Sara Suchman, the founder and executive director of the National Center for Montessori in the Public Sector, joined me to talk about the growth of Montessori public schools. As attention shifts to how to meet each and every learner with what they need and how to help students build the social-emotional skills they need to thrive, Montessori schools have been doing just this for decades. Often seen as a private school offering catering to the elite, Montessori education has in fact thrived in limited public settings and in serving low-income students. Sara talked about the reach of Montessori schools in the public sphere, what are the broader barriers to spreading the impact, and what her vision is for a more widespread and accessible Montessori education and how her organization is helping this vision solidify.

The Khan Academy now serves over 100 million learners. It runs its own brick-and-mortar school, the Khan Lab School. It offers tutoring at Schoolhouse.world. And now, in partnership with Arizona State University and the team behind ASU Prep Digital, Arizona State's virtual learning offering for high school students, it's standing up the Khan World School, a virtual school for high schoolers. Sal Khan and Amy McGrath, from ASU Prep Digital, joined me to share their vision.

John Edelson, president and founder of Time4Learning, joined me to talk about the durability of the spike in homeschooling since the start of the pandemic and what lessons educators and schools can learn from homeschoolers.

Aaron Rasmussen, the founder and CEO of Outlier.org and cofounder of MasterClass, joined me to talk about his solution for helping expand access and affordability in higher education, his company's recently announced partnership with Amazon, and how he thinks about the differences between MasterClass versus Outlier.org, which offers learners affordable for-credit college courses.

Amber Oliver has been leading the Robin Hood Learning+Tech Fund since it began its grant-making. The Fund has been at the forefront of helping students build their literacy skills through knowledge-rich curriculum that is personalized through technology and embedding computational thinking in schools. These strategies are increasingly converging in important ways, which Amber and I discussed during this conversation.

Mallory Dwinal, founder of Reach University, joined me to talk about the new accredited institution she started, Reach University. In the episode, we talked about just what is job-embedded learning, how does Reach University validate it in a reliable and rigorous way, what problems does this approach help solve, and what does this mean for the future of higher education and training—specifically in terms of teacher training, but also more broadly.

Edson Barton, CEO and founder of YouScience, joined me to talk about the science behind YouScience, a platform that offers assessments to help students discover careers for which they are well suited. In this conversation, we dug into how the aptitude tests work, what's their validity, how does YouScience compare to other similar solutions out there, what does the student and educator experience look like, and what can educators, families and students do with the information. As always, you can watch the conversation here or, in a new feature, listen here or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

At the end of January, Jobs for the Future announced an acquisition of the Education Quality Outcomes Standards Board, a nonprofit I cofounded. In this conversation with Tameshia Bridges Mansfield and Steve Yadzinski from JFF, we dig in to why JFF made the acquisition, what they hope to accomplish with EQOS, and the broader importance of and use cases for outcomes in postsecondary education and training.

Marc Prensky has been turning heads around how education should work since he wrote his influential book arguing that video games were good for learning. He's at it again, with a set of ideas for empowering students to accomplish continuous real-world impact projects with guidance in hubs that are dramatically different from traditional schools. He joined me to talk more about the concept.

Strada Education Network, a philanthropy focused at the intersection of education and careers, has a new person in charge, Tom Dawson. Long among a handful of organizations that are changing the role philanthropy plays with non-profit and for-profit organizations, Tom joins me to talk about the philosophy behind Strada's strategy and how it's set up to advance social impact.