Mickey Revenaugh was one of the first people working in education I met after Disrupting Class was published. She helped organize one of the first talks I gave about the book—and was in attendance (along with my parents and wife—then my girlfriend). If you haven’t heard of Mickey before, you’re missing out. As the cofounder of Connections Academy, one of the first full-time virtual schools in the country—she’s one of a handful of education innovation visionaries with consistently constructive takes and insights on where education is going.

After a couple decades of innovation in education, Mickey retired at the end of last year from her formal role in the education space with Pearson. I wanted to take the opportunity to celebrate her career and learn some lessons from her. In this rich conversation, Mickey and I chatted about the origins of virtual and online education, her entrepreneurial journey to co-founding Connections Academy, her lessons learned along the way, and her predictions for the educational innovations to come. By the end of the conversation, Mickey was asking me questions about some of the trends that have us really excited and nervous—and then we started wondering if we’re really just traveling back to the future in education, work, and our social circles in some ways.

As always, subscribers can listen to the conversation above, watch it below, or read the transcript.

Michael Horn:

I'm lucky enough to count today’s guest as a friend, Mickey Revenaugh. She's one of the founders of Connections Academy, which we'll hear about, who's been working at Pearson for many years. And then Mickey, you've recently allegedly retired, but I think you're now part of the #amwriting 5 a.m. Writing Club or something like that. So first, it is great to see you. How are you and how are these first few months of not fading quite into the sunset?

Mickey Revenaugh:

It's been wonderful. I would highly recommend retiring to anybody who can live long enough to get there. And I was really fortunate to kind of work with a retirement coach for about a year before I made this move. And her message was, find something that gives you joy to do every single day and stay active basically. And so I've been able to do that in the 5 AM Writing Club. I was keeping UK hours for the last couple of years, so this feels like sleeping in because I am actually getting up at you a little bit before 5:00 as opposed to a little bit before 3:00. So all good. It's very relaxing.

Horn:

I was going to say that sounds like a big improvement relatively speaking, but it's still 5:00 am, it's still dark.

Revenaugh:

It's 5:00 am, there's still a few hours before the sun rises, but I have learned the hard way that early morning is my good creative time and a time when my brain actually functions relatively well and then it goes way downhill as the rest of the day goes by.

Horn:

I find the same thing, the best writing occurs in the morning when you're fresh and coming out of Dream State. But let's first, before we get into the here and now and sort of Mickey's predictions on the future of education and all that, I actually think folks would really benefit from hearing your story and how you came together with a couple others to found Connections Academy. I think that was 2001, if my memory's correct. So it was certainly before I was in the education space, as you know, because you met me just after my first book was published. No embarrassing me yet. But I'd love to hear your own founding story and how you came to with that team, create Connections and you can tell people what Connections is of course, as well.

Revenaugh:

Sure. And I'd like to kind of reel back even about a decade and a half before that because I first got involved with education technology right around the time when they were rolling out Commodore 64's and the first Apple computers into classrooms in the mid-'80s. So I had been a journalist and working in writing and editing for what was then my whole life, which seems like a little sliver at this point. But I got hired at Scholastic actually to edit a couple of computer magazines for classroom teachers, which was a pretty revolutionary concept in like 1986. And the thing that really struck me then was that the educators that were embracing this were not the young hotshots just out of education school, but instead it was elementary teachers of a certain age who kind of saw this box, this machine as something that would allow them to do what they always thought they should be doing in their classrooms, which was personalized learning for kids, energize it, bring excitement in, but also allow students to go down pathways that are unique to them as opposed to everybody doing the same thing.

And back then it was not such an easy thing to pull off. I mean, this was even before most shrink wrap software was available. So we had teachers, we would run basic programs in the magazine, you could type it in and a tree would grow on the screen. It's like, "Oh wow, a tree growing on the screen." But pretty quickly, local area networks came along. And then by the mid-'90s, of course, the internet and I was still in educational publishing at the time thinking about what does this internet thing mean for teaching and learning? And only had a brief time to think about that because I then went to work on the founding of the eRate program, which was really the federal government's effort to make sure that every school and library in the country, public, private, small, large, poor, rich, could benefit from this thing called the internet.

So it was wiring every school and library for access to the internet and then internal connections within school buildings. And then it's evolved ever since then, and I'm thrilled to see that the eRate is still going along. It's very institutionalized then, but in those early days it's like, "Oh, we have $3.2 billion that we're going to have to get into the hands of schools somehow and make sure that it's used really well." So that was my early introduction to the very emerging possibility of what online learning could be because at that point, folks were really using it more for going and finding stuff on the internet and bringing it back into classrooms as opposed to connecting with each other via the technology.

Horn:

I mean, that was my recollection, certainly was it became a research tool in effect. And I remember in the school newspaper wiring up the computers so that they could talk to each other, forget about about pulling something to collaborate to someone in another school, but that's sort of where you started to go is to allow people to collaborate over time and space in effect.

Revenaugh:

And it was the really right around 2000 or so that I had changed, I did a little startup thing. So one startup and another startup and another startup, and all of them were really focused on harnessing the technology to allow equity of access for students no matter where they were, to really high quality education and then connecting people. And so the origin story of Connections Academy per se started with actually, I call it a cabal of consultants, a bunch of folks that it wasn't a company yet, but I was sort of loaned from one of the startups I was working on to this little effort to figure out how do we use the internet to connect teachers and learners across space and time and yet make the experience really intimate and high quality. And so the actual birth of Connections Academy was driven quite a bit actually by 9/11.

I mean, I'm a New Yorker, I was sort of around in those early days after 9/11 and we were filing our first charter application for this online school and didn't have a name for it. And so I was actually walking along streets in Lower Manhattan watching the emergency vehicles speed by and looking at all those posters up on the wall looking for missing people, this sense of both being under siege but also really needing to find a new way to be in the world. And the idea of connections kind of kept coming back to me again and again. So we said, "Why don't we call it Connections Academy?" And that was all the market research we did to figure out the name of the company.

Horn:

Best names are...

Revenaugh:

 And the names...

Horn:

The most authentic, right?

Revenaugh:

So that was fall of 2001 first, the first online schools that we were supporting open and fall of 2002. And so Connections Academy, all props to our big competitor in the field, k12.com, now call Stride. I like to joke that we are the Coke and Pepsi or the Lyft and Uber of the online learning world, but we really wanted to figure out a way to bring super high quality curriculum and content and really high quality teachers into this emerging space of online schools, of virtual charter schools as much as they were back at that point. And we tackled it from the hardest place possible, which is K through eight and did crazy things like built a platform and stuff that I would never advise anybody to do now if they were starting an online school. But back then, what were you going to do to, what were you going to do? Put a kindergarten on Blackboard? I don't think so. Yeah, we really kind of rolled up sleeves and made it all.

Horn:

Which I mean is the founding I think of most new industries is the first companies are vertically integrated. You got to do it all because the parts just don't exist as standalone, or if they do, they're not built for your context and use case to your point. So you build Connections Academy, you grow it quite a bit, a lot of virtual charters, a lot of students. You start branching into different parts of serving school districts even with it in a variety of ways, and then obviously it gets bought by Pearson in a pretty big transaction and you go there and then you have this whole other career of international schools and innovation there. Tell us a little bit about that.

Revenaugh:

It was really exciting. So the development of virtual schools in the US really tracked pretty carefully along the expansion and evolution of charter schools per se, in school choice, and then the ever refined availability of technology. So back in the day it's like how do we get teachers and students to talk to each other in real time and then not too long down the line, like Adobe Connect comes along, you go, "Oh, we could use that." But by 2011, which is when Pearson acquired Connections, which was a pretty spicy transaction actually, I think the Pearson powers that be saw it as the future, but a lot of Pearson colleagues thought, "Oh my God, what have we done this crazy out on the edge, going to piss school districts off in a really big way company that we're bringing in. Is this a smart thing for Pearson to do?"

And in the end, it turned out to be yes. In fact, this really was where everything was going in terms of use of technology and we'll come to the pandemic in a second, but in that few years in between there from 2011 to the time of the pandemic, I was incredibly fortunate to work on a few even more cutting edge things like, what might this look like if you were serving students around the globe and not just within a state in America, how do you deal with time zones? How do you help students feel engaged and connected with each other if they're from really, really different cultures and really different ways of learning?

Then we made it even more complicated by launching a UK curriculum virtual version of the same thing, which I learned so much about the differences in curriculum approaches that a nation or a collection of nations might take and what that says about what they think education should be. And the UK system is really different than the US system, but we found a way to make that work for online as well. And then a little forays into blended learning with some site-based implementations and then finding ways into things like a little bit of virtual reality, a little bit of AI, and figuring out how all those things fit together as well.

Horn:

Stay on this for one moment because you just mentioned something very tantalizing about how a country thinks about the purpose of education. What's the lesson that you learned from there and how would you describe maybe the difference for a US audience versus a UK audience?

Revenaugh:

So the thing that struck me first and foremost is that in the UK curriculum, and this is true in what is now called the Commonwealth I guess, but it was really where the empire was or everybody who had embraced the UK approach is very much of a sorting hat approach that kicks in really in a definitive way around age 14 and then age 16, and then beyond that where students based on really high stakes exams, their future gets determined. Are they going to be university bound or are they going to be vocationally bound? And so much is freighted on the GCSE exam when you're 16 and then A-levels when you're finishing up our equivalent of high school that the pressure on young people to perform on those things and do it really well has been a defining characteristic I think, of the British education system for better or for worse.

I mean the good news is that those exams are, I like to call them the AP exams on steroids. They're very deep, very high order thinking skills. They're not a bunch of multiple choice questions. They are tough exams, and to prepare for them, you work for a couple of years going deep on subjects. The bad news is that if you're not a great test taker, if you screw it up, it could mean that you're kind of tracked into becoming a hairdresser or an HVAC technician, which could be wonderful things for you, but it might be that you have then closed off the opportunity for further education in higher education. The US system kind of goes the opposite direction. It's like everybody is supposed to go to college. More and more our high schools are stepping away from a standardized exam as being the key to entry onto those things and much more hopefully moving away from just seat time and more towards experience and competencies.

But those experience and competency things are still pretty cutting edge in the world, I don't, at least in what has traditionally been the British system, those things are just now beginning to be considered, and the anxiety about letting go of them is as much on the part of students and parents as it is on the part of educators. There's a sense that the A-level is the great leveler, no matter if you went to a really poor and crappy state school in some bad neighborhood in London or a fancy private school, when you sit for the A-level, it's a...

Horn:

This is your chance.

Revenaugh:

Huge chance experience. Yeah. Doesn't always work out that way. It very much tracks socioeconomics the way it does in the US, but there is a perception. So anyway, very long rambling answer.

Horn:

No, it's interesting because I think from a US perspective I would say, "Oh, we have a sorting system." But you're right, relative to a system that was much earlier, it's nothing even close to it. And so there's a lot of just interesting things to unpack there I think. Let's fast-forward then into the pandemic sort of a capstone, if you will, of your career with Connections in Pearson and what was that experience like? What were you working on? Because all of a sudden, as you said, the world was going digital. In many cases, full-time virtual but not always and what were you doing there and what'd you learn?

Revenaugh:

So our first impulse was a little bit of like man the sandbags with the Red Cross. It's like we know how to do online learning suddenly every kid in America really around the world. I mean, I think the UN statistics that we looked at is that nine out of 10 students were suddenly overnight in an online or emergency remote learning situation and nobody really knew how to do that except folks like us. And so we sort of jumped in with both feet to advising districts about how to set up and operate online schools in some cases using our curriculum and platform and in other cases not, but really just trying to bring the benefit of our experience to what was happening in those schools. And then I mean the inflow of students to both our US public schools, virtual schools and to our private schools that served the globe was pretty astonishing.

I mean 30%, 40% increase in enrollment within a month or two, and that was sweaty, as you might imagine. It's because it was a combination of just capacity, but then also serving what I've been calling the COVID cohort of families and students who didn't necessarily choose that, weren't kind of coming to this with a well-thought-out plan for I really want to be in online learning but needing to be served well nonetheless. The proudest thing that I came out of the pandemic with is that of that COVID cohort of families that came in, we actually retained the majority of them in persistent engagement with either our managed online schools, the district schools that we help set up or even our virtual schools around the world. And I think it's because we tried to really hard to pay attention to the soft part of learning the social emotional part of learning and the engagement between teachers and students and between students and each other in a way that we could do because we already had a curriculum and platform, we didn't have to spend all of our time spinning up lessons.

Horn:

Building and just trying to get the best results. That's interesting. That's super interesting. I actually saw some data yesterday from another in-person school setting, but during COVID around academic achievement, but it correlated almost 100% to, did they feel taken care of socially and emotionally, and they were really, as it was described to me in a ready state to learn, well then they continued to have academic growth and for those that didn't, you didn't see much growth.

Revenaugh:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And our virtual public schools, I mean this whole learning loss thing, which I know is a term that I kind of hate, and I think that's shared, we didn't see an erosion of students academic performance if they were in a full-time virtual school and especially if they had been there before, but even if they'd come in since then because the routines and rituals of being in an online school were there already and served that purpose well, and then what's exciting to me is to see the spinoff things that are happening from there, micro schools and pods and so on that I think a lot of people thought those are not going to last any longer than the pandemic does. And in fact, a lot of families are saying actually that combination of in-person custodial care and guidance and tutorial with a really high quality online school is the ticket for my kid. I see them thriving in that.

Horn:

Yeah. So I want to get there in the moment because that sort of the forward-looking thing, I want to come back a little bit to, not oral history so much, but more or lessons learned, right? And for those that don't know, I got to travel around a lot with you on the road in state capitals and stuff and hearing pearls of wisdom that you would drop here and there, but you got to see a lot. You got to have a sense of where things should go and were not going in many cases. You made that allusion to the fact that there was this, which I didn't know actually this internal sort of angst in Pearson around, "Hey, is this really a good thing? Is digital that important?" And it was, what are some big lessons learned that you take from these few decades in education?

Revenaugh:

So I will confess that I was probably not as big of a believer in the personal magic that happens between a great teacher and students and that often that magic is delivered in real time in a synchronous kind of setting. And it's partly because I spent a lot of time watching teachers do stuff in classrooms that either wasn't a good use of their time or wasn't a good use of their kids' time. A lot of classroom management, a lot of boring routine stuff, a lot of things that were frustrating to educators and saw that what the educators that came to work at Connections Academy really loved was the ability to use data and really understand in a sort of scientific and quantitative way how the kids were doing and what to do next. If you go a little bit too far down that path, you forget about the art of teaching.

I think that is less about being a great performer and more about tuning into what makes a kid tick. I don't believe that that always has to happen literally in person, but I do believe it is facilitated by careful and intentional use of synchronous instruction, hard to do in a synchronous classroom with one teacher and 30 kids all on at the same time. Much easier to do in small group, very easy to do one on one. And so, one of the lessons I feel like I've learned is that, and just in time for the synchronous tools to get better, by the way, and for kids to be learning, living in a synchronous way online outside of school too, is that the use of video, audio, and real time instructional tools is really valuable and important and continues to be valuable no matter how good we make the content and curriculum and how engaging that is on its own as the students are interacting with that directly.

That combination of things I think will always be a work in progress and will need to continue to be really calibrated for individual students learning preferences and individual teacher strengths, but will never, I don't believe that all one or all the other will ever be effective or as effective as it could be. So that's a big lesson learned, and if you'd asked me 10 years ago whether how important synchronous was, I go, come on. That's just replicating what we do in the classroom online. It's not a good use of the technology at the time, and I'm disagreeing with myself now.

Horn:

Super interesting. That's super interesting evolution. One other question on that because that relates to the international work that you did where you're trying to stitch together schools [around the world]. I'm on the board of Minerva University that has a global campus or global campuses I guess is the better way to say it. What are the lessons you've learned about the ability to stitch together students from very different time zones, countries, cultures, and systems of education or beliefs about the purpose of education?

Revenaugh:

I think the most striking examples that I saw were actually in the Monday assemblies at Pearson Online Academy, UK, Global, and [inaudible 00:23:20] School online, which were the opportunities for students and all of the teachers and staff to engage with each other in a way that was a little bit informal. And what I saw with my own eyes was that students who had common interests with each other would find a way, even if it meant somebody logging on at 10:00 at night and somebody else logging on at 6:00 in the morning to be synchronous with each other and work and collaborate, and that there was almost unlimited joy in that experience for them. Now I think these international online schools are attracting students who either aren't finding their peeps in their local setting. There are people who are either already globally focused or learn a little bit differently or are training for the Olympics and therefore have their eye on something else.

And just being in a collection of other kids like that was such a relief and so thrilling that they were sort of willing to do whatever it took. We also worked really hard to cluster kids together in at least adjacent time zones so that you know, didn't have to be on at midnight in order to get the best of your chemistry teacher. And it worked generally well enough, but I think educators have a inclination to over-engineer those things when if we let ourselves be led by the students a little bit more, we often end up in a really good spot because they know what they need. They know when they need a hug and when they need a push, they know when having two or three buddies helps and when it is a distraction and paying attention to that sort of super structure of their learning is where I think teachers and school leaders can start calibrating and making it make sense for everybody.

Horn:

It's very wisdom of Maria Montessori for you. Observe the child and follow them.

Revenaugh:

Go figure.

Horn:

Let's turn to predictions in the future of what's going to come, because you've always been someone who has bold ideas about what should be there, but also really thoughtful reflections of like, are we going to get there? How are we going to get there? Trends to watch and things of that nature. And you tend to see things before others do. So what's on your radar of what's coming down? And let's start there. What's on your radar of what we should expect?

Revenaugh:

So I am really a little fixated right now on these kind of two sides of the same coin around sort of parent choice and the ability for families to access that idea of what kind of permissionless combinations of education resources that make sense for their kid. On the one hand, I think that's incredibly thrilling because I think going even back to disrupting class and thinking about the disaggregation of things that we think of having to be hardwired together in an education system. I mean, you see it happening all the time. Young people on their own go out and hunt and pack and find the stuff that makes sense for them and weave it together themselves. Doing that with some really expert guidance and with an eye on the ultimate prize of where do you want to go with your life, I think is a trend that we're going to see continue into the future.

And parents are starting to get, I think a little bit more comfortable with the idea that that could turn out to be a good thing and not a disaster for their kids. School doesn't have to be a place where you put your kid and then on the other end they'll come out formed that it's a daily process really. The flip side of that that worries me a little bit is this, this opportunity to further polarize what is a really polarized culture at this moment, and that's in the US but beyond the US as well.

So people being drawn to those resources and those ways of education that reflect how they think already and not being open to other ideas, other influences, other cultures, other ways of thinking about things. And I'm not quite sure what the reconciliation of those two sides will be, ultimately. I would hate to think that it has to be the education system insisting on things being done a certain way in order to address the common good. But I'm also... Most parents that I see have that kind of in mind, but quite a few of them don't and so that worries me a bit, and I'm intrigued to hear because you see even more of this than I do. I'm really intrigued to hear what you think about that as well.

Horn:

Yeah, well, so I think it's a great question. And, as you know in the new book From Reopen to Reinvent concluded that the only way forward frankly, was to follow this more pluralistic tendency that I think parents have and not try to force into the one size fits all because I think it's just creating a lot of friction and inability to progress. And I'm worried about the same thing you are on the other side of it as well, that there is a subset certainly that are picking the experiences that they are for fully values aligned reasons on both sides of the spectrum. And frankly, it's probably more of a 360 of a view of that than a left-right thing. And I don't know how we get out of that. I think my hope is that by being better educated and creating more ways to connect with others through interests that you share that you wouldn't have picked through where you moved, that we sort of rebuild the fabric in another way.

But I don't know that it turns out inherently that way. I was having this discussion with my father the other day because he said, "Well, you've pulled your kids into the private school." And I was like, "Dad, it's on any dimension you pick. It is more diverse than the public school district we chose to move to and then ironically, don't send to." So I confess I have a similar worry, but I think the only way through it is not to fight more because I think the friction is so unhealthy right now of pitting people against each other. I don't know though. It's a very good question, I think.

Revenaugh:

Well, and I think the friction and the digging in of heels makes me concerned that more families will just exit the system altogether and won't want to take advantage of the guidance or the resources that could make this an experience beyond what you as a parent could figure out on your own. That there's other parents and other resources and of this emerging career path that I see as of success coaches or learning coaches that can help a family figure out what is the next best thing learning experience for their student to tackle, either based on where that student ultimately wants to go for lifelong career or just based on what they're interested in right now. It's like when you stop being interested in dinosaurs and suddenly get interested in space travel, where's the pivot that you can take your kids so that you're building on that and keeping them excited about learning?

Horn:

Yeah, I think that's a good point. And I guess that's my hope is that if we create more pathways for that, that I'm going to stereotype for a moment, but the person in Vermont and the person in Utah who see the world very differently, but they both end up in the space travel unit together as a cohort because I do agree, I've come to believe that these synchronous cohort based experiences are extremely important as well. And all of a sudden you find commonality and maybe tear down visions of what "the other is." I hope that's a healthy thing that allows us to progress. And I guess the point being, if we hold it back, I just think people are going to continue to exit. And so I don't think you can... I think that's where it's going anyway, so how can we embrace the most positive vision of it to create choice and access for families and kids.

Revenaugh:

Including figuring out a way to truly embrace access and equity by having public funding that follows what is now very much of a privately funded experience for an awful lot of kids.

Horn:

And I'm intrigued by the education savings accounts toward that end and we'll see. And it really does unbundle things in some neat ways, but what else is on your radar?

Revenaugh:

So I'm really interested in the pivots that students make over the course of a K through 12 and beyond K through 12 career. And we're probably getting close to a point where we have some longitudinal data around students who have gone through, for example, virtual public school and graduated from that for high school. Long term, how do they do? What is their university experiences look like if they go that direction? Are they all going to coding bootcamp and becoming like tech moguls overnight? Are people floundering because their experience was so different from what is still the mainstream? And then my glass half full rose colored glasses view of that is how does that then impact university's and work? And I think it's in some ways a tragically lucky break that the pandemic really interrupted the traditional trajectory of higher ed and the traditional trajectory of work.

