Mike Flanagan, CEO of the Mastery Transcript Consortium (MTC), joined me to talk about the organization's recent “acquisition” by ETS, as well as its broader work in changing how we measure student learning and represent that to colleges and employers. Could the broader adoption of MTC change the game for how students choose college—and allow colleges to be more diverse, rather than “one-size-fits-all” as many are today? This was a fun conversation where I pushed Mike on a few ideas around skills—and then learned a lot from his nuanced answers. Look forward to your thoughts in the comments.

Michael Horn:

Welcome to the Future of Education. I'm Michael Horn, and you are joining the show where we are dedicated to building a world where all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their potential, and live a life of purpose. And to help us think through that today. I'm. I'm really excited. It's my longtime friend, Mike Flanagan. He's from the town over from me here in Massachusetts. But we've known each other since I was on the board of the National Association of Independent Schools, and he was running one of the very cool business lines for NAIS, as well as, frankly, all things technology for the organization. But then he became the CEO of the Mastery Transcript Consortium, which was acquired recently by ETS, an organization focused on testing across the country and internationally as well. And we're gonna talk about all of that today. Mike, so good to see you. We're not in person, but it's great to be with you on camera.

Michael Flanagan:

I am so excited. Yeah neighbors first, but, like, this is, what a great opportunity. I really, really appreciate the invite.

Michael Horn:

Yeah, I should have added, you're a CrossFit certified coach, as well. So, you know, we've got, like, I'm not that, but, you know, we have certain other things in common, as well, so.

Michael Flanagan:

Yeah, I always have to put that in asterisk on that. I was former. Former coach. Unfortunately, my certification lapsed when my job changed, and I found wound up spending 90% of my time on planes. You know, Crossfit's a great way to be healthy and stay in shape, but if you want to get injured, a really good thing to do is do Crossfit once a month.

The History of Mastery Transcript Consortium 

Michael Horn:

Fair enough. Fair enough. Don't do that. Get some regular rhythm, but hopefully not afflicting you. But it's good to see you. Let's dive in. You and I have had a long set of conversations around what the Mastery Transcript Consortium pre ETS acquisition is. We might call it MTC, so you know that's the acronym. But let's just talk about what Mastery Transcript Consortium was at the outset through its history, before the acquisition itself.

Michael Flanagan:

Yeah, I mean, I will say just a preview. It's what and still is, the changes as a result of our new home with ETS, which we'll talk about in a bit are much more about expansion and kind of continuation of what we're doing versus, like, a radical kind of rethinking of it. But to go back to the start, the way we talk about MTC, to educators out there is, to start with a pretty simple premise, which is that we think there are better ways of doing school, right. That the schooling models we have today, for a lot of kids, they don't feel very relevant, they don't feel very useful, they don't feel very engaging. And yet, at the same time, there's all these counterexamples of amazing schools. You talk to them all the time, right? School leaders who are innovators. They're doing project based learning, doing interdisciplinary work. They're getting kids out of classrooms, into the world of work. They're putting kids in teams and solving real world problems, and they're really focused on skill building. And the challenge we had, or the thing that kind of kept pushing us was like, these models are awesome. Why aren't they everywhere? Why doesn't every neighborhood have a school like this? And what we realized, talking to a lot of the same people you talk to, school leaders and innovators, is that what we kind of have is an infrastructure problem. We basically know how to produce this amazing, innovative learning. But all the systems we have to, frankly, keep score to credit and credential that learning are completely yoked, completely invested to old ways, credit hours, academic courses, and GPAs. And so the question is, like, what do you do if you're a school leader and the model you have, like, doesn't map to any of that? And the answer to the question for us was a grassroots effort, the consortium and MTC, the Mastery Transcript Consortium. And what we've built with our schools is, simply put, an alternative credential. It's one that's completely based on competencies and skills and also centers artifacts of student learning, like actual work product, and then combines the two. So you have the best attributes of what we think is a competency based transcript and a portfolio system. And that's it. That's MTC in a nutshell. We've built this system so that kids that are doing innovative learning don't have to translate or water down that learning to have it make sense to colleges and to workforce, but they can actually have a credential and exit ticket that is fully consistent, both in terms of philosophy and design, with all the hard work that the people that started their school are probably doing.

Michael Horn:

Very cool. I think what I've learned and appreciated over time, as I thought about it, Mike, is, is two things. One, by focusing on those folks that either have an innovative model or want to, to your point, you're creating the infrastructure for them to grow, for them to validate what they're doing to be accepted by colleges or trade schools or employers or whatever else, sort of giving them a consistent infrastructure across the school. So it's not just, oh, here's another one off here, here's another one off there. And then, number two, what I think I've come to learn is you're not necessarily in the weeds of my big thing of competency-based or mastery-based learning of we're throwing over seat time, and you get to move at your own pace. What you are more is on the, yes, that would be great. But you're more on the end of that saying, okay, whatever the system is, let us represent what you have mastered in some way that I can then click in and see the artifact of learning that proves you've in fact, mastered that domain, skill, knowledge, whatever it is. And so it's really, the way I kind of think of it is it's like an asset-based report card. At the end of the day, these are the sets of things I can do. And yeah, it may be jagged, but, like, that's a reflection of then who I am as an individual. I don't have to lie about it, right? I don't have to puff up these other areas. How do you think about that exactly?

Michael Flanagan:

I mean, jagged. Jagged and asset together, right? And I think if there's one thing that we spend, I mean, MTC is a nonprofit by design, because if we were a for profit, we wouldn't be able to invest so heavily in advocacy and outreach to higher education. And if there's one place where I think we've had to work very hard to move the needle and change the mindset is folder reading in universities and colleges today is largely done through a deficit mindset. It's how many APs did school X offer? Did applicant y take all the ten APs? And if not, why not? And it's a very weird way of thinking about the high school journey. It has this weird, pernicious effect where the most high achieving kids actually have the most narrowed options in terms of what they study and how they study, because they are basically engaged in a full time exercise of compliance. Like, how do I put the best portrait forward, no deviations allowed, whereas all the best real learning. I mean, 80% of the great stories you tell when you're talking to somebody who's innovated or built something new. All the Clayton Christensen work is like, oh, what comes from failure? What comes from looking at things through totally unexpected ways of bucking systems. And so if you build feedback loops and measurement loops for high schoolers that say, oh, no, we want you to be creative. We want you to take risks, but also we need you to be perfect at everything all the time. No variants allowed. They're smart kids. They know what the actual assignment is.

Michael Horn:

They know what the game is. Yeah.

Michael Flanagan:

Yeah. 

Michael Horn:

No, and I mean, I think, look, this should be a huge thing for colleges as well as, you know, I famously earned, famously sitting there watching the closures and mergers of colleges. My argument is, lean into what makes you as a college, distinct. Look for the students who match that profile. And guess what? We don't all have to try to look the exact same, which is the current system. 

Michael Flanagan:

One of the things that I, when you're starting new things, it can be very hard to find signal in all the noise. Right. And so I think one of the things that we've learned both in this role and in some of my previous jobs is generally, you know, you're onto something when you see that users on both ends of, like, a performance curve, like what you're doing, or see some value in what you're doing. Right. So for higher education, if I'm in charge, first of all, I want to stipulate that we as a society overly obsess about 20 colleges, and they're very, very low selectivity rates. And that's not where kids actually go to school. You know that better than anybody, written books about it. But since we do, if you are in one of those 20 colleges, you are still, you still have the mandate to yield a diverse, representative class. And the Supreme Court just tied your hands. So they now are saying, oh, you have new metrics. You have different ways of visualizing student capacity and capability in a systematic way. That's interesting to us. We want to have that conversation. So that's not anything MTC did. That's the kind of market shifting to kind of wind up where we already were. And then to your story earlier, the vast majority of enrollment managers at these institutions are actually just trying to find kids, right? So. And right now that the signals we give those same kids when they're wayfinding, trying to find the right, you know, destination, they're very blunt tools. It's like, okay, you have this set of SAT or ACT scores. That means if you theoretically stack rank all these schools, how high up are you allowed to aim? But there's no lateral dispersion. There's no way of saying, but what about fit? What am I actually going to do if I get into one of these schools. And that level of fit, real skill profile, that's where the jagged becomes a feature, not a bug.

Joining Forces with ETS 

Michael Horn:

Yeah, that second one, I confess that's where I'd love to spend the energy that. Not so interested in the former, but the, but let's, let's jump in then to the ETS question, because they made the choice. We're now, this is September, so I guess it was June or something like that.

Michael Flanagan:

Yeah, we went, we announced it in the middle of May. Signed the paperwork in early May.

Michael Horn:

Okay, so May. We're now a few months in. They acquired MTC. Why was this interesting for them? How does this fit into ETS strategic plans? Folks who follow the industry know they have a relatively new CEO. There have been a lot of changes at ETS as well. Wrap it in. Tell us the story.

Michael Flanagan:

So, first, what I will say is just for, in case you have any professors of law out there, it's not technically an acquisition, because we are a nonprofit and they are a nonprofit. Legal junkies out there will know that what we did was called a sole member substitution. But let's just say in plain English, we are now a wholly owned subsidiary of ETS. We are one of the ETS family of companies, so we still operate independently. MTC is still its own 501(c)3 but we are absolutely now in this kind of family that has much vaster resources and I daresay, like, grander aspirations. So ETS has been very busy. The ETS that you and I grew up with, Educational Testing Service, has rebranded. It's just ETS now. And if you look at their tagline, they're talking more about education and talent solutions. Amit Savak, who you just kind of name checked earlier or referred to, is definitely leading the organization in a new direction. I have heard him get on stage and talk to an audience of ETS customers and thought leaders and say, hey, standardized testing isn't going to cut it anymore. I mean, that's a very bold statement for him in that role of that organization to make. I think the strategy is that skills are the future. Interdisciplinary skills. If we really want to give targeted supports and take advantage of emerging technologies to give actionable insights to young people when they're in school, to young adults as they traverse high school to college or work, the more and better information we can give them about their skill profiles, the better job they can do of self-advocacy and wayfinding. In what I think we all kind of stipulate is a very complex and fast changing world. The classic compact that you and I had together, which is study hard, sharpen your number two pencil, get to a good college, get a good job. Like, I mean, good luck with that. I mean, that is a, that whole, call it a treadmill, if you want to call it quality, value proposition, has been very deeply upended in some ways for better. I think there are equity stories to tell in finding talent through new and different lenses. But that's sort of the big picture direction of ETS. They're going in a new direction. They're focusing on skills and most specifically in the area of K-12 schooling. They have an initiative, a partnership with the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning, which is led by Tim Knowles. And I know you've spoken with Tim yourself. Tim's vision for education is to upend K-12 educational architecture. He, like, we believe architecture and infrastructure drive practice. And so if you can move beyond seat time, as he has said many times more eloquently than me, the Carnegie Foundation created the Carnegie unit as we know it. And they're sorry, they're trying to kind of disrupt that. If we can move beyond seat time and we can widen the aperture of what counts as skill development and what we, you know, assess and credential inside of schools, we open up more pathways for young people to be successful. So I never thought I would say this, but we have been working at MTC now for seven plus years, kind of at a grassroots level, trying to be like, seat time, move beyond it, right? Like, hey, expand your aperture, think about skills. So to suddenly have those two organizations be like, no, this is right, this is where we should be going. That was a huge kind of, I guess, wind in our sails and also let us, you know, it was pretty short discussion when we realized just how aligned the senior leaders were of those organizations and our admittedly much smaller team and our senior leaders on board for what we were hoping, the change we wanted to see in the world.

Defining and Codifying Skills 

Michael Horn:

So quick question, and then I have a longer one. But the quick one first is when you say the word skills, so many ways to think about what that word means, right? Some people, it's critical thinking, problem solving. Some people think, you know, it's, it's the ability to do a task in a certain domain, you know, and maybe think, you know, show critical things, like lots of different ways to show that. Sometimes it's just applied knowledge. How are you all like, what does that word mean in MTC land?

Michael Flanagan:

Yeah, we are borrowing very explicitly and with a lot of gratitude, the phrase durable skills from our friends at America Succeeds. And so for your listeners out there, please check out America Succeeds. Google durable skills. What you'll see is a wonderful research project where they did a meta analysis and like a data extraction of 80 million different job postings online. And what you see when you look at those is that there's a tremendous consensus about what employers are looking for. Technical jobs require certain technical skills, and I don't mean like STEM jobs, coding jobs, although those certainly do. Right. One job in a bakery, there are technical skills you need to have, like understanding how doughs proof and how to laminate doughs if you want to make croissants and things like that. But there's also soft skills, which they have rebranded as durable skills. You have to be able to communicate and partner well and make this problem solve on the fly. So whether you're in the bakery or whether you're working at Facebook, those durable skills are transferable across those in ways that the technical skills are not. And more importantly, employers are very comfortable, we think, skilling up entry level hires in technical skills that are specific to their tasks.

Michael Horn:

I see if they have the durable skills, they'll take the chance on them.

Michael Flanagan:

They have a much higher bar for their expectation for what we as education leaders give them as product. And so in terms of there being a mismatch between what K-12 is doing and what employers might want, we think it's the opportunity to add more value is in the explicit creation of durable skills. And I hit that word really hard, right? Cause I am a former English teacher. That was my first job out of college. I was a liberal arts major. I majored in English. I'm a huge believer in a liberal arts education. I know my communication and critical thinking. And I guess in some ways my negotiation skills were built around the seminar table. I had no doubt about that. The difference is those were implicit. The compact was go to a school of certain profile, major in certain subjects, and we can trust as an employer that you'll have that toolkit. It'll just kind of happen. Like the secret sauce will just out itself. We're actually saying, no, these are explicit skills. You can see clear progressions. The progressions are backed by learning science. Teams with the capacity of, say, ETS or Carnegie can surface those very explicitly. And when they do that, it's to the whole betterment of the sector for us to be able to use those as yardsticks as we coach and mentor young people through the skill development. So just as an aside, you know, as you know, I spent now the past seven years talking to a lot of very skeptical admissions offices. Right. I'm saying, hey, we want to give you something you've never seen before, but it's going to do a better job. Trust us. One of the best conversations I had was with the admissions team at West Point, because I showed up there and they're like, okay, look, we've read your website. We get it. But honestly, we're kind of into this ranking and sorting thing. Like, we think that's a feature. And what I said, yes. And we probably also agree that leadership can be taught, like, it's not this, like, thing some people have, some people don't. You can. It's a process. And they were kind of like, okay, we found common ground on that. So if they believe that leadership can be taught explicitly that there's ways to do it developmentally at scale, that's sort of the big idea that we're trying to lean into with durable skills and skills for the future at MTC.

Michael Horn:

Stay with me on this, because I think we'll lead into why the ETS partnership probably makes triple sense. But I guess the push I want to have is durable skills, like critical thinking or problem solving. Does it really transfer that much from domain to domain? Because in a bakery, it looks very different from a coding job. Looks very different from me behind my desk podcasting. Like, how do you think about. Or is it. No, we've codified it. And therefore, like, whatever domain you're working in, yes. You got to build up the knowledge base. But as you progress beyond novice, we expect to see this sort of set of behaviors.

Michael Flanagan:

So the easy thing, because it's the right thing, is to just agree with you and say it's more of a matrix than a ladder.

Michael Horn:

Okay.

Michael Flanagan:

There's not a unified model of critical thinking that is domain independent. Okay. But there are versions of that ladder that are optimized for critical thinking, say, in the humanities or critical thinking in the STEM fields. And I don't know how fine grained we can or even should be as we parse those. And I use the we there very loosely. Like, I am not a psychometrician who's going to be making that deliverable for the sector. I'm very lucky that ETS employs, I think, 75% of the psychometricians in America so that we've got the capacity to do that. Now. Smarter people than me will be figuring that out and also working across the sector, you know, bringing into domain experts. So we can have their voices as we build out the skill progressions.

Michael Horn:

No, that makes sense. I mean, I know at Minerva University, the way, and I'm on the board there, the way that they have thought about it is what you just said, which is we create a clear framework for these different, they have different names for them, but these different habits or skills. And then whatever you're learning, like, we expect to see the progression over time that you mastered. And so it becomes a habit that does transfer, to your point. As I move domain to domain, I guess the question there, or the, perhaps maybe I'm jumping to something, but it seems like ETS the partnership rather than just resources. The other thing now it does for you is we can actually create validated measures to say, like, yeah, what you just represented in the MTC transcript, that artifact of work like this, is how we assess it, validate it. And so that's sort of scalable, if you will, across the platform. Maybe there's even a third party way to do that that gets out of the, oh, my teacher liked me and therefore said this project was good.

Michael Flanagan:

That's exactly right. I mean, I think of the....Our moonshot is if you think about why AP's have gotten such traction, right, and why they. It's that there is value in having a national verified, psychometrically sort of stamped, you know, exam that certifies on a scale of one through five that, you know, student is at this level of capacity in Area X. Huge value in that as like, as a premise. The downsides are one time a year, very high stakes, you know, very significant upstream effects on what the curriculum is. And what if you didn't have to compromise? What if you could have a student doing an independent study, a portfolio defense capstone project completely of their own choosing, all the right adjectives. You would want self directed, personalized feedback, you know, from, you know, defending into experts in the community. But you could take the deliverables that came from that and run them through, we'll call it an engine, and get valid feedback about their communication skills or evidence of their critical thinking. And you could do it in theory, ad infinitum. You could run it through that engine as many times as you want. You could take a single high stakes exercise into a formative exercise, and you could take one of the biggest gating factors to the adoption of these exciting models, which is teacher workload. And you could turn some of these technologies into copilots. We're not taking humans out of the loop like, education is a relational, human centered exercise, but if you could have that kind of heads up display. Right. Those metrics on the side that assisted educators took a little bit of the burden off them, but also improved the validity and accuracy of the feedback they were giving to the students. I just think it could be transformational for the adoption of these practices in actual classrooms. And yes, they result in credential, whether it's a mastery transcript or a learning record. The biggest area of pushback we still get with justification is, well, these are really just collections of local assertions by the schools, which, by the way, is what grades are. So that's the current state that we're kind of solving against is grades. But yes, a competency based transcript currently generated by MTC school is ultimately what the school says. So. And we work very closely to make sure their competency models are as. As strong as they can be. We have to advocate implicitly and explicitly on behalf of those models. With higher eds, we have skin in the game and making sure they're high quality, but that's not the same thing as all as being able to say, oh, because we've run this portfolio of work through a process, we can now certify or stamp or put a badge on those things. I hesitate to use the word badge. Let's scratch that. But you can certify or stamp those. To say, no, you can take this to the bank. Means something third party.

The Role of AI in MTC’s Work 

Michael Horn:

Very cool. I have to ask, is AI a central component of being able to build that scaled infrastructure in some way?

Michael Flanagan:

I mean, it's not even a yes or no question. It's sort of in what ways? Right. The areas I'm most excited about are thinking about certain kinds. Like, if you think about what a mastery transcript is today, you pull it apart. From a technology perspective, what it really is is an assemblage, a collection of varied artifacts, student work files, meta tagged with a lot of data about skill and skill development and scales and other things by humans. That is a really interesting kind of corpus of data and text to put into a large language model. I'm really excited to see what happens when we have a lot of these flowing into trained models and to see what we learn by doing. The other thing, too, is that there are problems that we face now as a consortium. So last count, we had about 400 schools and districts that were working within the MTC environment, right? That probably means we got about 400 bespoke competency models that are in play. Each of them is kind of built with good intentions and backwards design and community buy in, but that's a lot of different ways of defining communication. So there's two ways you solve for that problem. One is by fiat. Somebody comes in top down and says, no, this is how we do it, which is terrible for change management and terrible from a product and customer perspective. The other is you say, hey, we've looked at all of these in a very analytical, thoughtful way. We've run them through different large language assist models. And what we can tell you is that in all these different models, it looks like there's actually two meaningful variants. If you have communication, you're probably doing it either this way or that way. And we'd encourage you to maybe like choose one of those and try and move towards that. That kind of like AI assisted harmonization, I think is going to solve a lot of our problems in the coming years.

Michael Horn:

Very cool. Very cool. As you were saying that, I was laughing to myself at your earlier assertion again, which is like, hey, grades in English suffer from a lot of the same problems, but we sort of accept it because we've accepted the Carnegie unit and we think we have an understanding of what goes on in an English class. Even though I would argue the signal of grades has been increasingly breaking down over the last several years in particular, always flawed in my mind, but really breaking down in the last few years.

Michael Flanagan:

Covid pressure tested our kind of national and local assessment practices and not surprisingly, found them wanting in areas, as you've, as you've documented, probably better than, better than anybody. No, but I mean, you know, for those of, you know, listeners out there who are less familiar with mastery learning, I could see some of them saying, well, isn't this kind of just standards based grading? And it's that the answer to that is not a no, it's a yes end. Like standards based grading is awesome. It's criteria and referenced. It's very objective. You can look at, you have scales. The difference is you can still do standards based grading and not tinker all that much with the fundamental architecture of school, right? You can still have everything in, like seat time. You still have everything based in like, academic subjects. Not a lot of, not a lot of, you know, moving the needle on sort of what school feels like and is a lived experience for kids. Still better than status quo grading. And that's my point on that. But we think that's a good start. And what we want to do is take the same essential principles, really clear criterion reference scales, but expand them so we can use them to measure new and hopefully more relevant things and create.

MTC’s Plans for the Future

Michael Horn:

The room for that jagged asset base. Okay, so last question then for me is you all are a separate nonprofit still legally, that's how it works. But there's obviously a great deal of integration. What does this look like down the road as you play this story forward with ETS and MTC in the work together? And what's the hope for what this looks like in five years?

