like — labs, smart TVs, shared home phones, and the rise of two-phone households
• Defining AI literacy through AI Samarth — empowered, ethical, safe use, not "AI as Google search"
• Resilience and collaboration — the human skills at risk of "cognitive stunting," a term she borrows from Brookings
• Why pilots break at scale — product, program, governance, and the unsolved question of how governments budget for AI

A clear-eyed look at what it takes to make AI serve 250 million children — not just the ones who already have the most.

• Central Square Foundation — https://www.centralsquarefoundation.org/
• EdTech Tulna (quality standards index) — https://edtechtulna.org/
• AI Samarth (AI literacy curriculum) — https://www.aisamarth.centralsquarefoundation.org/
• TicTacLearn — https://www.centralsquarefoundation.org/edtech
• Bharat Survey for EdTech (BaSE) — https://www.centralsquarefoundation.org/reports-and-publications
• AI4Bharat (Indic-language models, IIT Madras) — https://ai4bharat.iitm.ac.in/
• Development Innovation Lab, University of Chicago (Prof. Michael Kremer) — https://bfi.uchicago.edu/development-innovation-lab/
• Khan Academy / Khanmigo — https://www.khanacademy.org/
• Madhi Foundation (Tamil Nadu, guest recommendation) — https://www.madhifoundation.org/

Mentioned in this episode:

Education Futures Fellowship

A six-week programme starting on September 22nd, where seven world-leading experts in developmental psychology, neuroscience, and AI child safety will share everything they know with you: educationfutures.ai/fellowship.

On building safe, pedagogically sound AI for young people and the fellowship we built to do it.

This fellowship is for builders of AI x education products or anyone thinking to do so in the future.

https://educationfutures.ai/fellowship

https://educationfutures.substack.com/

Dr. Tyler S. Thigpen is the co-founder and Head of School at The Forest School: An Acton Academy, a self-directed K3–12 microschool in Trilith, near Atlanta, Georgia, and co-founder of the Institute for Self-Directed Learning. He holds a doctorate in Education Leadership (Ed.L.D.) from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, a Master's in Public Administration from the Harvard Kennedy School, and a Master's in Theological Studies from Regent College.

Before founding The Forest School in 2018, Tyler wore many hats — church minister, Spanish teacher, and public-school principal — and co-founded Chattahoochee Hills Charter School and MENTOR Georgia, later working as a partner at the school-redesign nonprofit Transcend. Today The Forest School serves roughly 160 learners on campus, plus Forest School Online, which reaches students across the US, Kenya, Uganda, Costa Rica, China, Mexico, and Thailand. Tyler is also an instructor and Academic Director at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, where he teaches "Introduction to Teaching With AI"; the author of The Playbook for Self-Directed Learning (Routledge, 2025); and the creator of the Story Arts curriculum, which was adopted statewide by Georgia's Department of Education.

In this episode, Tyler talks with Svenia Busson about:

• The thread connecting a church minister, a Spanish teacher, and a self-directed microschool founder
• Inside The Forest School — no homework, no grades, guides instead of teachers, badges instead of tests
• "Practicals": oral defenses and performance tasks that make learning AI-proof — you can use AI along the road, but you have to prove mastery at the end
• Why discernment and judgment are "the new literacy" — and where he agrees with MIT's Justin Reich that AI literacy can't really be taught
• Cognitive debt — keeping learners in the "challenge zone" so the thinking never gets outsourced to AI
• The four phases of self-directed learning: desire, resourcefulness, initiative, and persistence
• Scaling without cloning — the Institute for Self-Directed Learning and redesigning models with 20 Georgia superintendents
• Sliding-scale tuition and "diverse by design" — why being self-directed makes the school leaner and more affordable

Robin Lake is Director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE), based at Arizona State University's Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College. For more than two decades she has been one of the most respected systems thinkers in American education — researching charter schools, district–charter collaboration, portfolio strategy, and urban school reform, and testifying before the U.S. House Education and Labor Committee and state legislatures. She holds a BA in International Studies and an MPA in Education and Urban Policy from the University of Washington, and was named to the 2016 class of Pahara-Aspen Education Fellows.