So as these young people are coming into higher ed, they're encountering the ability to be more hybrid, to have more diverse experiences, to pull together a university experience that makes sense for them. That doesn't include just going to one institution and then when they get to the world of work, unless all the CEOs that really want everybody to come back face to face have their way and are leading companies that are not populated with very many people, work is going to be a really interesting hybrid experience that involves a lot of twists and turns over a person's career just as we predicted it would. But in a way that is way more extreme than I think we expected. I believe that young people who have gone through a diverse learning experience on the way there are better suited and better prepared for what that economy's going to be like when they get to it. But I think we're just now getting to a place where we can prove that or disprove it in any kind of structured sort of way.

Horn:

It'd be super interesting to watch that. I actually want to try this idea out on you, which is, I've wondered in the same way that we've envisioned some of schooling going back to the one room schoolhouse, more personalization, etcetera, the good sides of it and tutoring and things of that nature, maybe a return to apprenticeships as part of that, obviously. But also frankly, I think the world of work where we went to a central place where we interacted with colleagues is a 1900s creation or 1800s I I suppose as well with factories and lull and things like that. But for a large part of the history, you worked on the farm, you had your had shop, you had...

Revenaugh:

You had your [office] right?

Horn:

Yeah. And you went next door and you weren't that far away. And by the way, your kids maybe apprenticed with you, and in today's world it'd be both the girls and the boys. It wouldn't just, right, it wouldn't be gendered on that. But I guess I wonder is there some of that return to the past, but hopefully a more egalitarian version of it?

Revenaugh:

I actually think the answer to that is yes. And one of the things that keeps occurring to me about what is the impact of technology, the impact of technology really is the knitting together of individuals into collectives and a shifting array of collectives that are often driven by the choice of the person, but in some cases maybe driven by the institutions they serve, whether that's work or church or the university, whatever it might be. And whereas if you were the blacksmith stuck way out in the country, your circle of people that you could interact with was really limited by what you could get to geographically. Now that's not the case. And so I'm really intrigued by the idea of the return of the artisan, someone who is creating and making things, whether those are made out of ones and zeros or made out of wax or made out of whatever.

And then being able to serve the entire world because of the internet and groups of colleagues that come together around projects around common purpose that absolutely do not have to be in proximity to each other to get the best out of what it is. And we've seen a bunch of that happen already, but it's always been on the margins as opposed to the enterprise itself. And I think that genie is out of the bottle. I think we're definitely headed in that direction and hopefully in a way that those artisanal individually shaped careers are family supporting, that you're not off of a safety net that allows you to have healthcare still a problem in the US as we know, or interact as a citizen to kind of help drive your community. But I am optimistic about that. I think people like local, they like local things. They like going down to the farmer's market and they also like having friends on the other side of the world that they can play games with. And those two things are not counter to each other. They're all part of our experience now.

Horn:

Love it. And it's about connections at the end of the day. So...

Revenaugh:

There you go.

Horn:

There you go. I think it's a perfect place to end it. Mickey, thank you for your continued thought leadership, your continued bias toward action and all that you've created. And just appreciate your friendship and you joining us today.

Revenaugh:

It has been a thrill.

Engaging alumni—whether to have them help current students or for fundraising—isn't easy for many colleges and universities. And it's arguably been getting harder (especially on the fundraising side) even as the alums of any college or university are often their most valuable asset. What's the benefit to the alums that their alma mater promises? What sorts of engagements are meaningful to them? In this conversation with Max Leisten, founder of Protopia, he talks about how his company uses artificial intelligence (AI) to answer this question. The company does it without creating an app for users—there are enough of those he told me, and he doesn't want to create more friction. And he does it by intentionally avoiding the use of the word "mentor" when he asks alums to support current students—because that's a word that implies a real commitment on the part of students and alums. More friction, in other words.

As he told me: “Sometimes I talk about this in Venn diagrams. You’ve got the alum that is looking for impact. The student that’s looking for you to deliver on that promise of life-long community. You’ve got that front line fundraiser that says I need more and better conversations with the right donors. And that sweet spot, that’s where we operate."

As always, you can listen to the conversation above, watch it below, or read the transcript as a paying subscriber.

Michael Horn:

Today we have Max Leisten, he's the founder and CEO of a company called Protopia. And they offer what they refer to on their website as personalized donor experiences at scale, empowered by artificial intelligence. There's a lot there I think that's very interesting. As someone who has been a fundraiser for my alma mater since I graduated, I'm particularly intrigued by this.

And Max first, thanks for joining us, but I'll give my personal vent up front because I think you helped solve it, which is it's always struck me that when you're fundraising, you have all these mass announcements historically going out to every member of the alumni body. And some people really love green energy and want to give to campus initiatives. Some people probably think it's the devil and don't want to. Other people really get excited about financial aid or research or whatever else. And yet we're broadcasting all these messages historically in a mass way. We're going to get into it in a moment, but my guess is that this is what you're tackling. But I want to just start with your own personal background before we get into what Protopia is. How did you come on this journey to founding this company to start to give these personalized donor experiences?

Leisten:

No, thanks Michael. And I'm extremely excited to be here. Thank you for hosting us and we probably should come up with a safe word once I start talking because I'm so passionate about all the things you just mentioned and particularly the journey that got us to where we are, the company today.

Yeah, so first of all, Max, founder and CEO of Protopia, and that accent is German. So before you were curious, it is German. I came over here a long time ago. My wife's from North Carolina and that's how we ended over here. And it was a little bit, I think like most founders a painful journey. And I advise as founders up to this days on when they should start a startup or not. And in most cases, to be honest, I say run while you can because these are tough journeys.

But I worked for a number of decades at SaaS startups, always in the enterprise side. And I worked for a high education enterprise software in a product management capability. Always love working with customers on the problems to solve. And we are just finished raising a Series D for my startup. And we were incredibly burned out. I was burned out, my soul was gone because it's really hard to work in a startup.

And so I quit my job and my wife has an impact job. And to be honest, Michael, I got actually really jealous that she managed to make a big difference. And I thought, well, why can't I do something that I feel better about versus more software? And I went on a big learning journey. My undergrad degree is in marketing, HR. I've always been curious about people's careers. And that was the last time I felt really good. And why am I doing this? Why did I start my journey on that career side? And I had a lot of lunches with people and I basically said, tell me a little bit where you're struggling with your career search.

And the second stage of the career search is the resume. So most people get feedback on their resume from friends and family. They know it's not good, but because it's not relevant and most cases, family will never tell you the truth. So we basically started by taking your resume, sharing it with people that are relevant to you. And I would say, give me feedback five minutes blind for Michael and I'm going to collate this and share it with Michael. And Michael felt great, right? You would say to me, oh my God, this was amazing. I can't believe they told me the truth.

Here's the thing that really sparked where we are. The people I asked to help to give you feedback on your resume called me back to, emailed me and said, where's my next resume? I want to help. This was amazing. I loved it. It was quick, it was blind. And I told my wife saying, I don't know I'm going to make money with this, but I feel like a million dollars, Mike. I feel like I make a difference in Michael's life and in the life of people that help others because behavioral science shows that helping someone actually feels better than getting help. It validates who you are. You feel amazing for a few minutes and you want to know that your community is there for you when you need help. So it validates a little bit all the things you've done in your past.

So we went on a road trip, looked at the data, and it turns out that one of the greatest affinities, why we help others is alma matter. We looked at women reentering the workforce, veterans, people living in the same city, but if we were to say, hey, here's a Carolina grad that needs help, not only would you recognize why you should help that person, but in a sense you also remember that amazing experience you had on campus. You're thinking back to a time where the world was still amazing. You had so many options and that combination had people engaged at a much higher rate than other affinities that you may have in common with someone.

So we went on a road show, I did a bunch of reading, and it turns out that institutions sit on that gold mine of goodwill because you are alma mater. You can't wait to help someone that's on the same journey that you're at. And these institutional leaders, when I talk to them, I said, wow, you're sitting on this gold mine of goodwill. How are you mining this? And they start complaining saying, well, we're trying to solve it. We're building platforms and we don't know why are alumni not coming back? They're not signing up. We want them to help students. And then we talk to students, why are you not signing up? Why you're not joining this mentoring program? When we talk to alumni, why you're not helping? What's in the way?

So from a design thinking perspective, we did a lot of exploration of what's in the way of something that comes so natural to us that we all desire give and get help from each other. And so we built a platform from there, but it was quite a journey to be honest. And for me the true north always was let's make it easier to help each other because it was totally selfish to be honest, Michael. It was what makes me feel good and what helps me make an impact and that guided that journey.

Horn:

It's awesome. And it's interesting listening to you because obviously your founding story then is very different from what's on the website right now. It sounds like you essentially built a tool that could help alumni connect to each other. And you're totally right, someone from my alma mater, I'm much more likely to help than someone from another random place because human beings, for better or worse, we like tribes. We have these affiliations. And so it seems like you're unlocking that progress and really helping people connect on their own career journeys. How does then Protopia move to this donor side of the equation? Is that sort of like the, okay, this is what we're doing for the alums, but we also have to do something for the institutions in the process or how does that kind of work?

Leisten:

No, and it is funny. And most startups, it took us a while to understand who the buyer is. So I can lead with an emotional story. I want Michael to help someone because I love seeing Michael happy that he gives back. The funny thing that took us a while to realize, there's a lot of established data that when an alum helps and volunteers, she is three and a half times more likely to donate money. It's a [inaudible 00:08:20] good institution saying you need to connect alumni and students. You feel good, but what's the actual benefit to the institution? And the benefit is that the alum, when she discovers, reconnects the institution, it is a lot easier to unlock and get her to donate. And one thing I firmly believe that nearly every alum would give money to the institution if you make it about them personalized and relevant and simple.

And it was a conversation with the advancement shop. I mean donations as I think about 30 to 32% of an institution's operating budget. So they are really dependent on donations, not, I'm not just talking about the capital gifts, I'm talking about the long tail giving and curating and building that donor base of that next generation.

And for us was, well, there's many reasons you can get that alum back to come to campus in particular with COVID, it's got to be digital, they're not going to travel back to campus and nothing works better than to get that alumni to volunteer. And for us it was how can you make that volunteering easy, that giving back where Michael would share something with another student and feels good. And then the person that really cares about this in a sense, as you can see on our website, is their frontline fundraiser, right? And really, sometimes I talk about this in Venn diagrams. You've got the alum that's looking for impact. You've got the student that's looking to for you to deliver on that promise of a lifelong community. And you've got that frontline fundraiser that says, I need more and better conversations with the right donors and that sweet spot, that's where we operate.

Horn:

It's super interesting. So then the business model in effect is you're going to the university, they're paying you some license fee, I'm assuming you're not getting a percent of donations and then, so it's a license fee. And then you're basically sitting in the middle of this and facilitating these different interactions, whether it's students to alums, whether it's alums to university, and basically allowing them to have a personalized moment to be able to give back in some way. Is that the way it works?

Leisten:

That is a hundred percent spot on. Couple of nuances, Michael. We often actually say that you've got to make your entire community to everybody. So one of customers is NC State University, and when you look at what they do, they invite prospective students to come back and ask current students, past students, faculty, researchers, entrepreneurs, parents. It really is making the entire community available at the push of a button. And then our job is to find the right people that can respond to something. And the nuances going back to a little bit who pays and the business model, yes, it's a license fee, it's based on how big the institution is, but also giving you ROI for this.

Horn:

Gotcha. So let me ask a question then, because there've been other companies, and I know we emailed about this beforehand, that have come into the space of trying to connect alums to students to help them with their career journeys. PeopleGrove, for example, comes to mind. Others, I don't know that they've jumped to the donor side of this equation, at least in my knowledge. But how is your approach different from some of these other players out there that have been trying to create the mentorship opportunities, so to speak?

Leisten:

Yeah. So let me start at the tail line. I actually intentionally avoid the word mentoring because that's actually one of the challenges. And I think the space seems to be moving away a little bit further. If you look at PeopleGrove, they're now really a career platform versus mentoring platform. 'Cause the problem with mentoring is that it's a really hard step. It's students often not looking for mentor, they're just looking for help. And alumni are not looking to become mentors because I don't know about you. It's a big commitment. So we often say we spark relationships.

Now how we're different. It really goes back to design thinking, asking students and alumni what's in the way of them connecting with each other. And number one is we're actually not a platform. There's some amazing platforms out there, the Graduway, the Almabase, the Hivebrite, the PeopleGrove, but the average professional uses 35 different apps in her day. They're not looking for app 36. It's really easy.

As you know, we're going to get to the I part, it's never been easier to build an app. I can go to ChatGPT, give it a command in Python saying build me an app that is great for alumni engagement with some event management and a forum and two, three years from now it will help that build in an hour. And then my challenge becomes on how to differentiate from everybody else out there. And you just have to go to G2 and how many alumni engagement platforms are out there. But the core challenges in a world where we're flooded with apps, another app was not the answer. And that's really not what we heard from alumni and students. So we're not an app.

The second problem that's closely related to this is that alumni told us they don't want to sign up for anything else. They don't want to sign up or sign in for anything else. They don't want to opt into anything else because to overwhelm. That does not distract from their capability and desire to give back to something. So we are really selling, we are an opt out platform. We typically get the institution's entire member data, constituent of data and that is what we use to then find and mine the best alumni that can help. An analogy I often use and how we're different is, and you may remember this. Fidelity, you actually had to sign up for 401K about 10 years ago and the industry basically said, why is it so hard for someone to get out, sign up for something when we know that's what they want? So they flip the model, everybody's now opted in your 401k and you have to opt out because it's in your interest to hear this to save money.

We've taken a save model, everybody's enrolled because it is hard to get somebody opted. I'll give this statistic. The typical alumni engagement software has about 7% at most of alumni sign up. That is not the fault of those platforms because they're really good Swiss army knives, but alumni will not sign up and about 2% of alumni come back on a regular basis. And we flipped this around. We said, okay, we know Michael wants to help. What's it going to take for him to help? Let's go to him. Let's use tools he's already using. Let's not force him to do something, a barrier that prevents engagement. But it really is, we're different. There's no platform, nothing to sign up for. We use tools that you already use, email, Slack, SMS. And our job is to tell you the right story about somebody essentially who wants to be you in about 20 years.

Horn:

In essence, you basically get access to all the data in a university's CRM, maybe their SIS, whatever systems that they are using to store that. And then I'm guessing this is where the artificial intelligence comes into play. It's starting to make pattern matching recommendations and so forth. And it says to a student, hey, or an alum or whomever, hey, we have a connection for you. Would you chat for 10 minutes with this person who's struggling with X? Or whatever it might be. Or maybe it seems like as you've gone down the donor way, like hey, you love Duke basketball. Coach K retirement, watch this great video or whatever it is based on the proclivities. And you're probably looking at past campaigns and things that I've clicked on, my LinkedIn profile, whatever things to understand who I am as an individual and what are the sorts of things that I'm likely to engage with and bring me some value. Am I getting it?

Leisten:

No, again, you're spot on. It really is about personalization. We want to make something as relevant to you as possible. So you are the custom ultimately as that alum, right. Institution the beneficiary. And from an AI perspective, and there's a lot of conversations I'd love to go to where we are around AI and ChatGPT and AGI, but the process you described is exactly that. Anybody can ask for help. We've got a natural language understanding engine that takes apart the question. There's multiple models based on what you ask that identifies what exactly is Michael looking for. Is it more important around career advice, entrepreneurship, academic question, a project, an assignment? There's all kinds of buckets like the intent and that criteria is then run against the data that we have from institutions saying not unlikeGoogle, who are the top 20 best alumni that can help with that?

And it's actually multiple alumni we ask, typically about 25. And then we ask that alumni via blind email so the student doesn't know who we're asking because we want to protect your time and privacy and saying, can you help someone because that feels relevant to you. And so if it is relevant and our performance shows this, I know you're going to open the email and you're very likely to help because you understand why you received this. And by the way, Michael, if you can't help, we are going to ask the next alum, right? Because it's not just make it irrelevant to you. You also have to have a way to easily say no. There's a lot of conversations we have with alum why they don't help. And that saying no is so hard.

If I reach out to LinkedIn to you Michael, and you have to say no for a few seconds, you actually think I cannot be that best person that I think I am and I'm less likely to help in the future. It was amazing to watch all the dynamics that drive that giving. But this is now then what we learned working with advancement. 'Cause they said, well Max, there's 150, 200 really good alums in New York City. Duke basketball fans work on Wall Street, amazing careers. I don't really want to talk to all 150, 200 of them. Which ones of those are major gift prospects? Because wouldn't the student be helped if she gets amazing advice, somebody working on Wall Street and the alum feels great and I get to talk to major gift prospects. So that really is where we look at propensity and capacity and engagement from a CRM system.

Say there is a world where the alum is really relevant, where the student is going to get amazing help and we get the right fundraiser to have a conversation. So really to your point is all that data that the engine looks at and the engine also from an AI perspective looks at the philanthropic goals of the institution. So we often sit down with someone advancement saying, do you have a campaign running? Do you want to activate lags? Do you want to look at labs, major donors? We understand this and that is actually influencing the targeting algorithm that we then apply and how we stack rank and look at everything. And there's other nuances. We really believe about building diverse dialogue. We may look at opposite gender, we may look at clubs you belong. Are you part of the Black Alumni Association? So it really, sometimes I describe it as a team composition. You wouldn't field 20 quarterbacks. And we build really a relevant team that matches all kinds of different goals.

Horn:

So let me ask one other question because you mentioned the student wants help. How do they make that known to you? How are they asking the question that you realize, hey, Michael's a junior trying to figure out what to do for his summer internship. He has a question that these alums could answer. How do you even get that surfaced that I have that question?

Leisten:

Oh, so let me start at the, we call that a dimension. How do you create demand for alumni? And it often, it varies by institution, but it comes down to campus partnerships. Sometimes I describe what we do, it's like alumni as a service. So you go the admissions team saying, is there an opportunity to connect prospective students to alumni who can share their amazing career journeys that they have after graduation? And they're going to say yes. How about make that easy for you so you not only have the best alum that can help, but you no longer have to ask a fundraiser if you can involve that person. Same thing in the classroom. Some institutions it's a requirement. So students, maybe even fields that are more introverts like engineering, have to use us so that they learn that networking is the most powerful way to tap that community. Same thing with young alumni. So it comes down to marketing.

Some institutions use sandwich boards, they integrate us and their digital communication, they have the student president talk about us. Now we're in the middle of getting ready for graduation so they're thinking about how to give that gift of community to graduating seniors. But it really comes down in advance when alumni is saying to the entire institution, wouldn't it be amazing if we can give you the best alum to help your constituents at the push a button? And then we get that question and like I said, we kind of take it apart and do data mining.

Horn:

Super helpful. So let's get into this last piece then, which is the topic du jour around artificial intelligence, AI. You all have been using it before ChatGPT came out to the public. But I love your, it's obvious that AI has found a good use case in where you're using it, right? I'd love you, though, to sort of zoom out a little bit and reflect beyond where you're sitting, what you think AI's impact on higher education is going to be. Where is it going to be useful? Where is it maybe over hyped? Where are we maybe missing the story, so to speak?

Leisten:

So I'll start with a disclaimer for the more technical audience. There is no AI, right? So when most of us say AI, we refer to AGI, artificial general intelligence, and there's a lot of conversations around when we get there. Ray Kurzweil, if you know him, the author of Singularity said 2029. Some thinkers say it's the end of the century. So even ChatGPT just uses large language model. It's not AI but it's a good term we use it in our marketing, but it doesn't exist yet. It will. And personally, I'm extremely excited. There's obviously ethical concerns, there's concerns about how we apply it, but from an education perspective, and I am totally biased, if you look at that it's going to be a lot easier for us to buy education online, just in time learning, how do institutions differentiate themselves? And from my perspective, there's no more powerful value that you can deliver than the community of prior graduates.

That community for me is, that's the lens I look at, is an unbelievable asset that even mid-tier institutions are underselling. There's a customer we have, they have 250,000 alumni. They're middle four or 500 ranked institution. And if you can't compete on the knowledge and maybe you can compete on the campus value of coming here, having community, you should absolutely compete on that network being the most valuable asset that you can ever bestow upon your graduates because they open doors, they give advice. So again, I'm a huge believer in this that AI is going to help you unlock this and make this even more valuable. But from an AI perspective, there's a lot of tech companies that apply AI in the classroom that as you know, there's a conversation going around, how do I allow ChatGPT when writing essays?

I'll tell you a true story. When ChatGPT come out, I have two 16 year old boy twins and I was so excited and say, and I demonstrated how they can write an essay because it's not a matter if you allow it or not, the cat's out of the bag. You've now have to teach students how to use these tools to be more competitive. I'm a huge believer in this and I think the field is changing. So that's one element in higher education. Learn to embrace these tools.

I am a firm believer that liberal arts education is going to be more and more important going forward because a lot of engineering, computer science is going to be automated. One of my sons has generated Python scripts via ChatGPT. But it's a critical thinking that's going to be so important, that creativity and in order to take advantage of those tools, those are going to be hugely important skill set. So that's what education has to teach. And again, I see that a lot already with customers saying we're going to teach them that. But I'm personally, I'm extremely excited not losing sight of all the dangers, but we are going to be in a world where we take advantage of those tools and make it exciting for us.

Horn:

Max, there's some big takeaways from this conversation. I appreciate you having it with us. Some things that I'm going to take away are reducing the friction to letting your community, your alumni be your biggest asset. And you're right.

Look, donor rates have been falling for years at higher ed institutions. Alumni engagement by many measures is at an all-time low on a lot of places. Yes, the overall giving is up because of big ticket items to some big ticket universities. But in terms of the population, right, yeah, it's not where it needs to be for these institutions, but you're right, the value so often is the community you enter when you leave. And that's what people really want to be part of and embrace. And whether that's for transactional, get me my next job or just because it's fun to be part of a nostalgic and great to be part of a community. I think you unleashing this and making better use of it could be one of the most valuable things colleges and universities can invest in.

So Max, appreciate your work, appreciate you doing this for individuals and the institutions and we'll keep a close eye on your journey at Protopia.

Leisten:

Absolutely. Thank you really for hosting and as you can tell, we're super passionate. Simplicity is the key and simplicity in making a more humane, that's huge value for institutions.

Horn:

Well, we'll keep an eye on it. Thank you for joining us and for all you listening, we'll be back next time on The Future of Education.

Carnegie Learning was perhaps the first company to enter the education technology market with an artificial intelligence (AI) powered math learning solution. CEO Barry Malkin joined me to talk about Carnegie Learning's approach, how the company has evolved since those early days, and how they approach some of the hot button questions in math education. In particular we tackled questions around conceptual learning in math versus memorizing procedures, the grain size at which Carnegie Learning approaches personalizing learning, and what the impact of artificial intelligence is likely to be more broadly. As always, you can listen to the conversation above if you subscribe, watch it below, or read the transcript if you’re a paid subscriber.