Michael Flanagan:

I think you can almost work backwards. And when we talk about this now as a team, we have two big goals. One is to use all the amazing support and the brand equity and the relationships with of our new parent to grow the footprint of what we're doing. Like we more or less, without spending any resources on sales and marketing, just kind of grassroots, have managed to build really good sustaining relationships with like these 400 schools and districts. There's no reason we can't double that in the coming year. And who knows? I would love us to be and say, be available to half of school districts, right, as MTC by 2030. I think, and we're now in an organization where like you talk about having a couple hundred thousand kids and they're like, yeah, it's a good start. So I think that's one thing. The other is anything. When we think about product and we think about innovation, it's just contributing as much as possible to the success and product development of the Skills for the Future initiative. I want to be very clear, Skills for the Future. It is owned by Carnegie and ETS. Those are the organizations. That's their jam. But anything we are bringing to the table that can be used or leveraged in terms of thinking about how you build skills based credentials, skills passport or skills transcripts as Amit sometimes likes to refer to them. And also the fact that we do have, you know, as we work with these five states, that first Skills for the Future that Carnegie and ETS have recruited as co design partners, we also can use the portfolio of MTC schools to get feedback and kind of testing new innovations and assessment and insights. So all of it I think fits together from a product perspective and a growth perspective.

Michael Horn:

Very cool. Mike, thanks so much for the work. Thanks so much for joining me and walking us through where you've been and where you are now and where you're going. Really appreciate it.

Michael Flanagan:

Thank you for, thanks again for the invite. Love the conversation.

Michael Horn:

No, I'm, I've been thrilled to watch from afar and sometimes close. And it's great to see. And for all you tuning in, we'll be back with more stories like this next time on the Future of Education.

Michael Flanagan:

And you can find us at mastery.org.

The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Amar Kumar, Founder and CEO of KaiPod Learning, joins Danny Curtis in this conversation! They discuss the growing microschooling movement, unpack what teachers need to feel successful starting and operating their own schools, and envision a future in which districts leverage the power of microschools.

Danny Curtis:

Welcome to the Future of Education, where we are dedicated to creating a world in which all individuals can fulfill their potential, build their passions, and live a life of purpose. I'm Danny Curtis, producer of the podcast and collaborator with Michael Horn on all things learning innovation. And I  am stepping in front of the camera here again this week for a conversation with Amar Kumar who is the founder of Kaipod Learning, which is a technology solution and service provider for microschools. Amar, thank you so much for joining us here today.

Amar Kumar:

It's great to be here. Thanks for having me, Danny.

Amar’s Journey to the Work

Danny Curtis:

Yeah. Well, Kaipod Learning has been such an important player within a microschooling movement that has been growing rapidly and earning a lot of attention. So I'm so excited to have the chance to learn from you about all of the great work that you're doing. And so to start us off, Amar, could you tell us about your journey to microschooling and the founding story of Kaipod learning?

Amar Kumar:

Yeah, happy to. I have been in education for almost 20 years now. I started off as a school teacher where I taught a high school math class in a very high needs school in India. And I discovered in front of the classroom what I think a lot of teachers discover, that you might be planning to teach the pythagorean theorem today, but there are kids who are not ready for that. They're maybe doing math at a fourth grade level, and there are some kids who were way past the pythagorean theorem and they're doing calculus and they're all sitting in front of you waiting for a lesson. That problem of I just couldn't appropriately target all kids with the same lesson plan was really, really difficult for me, and it caused me to want to try things differently, create small groups. I started experimenting in my classroom, which worked to some small effect. I became the principal of the school, saying, I'm going to do this across the whole school. And it all failed because I started to realize that the construct of a rectangular classroom with a teacher at the front and students sitting down all getting the same delivery at the same time, that construct itself is the problem. I wasn't the problem as a teacher. So I left traditional brick and mortar education to do a lot of things in education. Eventually, that journey led me to online schooling, where a curriculum and lesson plans and assessments are all pre-created on a predictable path, and the students move through that at an unpredictable pace. So students get to choose how fast they're consuming that knowledge, demonstrating understanding before moving on to the next thing. And I loved it. I fell in love with that model because I said, this is the future. Every teacher doesn't have to reinvent the lesson plan. The teachers just focus through an online network how to help each child. Loved it. I became the head of product for Pearson's online schools business. And of course, as much as I loved it, I started to also realize the flaws in that system. When students are completely home alone, it can be really difficult from a social and emotional perspective for them. It's difficult for parents when maybe just need some childcare, when the kids should be in a safe place outside of the home. And so I knew that that solution was also incomplete. And when the pandemic happened, like all education companies, I said, what do we do now? And we in Pearson were seeing massive growth of our online schools business.And the families who were in those schools were saying, wow, my child is thriving in an online learning environment. And never predicted it, but, oh, my goodness, like, I would never want this long term because socialization, childcare. And so for me, there was a really important insight there. While the conventional wisdom was, everyone's going to go back to traditional schools, for me, the counterintuitive insight was, but this form of learning really works. So what if we could create small groups of kids who come together socially in a safe place outside of the home, and they're learning at their own pace? So I thought I'd invented a brand new learning model. I was going around telling someone, I've invented something new, until someone said, this is called microschools. We know what this is. And so for me, it was a really interesting sort of bottoms up way to enter this space when I just found this problem that I thought I could solve.

The Evolution of Kaipod Learning 

Danny Curtis:

Got it. So, you know, you saw the shortcomings of traditional education from inside the four walls of the classroom, as you said, and also some of the challenges of tech only from within ed tech, and then tapped into this microschooling movement that was trying to get the best of both worlds. And that was a movement that was in the midst of a lot of growth and change. When schools were closed during the pandemic and more parents were sort of entering their students into these small, personalized learning environments, learning pods, and some of which stuck with it even after school doors reopened. And I understand that Kaipod learning is also in a period of growth and change. Could you tell us a bit about how Kaipod looks differently now than when it started?

Amar Kumar:

Yeah. It's interesting because when we first started, we grabbed onto this concept of learning pods, or pandemic pods, as people were calling them, where parents would voluntarily come together, hire a teacher, meet in someone's basement, and the children would be learning in person. And same thing as what I mentioned earlier, parents who were in the system said, wow, my kid is happy. He's not being bullied. He's learning. This is wonderful. I love it. It's the best year of school he's had. But when schools reopen, it's like, why? Why would you do this? This has been great for you. Again, the insight there was, it was a huge pain to organize these learning. It was a huge pain to hire the teacher. So when we started off to your question, we said, we can organize this for you. We'll grab the space. We will hire the teacher. We'll set the schedule. We'll recruit the families. You just pay a membership fee to join. And that model scaled from our first site in Boston three years ago to 16 sites across the country. And so we saw families were craving this model. Families who'd been homeschooling or families who've been doing online schools. And what we discovered is every time we would want to open a new site, we would get hundreds of applications for our learning controls, and then we would get hundreds of families who said, I'm interested in learning about this. So we just knew we just couldn't do it faster. We knew we could never open enough. It's very capital intensive, as you would imagine, to open one of these learning pods. And so for me, I really wanted to bring this learning model to many, many more cities and states across the country. And I said, I don't have to hold the secret. I don't have to be the one that has my name on the building. It can be someone else who opens it. And so I went sort of down the path of franchising, but there's a lot of legal hurdles there. And then eventually we discovered, actually, if a teacher in a community has a lot of passion around creating her own school, she knows the families in that community, she knows the geography, so she knows kind of where the school could be. She has her own how she wants to run it. Why don't we support her to get her dream off the ground? And then once she launches, we can continue to provide that support, and that can be the start of a new business model. So that's what Kaipod is turning into, is we have sort of our core pods. Those are like our innovation sites where we continue to learn and iterate. We work with great kids, we help improve their life outcomes. And everything we learn there goes into supporting our partners. And there are now almost 100 partners across the country who are opening their own microschools. And so I'm sure we'll talk about that now. But that program is called Kaipod Catalyst.

Kaipod Catalyst

Danny Curtis:

Yeah. Yeah, I think it's a great segue. I would love to focus in on that work that you are doing to bring new founders into the fold and support aspiring micro school founders in making the leap. And I know you all have been doing a lot of work around it, as you mentioned, and have some big goals around it, too. So could you tell us a bit more about that initiative?

Amar Kumar:

Yeah. The number one goal here is lower the friction to start your school. So if you're a teacher who's got this dream to say, I wish I could have my own school, or if you're a teacher who's sometimes in a staff meeting, like, I bet I could run this place a lot better than those people. If you have those types of attitudes, you should think about starting your school. And when you start thinking about starting your school, you get overwhelmed very quickly, because that's a really big task. And through our research, we've identified four really big barriers for teachers who want to do this. The first is sort of content and knowledge. They don't know what to do.

So how do you build a website? How do you figure out regulation? How do you build, set your price? How do you do marketing? How do you enroll families? There's so many things, probably hundreds of decisions you have to make. Teachers don't have a knowledge base to do that right now. That's the first big barrier. The second big barrier is confidence. Teachers don't have the confidence to say, I am going to be, I'm going to be a small business owner. That's a really difficult transition for teachers to make, but it's really important going to start school. You got to see yourself that way. The third is community. If you're doing this alone, it can be a really lonely journey and a lot of people give up. In fact, 90% of the people who want to do this give up—90%. So we know there's a huge problem where people feel alone in this journey. And then the fourth barrier is capital. You need a little bit of money to get started. It's not tens of thousands of dollars, but it is some money to get a lease, to pay for some marketing materials, to buy curriculum, etcetera. So there's a little bit of capital required.

So these four barriers prevent teachers from starting their schools. And if you prevent teachers from starting new schools, you're not creating new supply. Because the new supply starts, the more demand generates, more and more parents get interested. So this is the problem we're setting outwards. How do you break down each of these structural barriers? Teachers and the catalyst program is very specifically designed to break down each of those barriers. On the content side, you have our entire playbook. Everything you need to know to start a school is in our course. That includes lessons, videos, master sessions, tools that you're going to need, templates like, gosh, I spent like $15,000 on my first staff handbook and family handbook with lawyers. Don't spend that much money with a lawyer. Like just use my handbook. Customize my handbook for your school. It's just like that. There's lots of these templates that the school founder has to build. It takes a month to do it. So we think we can accelerate your journey about six to seven months to get your school off the ground.

On the confidence piece. We provide a lot of coaching, one-on-one coaching, group coaching to help these teachers make that mental transition that I am first, a business owner. I'm figuring out how to build a sustainable microschool for my community. So it serves kids forever and it gives me a sustainable wage. So we do a lot of coaching.

The third is the community itself. Like I said, we already have about 100 founders. We're tracking more than double that this year. So the idea is that you are not alone. There are people on this journey who are a few steps ahead of you. There are people who are a few steps behind you, but you're all moving together to create new education options in your community. And one of the most famous phrasing sayings in our community is don't make this mistake, we've made it for you. Because whenever someone asks, oh, I think, I'm going to buy this, like 15 people will say, don't do this. I bought it. It was garbage. It didn't work. And so it really helps people see how they can learn from each other. And these founders are all over the country, and they're really helping each other because there's no competition. They're all over the place. And so it's a really vibrant community. And our founders helped. They feel so supported. Every time there's a win, the first place they go is their husband. The second place they go is our community.

Every time there's a fall or a hurdle, they come to our community because they want the help. They know there's going to be 15 people who have ideas for them on how. And then finally, capital, which is the fourth. We're working with banks to provide loans. We're working with nonprofits to provide grants. We have access to our own grant that the catalyst founders are eligible for. So we're trying to build all these wonderful supports so that there's as little friction as possible if you want to start school.

Danny Curtis:

Yeah. It strikes me as a comprehensive set of offerings that you all have, no doubt informed by the 360-degree view you got into the challenges of microschool operators during your time or in your role as a direct service provider yourselves. And I love that you are not just leveraging your own expertise and experience in this field, but crowdsourcing, the wisdom of microschoolers everywhere, through the community piece that you're describing.

Amar Kumar:

Our network just gets stronger and stronger as more people join the network, that crowdsourcing gets better and better. And so we're really excited about the future.

Serving the Varied Needs of Microschools 

Danny Curtis:

Yeah. And to stay with the alliterative c theme, I'm wondering about another term starting with c customization. One of the great parts about microschools is the wide variety of microschools around the country. Kaipod is plugging into schools with very different missions, different methods, different student populations. And so I'm wondering, how have you all designed your product, your services, to allow it to meet the needs across so many different contexts?

Amar Kumar:

This is great. I think the first thing you picked up on is that the strength of this movement is its diversity. This is the primary reason I decided that the franchise model was the wrong model, or just like the company owned center is hundreds of times the wrong model. Because the reason microschooling will be successful is that they can completely flex to serve their community. They're founded by people from the community for their community. And they're in the community. Right? So I'm sitting in Boston. I have no business telling a founder in Wichita, Kansas, how to launch your school. She knows her community, so then my job becomes to give her a wraparound support and give her the key principles and teach her what would make her successful in her community. So, essentially, we have 15 building blocks of success. Each microschool needs to think about these 15, but the way they adapt them within their school is going to differ. And so, for example, one of them is family relationships, right? Obviously, a great microschool has very strong family relationships. They're not just, we do a parent teacher conference twice a year, but, hey, family member, like, you're getting pulled into the school to support each other, support the other families, support the other kids. Now, for some schools, that dimension is very explicit. There's an expectation that families are volunteering. They're running enrichment activities or field trips for other schools where maybe they're serving a different segment of families that might be busier. There's not an expectation that they volunteer, but there are regular community events. So we don't prescribe how you should do these 15, but we give them guiding principles. We give them the way to think about how their school brings these 15 to life to get to excellence. And so we found through that framework, all of our software, all of our services, all of our coaching, everything can flex to support each founder in their journey. And the biggest proof of that is in our network today. We've got one school in the Bay Area who's charging $30 to $40,000 a year for a very high end gifted student education. That's what that market commands. In the same time, we have microschools in our network who are serving very low income families in Atlanta for less than $5,000 a year. And we, as the network, can and have been supporting both founders serving these extremely different sectors. And so that, for me, is the promise that microschooling diversity is great, and we, as a network, can flex to support that.

Danny Curtis:

Yeah, got it. Accomplishing two very important goals, providing the bones and the structure to stand these things up, maybe more quickly and more easily, and also providing and affording the flexibility to adapt these to different contexts and environments, both of which so important to doing this at scale and making room for the potential for innovation, the enormous potential for innovation of the microschooling movement.

Amar Kumar:

This is the great thing about having teachers start them, because teachers have a million ideas about how to do things better, how to do it differently, for their community. So to give them that flexibility, the bones, like you said, giving them the structure to innovate within is exactly what's right for them.

Founders’ Experiences 

Danny Curtis:

So, Amar, I'd love to hear what you're hearing from the microschool founders that have gone through the program, both about the program itself and the experience of moving into the micro school founder and leader role.

Amar Kumar:

I would probably categorize their reactions in three buckets. And the first is we're hearing that the comprehensive nature of compliance support is really valuable to them. They love that they are never alone and that that support doesn't stop once they launch their school. So I haven't mentioned this, but the way the Catalyst program works is you actually don't pay anything to join the program. You don't pay anything for any of our coaching, any of our support, any of our content, because my vision, my passion is not to run an accelerator for schools. My passion is to run a network of really successful schools. So my incentive is to get you to that point that your school is so successful that I'm so happy to be in your network. You're in my network.

So essentially the way our model works is it's free to join the accelerator, and then when you launch your school, we essentially do a revenue share model, like a first student fee model for your school. And so what people love about Catalyst is that it's a full amount of support and we're with them forever. Like, we don't give up or we don't let go once they've launched. So they always feel like they're part of a bigger team. The second thing we hear is this, this phrase that comes up all the time, that this is literally a lifesaver. I think literally is being used a little extremely here, figuratively a lifesaver. We've had founders who've been two days from being evicted, that we've been able to step in. We've had founders who have accidentally signed a lease for a department that wasn't zoned. So we've been able to step in and help them out when they've made these types of unfortunate mistakes. And so I think knowing that there's a national network with connections, with resources, with the ability to help them get out of sticky situations has helped them get the confidence to keep going on this journey. You can imagine it's really stressful for a first time founder to have made a big mistake like that. And so we're there to help them in that. So that's, we feel great when we hear that. And third, which for me is just the most amazing, is when they say, this journey and this program has changed how they see themselves or it has changed how their family sees them. And they use phrases like, I used to be, quote, just a teacher, unquote, but now I built a school, now I'm a founder. And those phrases, you know, it's really hard to be a teacher. Saying just a teacher is not a great phrase. It's a really, really difficult job. But to make that leap and then see yourself differently and see your community, have your community see you differently is just so incredible to see that transition. And these, these people, they just sit up a little straighter. They carry themselves with more confidence, and they tell us that, hey, I was at the grocery store and someone recognized me as, you're the lady who started a school, right? And their daughter is beaming with pride at their mom being recognized. I love those stories. Like, these are people who are creating jobs in their communities. So this is as much of a story of education innovation as entrepreneurship in some of the most disadvantaged communities or with some of the people, these teachers who've been really forgotten, who aren't respected, and now they're taking matters into their own hands to do something about them.

Danny Curtis:

Yeah, I love to hear that. One of the biggest drivers of career dissatisfaction that we hear about from teachers is that lack of career pathway in a lot of traditional education settings, the lack of opportunity for experienced, excellent teachers to sort of grow their responsibilities and their role within the traditional school context. And so it's nothing surprising to hear that that is the opportunity to be a CEO and a leader and a decision maker within their own school and in their own classroom. That that is one of the most gratifying and rewarding parts about this switch. But for those teachers that might be skeptical of microschools or apprehensive to making this switch, what would you say to them?

Amar Kumar:

Yeah, there's plenty of them. I don't think starting a microschool is right for everyone. Like I’ll be upfront about that. But I think the first thing I would say is every teacher deserves more than they’re getting. And I don't think that's a controversial statement. I think everyone of any political stripe would agree with that. Teachers deserve more. That's the first.

The second is asking these skeptic teachers who may be skeptical or apprehensive, asking themselves why they got into teaching. And when I had this conversation in an interview for Catalysts, they often sort of give, like, the rehearsed answer, but then, like, I push, and then I let them sort of sit in some awkward silence. And then it really gets into the real reason, you know, the spark in a kid's eye. Or, like, my grandmother was a teacher, and she inspired me to do it, but now I've lost the passion, etcetera. And so we asked them, why did you get into this? And are those dreams still being fulfilled? And if not, which, unfortunately for the majority of teachers, it is not being fulfilled, then I would say, just start looking at some of the profiles of people who started schools. Believe it or not, they look like you. They have the same struggles as you. If you go to our website, Kaipodlearning.com, you'll see these profiles, you'll see these men and women of all ethnicities, in all geographies, all income levels, all backgrounds, all ages. Who said, I need to take charge of my life, of my careerAnd all of them were. All of them were skeptical. No one wakes up and says, that's it. I've decided I'm gonna start a school today. No, that's not how it works. Entrepreneurship isn't this magical spark that we might see on Twitter or on TV. It is a slow and fearful journey. It's a journey where eventually you say, oh, my goodness, I have to do this. Something or someone is calling me to do this. So if you're religious, that someone or something is God. If you're not religious, that someone or something is your own inside or the fire that's burning inside you saying, you've got to do this. So if you're finding yourself moved by some of this, just read profiles of people. Type in microschooling, type in how to start a school. Go to our website, whatever you want. Just start learning.

Because it might take you three years to get there. It might take you three days to get there. But everyone should. Every teacher should say, I deserve more, and I want to know what I can do about it.

The Future of Microschooling 

Danny Curtis:

Yeah. To your first point, a big fan of using the five whys to get at that deeper meaning or those deeper reasons. And on the second point, I can imagine that as microschooling grows in popularity, and more and more teachers are seeing more and more teachers like them developing these schools. It becomes easier to imagine themselves in those roles and taking on that responsibility. And for this last question, as we wrap up, I want you to get your crystal ball out and look five years into the future, and I'm curious, where do you see this microschooling movement going? How is it growing or evolving over that period?

Amar Kumar:

Yeah, I think there's probably two scenarios on how this plays out. The first scenario is microschooling starts to get steam. More teachers are starting schools. More parents are then leaving traditional schools, public or private, to start there, to join these micro schools. And that plan just continues. More and more people leave the system, which creates more demand for these microschools, which then spurs more supply. More demand, more supply. Right? So you can imagine a world where, say, 70% of kids are in a microschool in the next ten years. It's not unrealistic. You might think I'm crazy, but it's not unrealistic. North Carolina today already has 25% of kids who don't go to public school. 25% are already opting out of traditional public schools. That's one state. But it's not inconceivable that across the country, 70% to 75% of kids will have opted out of public school. That's a really big existential crisis for the public school system. It is also an exciting opportunity for education innovation and transformation.

So that's one scenario. The second scenario is public schools see this trend, and they say, we're not gonna. We are going to start competing for these kids. Public schools say, I will not lose another kid to these new microschools, because why? I'm gonna empower my own teachers to create new pathways, new microschools within my district. So I have this really wonderful teacher. She's a middle school math teacher. Everyone loves her. She's got such amazing energy. I'm going to say to her, you now create your own pathway for robotics. A microschool focused on robotics within the Boston Public Schools system. You're still a tenured teacher. You're still in our union. Families still join public school. But now kids can opt into your pathway. And if they opt in and that pathway grows, she can grow, she can add more teachers, and if that pathway dies, then someone else can do that. What a great pluralistic system that would be to build within the public sector. That's the second scenario. Now, which scenario will it be? Anyone's guess. And I think it comes down to how the public sector responds. The way I see it is this innovation is going to happen regardless. Whether the innovation happens by teachers who have left the system or by teachers who are still in the system is the choice of the people who control system. Yeah, it's an exciting vision that you've laid out in that second scenario where students in more traditional settings are getting access to this personalized small learning environment. But obviously, as you have already alluded to, a lot will need to shift or change for that to become a reality. And so, I know I said the last question was my last question, but if you'll allow me one more, I'd love to hear what do you see as those necessary supports or changes that would facilitate or accelerate that future? And feel free to take this any direction you'd like, from culture to technology to policy. I mean, I'm a pretty simplistic person when it comes to this. I feel like there are, when something feels too hard to do, you think about what are the barriers? And there are barriers that sometimes exist in nature, and then there are barriers that are man made. And I think in this case, all of the barriers are man made. Right. All it requires is the political will of a strong school superintendent or school leader, the support of the bargaining units, the excitement of local parents and the passion of teachers. Those are all man made. Like, these things can happen in any school district in America, but those four ingredients don't exist yet. And so the question is, how long will it be until the school leadership, the staff, like sort of the membership organizations like unions, the parents and the teachers, how long will it be until they come together and say, we're tired of losing kids, we want to do something about this. Right? So I think those are the things that have to happen. Am I optimistic? No, but that's for the next five years. It's all really I can see. I don't think it's going to happen in the next five years, at least not at scale. But I do know there are school districts who are thinking about this today. This is not a pipe dream. Some of them are saying, I wish we could do this. What would we have to put in place to get it right? So it will happen in small pockets over the next five years, not at scale. And my hope is that in the five to ten year horizon, you do start to see the majority of districts say, we're going to build this within.