Over the past three years, Robin has pivoted CRPE's work toward AI in education. She writes the newsletter Think Forward: Learning with AI, leads the inaugural Think Forward Fellowship (bringing together policymakers, system leaders, educators, researchers, funders, and technologists), and convenes the annual Think Forward: Learning with AI Forum. Her recent work includes Getting Beyond the Lightbulb Stage: Why AI Is Not Yet Transforming Education (CRPE, 2026), based on 50+ stakeholder interviews.

In this episode, Robin talks with Svenia Busson about:

• The "lightbulb moment" vs. the transformation moment — why AI is saving teachers time but hasn't yet changed how schools actually work
• "Precision learning" picking up where personalized learning failed — inspired by a Fred Hutch cancer-center billboard, "We treat your cancer like it's YOUR cancer"
• Why the real prize is making schools more human — using AI to deepen relationships, not replace them
• Fixing measurement and accountability first — why old assessment systems block the durable skills (adaptability, resilience, judgment) the future demands
• AI governance as an R&D endeavour — balancing guardrails against innovation, and the case for state-backed "innovation districts"
• The charter school model as a "license to dream" — what Agua Fria's AI-powered career academies and Summit Public Schools reveal
• Why schools of education are failing to prepare new teachers for AI — and the certification signals that could change it fastest

A clear-eyed case that AI's greatest gift to education could be making school human.

Links mentioned

• Robin's newsletter — Think Forward: Learning with AI: https://crpe.substack.com
• CRPE — AI in Education: https://crpe.org/projects/ai-in-education/
• Getting Beyond the Lightbulb Stage (CRPE, 2026): https://crpe.org/getting-beyond-the-lightbulb-stage-why-ai-is-not-yet-transforming-education/
• 2026: A Year for Leadership (CRPE): https://crpe.org/2026-a-year-for-leadership/
• Wicked Opportunities: Leveraging AI to Transform Education (CRPE): https://crpe.org/wicked-opportunities-leveraging-ai-to-transform-education/
• Summit Public Schools: https://summitps.org

Kumar Garg is President of Renaissance Philanthropy, the science-and-technology philanthropy he co-founded with Tom Kalil in 2024 to help donors invest in high-impact research across AI, climate, and education. He holds a BA from Dartmouth and a JD from Yale Law School, and worked over eight years in the Obama White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, where he led the administration's STEM-education agenda — including the "Educate to Innovate" campaign that mobilized more than $1 billion in philanthropic and in-kind investment, and the White House Science Fair. Before Renaissance, he spent nearly six years (2018–2024) as Vice President and Managing Director at Schmidt Futures, where he built much of its science, talent, and education portfolio and launched the Learning Engineering Virtual Institute (LEVI). He is one of the principal architects and evangelists of "learning engineering" — the idea that instruction should be treated as a systems-level engineering and data challenge — and delivered Carnegie Mellon's 2022 Simon Initiative Distinguished Lecture, "Shaping the Field of Learning Engineering." Today, Renaissance runs a DARPA-inspired "fund model" that raises capital against well-scoped three-to-five-year technical bets, from doubling middle-school math outcomes for low-income students to catching early-reading difficulties before third grade.

In this episode, Kumar talks with Svenia Busson about:

The Renaissance "fund model" — how naming a bottleneck, recruiting a technical lead, and raising from donors like an investor raises from LPs unlocks three-to-five-year breakthroughs

Why environmental factors like lead poisoning and classroom air quality may drive learning outcomes as much as pedagogy — and can move a child 10+ IQ points

Learning engineering explained in plain language — the four always-running loops of learning science, design, instruction, and the individual learner

LEVI Math's north star — doubling the rate of middle-school math gains for low-income kids at under $1,000 per student, down from the $4,000 high-dosage tutoring benchmark

The LEVI Literacy Initiative — using AI as a diagnostic screener, not a teacher, to flag dyslexia and speech errors in the K–2 window

"Dynamic dosing" and the human + AI tutoring triangle — why teachers and tutors enhance, rather than compete with, AI tools

Building rigor into edtech — the Tools Competition's research-partner requirement and ending moonshots with published RCTs

Why the advanced AI-and-education world is "shockingly small," and how DARPA-style active program management grows it