Michael Horn:

Today's guest, Barry Malkin, has had a fascinating career at a fascinating perch right now at a company that I got to know very early on in my introduction to the world of education technology, which is Carnegie Learning. We're going to hear a significant update, I think, about what they're up to and as well as frankly some perspective on some of the burning questions that educators are really asking right now around the rise of AI and more, but all in this bigger question because we're obsessed with helping all individuals build their passions and fulfill their human potential. And so Barry, first, it's great to see you. Thank you for doing this.

Barry Malkin:

Well, thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.

Horn:

Yeah, you bet. So let's start with that, just your own background into your current role leading Carnegie Learning and your own journey. I suspect when you started out, that's not something you would've necessarily guessed that this is where you'd be at the moment.

Malkin:

No, probably not. Although, I have enjoyed every moment of it. I've been here for seven years now, and I'm having a ton of fun. We're making huge progress and having a huge impact on students across the country, so I couldn't be more thrilled with what I'm doing. I have had I guess an interesting pathway to where I am today. So I started as an investment banker in New York many, many moons ago focusing on mergers and acquisitions and covering a variety of industries at the time. And so I was in New York for a while. I'm from the Midwest originally. I'm from Milwaukee and a Midwesterner at heart and decided to finally move back to the Midwest and brought my fiance or wife at the time to Chicago with me, who is a New Yorker, so that was a bit of a tough sell, but I was able to convince her. And I got a job working for Deborah Quazzo and Michael Moe, actually. That was my first job in education.

I was working with them, for them at Merrill Lynch in Chicago, and they were building an amazing business services and educational services practice at the time, and I just fell in love with education. I fell in love with the people, I fell in love with, the mission, the entrepreneurialism. It just felt right for me, and I kept rolling with it. So I stayed in investment banking for a while with Deborah and Michael, went to another firm where I also stayed for a while and was advising companies all over the world on capital raising and mergers and acquisitions in education across the spectrum. I made a job transition at that time, and I went to what they call the buy side where I worked for a public company, Career Education Corporation, in their mergers and acquisitions group. And again, working all across the world looking for higher education institutions to purchase at the time.

That was a transition from advisor to principal, and I really, really enjoyed it. To make a long story short, I ended up at Apollo Education Group where I was the global head of mergers and acquisitions there and worked on an acquiring educational technology companies and higher education institutions and even building some product there and doing some strategy work as well. It was a lot of fun. I was there for about six years. One of the acquisitions I did at Apollo was Carnegie Learning. So in 2011, we had a real challenge at the University of Phoenix, which was the largest business within the Apollo Education Group, and that was we were having persistence problems with students getting through basic math education courses, and we needed a solution. We were using products by a number of third parties, and it just wasn't satisfying the requirements, and we were losing too many students too early in their post-secondary education journey.

So we went around, we looked for solutions, and we came across Carnegie Learning. We were fascinated by the work that they were doing, the research that backed the product, the AI and its capabilities, and we ended up acquiring the company in 2011. Again, to make a long story short, the post-secondary industry had lots of challenges, and the integration of Carnegie Learning into Phoenix didn't quite happen in the way we all envisioned it because of lots of distractions and changes in that landscape, but the idea was to obviously improve the outcomes in math, but also to leverage the AI across different subjects and classes throughout the university. So that was the rationale. It was a good thesis, a really good thesis, and a great little business.

In 2015, so I had left Apollo, and I had been gone for about a year, I was doing some advisory work, some personal investing, and trying to figure out my next gig when Carnegie Learning was for sale. So they decided to divest the business when they were taking it private, and I put together a small group, and we bought the business from Apollo. It's been seven years now, and we've completely transformed the organization. I just always thought it was a sleeper. I thought it had great bones, amazing people, great technology, the pedagogy was amazing, and I naively felt that I could do something with it.

Horn:

Well, and you haven't been wrong, so I mean that's your history and coming into it. The history of Carnegie Learning I think is also fascinating because people may know, maybe they don't, but if they don't, it was initially a math-only solution, and if I recall really an algebra-only solution developed out Carnegie Mellon. It was built with AI. As you said, it's really, I think it's fair to say, and we'll get into this later, the first ed tech product with artificial intelligence in it that I'm aware of anyway, and a rigorous curriculum, rigorous backbone, lot of research behind it. It also had a very, at the time, sort of specific, shall we say, classroom models, a little arcane in its early days, but you all have evolved a ton. You have even more research. You're one of the few folks that has a federal government research study behind it showing positive and significant effects on student learning, but what are you all today? It's much broader than math if I look at the website.

Malkin:

Yeah, it is broader than math. And so when I began in 2015, we were simply focused on middle school and high school mathematics, and that had been the business for 20 plus years. And as you said, it started at Carnegie Mellon University. It started as a research project between the School of Cognitive Science, the School of Psychology, and the computer science department, all led by John Anderson who was really the force behind the research that created what was called Cognitive Tutor at the time. That was very early in ed tech days before there were computers in classrooms. And in schools, they weren't prevalent at all, so they were way, way, way before their time, but they had some success rolling it out as a research project within the Pittsburgh Public school system and got a lot of interest in what they were doing from districts across the country. And Carnegie Mellon University is a very commercial university and knows a lot about tech transfer and monetizing intellectual property, and that's exactly what they did with Carnegie Learning and created a company from it.

So we've evolved quite a bit. We first started out as a technology company, we moved into curriculum, and then we also moved into services. So those are really the three legs of our business today. But now we're broadening the business beyond math, but also expanding within math as well. So one of the most exciting things that's happening at the company is the launch of our K-5 math product, which is going to be a blended learning product, much like our existing 6-12 product line. So we're incredibly excited about this. This company has always wanted to do a K-5 math product, and so I'm incredibly excited. The product's amazing. It'll launch officially at the beginning of September, but we're already getting a lot of interest in it.

That's the main thing. We've expanded beyond 6-12 math into K-5, but we've also expanded into literacy as well as world languages as well, and we're putting a lot of effort into improving, reinventing, and wrapping technology around those subjects as well. So we're super excited. We've got a new core 6-12 product coming to market and lots of exciting things happening in the world languages space as well.

Horn:

Very, very cool. So let's dive deep though in the math strand itself because one of the interesting things that you all say is you don't just teach people the what of subjects like math, but you really focus on the why behind it. I can guess what that might mean, but I'd love to hear it from you. What does that really mean? How does that work in a digital learning solution? I think when people think digital learning, they think procedures and computations, but not why. That sounds like something you'd get out of a humanities course. So how are you all doing that?

Malkin:

Look, the whole point of what we do is to strengthen the conceptual understanding of mathematics. We are not a procedural math company. We really believe that students must internalize and understand why they're doing the math, what its proper application is, and when and how to use it most effectively. And if you're just teaching multiplication tables and memorization and manipulating equations, you're not teaching anybody the application of that mathematics, and so that's really what we try to do. We center a lot of our problems around word problems, and I know some students find that more challenging, but at the end of the day, it produces students who understand much, much more about the mathematics and how to apply it in the real world.

If you were a engineer at SpaceX, and you were trying to figure out the aerodynamics of a rocket, an equation is not suddenly going to appear for you to solve that problem. You're going to have to figure out what it is you're solving, the purpose of the math that's necessary to solve that problem, and then only then do the equation. So this is what we do, this is how we teach, and we believe it's by far the most effective way of instruction.

Horn:

So I want to dig in this a little bit more and understand it better because as you know, there's been this big reckoning over the last few years around the science of reading. And for folks tuning in, the importance that you actually have to teach the mechanics of how to read and not just guess based on the pictures near you and so forth. We haven't seen that, I don't think, in math per se. We've seen commissions come along and so forth, but it does seem to me, if I look at it from a high level, that there are some food fights or fractures, if you will, in the world of math. Crassly, I'd say on the one hand you've got folks talking about the importance of learning procedures, getting to automaticity through like, you got to memorize your times tables so that you'll be able to do the higher order math.

And then I think on the other hand, you have the conceptual folks that talk less about the importance of getting the right answer and more understanding the why behind the answer, sort of what are the mechanisms in other words. And I'm just sort of curious, in your answer, it sounds like you're saying both have wisdom, but I'd love to know how you think about the split and fundamentally what's the country getting right and wrong right now about math instruction?

Malkin:

So you said something that was interesting. You said that in the conceptual framework of mathematics, you care less about what the answer is, and I think that's a misconception. We want to get to the right answer, we just don't believe there's a singular path to achieving that answer. Every problem in life has a number of solution sets. It doesn't matter if it's math or any subject or domain. So there is a right answer here, but we want students to be able to prove it out in their own way. It doesn't mean there's a unlimited pathways, we obviously need to instruct the student in the most efficient method, but by stressing the conceptual framework and the ability for student to take their own path, it's only there that we can actually understand where their struggles are and where their misconceptions are. If they're just memorizing math problems and manipulating equations, we can't see the work. And if we can't see the work, we can't really diagnose the specific skills that they're struggling with.

Horn:

That is super interesting. So in other words, it sounds like, yes, I'm doing the procedures, but I want to see your actual work behind it to see the pathways because it may turn out that when I start to do the quadratic equation, you realize Michael actually has a more fundamental problem on understanding exponents or multiplication or whatever it might be, I don't know, factoring. And so using that would say, "Okay, we actually got to go there and maybe it's not a procedural thing, it's like a conceptual. Michael doesn't understand that this is in fact a question of division." Is that sort of how you're thinking about it?

Malkin:

That's exactly right. What's interesting is our textbooks as well as our software utilize the same principles. So even though it's a digital solution, the digital solution is unpacking the specific skills that students are struggling with. And so within any math problem that we're providing within our MATHia software, we could be analyzing anywhere between five and 25 different skills in a single math problem, and we're really looking at those discreet capabilities of the student to understand where their struggles are. So it works our print, in our eBooks, as well as our software.

Horn:

It's fascinating. So this actually I think hits at another tension we see right now in the math... it's not the reading words, we don't have the math words, but I think there's some tensions brewing, and one of them seems to be acceleration versus remediation, like you're going to fix the thing that the kid is struggling with versus we're going to push you through, but we'll sort of loop in to build the skill up that maybe is deficient in the service of that high order thing. I think those are the crass categories, if you will. How do you think about that question? I have a guess based on what you just said, but I'm sort of curious philosophically how you think about the importance of personalizing learning in a subject that's more cumulative maybe than any other subject that's out there.

Malkin:

This is a hot button of this organization, as well as myself personally. So what's happening in math education really way too often is that students are being placed in below grade level content because they are struggling with some component of on-grade level material. And unfortunately, when you take a student and you put them two, three grade levels behind, it could be a life sentence for being behind in mathematics for, like I said, forever. And so what we try to do is we try to remediate the specific skills that they're struggling with. And every student, whether they're an accelerated class or intervention course, they need remediation, but they don't necessarily need to be put in a single or multiple grade levels below where they need to be. And so we think of it as a highway. And the student can get off the highway for a moment or go on a rest stop, but they're getting back on that highway.

Most other companies through remediation, intervention, they're taking them off the highway, and they're putting them on a completely different road. We don't believe that's necessary. We think with the power of our curriculum and the power of our software that we can see specifically where they're struggling and maintain their trajectory on the road, on the on-course level material.

Horn:

It's super interesting. This is my aha thing from hearing you say that, and tell me if I have this right. It sounds like to me, basically you're saying, "When we personalize along the categories of on-grade level or all for fourth grade math versus sixth grade, it's too blunt an instrument. We are tracking people on things that are hard to escape. Whereas when we're personalizing it sort of the atomic level of the specific misconception, then we're being much more precise. We allow for a lot more fluidity." Frankly, once you remediate maybe that one thing I didn't understand from three years ago, I might start soaring now because now everything comes together. Is that the right way to think about it?

Malkin:

Exactly. A hundred percent. Every single student needs remediation at one point or another. The difference is we are keeping them on grade level. We're not sending them down a grade or two. We, that's our whole objective. That's our north star. Keep them on grade level, remediate them where and when it's necessary, but keep them on task.

Horn:

That's awesome. All right, so last topic as we finish up because you all hit on a bunch of the hot button issues in education, and the last one right now is artificial intelligence. It's everywhere. ChatGPT. And is it the end of English and all these questions and math faculty being like, "Now you have a calculator," and all this stuff. So I said it up front, Carnegie Learning was at least as far as I know, perhaps the first solution out in the market with an AI driven solution. So not the first in research, but really out in the market. There's obviously so much hype, excitement, worries around this stuff right now. And it can be beyond your product. How do you think about the use of AI in education? Where's it going to make an impact? Where is it overhyped? And I mean, you probably have a level of nuance that we don't, so what are we missing? What's the media conversation missing about this story?

Malkin:

Yeah. Well look, things are changing so rapidly with ChatGPT, and it's hard to know exactly where it's going to go. I'm not a fortune-teller or Nostradamus, so I don't know exactly. Look, the real challenge of teaching in the classroom is being able to differentiate between all the students and all their different needs because they're all at different places, without question. And so the power of artificial intelligence is the ability to give those teachers some additional leverage to help all of these different students who are at many different places. It's what our MATHia software does, it's what it was built for, and it's really what makes it so special. It's a competency-based framework. Everybody goes through it at their own pace, and it provides that differentiation to really help again scale the teacher's ability. So I think AI is an incredible tool. It's obviously in its infancy, but the power of it and GBT and AI is really around the ability to personalize instruction for every student.

That is the Holy Grail of education to be able to meet every student where they are at any moment. And so I'm very, very excited about the recent developments. It's going to keep us on our toes. We have to continue to reinvent ourselves and continuously improve our products, but I couldn't be more excited about where things are headed.

Horn:

Let me stay on that one bit, and this is my observation. You didn't put me up to it, but I think it's a chance for you all to toot your own horn.

Malkin:

Okay.

Horn:

No pun intended. But as I look at it, one of the things that I've sort of concluded about AI before the ChatGPT stuff came out was that in and of itself, it's not going to deduce causality of what things you've got right or wrong in its own sort of big abstract model. It is best used when it's built on a rigorous curriculum with good assessments that are giving good data into the model, and it has a theory of learning. And when I look at you all, again, you're developed out of Carnegie Mellon, there's a clear theory of how math concepts connect with each other, the importance of understanding the why behind them, how you build that up, all that is there, and then the AI sort of turbocharges it within a model, it seems to me, as opposed to... I mean, we're seeing this right now with Bing and Google getting all sorts of things wrong in the world, which is okay when you're doing a search, less when you're instructing someone.

It seems to me it's the two together though, like rigorous theory-led curriculum with the AI, that's like the magic sauce. Do you agree with that? Is that too simple?

Malkin:

I do agree with it. And this company is unique in that we have a large research staff. We are undoubtedly the most researched education technology company on the planet. There's been more independent, truly independent, not like casual research and case studies, but truly independent research that's been done on our products and services, and it's proven that the approach that we take is sound, it works, it works well, but it's... So it's a really a combination of the pedagogy and the technology that works so well together. So I think we're in a unique place as a company. I think we have the ability to really make huge gains in outcomes. There is going to be a flight to quality within the K-12 school systems. All of these products and services, whether it's supplemental or core, that have been sold into the market for way too long have not had any discernible impact on student learning. Just look at the numbers.

And so I really think that districts are going to focus more on research-driven products that they can trust, that they can get a quantifiable return on investment, and that's why I think this is our moment. This company has always been way ahead of its time. Today, we are exactly where it needs to be to make a huge impact on students across the country.

Horn:

Well, here's to the impact. And Barry, thanks so much for joining us. I really appreciate you sharing the stories and the work that you're doing.

Malkin:

Well, thank you for having me. It's been a pleasure.

Horn:

Yeah, you bet. And for all of those listening, we'll be back next time on The Future of Education.

If we're serious about helping all individuals build their passions and fulfill their human potential, then we need to help them not just with their academics, but also focus on their health and wellness and their habits of success. A big part of that can and should be built on a foundation of fitness, which means instilling lifelong habits of fitness when they're in K–12 schools. But that means some big changes in how we think about sports, PE and more in our society. To help unpack elements of this topic, Steve Mesler, an Olympic gold medalist and the co-founder and CEO of Classroom Champions joined me, alongside Andy Rotherham, a national leader in the world of education reform, the co-founder of Bellwether Education, and a member of the Virginia Board of Education among other roles. Steve and Andy’s passions for this topic really shone through in this conversation, in which we touched on everything from the reasons why sports are beneficial to students, how the high demands and desires to be great in one thing can be counterproductive, and why it’s necessary to make sure sports are fun and not just about the competition. The conversation rolled into a lot of important and controversial places, as it touched on everything changing the youth sports culture to the role of social-emotional learning (SEL) in schools.

As always, you can listen to the podcast, watch the video below, or read the transcript if you’re a paid subscriber.

Horn: I've long said that if we're serious about helping all individuals do just that, then we need to help them not just with their academics, but also focus on their health and wellness and their habits of success. And a big part of that can and should be built on a foundation of fitness, which means instilling lifelong habits of fitness when they're in K-12 schools. But that means some big changes in how we think about sports, PE and more in our society.

So, to help us think about this topic and frankly, the broader topic of preparing students to lead successful lives, we have two incredible guests today. First, we have a first on this show, we have an Olympic gold medalist in Steve Mesler. He won Gold in the 2010 Olympics in the four-man bobsled, but he also currently serves as the co-founder and CEO of Classroom Champions, which offers an award-winning social-emotional learning curriculum in K-8 schools.

We also have my friend Andy Rotherham joining us today. Andy, of course, has been a national leader in the world of education reform, and he has served in a variety of roles, really as a bridge across the various partisan bickering and silos. He's the co-founder of Bellwether, which works to transform education systems to ensure systemically marginalized young people achieve outcomes that lead to fulfilling lives and flourishing communities. He writes the Eduwonk Blog, has been a columnist for Time, and serves on the Virginia Board of Education. You get the idea, two big deals here today. And with that, Andy, Steve, thank you so much for joining me. It's great to see you both.

Rotherham: Great to be here. This is going to be fun.

Mesler: Thanks for having us.

Horn: Yeah, you bet. I just want to dive in with a macro question for you both really to set the table, which is, in both of your views, why are sports important to young people today? Andy, why don't you go first and then Steve, you can jump in after.

Rotherham: Yeah. I mean, well, there's a couple reasons. I say there's like three, starting with a basic one. It's fun. Sports are fun. They're fun for kids, they're fun for us to watch. They bring a lot. But more importantly, there's a couple of really important things that happen with sports. One, we know kids who participate in sports and it's particularly true of girls. And I have daughters who participate in sports, have better outcomes. And some of that is obviously just the math. If you're spending time doing sports, that's time you're not spending doing other things. So it makes sense that some of the sort of behaviors we think about as being more at risk behaviors, you'd be less exposed to it just because of time. But even accounting for that, there are other things that lead to really good externalities and outcomes.

And I don't think it's surprising you see, particularly again among women, women who participate in sports achieving elsewhere in their lives at a very high level. And I think that's because of that third thing. It gives you the ability to learn how to win, how to lose, how to communicate, how to work together, all kinds of skills that are just really important out there in the workplace and in life. And it lets you get them in a very authentic way. It's not contrived, it's not made up. You're learning those things through real lessons. I mean, I'm on Steve's board at Classroom Champions and we don't want to spend the whole time talking about that. But as I segue to Steve on this question, that is part of what we do at Classroom Champions is sort of letting students see this happening in authentic ways with their mentors. Not contrived ways and made up, but in very real ways, see these kinds of things and learn from them. Steve, what would you add?

Mesler: Yeah, I mean, well first of all, wait a minute. We're not talking about Classroom Champions the entire time here?

Rotherham: The bait and switch.

Mesler: I know mean it's an incredibly important question, Michael, and I mean, I think honestly it leans back to your opening, which is thinking about how to help kids have a life that not only provides them academic opportunity, which then we know is whether you're looking to break the cycle poverty, whether you're just looking to get ahead of life or just do bigger things, that it really begins with academics. But I think the realization that it doesn't begin and end with academics is where sport comes into play. Because ultimately, what else are we all doing here? What else are we all doing here? But to live rewarding lives that we can live longer, we can live happier, we can be healthy, we can think longer, we can do all these things.

And again, whether you're talking about trying to help kids, whether it is in some of the communities that Classroom Champions serves in Camden, New Jersey or in rural Indiana, or whether you are talking about those maybe on the haves side of the American economy, ultimately I think sport is this demonstrable place for kids to see, just like Andy said, I mean, I'm going to echo something that Andy said, but ultimately it's demonstrable.

Kids can see it happening whether they're experiencing it themselves or not, and they're participating. Look, sports isn't for everybody. I'm okay with saying that, I'm comfortable with saying that. But the principles that sport teaches are for everybody. And when kids can see winning and losing happening, whether again on the field themselves or in others or in their role models, athletes still to this day right there with YouTube stars and TikTok stars athletes are those people. They're the only consistent role models as we've kind of transitioned from a generation that participates and watches things on television to now can find their own role models as they please on the internet. And those role models are getting thrown in their faces in a way that wasn't there when we were kids. Sports serves a purpose because again, the rules are clear. It's an opportunity to follow, agree to rules.

And we have to remember, look, I spent eight years on the board of directors of the US Olympic and Paralympic committee, and if there's one thing that I really took away from that, it's all made up. It's all made up. We all decided the line in football is out and the line in tennis is in, those are arbitrary things, but so are majority of the laws and so are the majority of the things that we do in life. And I think sport is this wonderful place where life kind of just mirrors there where we've all agreed to a set of rules, we're going to follow them and the moment somebody doesn't follow them, they either get thrown in a penalty box and they have to sit on the sidelines and be singled out in front of 20,000 people in the NHL. You're sitting in a box just by yourself because you messed up and it reflects on that.

So I think that's where, from a societal standpoint for sport, that's what I really see the value on. And again, Andy I think did a great job talking about those things that go into the sport world.

Horn: No, that makes sense. And Charles Barkley, I suppose be damned in terms of the role model comment, but I'm curious sort of how we're doing on that in terms of schools and society more broadly, because this frankly doesn't have to all be on the backs of schools, but really opportunities for the kids that want to choose. And I take your point, not everyone's going to want to do sports, but for those kids that do want to participate, how are we doing in creating those opportunities in your view? And what are we doing right and wrong?