Danny Curtis:

Yeah, well, thank you, Mar, for sharing that vision and the ingredients it will take to realize that vision and more generally, your knowledge and expertise within this world of microschooling, and not only with us on the podcast here today, but with microschooling founders around the country. I look forward to watching as you continue to inspire innovation and facilitate learning across education and just really appreciate you joining us.

Amar Kumar:

Thank you. Appreciate you having me. And to the teachers who are listening, I'm serious, you deserve more. We need to look into what that means for you. We have a new program of Kaipod Catalyst that's going to start this fall. So if this is something you want to think about doing for next year, go check it out. This could be the right, this could be the thing you've been waiting for.

The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

John Woods, provost and chief academic officer at the University of Phoenix, joined me to discuss how the University is drawing a closer connection between college and career. We discuss steps the college has taken to build career pathways and equip students with the language and signals to communicate their skills. This episode is worth the read/watch/or listen, as all that they’re doing I suspect will surprise you.

Michael Horn:

Welcome to the Future of Education. I'm Michael Horn and I'm excited about today's show because we're going to get to geek out on topics that have just become more and more of interest to me as we think about where the puck is going in education, learning, upskilling and so forth, which is a lot about careers and skills and things of that nature. And so to help us navigate that conversation, delighted, we have John Woods. He is the Chief Academic Officer and provost for the University of Phoenix. John, thanks so much for joining us.

John Woods:

Thanks, Michael. And thanks for the hockey reference. That resonates with me as a Canadian.

John’s Journey to the Work

Michael Horn:

There you go. And we’re trying to make you really feel at home, right? But let's start and make you feel even more at home. Before we get into some of these conversations around skills and careers generally, let's talk about your own career path to the University of Phoenix and perhaps reintroducing the University of Phoenix to folks. You and I got to spend some time together just a few months back and with a lot of the senior leadership team at the University of Phoenix. And it's clear to me anyway that it's a very different place from, say, 15 years ago, say a decade ago. So if it's easy to do, interweaving your own story with how the University of Phoenix has evolved and how you've landed as the provost there.

John Woods:

OK, so real kind of quick backdrop here. I've got a coal miners lamp on the shelf behind me, one of the many things on that shelf. Both my grandparents were coal miners and my parents, neither one of them went to college. I had two older sisters that didn't go to college, so I was a prototypical first generation college student. I was not a very successful student. I tell the story of my mother dropping me off and some upper class students grabbing my duffel bags and me waving goodbye. And that was it. And I was there for eight years. I don't think my parents visited the campus once. I did an undergrad and a master's and went on to do my PhD in higher ed, higher education administration. And I took a real interest in that because of my own experience in higher ed. And I did a couple areas of focus within my PhD work. One was adult learning theory and the other one was academic honesty. And I thought I would return to Canada from the US with my PhD in hand and go to work at a Canadian university. But I had a lot of opportunities in the US and stayed. I worked for about 25 years for adult focused institutions some eight years ago, I was contacted by the University of Phoenix when they were looking for a future provost and lucky enough to come on board there. Coming up on my 7th anniversary, I guess it would be soon and been part of this thing you just described, which is becoming a very different university. When I joined, new owners had recently purchased the university as well as a number of other companies within that same portfolio, and they sold the other companies off. Some of them were institutions in other countries and they really focused on the University of Phoenix, which had kind of a different model when it was publicly traded. There were not only these other companies within the portfolio, but there was sort of a central service providing really help to the different business units, including the University of Phoenix. And what they sought to do was really divest of all the other things and focus on Phoenix and push all the services back into the university to make it a standalone soup to nuts entity. And as well they decided that they were going to make a number of changes to improve the outcomes at the university. I've been part of that journey, which has been fantastic. I really consider kind of to be the capstone of my career, working with working adults.

The Career Optimism Index

Michael Horn:

Very cool. And obviously I think this is going to be a more natural segue than I had even planned with that backstory because obviously now you're making sure the education you all provide is not just academically rigorous, but it's also career relevant. And maybe career relevant is where you all start. And I don't think I have to tell you that it's unusual for a provost at a university to have that sort of focus and that be the portfolio sort of charge, if you will. But one of the things that you oversee each year is the Career Optimism Index. It surveys 5,000 American workers to understand their points of view and their sentiment on the labor market economy and so forth. And we'll be sure to link to the current version of it, the 2024. But I'd love to hear from your perspective, what jumped off the page. What were some of the highlights from this latest installment? Because I will say it was interesting to me that there seems to be a lot of tension in the market right now. That was one of the things that really came out loud and clear, but I'm curious if that stood out to you as much or what your big takeaways were.

John Woods:

Yeah. To connect some of the transformation at the University of Phoenix to the most recent findings in that survey, which I think there's just a wealth of good information in there and I'm glad you can provide maybe a link to it. We presented it to chambers of commerce across the country and a number of different organizations that are really interested in that data. So some good stuff in there. The transformation kind of, of the University of Phoenix included eliminating a lot of programs that we're not tracking to above average job growth projections. So that's where kind of this starts. And only adding new programs that met that criteria for a certain amount of growth that was projected in terms of jobs. And when I laugh a little bit sometimes when people kind of compare the size of the university to what we used to be and say the beleaguered University of Phoenix, which is much smaller than it used to be.

Michael Horn:

What is it right now? Like 100,000 or so?

John Woods:

We're over 80,000, but getting smaller was intentional. So moving away from campuses, because working adults had clearly chosen online as their modality of choice, moving away from programs that didn't track to really good job growth prospects, and then adding programs that only did that, those were big steps. And then probably the next biggest couple of things is we reduced the cost of attending the University of Phoenix in 2017 and haven't increased it since. I think I saw a statistic the other day that, on average, higher education has increased its price at a rate higher than the rate of inflation for something like 65 of the last 70 years. So we really bucked the trend there. And then we skills mapped every one of our programs so that when a student completes a course in their program at the University of Phoenix, they've earned a number of skills. But we clearly signal to them what the three top skills are that they've earned, and that skills mapping tracks from the learning content that they are exposed to, to the assessments they complete, to the data we collect, that tells us the level at which they achieved on those assessments. So how I connect this to what the Career Optimism Index survey tells us in its most recent iteration is that, as you said, not only do we survey a bunch of workers to get their sentiment on their career prospects, but we also, as part of that study, survey a number of companies, and we hear from them as well. And it's interesting to kind of see the points of differentiation between the two sets of populations and their perceptions. Companies are saying it's hard to find people, hard to find people that have the right skills, that they need. Workers are saying that companies don't seem to value professional development as much as they once used to, and companies don't do enough to develop their talent, to keep their talent, to grow their talent, and so that's an interesting, you know, kind of dichotomy, because the, the mapping of our programs for skills, we think, has given our students a language that they can communicate in with an employer or a boss or a future boss or prospective boss.

We've now issued 685,000 skills badges. The badges are collections of skills, and the students can post those instantly with a couple of clicks to their LinkedIn profile or zip recruiter profile. But more than anything, as I said, it's given them a language they can speak in that companies understand. And that skills mapping that took three years to do has enabled us not only to do that badge work, which I think is probably more badges than any other institution is issued so far, but we've also created a set of career tools with that same data. So one tool allows students in their portal to be sent actual jobs that match their skills profile with us. So the data is all connected that way that, Michael, I could send you three jobs and you'd see that you are an 85% match to those jobs, and you could apply or click on a link to get help to apply from us. And we think that's changing the game, because the notion of, I'm going to go back to school, and when I finish, I hope I get a better job, it shouldn't really be that way. The degrees and what people learn should be far more transparent, and people should be able to earn as they learn, maybe change their circumstances, not only at the end, but even as they go. But that can't happen with the opaque nature of a degree where people say, I'm done my second year, can you hire me? It can't even be done sometimes when they've got the degree in hand, because it's not clear what's in the degree. So we think this really can unlock some of that.

The ‘Grain Size’ of Skills

Michael Horn:

Very cool. So let's double click on the skills part of it and the badging and so forth. I'm just curious because sometimes employers have, like, really clear understanding of the skills that they want, and sometimes, as you know, they don't really have much clue, so. And you all have an unabashedly sort of both and approach to this, right, degree and skills, which I think stands out in a marketplace where, you know, a lot of places are all in on one or all in on the other. I'm just curious, can you give us a sense of, like, the grain size of the skills? And are you the one certifying them? Are they third party? And just so you know, the reason I ask, I was with a CLO of a large company the other day, and he was observing, “you know, I think we're sort of overthinking the skills conversation. We're trying to get so granular and specific that we sort of lost the plot,” was his argument. So I'm sort of curious your take and what grain size we're talking here.

John Woods:

Yeah. So I find it really fascinating. When any of these lists are published annually of the top skills employers are looking for, they usually come out from people like SHRM or the big consulting firms. Those lists always have what we'll call soft skills.

Michael Horn:

Yeah, the communication, critical thinking, which aggregates well across all skills and industries.

John Woods:

That's getting somebody who can really function and by their sheer nature being able to function while they're more teachable or trainable along the technical skill stuff. And so we mapped for that, too. And I think that's been really important, those types of things, executive functioning skills, some people call them. They exist in core classes and they exist in gen eds, and we've mapped for them too. So park that for a second, because I think those are really valuable and helpful, making people better workers and more promotable and all these other things. But the mapping we did of all the technical skills kind of took a bit of a Rosetta stone to build that, because the inputs were many and employers certainly wanted input. We have our industry advisory boards made up of companies that gave us those inputs, but we also have programmatic accreditors who say these things have to be in your programs for you to hold our accreditation. And then on top of that, we had all the kind of industry groups that weigh in on these things.

And then you actually had all of the jobs and their definitions from the Bureau of Labor. All the jobs have codes, and all the codes have a number of ingredients baked into them of what the skills should be. So we mapped all of that and saw that we taught all these things in our programs, but we needed to probably simplify to what you said and identify the top ones. So where, from all the source data, where are the things that people are asking for? What are those, the things they're asking for the most? So we rank them, and the top three are most clear, and those are the ones that we make more clear to the student, and it's collections of those that give students badges. Now, on the other side of the coin, to your question, we're doing an awful lot of work with employers, so we can tell employers this on behalf of our students and make them more interested in our grads but we also have some tools that leverage, and I know you wanted to talk a little bit about this today, but we have some tools that leverage AI, which will allow an employer to identify the skills being demonstrated by a group of people within their organization and map that up against. Maybe it's the next level position in that organization, that they've identified the skills for that job, and we can show them what the gaps are. And in that way, we could maybe do some just-in-time training for the people. They've got to be developed into these other roles, which is a lot less costly and risky than bringing on brand new people for those roles, plus more enfranchising for the people they already have to take an interest in their growth and development and show them a path to promotion. So we've actually got a couple of pilots going on with employers where we're doing that leveraging, like I said, some AI tools.

Michael Horn:

I mean, that gets cool, because I think what you're saying is the AI allows you to assess and skill in context, as opposed to pulling me out of my job. And as you also know, critical thinking, we use the same words in every field, but how it manifests in one field is very different from another. So now I can develop that critical thinking skills in the context of the industry I'm working for.

John Woods:

Yeah, and I think, you know, we hear an awful lot about employers and their frustration with higher ed. I think this can really solve for a lot of that. And, you know, I think kind of running parallel to their own skepticism of higher ed and some of the pronouncements some of the bigger companies have made, that they'll hire people without degrees, you know, no degree required, we'll train you. Running parallel to that, in the last year, we've seen 100 institutions either go away entirely or merge with somebody else. We know higher ed is costing more and more. We've seen dozens of institutions announce that they have big deficits, that they have to cut programs and even sacred ground, eliminate tenured faculty roles. So higher ed doesn't have a great brand right now of solving employer problems. And we think the combination of being more affordable and being much more granular, to your words, around what the student is learning and making that connection more clear, that people can speak to what they've got in terms of skills, employers can hear it and understand it and feel more confident. We feel this is kind of a recipe that is, it's time has come kind of thing, especially with what's going on in all of higher ed, as I described.

Reducing Anxiety, Increasing Transparency 

Michael Horn:

Well, it's interesting. If you step back from that and you think about the anxiety that you described in the Career Optimism Index on both sides, the employees and the employers, one of the things it seems to me that you're doing is trying to strip out anxiety on all sides. right? We're not raising the price you've held at constant. You're trying to make the skills that you actually learn within the degree much more transparent. So you know where the matches are in the market, and then you're trying to do it within context so it's less of a step away, if you will. And I want to try this one out on you and see how you react. Someone observed recently, actually my co author on the upcoming book Job Moves observed to me that everyone sort of wants to rag on Gen Z for being impatient and looking for the next thing right away and so forth, and he's like, can you really blame them? All we do is sit there yelling at them that their skills are eroding faster than ever. Of course they're impatient to use them and put them to good use.

I'm curious, you know how that lands with the moves that you are all making and the folks that you're serving.

John Woods:

Yeah. And this one hits close to home, too, because I've got a grad, a college grad from, I remember that three months ago who's looking for a way to launch, and I need them off the payroll. And then I've got one in college who's trying to figure out what to major in. And right now she's, she's majoring in psychology and, well, I have to wonder where that's going to go. So we'll figure all that out. But the generation you're talking about, I think they need a better set of tools to navigate a really complex, rapidly changing work environment. And the frustration that they're facing when they talk to employers or prospective employers, I think, is that they're not speaking the same language. And I think the anxiety of folks on the employer side who could hire their way out of this thing can't anymore.

John Woods:

The labor market is pretty tight. Unemployment is pretty low. There's not as much churn as there was in previous years in the market. So just finding people to do the things they need to do is not easy. So I think they got to grow their own people, and they might have to bring more people in at lower levels and have great programs in place to engage and develop them. And the only way they can do that with any amount of specificity or accuracy is the skills kind of map the skills taxonomy, the skills pathway that I think we've sort of tried to unlock here. So we're really actually pretty excited. We can reduce anxiety in both those groups.

Michael Horn:

Yeah. And I forgot the other way you're reducing anxiety is by eliminating degree programs that don't have that positive ROI. And I'm going to get the number wrong, but I think it was Third Way that said, over a third of bachelor's degrees - right. - have a negative ROI after five years. I think Preston Cooper's research has shown, like, 25% or something, always have a negative ROI. Getting those off the table and being transparent about it, I think that probably helps a great deal as well.

John Woods:

And those numbers being well documented, if you put that up against the number, that seems to persist. And I wrote it down here for today, the New York Federal Reserve said that people with bachelor's degrees are earning, on average, $60k versus $35k for people without. If you think about that and the negative ROI and a bunch of degrees, it means there's a lot of degrees out there that are really helping people improve or change their lives.

Michael Horn:

That's a great point.

John Woods:

Yeah. And so what we try to, I think, make clear to folks is the degree over the long haul is still an amazing ROI. And if it comes with a couple of caveats, the school that's offering it should be able to tell you our degree because of the network you'll get at our liberal arts college. And another school will say our degree because there's a need for technicians who do HVAC or whatever it is. And we'll say it's our degree because it's practitioners who've done the jobs you want teaching it. And the skills that we've mapped into the programs, into the courses, give you what you need to, with confidence, share what you know, and employers will understand that. So everybody kind of, you know, across this vast landscape, diverse higher education institutions, they've got to have the, you know, the story that backs up what they are selling. And that's some kind of great thing about American Higher Education, is its diversity.

But the stories are being challenged, so you got to back them up.

Educating Employers

Michael Horn:

Yeah. And I love the way you just framed each of those narratives for three very different universities in very different parts of the stack, if you will. Last question for me as we start to wrap up, which is you've talked about growing your own and the reskilling or upskilling that employers have to do. I think that's right. Some people worry, well, will they go to another company. And as Richard Branson, I think, quoted once said, yeah, but what if they stay at yours and you didn't upskill them? So I think it makes a lot of sense. The curiosity I have is you're introducing the skills, taxonomy and language so that people, employers and employees, or prospective employees in some cases, can talk with each other better and make these matches. How much education are you having to do on the employer side? And the reason I ask is, my observation at least, is they do have a pretty good grasp of the core technical skills that are at hand in any given job.

And then the critical thinking, communication and stuff like that. They know it's important, but they don't really know how to measure or assess or like what it really means in their context. And so I'm curious how much education or to get them to buy in, if you will. You all have to do on that with sort of the leadership role you have to play?

John Woods:

Yeah. The interest we've had, when we share what you and I just talked about for a few minutes, the interest is really high. It comes in within an environment of a lot of people talking about skills-based hiring, maybe more than I've ever heard talked about. And like you said, the proof is in the demonstration of the skills, whether they're technical or executive functioning, soft skills, durable skills, whatever you want to call it. I think what we've been able to do is show them how we assess those things, how they can assess those things. I think that will be an evolution. I think we'll get better at that and they'll get more receptive to that. And I think the driver for that is the sheer economics of it. Many of them are already paying for their employees to go back to school as a retention tool because some other employer will offer it if they don't. They want that to make sense for them and for the learner. And making sense means they'll stay, they'll be increasingly more valuable to the organization. So those economics all work far better than we had. X number of positions we couldn't fill for a long time, and they were vacant, and as they were vacant we were hurting from it. Or we filled x number of positions, but a lot of them flamed out of or we hired a bunch of new people at a tremendous cost. We wish we didn't have as much churn and need to do that.

John Woods:

The economic drivers are at least those and many more for folks to be open and interested in this concept, in this conversation. So I think it's for those reasons we've had great conversations with companies and are helping, we think, kind of solve some of this challenge for them.

Michael Horn:

Yeah. So actually I lied. I want to ask one more question about that because it's so interesting. I guess my observation then out of that is like you're basically tagging these skills to a much clearer KPI's so they can understand the ROI with much more granularity perhaps than past education investments they've made. The flip side of that, I guess, is as you're starting to show them how you assess it, can they start building that into their own performance management systems to better show the growth of their employees and where they need to work?

John Woods:

Yeah, I think that's possible. I think in a couple of really far along conversations we've had with companies, we've talked about doing exactly that as kind of follow-on work. Step one would be we have people we can demonstrate, have the skills to the jobs you've got today. Just need to give them that opportunity. We're confident we've got the skills right for what you have. Second part of the conversation, we think we can assess the skills of the people you've got and get them to different positions within your organization, not even maybe with whole degrees, but with courses or certificates. And as you said, the third part of the conversation would be kind of following those people along and being able to measure the actual demonstration of skills that we all kind of bought in and thought would happen and seeing where they go over time. And I think we'll get there. I think AI is going to be instrumental in getting there. There's a lot of way to evaluate different kinds of work product and use inference and some of the large language models to inform what is versus what is not in terms of the work product. So we're excited because that's only evolving and at a rapid pace. We think these conversations can get even better. We're excited about where we are, but we think there's a lot more to come.

Michael Horn:

Very, very cool. I mean, I love the transparency, careers making skills a real currency and lingua franca, if you will, on both sides of. John, huge thanks for joining us and talking about the approach that the University of Phoenix is taking on this.

John Woods:

Thanks, Michael. Enjoyed talking to you and happy to do it again, maybe give you a ere's the rest of the story down the road.

The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Danny Curtis, producer of the Future of Education podcast, joins me on the “mainstage” to discuss a new bill introduced recently in the Senate that would increase Research and Development in the Department of Education. We discussed the bill’s potential to spur learning innovation, the demand-side challenges to adoption, and systemwide reforms that can support in addressing those. Danny will be making more appearances in the weeks and months ahead, so I’m thrilled to introduce him to you all here by video.

Michael Horn:

Welcome to the Future of Education. I am Michael Horn, and you are joining the show where we are dedicated to a world where all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their potential, and live a life of purpose. And over the past year and a half, it's been really fun because I've had a partner in crime on this. He's been largely behind the scenes, although we have bylined some articles together. So you’ve seen his name pop up in different things, different forums, but he has literally been overseeing all of my digital products, all the digital work that I do. He's helped bring up the quality a ton, but he also happens to know a lot about education as we'll get into it in a moment. He's none other than Danny Curtis. Danny, thanks so much for actually coming on the live stage and showing your face to the audience today.

Danny Curtis:

Thanks, Michael. It's great to have the chance to step in front of the mic today.

Danny’s Journey to the Work

Michael Horn:

Well, why don't you tell folks about yourself? Because part of this idea is we want you to be in front of the mic a little bit more, either riffing with me, bylining with me, or maybe even interviewing some guests. I know you've done one interview that’s super interesting coming down the pipeline, but why don't you give people a taste of, you know, your background, your experience in education specifically, and workforce issues as well. Before you and I teamed up to start doing some of this work together.

Danny Curtis:

Well, outside the work that you and I have done, Michael, I have also worked in education workforce policy, as you mentioned, at the state and local level, and a nonprofit, all towards designing systems that do a better job of connecting learners to opportunity. And got my start in this work as a high school English teacher in California, where I met so many inspiring people, teachers, administrators, students, and saw incredible work being done and also noticed the ways that that work was constrained by outdated systems. And that's really what got me into policy to try and create that change. And it's also why the mission of the Future of Education, to unlock the potential of schools and students through innovation, why that resonated so strongly with me.

The New Essential Education Discoveries Act

Michael Horn:

Well, I appreciate everything, obviously, and let's dive in. There's a bill that has come up that you called my attention to has some bipartisan support. It's around research, I think. But why don't you give folks a flavor of what we are talking about and why it caught your eye and worth talking about here in the show?

Danny Curtis:

Yeah. So I wanted to talk about a bipartisan bill. I know, very rare these days, that has proposed increases to federal education research and development funding. That was introduced in the Senate at the start of August. It's called the New Essential Education Discoveries act, NEED for short. And it was introduced by Senators Michael Bennett, a Democrat from Colorado, and John Cornyn, a Republican from Texas. And it would develop a fifth center in the Institute for Education Sciences that they're calling the National Center for Advanced Development and Education. And it would be dedicated to developing, disseminating, investing in what they're calling high risk, high reward, cutting edge innovations in education. And that includes technologies, innovative learning models. And it also proposes some changes to the state longitudinal data system. But for today, we'll stick to the R&D and learning. Innovation specialists have long argued that one of the great challenges of implementing innovation in education has been the lack of research and development and supply stemming from that. The federal education budget allocates only about $2.5 billion to R&D in education, which sounds like a lot, but it's only 2% of spending on education in the federal government and like, two tenths of a percent of total education spending when you take state and local into account. It also stands in stark contrast to the R&D spending in other departments. Like one department that it's often compared to is the Department of Defense with their DARPA fund, which spends $79 billion a year. And so for those reasons, this bill has garnered a lot of interest from learning innovators and a lot of excitement, too.

Michael Horn:

Yeah. And I think it's great. Like, if we start putting more research on those big sort of home run questions, if you will, budget behind it, see what we can develop out of it, I think that makes a heck of a lot of sense. Not nearly enough R, as you said, in education. I mean, that's, you know, that's pennies on the dollar when you think about what you just said. And for a sector where so much is riding on it, look, we'd never do that in healthcare at this point, right? We invest a lot in R&D. It's incredibly important. Basic research is incredibly important. Solving the most intractable problems, incredibly important. I think all those statements apply to education as well. And frankly, I talk a lot about personalizing, customizing education. That's akin to precision medicine in the medicine field. But they went through this whole field or movement where they had empirical medicine, where on average, if you have these symptoms, you should do this treatment. And, yeah, it didn't work all the time. But it started to come out of RCTs before they've started to refine it more and more. It's funny. In education, we don't even have the empirical stage often even in place. We don't even know on average often what works. And we're sort of trying to leapfrog into the precision or personalized. We just need a lot more research on a whole host of things, not just science of reading, so that we can get much more precise. I love all of that. 

The Education System’s Demand-side Differences 

Michael Horn:

The one quibble I have is, and you didn't say it, but, you know, you hinted to it, which is that a lot of people compare this to DARPA, the defense advanced research projects arm that has given us the Internet, you know, GPS. Right. All those things. And I just, I don't love the analogy.

Because in DARPA, it's big, thorny problems you're trying to tackle with a relatively centralized buyer that is also federally funded. Right, as in the military service arms. And if DARPA comes up with something really interesting, you have a buyer that, yeah, I get procurement is broken in the military, but relatively speaking, it's nowhere near as insanely fragmented or idiosyncratic, frankly, as school districts are in America, where we don't only do a very bad job of understanding demand from the top down, frankly, what they’re going to demand, the problems that they think are most interesting are often different from place to place in unpredictable ways. And so thinking that we can crank out something and then theres going to be an at scale adoption, thats the only piece that I would say, like, lets go a little bit easier on that part of the D, if you will. But I still think the reps of basic research leading into something that actually produces a product. Its not just an academic report on a shelf that has a lot of value. I would agree.

Danny Curtis:

Yeah, yeah, you raised some really important points there. And I agree for the most part, not only is the education system far more diffuse, you mentioned the defense has a fairly centralized buyer. And schools, there are about 14,000 school districts around the country somewhere around that. And not only is it diffuse, but many of these school districts, most of these school districts are locked into an industrial paradigm of education that makes it hard for them to incorporate a lot of these innovations and therefore kind of suppresses demand. And there's historical precedent for these challenges that you're raising. In the 1990s, there was the new American Schools federal initiative that had a lot of the same R&D goals as the current one. In the Obama administration, there was the I3 initiative. Having said that, I do think that there are some factors at play here that point to maybe this time being a little different. Post Covid, I think there's a lot of. There's a renewed sense of urgency around supporting students to recover learning and maybe increase openness from that. I also think that the growth of new education AI tools and all of the buzz around AI has created a sense of excitement about learning, innovation. And then in the post secondary front, I think the wave of college closures that we've seen also increases a sense of urgency to try something new. And also included in the bill, there are measures designed to solve for this. There's a lot of discussion about these within the bill, about these innovations being community informed. And the plan for going about that is they would create these advisory panels and they'd be comprised of teachers, specialists, parents, students. And the idea there being that they want to ensure that what is being produced by this new center is solving for problems that exist in schools.And so they're kind of working to ensure that whatever is created there is a practical use for. But I think that stops short of necessarily solving all the demand problems that you're describing. But there is more that can be done at the state, federal, local level to stoke demand as well.

Michael Horn:

Yeah, and in some ways, let's have the breakthroughs and then we could figure out the demand side of the equation is, I think, part of the thinking that I think would be great anytime we can get researchers, frankly, they struggle often to get into districts to do really good research. If we can get researchers into districts with companies, those who can create product, I think that's all to the good, and I think would get me excited. I'll add one other thought, which is we also know that there's another bipartisan bill around research. It's much more around the model providers. Our friend Joel Rose and new classrooms has spoken about this in the past, and I think model providers are super interesting because they can also more readily rethink the industrial model itself. Which to your point, frankly, if you're trying to innovate within an industrial model context, the model can only prioritize those things which perpetuate it, not undermine or overthrow it. And so I think having model providers out there, deeply integrated, maybe frankly, what about an army of 200 lab schools, truly lab schools, not sort of John Dewey reprised, but like real lab schools paired with deep researchers at research universities, were not just the ed schools, but cognitive of neuroscientists, etcetera, could come in and really be playing in an integrated way with all the different inputs there. I think there's some very cool things when you get into really rethinking the model, integrating all the parts in very different ways.

Rethinking All the Parts Together 

Michael Horn:

That's where the real breakthroughs, frankly, in any field come when you get to rethink all of the parts together. So, Danny, that Bill starts to get into some of the out of the box providers that have been written about that, Joel's written about New Classrooms, has written about, and a series of recommendations there for how we would start to get that really started as an engine of innovation in America's schools as well. Thoughts on that as we wrap up here?

Danny Curtis:

Yeah, I mean, you mentioned the Out of the Box report, so much good stuff in there on how the system can sort of more comprehensively, in addition to this R&D initiative, increase that demand and ensure successful implementation of innovations. And so looking at the federal level, I think there's a real opportunity here to create a grant and introduce funds that will facilitate the adoption of innovations by unburdening districts that decide to take these on of the costs of implementation and so helping them cover some of those startup costs for creating new schools and new classrooms that are going to be implementing new forms of learning, both state and federal level. There's an opportunity to change regulation, open up flexibility around testing and procurement so that districts can implement these innovations to their best ability or to their fullest potential rather. The California Math Framework that was immplemented this time last year stands out as a really good example of that to me. And then at the local level and at the school level, Michael, you write a lot about how difficult it is for an organization or a school to build the classroom of tomorrow while also operating the classrooms of today. And so I think schools can start thinking about creating those separate arms that are dedicated to innovation and dedicated to thinking up new ways of teaching and learning.

Michael Horn:

Yeah, it's a great point. It's a great point. Danny. Sorry, keep going.

Danny Curtis:

Well, I was just going to bring it back to your earlier point around model providers. We've already talked about the diffuse nature of, of our education system. So many districts doing so many different things. It can be really difficult to have your finger on the pulse of learning innovation when you are operating a school day in and day out and doing that difficult work. And so partnering with model providers who do have that landscape and have worked on implementing these new forms of teaching and learning across the country can be a great way to really get the ball rolling and ensure the success of implementing innovations.

Michael Horn:

Yeah, all of that makes a lot of sense. And I think, to your point, and we'll wrap up with this thought, is that as you start to have different arms, different educators coming to the table with space, time, and their only job is to create these new models and then find places for them, that makes sense, right? Asking someone to operate your classroom and innovate in a radically different way doesn't make sense. You never ask pilots to come up with new ways to build airplanes. That's insane. And similarly, I think with schools, frankly, that's true in healthcare, too. We're not asking the doctors on the front line to come up with the vaccines. They're giving input into the vaccines, but they're not actually doing that sort of work itself. That's where the researchers, the developers, et cetera, come together. Same principle here in some ways, like, it's surprising that we think, oh, you know, why aren't schools innovating more? Well, of course they aren't, because they're trying to operate the schools and serve the kids and like, of course you need other people to do it. So great set of points all around. Really appreciate you bringing this bill to the fore so we could talk about it, and we'll look forward to seeing you much more on the Future of Education. And for all of you tuning in, it'll be a relief because you won't just see my mug made for radio on the screen. You'll also get to see Danny. So thanks so much for joining us.

The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

As the political conversation heats up around the impact of tutoring at-scale and the actual results from all that one-time emergency money school districts received in the wake of COVID, Jessica Silwerski, cofounder of Ignite Reading joined me to discuss the organization’s approach to literacy tutoring. We talked about the science of reading, the keys to Ignite’s success, and how districts are budgeting for tutoring as those one-time elementary and secondary emergency relief (ESSER) funds dry up.

Michael Horn:

Welcome to the Future of Education, where we are dedicated to building a world in which all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their potential, and live a life of purpose and to help us think through that today and how we get there, how we get to that promise for all individuals. I'm really delighted that we have Jess Reid Sliwerski. She is the co founder and CEO, most recently of the the literacy tutoring company Ignite Reading, which we're going to hear a lot about today. But Jess, welcome. You have a fascinating education background in general, so we're going to get into all that and more. Thank you so much for being here.

Jessica Sliwersk:

Oh, my gosh, Michael, thank you so much for having me. I feel like I am living the dream right now, getting to do a podcast with you and talk about my favorite thing ever, which is teaching kids to read.

Jessica’s journey to the work 

Michael Horn:

Which is incredibly important. And that's why we're both excited for this conversation as a result. So let's dig in. But where I want to dig in is both the founding story behind Ignite Reading, because it came about at a really important time, the country's history, the world's history, the school's history at a challenging moment, but also your own background into that story, because, as I said up front, like, you've had some really neat roles in the world of education. Lots of different organizations, seen lots of different stripes of all of this. And so I'd love you to blend those two together, if it's possible.

Jessica Sliwerski:

Yeah, definitely. I am going to go back in time about 20 years, when I first started my career in education as a classroom teacher. And then I'm going to tell you all of these really interesting steps I had along the way that I believe in retrospect, positioned me to be doing exactly what I'm doing in building and leading Ignite Reading. So 20 years ago, I joined Teach for America on a complete whim and was placed into a fifth grade classroom in the Bronx in New York City after a six week crash course. And it became very apparent to me within my first week of teaching that many of my students still did not know how to read. And over the course of the next two years, I tried everything I could to figure out how to teach them to read. And, you know, 20 years ago, we were just starting to use Gmail. There wasn't a bunch of resources that you could google around science of reading in order to figure this out. And so I was asking everyone, you know, how do I teach my kids to read, and nobody knew how to help me. And so it wasn't until my third year of teaching, when I was a founding first grade teacher at a school in Harlem, that I finally learned how to teach my kids to read. Because it just so happened that that school was using an evidence based foundational skills curriculum. And I vividly remember, Michael, that feeling of going from working with kids who were just learning the Alphabet to then watching them learn to read words and sentences and paragraphs of text. And it was so deeply, emotionally gratifying. And I was also angry as hell that I had gone my first two years of teaching not knowing how to do this. Because what was so obvious to me, even as a baby teacher myself, was that, yes, learning to read is a science. And what I was able to very easily understand was that it was not rocket science.Because here I was in my early twenties, and I was learning to do it, and it was working, and all of my kids were learning to read in first grade on time. And so that was when there was this fire that was lit in me, and I became absolutely obsessed with wanting to help as many kids as possible learn how to read. And so fast forward. Over the course of my career, I've had a really unique mix of roles in education. I became a school leader. I was a K-12 instructor instructional coach with a focus on foundational reading and, you know, the other strands of what lead to highly skilled reading for kids. I was coaching principals across New York City in best practices and literacy instruction. I was a literacy specialist for a network of 22 schools in New York City. And then I accidentally co-founded my first edtech company with a literacy app that I designed with the goal of helping teachers and helping school leaders. And then it was like, oops, I think this is a product, and we now need to build an ed tech company in order to scale this. And that was when I then had my first taste of national impact, which for me, the work has always been about trying to help as many kids as possible. So that was exhilarating. And when I got my first taste of working at a national level, I just wanted more. And I went on to lead a nonprofit called Open Up Resources that publishes high quality instructional materials. And this is where it gets even more interesting, because while I was running Open Up Resources, my daughter started Pre-K in Oakland Unified school District. And of course, being an educator, I was like, oh, I can't wait to volunteer in her classroom. And being a CEO, I had the flexibility with my schedule to make that happen. And I quickly saw that kids in her class, as well as the grades above, were not being taught to read with an evidence based curriculum. So at this point, it had been about 15 years since I had been in the classroom, and I'm just having this moment of like, are you kidding me? This is still happening, even though we know better. And so I started teaching kids to read using a structured literacy approach, and then was very quickly kicked out of volunteering because I was being a troublemaker. This was in a school that was using the Lucy Culkin's curriculum. They were using guided reading. I was told, if you want to be a volunteer here, you must do guided reading.And my response was, you want me to do something that has proven to be ineffective and harmful to kids rather than giving them what the reading research shows their brains need in order to learn to read? And they said, yes. And they said, I'm not going to do that. And they said, then you can't volunteer here.

Michael Horn:

Wow.

Jessica Sliwerski:

And I am stubborn. And I also, when it comes to kids, I fight really, really hard because I think about the fact that I am so lucky to have the education that I have, and it's not right that any kids in our country shouldn't be getting the best possible education. And connected to my story is that I'm also a cancer survivor. And as obsessed as I was with teaching kids to read prior to my cancer diagnosis, having gone through the experience of cancer right after my daughter was born, surgeries, chemotherapy, I learned how strong I am, and I have a deeper appreciation for just how short and precious this life is. And I want to live every day with purpose. And so there's this passion that I already have that is now on completely steroids because of this crucible that I've experienced in my life. So I get kicked out of volunteering, and I'm just like, oh, hell, no. No. And I go to the office that places volunteers, and I say, hey, is there a school I can work in where they will embrace the fact that I know how to teach kids to read? And they said, oh, yes, definitely. And they dropped me in the lowest performing school in all of Oakland. It's in East Oakland, and at the time, had 2% literacy proficiency. So their mentality, I think, was like, okay, troublemaker, go here and see what you can do.

Michael Horn:

Yeah. Yeah.

Jessica Sliwerski:

Meanwhile, Michael, I'm like, challenge accepted.

The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Michael Horn:

Accepted. Let's do this. Roll up our sleeves.

Jessica Sliwerski:

Let's do this. Bring it on. So I show up in this classroom with this first grade teacher who's in her second year of teaching and is completely frazzled because the only thing she's been given is Lucy Culkin's units of study, and she can obviously see it's not working. Her kids aren't learning to read. And yet, like me, when I was a new teacher, had no other resources, had no other support, and nobody else helping her figure out how to teach kids to read. So in I walk and I'm like, hey, I'm Jess. I'm here to help teach your kids to read. And she's just like, great.

Jessica Sliwerski:

I will take anyone with a pulse. And she's kind of thinking, I'm going to do what like a lot of folks do, which is just sit with her kids and read books, right? I start teaching them.

Michael Horn:

But you don't.

Jessica Sliwerski:

I don't. I start teaching them, and very quickly they start learning to read. And then she's like, what are you doing? I need to learn how to do this. So I teach her, and then the two of us every afternoon are pulling small groups and we're doing differentiated instruction. And her babies were learning to read, and they were learning to read fast, and they were on a trajectory, for perhaps the first time in the history of that school to end the school year reading on grade level.

Michael Horn:

Wow.

Jessica Sliwerski:

Which, when you learn to read on time, which is ideally before the start of second grade, it fundamentally changes everything else about your school and arguably your life trajectory and the opportunities that are available to you. And I was, like, watching all of this happen, it was incredibly, incredibly exhilarating. And then, boom, it came to a screeching halt because of the pandemic. We packed the kids up for what we thought was going to be an extended spring break, and they never came back that school year. And I couldn't stop thinking about them. And my personality is kind of obsessive. And I'm watching, in the meantime, my own child transition to Zoom school. And I'm thinking to myself, this is a disaster, but there's something really interesting about this. And then meanwhile, the teacher I'd been mentoring was like, hey, we're gearing up to go back to school in the fall and be fully virtual. What do I do? And I said, you're going to do exactly what we were doing, but we're going to adapt it to be virtual. And I'm pretty sure your kids are still going to learn to read. And she trusted me and she tried it. And sure enough, within the first month of instruction, we had a crop of data showing, from baseline to progress, monitoring. Her kids were growing as readers.

Michael Horn:

Goosebumps listening to this.

Jessica Sliwerski:

During a pandemic via Zoom in a school where she had little to no support, high population of multilingual learners, high poverty students with IEPs. Every single odds stacked against her and her kids, and they were doing it. And as I looked at this data and I looked at what we were doing together, I was like, there is a model here. What would it mean to create a core of highly trained reading instructors who meet virtually with kids during the school day and teach them to read? What could that mean for those kids? What could that mean for the teachers in those classrooms? Because I know firsthand how hard it is to differentiate and give every child what they need. And what could it mean for catalyzing the system to really, truly embrace the science of reading and all of the nuances that are connected to that. So this was like the genesis of Ignite Reading. And there's actually a documentary film called the Right to read. Have you seen that film or heard about it?

Michael Horn:

Yeah, sure.

Jessica Sliwerski:

So, fun fact that teacher, Sabrina Causey, is the teacher

Michael Horn:

Oh, wow.

Jessica Sliwerski:

And I am Jess, who she mentions in the film, who taught her to teach her kids to read.

Michael Horn:

Oh, that's wild.

Jessica Sliwerski:

Okay, so, fun fact, a little bit of behind the scenes tea. Is that the Right to Read film? And the story of Sabrina Causey is also the origin story of Ignite Reading.

The Ignite Reading model 

Michael Horn:

Very, very cool. Very cool. And so there's a couple angles of this that are so important this time, right? Because coming out of the pandemic, or as the pandemic hit, the emphasis on tutoring became a big deal to differentiate instruction, to be able to get kids the right thing that they needed to unlock progress. Obviously, the focus on literacy, science of reading, became a huge conversation across the country, and frankly, how we were ignoring the best evidence in hundreds, thousands of classrooms across the country. And Ignite Reading model really takes both of these things and pulls it together in a model. So tell us how it actually works today.

Jessica Sliwerski:

So, at the highest level, the way that our program works is that we partner with schools and districts to provide live, one to one virtual tutoring that helps kids who need extra support learn to read. Our tutors are working with students specifically to master foundational reading skills, not because decoding is the game, but because it is the ticket to the game. And when you can decode to the point that it is automatic, you don't have to look at the word and sound it out. You can just look at it and nothing be able to help but read it, then your working memory and your brain power is freed up to do the rich work of comprehension. So when you see high stakes testing scores starting in third grade that are indicating a lot of kids are below proficient, typically what's underpinning that is disfluency. And disfluency is caused by kids having gaps in their decoding skills. And so our tutors are working with students one on one every day, virtually for 15 minutes a day. And it's during the school day until such time as the kids become fluent automatic readers. But the thing about our model is that we honor what we know is best practice when it comes to teaching and learning, specifically in the realm of literacy, but that it is so difficult for schools to do on their own because the system is simply not designed to enable them to make the main thing the main thing. And in the design of Ignite Reading, there are five important things that make our model distinct. So the first thing is that our tutors are highly trained and accountable. They are completing over 100 hours of paid professional learning and practicum experience before they're certified to tutor up to 30 hours a week. And then even after they're certified, we are maniacal about ongoing performance management in order to ensure they're implementing with fidelity. The second thing that we do is that we differentiate instruction so that every child's precise needs are being methadone. Kids don't have time to waste. And the reality of classrooms is that there's a vast spectrum of where kids are on the continuum of learning to read. So precision matters. Third, the nature of one on one enables the necessary at bats or repetition that kids need to solidify the code. And while we're all running around talking about science of reading, what a lot of people don't know, but is also core to the science, is that the research shows that at least 60% of kids must have not only direct instruction, but also ample at bats and repetition to create that automaticity. So the one on one provides that additional practice for kids. And the fourth thing is that this human element is so crucial. The relationships that tutors are building with students fosters the motivation to persist. Learning to read is hard for little kids. Humans don't like to do hard things. Look at the number of adults that you probably know who have to hire a personal trainer because otherwise they won't.

Michael Horn:

Work out, they won't do it right.