Mesler: Yeah. No, I mean look, there's data behind this. There's my opinion, but then there's actually what the data says in this world. And the fact of the matter is that over the last 13 or so years ago, our friends over at Project Play at the Aspen Institute, Tom Farrey's and Jennifer's amazing shop over there. Their data's pretty clear. I mean participation's down from 45% in 2008 to I think 37% in 2021, that's a pretty material drop. And then over half of the kids that are participating, 58% of the kids that are participating are doing so through their community-based programming. So where are kids coming to those community based things. I live up in Calgary, Canada. I moved here to train when I was bobsledding. I was two feet wider, two feet taller back in my bobsled days. And I moved up here to train and our daughter can participate in community sport right here.

Same thing happens all over America. So I think how are we doing? We're losing them. But I think in that turn, we can maybe also see the value and what it is that we're losing. And I think the only way to turn things around is people have to see what we're losing and see what the problems are. And I think this is going to be a pretty stark one outside of the concept that, look, when all of us were in school phys ed was a much more prominent part of our days. And I think the transition from when I went to school from the eighties and nineties, you could see phys ed activity, daily activity dropped from something that was a relatively daily occurrence to a once in every five or six day allotment. And two generations later, we are in a mental health crisis. Those things are not not connected. We've increased screen time and we've decreased physical activity and we've decreased the mandate of that in our schools. To your point, it doesn't have to happen in schools, but hey look, basically 100% of kids are in schools.

Rotherham: So I guess I look at it a little differently. That was interesting and we didn't rehearse this. So that was interesting to hear from Steve because I look at it a little bit differently. I don't think we're doing great. And there's some, I mean, look, Steve mentioned the Aspen work and they're doing just fantastic work on this. I encourage everybody to check it out. One of the things in a recent study they put out it's almost $900 a year people are paying out of pocket for sports. So that right there, that's going to be inaccessible for a lot of people. And I think that's actually a low number, if you know kids-

Mesler: Did I say it wrong? It's dropped.

Rotherham: Yeah, yeah. No, it's dropped, I know it's happening around the country. I worry that we're actually de-emphasizing rec sports in favor of competitive sports. And so for example, Chili Davis, the baseball player, he's talked about how it's become so specialized, he's not sure he would've been a baseball player now, and you're seeing this in a number of sports. I remember with my girls, a well-intentioned parent with older kids took us aside when they were playing soccer and was like, "Hey, if you're really serious about them succeeding in soccer at a high level, playing varsity, be able to play really competitive, travel. Here are the kinds of things you need to be doing with them now." Clinics, labs, specialized coaching, my girls were seven at the time. And we were like, they don't even know how much they like soccer. And they've both been very successful in sports, but neither of them actually in soccer, they found their way to other sports.

So what I worry about Michael a lot is we're losing that emphasis on sort of sports for fun, sports for rec. Kids stop playing when the funnel gets more narrow. And so if they're not making varsity, and they're on track for that, they stop playing if they're not JV. You see that funnel, and I don't want to romanticize it, but if you spend time in Europe, I'm always struck, even when you just talk to people in a lot of European countries, they don't ask you, do you play sports? They ask you do you do sport? What sport do you do? And that's not just a contrivance of language, it's a different thing. We think of play and competition and so forth, they think of doing as moving and doing those things and being active. And I think there's a reason you see in Europe, many more people playing sports much later into their lives than you see here.

And so to Steve's point earlier about the important health outcomes and so forth, we should want to get as many kids as possible playing. So we'll have as many adults as possible still moving and doing things. And I just don't think we're doing a great job. And one thing maybe we can talk about here is that relationship, school sports, community sports, do we need to be rethinking that just as a basic access, equity, inclusion kind of question?

Mesler: Yeah, no, and sorry Mike, I'll hop in. Because I think Andy is, again, having lived in a foreign country for 20 years now and yet Classroom Champions works across the US system and across the Canadian system, I have this really interesting opportunity to look at both sides and then again, being part of the US pipeline, I did junior Olympics from 10 or 11 years old. I got an NCAA scholarship and then I went to three Olympics and then I sit on the board. So I personally have had the entire lifecycle of doing multiple sports as a youth, excelling in one that I found after my first sport and then moving through the entire system and then wind up overseeing the system in that way. And I think that there's one thing that the US has a completely different viewpoint of than the rest of the world.

And that is to what Andy said, there is our viewpoint of the value of sport. It is intuitive in Canada that sport for young people is good. It's intuitive in Europe, that's sport for young people is good. In America it's like, well, I don't want my, they're going to try to go to the NFL where they're trying to go to the NBA. We have this viewpoint that participation in sport has an end goal, which is success at these higher levels in a lot of ways. And it's permeated through and kind of corrupted, to Andy's point, they're trying to get them at seven years old. They're trying to get them into clinics and all these things because Andy's goal must be to get them a college scholar scholarship. That must be the goal if he's having a seven-year old participate in sports.

And I see it now on the other end of Andy in some ways, I've got a five and a half year old and an almost one-year-old. So I'm thinking about these things a lot. And it is, how do you change that? I don't if you could think about changing the culture in America on that one, but how can we change? We change. And I think that's where schools do come into play because you do have systemic opportunities there that you can influence in that way.

Horn: And that sort of gets where my head goes, which is, so I've got eight-year-old girls, they're super into gymnastics. I can see the funnel already starting and frankly it's kind of crazy from what I've read about the research around not trying to specialize. And then to your point, we sort of have this PE which frankly I was in Montgomery County growing up. They had already moved PE to once a week I think, back in the 1980s. But you sort of see this steady decline of a focus on participation in movement and that just be active. And I guess in terms of this participation conversation, two of the books that I've read that have really influenced my thinking over the past decade are both by David Epstein and Steve, you reminded me that you're in one of them, The Sport Gene and Range, of course.

And one of my takeaways from the research there was even for those that do want to star in that sport or want that college scholarship because this is their "way in" or whatever else it is, frankly, maybe even especially for those individuals that they ought to play lots of different sports and not specialized too early. And David sent this great newsletter out about this moment with Serena Williams in the front row where he was presenting the research and being like, well, she was the consummate tennis player from early on. And she was like, no, you're right. I learned to throw football. I did all these other activities.

And to your point, Steve, I mean your own personal journey, I think you were a decathlete in college for the Florida Gators, so you obviously were doing a lot of different things. How do we get that narrative out there, maybe? Maybe that's the question. How do we change the narrative so people recognize just doing is a really important thing right now in a lot of different fields and then we'll let the chips sort of fall where they maybe over time, but not have that immediate transactional obsession upfront.

Mesler: Upfront. I mean, I think it's a great question, Andy. I mean what do you think from a school's or from a community communications standpoint?

Rotherham: Well, I'm struck when you talk to people who have succeeded at a high level and with one of the things with my work is you sometimes get to interact with folks who have succeeded in professional in baseball or in hockey or whatever. And one of the things they uniformly are like, don't specialize young, do different. This idea that you have to specialize is almost like a bias of people who didn't succeed at a high level. I remember I did a session last year at the bar conference with Nicole Hensley who's the goalie for the women's Olympic hockey team in Kelly Pannek who's a forward. And this issue came up and I remember, I think it was Kelly Pannek who was just like, your kid should play any sport that's going to make them happy in high school because if they're good enough to go at that sort of D1 and highly competitive level, they're going to be good enough whether they're playing two sports or one sports, this idea that you need to focus them and specialize if they're that at that level of being an athlete, which again, most kids aren't.

So one of the big things is helping people understand these funnels are incredibly narrow and everybody thinks... The most important thing you should make sure is happening is that your kid is having fun, they're enjoying moving, they're creating lifelong relationships with sports and physical activity because the odds of them competing at that level are extremely slim and even slimmer after that. And so you just see that again and again, somebody I don't know, but know of Justin Williams, former NHL player with the Caps, the Kings, he's won the Stanley Cup, he runs a highly regarded hockey camp up in Canada and every day he has the kids doing a different sport, just expose them to them. So one day you're going to learn about these different sports besides hockey and it's a hockey camp and I think a lot of people think you're going to a hockey camp run by somebody like that it's going to be hockey 24/7, but he's really into this idea, learn to do other stuff.

And I just think as a parent, and I know Steve's experiencing this, you got to expose your kids to lots of stuff because how are they going to find out what they like or don't like? If all you do is one sport, your kid might be a great tennis player and they're never going to discover that passion that that's actually what they love, not whatever sport you have them doing. So I think it's a little bit, it would be helpful if more people in those positions kind of communicate that they didn't necessarily get where they got because they just did one thing again and again. They did sort of do different things. They followed some of the stuff that David talks about in those books.

Horn: Steve, what's your take?

Mesler: I mean, I'm of two minds on this one, and look, we talked about this sport pipeline a lot.

Rotherham: You need to take a break in a second to take his kids un-tape their right hand from behind their back.

Mesler: Exactly. All of those things. All of those things. I'm of two minds. We talked about the sport pipeline a lot at the Olympic Committee, Olympic Paralympic Committee for sure. But ultimately I'm here and there. Look, I'm 44, which means my story of how I became successful, in my day there wasn't a hyper sports specialization. So I can't necessarily tell you that your kid can do what I did if they take my path because the people they were competing against weren't hyper specialized. If I had to hyper specialized against kids in other sports and I wasn't hyper specialized and they were, would my physical attributes be able to overcome?

I'm definitely of the mindset, which is, look, if your kid kid is good enough to get a college scholarship, they're probably going to have a really good opportunity whether you specialize them or not. It's the ones that are on the fringes. It's hedging your bets. It's the ones who maybe, look, my kid is always going to have to go against. And she, I'm seeing it already in the ski hill. Yeah, she did good, but her dad was an Olympic gold medalist. So she already has this, it's thing that she can't help, that she can't control that she has theoretically good genetics for sport in that way. I mean, my sister got the brains in our family.

So I think that's the thing is there's this generational emphasis. I can't tell you in a hyper specialized world whether a generalized approach to sport success is going to work today. And I love Range. Look, I was a decathlete. I lead my organization with a decathlete mindset. The thing is, if your kid is, I don't know if they're in a hyper skill sport and you don't have necessarily the jumps and the speed to them, is that going to help them? Probably. Do I think that is what is best for kids overall? Absolutely not. Do I think that is what is best from a sport participation standpoint? Absolutely not. But I do take exception.

Rotherham: What does that mean? You might be right. I'm not disputing the point because you may well be right that the level of specialization means everybody has to, but from an equity standpoint, that's a pretty daunting, if that's true because the costs of these things, even just the camp I mentioned a minute ago, all this stuff is staggering and just out of reach for a lot of parents. And so different sports have different challenges around inclusion, diversity. If you are right, we need to rethink how we're creating those opportunities at the municipal and school level or we're never going to have a level playing field.

Mesler: No, I agree mean absolutely. Yes, there are sports like track and field, there are some other, let's call them pure. You're fast. Yes, you can get a little bit faster, but you're fast. I was the fastest kid on the soccer team. That's how my dad got me into track. But I think Andy, maybe one of the answers has to be, we have to think about, I don't know if we can change the momentum of this. What are you going to do tell private coaches to make less money and try to do that? I think the horse is out of the barn on this one. It's really hard to put it back in. If I'm a parent and I have the opportunity to give my child more training and more coaching and pay for better things, who as a parent isn't going to try to do that in a lot of standpoints?

I'm again 50/50 on how that is actually good for my child's development. When you talk about Europe, Europe has this overwhelming gymnastics space to their physical education programs, Europeans dominate Americans in general up until the junior ranks. What happens at the junior ranks, that U19 rank right after that, our NCAA system kicks in. So they have a wonderful foundation in gymnastics. Our kids do gymnastics 100%. That during the pandemic was painful. We have a tall gangly five and a half year old. So I really wanted her gymnastics and she missed a year, year and a half with that up here for sure. But they have the gymnastics base and then our demographics as well as our NCAA system kind of take over once that gymnastics foundation leaves and slightly better coaching at the youth age group level.

But then ultimately on the other side of it just becomes maybe we need to think about where we invest differently. Do we need to think about our philanthropy or our investments going towards programs like in Canada have something called KidSport, which pays for the fees for kids to compete. And I think that may be a more direct injection, better angle than trying to change the system and the mentality that is hyper american competitiveness, which benefits our society in a lot of ways, but from a haves and have-nots it clearly,

Rotherham: Well, you definitely can't bottle it up. And we're seeing out in the broader political landscape, what happens when you try to achieve equity by modeling up opportunity. People don't like that obviously. And you can't tell the coaches in a market economy to charge less. I think it's that third thing you just talked about. It reminds me a lot of the SAT, the affluent are always going to give their kids support on the SAT. We knew this. And so the strategy wasn't to attack them or try to get them to stop doing it was how do we start to have good SAT prep available for all kids to try to level. You're never going to completely level the playing field, that's life in a liberal democracy, but you can definitely shrink those gaps substantially. And I think the same thing here. How do you provide those kinds of skill?

And just from the beginning, those kinds of exposure, again, the kids see sports that they may not be aware of, their families may not be aware of just to make sure they're aware of just the broad range of things that you can do.

Horn: Well, and that strikes me as where schools can play a role and PE is to have a more gymnastic foundation and more exploratory with regularity of getting to sample lots of sports. So to your point, it's almost like a nudge as opposed to a, "thou out stop this behavior" sort of attitude as well as having these more equitable leagues that where the fees are paid for or covered for those who can't. I guess the question is how do we start to move that in schools? Because you know this Andy, reading and math has crowded out social studies and science for goodness sake in elementary school, which turns out to be critical for reading. But forget about that for a moment because we're so sort of hyper concerned about some of these things. How do we reverse these?

Rotherham: Yeah, well this is a classic. Look, schools have low capacity to react to these challenges. People crowded out other subjects, but if you're going to teach reading what exactly are the kids reading? That is how you should be teaching social studies. It's part of how you should be teaching science. So the curriculum narrowing to the extent it happened was the wrong way to actually, if you were serious about wanting to raise your test scores, it was the wrong way to do it in the first place. I think it's the same thing here. We know kids need to move around more than they do, and American kids move around less. It's good for them to be outside, it's good for them to be taking breaks. And we sort of limit those. We still have a lot of places where they take away your ability to move around as a punishment.

So if you act up, you lose the ability to go out for recess, when in fact the reason you're acting up may be because you need to be out there doing some of the stuff you do during recess. So I think it's achievable, Michael. It's one of these things schools need to actually look at what works, what does the research show potentially challenge some biases around some of these things and make sure kids are moving and doing these things. And again, you look again in some other countries, kids are just outside much more, they're much more active walking during the school day. These things, these habits and behaviors that you want. There's just a lot of inertia here and we don't do them.

Horn: Steve, I want to go to you on this because you said you want to bring in Classroom Champions and is it a conversation about Classroom Champions? This the opportunity, and just to hit a few controversial topics in this right, social emotional learning is its own hot button issue right now in the United States. You all at Classroom Champions are saying these are critical life skills for people to be successful, whether it's through sports or otherwise. And you've created this curriculum. I'm curious just talking about that, how do you define social emotional learning? What does it consist of what isn't included in SEL and how you approach that because you're obviously working with schools to help make sure that they embed this for kids?

Mesler: Yeah, no, I mean, thank you. And I think before I even jump into Classroom Champions, I think it's to talk about the role of sport and how can we help not change, but how can we help people lean into it? And I think ultimately look at Classroom Champions. We have our countries in the world's best Olympians, Paralympians, NCAA, pro-athletes. They are in the midst of their careers, not the gray haired has-beens like me telling my story. And I say that both in jest and in reality, which is when you're in the moment of something, you are never more clear of what you need to do to succeed. As I look back, I can say maybe I didn't need to be so serious. Maybe I didn't need to not have a drink on a Tuesday night randomly. Maybe I needed to not. But in the moment you couldn't have wavered me for that.

I had a drink once every four weeks on a Saturday night at the end of training cycles. There was never a casual Wednesday evening cocktail. But ultimately, if we can lean into those attributes and lean into that and look at sport as a cultural phenomenon today, sport is probably, and I'll say this without the data behind me, probably the one thing in our society that got politicized and snapped back in the last five years, basically nothing else has. You name me another thing, another piece of our society and culture that got politicized and then isn't just in whichever corner, if it landed on the right or if it landed on the left, it's just stayed there. Sport came back, they stopped kneeling, they did whatever they "made amends" to the people that they were offending on that side. And now literally, I just saw last week, 94 of the top 100 broadcasts in America, the things we watch together, the things you come into work the next day and go, "Hey, did you see that?" It used to be friends in Seinfeld and sport and this and that.

Now it's 94 broadcasts out of 100 were sport. And by the way, one that wasn't sport was also the Academy Awards. So competition. So when you think about the meritocracy, sport is a pure meritocracy. It truly is. And when you think about it Americans hunger for that. So there's still a societal need for a societal need for that. And there's places where we need to change those inputs. But ultimately Americans still watch sport because they're watching something that has a winner and a loser and they can watch it happen in front of them. So when it comes to how do we at Classroom Champions view SEL is we view these things as the things that sport brings kids and things that brings all to watch the inspiration, the hope, the stick to it-ness, the grit, the perseverance, all those things are previously black box skills.

"That Michael works hard, he's a hard worker." "Andy has a lot of grit." No, these are skills. These are skills that at some point somebody put a value on that either the self or somebody else and then taught them and then they worked on those skills. But for some reason it's been this black box where you come out of high school and you come out of college and you come out of any postgraduate work, whatever it is, and no one taught you these things explicitly. You were supposed to implicitly learn it. And did you learn those things or not? I couldn't tell you at Classroom Champions other than some of our higher education folks. I couldn't tell you exactly what everybody's degrees were, but I can tell you their personality. I could tell you what their stick to it-ness is, their conscientiousness, those things. And these, again, they're skills. So at Classroom champions we view SEL in that way.

We view them as, I don't love the word "life skills", but they are, it's just too broad. We view it as they are skills that do help with goal setting, perseverance, critical thinking, decision making, tenacity, teamwork. Our curriculum aligns with Castles five basics of SEL, self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, responsible decision making, rolling them all off. We align with that. But ultimately, how do you help schools use sport as a neutral place, apolitical place that everybody, whether you like sports or not, you are fascinated by them in general. You are fascinated by the people who do them. How do we use these people as a keystone for that and then bring an SEL program around it.

And that's the way we look at it. And I worry that we see sport as this separate thing in society. And I think sport has the opportunity to help build positive culture in so many ways. And we've seen the data on that at Classroom Champions. So I'll stop myself there. This is an area of where SEL, the politics of it all, the way that society still views sport are just this really, really big flashpoint for us.

Horn: Andy, I'd love your take on this because obviously Virginia has been no stranger to the debates over this question, but I really like the way Steve just phrased it as sport can cut through that and I don't know parents who don't want their kids to grow up with a sense of perseverance and a mindset of working hard leads to success when we get at that level. I don't know parents that disagree with those sorts of things. So is this sort of the way to cut through all this?

Rotherham: Well, yeah, I mean I would extrapolate from it. Classroom Champions is great, obviously as I said, I'm on the board. I don't think we're the only way to cut through it. I think the problem, and Steve didn't talked about the politics, the problem is right now, SEL's become one of these terms, it's impossible to define. Lots of things are flying under that flag and there has, and we should be honest about it, there's been an effort in some quarters to use SEL as a way to smuggle political ideas into classrooms in a way that I think parents are like, wait, that's not what I signed up for. So I think one of the most important things the SEL community needs to do is come up with, and especially the particular providers, come up with what they're talking about. I mean you listen to Steve can give you a very specific answer when we talk about SEL, the skills and so forth and what we're talking about.

And that they need to be willing to stand behind those definitions so we can start to have some clear lines in terms of what is these things around ethical behavior, good life skills like tenacity and grit, things like compassion and understanding and so forth. And then where does it morph into more political content that in a pluralistic society need to be very careful about having in the public schools. So I think that's the most important thing. And look, I mean you mentioned Virginia, so I'll just say one, a lot of the stuff that's flared up in Virginia and elsewhere, it's not organized curriculum. It's teachers freelancing because they're not being supported. And so they're being told by their school district to and make sure that they're talking about equity and equity's not even very clearly defined or make sure that they're talking about challenges of racism in society.

Then they're just told to go figure that out. And just like airplanes, you don't hear about all the ones that take off and land fine, but you do hear about the ones that don't and it doesn't take many where teachers cross lines, they may be well-intentioned but they downloaded something off of Pinterest or whatever it is, parents are upset about, that winds up on social media and the average parent doesn't know that that's something that some teachers freelancing, they just think, well that's the curriculum, that's what the schools are doing now. And it just raises the temperature. And so not just Classroom Champions, but lots of these providers across a range of things, teachers just need support and they need to be helped to take on different topics. You don't wake up in the morning knowing how to do this stuff. And we've done a really poor job supporting teachers on this stuff and in the process have done a real disservice to them.

Mesler: Yeah, and I think if I can echo what Andy's saying and build on that, which is ultimately from the politics side of things, I think Andy mentioned it and touched on it. Look, there's been people in the SEL leadership world who have, I remember as the social justice two summers ago happened where SEL was going to be a Trojan horse for social justice. We can't have Trojan horses in education. We can't. First and foremost period, whatever it is, yes, social skills and emotional skills are the basis for understanding each other and working with each other and doing those things so it can support kids and society's views and how we tackle our issues from a social justice standpoint, yes, but to view SEL as the mechanism as a Trojan horse that there was a time when everybody started just dumping and it's still happening.

Everybody's just dumping. If it's not math, science, history, et cetera, it's SEL. That's incorrect. Including mental health. Mental health is something you need reactive clinical professional people to support mental health. Look, I competed in the Olympic Games with six teammates. Two of them have taken their lives, I have spoken on this. I have worked with our performance teams at the Olympic committee on how to help athletes from these standpoints. SEL, we've seen it, we're seeing it in Monroe County schools that we support in southern Florida where they have, looking at our mentorship plus program, which is our higher level of our social-emotional learning curriculum or a higher level on top of that where you actually get matched with an Olympian or a Paralympian for an entire year and they communicate with the classrooms or at the schools that they're worked with and they're seeing improvements in mental health. But that's from a proactive SEL standpoint.