Jessica Sliwerski:

So our tutors are like personal trainers for little kids, adorable brains, but they're building these caring relationships that then enable kids to be more motivated. They're not going to opt out and try and avoid it because they care about pleasing this human that they are so excited to see every day. And then they're learning these competencies which create more motivation to persist. And it's this really virtuous cycle when it comes to learning. And the fifth thing that we do that is especially unique, and I am really, really proud that this is part of our model, is that we are focused on also building capacity with our partners by giving them a designated Ignite Reading literacy specialist who meets with them at the beginning of the program to unpack baseline diagnostics and every month thereafter to talk about progress and to connect the dots instructionally back to the literacy ecosystem and what teachers can do to piggyback off of our intervention. So these are all like really intentional moves. It is above and beyond what you typically see in this space from an edtech company. And I believe that's because the person at the helm, me, is someone who comes into this with the lived experience of an educator and understands all of the pieces that have to be at play to make this sticky so that we can work together to ensure every one of our babies learns to read well.

AIR study on Ignite Reading outcomes 

Michael Horn:

And it's paying off. If I understand, like you have some research a couple years now, I think, worth of research, why don't you share those results about what you've learned, about what it actually is happening in the field, and how you just set up those research studies?

Jessica Sliwerski:

We are actively building our evidence base. And this is really important because, as I've already said, and you've certainly picked up on, I want to prove a point and I want to prove what's possible for kids. And I want to prove that the issue with the literacy crisis in our country is not because kids can't, it's because there hasn't been equitable access to all kids getting what they need.

Michael Horn:

The adults haven't. Right? It's not. They can't.

Jessica Sliwerski:

That's right. And so we have a study that was published last school year, school year 22, 23 by AIR, and it showed that kindergarteners through third graders who participated in a 14 week pilot experienced 20 weeks of learning. And that meant that on DIBELS, they went from 11% on benchmark to 45% on benchmark. And that was after merely a 14 week pilot. Fast forward to this past school year. We have a forthcoming quasi experimental study from Johns Hopkins University that looked at first graders across 13 school districts that we were working with in Massachusetts, and the outcomes are phenomenal. But I can't yet share them, which, of course, is killing me, Michael.

Michael Horn:

Killing you right now, we'll have to.

Jessica Sliwerski:

Do a part two to this.

Michael Horn:

You'll come back. You'll come back.

Jessica Sliwerski:

But anecdotally, what I can tell you about our DIBELS data, because we validate the growth our kids are making with a third party assessment, is that we saw, with first graders in particular, who we were working with, which is the best return on investment. You can close the kindergarten gaps, you can tackle the first grade content. You can graduate them ready to start second grade building knowledge. That being said, heartbreakingly, we work with kids through high school. But in one of our analyses, what we saw for first graders in particular was that our students went from 17% on benchmark in DIBELS at the beginning of the school year to 51% by the end of the year. So that's three X growth right there. And, you know, the. The recovering perfectionist in me and the advocate for kids, advocate for kids looks at this, and it's like, this isn't good enough.

Jessica Sliwerski:

This isn't enough, and how do we get even better than this? So there is a level of continuous improvement we're constantly thinking about. But at the same time, what we have to recognize, the kids we're serving are the kids who historically come into first grade, or whatever grade they're in, already having gaps. And rather than those gaps being addressed and then the kids being accelerated forward, the gaps just widen. So when we're working with older kids, we see many of them still don't even know the alphabet or how to read simple words like sit or mug. So it's pretty significant that we saw three X growth. And then what was even more exciting about that was that the kids who had the most significant gaps when they started with us, for example, not knowing the alphabet, those kids had five X growth in our program over the school year. And this is where we see a lot of tropes in our country around why kids aren't learning to read. And you'll hear things like, oh, well, it's multilingual learners, or they have IEPs. The reality, Michael, is that it comes down to access and kids getting what they need when they need it, when they need it, then honoring the research around how the brain learns to read. And it sounds so simple to do those things. But we know that K-12 education is a very complex system, and that's where the design of any kind of product or service has to be so deeply intentional. And all of this data that we're seeing in our forthcoming study as well gives me so much hope. It tells me that we really are living in an era where if we all put our minds to it, and if we work together, we could actually have a world where every single child learns to read on time, which is ideally before the end of first grade.

Tutoring post-ESSER

Michael Horn:

So let's take this, because you've said several obviously interesting things, but the one I want to pick up on at the moment is we're different from your average edtech company, and I think that's a good thing on a few dimensions, as I'm hearing it from you, I've argued edtech companies can't just simply throw their product over the wall and hope it gets implemented. And they have to be really intentional about thinking about the whole model and the coherence across all the tools being used, which is effectively what you're doing as you build capacity with your partners and really leaning in not just to make sure it gets used, what you're offering gets used efficaciously, but that it coheres with the rest of the activities going on in the building. I would love to hear you reflect on two things out of that one curiosity, like what are the resources for a school district to be able to afford that sort of services? And then the flip side is, we know a lot of the federal aid out of COVID is going away. There's a lot of talk about the tutoring services that have been offered that have in many cases not been implemented efficaciously. They've missed on some key things that you just described, but either way, those might be going away. How do you maintain and grow this service that you're offering? As maybe resources are being stripped away with what I imagine has some resources that are required to be able to provide it.

Jessica Sliwerski:

Really great question. And this is something that when I look across the landscape of Ed tech and particularly high dosage tutoring, you see a lot of companies that are struggling in this moment with ESSER funding evaporating. And we are not in that category. And the reason that we can maintain our program in light of what other companies are experiencing as like catastrophic funding shifts is because we get results. And the results that we are getting are results that schools and districts cannot get by themselves. Even in the most perfect literacy ecosystem, where you have adopted all of the right programs, all of the right assessment tools, you've done letters, training with your teachers, right? You are checking all of those boxes. And the reality is, for a host of reasons, kids will still fall through the cracks. And so Ignite Reading becomes that foundational skills safety net, working in partnership with all of the other strategic intentionality that's at play within the ecosystem. And oftentimes our partners say we are the missing ingredient that pulls it all together. And because of that, and because we are so transparent with our partners about our outcomes, we are self reporting every single month via the Ignite Reading literacy specialist. And they are seeing that this is a phenomenal return on investment for their kids, especially when it is a just in time intervention in first grade versus a reactive RTI situation for older kids when they can see this. And it also aligns with their own intentionality around really, truly making sure all kids have the right to learn to read. They find the money in their budget. So what we're seeing is that many of our partners, in light of the ESSER cliff, are now going into their budgets and they are operationalizing us with more sustainable funding streams. Be that title funding idea, it could look like school improvement funds. Right? The beauty of our model is that there are so many different funding streams that can be strategically braided together, and we work with partners to figure out how to access those funds creatively and to think about, well, what are the other things you're spending money on? And are they working because there's some historic vestiges of edtech products that they've been purchasing that they might be reluctant to get rid of? I see this a lot in education.

Jessica Sliwerski:

We like to hoard.

Michael Horn:

We don't like to prune very much in education.

Jessica Sliwerski:

No, no, not at all. It's like, I remember when I was a classroom teacher and I first walked into my classroom and opened the closet and there were like floor to ceiling materials from the last 50 to 100 years. We don't like to get rid of things, even when they don't work, even when they're not good for kids. But I think what we're helping to create is a new vision for everyone that we're working with and for the market as a whole of what's possible for kids and how best to allocate precious public dollars and budgets to do what I would say is the most important thing we can possibly do in education, which is make sure our kids learn how to read.

Michael Horn:

Love it. Jess. Final word, final thoughts. Where can people stay tuned for that study when it comes out and find out more. Take us home.

Where to learn more

Jessica Sliwerski:

So our website, ignite-reading.com, is the best place to get lots of information and insights around everything that we are uploading to and if anyone is interested in learning more or wants to be part of this incredible movement, they can also contact us via the website. I anticipate that once the study is released that there will be lots of people talking about it. And I cannot wait.

Michael Horn:

Well, I'm looking forward to it. I'm glad it's in Massachusetts where I live. I'm glad to hear that as well.

Jessica Sliwerski:

I planned that for you, Michael.

Michael Horn:

Yeah, yeah. Just exactly right. That was the reason.

Jessica Sliwerski:

And like every holiday that you celebrate all combined into one, it'll be the best gift, best gift, best package.

The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Clayton Lord of the SHRM Foundation joined me to discuss shifting from a degree-centric hiring system to one that is skills-based. We talked about how the Foundation is helping employers operationalize this transition, the benefits it accrues to candidates and businesses, and the risks and challenges being addressed to spread its benefits on a broader scale.

Michael Horn:

Welcome to the Future of Education, where we are dedicated to building a world in which all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their potential, and live a life of purpose. To help us think through that today, I'm tremendously excited. We have Clay Lord, he's the Director of Foundation Programs at SHRM, joining us to think about how we help unlock that path of progress for individuals, employees, and their jobs, but also for employers who can get so much more out of those individuals when there's a better match in all facets of how they work with each other. So, Clay, thank you so much for joining us today.

Clayton Lord:

Of course. Thanks for having me.

Clay's Journey to the Work 

Michael Horn:

Yeah, no, you bet. Your work obviously gets to interact with lots of different individuals, lots of different companies, creating changes in a variety of ways. But just before we dive into that, talk us through your own path to the role you're in now and your passion for it, and how you got to know SHRM originally.

Clayton Lord:

You know, it's an interesting and sort of circuitous story. I've been at the SHRM Foundation for about 18 months now. Prior to that, for about 20 years, I was in the arts and culture sector, working at the local level and then at the national level on a variety of issues that I would now roll up together as workforce issues for the cultural sector in the United States. This sector mirrors a lot of the populations that we work on now at the SHRM Foundation, in that it is generally speaking, chronically economically insecure. It's extremely diverse. It doesn't have the strongest voice as a class when it comes to policy. 

I came out of Georgetown. I grew up with a lot of privilege, went to a really good college, and dove into the cultural sector. Through a lot of engagement with different partners, I developed my understanding of what equity meant and my understanding of how I got to where I was and where that was me and where that was the conditions that I was given at birth. 

Since then, I've tried to devote a lot of my work and my life to increasing opportunity for folks who are otherwise left out in the cold because they don't work within the same systems or don't have the same advantages as some people do. I ended up at SHRM because I knew some folks who were working there. SHRM is the largest society for HR professionals in the world, with 340,000 employer members predominantly in the United States. The SHRM Foundation is one of the only real loci for driving employer action, particularly through the HR function, to be agents for social good. It seemed like an interesting fit for me as I was trying to navigate from the niche work in arts and culture into broader conversations about workforce and the future of work.

SHRM Foundation’s Skills-Based Hiring Work

The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Michael Horn:

Super interesting to hear that pathway, and I love how it's not linear and yet ends up in a place of passion for you. On that topic, over the next decade, you all have set a lofty goal of aiming to transform hiring and advancement practices for 100,000 employers, 500,000 HR professionals, managers, executives, and specifically as part of that, your aim is to shift away from a degree-centric hiring model toward a skills-first model. I'd love for you to talk through what that would look like when it's done and why it matters so much.

Clayton Lord:

Well, it's a great question. The short answer is that it is responsive to the evolutions in how people are being educated and how they're trying to find their way into work. Today, two in three working-age adults in the United States do not have a four-year degree. Yet, three in four job postings require a four-year degree when they're posted. This represents a significant and ongoing mismatch between where and how people are finding their skills, aptitudes, and competencies, where they're developing the things that they can bring to bear in the workplace, and what is required as a first gateway to access a lot of jobs. 

Among three focuses that the SHRM Foundation has, one of them is what we call widening pathways to work. It's focused on two sides of that coin. One is around untapped pools, helping employers understand where, when, and how to engage folks who have historically been marginalized out of the job market, including people with disabilities, people who've been justice impacted, people connected to the military, older workers, and opportunity youth (people aged 16 to 24 who don't work or go to school). 

On the other side of that coin is skills-first at work. We focus on helping employers shift their hiring and retention practices from being degree-centric to embracing a broader aperture of hiring and advancement that we shorthand as skills-first. This is not to the exclusion of degrees. It's to say that people get skills in all sorts of ways, at various moments in their lives. If they're doing it right, they're learning new skills every single day. All of those skills deserve to be taken into account when you're hiring for a job, which is essentially a bundle of skills. 

At the SHRM Foundation, we are making that investment by creating the conditions to help employers, 90% of whom today say adopting skills-first strategies is a good idea, but only 15% of whom are actually saying they're doing anything about it. We aim to move them from agreement to action by offering incremental, measurable, manageable opportunities for change, allowing them to move towards a skills-first mentality that lets them access the full spectrum of talent. 

You asked what that looks like. In ten years, if we do it right, we will hit what we think is an inevitable tipping point. Skills-first is the future, whether we do anything about it or not. Those who think we aren't moving towards more people accumulating skills outside of a four-year institution will be left behind. However, we believe there's a way to handle this transition that is less chaotic and more manageable for the world of work. 

For us, if we get to that moment, we will have 100,000 employers who have demonstrated that they've moved in the direction of skills-first hiring. We don't think it's flipping a switch, but we will build maturity models to test how employers are doing and how much they've embraced these practices. There are nearly 3 million HR professionals and millions more who touch the hiring function every year. Even a small percentage of those, which we tag at 500,000 HR professionals, hiring managers, and C-suite folks, educated on skills-first hiring and advancement practices, would create a tipping point. Our goal is that skills-first hiring becomes ubiquitous and unremarkable, the default practice that happens all around us. Right now, the default is degree-centered, leaving many people out. Changing the paradigm to hire for the full spectrum of skills, regardless of where, when, or how they were acquired, will open up more opportunities for people and provide workplaces with the full spectrum of talent.

This edition of the Future of Education is sponsored by:

Barriers to Skills-First Hiring

Michael Horn:

It strikes me that you want employers and companies to hire people who will help them progress, recognizing individuals not just as a bundle of credentials but through the collection of their experiences. This alignment benefits both the employer and the employee, who get to make progress in their lives by matching their capabilities and drives. You started to allude to it; this isn't a switch that you can just flip. What are the big barriers toward moving toward this vision that you see right now?

Clayton Lord:

In our research, there are three main barriers to moving from degrees to skills. 

The first is the ROI being murky. The return on investment for a degree-centered practice is relatively well known. Sometimes it works out well, sometimes poorly, but when it works out poorly, the blame is usually placed on the candidate, not the business or HR provider. If you hire five people from Ivy League schools and two of them don't work out, the assumption is that something didn't work out with those two people. If you hire five people from skills-based backgrounds without a degree and two of them don't work out, the assumption is that the HR professional or hiring manager took too big a risk. 

The second barrier is around trust, quality, and knowledge. There are about 60,000 providers of credentials in the world and over a million credential options, many of them of dubious quality. There is also an ever-growing number of startups and vendors in this space. Pair that with the fact that knowing how to move from degrees to skills is different from believing that moving from degrees to skills is a good idea, and you have a challenge, particularly for small to mid-size employers. 

The third barrier is risk aversion and loneliness. Businesses are naturally risk-averse. When you ask them to take a leap into something new, using language that expresses risk and innovation instead of incremental change, it creates conditions that are not great for business decision-making. This movement often starts with a single person or business within a sector, creating a sense of loneliness and risk. Our goal is to build tools, trainings, coalitions, and resources that tackle each of these challenges by consolidating information, raising awareness of the positive ROI, and creating opportunities for the coalition and community.

Tools for De-Risking

Michael Horn:

Yeah, that makes sense. So let's tackle that risk aversion one. Governments and companies are great at dropping degree requirements, but for HR, mitigating risk is important, and hiring someone with a degree just feels less risky. What do those tools look like that really de-risk this and give them the security to hire someone without a degree but with demonstrated experience?

Clayton Lord:

Well, it's a good question. Risk comes in a variety of forms. We think about the different types of risk at play, such as financial or structural risk to the organization. We're exploring ideas like de-risking the near-term financial obligation of skilling through low or no-interest loans, mini-grants, and consortium models. We've done this in some of our pilots, providing seed money for interventions, which boosts success rates. 

Skills-first hiring and advancement are already happening under the proxy of a degree. Every person is ultimately hired for their skills. The current model doesn't allow time to take in the fullness of a person's skills and aptitudes, often reducing a resume to a six-second glance. Technologies are being developed to parse resumes and experiences into skill stacks, matching them with job requirements. This technology allows a candidate to progress to an interview based on their skill stack rather than their degree.

Another risk is personal risk. If a candidacy fails, sometimes the blame is on the candidate, and sometimes on the person who picked them. Over time, we need to deal with this reality. We've identified two main strategies. First, we lack great case studies of skills-first hiring and advancement strategies demonstrating positive ROI. We're working with the Business Roundtable and the US Chamber of Commerce Foundation to create a compendium of diverse case studies. Second, we're investing at the individual level, working with Opportunity at Work and other partners to create a credential for skills-first hiring and advancement for HR professionals, hiring managers, and C-suite decision-makers.

This credential will provide documented expertise, supporting dialogues with decision-makers and boosting confidence in one's ability to implement skills-first practices. The Skills-First Center of Excellence, coming online at the beginning of 2025, will organize resources, provide direct information, and offer certification for skills-first hiring and advancement professionals.

Understanding and Communicating Skill Requirements

Michael Horn:

Makes a lot of sense. You've actually answered a bunch of the other questions I had. Let me ask this one, because it strikes me as a bigger question mark. Employers often don't know the skills at the heart of successful employees. They might know the technical skills, but job descriptions are almost more legal documents to mitigate risk, listing every possible skill. How do we move to skills-based hiring if employers don't understand what the skills should be?

Clayton Lord:

It's a fair question. People use degrees as a proxy for much more than they're actually for. They're doing this because they don't know how to write an accurate job description that reflects the full spectrum of what someone will do. Most job descriptions include core tasks and a catch-all "other duties as assigned." 

When advocating for employers to shift from degrees to skills, we ask them to consider what it takes to adequately and accurately describe what a person needs to do to succeed at work. This involves more than just hard skills. Employers often say they can train most hard skills into someone. What they look for is a specific combination of durable skills, plus a desire, aptitude, and positive attitude for the work. 

We did a pilot in Arkansas, and many employers said they want an enthusiastic person to show up every day, on time, and sober. They can do the rest. Degrees as a proxy are an unfair way to start that conversation.

There are emerging technologies that help. For example, tools using AI to pull skill stacks from resumes and job descriptions, matching them together, and proposing candidates based on these matches. This allows hiring managers to stay within their comfort zone while expanding the pool of candidates.

Indicators of Success

Michael Horn:

Got it. That makes sense. Last question as we wrap up. In a decade, if you meet your goals, what are the big indicators that will show we've reached this vision of a skills-first hiring environment?

Clayton Lord:

The biggest indicator will be if skills-first hiring is ubiquitous and unremarkable, the default practice. It will be an exception if degrees are in job requirements or if applicant tracking systems lock people out without a degree. 

We'll see workplaces with more fluidity between jobs, reflecting SHRM's own experience. At SHRM, we've simplified job descriptions to focus on core skills, allowing broader engagement and fluid movement within roles. This is essential as work becomes more intersectional and evolutionary.

We'll also have our hard metrics: 100,000 employers and 500,000 individuals involved in skills-first hiring. We estimate that skills-first hires, moving from non-degree to degree-equivalent tracks, could result in an average of $26,000 more per year in income, $900,000 more over a lifetime. This would benefit populations historically disadvantaged by degree requirements.

Given the decline in two-year and four-year degree attainment, we need to change or face a significant worker shortage. Some industries are already in crisis due to degree requirements, and they're the most open to skills-first innovation. Our goal is to be proactive, helping the world of work adapt before every industry reaches a crisis point.

Michael Horn:

When the alternative is no human talent at all, employers realize there's a lot of human talent on the sidelines. Let's unleash that talent. Clay, thank you so much for your work in moving companies toward these practices and for unleashing the potential of many who would otherwise be sidelined.

Clayton Lord:

Thank you for having me. This has been a great conversation.

The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Phil Vaccaro and Nita Bhat of EY-Parthenon joined me to discuss their work partnering with Arkansas to help the state design and implement its Education Savings Account (ESA) program. They shared the big questions every state must consider when developing and operationalizing their ESA programs and discussed the thinking behind some of Arkansas’s choices. I confess, when I think about ESAs, I hadn’t thought about all the questions that goes into operationalizing them beyond passing the legislation, so this was a very interesting conversation for me. I look forward to hearing from all of you!

Michael Horn:  

Welcome to the Future of Education, where we are dedicated to building a world in which all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their potential, and live a life of purpose. To help us think through how that might work with some new designs cropping up in a number of states throughout the US right now, we have two special guests today from EY Parthenon, Phil Vaccaro, a partner there, and Nita Bhatt, a senior director. Nita, Phil, thank you so much for joining us. I can't wait to have this conversation.

Phil Vaccaro:  

It's great to be here, Michael. Thank you for inviting us to participate.

Michael Horn:  

You bet. I'm excited to dig into this because you all did this fascinating work that we're going to talk about in some depth around education savings accounts, particularly ESAs, and their implementation in a state. People might pause there and think, "Wait a minute, implementation of ESAs? What does that even mean?" We're going to get to that and why it's so important in just a couple of minutes. But let's start at a high level. What brought you to this work in education in Arkansas in general? Phil, why don't you start us off?

Phil and Nita’s Journey to the Work 

Phil Vaccaro:  

In some ways, Nita and I bring a similar background to the work, but I started as a teacher in the New York City school system, worked for the school district for five years under Mayor Bloomberg, and then switched over to the Parthenon team to do this work in education from a consulting standpoint. For the past 14 years, my goal has been to stay relevant from a commercial standpoint, tracking what states and districts are doing, what their top priorities are, focused around system-level change and school improvement. We've seen various waves of what education reform looks like and which policies have been more or less in vogue. Over the last few years, private school choice policies have really accelerated in terms of their adoption across states. This builds on a trend that’s been a long time in the making with school vouchers and the broader school choice ecosystem. We've supported school systems with strong choice environments. This is where we currently are with these new policy initiatives around education savings accounts.

Michael Horn:  

Gotcha. Nita, how about you? What's your own story into the work?