So I think what we have to really understand is call it SEL, call it whatever. We have to have proactive places in schools that we are teaching kids these skills to not just to cope but to thrive. And part of the coping skills are if you understand that people that are team USA Olympians are dealing with anxiety but perseverance through it, it makes your own struggles better and easier. But then we certainly need, and we're doing a better job reacting. You're seeing schools putting in counselors and social workers and other things like that. Not as much as we need, but we're doing a good job reacting to the trauma that our kids have gone through from an evidence-based trauma standpoint. But we're doing a lousy job continuing to Andy's point, you have math teachers, science teachers who are trained in those things who are now being "made" or asked to support the social emotional development of children and they're just not equipped. They don't have the tools in place. So I think that that is a big thing that we got to solve that quick.

Rotherham: And it's playing out against a really tough political backdrop. We should just name it, Michael, where essentially, not to overgeneralize too much, but you basically have a situation where you've got some folks on the right, far right who really are snowflakes about this stuff. You mentioned racism and they fall to pieces. And then you've got some folks on the left who they think a particular political view of the world is so self-evident that it should be taught to every kid. And those things are just colliding in really counterproductive ways. And most people are in the middle. They don't subscribe to either of those viewpoints and they're just getting sort of buffeted along for the ride. And we need more leaders to be willing to speak up and where necessary call BS on both sides so that we can have a more reasoned conversation.

Because the tragedy will be if some of what we're talking about with SEL, some of the things Steve's talking about here, and again, this is broader than just Classroom Champions, but the folks who are doing this work well if this kind of gets washed out in a backlash or people lose trust, and that'll be really unfortunate because there's a lot of really good important work.

And as you said earlier, Michael, most people, they want their kids to learn these skills. They want them to learn ideas like tenacity and how to solve problems, how to work with others. That's one of the reasons they send them to public schools in the first place.

Mesler: And let's not forget, reading is a goal. Learning to read is a goal. There are steps to that. We kind of skip over that with kids. We tell them to set a goal, we tell them to set a goal for an A, but then we kind of miss and skip over the fundamentals of how a goal works, which is that you will have short-term goals and medium-term goals, long-term goals. And oh, by the way, many of your short-term goals won't happen. So how do you adjust and how do you insert perseverance to do that? So I mean the data is incredibly clear when you're talking about double-digit percentage increases in academic performance with quality SEL style programs that are in there that are offering solutions and providing these skills to kids.

And I think that's the mind-blowing thing for us, which is sometimes I step back and go, man, how did we have education around this long where we just skipped over a few pretty darn important parts of life, let alone let alone learning? And I think there's where the opportunity for people like you to really help get the word out is like how do we help? And to Andy's point, we need leaders who are willing to be there. And I think that's a really hard place considering the politics around it right now.

Horn: But I love this conversation the way you've both framed all of this. And I guess that gets to the last point I just want to ask you both on as we wrap up here. It occurs to me we could go for a while, there's a lot of topics, but just focus on that, which is, you mentioned Steve, how you reach a goal, executive function skills, things of that nature that you're just not born with, it turns out. You need to learn. And so as we talk about resetting the place of sports and participation and building these skills in our youth and so forth, and you all have both, I think eloquently laid out the goal as we think about that one next step, maybe let's take the sports arena of resetting that in American society and one thing that ought to happen. What's that first step in your mind that we ought to be doing? Steve, you want to go first and Andy you get last word?

Mesler: Yeah, happy to. What's the first step? I think first step would be we need to find some places of agreement. Traditional problem solving 101, right? Conflict solving 101. We got to find some agreement. And again, I believe in the power sport, I believe in and in so many ways outside of we go back to the beginning of the conversation, which is what else we all do in here but trying to enjoy our lives and be healthy and pass that on to our kids. Given that, so I think coming to a place within, I think the schools are a key... Clearly the schools are a key to our society is where all of our children go at one point or another for extended periods of time in their life. So I think find a place of agreement. Sport could be one of those places where having sport influence, being an influence could be one of those places.

And if it is from a sport standpoint, then I think we've got to get together. We've got to get our major leagues together. And I think there's a huge opportunity there. Our professional and NCAA systems don't quite understand the power they can have in turning around our schools. And if they did, and that's what I'm trying to spend a lot of time, both from Classroom Champions perspective and a personal perspective, is showing them, look, NBA, NLF, MLS, NHL, MLB, NCAA, Women's National Women's Soccer League, WNBA, let's get all of you guys together in a room. Let's get the 50 state chief superintendents organization and the council of great city schools in a room, and let's talk about how can sport in a systematic way support the needs of the system.

And I think there's a huge opportunity to do that. So Michael, I think those two things, let's come to an agreement and find some agreements on how to move forward, if sport's one of those things, there is a giant hunger from the leagues, the teams and the players and the athletes to do something meaningful. And I think that's how sport can really make a difference in that way because that's where we aggregate everybody. You can get in sport more so than the arts, more so than in music and other places, you have places where you can get eight people in a room and you can speak for thousands of role models that our kids know and believe in a way that is more powerful and more systemic than anywhere else.

Rotherham: Yeah, I don't have anything to add. I thought that what Steve said, so that I'll just go in a slightly different direction and you said one thing I'll give two. Number one is gender equity in sports. I think we still have such a long way to go. And you were saying, Michael, you've got daughters, you're going to see this as they grow up in ways big and small, how girls sports are just second class citizens just across the board in all kinds of ways. Obvious in terms of access to facilities and time in weight rooms and in ways subtle in terms of the messages that are sent. And girls sports are great, they're exciting, and we need to build a culture like that. And it's exasperating when you go to high schools where the football team might be mediocre or the men's basketball team and the women's basketball team's great and it's barely supported and they're actually doing the winning or the volleyball team or whatever it is.

So I think that's a big culture shift where we still have a lot of work to do and in terms of a more inclusive society is really important. And then the second thing would just be, we've got to have a broader frame on this. We anchor off of elite sports. We love elite sports. Most people, the closest they're ever going to get to elite sports is the stands and we should be more open about that. And that's how you build a culture of kids continuing to play and so forth. And I think elite sports are great, they're exciting, but if you want people to just develop a love for sports and so forth, we need to broaden the frame.

And if you look at most of our most sort of fractious issues, whether it's toxicity in youth sports or issues around transgender athletes, it's all anchored on these really elite sports. When in fact, at a more broad level, these things aren't actually sort of huge issues. It's always on these places where it becomes zero-sum and we just need a broader frame if we want people to keep moving and so forth and not think sports are something you do until you're not good enough at some level, and then you stop rather than something you do in your life and as a part of your life.

Horn: Really well said. Steve, Andy, thanks for helping us unpack this topic and appreciate you all joining us in the future of education. We'll be back next time.

Anthony Kim has done some of the most impactful work in actually helping school districts implement innovations as the CEO and founder of Education Elements. Now the Chief Learning Officer of Scholarus, of which Education Elements is a part, Anthony joined me to talk about why simply switching out the curriculum of how students learn to read won't be enough to create actual change on the ground that leads to real outcomes. Implementation and operations will matter.

As always, you can listen to the podcast, watch it below, or read the transcript if you’re a paying subscriber.

Michael Horn:

I am incredibly excited about today's guest because he's been a longtime friend, collaborator in the field of education. Frankly, for almost as long as I've been in this world, I've known today's guest and he's someone from whom I've learned quite a bit, but someone who does incredible work on the ground as well. He's currently the chief learning officer of Scholarus. EdElements is a part of the Scholarus companies. Anthony Kim is our guest. He's also a serial entrepreneur in the education space and someone who's great at spotting the trends, but then also making sure that they actually get acted on to create real change on the ground to benefit human lives. So Anthony, it is great to see you. Thanks for joining us.

Anthony Kim:

Thanks for having me, Michael. And I'm happy to have this conversation more publicly. Because over the last 12 years, you and I have had a lot of conversations and worked on a lot of projects together where we talked about some of the things that we're going to talk about today. So, one I know we're generally and mentally aligned on some of the things that can happen in education. And so glad to be here and open to sharing some of the thoughts that with your audience that we would normally have in private, I guess.

Michael:

But really, Anthony, when I think about you, one of the things that I admire most about the work that EdElements has done over the years, and I'll say as a former board member, was proud of, was the way you worked with all sorts of school systems, from private schools to public school districts and individual schools and all the rest to not just help them innovate, but actually operationalize in a really strong way the work that they were doing. And maybe before we get into the topic that we both want to delve into today, I'd just actually love to have you reflect as a consultant that comes in with a school district say, and isn't just consumed with helping them think up the next big idea or create a fancy looking deck or whatever. But actually being committed to put into action what they're saying that they want to do. How have you all developed that capability? And where has that expertise come from for you?

Anthony:

That's the topic I wanted to talk about in general today. And quite frankly, I think a lot of that started day one when you and I were working together in creating the EdTech market map. So if you recall, that was 12 years ago maybe.

Michael:

Yeah, that's probably about right.

Anthony:

And we were asked with Ted Mitchell to start to organize EdTech at that time before people are starting to think about it. And when we were doing that research, I recall, there were so many good products out there. And everyone would argue incrementally, this product was slightly better than this product, or this one was good for middle school and this one was better for middle school or elementary. And there was a lot of debate around where they got categorized, what to use them for.

And I think from my early interaction with you and that work, we saw that implementations varied dramatically regardless of the quality of the product. And there were schools that implemented a very simple product really well and got results and there are schools that implemented something that was really sophisticated poorly and got bad results. And so that's when I started to wonder about more of the implementation as opposed to the product because I knew that a lot of companies were investing a lot of time and thought into the research of the products themselves and the efficacy of the products. But the idea of the implementation was always designed around perfect conditions. And we all know that implementations aren't in perfect conditions. And there are a couple things that we also learned when you and I were active promoters of blended learning and how hard that was to implement something that we knew would actually get results.

Michael:

Yeah, no, there's no question about it. And you all built a muscle around... It strikes me not just seeing the problem, but actually getting people to row in the same direction and operationalize. Let's stay one more beat on that before I jump into the topic du jour, if you will, which is just, how did you build that muscle then? You have a whole team. How do you help the schools and the educators themselves get that fidelity to implementation to what they've designed?

Or maybe that's the wrong question. Maybe there's another secret, but how do you get that discipline in actually enacting? Because again, you said it well, you hear all the time, our friends in the ed tech space, they'll come up to us and be like, "Our product's amazing if only they would use it right." And you're like, "Well, they're going to use it how they're going to use it. So you have to take that into account somehow." But it seems like you've done a really good job of both building systems and then getting people to execute in a realistic way. I don't know how else to say it. And I'm just curious how you've built that muscle, not just to recognize it, but build the muscle and see it enacted.

Anthony:

Yeah, I think part of it came from when we were doing all those tours during the heyday of no child... I mean NGLB, right? NGLC, sorry. Next Generation Learning Challenge, right? And it was race to the top and innovation grants. And there was a lot of visits to schools that were doing something slightly different. And different schools had different products that they were using, different ideas around grouping of students, different ways of scheduling students, whether it was sections or blocks. The variety of ways schools were getting implemented to create those innovations. And also the outcomes was pretty diverse. And I remember when you were at the Christensen Institute, you were doing that research too, and you were trying to show patterns through the different models.

Michael:

And we couldn't draw anything to advocacy because the implementations were totally different. Yeah.

Anthony:

Yeah. Right. But even with a station rotation model or a lab model or a flex model, one school would try to do a flex and do it really well like Carpe Diem, and other schools try to do that and did it really poorly. And so what I realized is that a lot of it has to do with the culture of an organization and the human reality of how people work together. And I think having been in startups for so long, there are a lot of companies that get started with similar ideas, but the actual implementation of the actual company and how they operate varies a lot too.

Michael:

No, that's super interesting. So let's get in the topic that has become hot, not just across the education space, but in a lot of communities, a lot of parent communities, people tuning in and all of a sudden, discovering this new phrase, the science of reading, if you will. And basically, for those that haven't followed, the basic idea, I don't think is actually anything that new. It's that teaching kids to decode and learn their phonics and pattern match what they're seeing on a page to the auditory sounds and then build fluency and so forth, turns out to really matter. You can't just guess at words and look at pictures and try to pick up hints and somehow be able to read more complex texts over time. But I think you're asserting that all these training programs around teaching teachers about the science of reading are changing out the curriculum that didn't do that, that did the triple cueing or whatever methods instead of building this foundation that, that won't be enough, if I'm understanding what you're arguing.

Anthony:

Yeah. I think that when we think about implementing something as comprehensive as a reading ELA program, and what I see happening right now are a lot of debates, classroom to classroom, building to building, state to state, whether one program approach is better than the other. And there's probably some variation. I've talked to some academics and professors that are arguing the benefits of both. One, they say is easier to implement and so easier to adopt as well. And other is more complicated to implement and also takes a lot of rote development of students. And so the reason it shifted to one form of the other is because the movement and the trend shifted because something was hard to do.

And so now we're at a place where something that seemed easier to do, actually doesn't seem to be producing the results that they had hoped. And so now they're like, "Okay, well let's go back to this other thing." And there's this whole debate now. So my experience in looking at this has been that there's a lot of conversation around the academics of it. But for anything to be implemented well, there needs to be a system of implementation. And just going back to what we started with, there's a way in which we see this thing being implemented, science of reading being implemented. Well, that seems to have more stickiness and the momentum building that we started to see in things like blended learning and personalized learning but didn't continue on. So what I wanted to create an analogy around is, you know the concept of the flywheel, right? Like The good [inaudible 00:10:54] Collin's flywheel.

And what he says is in the flywheel analogy is that through these small pushes and rotations, you start building momentum. And once you get to a certain level of momentum, it spins on its own. It has inertia to continue to spin. And if you actually don't do that, well, there's another term called the doom loop. And it reverses the progress. So when I think about our work with blended learning and personalized learning, what the early stages of the flywheel were funding through programs like NGLC or Race to the Top. Examples of pilot schools that are doing different things, and that's what Christensen Institute did a lot of studying around. And then other communities that practice Digital Promises, League of Innovative Schools started to create this momentum because every year, there were new members that wanted to become members of the Digital Promise, League of Innovative Schools. More grants were given out. And then more pilot schools were created.

And so people were like, "Okay, I got to jump on that." And it created the necessary momentum around the flywheel. So if you want to do something like that around a shift towards science of reading, what do you need? And that's what I started thinking about. And one is teaching conditions and teacher mindset. And the way I think about it is, if I'm trying to do a diet in November going into Thanksgiving and the holidays, it's unlikely I'm going to be successful. If I try to start a diet in January, it might be a better time. But still, most people are unsuccessful in that timeframe. So my mindset has to be right in order for me to fully commit to something. In addition to the fact that there has to be less roadblocks and things like that.

So one is just what makes the right conditions for a group of people to be successful in implementing something new for a set of goals that they have? And I think that's a human condition thing. The next piece is professional learning communities, PLCs. And you know whether you're training for something like crossfit or doing a diet or I'm training for something or I'm trying to learn something new, having that community to share stories and share experiences together is really key to maintaining momentum.

And then the third piece is systems of support. And in the case of the work we're doing in Texas where the state of Texas is actually providing certification and funding and time to do those things, that those three things working together allow for that flywheel of implementation to take place. You get into doom wheel when there's fewer successes, small successes, smaller wins. You don't have wins, so you don't see improvement. Then you start getting into a doom wheel. And when you start seeing a lot of negative activity where people are saying, well, this or that doesn't work, or they're constantly bashing you about stuff. And I think we saw a little bit about that in the blended learning world where people were talking about too much tech, blah, blah, blah. Then Covid comes along, and it's like, "Everyone, we need tech."

Michael:

Yeah. And then all of a sudden, we were disaster situation. So mindsets, the professional learning communities around you, systems of support that reinforce that. Those are the three big ones. I was going to ask you, you started to allude to it, who's doing it well? It sounds like Texas has put some things in place, but who would you spotlight that seems to be getting that balance correct?

Anthony:

In the blog post around this that I wrote, which is called Implementing the Best in Imperfect Conditions, Tips to Making Change in Instructional Practices at Scale. The way I see it happening is at a school level, different teachers are excited about something like science of reading. And then what's happening is that they have to expend so much energy convincing people. And so there are a few schools that are implementing it really well. And then at a district level, I think one of the things that is hard is there's, as you know, educator exhaustion. There's leadership changes. And so what happens a lot of times when districts have those things happen, especially leadership changes, it's like, well, every time a new leader comes in, they want to reevaluate everything. So that is challenging for programs like this because you're constantly restarting and re-validating what you're trying to get done.

So you never really get to the point where you get that flywheel motion and you get into the doom loop. So I think states like Texas are actually starting to think about it in a way where there's a longer term plan, there's strategies that are supporting at scale, and they understand that different clusters of teachers are at different stages of mental readiness. And so they're anticipating that. And I think they'll be more successful than other states trying to implement science of reading or something else, just because of the way they're thinking about readiness, longer term planning, and also the fact that people are coming at different starting points and need different lengths of time. And a lot of times when I see schools trying to implement programs, they think everybody's educated at the same level, they're ready at the same level, and they're going to commit the same amount of... Put of time into implementation.

Michael:

It's funny when you say that. Frankly, it's the same problem with the school system writ large, which is that we feel like, oh gee, you were born in the year of the rabbit. Therefore we expect on September 1st that you have automatically already learned these things. Maybe you have, maybe you haven't. Maybe you've learned much more. Maybe you've learned much less. But we're all going to give you the same thing no matter what. And obviously that doesn't work well. And the same is true with teachers also. The other piece that I just pull out there is you talk about building on successes, and I've said, just like they say success is the best deodorant in team sports, that it sort of masks over problems among the team chemistry and makes people get along and get excited and we'll get on board and builds culture.

I think the same thing is true in education. It attracts parents. It attracts teachers. A lot of the school board fights go away if you have this sense of momentum and success that we're all, we're moving towards something desirable. In the blog post, you brought up something... You talked about the Jim Collins work. But you have another trendy book in there, James Clear's Atomic Habits, that I think relates to some of this. So why don't you just spell that out. Because I think it's an interesting set of points and I think it's one that resonates with individuals, frankly. If Jim Collins speaks to an org leader, Atomic Habits I think right now speaks a lot to individuals making changes in their lives.

Anthony:

And I think you bring up a great point. One of the problems I see that's different in terms of just wins in education versus other industries that I've been in is when a school wins, there's a lot of questions that come up. You just don't take it for granted that they did it well. People are like, "Well, that school leader, those kids were different, they got this extra money," or whatever it is. And we've seen that happen over and over again. And so the credibility of wins are often questioned instead of just saying, "Hey, I could win too."

And I think that's a really tough mindset in the education space right now because in other industries, when people see other people winning, they're like, "I could do that too and I'm going to win and I'm going to do it." And that's how we get Silicon Valley. That's how we get innovation happening. And we often try to stifle innovation in school systems because we're always questioning the validity of something or how they did it or why they won instead of just appreciating it. And so that's where I think the Atomic Habits does come in. And what I like about James Clear's work is, it's repetition, discipline, and small wins. So he talks about 1% change. If you do 1% change cumulatively over a year, you make massive amounts of change.

And he says, let's say if you want to become a runner, you could start by saying, "Well, I want to run ultra-marathons at 50 miles or a hundred miles," and that's a daunting task and it looks scary. And then you're going to try and you're going to realize you can't even run 10 miles straight. And so if you want to start a runner and you haven't been a runner, maybe the first step is just getting up to run every day.

That's 1%. You just got up, got out of the door because, first, you just need to build the habit of getting dressed and getting out the door. And I think part of the reason why a lot of folks that you hear on other podcasts and stuff and self-improvement books talk about cold showers and cold baths, it's not only the physical benefit, but it's the idea that you could put yourself in a condition every day that's uncomfortable for short periods of time. And building that repetition, even with something as simple as a shower, creates the notion that you could do hard things over a longer period of time and you're building that habit and muscle memory.

Michael:

So I'd love to bring this back to the classroom. I suspect some people tuning in are like, "Okay, this all makes sense. But at the end of the day, I'm subbing in a textbook from the textbook I had before. It's better written. I've got new lesson plans. Is this really that hard? Are we complicating this too much?" To that person who's maybe looking at it that way and feels like it's just a, change the ingredients, stir once and then repeat, why is this more complicated when we're talking about science of reading than that specific mental model I think some people have when they come to this conversation? In particular, which I'll just add, I think a lot of people think it feels different from other conversations 'cause it feels like, well we use swap textbooks all the time. We're not asking anything more than that. So why is that mental model too simplistic around this?

Anthony:

Yeah, I think one of the reasons it's hard is because somehow the idea of phonics got marketed with various companies, different ways. And it created a mental model of the problem with it too. And so now I think when you start bringing up phonics, people think Hooked On Phonics. And that wasn't a great thing. And it was kind of a sham and whatever. And so there's a lot of preconceived biases that exist. And that's one thing you just have to get rid of in order to start getting to that 1%. It's like, you think it's bad, then you're not going to naturally want to implement it. So one is, you just have to get those small wins, those 1% wins by trying it, and trying a little bit of it. We're not asking you to do something major. Just let's start trying small things to see if you could see the improvement instead of just having that biases and saying that it won't work because that's preventing you from doing it.

Michael:

Very cool. Last question as we wrap up here. You love to make prognostications and look into your crystal ball for the year ahead. We're still early in 2023. You're thinking a lot about this topic, implementation, science of reading, but you're also looking at the broader landscape. Any big predictions or things that you see coming that maybe the rest of us are blind to right now?

Anthony:

Yeah, thanks for asking that. Yeah, because I do try to do the predictions every year and some ears are definitely easier than others. One, everyone knows about the political landscape and we have elections, we have ESSER and all of that. So that creates some unique conditions. But one, I think there's going to be a refocus towards career education and a re-looking at what that should be. And because Perkins 5 was reinstated and such, there's funding in around this. But what's interesting is, there's growth in things like AR and VR in this particular space because I think also Covid made it hard for people to actually go into offices anymore to experience what happens. So now you are stuck with those experiences in a virtual mode. So that's one area. And then I start, I know chat GPT and AI is a hot topic. But it was one of my predictions too that AI is going to come up again because one of the things that we heard from school districts which was interesting is that a lot of districts implement... bought tutoring services, for example.

And when you buy stuff at scale at a short period of time and those companies are trying to ramp up too, and we saw that with Amazon and we saw that with other even larger companies, even Zoom, it's hard to keep up with the demand at a rapid pace. And so I think quality was really different and varied in a lot of the programs like that. And what students have found is that sometimes, it's just better to have AI interact with you. And if you had to return something on Amazon or you had to interact with some sort of customer service angle, a product, basically you are often interacting with AI and you don't even know it. And so it's gotten to a point where you don't know until you get to the 1% problems, not the 99% problems. And I think that, I'm not talking about the plagiarism stuff like that, but sometimes the experiences through AI seem to be more consistent and people are getting more and more familiar with it through the experiences that we all had together.

Michael:

Super interesting, super interesting, and a different take on AI and how it's going to keep coming into the school system no matter what educators and their well-meaning efforts try to ban it or the like. Anthony, appreciate you coming by and it's just good to catch up and hear what's on your mind. And I think a set of lessons around the implementation that people would do well to heed now rather than go five years from now, the hype around science of reading and then we're back in the other cycle where there's a backlash to it because we didn't think about these things up front.

Anthony:

Yeah, and I agree and I think we're at a interesting stage in education, and you might have thoughts around this, Michael, because you're talking to so many people, but we went through this rapid adoption and change during Covid. Now people are talking about things like learning loss and stuff like that, teacher retention issues, all sorts of things that are destabilizing the infrastructure. And we have the option to go down and rebuild what we had or we modify and evolve and rebuild something different. And I'm not sure which direction the industry's going to go. But I do think that there's a little bit more towards doing something slightly different than there was before even just because parental understanding of education is heightened much more than it has been in the past.

Michael:

I totally agree with that. And I think while I'm dismayed, I think, often by the number of places that are just going back to business as usual. As you know from your board role with the National Micro Schooling Center, and we had Don Sofer on here as well. To your point, there are a lot of parents and there's a lot of educators that are saying, "No, we're not going to go back to normal," and are creating all sorts of novel innovations and ways of doing schooling and ways of connecting with students and flexible schedules and the like that work for frankly also a big shift in family units and what parents need from school as well that doesn't fit in the 8:30 to 3:00, if you will, window for a lot of families. And I personally think that's a positive because I think that'll also create more pressure on the districts to innovate as well and figure out new ways to reach not just the students, but also the families in a larger sense.

Anthony:

Great. Well thank you Michael. Thanks for having me.

Michael:

Yeah, look, Anthony, thank you for the work you're continuing to do. Appreciate it. Folks, check out the blog post. I'll include it in the link here as well. And keep an eye out on what Anthony is writing about and what they are doing on the ground. And we'll be back next time on the Future of Education.

Microschools have been around for many years, but many more people enrolled in them during the pandemic. In this conversation, I chatted with Tiffany Dudley, an educator who helped cofound a microschool to help her son during the pandemic. She's also the co-leader of the Black Mothers Forum’s Economic Development Team. The Black Mothers Forum strives to give students of color opportunities that have eluded them through mainstream education channels. Arizona awarded the Black Mothers Forum microschool $3.5 million in 2021 to develop up to 50 additional microschools throughout Arizona.

What's the secret, according to Tiffany? “It’s the autonomy that their children have, where they’re more of a participant in their education instead of just a bystander in the background,” she said. “At the microschools they had a lot more freedom; they’re able to learn through project-based; to take the things that interest them.”

As always, you can listen to the podcast, watch it on YouTube below, or read the transcript if you’re a paid subscriber.

Michael Horn:   Welcome, welcome, welcome to The Future of Education where we are obsessed with helping all individuals build their passions and fulfill their human potential. Today's guest is Tiffany Dudley, and I'm going to give a bit less of a bio here because I want Tiffany really to tell her own story. But in brief, she's an educator, she's an education entrepreneur, she's a mom and she's the co-leader of the economic development team at the Black Mothers Forums. Tiffany and I first got to know each other because we were both panelists at a session, at a recent education conference. And I was so struck by the work that she was doing that I just wanted to highlight it here on the Future of Education Show and have her tell the story. Because I think it's a powerful narrative into the shift that's starting to happen in education, not just in Arizona where Tiffany lives, but frankly nationwide. So first Tiffany, welcome to the show. I just appreciate you joining us and it's good to see you.

Tiffany Dudley: Thank you. Thank you for having me here. I'm really excited to be able to join you today. So I was really glad I got that invite to be here with you today.

Horn:                110%. Are you in Arizona today?

Dudley:             Yes, I am in Arizona today. Enjoying the weather out here.

Horn:                I was going to say, don't make us all feel jealous here in New England, but-

Dudley:             Yes.

Horn:                So let's start with a little bit of your own background. You helped found a micro school as we'll talk about. But before that, as I recall anyway, you were an educator in a charter school. So I'd love to hear more of that part of your story of getting into education and the work you were doing in that school.

Dudley:             Okay. Well I kind of accidentally ended up in teaching. My background was a degree in interior design and I actually, had been a stay at home mom for a few years and happened to attend a mandatory parent meeting at my oldest son's school. And at that meeting they were looking for an aide, a paraprofessional to be inside of the classroom. And so I was like, I've been a stay at home mom for a few years and this would be a good way to get back into the work field. And the convenience of being able to work at my son's school part-time was perfect.

                        And so I end up applying and getting the position and I was not there very long before I realized that how much I loved being in the classroom and being able to help the students and being able to shape and help guide the kids through their learning process. And what started out to be like a temporary job ended up turning into eight years that I ended up at that charter school. By the end of it I started as an aide and ended up as the fourth and fifth grade teacher of the classroom because we had dual classrooms.

Horn:                Just tremendous. And so your son's enrolled in that charter school, you're teaching at the charter school, things are going well if I remember and then COVID hits. And I'd love to hear what happened and what you started to see.

Dudley:             Yeah, once COVID hit, by the time COVID hit, all three of my children were attending that charter school. And since we were a smaller school, we did shut down for a brief minute but was able to stay open. But it had a hard time with the numbers and being able to help the families, having issues with the technology because that's when a lot of families didn't have the technology or the internet capabilities to be able to do online school. So it became just a real challenge. And during that time is when I got introduced to Janelle Wood and Deborah Colbert-Green who are the Founder and CEO of Black Mothers Forum. And they were founding and building a micro school and being on one of their information sessions, I originally thought this would be a good place to place my child because he was having difficulty staying focused and being engaged in the school where he was at. Even though I was a teacher there, I think I was more so a distraction being a teacher there instead. So it was a very interesting topic to hear more about.

Horn:                Super interesting. And I'm just sort of curious, that's a big move, right? I mean any parent that sends their kid to a school, I think often you say, okay well they're going to be there until the school runs out of grade levels, they go to the next one. And plus you're a teacher there, there's an emotional tie, this is where you work. And so what was happening that you sort of said, gee, we're going to make the switch and actually start this micro school. What jumped out at you about it?

Dudley:             I think it was the autonomy that the children have, where they're more of a participant in their education instead of just a bystander in the background. Normally at how we were taught to teach is that we have information, that we give the information to the child and basically we tell them what they're going to learn and what they're going to do and in what order they're going to do it. But at the micro schools, they had a lot more freedom, they were able to learn through project based, to take the things that interest them, that they're interested in learning to be able to dive deeper and study into it. The very smaller classroom sizes was a big thing. The micro schools have a very short number. This one had a max of 10 kids per classroom. And so being able to be in that space where you can get the one-on-one help, being able to have that autonomy to learn and ask questions and to grow at your own pace.

                        And that was kind of the things that attracted me to the micro schools, especially in regards to my child because he was having a lot of time, hard time focusing. He didn't want to be at school. He just had lost all interest in learning whatsoever. And at home it had become more like a fight to get him to do his work, to get up in the morning. And it was starting to shift and change the dynamic between the mother and son relationship. Because now when we're not home, I'm still not mommy, I'm still teacher because I'm having to be on him about doing this work and this is what you have to learn.

                        And so just going through that, I knew that something needed to change. And so when I saw the microschools and I was like, I believe it would be a really good fit for him. And so a little bit of fear, because change is big. The school that he was going to was the only school that he had been to, so he had never been to any other school. And so I was nervous of how he would adjust to the change. But it ended up being such a smooth transition and one of the best transitions he's did. So I was super happy to see how that go.

Horn:                Super interesting. But what's also interesting is, it wasn't just him that made the transition. As I understand it, you made the transition as well and helped found the microschool. Tell us about that jump and leap and what that meant for you personally and professionally?

Dudley:             But yes, I was at one of the microschools, one of the teachers that was there from the beginning. So from the beginning of its inception I was there and it was a big jump because this is new. The micro schools is something that hadn't been done and organized in such a way. So it was kind of a scary jump to be able to make that transition. But at the same time, there's also, you know there's something that needed to be changed. I saw the need to have it changed even in the lives of my own children and they're not the only ones that I've seen that they need a different approach when it comes to education. And I believe that the micro schools was that approach to be able to take. That it would give that opportunity that we needed to change the dynamics of education, to change that narrative.

Horn:                I'm curious, do all three of your kids now go to that microschool or how has that shaken out?

Dudley:             My two youngest one does. My oldest one is just in high school, so they don't have the microschool for his age. But my two youngest children do go. And it has been such a beautiful transition for them, just to see them not be so down casted when it comes to learning. Like, "Oh, I have to do this. Oh, I have to do this." So it's no longer a fight to get them to want to do stuff. Now they'll ask questions about things that we're doing in the classroom and sometimes they'll even take the initiative to dig deeper and learn themselves to come share in the classroom.

                        So that transition has been beautiful and even at home as well. So now I don't have to fight with them to do work as much, so when I go home I can be just mommy. So it has also improved our relationship as well too. So with both of my children, it took them a little bit to get used to it because they're in the same classroom, so they're around each other all day. And so at first you would see a lot of the bickering that you do within siblings, but even that itself has started to smoothed out as they mature and as they dive deeper into the learning and asking the questions of things.

Horn:                Wow, that's something I'm taking notes on as a parent of twins where I'm always wondering about how that might shake out if they're in the same class. But I'm curious, because that harmony is something I talk a lot about with parents is like, you don't want to be fighting with your kids about what's going on in school. You want to be their advocate and behind them. It sounds like you were able to make that work and align those things in your personal life, on top of the fact that I guess there's been a bunch of policy changes in Arizona that's made micro schools more possible.

Dudley:             Yes.

Horn:                So I'm curious, what's the state of microschools more broadly in Arizona and the current context of the microschool, how many students are there? How how's it going today as we've really emerged on the other side of at least the pandemic piece of COVID?

Dudley:             Right. And definitely in Arizona, they do make it a lot easier to have the microschools out with the laws that are already in place and the support with school choice that's out here. And so our microschools are able to grow and expand a lot easier and be formed. Our current microschools will go up to 10 students per classroom. And we normally have two coaches inside of each classroom. So there's a one to five ratio when it comes with the kids. And so that in itself creates that harmony that you were speaking of. When you're in a setting where you really get to know the people around you, you really get to know your teacher, you really get to know your other classmates, you become comfortable and they almost become a little bit of a family, like little cousins that they call each other.

                        And so just them feeling that safe and comfortable in an environment, tends to drop down their defenses. And so they're not all defensive or guarded all day. Being on your guard all day is kind of exhausting. And when children live in that state of guardedness, I don't know what's going to happen, especially coming from post pandemic because there are so many changes. And so mentally and emotionally they're all guarded. But when they're in an environment that they feel safe, where they feel secure, where they feel protected, being in that environment really helped my children be able to feel safe. Especially being in an environment with The Black Mothers Forum where they were able to see guides and other students that looked like them as well.

Horn:                Yeah, it seems incredibly powerful. And I guess it's where I want to go next, is shifting into this more macro work you do with The Black Mothers Forum as well. Why don't you actually tell us about that organization first and the work you do there before we get into the connection with your education journey?

Dudley:             Okay yeah. The Black Mothers Forum their mission is to educate, organize, and take action. And in this regard as relates to school, there was a lot of issues that the mothers, there were just mothers at the time were seeing that was going on in the education system. Just injustices the things that were going on. And so they were advocating for these families, trying to help them, going to school boards and going to the meetings and stuff to advocate for parents whose children were being unjustly treated in the classroom and by administration. And so within that work, they kept coming together, coming together, and then Black Mothers Forum was created to form, to help go for advocacy is how it started. But as the years went by and they're still working in this fight to get the same treatment for all children, that it turned into a place that maybe what we're looking for and what we're needing is not there. Maybe we have to create that environment.

                        And so that's when the ideal of the creating a school was born. And COVID kind of helped shift those things with the emergence of these micro schools. And that's kind of how the micro schools were formed in that need. And so the micro schools are targeted to help our Black and brown children because in Arizona we tend to see those statistics or those are the ones that tends to fall in those cracks. And so those are the ones that need a lot of help, that needs a lot of love and attention.

Horn:                So it's interesting, if I understand it because essentially The Black Mothers Forum exists to take action to make sure that there's these avenues for these microschools or other such interventions that-

Dudley:             Yes.

Horn:                Create pathways if you will, for the young to really allow them to flourish in many ways. And when you're describing having a school environment where kids can let down their guard, they don't have to be on their defensive self where they can see role models that look like them and so forth and really make that identification. And then be picking work that's meaningful to them to learn the various standards and so forth. It seems like in many ways that's... Culmination is probably the wrong word, but it's a great manifestation of the work that Black Mothers Forum is doing to make something really tangible that parents can opt into. Is that sort of the theory of change? And where do you see it going as this continues to play out?

Dudley:             Well, I see them growing a lot. The need especially post COVID, the need for something smaller or the need for change has been driven to the forefront just by society itself, wanting to see some kind of change. I think the eyes were opened of all that teachers do and what is required when a lot of the kids had to stay home when that pandemic hit. And so a lot of parents and stuff are seeing what's going on specifically with their child, because a lot of parents didn't really get eyeballs in the classroom, so to say, to see how their children processes through work. And COVID kind of allowed that. So coming out of that, we are seeing a more demand of a need for change and it can change in a different way. So I see it growing tremendously.

Horn:                So it strikes me that you're really empowering parents then to be able to make a choice and not feel like that they're at the mercy of the 'system' and that they have these personalized options. I'm curious, you get to talk to the families who are enrolling in the micro school. Is that the motivation that they bring or what sort of drives them to find this?

Dudley:             I think most of it is just the need for their child to feel safe. Because a lot of times when people come to us, they've tried all the avenues that they know how to try. They tried working with teachers, they've tried working with administration, they've tried moving to different schools and they just can't find the right fit that they're looking for for their child. And a lot of times they often don't know exactly what it is. They just know that what I am in right now is not working and I need to change something. I need to do something else. And so when we come here, they're just looking for something. And what they don't know is a place where we can look at the child, the whole child holistically and not just the academic portion of the child.

                        A lot of schools, they really just focus on the academic portion. Are they learning the standards? Are they learning the curriculum? But they don't really get a chance to look at the whole child holistically. Are you emotionally okay? Are you physically okay? What is wrong with you in general? And oftentimes when you have 30 kids in one classroom, there just isn't time for you to be able to do that or form those kind of bonds that the children at that age kind of need.

Horn:                So it's fascinating on so many levels. Because what you're describing I think mirrored with the research that we did around why parents switched their kids' school. And one of the big reasons is the current place, it's just not going in a good direction. I need that escape valve and something is going to be better than what it is now. And so they're making that leap to get out of a bad situation in many cases. And it seems like your answer in many ways is this more personalized feel. And as we wrap up here, the last question I'm curious is, for you as an educator, having been an aide, taught in a more conventional school and so forth. Now you move to this environment where you get this incredibly nice student teacher ratio, you get to do the projects, you're following the interests of the kids, you're getting to attend to the whole child. What was hard about that transition or what have you learned maybe is the better question out of that transition for you professionally that you might not have expected when you got into teaching originally?

Dudley:             It was a whole lot of things that came out of this transition. Number one is, I didn't realize how lacking it was until I got out of the environment. To be able to... Just noticing how the children react now if a child came in and not a good mood or something like that. How you treated it at a public school is very different than how I can treat it now. Well before, you still have to come in, I see you're looking different than normal, but you still have to come in, you still have to sit down, you still have to get to work. And if things are not going well, then I send you to a nurse or I send you to a counselor or I send you somewhere else. But here, when a child comes in, I'll be like, the first thing I ask is, "Are you okay? Or do you want to talk about it or do you want to journal it?"

                        Because they have their own journals and so have them let it out. And over time they start talking and they start sharing and you're almost like a counselor, or just a listening ear so to say. But that student teacher relationship shifts a lot. And so that was one that I was not expecting. But I do love how beautiful it looks when it comes. Because when a child fully feels comfortable and lets down all their guards, watching them blossom, it's just so beautiful when you see that curiosity and that passion ignited once again to be able. To see their eyes of wonder that open up when we're doing experiments and things like that.

                        It is so wonderful to be able to see that light bulb turn on in children again. And so that was one thing that I was not expecting to see come out of it, is that closeness relationship. Not only do they open up, but I open up a lot too about what my passions are. Also, the work that I do with the economic development team of Black Mothers Forum, I'm able to share that in the classroom as well too. Teaching them how they run their own businesses, how economics and how finances work. Something that they typically won't get in elementary school in class, we're able to incorporate that in as well.

Horn:                That's powerful. And it occurs to me that in many ways you're illustrating the truth that we know from the research, which is that when you're on your defensiveness, when everything's coming at you, the ability to be curious or creative or inventive, it's just not there. But once you create that safe space, you open everything up. So I lied, I guess one more question, which is-

Dudley:             Oh yes.

Horn:                If you're speaking to parents right around the country, around the world who are trying to figure out how to unlock those opportunities for their kids, what's your biggest piece of advice to them as they go on this journey, advocating for their children?

Dudley:             Is to just keep speaking up. A lot of times we see parents get very discouraged as they're trying to look and trying to fall in other alternatives and things. It's just to keep speaking up. Oftentimes we find that in our children as well too. When they come to the microschools, they don't know how to speak up for themselves. So you ask them questions and they don't know how to respond because they're so used to being silenced or used to not being listened to. And we see that reflecting in a lot of parents too. It's just to just keep searching, keep advocating, keep speaking up. There are options. And now more and more, you see more of these micro schools popping up, more of these different ideas in traditional schools popping up everywhere. And just to keep looking and keep speaking out and keep advocating for your child.

Horn:                It's a super powerful message. You are a super inspiring example of living it.

Dudley:             Thank you.

How do we measure not how smart someone is, but how they are smart? That's the question that Elliott Washor and Big Picture Learning have sought to answer with their innovation—the International Big Picture Learning Credential. Exactly how they have built this set of credentials and made it valid and reliable is the topic of my conversation with Elliott—and what it might portend for the future of learning. As always, you can listen to the conversation here or on your favorite podcast player (just search the Future of Education), watch the conversation at YouTube below, or read the conversation below in full if you’re a paying subscriber.

Michael Horn:                Welcome, welcome, welcome to the Future of Education where we are obsessed with helping all individuals build their passions and fulfill their human potential. And today's guest has been doing that for a heck of a lot longer than I've been involved in trying to transform education and he's been doing the work in a variety of ways, really by pushing the envelope or even ripping up that envelope and throwing out the playbook altogether and innovating. His name is Elliot Washor and among the many hats that he has worn and had, he's the co-founder of Big Picture Learning. He’s the co-founder of the Met Center in Providence, Rhode Island. And we of course have had learners from Big Picture Learning schools on the show we've had Andrew Frishman on the show. But the topic that I really want to dive in with Elliot on is the international Big Picture Learning credential, which in the words of Elliot to me, “Changes the equation by measuring how an individual is smart, not just how smart they are.” And I think that's a really profound flip and an exciting set of opportunities. So first, Elliot, welcome. It's really good to see you. I assume you're coming to us today from San Diego?

Elliott Washor:           Yeah, it's not what people think. It's raining and chilly here today. I got a sweater on even. I don't mean to make anybody feel bad who's in real cold weather, but not all is perfect in San Diego like people think.

Horn:                Well, still close enough to paradise I suspect. But before we really dive into the nuts and bolts here, let's talk about this credential that you all have created. It was developed by Big Picture Schools, as I understand it in Australia, and then the University of Melbourne I think partnered on this to sort of vet and bless it if I understand. But tell us a little bit more about what it really is and why it's unique.

Washor:           And I feel that over the five decades that I've been working that... And we've all in very good ways, many of us, struggle with assessment, constantly that our colleagues in Australia and the Viv White who's the co-executive director of Big Picture Learning in Australia and her staff and we have about 40 schools there, have come up with something that contribute a lot to the field. So what happened was, is that Viv took Big Picture's learning goals, which are basically pretty easy to understand by anybody in that we like to credit students around how they apply their academics in and outside of school with mentors and teaching staff as advisors in the real world and in school, once again in communities.

                        What they did was they took the learning goals and they went to the University of Melbourne to the psychometricians there, the head of whom is Sandra Milligan. And they said, "We want to credit teacher judgment, student self-assessment and mentor judgment and we need a warranting and validation entity to do that." And Sandra and her team collaborated with our schools and developed an algorithm that as you put the information in, through once again teacher judgment, student self-assessment and mentor judgment, it spun out a validation that vetted and warranted that this was real, that what they actually said they did, they did. And then our students applied to universities, colleges, technical schools, and the workplace in Australia and it lo and behold it was accepted without using standardized test scores or GPAs.

Horn:                These areas now that they're vetting are things like communication skills, empirical reasoning, quantitative reasoning as I understand it, personal qualities and sort of metacognition or knowing how to learn, I think. What are those artifacts that they're feeding in or into that algorithm really look like?

Washor:           So basically it is students create their own learner profile, which is both text and video, that's a piece of this, and that can start and we see this starting kindergarten all the way through. Right now we're doing some work at the K to eight level with this, excuse me, but it's mostly at the high school level. And when a student has compiled their work, both they're in school work and they're out of school work, which for us are connected, they put it together and run it through what they call this pedal or ruby, which looks like those six measures in them. The learning how to learn, one is metacognitive as well as disciplinary thinking, how to learn to think in a discipline.

                        And once again, all that work is looked at and vetted all the way through. And then in the junior year and senior year it goes into the University of Melbourne to be vetted and warranted and they somehow spin it out with an algorithm that they're working on to get better and better. And it's pretty good now. And lo and behold, it worked. It gave enough validation and credibility to what many of us needed.

                        So for example, if you have a portfolio from any school, how does that university, workplace, technical school know that it's real? And that's the function of what Uni Melbourne is doing. And I don't know why we never thought of it like that before. It seems pretty simple and smart what Viv and her colleagues came up with, but we hadn't. And so we just relied on sending out transcripts if you will, and portfolios. Now if there really is, and there is developing a clearing house around this, we can utilize a university, a trusted place, to vet and warrant these three things around student learning. So now what happened was in the research and at the end we can point you to the research that's been done in Australia by third parties, we found out that indigenous students, immigrant students are getting into places that they normally wouldn't get into, because it's not about how smart you are, how you look to a test, but it's how you are smart. And all of a sudden people are starting to recognize that and go, "Wow, this is really, really different. This makes a lot of sense."