Nita Bhat:  

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks, Michael. For me, it goes back to how and where I grew up, which was in Miami, Florida. I remember going to four different public elementary schools and high school, applying to and being waitlisted at a bunch of magnet schools, some fairly far away from my house, because my parents wanted me in a specific program or felt some aspect of my schooling wasn't meeting their expectations. We didn't have the right vocabulary for it at the time, but that was my parents saying they didn't want the house they could afford to limit the quality of education they wanted me to get. Fast forward after college, I had the opportunity to teach at different neighborhood and public charter schools in Philly, another angle on school choice. Then, at Parthenon, over the last decade, I've served in some interesting school choice contexts, including in New Orleans, which has really shaped my thinking, where I gained an appreciation for how to design a system that promotes not just choice for kids and families but good school choice. That's what brought me to this work with ESAs in Arkansas.

The Core Components of ESAs 

Michael Horn:  

Super interesting and an unbelievable background with your parents engaging in that before people thought about these questions in the same depth. As I mentioned, my audience is certainly familiar with education savings accounts. It's something we've talked about on the show, but they're clearly different from some of the other forms of private school choice we've seen historically: tax scholarships, vouchers, even the charter space. I'm curious, in your minds, what makes a funding vehicle an ESA? What are the core components to level set us about what exactly we're talking about with ESAs? Nita, why don't you lead us off on this one?

Nita Bhat:  

Rather than getting too technical, I want to take this conceptually. What makes an ESA unique from vouchers is two main things. First, ESAs are being rolled out to serve a much broader set of students than ever before. While vouchers were primarily targeted at low-income families, at least in the beginning, ESAs, in today's avatar, are intended to serve many more students. In some states, any family is allowed to apply, so it's called universal. The second thing is that ESAs can be used for a much broader array of expenses than vouchers. Vouchers typically went from the government directly to a private school to support tuition, whereas ESAs involve the state putting the money into a digital wallet for each participating family, and then they can deploy the money where they choose to, whether it's a private school or to curate a curriculum, buy books, uniforms, or a course at the public school or a local charter school. That's the difference. In terms of why we think they have taken off, the pandemic illustrated that traditional school models aren't working for everyone. In fact, that may be true for a large number of students. Nationally, we see the rate of chronic absenteeism, where kids aren't coming to school, has doubled between before and after the pandemic. Parents and advocates are saying they want to take education back into their own hands.

The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Arkansas ESA Program

Michael Horn:  

Super interesting. That leads into the work you all did in Arkansas, where they were launching a universal ESA program. Tell me about that experience because I suspect folks like me might think they passed a policy, allocated funding, there's a digital wallet, and boom, you're off to the races. I’m certainly interested in learning how this really works and when we’ve had some back and forth before this, it sounds like it's not nearly so simple as that. It’s much more complicated. Phil, why don't you lead us off and talk about some of the major design choices that go into launching a universal ESA program and give us a sense of the complexity involved?

Phil Vaccaro:  

Yeah, I'd love to. To start, it is complex, and I'm glad you're focused on the implementation piece because that is the overlooked factor in bringing these education savings account programs to life. There's a lot involved. There are a number of strategic and operational questions that need to be answered, and you have to build a team with the capacity to implement the work. From a strategic standpoint, one of the first questions a department has to ask itself beyond where it will live within the state. In Arkansas context, it lived with the Department of Education. In other systems, it lives with other government agencies. A big question on the front end is what will you do internally and what will you hire someone else to do? There are a few vendors active in this space that bring primarily a technology solution but can also bring some process around it. Departments need to figure out what to insource and what to outsource. With that knowledge, how do you design a process where the department can work with the vendor(s) on a regular basis to get the work done? The set of activities during the launch of a program can differ from the activities once a program is launched. When we first got into Arkansas, our support for the state is public record. We co-authored a LinkedIn blog post with them about our work. I'm proud that the folks in Arkansas dedicated time to getting the implementation right because we've seen mistakes in other states that have set back those initiatives. Nita spent a lot of time on the ground from day one working with their team on the nitty-gritty issues. You start with a statute and then bring that to life. The first step is a deep dive into the rules. What doesn't exist in statute that needs further clarification? That sets up a number of design choices and operational decisions. I'll turn it over to Nita to talk about some of those.

Nita Bhat:  

Sure. There are hundreds of design decisions, and I can't go into all of them. Phil said he could talk about this for three hours, and it's true. I'll stick to some high-level things that both the law had to consider and we had to build on during the design and implementation. First, is around what population do I intend on serving? Is it kids in low-performing public schools? Is it everyone? Something in between? That line of inquiry is usually figured out in the law, and then we build on it. There's a whole layer of questions around accountability. Do I want to measure how students on ESAs are performing academically? How do I want to measure that? Do I want to test them? In what subjects? Are there consequences for providers or families if a student isn't testing well? How long do I give them? How do I use the information I collect? Do I make it public? There are hundreds of questions in that layer. One of my favorites is around financial safeguards. How do I curtail providers from unreasonably inflating their tuition? In some states, the ESA goes into effect, and let's say it's $7,000. The private school had a tuition of $7,000, but after the ESA goes into effect, they raise it to $14,000. The families aren't seeing the benefit of the ESA. They're paying the same as before. That's unwanted behavior. How do you curtail that? There's a layer of questions on what can I spend the money on? Books, tuition, uniforms, great. Sports uniforms? Shoes? Are shoes okay? Can I buy the new line of kicks? No. Is transportation allowed? Can I take an Uber? Can I expense that? Private school tuition fees are allowed, but what about required donations to the church, do I want to allow that with this publicly funded taxpayer money? It becomes very nuanced. Hope you get some sense of how complex it can get.

Design Decisions 

Michael Horn:  

Yeah, I'm thinking through those and wondering how you parse through them. Let's take some and dig deeper. Let's start with the program's intended audience. You mentioned it's universal, but that implies a level of focus and outreach. How did you work through that question in Arkansas? How much was in law, regulation, and figured out on the ground?

Nita Bhat:  

Yeah, great question. I'll take it broadly than just Arkansas. Some states are clear in their intentions, like prioritizing kids in low-performing schools, as Georgia does. Some states are universal, like Arizona and that is where Arkansas is headed. Sometimes states take a middle approach, phasing up to universal by prioritizing vulnerable populations: special needs, low-income, homeless, foster, etc. They might also prioritize kindergartners. In year one, we fill the program with those kids. Next year, we have more budget, and we're going to grow our program a little bit. So we let more vulnerable kids in but maybe lower the threshold slightly. If the income was the most stringent threshold in year one then in year two, we’re going to relax it a little bit. It’s still for lower-income kids but slightly higher income than it was in year one. This year we are going to let kindergartners in again and add first graders. We’re growing and phasing in a way that seems reasonable. One thing that I don’t think people are necessarily thinking of is in these situations the kindergarten and first-grade uptake rate becomes quite high compared to the high-needs population unless you are intentional about it. This is quite logical. We see families with more information and resources are the first to take advantage, applying fast. Once a child is in the program, they’re in. What you see in the out years, years four, years five, years six, and onward... If you're a kindergartner and you're in the program, you could be in the program for 13 years. You could end up with a day where the program is approaching full or is full. Now you have a situation where the composition of the program you have is not all that strategic, leaving new families out. This is something people might miss. We had the benefit of modeling it out.

Funding  ESAs 

Michael Horn:  

Yeah, no, it's fascinating. I'm imagining the keyboard warriors signing up for summer camp. It's the same sort of phenomenon. I'm going to be the first one to get in on that before it fills up. But then it brings up the question that naturally comes, which is around financing and funding levels for these programs. Are they pulling from public school dollars? Are there caps to the funding? How has that all worked out, and what are the major things people ought to be thinking about on those dimensions?

Nita Bhat:  

No, this one's great. So Phil and I are district finance nerds. Our head goes there pretty quickly. One of the common criticisms that we hear about ESAs is that it's taking money away from public schools. There's a logic to that, right? The student leaves a public school to go to a private school. The public school loses the money that it otherwise would have gotten for that student. But the reality is more complicated because, in many states, not all students in the ESA program were public school students to begin with. In fact, some of them were always in private school. In some states, we know that most of them were already in private schools. So what's happening is the government is allocating new money towards that student that it wasn't before. That money is usually coming from the state's general fund, which is tax-based, maybe from some reserves, but it's not education-specific dollars. In effect, a state may be investing hundreds of millions of dollars in new money in education, but it's only going to fund a very small fraction of the state's students. Critics will ask if that's the best use of new education funds. That's a criticism states have to contend with if they're designing things this way. Down the road, if your ESA program gets big enough, policymakers may need to ask themselves where that money will come from and if they need to cut funds on the public school side. These considerations need to happen within a broader frame of how much is being allocated to this program and what the caps are year over year, even if it's a universal program.

Michael Horn:  

Just stay on that for one more moment. You mentioned the providers that maybe double tuition once they see there's $7,000 of public subsidy coming in. So they still get $7,000 from the families because they were paying it before. Why not charge $14,000 in that hypothetical example? How do you navigate those considerations? Where did you land on trying to curtail some of that behavior? Or is that something that you say stinks in the early years, but hopefully, the market has enough providers that it shakes out?

Nita Bhat:  

Yeah, I think that's a good question. Different states have approached it differently. As far as we know, Arkansas is the only one that has put a stake in the ground and said they are going to monitor this and do something about it if they think it's unreasonable. That was a promising place to start. By the way, this isn't happening broadly, and I don't want to overexaggerate the extent to which this is happening. We toyed with a number of considerations for that particular question. Should we be monitoring growth? Should a school provide justification? Should there be a limit they can go up to? Ultimately, we felt if we defined a limit, maybe it's 5% or 10%, we worried that schools would use that as permission to raise to that amount, even if historically they weren't or didn't intend to. Ultimately, we left it as we are going to monitor this, ask for rationale if we see an above-average increase or an outlier, and take a case-by-case approach.

Fitting ESAs in Broader Strategies

Michael Horn:  

Gotcha. I assume you're trying to avoid the college tuition behavior over time. Phil, let me turn to you because I'm thinking about how you situate these ESAs in a broader, not just school choice strategy, but a school improvement strategy across an entire state. How do you think about that as a component within a strategy? Where are you landing on helping not just Arkansas but any state think through that question?

Phil Vaccaro:  

Yeah, it's a really important question, Michael. One just making sure that the conversations emphasize education savings accounts as one lever of school improvement in a system, whether it's because you're getting more kids into better schools or creating more competition in the system. The notion being that creates a rising tide for all boats. We've seen systems go heads down quickly in terms of implementing the statute. But really, what are they doing to think strategically about how this fits in with other school improvement strategies they're pursuing? How are they coordinating with districts, which have been responsible for supporting a student's learning? In Arkansas, we built into our process a regular cadence around strategic discussions. It helps to map out where the students are, where the schools are, where the lower-performing schools are, where the private school capacity is, and where there are parts of the state without sufficient supply to meet potential demand. Where are there robust charter systems, and how do charter schools fit in with private school choice? There are strategic questions about how private school choice helps in certain parts of the state or where you have many private schools, but they're mostly full. You have to think there will be a percentage of students that benefit from this program, and hopefully, they will have access to a better school or create competition that helps those schools improve.

In places without capacity, how do you provide new capacity into the system? Whether it's through new charter schools, micro-schools, or consortia of home schools. That's a huge strategic question that states need to think about. Also, in coordination with the districts where there's a net outflow of students, there is a funding implication because they are serving fewer students. If that happens to any degree of scale, it changes how that district can serve students. Taken to its logical extreme, it can change the dynamics in which those school districts serve students. You think about this policy in the broader landscape of school choice as part of your theory of change. The LEARNS Act in Arkansas was a comprehensive bill specifying policy change in a number of areas. Where the program lives is important. If it lives with the Department of Education, it has a higher likelihood of staying connected to other strategies implemented in the state. If you give it to other government agencies, you can run a great program, but you must make a concerted effort to coordinate with the Department of Education to consider this policy a lever for school improvement in the broader context of other things that states and districts are doing.

Supply and Sustainability

Michael Horn:  

Yeah, you hit on a couple of important things. One big thing I've been thinking about is the supply side. Not just how do you trigger new operators coming in, but do they have sustainable models that will last more than two or three years? A lot of teachers say they'll volunteer for a year or two, but then what? The second question you're raising is coherence with the Department of Education and the rest of the programs they oversee strategy, etc. As we start to wrap up, reflect on that part of it.  You began with one big question to think about was not just where it lived—Department of Education may be one answer to create that coherence—but also what are the resources internally and externally, and where do those different things sit that the department or wherever it's sitting will deploy to implement and operationalize this program? Reflect on that. A state launching an ESA going into year two, what are we talking about in terms of effort? Are there off-the-shelf things that can help? How should we think about what it takes to do this well?

Phil Vaccaro:  

Yeah, it's a great question. Historically, states' roles in education have been standards, policies, budget allocation, and accountability. They have not been set up to do direct-to-family programs, creating a need for capacity at a level of scale that hasn't existed within school districts. You have to build out a team to do this work. Nita can tell you war stories of all the inbound questions about filling out applications incorrectly, whether they got accepted, or when tuition will be transferred. You can do a lot with FAQs, but people want to talk to someone on the phone. There's real work involved. You can outsource that to vendors, so choose your vendors wisely. Be explicit in the RFP about what you're looking for and the division of responsibility between the host government organization and the vendor. You need to build out your team. Working side by side with your team during the launch period helps build out workflows and data flow to specific places at specific times. You must be very specific about making these connection points. We are reimagining what the state is responsible for in terms of the work they are committed to, not just setting policy but focusing on implementation. This can get confusing with the school districts. Role definition needs to happen upfront to maintain coherence. This is where we can't lose the discussion around strategy and how these levers fit within a state to support school improvement.

What’s Next for ESAs 

Michael Horn:  

Super helpful. Huge thanks to both of you. I feel like we're just scratching the surface, and I see, Nita, why three hours wouldn't be hard for you to talk about in-depth. Each of these things has trade-offs at any decision point. As we wrap up, reflections from each of you as we move into a new legislative season. I suspect we'll see new ESA programs pop up. We already know Texas is pushing to get that on the radar. We're going to see more of these. Bring us home. One or two things to consider going into the season of implementation.

Phil Vaccaro:  

I would say set out a clear list of guiding principles. In Arkansas, we had six guiding principles around empowering parents, expanding educational opportunities, supporting high-quality school options, and so on. It's important to have guiding principles for two reasons. One, when making decisions, it's helpful when you want to develop a coherent program to refer back to your guiding principles and say which of these decision options are most aligned with the guiding principles we set out to accomplish. So being able to have a common reference point I think is important. Two, it helps with communication, so you have consistent talking points. Sometimes systems say the real purpose of this work is X, and someone else says it's Y. Both can't be true, so which one is it? Being clear on the communication piece is important. On the implementation side, these systems are allocating tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars to these programs. Take the time upfront to design the work well and put a clear plan in place for implementation. If you're going to spend $800 million, spend $5 to $10 million upfront to consider the strategic and implementation issues. Map out budget possibilities, implications, how it fits with other school improvement strategies, what can go wrong, have contingencies, and dedicate time upfront. It's a high-stakes endeavor for any state. This is part of the Republican platform now, with 17 states implementing it and others in the process. States can't think about this only from their state's perspective. This is a national movement. For the movement to be successful long-term, states need to implement it well so students who can benefit most can access these programs.

Michael Horn:  

Super helpful. Nita, final thoughts?

Nita Bhat:  

I think that was great, Phil. The only thing I'll repeat is this should be a school choice movement. It's great to create options for kids and families, but let's have them be good options. What do you have to do as a system to ensure quality choices for kids?

Michael Horn:  

Nita, Phil, thank you so much for sharing just a fraction of your expertise on implementing ESAs. Hopefully, we can have you back to tell us more findings as you continue this work. Deeply appreciative of you both.

Phil Vaccaro:  

Thank you, Michael. We are proud of the folks in Arkansas for their work. I think they've done a great job.

The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Cyndi Court, CEO of Tiger Woods’ TGR Foundation, joined me to discuss the organization’s education work. It was an eye-opening conversation, as we talked about different components of career-connected learning and its benefits to students and employers. Cyndi shared stories of student’s journeys through their programs and the Foundation’s plans for the future. I loved her framework to organize career-connected learning as “learning about work, through work, and at work.” Have a listen or read the transcript and let me know your thoughts in the comments.

Michael Horn:

Welcome to the Future of Education, where we are dedicated to building a world in which all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their potential, and live a life of purpose. To help us think through how we accomplish that, I am tremendously excited for our guest today. She's the CEO of the TGR Foundation, none other than Cyndi Court. Cyndi, thank you so much for joining us today.

Cyndi Court:

Thanks for having us, Michael.

Cyndi’s Journey to the Work 

Michael Horn:

You bet. So, before we get into the work of the foundation and some of the labs that you're running and scaling, just tell us about your own journey into the TGR Foundation and what attracted you to this opportunity specifically

Cyndi Court:

Yeah, I'm an educator. I did my education degree many years ago in Toronto, Canada, but I fell in love with the after-school space when my husband and I moved to Tampa, Florida. I love the creativity that happens in the after-school space. I love the fact that we can come alongside both schools and be great partners, supporting schools and local educators, but also come alongside families and provide wraparound services in the after-school space. I've spent the majority of my career with the Salvation Army and over a decade with the Boys and Girls Clubs of America. The national office for Boys and Girls Clubs movement, I was their chief development and marketing officer. This opportunity appealed to me because of the big differential in what Tiger is trying to do here.

The mission is very clear. It's about empowering young people to pursue their passions through education. We run programs during the day, and we have kids come in from local schools all over Anaheim. While they're getting hands-on creative STEAM curriculum, their teachers are getting teacher education. We have this beautiful 35,000-square-foot facility with the latest technology. It’s not just used after school; it’s used all day long. This partnership with schools and communities was incredibly attractive to me.

Career-Connected Learning

Michael Horn:

That is exciting. What an opportunity. When I hear you talk about it, I always think after school and these wraparound areas are what I would call in our research areas of non-consumption, where the alternative is nothing. You can often reinvent the space and give students opportunities they otherwise never could have. Start to describe that. I know in these learning labs you do a lot of work with career-connected learning and employer-based partnerships. When you're talking about exposure to passions, you are not kidding. There are a lot of opportunities for kids to have those experiences. Tell us about that work and what it looks like.

Cyndi Court:

We've started and actually done career-connected learning by exposing young people from under-resourced communities to careers from the very beginning. Starting in fifth grade, our STEAM curriculum is designed so that kids are introduced to careers available to them. We know that 11% of the future jobs and the 11% of the growth are in the STEAM area. We want to make sure they’re prepared for those. So it’s begun from the very beginning as far as exposure. We do pre and post-assessments, measuring our students' engagement with us. They often tell us in our post interviews that they learned about a career and felt more confident in their skills to pursue that career. Now, we're beginning to be very intentional and target the teen population, which is tough to serve. It's more expensive, and it’s hard to attract and retain them. But we're being super intentional with those high school students. They get exposure through our curriculum and real-world opportunities to meet professionals from different careers in kind of one day career fairs. These career opportunities are where we have professionals come into the learning lab and share what their career path looked like and just expose them to different opportunities.

I'm a first-generation college student, the first in my family to graduate from high school. So I know firsthand, often kids from under-resourced communities don't even know these careers exist. So there's a lot of work to be done just exposing them. We call that learning about work.  So how do we help students learn about work? Then we go deeper with them, with pillar three of that program for our high school students, where we help them learn through work. One of our marquee partners is Providence Healthcare on the West Coast. Very large healthcare system, 52 hospitals, and one of the biggest employers on the West Coast They brought their professionals in and gave us a challenge that they’re having around doing community assessments in under-resourced communities in their health system. We gave this challenge to our young people, did a six-week curriculum in the classroom, and they were split into teams to solve the problem for Providence Healthcare asa competition. So they were actually learning through doing the work. They came back, Providence evaluated them, and it was a great way for them to understand some of the careers and actually do the work. They were out delivering healthcare assessments in communities.

The third pillar of our program is learning at work. How can we help them secure pre-apprenticeships, internships, prepare for mock interviews, and build their resumes and LinkedIn profiles, even as high school students? Some careers require college, some don’t. We help them understand the credentials they can pursue. We’re trying to be intentional and wrap around the whole career-connected learning area.

Employers Partner with TGR

The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Michael Horn:

That's an incredibly helpful overview. I love the way you've divided it up into learning about work, through work, and at work. I'm curious, you hinted that this benefits not just the students who obviously get this exposure, connections, experience, actual real internships and pre-apprenticeships, and the like. But you started to hint to it that the partners get something out of it as well. Talk to us about the benefits that companies and employers get out of partnering with you all.

Cyndi Court:

For a lot of the companies that partner with us, they are committed to doing good and improving communities, but they also have a business issue. They have a workforce issue, trying to drive a diverse, highly qualified workforce that might stick with them and grow. The employers get a great benefit and we're preparing the students. Some employers are looking at which jobs require a college degree, which ones maybe only require two years, and which ones require just some credentialing. How can they help us get the workforce into those jobs and provide career ladders within their industries so that their workforce is staying longer? It's about how we diversify them, prepare them, make sure they have durable skills. Some people call them soft skills; we like to call them durable skills. How do we help them work as a team, understand work ethic, and be prepared? We want to make sure our students are great employees and help them stick in those industries so they have a career.

Michael Horn:

Makes a lot of sense. Let’s back up a little. There's a lot of points of leverage that you all, and Tiger woods, when he was thinking about this, could have picked. There's a growing amount of research about the importance of career exposure for really fifth-grade, middle schoolers, and high schoolers.  Getting them aware of what's out there, building social capital, a lot of things historically the education system hasn't thought a lot about.  Why did you all decide this is the leverage point where we want to insert ourselves?

 There's growing research on the importance of career exposure for fifth graders, middle schoolers, and high schoolers. Why did you all decide this is the leverage point where you really want to insert yourselves?

Cyndi Court:

It was after 9/11. Tiger was caught in another place, rented a car, and drove home. Driving home, he thought about how to make an impact and change communities. His mom always made him hit the books before he hit the course. Education was important to her. He grew up in Anaheim, so he had a sense of communities without many opportunities. After 9/11, he asked what we could do in the Anaheim community where he grew up to ensure kids can chase their dreams and have a safe place to do it. It came from multiple factors but converged around what a lot of us did after 9/11 rethinking how to do more.

This post was sponsored by:

Future Plans for Expansion

Michael Horn:

Completely. So then talk to me about this. You're in Anaheim with the learning lab and all these opportunities. You're scaling and expanding. Talk about what's coming down the road and where else the foundation will be operating these labs.

Cyndi Court:

I get construction pictures every day now from Cobb's Creek. We're going to Philadelphia. Cobbs Creek is a revitalization of a golf course that has been there that has been a great story of inclusion since the golf course was built. Charlie Sifford learned to play there. So it's a wonderful story of Charlie Sifford and Tiger, and he was a mentor to Tiger. It is a forgotten corner of the Philadelphia community. A lot of students who need a place to go need the kind of programs that we're offering.

So we're going into Philly. We'll actually get the keys on December 11, not that we're counting days, but we'll open the doors in early February of 2025. Then the next year after that, we'll be in LA, just beside Los Angeles International Airport and on a very large campus called Lulu's Place, which is being built. We've broken ground there with a philanthropist named Doug Kimmelman and the Kimmelman Family Foundation. It is a partnership with USTA. Every one of our facilities has STEAM programs, career-connected learning, and health and wellness opportunities for kids to go outside, be active, learn about hydration, and explore things they may not have opportunities to do in their communities. Again, they may not have an opportunity to play golf or tennis in the communities where they grew up.

Michael Horn:

Wow, such a neat set of opportunities. In terms of scale, how many students will you be serving in the next three to five years?

Cyndi Court

In Anaheim, we're serving about 7,000 a year. So we'll be serving as many as 21,000 and are already looking at other markets.

Michael Horn:

Wow. Let's go micro now to individual student stories. I was reading about Sammy Mohammed, highlighted at Tiger Woods's return to competitive golf. What are some of the student stories that stand out to you?

Student Success Stories

Cyndi Court:

One of them is Brandon, who we highlighted in a video on our website, learned storytelling at the learning lab. We really are STEAM, which does include the arts. Brandon got a lot of opportunities to explore photography and podcasting. We have a podcast room. We need to have you come, Michael, and do a couple of things. But Brandon had a great opportunity to do all that and had experiences. Another student, during our Genesis golf tournament in Los Angeles, got to job shadow with the Golf Channel and do media interviews with the Dodgers. It was a chance of a lifetime. There were about 41 young people from the learning lab who got job shadowing that day. Our students are flourishing. We’re looking at our alumni, reconnecting with them, and doing a lot of storytelling because they're doing fantastic things.

Michael Horn:

Now I have to ask because I didn't expect to hear podcasting as one of those avenues and all that media exploration when I was thinking about STEAM. You're right, Arts is obviously a critical pillar of those of that acronym. These students, when they get this exposure. They're connecting with different companies. They're connecting with different mentors. What do they gravitate toward? What are you learning about what careers are most interesting to the students?

Cyndi Court:

We have a great supporter Nick Gross. We use a product that he built called Find Your Grind, which helps young people assess their passions. It’s not a typical assessment of careers but looks at what they’re passionate about. For example, if they love to connect with people, we show them careers that fit that passion. It helps them understand what they're great at and try different things whether that’s an afterschool club or robotics club. They love our drone class, the science of cooking. So we may be putting some great chefs that just understand the science behind what they do, but helping those people identify what their passions. Then try different things on again. If college is required, they know before they even go to college, a sense of their direction. So hopefully, they're not changing majors four times in four years and ending up there for eight years.  We aim to prepare them to hit the ground running and be successful in life.

Michael Horn:

Amazing. I'm just thinking about those chefs now in the science of cooking because my wife's in the culinary world, and her chemistry knowledge is way more than mine because she actually uses it. As we wrap up here, anything else the audience ought to know about TGR learning labs helping to shape the future of education and where you all see this impact going as we continue to chart forward?

Cyndi Court:

There’s a place for everyone to help. If it’s not with TGR Foundation or at a TGR Learning Lab, find a place to give back to these communities and kids. Everyone is needed and can make a difference. Check out tgrfoundation.org. Find a learning lab and ways to get involved. We have mentors and a college scholarship program. Get involved somewhere, whether it's volunteering or financially. Together, we can make a big difference.

Michael Horn:

No kidding. I love how you’re prototyping the future for these students by allowing them to try on different career hats. You’re probably teaching the mentors a lot as well as they help these students, and they probably get inspired daily. Cyndi, thanks for inspiring us today and for sharing so much about the learning labs, how they’re scaling, and their impact.

Cyndi Court:

Thank you for having us.

The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Description: Michael is joined by Jon Carson of the College Guidance Network to discuss their new AI-Driven tool designed to improve postsecondary outcomes by bolstering high school guidance. The two dive into the tall task facing guidance counselors, the importance of the importance of informed decision making at the end-of-high-school transition period, and the potential of their AI chatbot, AVA, to support students, parents, and counselors.

Michael Horn:

Welcome to the Future of Education, where we are dedicated to building a world in which all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their potential, and live a life of purpose. To help us think about how we can do that better today, I'm thrilled to have Jon  Carson, the founder and CEO of College Guidance Network, CGN. Full disclosure, I host shows on occasion for them on careers. I'm delighted that Jon is joining us today to talk about their work and how they're helping individuals, families, and parents better navigate the landscape of post-high school. Jon, it's great to see you. Thanks so much for joining us.

Jon Carson:

Good to be with you.

The Why Behind College Guidance Network

Michael Horn:

Let's dive in. You're a serial entrepreneur and have had many interesting ventures in your background. Let's start with the why behind this one, behind College Guidance Network. Why this company? What's its mission, and what does the work look like?

Jon Carson:

It started four years ago with my oldest. He was in the college process in high school, and there were a set of experiences I had that, as an entrepreneur, made me start to dig into how the college and career guidance system works on a large scale. I ultimately came out of that with a much better understanding of how the system fundamentally does not work in some very structural ways. Having worked in edtech for many years, as well as in content and media, it seemed to me like there was a way to solve this. At that time, AI had not yet come into the picture. Now, as AI has entered the scene, it's clear we're in a period similar to 1990-1996 when the Internet started. For us as entrepreneurs, we've come up with a design that can fundamentally change the way college and career counseling is provided in the United States at scale.

Diagnosing the Problems with Guidance in American High Schools

Michael Horn:

Super exciting to hear that. Before we get into the solution, let's diagnose the problem a little bit. In your view, there are some big structural factors that drive the challenges around guidance for high school students. I know you see it in the outcomes: student graduation rates, dropout rates of college are not that great. I think in your view, at least some of that is structural. It starts with the guidance system in place. Talk through what those major factors are in your mind that lead to the brokenness of the current system.

Jon Carson:

You almost have to start with the supply side, which is the colleges. We've got an increasingly complex process that is a bigger and bigger high-stakes financial decision. With that complexity, we have a situation where, unlike when I was graduating from high school and all escalators went up, not all escalators go up anymore. In fact, some go down and can become non-recoverable. That's the supply side. On the demand side, the issue is that you start with a high school counseling department. Those counselors typically have a union contract of about 180-185 days a year. So right away, about half of the year, they're not available. Then you have the next issue, which is the high ratios. I was unable to get a hold of my kid's counselor, and that school is at about 220 kids per counselor. Some schools have 300,400, 600 kids per counselor. It's just not possible. That is not the counselors' fault; it's a math problem. So you have a big access problem. Then you have the issue that counselors typically have their degrees in social work and are being asked to be knowledgeable across a wide range of topics. How can a counselor who talks a kid off the ledge in the morning also be an expert in how STEM careers are unfolding in the world of AI? They can't. Lastly, if you think of this whole process as a metaphor of a car and the kid is driving the car into life, they don't know how to drive the car. They may not even want to be driving the car. They're often distracted by social media. The counselor is in the back seat but in 400 back seats. I, as the parent, am in the passenger seat, wanting to be helpful but not knowing how. The counseling department doesn't have anything for the parents, who are the only other adult authority figure in the car that can reasonably have the capacity to help the kid. If you put all those things together, the system's not working. You talked about the default rates and dropout rates. Burning Glass has just released data that shows that 52% of all college graduates are underemployed after a year. We clearly do not have good decision-making at a very high-stakes point in the cycle. The system is crying for something to fix it, and you can’t do it internally because schools are not going to have the dollars to throw more counselors at the problem. You have to have something else.

Ava, the AI assistant

The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Michael Horn:

Super interesting to hear you break that down at all levels, frankly, in terms of how the matching problem starts and the dynamics throughout the system. One of the parts of your solution revolves around AI. You mentioned that earlier, and you've launched this AI solution. Your agent is named Ava, I believe. You're coming to market with Ava, not as a standalone AI offering but bundled with a variety of other elements. How do you think about this AI product strategy? How do you think about AI in this current solution, and how is it woven into what you are doing to solve the challenges you just described?

Jon Carson:

First, I'll just say that I may sound fairly coherent right now, but it has not always been so. When we first started out, the idea was to mimic a company called Masterclass, which had begun producing a very high-end video library around things like cooking and sports. Our idea was, what if you could create a Masterclass for college and career guidance? We began building this library of experts, but it turned out that was not the right answer because not that many people want to walk the stacks. That's like work. That was version one. Version two, the next step was putting a layer of technology on top of the library and turning the whole thing into a personalized roadmap generator for mom, dad, and the student. It was a month-by-month roadmap that included workflow management videos from top experts personalized to you and your kid. The third piece, which we are currently in the process of rolling out over the next two months, is adding the AI piece. Ava, which stands for Another Virtual Assistant, is our AI counseling assistant. Ava's distinctive characteristic is being trained by the content we have across these experts. We currently have just under 300 experts across 110 topics and just under 3000 videos. We've better understood that content equals data, and very high-quality content equals very high-quality data. That's very important in having a quality conversational assistant. If you put together a conversational counseling assistant with a personalized roadmap, personalized text and email nudges, and a year-round live programming schedule of live experts, that becomes a total solution. We think of it as guidance in a box. This allows a school to provide the capability to a family to have access to the best guidance 365 days a year, 24 hours a day. This takes an enormous load off of the counselor's plate, which is important because there's a whole teenage mental health crisis that desperately needs more counseling time. We think this can be a win for everybody.

Michael Horn:

Super interesting. If I understand you right, you're basically saying, counselors, you can lean into your expertise around social work and working individually with students who need the help. We have this breadth of content experts, 300-plus experts, and 3000 some odd videos that allow us to handle the breadth of questions any young individual might bring. My interests might be different from yours, so we have the expertise and content breadth to work with that. You're using the experts to provide the best advice for any given topic and have this knowledge graph that Ava is trained on so that I get the right piece of advice, the right direction, and the right nudge at the right time in my journey. Am I getting this right? Is this how it all comes together?

Jon Carson:

It is. I'll simplify it. We've done a ton of field research, and it doesn't really matter the socioeconomic background of the student or the family. Everybody really wants the same four things, which actually makes it easier from a design standpoint. We want to know what to do, when to do it, how to do it, and why to do it. If that can come from top experts that we can trust and that are credible, then that's the package. It's about delivering what, when, how, and why. To do that, you have to have a conversational capability. That's Ava. You have to have workflow project management. That's the personalized roadmaps. You have to have access to live experts. That's our live programming. And you have to have remind nudges because we're all so busy. There could be a window closing for the SAT registration test this summer. This whole project started because my wife and I barely made one of these within four hours. She turned to me and said, "I just want a plan." This is the plan. This is what guidance in a box would look like for someone navigating a very complex thing they've never done before.

Differentiating CGN's approach

Michael Horn:

I can hear the exasperation in her voice as you tell that story that leads to this solution. Talk to me about the limited budgets of schools, states, and the like, and how they can't just throw money and people at this problem. How does this content-centric approach coexist with some of the software solutions like Naviance or Score? I hear it a lot of times. A lot of states and schools say, "We've already got something." What's your take on how this is complementary and critical to their operations alongside what they think they have?

Jon Carson:

The best way to think about it is software versus content. The software solutions are robust aggregations of tools. There's something to build a college list, do scholarship searches, request a recommendation letter, provide your transcript, and integrate with the common app. These are software tools. The people who work at these companies are typically software engineers. Using my car metaphor, this is the steering wheel that the kid uses to drive the car from A to B. You must have that steering wheel to get from here to there. We are more like the GPS system that helps the family navigate. We are about guidance and content, not software. We do not have a robust software team. Our people come from PBS, ESPN, and Family Education Network. We think cars drive better with navigation. That's our role: to aggregate experts into a cohesive user experience that's not overwhelming, personalized, and complements the steering wheel.

Activating Parents 

Michael Horn:

You just said a few interesting things that I want to key in on as we start to wrap up this conversation. You used the word "guidance." You are not the software; you are the guidance. That's a critical piece missing in the depth and breadth we need across the system right now. You have a real focus on parents. Talk about why parents and guardians are the linchpin from your perspective and why this is such an important solution for them. A lot of people think, "Naviance, right? My kid has access to it in the school. They jump on in the career office or the guidance office, put in their scores and interests, and get some lists of colleges." You are providing much more guidance and really helping parents with this. Talk about that decision and focal point.

Jon Carson:

First, we know the current system is not working. If it were, we wouldn't have these massive dropout rates, default rates, etc. Just giving someone a large toolbox is not enough. You have to give them the instructions and navigation as well. Asking a 17-year-old to make this kind of high-stakes decision with all the complexity is asking a lot. Asking them to do it by themselves leads to problems. We can't put it all on the counselors because there's a math problem there. We're running out of options, but there's a really good one: the person in the passenger seat who's going to be either writing a check or co-signing a loan for a lot of money, who's biologically wired to care about the individual in the driver's seat, and who is desperate to be helpful but just doesn't know what to do, when to do it, how to do it, and why to do it. You have to make it easy for them. They need expert access because they're on the journey as well. Parents are really a linchpin. Jeff Riley, the commissioner of education for Massachusetts, has called them the sleeping giant. They just want to be harnessed. Their anxiety levels are high because they see these issues. As we watch the effects of AI on the workforce and entry-level jobs, it will become even more complex and important that kids are thoughtful about picking their career paths. We spend a lot of time getting experts on AI because we think the future of work is really important.

Parents have to write the check, they care about their kid, and they see their kid is distracted. They want to get it right, but nobody's given them the right solution so they can become that counseling assistant at home. We talk to schools about turning all parents into an army of counseling assistants with a caseload of one or two. That's an enormous amount of capacity that can be unlocked, and you don't have to pay for it because they'll do it because they care about their kid.

CGN's Content Categories and What’s Next

Michael Horn:

That makes a ton of sense. Parents care about this, have a lot of anxiety, and probably spend a lot of time on this. You're helping them be smarter and more secure in decision-making. For parents who may tune in and listen to this, I will say there are great resources to help their kids assume more agency and develop executive function skills so they can take more ownership. There's great guidance in CGN around those topics, not just the checklist of what to do next. It's a much more comprehensive solution, right?

Jon Carson:

We think there are four content categories: college, money, careers, and family dynamics. How do you talk to a teenager who won't talk back? The kid is separating biologically, which is important. There are right and wrong ways to engage that kid. Many parents make the wrong decision by leaning in too much, causing the kid to push back. We try to give parents access to family therapists and experts on teenage phone screen addiction and other issues that get in the way of healthy exchanges between an engaged parent and their kid.

Michael Horn:

Perfect. Jon, how can folks tuning in learn more about CGN and get in touch?

Jon Carson:

Our URL is collegeguidancenetwork.com. There's an ability to request a demo or reach out to us. At the end of August, we're rolling out this combined solution with personalized roadmaps and Ava integrated into the experience. We're excited about the fall pilots we're running. The commissioner in New Hampshire has funded a pilot, and we're excited to have a scalable solution that can change the way guidance is done in American high schools.

The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

I was so excited when Diane Tavenner reached out to me this summer so that we could interview David Yeager, psychology professor at University of Texas Austin and author of 10 to 25, a new book on youth development, on our Class Disrupted podcast. Together, we discussed lessons on healthy youth development tackled in his book, including the science of mentorship, importance of transparency, and strategies for how to help youth reframe stress.

Diane Tavenner:  

Hey, Michael.

Michael Horn:  

Hey, Diane. How are you?

Diane Tavenner:  

I am well. This is a first for us. We are doing a special summer episode, and for good reason.

Michael Horn:  

We are trying to break out of the old structures of a summer break where kids go home and don't go to school. We're trying to break out of that model that we've always done in this podcast and have an important conversation about a book that is upcoming and will be out by the time this podcast is released. So, Diane, why don't you introduce the book and our special guest?

Diane Tavenner:  

I'm excited to welcome Dr. David Yeager to the podcast today. He's a professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin and has a long, long list of accomplishments and works with a number of other learning scientists. I encourage you all to go look at that impressive bio. Let me just share personally that we met about a decade ago, and I have always been such a huge fan because David's work is so applicable to schools, young people, mentoring, teachers, and parenting. He is, in my view, one of the rare researchers who not only has a background in those areas but is deeply committed to making sure his research is actually meaningful and embedded in practice. Over the years, we've had tons of incredible dialogues and conversations about very practical things in schools. He had a huge influence on our summit learning model when I was at Summit. I am so excited for his upcoming book called "10 to 25." 

It's all about mentoring, which is a huge part of what I have worked on and focused on in my career. I am thrilled that you're here with us today to have this conversation. David, welcome.

David Yeager:  

Thanks a lot. It's great to be here. Diane, I think it was 12 years ago we met.

Diane Tavenner:  

Wow, Yeah.

David Yeager:  

You were my favorite person. We met at this crazy meeting where we were briefing thought leaders in education reform. The last question of that interview was, "If you could do one thing, what would it be?" Whatever I said, a week later, you're like, "Okay. So we did that thing you said, now can you help us?" I was like, I love Diane Tavenner. She's just gonna make it happen. So I've always been your admirer, and it's great to be on this podcast.

Michael Horn:  

It's not just talk with Diane, it is action.

David Yeager:  

Yeah, be careful what you say. She'll do it.

Filling in the blanks on youth motivation 

Diane Tavenner:  

Well, thank you. We are thrilled to have you. I wanted to jump in. This is going to be kind of silly, but I think it's meaningful. Your new book introduces what I would call a Madlib activity. It's like a fill-in-the-blank activity and the fill-in-the-blank sentences. I know you've asked a bunch of people to complete this, so I'm curious about the different responses you've gotten. It starts with this idea: The sentence, "Given that young people are ____, the best way to motivate them is ____." I’d love to know your response to that. Also, what do you normally hear from people when you ask them to fill in those sentence starters?

David Yeager:  

Let me just start with the most common things I hear. The most common thing I hear is, "Given that young people are kind of short-sighted, lazy, hard to motivate, not listening to grown-ups," or something like that. Something kind of denigrating. Then you tend to see one of two things. One is “Explain to them why all their choices now are not quite right and why they're not aligned with their long-term best interests or motivate them with either threats or rewards.” So, "If you do this, something bad is going to happen to you," or "If you do this, I'll give you this nice thing." Either bribes or threats. That's the most common answer I see. The second most common answer I see is, "Given that young people are stressed out, overwhelmed..."

Diane Tavenner:  

Addicted to their phone.

David Yeager:  

Right. Addicted to their phones, recovering from COVID, lonely, in the middle of a mental health epidemic, etc. The best way to motivate them is to remove their demands, chop up what they're doing into tiny steps, help them feel a sense of success, let them feel confident, don't overwhelm them. Basically, make it easy on them to grow up. Both of those internal logics make sense, but neither of them are great. The big punchline from my book is when I started studying people who do an awesome job at motivating young people, even in the most difficult of circumstances, they complete the sentence with, "Given that young people are capable of doing incredible things that make contributions to the world, the best way to motivate them is to inspire them, sometimes to get out of their way, to run interference, so that way things don't derail their ambitions and hopes, but really support their potential to come alive." I like this exercise because it reveals how our beliefs about young people are intimately tied to our practices and how we deal with them. That sounds obvious when I say it, but it's not obvious to most people. They just think, "Okay, the best way to motivate people is the following," and they don't question the fact that that's a choice, and it comes from a belief system, and it's something that could be changed.

David’s Motivation for Writing 10 to 25 

Michael Horn:  

It's really interesting. I'm feeling jealous at the moment because Diane's had the chance to read the book in advance, and I will read it once it's out. What motivated you to write this book, "Ten to 25?" What was your intention? What's your hope for the book?

The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

David Yeager:  

For me personally, the book comes from 15-20 years of frustration, feeling like the advice I had been given as a teacher and later that I saw in the research literature just wasn't cutting it. It wasn't good enough. I remember being a mediocre middle school teacher and caring so deeply for my kids and wanting to do everything for them and feeling like I never got that kind of inspiring, enthusiastic love of learning, where kids were embracing the hardest stuff and coming after class because they were curious about the topic. Then when I started doing research, I also felt like the answers I saw in the field were very... I don't know, just not useful. It was very abstract and bland and not applicable. We've conducted a lot of research over the last 15 years, and part of the book is, "All right, let's put that all in one place."

I'm often asked about this part of my work. Some people think of me as the community college student success person, others as the purpose-in-life person, others as the youth mental health, and others as the growth mindset. I wanted all the work to be in one place, but the other thing was just an acknowledgment that there was a lot I didn't know, and I needed to go out in the world and find great leaders who were awesome at motivating young people. The book is a combination of the science we've done over 15 years and original reporting on what I've learned from the wisdom of practice, I guess you could say.