Horn:                Super interesting. And as I understand it, in each of those six areas, there's five levels. So I can say in effect, "Here's my portfolio of work, the things I know and can do and show application of." And it's going to say, "Great Michael, you're a level four communicator." I'm making this up right. "You're a level three in your quantitative reasoning." Whatever it is. Basically these mastery thresholds.

Washor:           Yes.

Horn:                I assume. And then that's going to create a very simple portfolio of who I am. I say simple in the sense of it's a quick representation for a university or employer or whatever. And then they can dig into it to start to say, "Okay, what does that mean Michael can actually do and let's actually look at the work in itself and the exam."

Washor:           Yes. And before it gets to that point, there's professional development where staff from the same school and staff from different school look at different students work and rate it. So there's that piece going into that algorithm as well. And then that university psychometric work is saying, "Yes, it is what they say it is." And that's really powerful and important. So there's a lot to it that makes teacher professional development and judgment, it raises the bar on that, if you will.

                        And what we're finding out, and we've started it in the United States with about 25, 30 schools in California, Washington state and New York, is that the algorithm, the teachers are harder on the students and the students are harder on themselves than the algorithm is. So there's all this play going on, which I feel is really very healthy.

                        Now, the implications for that are pretty amazing, because now you can credit learning that happens outside of school, as well as inside. Now you're crediting tacit learning, where you know more than you can say, you can show things. Now you're crediting fluid intelligence and young people recognizing patterns that come out culturally and in their communities and from their neighborhoods and families. So it looks, it's taking this to another level. We've also instituted it in or started it in where we have schools in Barbados and Kenya and that it's working very well there as well.

                        So what we're looking for now and what the University of Melbourne is doing, Sandra Milligan and Viv is we're looking for university partners in the United States. And Uni Melbourne has sister relationships with other universities in the states and that's where Andre's going first. And we're seeing how they can partner with universities here. So the transfer of student data is not going across internationally. And of course there's all these pieces that have to be worked out around online student data and all that and privacy. And that's also a part of this work as well. And it's not easy work. It's rewarding, it's exciting, I hope it leads once again to other people figuring this out even better than we figured it out. But we're going to keep pushing on it because we think that Viv and our colleagues were really onto something.

Horn:                Well, so there's a couple pieces there that I want to come back to, but just, you talked about what it starts to replace a little bit. Standardized test scores that are very narrow measures of certain basket of skills, we'll call them, grades that maybe are unreliable because maybe the teachers are underrating what the students can do or vice versa in certain settings, I'm sure and grade inflation. But that it's creating these robust measures. It strikes me that something else that it's doing is that this isn't just say badging work that's been out there for years because there's this validity and reliability behind it. It strikes me, we see industry certifications, but what seems different here is that these are... The six areas you just talked about, those are sort of school competencies if you will, that should port across states, countries, school systems, et cetera. And then there's stuff like the Mastery Transcript Consortium and stuff, which I think is super exciting, but they're not actually doing the validating, if you will, of the actual learning itself as far as I understand it. So it seems to maybe not replace but fit within something like that. Do I have that right? What else is it replacing and tearing it out?

Washor:           We've been having some very nice conversations with Mastery Transcript and other platforms like Capable and it does fit because we're adding some value that quite frankly people haven't thought about in a way we have. And what's one of the things that's most interesting personally for me and for our work at Big Picture is that crediting outside of school learning that it doesn't just happen inside the four walls of the school. That certifications are out there in the real world as well as in school. And that becomes part of the process of bringing this work back in school and crediting it and accrediting who the young person really is from the community that they come from. All those pieces are in incredibly important that are leveling a playing field.

Horn:                Well, and correct me if I'm wrong here, I have this recollection that used to work in New Hampshire even before Big Picture Learning days. If I'm correct, I don't know where I'm pulling that from. But a place like New Hampshire now has these pathways to credential out of school learning. I think one of the reasons maybe people have had concerns about it is that there's not been an assessment sitting on top of it to say like, "Is this really just Michael Horn's volunteer hours at a community center? Did he actually know and do and apply something?" And it seems like this framework could also really help support those more systematic efforts as opposed to say, individual schools or school networks that have valued out of school learning. This could really turbocharge some of those efforts to be a little bit more true I guess, to this notion that we all know is true, which is learning happens all the time anywhere. We just haven't figured out a way to credential it, if you will, outside of the formal school day.

Washor:           Yes, to what you said, I feel that whether people buy into the work that is the international Big Picture Learning credential or learn from it, it's once again adding value to the whole body of work that's out there and it's needed and necessary if we're going to move this forward. I always say on the competency based systems, they talk about anywhere, anytime, but if they don't talk about the many ways that you really understand something that sometimes you can show it but you can't say it, which is how you work more in the real world, then we are bouncing back to a written text test or/and text for any kind of validation and certification.

                        And this is way more than that. You can actually show what you can do. As Wynton Marsalis said at one time, "There's only one school and that's the school of can you play?" And that you can't schools shy away from that. It has to be what you put down in a written test and what you say. But so much of the world works in the tacit arena, in the arena of a craft, if you will, and a science and an art all integrated together. Whereas our measures are text-based and written and spoken, but not necessarily something that comes out of a community of practice outside of school that is validating, "Can you do it? Is it good enough?" And those pieces around is the, my buddy Mike Roses who passed away would say, "As mastery as foregrounded, the clock recedes." When you looking in school time and a set time of a day and a set period and a set number of weeks and then you're punching out a grade that looks very, very different now, than something like the IBPLC.

Horn:                So I want to dig then into the valid and reliable part of this. And I mean a psychometrically evaluated tool, it seems to me that that's pretty breakthrough here. It's another thing that's different from all the badges and stuff that's out there because it says, "Yeah, the student can do these things." And you mentioned interrater reliability of having different places look at an artifact of work and saying what this really is a mastery threshold of and so forth. Tell us more about, how does someone know if it's valid and reliable, what does that really mean and indicate because we hear it all the time as sort of the gold standard of assessment.

Washor:           Yeah, no, it's a really good question and I'm not a psychometrician, but I'm glad that some psychometricians are interested in exploring this with us. And I feel that they have really put their heart and soul and analysis, analytics to this, to really come up with something that is ongoing and developing, but is pretty damn good. And so using what is being inputted by teachers, by mentors, by students and creating that analysis is what's doing this and looking at bigger numbers of students going in to this process is what's going to make it more, is going to refine it and make it even more reliable. I can say for sure, pretty much for sure that much. Like I said, I know it's not magic, but I know, and I know that there's a really serious bunch of people playing and involved in producing these kinds of analytics.

                        So I think they're on their way, it's real important. And for some reason we'd all like to say, "Just use teacher judgment." But it hasn't happened in 70 years and it ain't going to happen. So we come up with something called standardized tests, which measures things way, way too narrowly for most of us. It miss too much. This is something that's giving us this other kind of breakthrough, possibly, disruption, possibly. I don't think we're at the end of it, I think we're at the beginning of it. And I really feel very hopeful about it and I hope, and my hope is that we get the supports and that people, because people say, "Hmm, this is really important." I can't keep doing what I'm doing like you discussed in New Hampshire, it's not going to give me what we really want. It's not going to give it across states, countries, even within our own place.

                        And this is that whole piece around, as well, around our work and that's been in the field and the research work of people like Julia Freeland Fisher, it's who knows you know what you know, and that gets you to a place, well that's that outside of school learning validation that's coming into this, as well as you hear the student voice in the learner profile in the video and in their written work of them telling everybody who they are and who they want to become and what adds meaning to their life. And it's different for each and every young person.

Horn:                Well I love that you can represent that individuality and that pursuit of uniqueness as opposed to trying to all compete to be the best on something narrow, which creates the zero sum mess that we're in right now. The question I guess I want to end on is, folks who listen to me know that I think innovation in an assessment is perhaps the most important or in the top two certainly innovations we need to enable a real positive sum system to flourish where we move beyond the timed measures and so forth and allow each person to be the most unique person they can be, ultimately. So you all have developed the beginning of this, as you said, you're bringing it into the US now you're looking for the university partner. What are the steps ahead? Are all Big Picture Learning Schools going to start using this credential? Or what's it going to take I guess to start to get this spread? Give us a little bit of the roadmap mapping.

Washor:           Right. So right now we have about 30 schools in the US and around the world aside from Australia involved. And although we use... Big Picture Learning goals are interesting in the sense that I think you were saying, and I would agree, they're not so abstract like a lot of competencies, like creativity. All right. I mean when does that happen? I go, ah, when I hear that, I go, it's wonderful, but these are really tied to the school. Empirical reasoning is applied science. So you applying your knowledge and use of science, use of quantitative reasoning, mathematics.

                        When we talk about communication, we're talking about not just written, it's like the Isadora Duncan line, "If I could say it, I wouldn't have to dance." So that's part of communication too. All those ways that we can communicate. And so we are closely aligned to what schools can grab onto. And now we're saying, "Ah, wait a second, now we're including application." And the application can happen inside or outside of school and that's different. That's key. And yes, we're going to use the judgment of mentors who talk to students and teachers and yes, student voice is going to be part of this as well. So yes, we're looking for, and Uni Melbourne is looking for a university partner. We're looking for platforms that we could put this on, that are next steps so it is not... It's not two steps over the chasm to get to applied academics, which make it a lot easier set of learning goals, if you will, that can be understood by any school system, public, private, home.

                        And I think that there's a big market for this in homeschool. I think there's a big market for this in youth development and in public schools of course. So that's a little bit of an answer to your question, I think, of places we have to go and how it can connect beyond Big Picture Schools as well as using ours as a pilot as well as we have schools in, and another part of Big Picture called Upstream Collaborative, which are not necessarily Big Picture Schools in full, but are schools that want to learn more about how we do what we do. And they're also involved in this as well.

Horn:                Love so much of this and I can't wait to follow the progress and have you back on at some point, I think, to update us on that. But for now, as we wrap up, where can folks learn more about the international Big Picture Learning?

Washor:           Go to our website, Big Picture Learning and look up the IBPLC and my email's, [email protected] or send me an email and I'll send you, if it's not up there yet, I'll send you the research. You can go to Big Picture Australia, as well. They have a lot more posted than we do because it's their research. So yeah, there's a bunch of places you can find out more information. We're happy to talk to any and everybody about this and hopefully once again, like I said, if it's not us and somebody else takes this and goes further with it, in better ways, that's fantastic. But I really feel, once again, I give a lot of credit to Viv or colleagues that they really have contributed. And I'll say it might be a nice idea to have Sandra and Viv on to talk about those psychometrics because I'm fully admitting that I'm not the person to talk to about the details of how they analyze what they do, but I've heard them talk about it. I'm just not the person to talk about.

Horn:                Let's do that soon, we'll say. But for now, Elliot, huge thank you. Appreciate what y'all are doing and appreciate you and for everyone tuning in, we'll be back next time on the Future of Education.

Having served in a number of roles in education—from the superintendent of public instruction of Ohio to a teacher—Susan Zelman has seen many sides of the American education system. In this conversation, she shares some of the big lessons from her just released book, The Buying and Selling of American Education—and her conclusions about how to move forward to support the success of every single child. As always, you can listen to the podcast, watch this on YouTube, or read the transcript.

Michael Horn:    Susan has served in a number of interesting roles across the education ecosystem. She's currently president of the Zelman Education Consulting Group. I'll tell you more about why I'm particularly interested in having her today in a moment. But just to give you a little bit more of her background, before that, she was the executive director of the superintendency at the Ohio Department of Education. She has also served as the senior vice president for education and children's programming at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, where she developed policies and programs to integrate public service media into a national reform education agenda. And prior to that, she was the superintendent for public instruction in Ohio for 10 years. And during her tenure, the state of Ohio went from 29th among states to fifth in the 2009 Education Week quality counts report. But more important for this conversation, she's also the author, or co-author I should say, of a new and very interesting book titled The Buying and Selling of American Education. Susan, welcome. It's great to see you.

Susan Zelman:            Oh, thanks. It's great to be here, and thank you for interviewing me.

Horn:                Oh, you bet. You bet. So before we get into the conversation around the book and so forth, I've given obviously the thumbnail, if you will, of your bio, but I'm just sort of curious about your own journey through education and education policy and how that journey perhaps has shaped where you've spent your time and your passion within the world of education.

Zelman:            Well, I love that question. And actually my, I think education journey started when I was in sixth grade in Mrs. Eisner's class. At that time, we were living in the Marble Hill projects. And on my floor, a family moved in from Harlem. And the boy who was going to PS 122, though it's now not called PS 122, of course it was reconstituted, but was in my class, in my sixth grade class. And I actually tried to befriend him and walked to... We had a long walk to the elementary school together. And he seemed like such a nice, bright guy, and he was quite tall. And he lasted in my sixth grade class for one week, and then he got demoted to the fifth grade. So, I asked my teacher, Mrs. Eisner, "Why?" She said, "Well, he went to school in Harlem and they don't have good schools there."

                        And I thought, how unfair. And not only that, but he also got then demoted to the fourth grade. And that really freaked me out because he was so tall and just stood out a sore thumb. And I thought, God, the system has failed poor Ernest Gibbs. And to this day in my old age, I still remember Ernest Gibbs and kind of wonder whatever happened to him. The second thing is that my grandparents were immigrants from Russia, but education was the route to the middle class. I mean, my father was a lawyer, my uncle was a lawyer and a judge, and my uncles went to the city college in the thirties, and it was their way to become middle class. So, education was always very important and a value. Plus, I was kind of a nerdy kid, and I was the type of kid who failed summer camp.

                        Nobody wanted me on their volleyball team, but I couldn't wait for school to start. So in some sense, even though I know my father wanted me to be a lawyer, education was my passion, and I felt comfortable at school. And then I could have done college in three years, but I stayed on to get certified. And for one year, I was a high school social studies teacher at Grace Dodge Vocational High School... And I so... I would have to leave the teacher's room because I thought they were so judgmental about their students. They said they couldn't tell the Bronx students from the students at Grace Dodge, and that really me off. So, then I was able to get a full scholarship, a fellowship then to go to that, but I have to say this in... Because I live in Ohio right now, that other university up north, University of Michigan.

                        And I was in a doctoral program funded by the US Department of Education to train people who were interested in education, who had an education background, but who would do research planning and evaluation for public schools. And I got to do my dissertation from the Harvard Civil Rights Civil Liberties Law Review. I met my husband that brought me to Boston. And then he put it in our marriage contract, our marriage was no void unless I finished within a year, which I did. And then ironically, through a high school English teacher he had, I got a job teaching at Emmanuel College. And I was an academic for the first 14 years of my career. I also simultaneously held a research appointment at the Harvard Educational Technology Center. Then I got an NSF grant from Columbia Teachers College for women who taught in small liberal arts colleges.

                        I was getting kind of bored. Even though my kids were young. And I happened to meet actually Mike Dukakis at our neighbors party who was in his law firm and becoming a judge, and I was recruited to join the caucus administration as an associate commissioner. So, I left my brilliant academic career and joined state government. And not only that, but I really found my passion. I felt that I could help design and improve educational systems and I could make a sort of a greater impact. And I was the associate commissioner for a new division called Educational Personnel, and I lasted there for about six and a half years. And then I had an opportunity to really break the glass ceiling and become the first deputy commissioner in the state of Missouri. Oh my gosh, a far cry if we've ever been. And my two girls were in college at the time, but we took our son to Missouri, and he used to call it the good enough state.

                        First of all, he was angry because I denied his birthright of going to Harvard Square every day when he was in high school, but the reality was I realized the variability in the quality of education from state to state. He went to Arlington High. But quite frankly, where he went, which was considered a very good district in Missouri, was not as challenging for him. And that gave me even more passion. And then I was recruited to be a state superintendent in Ohio, and I did that for 10 years. I went to Washington for almost two, came back. I actually also did a short stint in a publishing company, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Yeah, Houghton Mifflin. And then a new governor came in, he wiped me, and I came back as executive director.

Horn:                I'm just curious because you have a lot of experience across a lot of states, a lot of context, a lot of personal passion, and anger in some cases, tied into all of this, right? And you're sort of your why. And I'm curious what you wanted to pull into this book and really share with the readers as you wrote it.

Zelman:            I had a wonderful experience of seeing how legislation is crafted both at the federal state and policy at the local levels. And one of the things that... What sort of struck me when I started to work in the State Department of Education and not the academic community was that people who engaged in education policymaking really didn't understand American educational history, and yet we were trying to improve and reform the system. And without roots, trees perish. So, I think it's really... First thing is that are very important for us to have a good conceptual model of where our American educational experimental system has been and is currently now over the past 230 years. And so that was one thing that I was going to do. And I also wanted to highlight the sort of what I would call the structural problems in trying to reform an educational system that I saw up close and personal, particularly in the state roles that I performed. That was one of the reasons why I wrote the book.

Horn:                No, that's helpful. It gives context. And I'll dig back into the history piece in a moment. But first, let's go to the title because you have this super provocative title, The Buying and Selling of American Education. And I'll give you some context for my question in a moment because I really want to hear how you picked that title, because this isn't really a book about commercial interests in American education or capitalism in American education, nor is it like philanthropists buying American education or even private schools. Frankly, it's not even like a Diane Ravitch type book. It's none of that, so I'm sort of curious why this title, and what does it mean to you?

Zelman:            Well, it was very clear to me in my work over the years that our educational system was designed around the needs of adults in the system. And we all, including myself, have vested interest in this system, and it is so hard to change because of our vested interests. So in the intro, not the introduction, I think the prefix of the book, I talk about the seven Ps, the politicians, the parents, the professionals, the publishers, the producers of educational software now, the plutocrats who want to keep the status quo, and the partisans, people from either the left or the right who don't like anything. So, I thought... And I've always tried to be provocative, so I thought The Buying and Selling of American Education: Re-imagining a New System of Schools was a title which I would hope sells books, but who knows?

Horn:                We'll find out in that, but hopefully will help a little bit and get people a little bit more interested. And so I want to dig in on the history part of it because this book has a lot on the history of American education,, and frankly it does it from a lot of the perspectives that you just laid out, the professionals, the politicians, et cetera. You sort of go around in a variety of these angles and help us understand how we got to where we are today through the lens of, as you said, the last 230 years. And so, this is a totally unfair question for a cast like this, but I'm curious as you think about the top couple things you hope people take away from that extensive history, what are they in a little bit more detail as sure as we think about informing where we are now and where we go?

Zelman:            Absolutely. Well, first of all, education, teaching is not a linear type of thing. I mean, we don't have a curriculum, we teach a kid, and then we expect to measure results. It's really kind... I think teaching and doing school... First of all, doing school is hard work, and teaching and learning is a complex human act, and that we don't do it in a vacuum. I mean, you're a classroom, in some sense, is a social system in a system of a district in a system of a community. And I think that in lots of ways, the school is a microcosm of what's really going on in society, and also relating to other systems, the political system, the economic system, the taxation system, the health system, housing policies, which I talk about in my book, banking policies that create neighborhoods for whatever reason. So, one is that this is really quite complex. And one of the things that I think educators need to do is to immerse themselves. And your book talks about this.

                        I think one of the problems we have become a political tool to the Republican party, and the superintendents are leaving, teachers are angry and they're leaving and so forth, is because we really didn't do a good enough job in community engagement. And we need to open up the schoolhouse store. We need to let the community into the school and immerse ourselves and go out into the community like cultural anthropologists, and also develop a sense of empathy for the families and the children we serve. And I think that's really, really important. And I think educators tend to be somewhat judgmental of their students, and that fosters a culture of soft bigotry, of low expectations. And for this book, I interviewed 104 Ohio superintendents, and one of the things that came out, particularly in Appalachia... And I'm spending a lot of my time working with JASON Learning, by the way, I think doing some terrific, incredible work in workforce development in Appalachia.

                        One of the things the Appalachian superintendents told me was because of food shortage and difficulties of getting learning materials, they went into the little villages, and they saw the conditions in which their students lived. And that really changed a lot of teachers' attitudes toward the kids and toward the families. So, I think that's really important. And I love your chapter where you talk about that you better, as a superintendent or a principal, understand that schools have different purposes for different families, and you better assess that. And you need to accommodate that, you need to develop trust, you need to listen, you need to take your judgment and work with community-based groups within your community and develop wisdom to solve problems.

Horn:                Well, so that's... I mean, it's a terrific set of points there and that piece of empathy, and getting out into the community to understand the progress that there's trying to make and so forth. I think you're right. It could break down a lot of these walls. And as you said, tools are the ponds that schools have become in a lot of these political fights. And so you give this diagnosis of how we got to where we are today and how broken and intractable some of it seems. But then really in this last culminating chapter six, you end with this conclusion of how we can move forward. And it's really... A major conclusion that you have is to embrace a more pluralistic view of American education in schools. And it's frankly, as you sort of implied, it's very similar to where I ended up in my new book, From Reopen to Reinvent, as I sort of worked my way through it.

                        And I think we both took different paths to it, but we ended the same place. And so I'm just curious, tell us more about that conclusion and why you see it as the only way forward.

Zelman:            Well, first of all, I don't see it as the only way forward. I want you to be provocative and say to people, "Look, you're not going to like my vision, but let's all come together form a multi-sector partnership and rethink." So, let me start off though with why I talked about, accountable pluralism. As state superintendent, first of all, I am the Zelman of the Zelman voucher case, and the Supreme Court is really moving... If you follow the Supreme Court decisions, they're really moving more toward funding private and parochial schools. That's one thing.

Horn:                Yes.

Zelman:            And that's happening in lots of other states with regard to vouchers, private school scholarships and charter schools. And I had three children, all who are very successful, thank God. I don't want to knock wood or whatever, but they all were very different types of learners. And as a parent, I mean, it was expensive to put all three of your kids in private school, and we didn't have very many choices.

                        And today, I think parents, all parents, not only poor, but especially poor parents need better choices. And as state superintendent, I saw how people exploited poor kids by making money off of the charter school movement, and that there is no accountability in these private school scholarships. And I thought in some ways, when you only have one system like the common school, which was never really... It was sort of a myth of the common school anyway. And I think, well, you know what? We're moving toward pluralism, but other democratic countries have done this much better than us because they hold people accountable. So, I always liked the work of Paul Hill. And he wrote this book in 2013 or 15 about democratic constitution for our public schools. And he was, as I was. Very upset about where the school choice movement was going because of its lack of accountability, and that we were not giving poor parents really good quality choices.