The Mentoring Mindset

Michael Horn:  

Very cool. I'm curious, then. Diane teased that a lot of this book is not just about motivation and how to spark students, but a part of that is this mentoring mindset, I think you call it. I've certainly bought hook, line, and sinker on the importance of mentoring, but the mentoring mindset is a phrase that is unfamiliar to me. So, what is the mentoring mindset?

David Yeager:  

Yeah, the mentor mindset is an approach or a philosophy you take with a young person where you maintain very high standards. You're tough, you expect a lot, but you're supportive enough so that a young person can meet those standards. It's not just saying, "Hey, I have super high standards, you can meet them or not," which often ends up with maybe the top 5% doing well and everybody else struggling. It's not saying, "I care about you, but I'm not going to ask a lot of you," where maybe kids feel supported but they don't grow and improve. The basic mentor mindset is high standards, and high support. It's a simple idea.

Where does that come from? It comes from this investigation of the most successful people I could find in K-12 education, higher ed, academic research, NBA coaching, parenting, management at retail, grocery stores, management, and technology firms. I wanted to look at anyone who's in charge of or relates to someone aged 10 to 25 in any of these domains. What do the most successful people have in common? The answer was this mentoring or mentor mindset. In the book, I describe it and also describe what's the opposite of that. What happens if you don't have that?

Diane Tavenner:  

Michael, you'll love it because it is a two-by-two because you always have.

Michael Horn:  

You're saying I'm going to feel at home is what you're saying.

Taking an Asset-Based Approach

Diane Tavenner:  

You're going to feel very at home. I love the mentoring mindset because it embodies the belief system that I've had for my career, this idea of high expectations and high support. Let's just put names on the other ones that you were describing, David. There's this enforcer mindset which is like you were describing, high expectations but no support, and this protector mindset which is high support but no expectations. One of the things I love in our conversation is you never start from a deficit mindset. You're always an asset-based approach where you're like, "Look, even those other two places have one of the two parts of the equation, so they're halfway there. We just need to get the other half in there, if you will." Say more about that.

David Yeager:  

Yeah, I think there are two ways in which it...

Diane Tavenner:  

Hopefully, I explained that properly.

David Yeager:  

Yeah, it was great. Later on the test, I'll give you a high score. As a professor, I'm just walking around grading everyone. Just kidding. There are two ways in which we try to be asset-based. One is that suppose you're in one of these off-diagonal cases, the enforcer mindset: all standards, low support; protector: all support, no standards. That's coming from a good place and I started to talk about that. Then the second is, as you're saying, reframing those two off-diagonal cases as you got half of it right, so just add the other half. Why do I say they're coming from a good place? Well, I think for a long time people have felt torn. If I'm a manager, a boss, a teacher, a professor, I have a dichotomous choice between being the tough, authoritarian, dictator, kind of hard-nosed person who demands excellence. The negative consequence of that, of course, is kids and young people are crying and feeling debilitated and crushed. Most people don't succeed.

But that is viewed as a necessary side effect of me upholding high standards. You can see how you could put your head on your pillow at night and feel good about that. It's like, "I'm the gatekeeper to excellence and high performance, and I'm doing what I have to do, though it's sometimes unpleasant to uphold the standard for culture or society or performance." On the other side, where you're very low standards but high support, what I call the protector mindset, there too, you can feel good about how you're caring. You love young people. You're putting their feelings and needs first. You're being empathetic. You're very attuned. Those are all good things to feel. The problem is that you're also a pushover and young people don't get anywhere. But it might feel like that's the necessary consequence of protecting young people from the distress of this dog-eat-dog world that they can't possibly succeed in. Both come from a concern for young people, both the enforcer and the protector. They're just a little misguided.

The reason they're misguided is because they're embedded in this worldview we have about young people generally being incompetent. If you think they're incompetent and I have to be tough, well, that's enforcer. It's like, "I need to maintain the standards, and I'm the last defense against the world descending into chaos." That's why I have to maintain rigorous standards. On the protector side, they're incompetent, they're weak, but that's why I have to make up for what they lack by protecting them.

Diane Tavenner:  

Yeah.

David Yeager:  

So the mentor is like, "All right, let's just take both of what's good from those. You've got the high standards. Great. Add the support. You've got the support. Great. Add the standards so you can have two reasons now to feel good about yourself at the end of the day, not just one."

The Transparency Statement

Diane Tavenner:  

Yeah, I love that approach. The book is filled with the science that's behind it. One of the things I appreciate about you is it's not only all the science and research you've done. You are highly collaborative, and you have an encyclopedic knowledge of all the other research in the space that everyone else has done. You are very generous in bringing those ideas into the book. We are not going to spend a lot of time on the science here today because we want to, given our audience, go to the practices that you put forward. But I will say for people who want to do a deep dive there, I've listened to the Huberman Lab podcast that you did. It’s 3 hours, and it's an extraordinary deep dive in that space. So I highly recommend that for people who want to go really deep there along with the book if you want to listen. I want to shift us over to these mindset practices. They're particularly profound here in conversation.

Honestly, when I looked at the titles of these chapters and when I started digging in, these are things that Michael and I talk about all the time on the podcast. These are cornerstones of, in our view, what redesigned schools and learning experiences need to be building on, incorporating how they need to function, essentially. We are deeply aligned in our agenda for what learning can and should look like. Let me just say off the top because our listeners will recognize these. We'll start with transparency, which is a really interesting intro. I think you say these go from easiest to implement to probably most challenging. So we'll talk about that. Transparency, questioning, this reframing of stress, and then purpose and belonging. 

Again, our listeners have heard us talk about purpose and belonging sort of at nauseam, but we can keep talking. Let's start with transparency because you have this very, very, I would say, easy lift that people can do, called a transparency statement. Tell us about that. What does that look like? How does that get you off on the right foot, quite frankly, in your relationship with young people?

David Yeager:  

The transparency statement that I write about is very simply explaining your motives whenever you are about to uphold some high standards and/or provide some support so that young people don't interpret it in the worst possible light. That can be very short. Let's take Uri Treisman, the world's greatest freshman calculus professor I write about in chapter eleven. He'll give students large intro courses in calculus, five problems where they have to find the limit of a function using L'Hopital's rule. The thing is, most kids, when they take AP calculus, memorize L'Hopital's rule, and then they just apply it to find the limits of functions. But the problem is that L'Hopital's rule is not an analytic solution. It's like a workaround.

So it doesn't work. It breaks a lot. He'll give students five problems, four of them L'Hopital's rule won't work for, and one it will. A normal teacher doesn't do that. A normal teacher would think, "You're a lunatic because they're going to cry," basically. Before he does that, he's like, "All right, I just want you to know the reason why I'm doing this is because you guys are preparing to be mathematicians and to think mathematically. I want you to have careers long beyond this class. I don't want you to apply math tricks. I want you to be able to take apart the math tricks, figure out how they work, and put them back together again." He says that before they spend 25 minutes struggling. If you don't, they would be in tears, thinking, "I'm dumb at math. I'm going to fail calculus. I'm never going to be a doctor or an engineer." That's where a freshman's mind is going to go. You have to say something. In a world in which he says nothing and there's crying, tears, and frustration, that's not a great world. The most marginalized students are going to quit first because they're also dealing with other stereotypes about whether they're smart enough, etc. But in the world in which he has a transparency statement, it's otherwise the exact same lesson and the students have the exact same great professor, but it means something totally different in that context.

That's why it's the easiest. You can already be awesome at mentor mindset stuff, high expectations, and high support, and you could be coming across the wrong way to your young people. Sometimes all you have to do is remind them of why you're giving them something that's a little unpleasant. The societal narrative currently about young people is, "Well, I shouldn't have to explain myself, because if they weren't such woke, wimpy idiots, then they would know that I'm here for them." There's a version in which people, adults and leaders, think, "I shouldn't have to explain myself." My answer to that is, look, for most young people, starting at the beginning of gonadarche and puberty until they're in their twenties, that day you're talking to them is the day on which they have the most testosterone they've ever had in their entire lives. That day and the next day when you do something else, that also will be the day on which they have the most testosterone they've ever had in their entire lives, both boys and girls.

That does all kinds of things to the brain that makes them over-interpret things that might be plausibly offensive. That's why their head goes to this crazy place of, "I'll never succeed," or "You hate me," or "This is biased," etc. You just have to explain yourself two or three more times than you think you need to. Not because they're too sensitive, but because the job of a young person is to figure out if they're being taken seriously and respected. Just don't make them guess. Just be transparent.

Diane Tavenner:  

Yeah. One of the things that comes up in the book is this idea that at that developmental stage, they want status and they want respect, and there's good biological reasons for that. When we are running counter to that, we're creating all sorts of distance between us relationally, which makes so much sense to me. I can just say from my career, I can't tell you how many of the rigorous teachers that I knew purposefully would not have been transparent upfront because they were actually trying to scare kids or create what is essentially a threatening environment because they thought that's what they were supposed to do with high standards. The science is pretty clear that the effect they were having was not the effect that I think they ultimately wanted.

David Yeager:  

Right. I mean, I think there's this mythology of the demanding leader that is impossible to please, and it's a little bit ambiguous if you've won them over. In that mythology, you're supposed to leave people you're leading a little bit in the dark for a while and then only at the end reveal that you cared about them all along, but they're supposed to be afraid for nine months so that way you get optimal performance. I 100% remember feeling that way as a teacher. If I tell them too quickly that I care about them, then they're going to take advantage of me. But that's not what the mentor mindset leaders do.

They're super hard, and students are often crying in the first few months of their classes in college and K-12 settings. But they're also super transparent so that by October, or November, students can now trust that when they ask a question, Mr. Estrada—Sergio Estrada is one of the teachers I write about—"Mr. Estrada, is this problem right?" He'd be like, "I don't know. Is it right?" Initially, students hate that. But he says, "Look, I would never deprive you of the opportunity to know that you can understand physics. I care about you too much to lower standards. So that's why I'm asking you the question back. So given that, do you think it's right?" He's got to say that for a couple of months. Eventually, students know that and then they start thinking on their own, and they own their own learning. It saves him tons of time. Later in the semester, they become independent thinkers. They go on to the next course in college and can do well. He's given them that gift of being independent, thoughtful, curious, intellectual leaders, even though it was a little rocky at first because students aren't used to it. But you're not going to get there if you wait till May and they hate you all year. That's idiotic. That's mythology.

Questioning Techniques: Asking v. Telling 

Diane Tavenner:  

You've led us into the questioning technique. Some of those teachers we're talking about, their class would also look like the professor not giving them any help or any support. That's not what you're talking about. Sergio and others that you profile, don't they specifically have this strategy around asking, not telling? Tell us the dimensions and characteristics of that approach that are quite different from other folks.

David Yeager:  

I was really struck by the parenting coach that I followed who is almost always coaching parents to ask questions, not to tell their kids what to do. The similarities between great parenting and great teaching, great tutoring, and good management. The great manager I followed, Steph Akamoto, who was at Microsoft at the time, would do her performance reviews and ask questions like, "All right, how do you think that went?" and so on, get their opinions. Then she would say, "All right, for you to be a top 15% performer on your next performance evaluation, what's a task you could do that's above and beyond that would really impress everybody, and that would be something you would want to do and you want to learn?" Then they would generate two or three ideas. Then she'd be like, "Huh? All right, what are you worried about getting in the way of those things?" An example in the book is Steph's doing a performance review when she was on the software testing unit for Microsoft. They would write manuals that would help the developers know what Windows is doing, for instance. Someone on her team was like, "Well, instead of just testing it and writing the manual, I could go talk to the engineers and fix all the goofy things with the software now, rather than have 20 pages in the manual about how the goofy thing is a workaround." She's like, "Okay, what would be hard about that?" "Well, the engineers don't want to talk to a tester because I'm low status, and the manager is going to be like, 'Stop wasting my engineers' time.'" Then Steph would be like, "All right, would you mind if I contacted the manager and said, 'Get off her case and let her go talk to your engineers?'" "No, that's okay with me."

So they formed this whole plan where her direct report could overperform and do something testers weren't normally required to do. Steph's out... She's not doing it for the direct report, but she's running interference to give her the freedom to be in the room to talk to the engineers. Six months later, her direct report is overperforming as the top 5-10% performer, gets a raise, promotional velocity, etc. But Steph didn't do it for her. That's what I mean by questioning. There's a version of questioning that's not good. If your kid comes home drunk and you're like, "What were you thinking?" that's not an authentic question. What you really mean is, "You were not thinking, and you're an idiot, and you're in trouble. I could not be madder at you." 

That's what you mean. There are versions of questions that are just about facts. What I'm really talking about is what I call in the book authentic questioning with uptake, where it's a legitimate question that the person could have a true answer to that, in principle, the asker doesn't know the answer to. Second, where the question builds on some thinking the person has done. I found mentors did that a lot and did it really well, whether it was the NBA's best basketball coach, Sergio Estrada in physics class, Uri Treisman in calculus, or Steph at Microsoft.

Reframing Stress

Diane Tavenner:  

It's resonating with me on multiple levels because as I build this new product to help young people figure out what they want to do in the future, this was the cornerstone of our approach. We would ask authentic questions of them and help them discover and explore versus the traditional approaches that kind of tell you, "We have this black box questionnaire or test, and then we tell you, 'Oh, guess what? You should be a firefighter or a mortician or whatever.'" Young people are like, "What are you talking about? That's not me." So very resonant. The next piece is a total reframing of stress. Especially coming out of COVID. Michael and I started the podcast during the middle of COVID and everyone, probably at the time, really swung one direction about, "People are so incredibly stressed."

We have to completely fundamentally change our expectations and our behaviors in response to that stress. I still think there's a belief that young people and kids are so stressed. This is where I think the protector mindset comes in a lot. The science, though, tells us something very different. We should think differently about stress and then act differently accordingly. Tell us about that.

David Yeager:  

This was an important chapter in the book because there's a world in which managers are out there saying, or teachers, or professors, "I'm a mentor mindset. Therefore, I have mega hard expectations for you, and you need to suck it up and just deal with how stressful it is." That's not what you see the best mentor mindset leaders doing. They definitely maintain standards. They definitely imply you should stick with it. But they don't tell you to suppress your stress or feelings of frustration, etc. Instead, they have ways of reframing the negative emotions that tend to come from pushing yourself to your frontiers and reframing them as, one, a sign you've chosen to do something important and meaningful. If it was easy, then anyone would do it kind of thing.

But the fact that it's hard means that you are doing something impressive. The fact that you're stressed often means you care about it, that it matters to you, and that's cool to do something that matters to you. Then, second, that those worries actually can be fuel to help you do better. You see that a lot. If you look at great one-on-one tutors or even a good golf coach or tennis coach, they're really asking you to go take on a challenge. In athletics, choose harder opponents, and if it's tutoring, choose the harder problems and try them if you can't master them. Second, that physiological arousal of heart racing, palms sweating, butterflies in your stomach, that's your body mobilizing oxygenated blood to your muscles and your brain cells, and that's helping you to be stronger and your brain to think faster and so on. Most people don't think that way.

They think the fact that I have butterflies in my stomach and my heart's racing means my body's about to shut down, that my body's betraying my goals, and it's going to get in the way. We talk a lot about the science of reframing away from what's called a suppression approach. So classic suppression would be, well, as a parent, "Stop crying. Stop being sad." You just tell your kid to stop feeling the way they're feeling. But as a teacher, what you often see is, "You've prepared. You shouldn't feel stressed. You're fine. You can do this. You should feel confident." You see this a lot. Kids say it to each other, "Oh, you shouldn't be stressed out." It's like, no, actually, you should be stressed if it matters to you and it's legitimately hard. Reassuring you that you shouldn't be stressed is a suppression approach. It turns out if you suppress feelings, they just come back stronger and get in the way. The protector mindset leads you to that suppression approach. You feel so bad that you feel distressed that I want you to get rid of it, and I want to get rid of it either by removing the demand or telling you to push the feelings down, you know, push them away, don't feel stressed, etc. I tell the story in the book about a student of mine who emailed and said, "Look, my mom just died. Most important person to me in the world. I can't possibly do the assignments for the next couple weeks.

I hope this won't make me fail, but I’m just telling you I can't do it." I could tell from the tone that most of my colleagues at UT would either imply that she was lying about it and that she had to prove it or would say, "Just take an incomplete in the class," either to save you the distress or because the teachers are worried about it being unfair to the other students in the class. That wasn't my approach. I had been thinking a lot about this stress approach, and instead my approach was, "Look, let's separate the intellectual difficulty of what you're doing from the logistical difficulty. The intellectual difficulty is you have to do an awesome final project that's very impressive, that hopefully you can talk about in your job interviews, can be on your resume, and that you're proud of. I don't want to take that away from you. That's why you took my class, was to learn new stuff and do things that are impressive. Frankly, your mom cared for you and rooted for you throughout college because you were doing cool, impressive stuff.

So one way to honor your mom's memory is to do a great final project in my class. Do I really care that you do the daily busy work that I assigned? No. That's only there to help you get prepared to do the final project. What I did is I reduced the demands for the logistical stuff, like the busy work, and I was like, just communicate with your group, and whenever you're ready, come back and then do your final project with them. She took two and a half, three weeks off and just kind of stayed in touch with her group, and then they did a fully kick-ass final project. They created this whole AI-based support to help teachers do empathic discipline rather than very harsh discipline. Three years ago, they did this before GPT was released, and then she talked about it in her interview, got this job for a major financial services group, and now is traveling the world on this rotational program, fast track for managers. She immigrated from Africa, is a very interesting young woman of color who is constantly trying to help improve society and culture.

I caught up with her a year later. I was like, "Did I do the right thing? Should I have just given you an incomplete?" She's like, "No. Half my professors told me to take an incomplete, but then I couldn't have graduated on time, and then I wouldn't be in this financial services mentoring program." That's an example where if you have the belief that young people are capable of impressive stuff with the right support, then you start thinking about, sometimes you maintain the intellectual demand or the demand for the work that's truly impressive, but the way you support them is to reduce some of the logistical demands. I think a lot of people mistake those two. They think being a hard-ass on deadlines is what it means to be demanding. But I think it's having people own thinking and contributions. That that's the demand. Deadlines are a means to get there.

Diane Tavenner:  

I love this chapter. The whole time I was reading it, I kept thinking back because you alluded to this in the beginning, David, but the first two times we met each other were arguably under very stressful circumstances that I would not trade, though. I mean, we were, in the first case, presenting our work to Bill Gates directly, and in the second case at the White House, presenting. If someone had taken those opportunities away from us, I think we would be very regretful. It was stressful. Those are stressful.

David Yeager:  

So stressful, but it's stressful in a way where you have to bring your A-game. I think the challenge is to see it as a positive opportunity to perform at your peak rather than a threatening opportunity to fail publicly. When you do the latter, you're still sweating, your heart's racing, and you're worried but doing poorly. But you also are like, all right, let's go. It's like if I'm a good surfer on a huge wave, that's how you want to feel.

Purpose and Belonging

Diane Tavenner:  

So, David, with our last few minutes here, we're going to give you the tall task of talking purpose and belonging, which are very significant. I should say the end of your book pulls all of this into whole models and approaches. Tell us the key concept here of purpose and belonging in your work.

David Yeager:  

I think that, as you know, 10-15 years ago, those were not concepts people talked about in education reform. It was like curriculum and interests were probably the two biggest things. The idea of a meaningful purpose, that wasn't around. I think Bill Damon's work brought purpose to a lot of people's radars, and I did a lot of the early randomized experiments, but even now, I think it's not as well known. Belonging, for a long time, was thought of as this soft self-esteem boost. Everyone needs a hug from all the world's friends. It wasn't taken seriously.

I think the common thread across the two is that they're super powerful, especially for young people who are trying to make it through the world, having a sense of status and respect. Purpose, because you want to contribute something of value to the world around you. Having a meaningful purpose where it's something beyond myself is depending on me, that's super motivating for young people. A lot of education gets that wrong because they just make an argument about making money in the future or using this lesson plan in a job in the future, or it's a delay of gratification, a long-term self-interest argument. I don't think that's ever really going to work to drive deeper learning. But the idea that right now somebody's depending on you, having mastered something and done a good job, I think that's really meaningful. In an enforcer mindset, you wouldn't think of that because you'd be like, well, they're going to choose the laziest possible way to do things no matter what. The only way we can entice them to do tedious work is through rewards, now, or delayed rewards later.

Belonging is similar in that now that it's starting to get on the radar, more people are talking about it, but it's still misconstrued. A lot of people think belonging is, "I'm going to give you a 'You Belong' sticker to slap on your laptop, and all of a sudden achievement gaps are going to disappear." As I say in the book, you can't declare belonging by fiat. It has to be experienced. One of the big things that has to happen is you have to help young people tell themselves a story of how difficulties could be overcome through actions that they could take. Then over time, they actually feel a sense of belonging in a community. I think that purpose and belonging go hand in hand because one way you know you're valued by a community is when you've contributed something that they perceive as important to that community back in our evolutionary history. I think there's a lot more in the book and there are stories about how you leverage those two to get deeper, more lasting, meaningful motivations rather than more frivolous things like turning education into a slot machine.

I don't think that's going to do it. What's more important is appealing to a deeper purpose, a sense of connection, a sense of mattering, and so on.

Diane Tavenner:  

That's awesome. There is so much more in the book. I can't recommend it highly enough. I hope everyone will read it and ping us with questions, thoughts, and what comes up for you. Maybe at some point, we can circle back and do even more on the other pieces when we hear from our readers what they think. Michael…

Michael Horn:  

I was going to say the same thing. Just huge thanks first, David. Check out the book "Ten to 25." I got a lot just from this conversation that has whetted my appetite, and I know many others will as well. Let's circle back once we have some more fodder because I can tell we're scratching the surface and you've hit these hot-button topics that, as you said, David, we sort of know there's something there, but the full depth of how it's understood is not there yet in the education field. I appreciate you writing this and joining us.

David Yeager:  

Absolutely.

Michael Horn:  

For all those listening, we'll be back next time on Class Disrupted. Thank you again.

The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.