                        A lots of charter schools only last for five years. Now look, there are wonderful models of charter schools out there. I don't want to bash that, but we need more of it. We need more innovation, we need more experimentation. And we need data, and we need people to understand quality processes and how to measure it. So, that's was really important to me. Plus, if you look at like 26 state policies on school choice, they're all over the place. And it's not a coherent system. They're discreet programs. So, I try to use my imagination and say, look, we have an ailing system. If I were queen of the world, what would I design? And I designed this system, which would be a system of schools. The CEO would be a superintendent type, but they would manage a portfolio of schools. The money, we wouldn't fund schools. We would fund students, and that we would stop the property tax because it pits parents against one another. It's not equitable. But we would have a statewide taxing system with an equalization formula based upon the needs of students and their families.

                        And I think with new emerging technologies, we could get a better sense of how to merge educational funding with health and human service funding and get better data. I mean, one of the good things about technology, I think from a research perspective, is that we will have these incredible databases, or we can, and we could understand what works under what conditions and why. And that's what I was sort of a arguing in chapter six. Where is the role of business, philanthropy, state government, the federal government in trying to build a stronger R&D for American education? And bring all people to the table from multiple perspectives and see what would come up. Do an XPRIZE. Rather than go to the moon or Mars. Why don't we do an XPRIZE for different types of educational systems, do some good research, design evaluation, and see what works under what conditions for what types of children and families, and provide better choice and accountable school choice for parents.

Horn:                So much to aspire to, I think, in that vision. Susan, thanks for writing the book. Thanks for joining us on The Future of Education, and thanks for continuing to push for quality choices and options for the families who need it the most. Really appreciate it.

Zelman:            Thank you.

Parents are increasingly voting with their feet and making novel schooling choices for their children. What's behind the moves and their desires? Adam Newman and Christian Lehr of Tyton Partners joined me to talk about the vast research they have done in this space to learn about why parents are making choices—or even where they aren't choosing something different, what their preferences are. In this conversation they detail their research and what we're learning about parent choice, student-centered learning, and the future of education. You can listen to the conversation above, watch it below, or, with a paid subscription, read the full transcript below.

Michael Horn:   We have a great topic lined up for you all today. It involves choice, student-centered learning, enrollment trends, innovation and more, all in K-12 schooling. To help us unpack that, we have two terrific guests, Adam Newman, the founding and managing partner at Tyton Partners, as well as Christian Lehr, senior principal at Tyton Partners. They are the authors of a series of research reports that are just fantastic, Choose to Learn and School Disrupted. I like it not just because it has the name disrupted in it, but they have really unpacked these trends around choice, some of these enrollment trends we're seeing in K-12 school districts, parents' desires and for what they want for their kids. I'm just excited to unpack a lot of this.

First, Adam, Christian, thanks for being here.

Adam Newman: Hey. Great. Great to be here with you, Michael. Thanks for including us.

Christian Lehr:  Yeah. Thanks, Michael.

Horn:                Yeah, you bet, so a lot of interesting findings in these reports that you've published. I've actually written about some of your findings, but I'm excited to hear about it directly from you guys. I think one of the most interesting things that you found frankly is that the momentum behind the enrollment declines that we saw early on in the pandemic from school districts is not abating at least as of spring of 2022, and so I'm just curious. That finding seems to have gotten more attention over the last several weeks, but why is that from what your research is showing?

Newman:          Yeah. No. Absolutely. It's a great question. Listen, honestly, we were surprised ourselves really to see the magnitude of the transition out of public district schools and into other options. A couple important factors, our enrollment numbers are through the lens of parents. Our work is based on a large, nationally representative survey of parents of children in K-12. It is not the official data that states capture. It's the parent perspective, and it's really focused on what they believe they are doing or want to do for their kids, which we think is incredibly important. Parents are a voice that we don't often hear from regularly in this debate. Really, we saw two things that were primarily driving the dis-enrollment in public district schools from the spring '21 through spring 2022.

                        The first was academic quality and perceptions of academic quality, which we could spend the whole hour talking about. I mean, I think, for different parents, that meant different things. Certainly, within the context of the pandemic, it meant the quality of the experience, the educational experience their students were getting based on the type of school model and format that they were participating in. The second dynamic was actually an interesting one to us and a little bit counterintuitive, which was school safety, but, interestingly, it was not focused per se on health, health-oriented safety issues related to COVID, but some of the more, unfortunately, age-old issues of bullying and violence in our schools that are really independent of the pandemic and those effects, but certainly as we see unfortunately in the news on an all-too-frequent basis continue to be really prominent.

                        Those are really two of the drivers, and I think the third one that I think underpins that is the pandemic. You've written about this, Michael, in a lot of your work, too. Parents had a front row seat into what their educational experience was like for their students as a result of the pandemic, and they realized it was not what they wanted it to be or what it could be, and so this idea of parent agency married with a proliferation of choices and alternatives that started to emerge in response to the pandemic we think are what were many of the drivers that we saw in that fairly significant 10% dis-enrollment from the district public schools from the perspective of parents.

Horn:                One of the most interesting pieces of that data point that you just said, the 10%, was that your sense was only 10% of that if I recall was due to the demographic declines or dropouts or delayed entry into K-12, which we heard a lot about the redshirting phenomenon in the wake of this, but the academic concerns, the bullying which frankly, if you talk to educators, they say that the school violence issues that they were dealing with were a lot worse coming out of the pandemic in the return to school as well. That adds up I guess, but I guess I'm just curious in terms of what you found that parents are choosing instead. What are they turning to when they make that choice to leave that district school? You mentioned that there's a lot more options. They feel like they have a sense of agency. What are you learning about in terms of the actual choices that they're making in a proactive way?

Homeschooling, charter schools, boarding schools, traditional schools, private schools, and more are all familiar modes of schooling. But the fastest growing segment of K–12 education is also one of the newest and least familiar: microschools. What's behind the microschooling movement? What might it enable? What should we watch out for as it emerges? Don Soifer, the CEO of the National Microschooling Center, joined me to share more. Don has been advocating for microschools well before the pandemic, and prior to his role in that movement served on the DC Public Charter School Board from 2008 to 2018. As always, you can listen to the conversation above (or in your favorite podcast player), watch it on YouTube below, or read the transcript.

Michael Horn:   Don, it is good to see you. Thanks for joining.

Don Soifer:       Great to talk, Michael. Always a pleasure and I've learned so much from your work and our work together. This is the most exciting opportunity to put it to good work, I've had to enjoy and in my career hopefully innovating.

Horn:                Well, that says a lot because you've been in a lot of movements at the forefront of education innovation. You see things early, you get on them, you do things with them. I want to start there by framing the conversation for folks.

                        Let's just do it around your entry point right now. What is the National Microschooling Center itself, and why are you excited about this microschooling movement that is burgeoning?

Soifer:              The National Microschooling Center is an empowering hub for pioneering small learning environments. In the course of doing this, and we've launched the center over the summer. We have both met and gotten to know some people that have been doing incredible microschooling work for a long time. We've gotten to feel like we've inspired some fantastic educators and leaders to do new and innovative things, and just as likely to do some old and innovative things. Microschooling is to me, in so many ways, the most exciting storyline we've come across in American education in a long time.

                        I think that way because the incredibly transformative potential that we see, it's all about designing learning and teaching learning around the needs of the particular learning that you're serving, and the relationship that you've built with those. There's just so much need and space for that everywhere we look in education, everywhere we've been in education. It's just exciting everywhere we look and the people doing it are the reason why.

Horn:                When you say you're helping all these entrepreneurs, all these microschools that are popping up, empowering them, what does that support look like on the ground?

Soifer:              Well, we've got one of the fastest growing movements and storylines in education. The researchers say there's between 1.1 and 2.1 million learners, who are relying on microschooling as their primary and first source of teaching and learning. It looks so different in so many different ways, in so many different types of settings, and in just about every different jurisdiction in the country. Depending on those jurisdictions, the National Microschooling Center loves to provide resources and learning tools.

                        Sometimes we do bulk purchase of learning tool licenses, so that we can take learning tools that we like working with and make them available to our microschooling leaders, along with some training and some background, and some help tracking them. In some cases, it's helping them navigate the often complex framework for operating that they're working in. In the school choice friendly states, that can be as simple as connecting in a seamless fashion with the school choice vehicle in their states.

                        Where there's other states that we have those incredibly life-changing educators that we're fortunate enough to have maybe one of in our lives, who are basically running microschools in some outlaw ethos. Because these are early adopters and the government and the regulators haven't quite caught up with what microschooling is, and how to work within in their setting and everything in between. Sometimes we help them connect with each other, sometimes we help them learn from each other.

                        Sometimes with the incredible leaders that we have, we're able to share insights and innovations in a real community way, and it's got a feeling to it. Maybe we saw in those early days of the charter school movement, when these brilliant educators were meeting together in church basements trying to navigate how to bring this to the learners in their lives. It's got a feeling a lot like that, but in so many ways, microschooling is just such a different movement than those were.

Horn:                I want to get into the compare and contrast in a little bit but first, I want to stay one more beat on this because you founded this center in 2022. But my recollection, is you got interested in microschooling well before that and frankly, well before the pandemic. It was something that I was certainly writing about before the pandemic.

                        But my sense and my recollection at least, is that several years before it maybe, you said this could be a really important set of innovations or enabling innovations in the education sector. Tell me, is my recollection correct? Why was it that it sparked it for you, even before it became part of the popular lexicon?

Soifer:              Yeah. I really fell in love with the ideas of microschooling around the time, Michael, that your co-author, Heather Staker, was getting involved with building the first acting academy in Austin, Texas. Really understanding the ways that knowing a learner and their individual needs, can make this whole process better. I come from the charter school world and school choice broadly, but particularly within the whole charter school world, lots has been written.

                        Lots of really smart people have observed that it's increasingly difficult for charter school authorizers, to be able to approve and work with truly innovative learning environments that really live up to their potential. A lot of that has to do with the whole charter school approach has become about compliance and standardization. Even the best authorizers and some really, really smart people working in that space, find it really difficult to be nimble enough that they can bring in and attract, and support the diversified.

                        Everything that microschools need to be, to really live up to their best potential. I lost a fight I felt early on in my involvement in charter schooling, where the idea of school specific and mission specific measures. So that if you've got a charter school with an approach that's maybe tied to social and emotional learning or performance art. That the charter schools could be evaluated on what's most important to the learners and the families that choose those charter schools.

                        Whereas as the charter school world is turned into one of looking for a model and replicating it, and evaluating it based strictly on performance on standardized testing. Microschooling is such a diversified movement that brings together educators. As many hard left educators, as hard right, that really bring to this diversified approaches that we don't see very much of in the charter sector. It's an exciting movement.

                        I think that the nature of permissionless education. In microschooling, the only permission that you really need is the permission of the learners and the families that you serve. That raises some really exciting potential and it makes this a space that has an excitement to it that we haven't seen in American education very often in a long time.

Horn:                I want to double-click on a bunch of these things. This is where I want to spend the bulk of our conversation because I think these tensions are really interesting and you're calling it out. I've thought of it similarly. You ought to say the intent of the school in the public domain, is to produce these outcomes. Let's measure it in a way reflective of the school mission itself.

                        As you noted, it just hasn't gone that way. What has that taught you, I guess, about when you start to take public dollars and you're asking for innovation at the same time, and maybe the tension there in it? Is this an inevitable thing that happened in the charter movement? Or do you think there's more nuance or subtlety there that it could have been done differently?

Soifer:              Charter sector, and there are some brilliant educators working in the space, and some really exciting charter schools doing some really life-changing work. But the charter sector, in particularly the way that charter authorizers have evolved, has become increasingly compliance-based and standardized in a lot of ways. That it's just difficult for a charter school authorizer operating within the legal frameworks, in which they have to work. Charter school authorizing isn't easy, but it's relatively simple.

                        A charter authorizer enforces the law by working with its community and with the schools that it serves, to satisfy the laws and the requirements, and the regulations that govern charter schooling. In ways that often put the most forward leaning and the most inspiring and inspirational charter school authorizers in a bit of a box, where they need to have a compliance mindset.

                        Where a charter school needs to have a full-time staff person dedicated to nothing else but complying with the rules and requirements of the charter authorizer. It just becomes more and more difficult to do something truly innovative in it.

Horn:                Stay on that for a moment, Don, just because is that the inevitable rise or creep? Because the ethos of charters originally, was free us up from the inputs because that's like the burdensome of the traditional district schools. We account for every single minute, how they use staff, all that stuff. It constrains innovation. The original ethos was free us up on the input side, and hold us to account on the outcome side. It sounds like charters in your view, have drifted considerably away from that in terms of how they operate.

                        That's consistent with what I've heard from a lot of folks in the field as well. Is that the inevitable result of like, "Hey, we've got public dollars here"? More and more regulation is just going to creep in and mandate how we do the work, not just what the work itself is. Is that inevitable or could there have been another turn in the charter movement in your judgment?

Soifer:              Well, I think that there's still plenty of opportunity for charter school leaders to be more nimble and to find ways to be truly innovative. It's not just the charter sector. I think that's something that we've seen broadly within the American school choice experiment. That when it comes to the use of public dollars, the deals that have to get made to bring people on board to the plan, or to bring an accountability regime.

                        Because so many stewards of the taxpayer dollars and of students during the day, are rightfully so focused on making sure that they can police and protect against the bad actors in the space. But we've gone so far in that direction, that as innovative a charter school as you want to put forward, and there are absolutely some innovative charter schools out there. They're pretty much all at this point in every state that I can think of, measured really strictly on their performance on the state test.

                        While I have always been an evangelist when it comes to the longitudinal growth of individual learners over time being the most important measure of accountability in a public education space. We have microschooling leaders that sit and that work with families, and the families themselves choose them because maybe they care more about the social and emotional growth of a child. Or because they simply have considered and reject their state's academic content standards, as being relevant to their child's future.

                        Or just don't ever want to subject their kid, their children to norm referenced or criterion referenced assessments. There's space for them in the microschooling movement, so that you have microschools that really wouldn't have a space in the charter school sector. Or even in other school choice programs that get locked into certain ways of doing things. That truly hybrid approaches can't even operate in some of the more innovative education savings accounts models that we have, that are often held up as the state of the art in school choice today.

Horn:                Well, so that's where I want to go next actually, which is you're seeing right now a growing movement across the country around education savings accounts, other forms of financing school choice. A lot of choice advocates are super bullish about this because they talk about the equity piece of this. That more and more families are going to be able to afford these innovative schooling options that are emerging. Which we should note, are generally lower cost than a traditional, independent or private school, but they still cost something.

                        We're seeing more and more ESA programs start to give families the dollars themselves, so that they can choose these microschool options in many cases or other school options as well. I guess I'm just curious from your perspective, are you nervous about that movement because the public financing could lead us down the same road that you've seen with charters? Or is there something different here with the microschools? Once they start getting paid for from ESA money specifically or micro grants, whatever it might be, that makes them in your judgment, more immune to these pressures?

Soifer:              I just don't know if I can confidently say I understand what the future of public school accountability is in this country. Everywhere you look, you see more and more hesitation to accept standardized testing regimes. And public education systems where you need to be so focused on compliance and adherence, and see time requirements, and 30 square feet per kid, and 180 days in a school year. Lawmakers that just can't resist getting involved in the academic content that we're teaching our kids.

                        There have been really smart people, John Bailey comes to mind, who have really been advocates of the education savings account approach. Because it really allows for a more learned everywhere way of thinking about our schooling, so that a family and a learner can be savvy consumers and draw their learning from multiple, diversified sources. In this environment, they can choose to get their math learning from this space, or they can get their career training from this exciting internship or apprenticeship.

                        That they can be truly hybrid in the ways that they pull together their education. The reality of this though, is that the reasons that education savings accounts are supposed to be better than school vouchers. Is that you should be able to use an approach where you're drawing your learning from a learn everywhere universe of different ways of learning. So often, our private schools and there are some really talented educators, who are really doing inspiring things in non-public education.

                        But so often, private schools are so heavily regulated. They're so heavily reliant on systems like the accreditation system, that in some places it can work quite well. But when we are relying on these sorts of structures all in the name of protecting our learners against bad actors, it really limits the transformational opportunity to give learners what they feel in this day and age, in this economy. At first, I think microschooling was largely jump-started by the pandemic and the pandemic circumstances.

                        I think since then, it's moved to a place where it's more motivated by the new economy. I think families at the more fragile ends of the income spectrum, are more likely to be willing to look critically and thoughtfully at the education system and think, "Is this where I want the learner that's important to me in my life to get all of their preparation to succeed in this new economy, or can we do better?" I think all of those reasons are contributing to an environment where families are just reconsidering their historic relationships with the institutions that they've relied upon to meet their education needs.

                        And looking to be much more active consumers of their learning. When you have an active learner, Michael, as you know from all of the incredible work that you've done exploring the personalized learning models that are really making the biggest difference in this country. When you can shift from a passive to an active learner paradigm, the sky's the limit on the growth that you can witness, and the potential to really make an impactful difference. I think that's what's driving microschooling as much as anything else right now.

Horn:                Super interesting on a number of levels there. I agree, by the way, that the shift from passive to active is maybe the most important part of this equation in my judgment as well. I've increasingly come to believe that. I want to stay on this outcomes or conversation just for one more beat. Which is there's some sense in the argument that I suspect some people will hear, which is pitting, if you will, private progress versus a public accountability or a public minimum progress. I don't know exactly the right way to frame it.

                        I guess I'm just curious to hear, I'm not going to make you education secretary. But if you were education czar for a school year, how would you think about that tension between the private goals of individuals and families making those choices for themselves versus the public interest? When there's public dollars at stake of some let's even just say minimum accountability, how do you think about those trade-offs? Or do you think it's a false trade-off in your view?

Soifer:              That's a great question on any number of levels, Michael. First of all, microschooling is about what you can create, not what you're leaving. When we look at establishing microschools in an environment like many states and many communities that I've worked in. Where for instance, more than half of Black boys are scoring at below basic skills in math in eighth grade, to cite one example. It's hard for me to look at the monopolist approach and think that this is a fail safe way to ensure that we're delivering a quality set of opportunities to the learners that we're being entrusted to serve.

                        That said, this should be about what we're creating and not about what we're leaving, because that's really where the potential for microschooling lies. When the pandemic started and you would read in particularly the New York press about pandemic pods. To me, those stories raised more questions than they answered about are these things effective? Are these things equitable? That's why when we launched our own microschooling, we wanted to make sure that what we were doing is measurable and is equitable. In doing that, we were focused on pandemic learning loss. Certainly, there are microschools that do a terrific job measuring the academic growth of kids over time, because that's the way that you set them up.

                        Microschools don't have to be set up with those goals in mind. One of the important areas that, I think, we've made good progress in the last three years, is that if you really want to show academic growth in a meaningful way, that we no longer are in a place where you need to rely upon the state standardized testing regime to do that. We did a fantastic case study with the Rand Corporation that validated the opportunity that if you want to use learning tools that are able to use their embedded assessments to measure the academic growth over time. And it can be aligned with state academic content standards or common core, or there's lots of choices that you can choose.

                        That these are also ways that hold validity when they're done with integrity. And are able to be used in a meaningful way to help families stay informed about the learning progress that their child is making. That you really can use tools that everybody has access to that are not incredibly expensive. That if you do them in the right and thoughtful way, that you can use these to measure the academic growth of kids over time. Which has always to me, been the most important measure of being a good steward of the taxpayer's dollar and the child's time. Because growth over time, it tells you more about the value added that you're bringing to this as a provider.

                        And less about the household that the child woke up in the morning, which is what proficiency ratings to me are so often about. That there's lots of ways to get this done. And that education technology, this is the golden age of digital content in so many ways. That what this creates is a flat earth environment where everybody has access to these incredible tools, that in the past only large government monopoly providers were able to access. That's a game changer to me in so many ways. And to bring this back to your question, it provides an opportunity that we just haven't had before that's enabled by technology, by everything we know about teaching and learning.

                        Some microschools or Montessori microschools that don't even rely on technology very much at all. But everything that we've learned about everything that has to go into how we learn. And how teaching and learning can really live up to its potential, has a real place in microschooling that it's really hard to find in a much more traditional, institutional government school space.

Horn:                So many good insights there, Don. I like it just because these are the questions that, I think, are so important to be wrestling with and asking right now, so I appreciate your insights and wisdom. As we wrap up here, I'll just offer a reflection of my side and then a question for you. Which is, I think, one of the mitigating things that should make people less concerned goes to what you were saying, which is that these point in time assessments that while you're learning they don't distract from learning, can show me the growth of my child.

                        Are incredibly powerful and they answer the question that almost all parents I talk to ultimately want to know, when they choose these options or any school. They want to know, "How's my kid doing?" They want the answers themselves and they can see that sadly, the existing system or whatever it is, is often not working. You alluded to it there, which is that you have a microschool in Las Vegas as well, that you're part of that community. I'm curious, what have you learned from the parents through all this, that maybe you didn't expect when you got started down this path, as we wrap up here?

Soifer:              Families that really experience a rich microschooling environment never want to go back. Something that really got jump-started during the pandemic, is now much more about what's possible in schooling. If a family within a robust, diversified, dynamic microschooling ecosystem wants to move from one microschool to another for a period of time, they can absolutely do that. They can have a microschool that fits their schedule, so that they can see their kids more often if they work shifts.

                        Or they can really adopt a learning model that works well for their learner, and change that model in December rather than wait until the end of the school year to make those changes. When families understand what's truly possible and that they really can build an education around their own learner's needs, they don't ever want to go back to a system where they give that up. There are some families that might be happy in a large public school, where they can play football or play tuba.

                        Maybe that's the best choice for them, and that's often the case. But as microschooling is gaining a bigger and bigger and more diversified market share, we're really seeing the innovative ways that it can live up to its potential. I think it's exciting.

Horn:                Incredibly exciting. I love the work that you're doing, Don. I'm hoping when I'm out in Vegas, that I get to see you and see some of the work that you're doing.

                        Just really appreciate you shining a light on this working to support so many educators, as they trailblaze this path. Then in turn, the parents and the students who are taking advantage of it. Appreciate your leadership so much.

Soifer:              Thanks, Michael. Likewise.